Memoir

Richard Keller Simon

Final version, March 2005

Summer 1946 with my parents Rhoda and Si

Tookany Park, near Philadelphia

That’s me over there in the picture, in the dark pants, standing next to Noah. It’s May 2003 and we’re on the Santa Barbara beach.

A few months later

WITH KATHY

Summer

2003

Photo by Bob Edmondson and taken in Bob and Susan Edmondson’s home in Walnut Creek California

I’ve thought about many things in the course of writing this memoir—how to make it interesting, of course, what to include, elaborate on, hint at obliquely, or leave out altogether. I hunted for images on the World Wide Web that made sense to include, and often was surprised at what I could locate. That has influenced the shape of this memoir because much of that material was important for many people besides myself. In the process, I figured out that a memoir like this had to find a balance between the ways I am typical of my generation and the ways I am unique.

I hope you find both aspects of this memoir interesting.

Here I am with Max Simon in September 2003. Max is a few weeks old, and the son of Paul Simon (my brother) and Bonney Lynch and he lives with them in Berkeley California.

Prelude

The average life expectancy for an American male is something like 77 or 78 years, so I figure at best I have contributed 18 years for you guys to divide up as best you can. Maybe one of you can live to 96 on my account, or two of you to 87, or if you want to, 18 of you can each have a year on me.

But regardless, I do wish that all of you will be able to die peacefully at the age of 95, quietly and painlessly in bed, surrounded by adoring family and friends. I’m sorry I missed this goal.

Many people I admired lived a lot shorter than that, even a lot shorter than me. For starters, among the people whose work I admired and used to teach: the novelist Jane Austen (age 41), the novelist Nathanael West (age 37), the painter Reginald Marsh (age 56), the actor Jules (John) Garfield (age 39), not to mention the usual suspects like Mozart. I also lived a lot longer than some of my friends and family—my brother Bill’s wife Cindy (age 43), my college friend Carl Cohen (age 28), my college friend Susan Gadiel (age 42 or so), my…well, you get the idea. This isn’t really a contest. But I take some consolation in not being alone here

Here is the grave of Jane Austen, and this is what is inscribed upon it.

In Memory of JANE AUSTEN, younger daughter of the late Rev. GEORGE AUSTEN, formerly rector of Steventon in this County. She departed this life on the 18th of July 1817, aged 41, after a long illness supported with the patience and hopes of a Christian. The benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind obtained the regard of all who knew her, and the warmth and love of her intimate connections.

Their grief is in proportion to their affection. They know their loss to be irreparable, but in their deepest affliction they are consoled by a firm thought humble hope that her charity, devotion, faith, and purity have rendered her soul acceptable in the sight of her REDEEMER.

Not bad huh? I used to read this out loud to my students in one of my Jane Austen lectures, and point out that none of us was likely to get such an inscription. The fact that she was a novelist is not mentioned on the grave at all, which is in Winchester Cathedral in case you’d like to take a look.

I want my ashes scattered so I am not in the market for such a memorial you understand. Yes, I admit it, with some vanity, I’d like to have had a Ben and Jerry Ice Cream flavor named after me, something in the manner of Cherry Garcia or Wavy Gravy. Kathy claims I can count Chubby Hubby, but that seems more generic of my sex and generation. I’d also liked to have been a question on Jeopardy, or had a star in some walk of fame somewhere. These are I know silly things and what counts is that you remember me in some capacity from time to time. It’s a lot more meaningful.

I wrote the following memoir following my diagnosis with mesothelioma, a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. I’d like to be remembered for my life and not for my death, so I have only written about mesothelioma at the very end. Meanwhile I would like to thank everyone who has played an important part in my life, named or not named in the memoir that follows. I have always felt loved. Thank you.

This is the view outside our home at 815 Skyline Drive in San Luis Obispo. I walked Skyline once or twice a day in the spring of 2003, as I recovered from surgery. The neighbors often watched my progress. Sometimes I wanted to dress up as the Grim Reaper but Kathy said, Bad Idea.

