The Resurrection of Mr. Phillips

Mr. Phillips had been dead for ten years and Mrs. Phillips was chained to him by her memory. That was the crux of the situation. And while I remember her as being incredibly old, she could not have been too much older than I am now.

We see the world differently when we’re nine.

My mom was absolutely certain on the cause of Mr. Phillips demise. “Ada (Mrs. Phillips) worried the poor man to death.” It had to be true. Mom was well connected with the neighborhood gossips and knew virtually everything about everybody.

I wasn’t exactly clear on what “worried to death” meant, but it sounded like Mrs. Phillips had a hand in it, which made sense to me After all, she was a witch.

And if her husband’s death was somewhat a mystery, his resurrection was positively astounding involving, as it did, numerous governmental agencies and an act of Congress. The greatest mystery of death is not the after life, but the paperwork.

That summer of ’61 my brother Allen developed a kind of a sixth sense. He had the ability to predict the weather. His accuracy was, and this is no exaggeration, miraculous. Each morning inspected the readings of his various pieces of meteorological equipment, looked intently at the sky, consulted his How And Why Wonder Book, and then announced his latest forecast over a bowl of Rice Crispies ®.

Among other things, Allen predicted a dry summer.
And dry it was.

I continued my employment as Mrs. Phillips’ all-round errand boy. I was sort of like Pepino on The Real McCoys, a smiling presence on which not much was expected. I was a salaried employee. No matter what I did, no matter how long I did it, my pay always remained the same: two shiny new quarters. I did not complain. Fifty cents wasn’t much but it kept me in Mad Magazines ® and pixie stix, the nectar of life for a young boy in the early sixties.

My relationship with Mrs. Phillips evolved during those months of servitude. Mrs. Phillips changed as well. Her facial expression slowly altered from her normal everyday hardened scowl to a softer, more sentimental hardened scowl. She also started calling me by my first name. No more did she yell, “Boy, get over here, now!” Instead she would yell, “Owen, get over here, now!”

Little things like that make a big difference.

Soon my list of duties expanded to include grocery shopping. Every Saturday I would follow Mrs. Phillips for four blocks to the corner grocery story lugging her collapsible grocery cart. Corner grocery stores have since disappeared. Gone are the narrow aisles, the creaky wooden floors, and the over priced canned goods.

And now that I think about it, we’re all better off without them.

Once, when we were in the fruits and vegetable section, I saw Mrs. Phillips secretly pop a grape in her mouth. I suppose she could have been checking for freshness, but she could also have been engaging in a bit of undetected pilfering.

That’s the thing about adults. They’ll talk all day on the Ten Commandments, but turn your back for a second and they’re stealing fruit. God found that out the hard way.

As summer progressed, I slowly made my way inside Mrs. Phillips house. When I first started, I was kept waiting in the backyard with the sunflowers. A week or so later I moved to the garage. And then I moved to the back porch. By the last week of August I was in her front room.

Mrs. Phillips was at odds with her furniture. Where Mrs. Phillips wore the same basic, drab outfit- gray dress, white socks, heavy black leather shoes- her furniture was stylish, ornate, even delicate. Everything smelled of lemon Pledge. Strangest of all, everywhere I looked there were framed portraits of Mr. Phillips.

There was a lesson here, but I was too young to recognize it. The prime motivator, the most important shaper of personality, and the single most cause of causes where human behavior is concerned can be summarized in one word: guilt.

It was about this time that Mr. Phillips literally rose from the grave. Highway construction had forced a local cemetery to exhume caskets and transport them to a new location. Although unusual, it does happen. The 1956 Interstate Highway Act demanded it.

Mrs. Phillips took the opportunity the exhumation offered and had the casket opened in order to view the corpse of her husband one last time. It was the scandal of the neighborhood. My mom harrumphed an entire afternoon over the story. My dad simply rolled his eyes mumbling something about that crazy woman.

It got me thinking, though. I was in servitude to Mrs. Phillips, but she, in turn, was enslaved by the memory of her dead husband. And she didn’t even get two shiny new quarters in the bargain.

By mid September Allen had abandoned his fascination with predicting the weather. His equipment quickly deteriorated into a pile of non-descript junk. His new passion, biology, took the form of collecting butterflies. This meant a whole new catalog of equipment and procedures: nets, killing jars and sticking pins into dead insects. To this, I could only say one word: neat! In short order we were traipsing through high weeds brandishing nets our fingers smelling of mothballs.

(It turned out that Allen never predicted anything. He merely listened to the weather forecast on the radio and parroted what he heard. I was impressed. Allen had taught himself the essential skill needed to succeed in this world- putting on a believable show also known as lying.)

Winter put an end to my work for Mrs. Phillip. When spring came I was off to a new endeavor: piano lessons. Though my mom never spoke of it directly, I suspected that I was removed from Mrs. Phillips influence because of the weirdness of viewing her deceased husband. That sounded completely unfair to me. I mean, how different was that from looking at my dad lying on the couch watching the Mike Douglas Show in his jockey shorts?

Years later, after we moved to the suburbs, I learned the final chapter in the story of Mrs. Phillips (My mom had remained in contact with the neighborhood gossips long after we moved away.) It turned out that Mrs. Phillips got herself a boyfriend and, if that wasn’t incredible enough, he actually married her!

My mom announced the coda of the story with a sense of triumph. As fate would have it, Mrs. Phillips did not marry the ideal man. He was something of a rogue. “He took her for everything,” she said smiling. “He took her for everything she had.”

The vicissitudes of Divine Justice is well beyond the ken of human understanding.

The Witch of Maple Street

When I was in the fourth grade my older brother Allen decided to give up his serious work in detonating small explosives and take up the study of meteorology. This seemed like an odd career move to me. Perhaps he originally thought meteorology was the study of meteors and was too proud to admit he made a mistake. Or maybe he really was interested in predicting the weather. For all the years I’ve known him I’ve never been able to figure him out.

Soon Allen’s room filled up with weather equipment: weather vanes, barometers, thermometers and wind cups. Some of the stuff we picked up from around the house. Other items Allen sent away for. We even made a trek to the shabby Army Surplus store on Main Street. We didn’t find anything there, but it did give us an excuse to rummage through the piles of blankets, mess kits and canteens.

We smelled like moth balls for almost a week.

Once assembled, the equipment needed to be set up outside. Since Allen’s room overlooked the garage that seemed like the logical place. It wasn’t long until I was going EVA on the slanted garage roof festooned with equipment while desperately trying to balance myself. As project manager, Allen remained inside by the window overlooking the assembly.

It was then that I saw her: the witch of Maple Street. Actually, I didn’t see all of here, just her sun hat bobbing up and down among her sunflowers. Her name was Mrs. Phillips and she was our next-door neighbor. I only knew a few things about her. I knew she lived alone. I knew she pretty much stayed in her house. And I knew her husband was dead.

No adult seemed to know the exact cause of his death, but every kid in the neighborhood had it figured out. Mrs. Phillips had devoured him. That’s what happens to you if you are foolish enough to marry a witch.

It wasn’t long until Allen, frustrated with my natural ineptness, joined me on the roof. His focus was securing and proper placement of the equipment. There was weather to predict after all. To his growing annoyance my attention was not on the science of meteorology, but on the simple joy of being on the garage roof. How cool was that? I was on equal footing the backyard sycamore tree!

Then the magic shattered. A voice shot up from below: “You, boy.” I looked down. It was Mrs. Phillips standing in the middle of my backyard calling to me.

The witch of Maple Street was in the middle of my backyard calling to me!

I looked at Allen. He was on his knees pounding the weather vane into the shingles. He acted like he heard nothing.

“You, boy,” growled Mrs. Phillips. “Come down here.”

What could I do? An adult had commanded me to do something. I had to obey. It was like a rule or something. I climbed back in through the window and went out to the backyard where the witch was waiting for me.

“Come with me,” she said. We walked to her garden where she gave me a bucket and a pair of big yellow gloves. “I can’t bend down like I used to. I need you to pull those weeds. Do you see them?”

I looked. “Yeah,” I said tentatively.

“Pull out the weeds and put them in the bucket,” she said, and then she disappeared into her house.

There was nothing preventing me from just walking away. But I lived in a world where adults were always granted unquestionable authority. I had been commanded to “weed” so therefore I must weed. It was the grim logic of the day. To do otherwise risked grave unknowable consequences.

It took me a half hour to fill the bucket. When Mrs. Phillips returned she gave me a glass of lemonade. I drank while she inspected the bucket.

“How did you do this?”

“What?”

She pulled a dandelion weed out of the bucket. “How did you pull the dandelion out, root and all?”

I showed her. My method was not to use the gloves. My hands were small allowing me to get a sure grip on the base of the weed. One quick snap and up came the dandelion, root and all.

Mrs. Phillips looked at me then looked at the dandelion. She nodded her head then reached into her apron and pulled out two quarters. “Come back tomorrow.”

I officially had a job. Given my needs at the time, it was a relatively well paid position. True, I was working for a witch doing menial labor. And the job itself was hardly rewarding. But I figured as long as I didn’t marry her I would probably be okay.

And then I found out what happened to Mr. Phillips and how he rose from the grave.

Next:
The Resurrection of Mr. Phillips

My Favorite Books (non-fiction)

It’s Saturday morning and I’ve just finished the novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. I found the book thoughtful, puzzling, contradictory and refreshing. I’m still mulling it over which means it is everything I want in a novel. The book was published in 1962, made into a play five years later and then into an award winning film. As recently as last week I had neither read the book, nor watched the play, nor rented the movie.

I am way behind the times.

I connect books in my mind. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie falls into a category dominated by Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Knowles’s Separate Peace. They are books where teenagers question the world around them. I suppose these novels appeal to me because some part of myself will always be a wide eyed thirteen year old.

The reason I decided to read Prime is that it was referred to in another book I am reading: How Fiction Works, by James Woods. Yes, I also read books about books.

That’s the thing about reading. It’s not static. My reading tastes change as I change. When I was an adolescent it was all spaceships and dinosaurs which evolved into Hammett's world of hard boiled detectives which transformed into historical novels which changed into non-fiction and a plethora of other subjects. Yes, a whole, complete plethora.

Everything, it turns out, is linked with everything else.

Below is an (always) incomplete list of some of my favorite non-fiction works.

Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton
One of the most harrowing books I have read on the Civil War. It concerns itself with the war’s final year, basically when Grant took control of the Union Army and, from the South’s perspective, the Civil War stopped being fun. The scope, range and tragedy of the war is laid out brilliantly. If you read this and want more, Catton’s trilogy on the Civil War is also remarkable.

Reflections on a Ravage Century by Robert Conquest
By any measure, the twentieth century was a bloody mess. Conquest examines what he considers the root cause of the horror: blind adherence to ideology. The combined madness of Stalin, Hitler and Mao ended the lives of over one hundred million people. This mind blowing tsunami of death is examined by Conquest not only as a historic fact, but as a horrifying portent for the next century.

The Uses of the Past by Herbert J. Muller
The title is out of print and the book I have is a hardbound 1952 edition. I purchased it for a buck at a used bookstore. I love this book. It is a study of past societies along with an intelligent analysis of current history. This book is reminiscent of Toynbee’s Study of History.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Victory Frankl
I admit it: the title is politically incorrect. It should be re-titled Everybody’s Search for Meaning (which has a kind of Sesame Street ring to it.) But gender sensitivity aside, Frankl’s insight is that there is only one true human freedom, and that is the freedom to choose one’s attitude about a given situation. The first half of the books is the author’s first hand account of life in a Nazi death camp. The second half explains his psychotherapeutic method.

The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey
Yes, this is the same John Hersey that wrote A Bell for Adano and Hiroshima. This time he records the events at the Algiers Motel the night of Detroit’s race riot during the summer of 1968. Shots are reported to have come from the motel, police arrive, and three men are shot. What happened and how it occurred are Heresy’s concern. The book is written in a matter of fact style and is an example of what investigative journalism should look like.

The Making of a President 1968 by T.H. White
The classic, of course, is White’s Making of a President 1960. My favorite is the book White wrote on the 1968 campaign. This one includes many of the seminal events of the 60’s (assassinations, riots, George Wallace, Vietnam, the Chicago Democratic Convention) culminating with the election of Richard Nixon. White ended up writing a total of four books covering Presidential elections and, incredibly, three of them involved Nixon as a candidate. White also wrote a pretty good Watergate book, Breach of Faith.

Life on a Little Known Planet by Howard Evans
“Is the fly more a more intricate machine than he appears, or are we less clever than we suppose…?” Howard Evans will tell us in this wonderful book on insect life. Evans is both a distinguished biologist and an accomplished writer. If you have any interest in biology and insects, you will love this book.

How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture by Francis Schaeffer
Bible scholar Schaeffer looks at Western Civilization and presents a cogent analysis of the changes taking place in the late twentieth century. He opens up the treasure chest of western culture including philosophy, poetry, novels, and films, and declares them to also be the property of Bible believing Christians. Always interesting, Francis Schaefer is never pugnacious yet anxious and ready to debate his beliefs. The television series on which the book is based is definitely worth a look.

The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris
The book The Naked Ape made Morris famous, but I like his follow up work better. The Human Zoo is a sociological study of human behavior. Morris is audacious, thought provoking, frustrating and fascinating. My paperback edition of the book eventually fell apart in my hands from over reading.

Shelton College

In May of 2005 I stopped by Cape Canaveral and visited what was left of Shelton College. Reverend Dr. McIntyre’s four-year institution of higher learning had closed its doors thirteen years before in 1992. There wasn’t much that remained. The boys’ and girls’ dorms had been reconstituted into condos. The main college building was now a dilapidated sign company. And the jungle in front of Satellite Beach had been leveled. It was now a residential neighborhood filled with split-levels, basketball hoops and two car garages.

The only building to remain unchanged was the Under the Stars Hotel.

In September 1971 Cape Canaveral was a depressed city. The American opinion of the NASA Space Program had moved from high exuberance to the low doldrums in a mere twenty-four months after the lunar landing. A kind “been there, done that, bought the t-shirt” mindset developed. I suppose most Americans felt the way I did. We landed on the moon, hit a few golf balls around and discovered it was boring.

I had been brought up on the space paintings and drawings of Chesley Bonestell. His lunar vision had colonized my mind; the moon was supposed to be mountainous, filled with high peaks and vast, flattened seas of hardened lava. The Hollywood lunar set of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was pure Bonstell. In reality, the landscape was just an unending rolling plain of gray dust. The lime lakes down Vanderhoof Road in Majestik Township were more intriguing.

The moon turned out to be no big deal.

Interest in the space program waned, tourism fell and by the summer of 1971 businesses were fleeing Cape Canaveral. It was as if the whole city was part of a gigantic closeout sale. That’s how the Reverend Dr. McIntyre got his hands on the property. Desperate people in desperate times do desperate things. The Reverend walked away with a complex of buildings for a pittance.

The center of the complex was the Under the Stars Hotel. During its heyday in the late 1960’s it was the place to go. Partiers from as far as Atlanta would travel to the Cape just to be part of the scene. In September of 1971 it was the cafeteria for Shelton College. In those first months it was not uncommon to have a group of partygoers pull up to the hotel in hopes of fun, frolic and fornication only to find themselves in the college snack bar.

I didn't studying much during my semester at Shelton. I remember buying text books and sitting in class and doing all the stuff that you do in college, but the memory that stands out the most is of Satellite Beach.

I loved that beach.

Satellite Beach stretched for miles in both directions. It seemed endless. At the time I was there it was completely depopulated. On some days you would find a couple of surfers, but more often than not the waves were few and tepid. Every so often a stray dog would wander by, sniff at the Atlantic surf and then go on its way. Most of the time it was just me. After class, I would sit on the sand underneath a palm tree and read.

Is there anything better than that?

One October afternoon I grabbed my latest paperback book and headed for the beach. You should know that there was a paved road to the shore, but that it meandered around and around.

But there was another way.

A trail that led through the jungle seemed to be a quicker and more direct route. I had seen that path every day and had been tempted to take it. And though I had never seen anyone actually on it, others must have taken that route. I mean, it looked well traveled. It was a path, after all.

After a second’s worth of hesitation, I started walking nonchalantly into the jungle. Immediately I notice the leafy growth on both sides of the trail. Everything seemed so incredibly green. Life was everywhere. It surfaced from the jungle in twerps, tweets and chirps. In front of me a swarm of Florida love bugs flew in random, stupid circles.

At that moment I fancied my self as a kind of ad hoc naturalist, a sort of everyman Darwin. I was an exploer seeking an understanding of nature and at one with the natural world.

Halfway into this complicated maze of growth I heard a rustle off to the left. A few feet in front of me a ten-foot rattlesnake crossed my path. It turned its head, sized me up and then sped into the jungle on the other side of the trail.

It would have been interesting to observe the snake more closely. Its speckled pattern, for instance, seemed incredibly complex. Also it didn’t seem to slither, but somehow used its scales to scoot through the foliage. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to take notes. At that moment I was screaming and running for my life.

At some point while in this mindless panic I left the path and flailed through the brush towards the road. I tripped and fell head first into a nest of bristles. I lost my book. Unfazed, I pulled myself up and continued my flight. I did not stop until I was back in my dorm room with the door locked behind me.

I discovered something about myself on that afternoon.
I hate nature.

I completed just one semester at Shelton College. I returned to Akron, Ohio, in January ’72 and did not revisit Cape Canaveral until 2005. By then Satellite Beach was more crowded, more commercial, and barely matched the scenes from my memory.

One memory was from December 1971. In the early morning hours I went to the beach to view the launch of a weather satellite. The newspaper described it as a minor launching. I sat on the sand and stared across the ocean to where, supposedly, at 5:30 AM the launch would take place.

5:30 AM came and went.