Top of hill looking down

Me at top of Hill

I also presented the faculty awards in June for the College of Liberal Arts. I was pleased to be able to do this.

TEACHING October 13 2003

These photos of me teaching English 350 were taken by my old friend Richard Doctoroff

Doing My Gig In a Class in the Modern Novel

Asking a Question

Teaching January 2004: Large Lecture

Humanities 320

These photos of me teaching Humanities 320 taken by my old friend Patricia Bauer-Slate

In medias res

I know that you can judge a life by how it is lived, and not by how long it may last. I would have liked mine to have lasted a lot longer, but it seems appropriate here to write about who I was in the time I had. I am standing with Kathy and Noah in front of a real San Luis Obispo sunset. There is no fancy video manipulation involved here, just a gorgeous moment in our neighborhood. It was taken when Noah was a junior in high school.

We came to San Luis Obispo in 1988, when I was hired to teach at California Polytechnic State University (or Cal Poly). Noah was five and a half. Kathy set up a private practice as a clinical psychologist in town. We had a fine life here together. Kathy’s private practice flourished, I rose through the ranks at Cal Poly, became a full professor in my turn, and the chair of a small humanities program, and Noah went to school, played baseball, soccer, and basketball after school, all the usual small town kid stuff. When we struggled, it was with aspects of the small town mind-set. We had, for example, to make up a religion so Noah could stay in the Cub Scouts. (Don’t ask.) Noah solved some of this problem by taking his senior year of high school as an AFS exchange student in New Zealand.

On Pismo Beach shortly before we moved here and were just looking the place over. This became one of my favorite places in the area, especially during low tide south of the pier. I loved jogging on the beach. Photo from early 1988.

When I first started teaching in the late 1960s, I used to ask my students to write out their philosophy of life as a paper assignment. My goal was to design an assignment that my students would actually keep, after the class was over, and it actually was a very successful paper topic. When pushed, 18 and 19 year olds do a decent job on a topic like this. I would quote Socrates’ line to them when explaining what I wanted, that an unexamined life was not worth living.

So what’s to examine? From the perspective of a 60 year old, the assignment seems much harder and much easier at the same time.

I have tried to balance the demands of career and family as best I could, loved and been loved in turn by Kathy, worked with her to raise Noah as best we could. I have tried to challenge and inspire students, to write academic books and articles that were meaningful and important, and to make a contribution in the world. I have been sustained by my sense of humor, and by a healthy skepticism to almost everything in that larger world. I mean really, how can you take most of it seriously?

I’ll start with my career as an academic. I have almost always loved being a teacher. Some of the other stuff that has come along with it has been quite frustrating from time to time, given the nature of universities, but the actual teaching part has been quite rewarding. My goal has always been to have a meaningful impact on the ways my students have thought about themselves and about the world. It’s hard to know exactly how successful I have been but I have been gratified when students have thanked me, or recommended that their friends take classes from me. I certainly also have felt I had the respect of my peers, who awarded me the Cal Poly distinguished teaching award in 1995.

This photo of me in my University of Texas office was taken by my brother Paul while he was a student in the RTF program, and enrolled in a photography class. Date is probably the early 1980s.

My favorite moments in my life as a teacher have been standing in front of a large lecture class full of students and trying to hold the attention of as many of them as I could. Over the course of many years of trial and error, I pretty much figured out how to do this, by always connecting what I am teaching to something that the students already care about. This has led me to teaching movies and television programs, and to understanding the psychological interests of 18-25 year olds. No magic is involved.

During my teaching time at Cal Poly, the largest lecture hall on campus held 220 people, and was nicely configured in a semi-circle that rose sharply from the podium. I almost always felt empowered in that room, especially with the ability to project interesting visuals behind me on a large screen, and especially at moments when I was able to hold almost everyone’s attention. It was my favorite place on the Cal Poly campus.