Another dud, I thought. Typical of the ghost town that Cape Canaveral was quickly becoming.

And then, in the distance, there was a spark followed by a growing roar. A brilliant column of fire appeared. Light flooded the horizon changing the sky into a false dawn. The fiery column rose higher and higher becoming a brilliant sun, then a white comet, and finally a shooting star.

There is only one word I can use to describe this.
Unforgettable.

Next:
My Favorite Books (Non-Fiction)

Hurricane Doria

Well, for starters, it was never really a hurricane. It was almost a hurricane, but not quite. Yet, in the 1971 Atlantic hurricane season, it was the costliest tropical storm of the year. Total damage in 2009 dollars was around eight hundred million bucks.

It was the season for political storms as well. In the summer of 1971 the Nixon Administration enacted wage and price controls. Earlier in the year, in April, 175,000 war protesters marched to the steps of the Capital. But worst of all, in the same month, the American table tennis team played in the People’s Republic of China. That would be red China. Godless Communist China.

The Reverend Dr. McIntyre was beside himself.

As an employee at his hotel in Cape May, Jersey, I had a ring side seat to the ongoing political brouhahas of the day. Of course he raged about surrendering to communism. But the important thing about McIntyre was that he did more than just rage.

McIntyre did things.

To show his disapproval, McIntyre and a few hundred of the faithful marched on Washington with the intent of playing ping pong in front of the White House. The plan was for Reverend Dr. McIntyre to bat the ball around with a Taiwanese team thereby demonstrating his condemnation of the Nixon Administration pro-Red China foreign policy. When informed by the Capital police that a stationary protest was prohibited, McIntyre had the table slowly carried as they played ping pong. No mere regulation would stand in his way.

When it came to staging ridiculous protests, the man was indefatigable.

I don’t remember having an opinion about Nixon’s China policy. I had my own interests that summer and protesting the Nixon administration was not one of them.

Mostly, I loved just hanging out.

During my time off from washing dishes, I would walk into downtown Cape May and browse a bookstore I had discovered. It sold mostly paperbacks of the beach book variety. But it also sold other, less mainstream, fare. It was there where I picked up a copy of Charles Reich’s Greening of America.

I loved that book. It was the first time I read a political analysis of the United States. Reich first outlined the historical path of America, then detailed its many flaws, and finally provided an answer. In the nutshell, to cure America’s ills all one had to do was to don bell bottoms, smoke weed, and channel Bob Dylan. Of course it was a ridiculous proposition. But the seventies were a time for ridiculous propositions. One more wouldn’t hurt.

On August 27th, Doria was 200 miles off the coast of Daytona Beach, Florida. It gathered strength, and made landfall on the North Carolina coast on the 28th. By the 29th, it was in Virginia, and by the evening of the 29th it was pounding Cape May, New Jersey.

All during the day, preparations were being made at the hotel. I noticed a slight more hustle and bustle around the front desk. As the largest brick structure in city, it was the one place people could seek refuge. As the blankets, towels, food and others supplies were being gathered, I went about my day as if nothing unusual was happening. I was in the middle of a book, after all. I didn’t have time for all this hurricane stuff. And besides, in the whole scheme of things, how bad could it get?

It turns out, it was pretty damn bad.

I was in my eighth floor room the night the storm hit. Bob, a busboy from down the hall, burst into my room. “Are you watching this,” he cried.

“Watching what?”

“The storm, man, the storm! It’s unbelievable.” Bob ran to my window and opened it up. “Come over here and check it out.”

I put down my book and went to the window and looked out. Bob was right. It was unbelievable. The waves were nearly ten feet tall, and crashed over the sea wall. The streets of the town were flooded. Numerous cars had stalled in the water leaving the drivers stranded in a roiling sea of rising water.

“Look at that guy, look at that guy,” Bob screamed. A car drove down the street at high speed virtually hydroplaning across the water in a desperate attempt to reach the hotel. It didn’t make it. The car twisted and turned in the flooded street, stalled and began floating in the opposite direction.

“What an idiot,” Bob declared.

The wind was impressive. As I watched, branches, paper, and miscellaneous flotsam spiraled passed my eighth floor window, circled, and then came back around. I was like a scene from the Wizard of Oz.

“Look there, look there,” Bob yelled. Below, workers from the hotel had formed a human chain, reaching out to rescue people fleeing to the hotel. Not everyone made it to the other side without incident. More than one slipped and fell into the frothy water.

We both found this to be hilarious.

In self defense, I would like to point out two things. First, all humor is based on some form of human pain so, technically, there is something innately funny about seeing someone slipping and falling into the sea even if it is during a raging storm. And secondly, I was nineteen at the time and was both young and stupid. The defense rests.

I suppose we could have remained in my room laughing and screaming insults at the people below for the rest of the evening. But the fun and games came to an abrupt end when the door crashed open. Standing there, drenched from head to foot, was Brazilian John, my fellow dishwasher. He had a facial expression that could freeze water. Apparently he was one of the people in the human chain and had looked up to see us laughing at him.

John was not amused.

The only thing that saved us was the fact that Brazilian John was a devout Christian and he was restrained by the Ten Commandments. He looked at us with disgust.

Then he uttered two choice words that aptly fit the situation. Apparently Brazilian John's tenure as dishwasher had increased his vocabulary in colloquial English to include personal invectives. He tuned and left, slamming the door on the way out.

The next day there was mostly cleanup work at the hotel. Not only was there debris to remove, but the tourist season was ending. Some of the help had already left. It was time to rejoin reality.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t.

The Reverend Dr. McIntyre had just purchased the Holiday Inn in Cape Canaveral, Florida. He was starting a college. Tuition was low and admission requirements liberal.

Now THAT sounded interesting…

Next: Shelton College.

My Summer of 1971

During the summer of 1971 I worked at The Christian Admiral, a three hundred and thirty-three room hotel in Cape May, New Jersey. The owner and operator was the Reverend Dr. McIntyre, an old school anti-communist fire breather and a fundamentalist minister. He was considered by some to be the “Dean of the Radio Ministers,” a kind of politically bent Presbyterian Oral Roberts minus the faith healing rigmarole.

Of course all of this meant nothing to me. I was nineteen at the time and more interested in escaping home than right wing politics. By nature, I am conservative. I was brought up thinking that people should work for a living and equated welfare with failure. I was a child of the middle class and a holder and defender of the middle values of Middle America. The world seemed pretty much black and white

In other words, I was clueless. If the Reverend Dr. McIntyre was an anti-communist, well, that sounded pretty good to me.

The hotel closely resembled Rev. McIntyre’s anti-communist movement. Both had seen better days. Built at the turn of the century, The Christian Admiral was originally called the Hotel Cape May. It incorporated many of the architectural features that were used on the Titanic: winding staircases, Victorian facades, and skylights. And where the Titanic sank on it’s maiden voyage, the Hotel Cape May’s best day was the first day it opened. After that it was all bankruptcies and sheriff sales until finally the whole complex landed in McIntyre’s lap some six decades later like over-ripe fruit.

I worked that summer in the kitchen as a dishwasher. My job was to run glasses, plates and silverware through an antiquated dishwasher. I never really understood the inner workings of the contraption. There was a conveyor belt of some sort, a valve that controlled the steam, and a pressure gauge whose needle seemed to be perpetually in the red zone. Lacking any mechanical skill, I left the management of the equipment to my fellow worker, John.

John was from Brazil and only knew one word in English: his own name. Whenever he needed help, you would hear him shout “JOHN!” and there he would be, waving and gesticulating trying to make himself understood. I rarely knew what the hell he wanted, but it didn’t seem to matter much. The problem generally resolved itself. And if it didn’t no one seemed to care.

We worked all shifts, scraping, cleaning, stacking and occasionally breaking all manner of dishes, saucers, bowls and cups spending most of our workdays totally drenched. At the end of the day I stank like a concoction that was two parts ketchup and one part body odor.

The interesting thing about working in a hotel was that you could see everything from the inside out. There were connecting hallways to all points of the complex, hidden closets that stored all manner of goods, and elevators with access to floors that were not available to the “guests.”

Though technically the Admiral had seven floors, the kitchen help had rooms on the 8th floor. We each had our own room with a sink, but the bathroom and showers were communal.

My room looked like something out of a George Orwell novel. The mattress on the bed was lumpy, the sink facet dripped, paint peeled off the wall. The only personal fixture in my room was a Peter Max poster I taped above the bed. But from my window I could see the Atlantic Ocean, the boardwalk, and the summer cottages eight stories below. In the morning I would breathe in the salt air from the sea and feel as if I had a million dollars.

I had nothing except a few books and some clothes.
But in some ways, I had everything.

As a worker at the Christian Admiral I was required to attend at least one Bible meeting each week. There was always a vast array of speakers at these sessions. Strom Thurmond, I’m certain, spoke there. Most of the speeches and sermons were a combination of old time gospel along with a generous dose of patriotic nationalism. (There was never a loss of topics to expound on. After all, Nixon was president and Vietnam was raging. The world, as always, was a mess.)

Today I probably wouldn’t mind sitting through a good right-wing diatribe. If you are in the right state of mind, they can be fun in their own way. But in 1971 I was still a teenager. My nerves hadn’t settled yet and I needed to be on the move. I would walk in the front door, sign in, and then sneak out the backdoor.

The boardwalk awaited me.

It really wasn’t much of a boardwalk at all. It had a few places to buy hotdogs and pop and a gallery of pinball machines. Usually somebody had a radio playing the Beach Boys. Most evenings I ended up sitting on a bench, looking at the ocean and enjoying the evening sea breeze.

It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
It was magic.

Then, sometime in the middle of August, Hurricane Doria began her destructive march up the east coast.

Next:
Hurricane Doria

How Grocery Stores Preserved Western Culture

I honestly enjoy shopping for groceries.

I usually shop off a list. True, my accuracy rate isn’t high; I bat around 80%. I’m more than willing to substitute generic chickpeas for garbanzo beans and iceberg lettuce for romaine. I’m also not too particular what kind of toothpaste I buy. I mean, really, how different can Aqua-Fresh be from the Giant Eagle brand?

But I draw the line at generic toilet paper.
With some products, quality matters.

I like looking at how items are displayed on the shelves. Most are heavily marketed and pleasing to the eye. I especially enjoy products with mascots such as Little Debbie, Uncle Ben, Tony the Tiger, Mr. Peanut, Captain Krunch, Charlie the Tuna, and Aunt Jemima. They seem like family. We should, however, have a moment of silence for the Frito Bandito. He last appeared on a package of corn chips in 1971 a few days before the Frito Bureau of Investigation deported him back to stereotypeville.

The price we pay for political correctness is large indeed.

Most of all I enjoy spying on my fellow shoppers despite this being a major breech in shopping etiquette. According to the unwritten rules of crowd behavior, we should all politely ignore each other. But how can you ignore those people who wagon train their carts, or the fastidious shoppers who fuss over each purchase while calling their significant others on their cell phones reporting the latest shopping outrage (‘But dear, they are all out of angel hair spaghetti!”)

Perhaps the most outlandish of all are the scooter people.

I have no idea when grocery stores started letting shoppers drive through the aisles, but it must be a recent phenomenon. The scooter people seemed to just appear one day. I can understand the store’s point of view; they were trying to impress the local community with their humanitarian efforts. Who can argue with attempts to assist the physically disabled?

It turns out that most of the shoppers who use the scooters are not physically disabled at all. They’re just too lazy to walk.

(And while I’m at it, I also have a problem with how the stores are organized. Why are eggs in the dairy department? They have nothing to do with milk or cows or cheese or yogurt or anything dairy. The only thing a hen has in common with a cow is that both live on a farm, and with big agri-business taking over the food industry even that is a question mark.)

My infatuation with grocery stores emerged from my shopping experiences as a kid. Our family shopped almost exclusively at the A&P. Kroger’s would do in a pinch, but my mom insisted that A&P products were more economical. What she did with the pennies we saved, no one knows.

I suspect not much.

(She also collected S & H Green stamps: she would paste them in books and then redeem them for cheap-o household fixtures such as a framed print or an end table lamp. I seem to remember a special store where we went to exchange the stamps for crap. Our house was littered with such items.)

In the late 50’s intense competition among grocery stores forced them to use more and more creative marketing techniques. Some stores sold plates. The idea was that you bought a dish each week, and after eight weeks or so you had a whole set. You couldn’t miss a week or you would miss a plate.

Most grocery stores did stuff like that. In 1960 our local A&P sold the Golden Book Encyclopedia.

I loved the Golden Book Encyclopedia. The sixteen volume set offered information on such diverse topics as aardvarks, parasites, quicksand, volcanoes, and, naturally, dinosaurs. Personally, you can have the Encyclopedia Britannica. Most of it is a pretentious bore. I would much rather read the profusely illustrated article “How Rubber is Made” in my Golden Books any day of the week.

Volume one of the Golden Book sold for two cents. Volume two sold for forty-nine cents. There after successive books cost a buck. Some families dropped out at that point (often capping their children’s knowledge at “Cereal,”) but not my family. Once started we hung in there till we completed the entire set, index included.

My Golden Books were a true treasure. My older brother Allen had his pup tent and pocket knives (which was a pretty scary development in itself.) My younger brother Lowell had his toy garage and his “binkie.” And I had my books o’knowledge. I carried them with me everywhere, cracking one open whenever I wanted to read about the Aztecs, the solar system, the US mint, or the presidency of Millard Fillmore.

I still have them with me today.

Over time grocery stores sold classical records, science books, atlases, American history and high school encyclopedias. I understand why grocery stores took it upon themselves to transmit western culture to its shoppers. It was a business move to insure customer loyalty. But I loved them for it just the same.

Now, in the post grocery store encyclopedia age, there are other channels for cultural information: CNN, Rush Limbaugh and wikipedia come to mind. The grocery store encyclopedia is dead.

And we are the worse for it.

Next
My Summer of 1971

Rudy Zallinger and the Canvas of the Past

Lately I’ve been thinking about the past and reworking it in my mind. In one pile are the things I should have done, but didn’t. In the other are the things I did do, but shouldn't have. I wonder if the piles somehow could switch places if things would be a different in my life.

Probably not.

In order to stop the first pile from becoming a bigger mountain of regret than it already is, I gave serious thought to what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. After a few moments of introspection I discovered that I always wanted to as travel.

So now I go places.

In 2005 I visited New York City for the first time. Forget anything you have ever heard about the place. I found the city complex, friendly, endlessly interesting and alive. I visited all the tourist traps: Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Central Park, Grand Central Station, Ground Zero. At first it surprised me that Ground Zero was even considered a tourist attraction, but then perhaps that how Americans deal with tragedy- drop by, look around, buy a post card, move on.

(Come to think of it, other sites of man made disasters have become tourist stops: the Alamo, Gettysburg, and Jimmy Carter's birthplace come to mind.)

Most important of all, I visited The American Museum of Natural History. Founded by Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the museum is a gigantic brick structure adorned with columns and rows and rows of steps. Inside were a myriad of exhibits that included polar bears, insects, a blue whale and DINOSAURS.

I love dinosaurs.

(Some of the more traditional religions question the existence of the “thunder lizards.” Why, they ask, would God create such pointless and silly creatures? But then, He also created the platypus, parasitic wasps and conservative republicans. Not everything in this universe, it seems, has a point.)

The dinosaurs that live in my imagination inhabit a world conceived by Rudy Zallinger. A Siberian-born American (1919- 1995), he painted the famous mural THE AGE OF REPTILES that hangs in Yale’s Peabody Museum. Pieces and parts of the mural were used as illustrations for many of the dinosaur books I read as a kid. Life magazine in December 1952, in an article entitled The World We Live In, made liberal use of Zallinger’s paintings. These pictures made a lasting impression on me.

When I think about past, this is what it looks like.

To me, this mural is a surrealistic masterpiece. In the center stands the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex, it’s body a walking contradiction of teeth, anger, and impossibly small arms. It’s both fearful and ridiculous.

The Natural History museum displayed the reassembled dinosaur bones in a great hall. All my favorites were there: the gentle Stegosaurus, the well armored and turtle-like Ankylosaurus, and, of course, the Tyrannosaurus Rex. I walked silently by, staring at each and taking as many photographs as I could.

I was slightly disappointed; they looked strangely domesticated frozen and nailed to the floor as they were. The dinosaurs that raged in my mind were massive, viscous, crawling, flying, fighting, living and dying. These skeletal displays were more like static x-rays that belonged in, well, a museum.

But that’s the nature of time and memory. The past is frozen in place, immutable and chiseled into the stone of long-ago. It can only be altered through the force of imagination.

Next: How Grocery Stores Preserved Western Civilization

Herb Alpert versus the Catholic Church

Right now I am sitting in my front room drinking coffee and listening to Grant Geissman’s album Say That. There’s only one track I really like and that’s the title piece. It’s overly produced, a bit too slick, and way too commercial, but that’s my taste. It’s in the same class of music as Sadao Watanabe’s Rendezvous and Chuck Mangione’s Feels So Good.

Music tells you something about a person’s mind. The fact that my bother Lowell can sit for hours in his room listening to Fred Waring & His Pennsylvanian’s rendition of Inch Worm is proof of that.

A few years ago A&M Records released re-mastered CD’s of Herb Alpert’s early recordings from the 60’s including his Christmas album. The only album excluded was the much-maligned Volume Two, Alpert’s too blatant attempt to cash in on the popularity of his first album, Lonely Bull. That’s too bad because I liked that album, too.

I’m a Herb Alpert fan from way back.

Here’s a bit of Alpert trivia; in the movie The Ten Commandments, Herb is the kid who is pounding the drums as the Jews exit Egypt. No joke.

In the spring of 1965 my family moved out of Akron and into the suburb of Majestik Township. From the moment I arrived I experienced the indescribable frisson of freedom.