I’ve taught in a number of very different colleges and universities over the course of my teaching career, and each has had a different kind of student. I started out in the late 1960s, at Northern Michigan University and Western Michigan University, then got a PhD at Stanford where I also taught as a teaching assistant, then went on to the University of California at San Diego, the University of Texas at Austin, and California Poly in San Luis Obispo California. I also taught briefly at a community college in British Columbia. My major trauma in all of this was being denied tenure at Texas in 1985, which Kathy does remind me, I may have brought on myself by teaching pornography in classes on popular culture. She is sure that some parents much have complained to the dean.

What was I trying to prove? That I would act at Texas the same way I would act anywhere else. That universities are places where you examine the difficult materials, and that free inquiry is what an education is all about. Yes and as a result I was unemployed for two years in Austin, but (the silver lining) I got to be Noah’s primary parent and primary care giver from the time he was 3 to the time he was 5 and a half.

I loved to collect and wear hats. My goal was to have enough so that I could wear a different hat every teaching day. Classes at Cal Poly met 4 times a week for 10 weeks, so that meant 40 hats. I never got up quite that high, but I came close.

I’ve also loved writing about literature and I have increasingly loved my major research project into the ways in which popular culture has been critiqued and understood. I’m really sorry that I leave it incomplete.

What I have most loved as a scholar is that moment when I figured out something that no one else had figured out before me. When I wrote my first book, The Labyrinth of the Comic, for example, I was working through George Meredith’s 19^th century novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, and noticed that his complex plot was an almost perfect copy of the complex plot of Henry Fielding’s 18^th century novel Tom Jones. I felt at that moment that I was in George Meredith’s mind, unlocking a puzzle that no one else had understood before, and it was truly gratifying.

Following the publication of my second book, Trash Culture, I was interviewed in 2000 by a number of radio stations, which was a lot of fun. Kathy and I drove to LA and San Diego and I was interviewed on call in talk show in both cities, and later, by phone, I did the same with a station in Illinois, but nothing came close to the hour I was interviewed by a national radio hook up in Australia, and I got to talk to all manner of Australians. That really was a high. My 15 minutes of fame included getting a review in the New York Times, but regrettably, the reviewer really hated my book.

CHINESE TRANSLATION

In 1995 I won Cal Poly’s distinguished teaching award, attended the graduation in cap and gown (borrowed), and was called to the podium by the University president. Cal Poly students throw tortillas during the graduation exercises so there was kind of a zany but festive mood in the football stadium. I didn’t quite know what to make of it.

I’ve had more than 15 minutes of fame: In 1978, following a series of public lectures I have at the University of Toronto, arranged by my old Stanford friend Mark Freiman, I was filmed by NBC News giving a lecture on advertising at UC San Diego, and then featured on a program called Weekend, which came on once a month in the Saturday Night Live time slot late on Saturday night. I was on for at least 15 minutes (after midnight of course) and did get some fan mail from around the country.

Then there was the crazy moment in 1970 when the national press wrote up the Santa Claus, Miss America, Superman film that I was making with a group of my undergrad students at Western Michigan University, and made me out to be a deranged drug dealer (all of this is described in greater detail in the part of this memoir devoted to my teaching experiences at Northern and Western Michigan Universities, 1968-1971.

Additional materials about my career as a teacher is on a separate document, Dick’s teaching.

MEETING AND MARRYING

KATHY WADDELL

The most significant single event in my adult life was meeting and marrying Kathy Waddell. She came to a lecture I was giving at Stanford in early 1973 on themes in rock ‘n’ roll, and asked if I would speak to the prisoners of war she was working with in a ward of the local Veterans Administration hospital. They had just returned from captivity in Vietnam. I said no. The POWS were pilots who had bombed women and children, but…to Kathy’s credit she didn’t give up on me, asked to borrow books I had used for my lecture, and pretty soon we were dating. By the time I had melted, and decided not to be such a hard ass, Kathy had been moved to a different project in the VA and was no longer dealing with the POWS. So much for the romantic start.

This was the photo we used for our wedding invitation in August of 1974.

And a really great life with Kathy followed from that moment for which I have always been very grateful. Thank you Babe.

Crystal Lake Michigan 1977, with our schnauzer Muff

Philadelphia 1987 about to go to a high school reunion

In Jasper Indiana 1987 about to go to Kathy’s 25^th high school reunion. We won the prize for being the best dancers. Kathy’s mom Rosie is in the distance.

BIRTH OF NOAH

The second most important single event in my adult life was the birth of our son Noah on November 20, 1982, in Austin Texas. I stood in the delivery room, sometimes quite scared because Kathy was screaming louder than I had ever heard her scream. She got through it pretty well, but not unscathed. Our friend Mitzi was the nurse in the delivery room and the doctor handed Noah to Mitzi who must have cleaned him up a bit and wrapped him, and than handed him to me. Jeez. I wasn’t prepared for the moment because Noah, aged 2 minutes, looked calmly at me with a look of intense concentration, like a little adult.

I knew we were in for an interesting time of it and I remember telling Kathy a short time later that our son was going to be curious, intense, and stubborn. All these predictions came true, but that’s a much longer story. After Noah’s birth I remember going to teach a class at the University of Texas and telling my students I had just become a father. I got a standing ovation, which, naturally, I loved.

And so I became a father, and there were constant surprises starting back then in 1982. Noah was a sweet and charming little tyke as the photos will naturally show, but also demanding. Just figuring out how to be a father was something that proved to be difficult in itself.

I’m skipping a lot here, but I do want to write about being a father. My own dad, once I got out of high school and he started to treat me like an adult, was a source of constant strength and support to me—from the time I was 18 to the time he lost it in the haze of the dementia caused by Parkinson’s. But by then I was past 50, so I really had the benefit of a good father for a long time.

I’m really sorry I won’t be able to be supportive in that way to Noah through his adult life. When things were bad my dad was comforting, and when things were good my dad was celebratory. I could write out some comforting and some celebratory things here for Noah to read, depending on the circumstances, but it seems kind of artificial. I love you Noah.

I’m really sorry I won’t be around to help out, to pat you on the back, to loan you the money to help buy your first house, to congratulate you on getting married or having children, or a success in your career, whatever. Hug from the past.

Noah drew this for Late Father’s Day 1995. “My Father chooses to read a book even if other things are going on around him June 1995.

But maybe it’s time to start at the beginning…

Starting Out in the 1940s

I was born on November 19 1944, during the last year of World War II, and lived with my mother and father, and later my brother Bill (born 1947) in the Northcliffe Apartments on north Broad Street above Stenton Ave in Philadelphia. It was a 3 story sandy brick building and we lived on the front end of the top floor, overlooking Broad Street. (The building no longer stands.) We moved out in 1950.

My parents, Rhoda and Si, pose here on the long narrow balcony outside our apartment shortly before I was born. I look at least 6 months old in the other picture, which was taken on the grounds of the Jewish Hospital at Broad and Olney—the nearest park-like area to our apartment.

Location of the Northcliffe Apartment House

Dick

Ration Stamps used during WWII

There was a lot going on in the larger world the week I was born. The November 20, 1944 issue of Life Magazine, for example, reported the election of Franklin Roosevelt to his fourth term as president, and Harry Truman as his vice president, and included detailed accounts of how the British were only partially successfully defending London against German bombs and missiles.

Map of London Blitz

Advertisement in Life Magazine November 20,1944

More ads from Life Magazine November 20 1944

Here I am with my mother, and my grandmother, Hermina during the Spring and Summer of 1945.

The Atomic Bomb explodes over Hiroshima August 1945

August 1945 V J Day in New York. World War II comes to an end.