You see, the section of Akron I moved from was a Catholic neighborhood. And I was not a Catholic. Therefore I stuck out like a sore heretic. All my friends, it seemed, were immersed in Catholic dogma; it was all Father this and Hail Mary that. Despite being a protestant, I soon was thoroughly indoctrinated with the details of the Holy Catholic Church.

As my friends saw things, I was going to hell. That was a given. The nature of hell, as my best friend Mike described it to me, resembled the comic book version of Dante’s Inferno: lots of fire, pain and nudity (much like Woodstock.) If it seemed unfair to be sentenced for all eternity for the crime of going to Methodist Sunday school, well, that’s just the way it was. Convert, or attend a Torquemada weenie roast as the weenie.

My foreordained damnation was bad enough, but worse were the religious barriers between my friends and me. An invisible theological wall separated us. Most of my friends were named after some famous Catholic. Mike was named for St. Michael and his idiot brother Peter was named after Christ’s brother. And me? Was there a St. Carl somewhere that I was unaware of? Nope. I was just plain old, protestant Carl. Named after nobody.

Our schools started at separate times, had different holidays, and in the winter it seemed that the parochial schools had a more lenient closing policy. That January as I trudged past Mike’s house through eight inches of newly fallen snow, I pictured him comfortably watching television, fiddling with his Rosary beads, perhaps lighting a votive candle or two while he awaiting his phone call from the Pope to be blessed.

It seemed that my damnation had already begun.

And then, that spring, we moved away. In Majestik Township no one gave a damn where you went to church. Or, incredibly, if you went to church at all. The theological concerns of my early years evaporated in an instant. I was free.

I may have been a stranger, but I was no longer in a strange land.

Every day during the summer of 1965 I would bike around my new neighborhood. I carried a small notebook and drew maps of the various streets. I made friends with every stray dog that would wander my way. I had stumbled out of hell and into a green suburban heaven.

And while I relished my new situation, Herb Alpert was on the radio playing his trumpet. His upbeat, accessible music was the perfect soundtrack for my life at the moment.

This explains why I never took part in the youth rebellion that was exploding around me. The generational battle over Vietnam, free speech, free love and the rest of it was a war over absolutes. I had had enough of that crap.

Life goes on and points of view change. I’m no longer thirteen. But whenever I hear the clear notes from Alpert’s trumpet, I recall that incredible summer of pure release.

I think I’ll put on Herb Alpert’s Christmas CD. After all, it's almost Labor Day.

Next:
Rudy Zallinger and the Canvas of the Past

Charles Dickens and the Middle Class Way of Christmas

Charles Dickens has been called the man who invented Christmas, and I think there’s truth to that statement. Before Dickens, Christmas was primarily a religious holiday celebrated by the faithful in church and by the carnal in pubs. What precipitated the change more than anything else were the Christmas stories by Mr. Dickens, the most famous of which was A Christmas Carol.

It was the genius of Dickens to fashion this holiday tale around what is essentially a ghost story. Marley’s ghost is a true horror, coming back from the grave in torment, weighed down by chains, to warn Ebenezer Scrooge to amend his miserly ways. Likewise, the Ghost of Christmas Yet-To-Come, a possible model for Fellini’s personification of Death in The Seventh Seal, always gave me the heebie-jeebies. I even found the overt jollity of Christmas Present to be strangely unsettling.

Dickens success can be measured by looking at the change in the Christmas celebration over his life. It was transformed from being a kind of low-key religious ritual into an overly sentimental, schmaltzified mixture of nostalgia and forced cheerfulness we know today.

And, knowing this, I still love Christmas. It is by far my favorite holiday with Thanksgiving coming in a distant second. I love the way the malls begin to over decorate with Santas and snowmen in late September. I love the way the radio slowly begins to play more and more holiday tunes until by the week before Christmas it’s pretty much all ho-ho-ho and Chestnuts Roasting over and Open Fire ternty-four seven(but I SWEAR if I hear Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer one more time I will vomit up a pine cone!) And I love the Sears Christmas catalog filled with overly priced “sale” items.

I love Christmas because it is corny.

I watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special on television every year, as well as the Andy Williams Christmas show. Heck, if they re-run Friends and Nabors at Christmas (Jim Nabors attempt at televised holiday cheer) I’ll even watch that.

Note that none of this has anything to do with Jesus. I suppose as a Christian I should focus more attention onto the Savior of Mankind. Yet I have totally bought into the Dickens’s Christmas vision of celebration for the sheer joy of celebration with the alacrity of an elf on steroids.

Growing up we celebrated Christmas at our grandparent’s house. (We only had one set, my dad’s parents having died off the decade before I was born.) Every Christmas Eve Lowell, Allen and I would don our sports coats, vests and clip-on ties and have Christmas dinner with a flock of relatives we barely interacted with.

It’s amazing when I think about how all of us fit into that tiny bungalow in the poor section of Akron. And yet there we all were year after year after year feasting on scallop potatoes, mashed potatoes, potato salad and any number of other potato-based casseroles.

I recall one Christmas Eve in particular: December 24th, 1968. My grandparents’ front room was wall-to-wall people. Uncle Harlan had added just the right holiday touch with his eye-watering cigar smoke wafting across the room. Normally the television was under control of the sports enthusiasts in the group. Their testosterone levels being higher than the rest of us, it would be impossible for anyone not interested in “the game” to wrest control of the TV and switch channels to the Dean Martin Holiday special. Yet, on that evening, there were no sports on the tube. Programming was pre-empted by a news event: Apollo 8 was orbiting the moon that night.

I remember hearing the astronauts read from the Bible, and then seeing the lunar surface on my grandparents’ old black and white television.

It was surreal.

In the forty years since then everything has changed. Old relatives passed away, new ones were born. The family, as it shrank and grew, dissipated. I celebrate Christmas with my wife and Lowell. Occasionally I have a glass of wine.

But I still remember how all of us huddled in that small cottage on Christmas Eve. There we are, taking each other’s photos, giving compliments freely and enjoying the season. I can see Grandpa with his pipe and Grandma with her apron, and a cornucopia of starchy casseroles steaming on the dining room table. People are laughing in the kitchen. Outside old Duke, Grandpa’s dog, is awaiting leftovers.

These are my ghosts of Christmas past.

Next: Catholicism versus the Music of Herb Alpert

A Jerry Built Life (1924-2005)

Jury rig and jerry built are two terms that sound similar, have roughly the same meaning but have two different origins. Jury rig is a nautical term and refers to repairs made while at sea. Jerry built comes from World War Two and was used to describe the German efforts to repair their various war machines. To jerry build something has a more make-shift, splash-dash, low quality element to the definition. It’s easy to see why. It’s hard to pay attention to the finer details of an engineering problem when you’re in the middle of Stalingrad.

There’s quite a bit of jerry building in the American character. Take for instance the transcontinental railroad. A monumental task of engineering, true, but the emphasis was to get the project completed. Short cuts were taken. Later, various parts were shorn up using the railroad itself to complete the task. This proclivity for “ad hocness” is reflected in American politics as well. FDR jerry built a federal policy out of an entire alphabet of agencies in order to tackle the problem of the Depression. And there is also a certain making-it-up-as-you-go-along element in the current administration. But that’s okay as long as something ends up working.

My dad was a jerry builder of first rank. Though his engineering projects were smaller in scale (mostly of the cost saving variety), they were non-the-less impressive.

His simplest apparatus was “the prop.” For example, when a couch leg snapped off dad would analyze the situation and then prop it up with a book or two. Some lesser quality JB engineers would leave it at that. But dad would be concerned enough to find the exact height necessary to avoid wobbling; he would test and adjust until that exact height was achieved. His favorite tools were volumes from the Golden Book Encyclopedia ®. When he was finished his prop would often last until the couch was carted off to the Salvation Army the next week.

Our house resembled a museum of Rube Goldberg throw-a-ways. When a refrigerator door failed to latch, Dad fixed it in no time flat with only a fist full of rubber bands and a small canister of Playdough ™. When the hall light when out, he was Johnny on the spot with an extension cord, a shop lamp, and a few of mom’s hair clips. I once saw him repair a three inch diameter hole in our screen door using a tube of model glue and a spool of black thread.

There was no household engineering dilemma that could defy him. I swear, if you gave him a Slinky ®, a pair of panty hose and a dab of peanut butter dad could fashion a better mouse trap.

In 1995 my mom died. Dad was consumed with grief. Occasionally, with the passage of time, there were flashes of the old dad. But, for the most part, he seemed lost in a gray fog. When things broke, they pretty much stayed broke until my brother Lowell had them repaired. My dad had fixed hundreds of things over his life, but the loss of my mom was something that broke him.

Dad passed away in September 2005. After the funeral I stopped by the house to have a cup of coffee with my brother, Lowell. When I arrived, Lowell smiled.

“Bro,” he said, “I’ve got something I want to show you.” He grabbed a flashlight and I followed him down the basement. “Check this out,” he said pointing the beam at the basement ceiling.