I was 9 months old.

My earliest memories? My Dad singing me two songs more often than any other.

BUTTON UP YOUR OVERCOAT

Button up your overcoat,

When the wind is free,

Take good care of yourself,

You belong to me!

Eat an apple every day,

Get to bed by three,

Oh, take good care of yourself,

You belong to me!

Be careful crossing streets, ooh-ooh,

Cut out sweets, ooh-ooh,

Lay off meat, ooh-ooh,

You'll get a pain and ruin your tum-tum!

Wear your flannel underwear,

When you climb a tree,

Oh, take good care of yourself,

You belong to me!

Button up your overcoat,

When the wind is free,

Oh, take good care of yourself,

You belong to me!

Boop-boop-a-doop!

STARDUST

Sometimes I wonder why I spend

The lonely nights

Dreaming of a song

That melody haunts my reverie

And I am once again with you

When our love was new

And each kiss an inspiration

Ah, but that was long ago

Now my consolation

Is in the stardust of a song

These songs, for my whole life, have played quietly in the background.

Harry Truman beat Dewey for the Presidency in 1948 but I was not paying attention.

I was playing with tinker toys and Lincoln logs and trying to figure out how to play with my kid brother. I think I have a xylophone stick here.

What do I remember from the 1940s? Not too much.

Walking with my mother down Broad Street to the stores around Broad and Olney, since my Dad had the car for work; playing with the other children who lived on my floor of the apartment house, or next door; my brother Bill, coming home from the hospital when I was almost three, and very considerately presenting me with a printing set; the day my tricycle was stolen, by neighbors across the street; the grumpy building superintendent of the apartment house, whom I tried to avoid; going to Kindergarten at the Pennell School, where my Mom and I were frequently late; and the fun of learning to tell the difference between Chevrolets, Desotos, Studebakers, and Pontiacs. There were a lot of used car lots on our block and my early education in the emblems on the front of cars was a natural.

This is what the late 40s actually looked like to me.

47 Chevy	47 Buick	47 Cadillac
49 Ford	47 Packard	49 Chrysler
1950 Studebaker	50 Dodge	50 Packard

So: My education begins here, to learn how to name all the cars as we walked by, and since I must have been, maybe 3 feet tall, I had a lot of close up views of front ends. My specialty was hood ornaments and insignias and in the late forties cars had fantastic hood ornaments.

But my first real love was the Philadelphia streetcar, shown here in what I hope you will immediately see as its full glory. These were utterly fantastic contraptions, designed and built in the early 1920s and by the time I started paying attention to them in the late 1940s, already equipment that had seen better days.

My first career goal was to be a trolley car conductor. When other kids dreamed of fire engines, I knew better. And as you look over these photographs of actual classic Philadelphia streetcars, I’d like you to imagine the wonders of these machines.

For one thing, they didn’t turn around, but had controls at both ends. When the trolley got to the end of the line (and Mom and I always waited for the 26 at the end of its line, at Old York Road and Chelten Avenue, just a short walk from the apartment house), the conductor took his control levers –I remember two or three wonderful wooden handles—and walked to the other end of the streetcar. His other task was even more impressive. Going outside, pulling the high metal rod down that connected to the electric cable in the street at one end of the car, and then releasing the metal rod at the other end. Bus rides were nothing compared to all this action. And given the fact that the conductor never had to steer the trolley, just make it go faster or slower, and yank on controls that opened the front door or the side door, this didn’t look too difficult. I loved riding in these trolleys, and often Mom and I would hang around just to watch the conductor change from one end to the other. Many seats, as I recall, could be yanked around –the backs were moveable—so they always faced forward.

Ok, so there was eventually some misguided progress and these lovely trolleys were replaced by newer and sleeker trolleys that did have a front and a back, and sometimes by busses.

These trolleys were ok, but nothing like the ones I loved.

KID LIFE IN THE 1940s

But I don’t remember much else. So I asked my Mom to supply biographical information about my life before age 6. This is what she writes. I was called Dickie in these early years.

11/19/44 at Abington Hospital. 14 day stay was standard. By the 10^th day we were allowed to dangle our legs over the side of the bed and totter about on the 11^th day. And so of course we had to have a nurse at home for the first two weeks—Louise Reinohl was our nurse. She lived in and got 4 hours off in the evenings. SI and I were suitably nervous for the first few of these evenings. After she left she wrote Dickie letters beginnning Dear Doll Baby and told Dickie how much she missed him.

We lived in an apartment house with 2 three year old girls on our floor, and so Sheila Coopersmith and Nina Gordon spent a good bit of time in our apartment entertaining Dickie and protesting how much they loved him. When he was old enough to go across the hall to Sheila’s apartment, she entertained him on the balcony fishing potatoes out of the garbage can to feed him.

Dick’s grandmother Hermina became a devoted baby sitter and used to check often in the evenings to see whether we had bundled Dickie up too warmly. Our routine was to walk down Broad St to the park-like grounds of the Jewish Hospital where we met many other parents and children. Some Sundays we used to go to Tookany Creek Park with Si’s mother Pauline, and various of Si’s sisters. I used to pack picnic lunches.

In 1947 Dickie began going to Ida Brodsky’s nursery school, The Little School on 8^th Street. Bill was born in October and Dickie was hugely disappointed in his brother. He hadn’t understood that he wouldn’t be able to play right away, and would take so much of everyone’s time. Dickie stopped eating, mostly surviving on milk and cookies.

Kindergarten: We lived in an area that was about 7 or 8 blocks away from two schools, Pennell and Ellwood, and we chose to enroll Dickie in Kindergarten at Pennell since Miss Gabel the Ellwood teacher had a fearsome reputation. Joan Freilich, who lived next door and went to Ellwood kindergarten, used to throw up regularly when it was time to get ready for school. Mrs Granatt, at Pennell, was a pleasant teacher but we were mostly late getting to afternoon kindergarten because of the necessity of coordinating Bill’s nap schedule, and lunches, since Bill had to accompany us in the stroller.I remember a spectacular Halloween with Dickie as a cowboy.

First Movie: DUMBO, and it scared me to death. Jeez what an emotional roller coaster.

Pennell School Kindergarten Party

Dick as cowboy

This is Nov 1949

The Fifties

Shortly after I turned six, when I was in the middle of first grade, we moved to a very large house in the East Oak Lane neighborhood not too far away from our apartment, 6709 N. 12^th Street, at 68^th avenue, a wonderful home built shortly after the end of the Civil War (full of nooks and crannies and history). The walls on the ground floor were about a foot and a half thick of solid stone. There were 1200 square feet of living space on each of the three floors, along with a pop out kitchen on the first floor, a full basement and full attic, and a detached 2 car garage, originally for horse and carriage. The garage had an attic and when we moved in it still contained an old bedstead and a chamber pot, for the coachman. For much of my time in the house I had the largest bedroom on the right side of the third floor.

EAST OAK LANE

East Oak Lane, a neighborhood of large Victorian and Colonial style homes, is the area to the right of Broad Street. The star is our house at 6709 N 12 Street, with 68^th Avenue dead ending into our driveway. The line marked Philadelphia and Montgomery designates the northern edge of the City of Philadelphia.

I took these photos of the house many years later. Flowers that grew in our yard are downloads from Internet.

Hydrangea

Back of house

My Mom’s garden in the 1970s

6709 N 12 Street

Peonia

Maple

Mock Orange
Peace Rose

Forsythia

East Oak Lane was a wonderful neighborhood, full of similarly large old houses built in the second half of the nineteenth century, and Ellwood, our local elementary school around the corner, was a great elementary school, though small. As you can see from the photograph, during my childhood it was also quite ancient.