It took me a moment to figure out what I was looking at, and then all the pieces fit. Apparently some venting had needed repair. Dad had applied some elbow grease and fixed it using a plastic milk jug and massive amounts of duct tape.

I couldn’t help but smile.
JB Engineer First Class, to the last.

Next:
Charles Dickens and the Middle Class Way of Christmas

My Favorite Books (1965 - 2009)

I have a passion for books. I love the touch of books. I love holding them up close and seeing them in my hands. I love looking at them at a distance on my shelves. I even enjoy their smell. And yes, I do judge a book by its cover.

Like most book lovers I enjoy browsing through bookstores. Not those corporate owned, bestseller laden gift shops, though they will do in a pinch. The kind of bookstores I love to browse through are used bookstores owned and operated by women in their sixties. These kind of stores are somewhat organized, but not really. Some books are the shelves, but boxes of books are everywhere.

And a cat is always asleep in the display case.

As it turns out I have a life in books. I can recall where I was and what was happening in my life when I read a certain book.

What follows is a list of ten of my favorite books presented in no particular order. The list is not definitive. It will change as I change.

Franz Kafka’s The Trial
The Trial is the story of Franz K. as he tries to weave his way through the Czech legal system. K. is never told the nature of his offense yet he must prepare a defense. This is not only K/'s problem. This is everyone's problem. I read this book in 1977 when I was twenty-four years old and trying to figure out how the world worked. I'm still working on it.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The theme of the book is innocence versus evil. This is an incredible, delightful, harrowing story of childhood. Atticus is the embodiment of liberalism at its finest moment. I read this book in a single sitting while I floating in a hot tub in Loudenville.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Critics claim The Grapes of Wrath is the greater work, but the plight of the Joads as they try to find work in Depression Era America is, well, depressing. Steinbeck always claimed that East of Eden was his greatest work and I agree with him.

Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
All of Vonnegut’s books should be on this list, really. Cat’s Cradle, Player Piano, Slaughterhouse Five are all wonderful. My personal favorite is Bluebeard perhaps because it’s the last one I read. At work in this book are all of Vonnegut’s themes (anti-war, anti-hypocrisy) along with a good dose of humor throughout the story.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury does not really write science fiction. The Martians of The Martian Chronicles are inanely philosophical and completely ridiculous. I once heard Bradbury called the “Rod McKuen” of sci-fi and I think that’s more true than not. His writing tends to be overly sentimental and metaphoric. Yet, in Dandelion Wine it all works. I love this book.


George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was in 8th grade. I found the book in the township library and was completely bowled over by the title. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Wow. The future. In 1965 the year 1984 seemed so distant yet the book proved to be a supreme disappoint. It took place in the future, sure, but there were no rocket ships, aliens or robots. Only poor Winston Smith in his jump suit and a bunch of rats.

White Noise by Don Delillo
You have to love a book about a professor who is the Department Head of Hitler studies. Throw in a free floating toxic event and it’s the perfect read.

Thomas Pynchon’s V
I found this book in a cardboard box in my parents basement long after I moved out. Its cover was yellowed and brittle, but the pages were still crisp. It had never been read. I picked it up and read it cover to cover. Quite literally, the book is about everything.

Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Simply the best novel I’ve ever read. To tell more would be to spoil the fun.

The Confidence Man by Herman Melville
I’ve written about The Confidence Man in an earlier entry so I will not elaborate here. I will say, though, that the book is difficult, allegorical and hilarious: a true American classic. Hawthorne, eat your heart out.

(This list is personal. I could have easily substituted other titles. And there is a whole category of books missing- poetry. Wallace Stevens, Cummings, Dante will have to wait for another list. And, I could have easily added other titles and authors: Atlas Shrugged, Dune, Anna Karenina, Steppenwolf, Huckleberry Finn, Letters to the Earth, We, Tarzan, Crime and Punishment, A Princess of Mars, and on and on and on.)

Next:
A Jerry Built Life (1924-2005)

Robert Sheckley and the Future that Wasn’t (1965)

In 1965 my old brother Allen’s bedroom was a permanent Katrina level disaster area. Underwear, comic books, sheet music, homework, Fritos ™ and other miscellaneous flotsam swirled in an ever-growing pile of kidcrap. I suspected our two missing gerbils had somehow been swallowed up by the maelstrom.

It was from this pile that I stole Mindswap, a science-fiction novel by Robert Sheckley. Allen would never notice. He had around three hundred other books sent to him by the Double Day Science Fiction Book Club. Every month Double Day sent him two books on the theory that someday he would send them a check.

Well, so much for theory.

Allen was away that Saturday morning for his weekly tuba lesson and had left his bedroom door open. You couldn’t help but look in: his room was an accident rapidly unfolding in front of your eyes. The book’s cover illustration caught my attention immediately. It showed a human (or humanoid) face slowly morphing into a Martian countenance. You see, you could tell it was a Martian’s head because it had pointed ears. After safely removing the book to my bedroom, I read the synopsis on the inside flap.

Hmmmmm. A human being switches brains with an alien. Intriguing.

That was my first, unassigned, solely voluntary reading-for-pleasure novel, ever. I was thirteen years old. I became a book addict at that instant. From that point on a book has never left my fingertips.

I grabbed up all the Sheckley books I could find (The Game of X, Untouched by Human Hands, The People Trap) and devoured them whole. I read other science fiction authors in quick succession: Blish, Bradbury, Asimov, Heinlein, Simak, Tenn, Clarke. Most of these paperbacks were purchased from the twirl-around-rack at the Majestik Pharmacy. Supply was limited but I wasn't choosey. Eventually no book was safe. My mother once left Potok’s The Chosen on the coffee table. In two days I sucked it dry.

Of all the authors I read during that period, Robert Sheckley remained my personal favorite. Perhaps it was because of Mindswap. I don’t know. He always seemed to be writing just for me. His stories generally had a humorous angle and a twist at the end. And the science fiction element seemed to add just the right optimistic touch. In the turmoil of the Sixties I was relieved that someone actually thought the human race had a future let alone one populated with rocket ships and robots.

That August my family loaded up the Galaxy 500 and we headed south to spend a week at Cumberland Mountain State Park in Tennessee. Unfortunately I was forced to ride the hump most of the way. As I sat there cramped in the fetal position between Allen and Lowell I decided to break the monotony of the trip by engaging in my new hobby: reading aloud from almanacs. I had brought along my Reader’s Digest Almanac just for this occasion.

Did anyone know what movie won the best picture of the year in 1952? No? I told them. What about the capital of Bolivia? Or the population of Kenya? Before we had even reached the Ohio border, by a vote of four to one, my almanac was tossed from the car and onto the highway median strip.

Our vacation was pretty standard. We rented a cabin in the woods for the week and intended to enjoy ourselves by making our lives just a little bit more miserable. Instead of watching television, we listened to hillbilly music on the radio. Instead of grocery shopping at Kroger, we allowed ourselves to be ripped off by the nearby general store. And instead of our real friends, we socialized with headache inducing strangers who we had never met before and never would meet again.

There was swimming and hiking most days. In the evening we listened to Hank Williams wanna-bes while Dad popped popcorn. Everywhere there was the perpetual trill of locusts. But what I remember most is reading Sheckley by flashlight and thinking about the future.

That future, of course, never happened. When the year two thousand rolled around there were only a few robots and just a couple space shuttles. Even the bad stuff didn’t happen. No invasions. No world destroying meteorites. No soylent green. The sad truth is that technological change is largely incremental. Science fiction is simply that: fiction.

Even without time travel, aliens, Martian colonies and genetic mutants, the human race somehow is still here. There is room for hope.

And that’s something.

Next:
My Favorite Books

Bill Cosby and the Lost Art of the Comedy Album

In 1965 our family moved to Majestik Township south of Akron. It was a small bedroom community: a typical suburb of the period. Split-levels and ranches were all the rage. We lived in a brick ranch. And, aside from the well-tanned Johnstons (who vacationed 6 months out of the year in Florida) and the intermittent foreign exchange student from Thailand, we were an all white community.

During those years, Bill Cosby was the only black man I knew. Sure, I had seen Sammy Davis Jr sing on the Dean Martin Show and watched Jim Brown play football. But I knew Bill Cosby. I heard his voice in my front room.

Yes, he spoke to me.

He spoke to me through his comedy albums. His major opus, Bill Cosby is a Very Funny Fellow, RIGHT, is, perhaps, the greatest comedy album ever recorded. No, it was not ground breaking. And it certainly wasn’t cutting edge. If anything, it was strictly G rated material. Yet I loved it for the sheer niceness of it all. His recollections of his childhood, his parody of Noah (“what’s a cubit”), and his hyperactive manner of expressing himself (“little tiny hairs, GROWING on my face!”) were pure genius.

I fell in love with Bill Cosby, and became a fan of the comedy album.

Having memorized Bill Cosby’s routine, I moved on to Bob Newhart. I missed his classic album, The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart, but made up for it with his composite album, The Best of Bob Newhart. His routines on Lincoln, a retirement party and the discovery of tobacco in the New World put me in stitches. More than a decade later when the Bob Newhart Show aired on television, I was already a fan.

At this point in our family history my older brother, Allen, was into folk music. Looking back, I can see how this might fit into the labyrinth that was his mind. After all, Allen did have a kind of rugged-loner-out-in-the-woods mentality akin to, say, a Euell Gibbons or perhaps the Unabomber. At any rate, Allen would play his Peter, Paul and Mary records over and over and over again.

(You would have thought that with this apparent love of folk music Allen would have played the guitar, but no. Allen’s instrument of choice was the tuba.)

Since my bedroom was next to Allen's, I got stuck listening to the same lousy Peter, Paul and Mary record over and over and over. I couldn’t figure out their appeal. I mean, Puff the Magic Dragon? What was that all about? For me, I was on to my next comedic discovery: George Carlin.

George Carlin’s album lasted a total of five minutes in my house. Once he started into his Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television rift, it was all over. My dad sailed the record out the back door like it was a Frisbee (he looked a little like Odd Job decapitating a statue with that razor sharp derby of his.) Yet in that short space of time I had heard enough of Carlin to know that, yes, I loved him, too.

Other albums followed in quick succession: The Smothers Brothers, Allen Sherman (the Al Yankovich of the 60’s), Cheech & Chong, Richard Pryor.

When I was in college I became an avid listener to the National Lampoon Radio Hour. It was an early, audio version of Saturday Night Live featuring the not-yet-famous voices of John Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner and Chevy Chase. The National Lampoon Radio Hour (which lasted a half hour) was broadcast sporadically and I missed quite a few shows, but when they republished the material in album form, I bought them all.

A short time later I discovered The Firesign Theater. This was avant-garde comedy, but a digestible form of avant-garde. My favorite album was I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus. This was political satire featuring a fantasy amusement park, a robotic Nixon, and a bus full of Bozos. What it actually meant was hard to tell. But whatever it was, it certainly had its funny moments.

Today the comedy album is practically comatose. Cable television has pretty much decimated the audio only comedy format by making visual comedy accessible. This increased accessibility has encouraged comedians to try to out do each other. More often than not, this has made their brand of humor a raunchier, more adults-only fare.

Cosby and Newhart seem to be quaint throwbacks to an earlier, more gentle era by comparison.

In my mind’s eye I can still see my family huddled around the hi-fi, safe in our ranch style home in Majestik Township listening to our friend, Mr. Bill Cosby tell us about Fat Albert, old time radio and volley balls. True, there were wars and riots and crime in the streets. Manson was still on the loose. The world was not a warm and fuzzy place.

But for a time, Cosby made it seem that way.

Next: Robert Sheckley and the Future That Never Was

Citizen Gaines (1963)

Everybody has a hero.
Mine is Bill Gaines.

First, a little history.

Bill Gaines’ father, Max, was the man who invented the comic book. Max gathered the Sunday color funnies from the various area newspapers and used them as content for a 64-page booklet titled Famous Funnies. Eventually these compilations of funnies evolved into sagas of full-bodied action adventure superheroes such as Dr. Fate and the Spectre. The rather wimpy title More Fun Comics soon changed to the much manlier Detective Comics (or DC). This was Golden Age of the Funny Book.

By then Max had left the publishing business for other endeavors. After a string of poor business decisions he returned to produce a new line of comics known as Educational Comics. Where DC produced stories of daring do, EC would give the comic book reading public somewhat different fare. One title will tell you pretty much all you need to know about the Max Gaines’ editorial direction- Stories From the Bible.

The thud you just heard were sales going into the dumper.

When Max died in 1947 his twenty-five year old son, Bill, took over. Bill quickly scrapped the biblical tales of yore and came up with a truly new direction for the business: horror comics. Soon Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear were decorating the newsstands. These titles and more like them were wildly successful and caught the eye of his competitors who quickly produced knock-off imitations.

Bill Gaines certainly knew his market.

Unfortunately he also came to the attention of the ever-watchful eyes of opportunistic politicians. This was, after all, the 1950’s and paranoia was in full flower.

A book soon gave the political class all they needed to create an issue. The Seduction of the Innocent by Dr, Fredric Wertham warned that comic books were an appalling form of popular literature and a direct cause of juvenile delinquency. Apparently gangs of youth armed with copies of Tales of the Crypt were tee-peeing houses across much of the Midwest. Faced with regulation from congress, comic book publishers created the Comics Code Authority that pretty much regulated virtually all of Gaines’ titles into the trash bin.

Except for one: Mad. It was a not a horror comic but a satiric screed aimed at current cultural icons. Everyone took a hit. Hollywood, Washington, even Madison Avenue. Especially Madison.

Mad was born in 1952 as a comic book.
I was born in 1952 as a human being.

By the time I had discovered Mad I was eleven years old. Mad had also changed. In order to escape the comic book code, Gaines transformed Mad into a “magazine” adding additional pages and artwork and charging a quarter.

I remember the first issue I purchased- issue No. 62, October ’63. The cover featured Fidel Castro who, in true Mad fashion, smoked an exploding cigar. You see, you knew it would blow up because there wasAlfred E. Neuman (Mad’s clueless human mascot) on the cigar band with his fingers in his ears awaiting the KA-BOOM. I thought it was funny and I didn’t even know who Castro was!

I loved the magazine and experienced a rush whenever I purchased an issue. My mom hated it, which caused me to love it all the more: silliness and rebellion for only a quarter.

Each issue contained regular features such as a Don Martin panel comic, Spy vs Spy, or Dave Berg’s Look at fill in the topic. Most of the times you could count on a television or movie parody by Mort Drucker. And there were beautifully illustrated articles touching on the inanity of modern life.

I rarely missed an issue and if I did, Bill Gaines was right there to help me out. He published “annuals” four times a year featuring the “worst” of previous issues. In addition he also published a library of paperback books (The Son of Mad, Mad Strikes Back, Mad in Orbit etc…) which reprinted earlier stuff from the fifties. Granted, the satiric pokes at the Eisenhower Administration made little sense to my fifth grade sensibilities, but I loved the art work by Wally Wood and Bill Elder and Jack Davis and, of course, Don Martin, Mad’s maddest artist. I could easily picture myself reading Mad for the rest of my life far into my golden years.

Then I grew up and my Mads simply collected dust in a paper bag in my closet. I went to college, married, and went to work. Sometime during all of this I picked up a copy. Everything, of course, had changed. Instead of a rush, I felt a pang of sadness. Gaines was not hip, or cool, or cutting edge. He was more like your weird uncle who wore leisure suits and tried a bit too hard to make you laugh.

In 1992 Bill Gaines passed away and his magazine now appears to be moribund as well. DC, the publisher, announced that Mad would become a quarterly magazine instead of a monthly. If I was Alfred E. Neuman, I would start to worry.

I will always admire Bill Gaines. He did not let the blowhards in Washington defeat him. He took a wildly ridiculous idea, blew it all out of proportion, and made himself a mint. His magazine became a 20th century icon. And for a season, he made me feel less self-conscious about being an adolescent.

In the middle sixties amid all the change that was swiriling around me, Bill Gaines made me laugh.

No small achievement there.

Next:
Bill Cosby and the Lost Art of the Comedy Album

My Ongoing Love Affair with Herman Melville (2009)

Everybody knows the story of Moby Dick: the great white whale, and Captain Ahab who pursued it. The book is considered to be the greatest American novel ever written. This judgment is rendered by professors of literature in colleges across America. Hollywood has also paid homage to the book by producing at least one feature film (screenplay by Ray Bradbury) and, who knows, Oprah may yet select it for her book club.

Yet today hardly anyone really reads Moby Dick. Even the Classic Comic version barely gets a skim. But then, maybe you don’t have to really read it. Big albino whale, enraged and insane captain, what else is there to know?

Actually, quite a lot.

I fell in love with Herman Melville after reading his first book, Typee. The book’s plot is simple. A sailor jumps ship while its anchored near a south Pacific island. He’s quickly captured by the local inhabitants and is kept as a kind of human lucky charm. The story contains hints of cannibalism and lots of naked Polynesian women. The 19th century American reading population loved it. It bounced Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter right off the best seller list.

Melville quickly followed up with a second book, Omoo. Again, it was pretty much the same tale as the first: life among the heathen. And again it was a monster hit. Melville suddenly smelled a literary career. He then did the absolute worst thing a man pursuing such a career could possibly do: he took himself seriously.

His next book, Mardi, was a flop. It contained the usual Melville motifs- exotic landscapes, unwashed heathen, scantily dressed Polynesian women, but he also wove into the plot symbolism and metaphor. This over estimation of the literary sensibilities of his readership was a huge mistake. Melville would continue to make the same blunder with everything he wrote after Omoo. Granted, the intellectual class loved this stuff. But the general public scratched their collective heads while thinking “what the hell?”

Consider his next novel: Redburn. In this novel a young man travels from America to London. It is told in first person by an older version of the main character. A large part of the fun in reading the book are the insights the older version of the character makes while examining the younger version of himself. Now factor in that this point of view is not Herman Melville’s, but the thoughts of a totally imagined character. In literary terms this is a point-of-view trifecta!

Of course sales went nowhere.

Then, after a few more disappointing novels, Melville unleashed Moby Dick. As everyone knows the story is told through a sailor named Ishmael. Well, sort of. Midway through the book Ishmael becomes a kind of omniscient narrator being able to comment on the thoughts of other characters.

Is Ishmael mad? Or is it Melville the author that’s unreliable? Or should the reader just accept it and move on with the story?

As the book progresses Ishmael examines the whale from every possible perspective only to end with the mystery still in tact. By the conclusion of the story the novel’s entire structure begins to crack revealing a narrative so large, so symbolically complicated that it resembles nothing less than the literary equivalent of a painting by Picasso. In many ways the book is a kind of proto-post modern novel akin to Pynchon’s V. Or is it V that is mimicking Moby Dick?

Graduate papers are still written postulating the meaning of the whale. Is it God, evil, everything, nothing or all of the above?

Predictably sales for Moby Dick were abysmal.

Melville’s last novel published in his lifetime is my favorite- The Confidence Man. The plot: On April Fool’s Day Satan, in the form of a mute, boards the Steamboat Fidele and proceeds to bilk the hypocrites onboard. Again, the book is filled with symbolism, allegory, metaphor and satire. Even the chapter titles are an essential part of the structure of the novel. Sometimes it seems that the novel’s voice transcends the printed page to discuss plot points with the reader! This was Melville showing off, flexing his literary muscles. But his readers were unimpressed and uninterested. He was casting his pearls before a rapidly vanishing audience.

He then withdrew from writing and made his living as an official at a customs house. But Melville always wrote. He published poetry and produced a book of short stories and, in the process, created another literary classic: The Scrivener. In this story the main character, a scrivener- a kind of human Xerox © machine- holds the reader’s attention by doing, literally, absolutely nothing.

In 1891 Melville died. It wasn’t pretty. He had been mentally ill for years and largely forgotten. An obituary the size of a postage stamp marked his passing.

And then he became great.

Thirty years after his death Moby Dick was rediscovered and at last appreciated. In 1924 Melville’s posthumous novel, Billy Budd, was published with critics claiming that it rivaled Moby Dick for its sublime, subtle symbolism and subdued style.

This is why I love Herman Melville.

Because of his stories,
Because of his unappreciated genius.
Because he never gave up.
And because he continued to write long after his audience left.

He is the rare example of a man who was great in spite of his audience, not because of it.

Next: Citizen Gaines (1963)

The Worst Job (1965- 1970)

To be truthful, being a paperboy is not the worst job in the world. But it was certainly the worst job I ever had.

Worse than weighing lampblack for Firestone.

Worse than bussing tables in New Jersey.

And, yes, worse than washing dishes and scrapping pizza pans in Cape Canaveral.

For five years I was forced to lugged a fifty pound bag full of pressed wood pulp around the neighborhood for three dollars a day.

My dad encouraged me to take the job. He had a romanticized notion of what it meant to be a paperboy, or, as he called the profession- a newsboy. He had been a paperboy himself. Of course back then the news was a bit weightier with Roosevelt, Hitler, World War II and the Depression.

When my turn came, I got stuck passing out a sack full of Nixon headlines. Trust me, no one was excited about that.

Life is unfair.

Think about it. When you’re a paperboy there are no days off. No sick days. No personal days. No excuses. God may have rested on the seventh day, but the paperboy who delivered the news to the rest of creation didn’t.

Here’s the list of some of the more hateful duties of a paperboy:

Dealing with neighborhood wildlife. Mostly dogs. This was way before mace became available to the general public. I had to deal with everything from menacing german shepards to yappy wienner dogs with only my wits to protect me.

I was lucky I survived.

Folding, rolling and delivering the papers. Not as easy as it sounds. Paper rolling is a learned skill among paperboys. Sure, anyone can roll up a Friday paper, but try a Wednesday paper filled with inserts and advertisements. It didn't help that I couldn't have cared less about how the papers were rolled.

Collecting. Basically, it’s a modified version of begging. You're a kid and an adult owes you money. Who do you think is going win?

Inserts. At least once a week newspapers came with some assembly required. We'd find our stack of newspapers next to an equally tall stack of Sears advertisements. Some paperboys simply chucked them, doing themselves and the consumer a favor. I, however, could never cross that moral threshold.

An Interesting Newspaper Fact

In terms of weight, not all papers were alike. As previously mentioned, Friday’s papers were always thin. Wednesdays could be as thick as your fore arm. Sundays were approaching the bulk of a Christmas catalog. And holidays were the size of a major metropolitan area phone book.

In 1966 December 25th came on a Sunday. In terms of paper size, it was a perfect storm: It was a Sunday and a holiday all rolled into one backbreaking sized paper. For the first time in my life I dreaded waking up on Christmas. To top it off, when I opened my eyes I saw it had snowed over night. Not just snow. But SNOW. Close to eight inches of the white stuff covered the neighborhood.

As I walked out into the kitchen, I was surprised to find that my dad had drafted a very reluctant Allen and cluelss Lowell to help. Then he fired up his VW and drove us around the route. He folded and rolled while the three of us delivered.

What could have been an act of futility matching Sisyphus turned out to be an exercise of familial cooperation.

When we were done, Dad drove home leaving my brothers and me to finish up and walk the final two blocks back to the house. It was around six in the morning on Christmas day. There was no sound except for the gentle hiss of falling snow. When we got back, mom had made up pancakes and bacon.

This is one of my most favorite memories.


Next: My On Going Love Affair With Herman Melville

Masonic Camp for Boys and the Juvenile Appeal of Fascism (1963)

For most of his adult life my Dad was a member of a mystery religion. He was a Mason. Each Thursday he would put on his red jacket and his fez and head out for the Lodge. My mom encouraged him to join, hoping that he would somehow gain an advantage, but this task proved too great for the Masonic brotherhood. He remained pretty much in the same job throughout his life.

My knowledge of Masonry comes secondhand through observation. For a mystery religion, there is nothing mysterious to report. If there was some sort of hidden knowledge of the universe, I’m pretty sure the Masons don’t know it. Among the various Masonic paraphernalia I’m familiar with (pyramids, Egyptian hieroglyphics, assorted bake goods) none of them speaks to a purpose higher than that of a social club.

Trust me. When the anti-Christ arrives, he won’t be wearing a fez driving a midget car in the Thanksgiving Day parade.

However, Dad’s Masonic membership made me eligible for The Masonic Camp for Boys just off the shores of placid Lake Majestik in north east Ohio. Each summer, until I was seventeen, I could be safely locked away in a concrete block bunkhouse along with twenty or so campees.

MCB was a state within a state within a state, and a totalitarian state at that. No doubt there is a juvenile appeal to enforced order. Kids love parades and, if the newsreels of the 1930’s are any guide, totalitarianism provides for lots of marching opportunities.

And there was lots of marching a MCB.

We marched to breakfast. We marched to dinner. We marched to supper. We marched to the lake. We marched from the lake. We marched to our marching drills and marched back. The only individual who was exempt from this marching life-style was the Camp Director, Big Joe Tuck.

Big Joe tooled around the camp in his electric golf cart while holding a nine iron. The question was, did he golf? But then how could he? He was completely out of shape weighing well over three hundred pounds. This made for some interesting scenes. At any one time you could see Big Joe cruising along in the distance his golf cart engine straining to carry his mass.

Activates at the camp could be divided into two distinct categories.

Category One: Activities I Hated.

These included:

Archery: After the invention of gun powder, this became essentially pointless.

Horseback riding: We would ride around the nearby woods in a big circle while the horses tried to scrape up off every tree they passed. Frankly, the horses had my sympathy.

Capture the flag: an activity more stupid and confused than a political convention.

Category Two: Fun Activities That Were Made Hateful

These included:

Canoeing: All that water and no place to pee.

Swimming: We were forced to wear caps that designated our swimming ability. I was a perpetual red cap- a beginniner. I figure I was the most important person at the beach. The life guards needed someone to save. It was here that I discovered a brand new place to be humiliated- under water.

Crafts: possibly the most hateful of all- the weaving of lanyards from multi-colored flat plastic ribbons. If Solzhenitsyn had been forced to braid plastic in the Gulag, the Commies would have broken him.

On the last evening of camp each cabin would sleep under the stars, abandoning the discomfort of the cabin to sleep on the ground in our sleeping bags under the sky. For our retreat we put on our life jackets and paddled to the central island on Lake Majestic: Turtle Island. We built a fire, ate hot dogs, told ghost stories and laughed about nothing.

I actual found myself having a good time.

I woke up in the middle of the night and looked up at the cloudless, unblemished sky. The beauty of the stars scattered across the blackness is a memory I will keep for the rest of my life. The mysteries of world were forever around me and all I needed to do was to open my eyes.

That was August of 1963. The world I knew had but a few months left. And then everything would change.

Next: The Worst Job in World