I loved biking around Oak Lane as a child, and Bill and I were part of a neighborhood pack of kids who played together after school, building forts, shooting cap guns, and the like. It was the fifties: Milk trucks delivered milk throughout the neighborhood every morning, rain, sleet, or snow, and some neighbors had bread delivered the same way. A farmer used to sell produce from his truck out front of our house in growing season.

My reading of the newspapers was limited to the comics.

Here I am with my Mom, and Bill in the early 1950s

Before television, there were Saturday matinees at the local movie theater, the Lane, where I watched countless Cowboy movies, cartoons, and serial adventures along with other screaming children. And ate candy.

Roy Rogers and Gabby Hayes. Hopalong Cassidy and Topper

The lessons of Hoppy and Roy? Greedy bad guys in black hats are waiting to buy up or steal all the free land that honest ranchers need. A few smart cowpokes can outsmart them all the time.

Roy Rogers and Dale Evans

Gene Autry & Champion

Roy and Trigger

And. sometimes it helps if you can sing.

There was other stuff I learned at the movies of course. Take the Flash Gordon serial.

What’s not to love about this stuff?

Ming the merciless here was always plotting to take over the universe, or some part of the universe, but Flash Gordon came through by flying a very small rocket ship that looked like it had a candle wick burning at the end, and fighting off the bad guys. SO much for my education at the movies….

At the movies, I led vicarious adventures against all the bad guys in the universe along with every other kid in the neighborhood. The world was full of great danger. Unless you could sing.

Oak Lane on the other hand was overwhelmingly safe, even though we were part of a big city. It was nuclear war we all worried about and polio. Little kids were getting polio all the time in the early 1950s and there were constant stories in the news.

EARLY PHILADELPHIA KIDS’ TV

There is a story here. This is Willie the Worm, a puppet that showed very old silent cartoons every weekday afternoon, the same classics of people and animals running and running and chasing each other. My brother Bill and I watched this program with great fascination. Willie was an ironist as I recall.

Ozzie and Harriet Rootie Kazootie

My Little Margie

Father Knows Best

I became a writer early on: In the third grade I started writing a sequel to the Mary Norton novel for children, The Borrowers, and read chapters aloud to my class once a week. And by the fourth grade I was composing funny commercials and reciting them to the class as well.

My role models were all the comics on television in the fifties—Jerry Lewis more than any other, but also Eddie Cantor, Steve Allen, Jackie Gleason, Ernie Kovacs etc. I wanted a career doing stand-up and pratfalls but settled for making my class laugh as often as possible…and my brother Bill: my special skill was making him laugh so hard at dinner time that milk would come squirting out of his nose.

Horn and Hardart was the restaurant of my childhood, and it came in waitress, cafeteria and automat varieties. Photos below of the automat, where you put quarters into slots and got plates of hot food. Other photo taken in a New York H and H in 1954.

Still a good corned beef on rye became my favorite restaurant food…

Howdy Doody	The Lone Ranger	Crusader Rabbit
The Honeymooners	Superman	Groucho Marx You Bet Your Life
Jimmy Durante	Eddie Cantor	Jack Benny

MY FAVORITE TELEVISION PROGRAMS AND STARS in the early 1950s

The Howdy Doody Show came on every weekday late afternoon for half an hour and for a number of years I watched it religiously with my brother Bill.

This program continued my education, big time. Howdy had to fight the creepy and nefarious plots of Phineas T. Bluster, the old guy, which was bad enough, but Buffalo Bob never understood the danger until it was too late, and Howdy’s friends all had major problems—Dilly Dally, too empty headed, and Flubadub here, too ditzy. Claribell the clown never spoke and had to communicate by honking on his horn, a truly difficult task, and spraying people with seltzer, which, though fun, never seemed to get to the heart of the problem.

BACK TO REALITY

My parents were part of a Jewish influx into Oak Lane, at the end of World War II, and while there were blocks with non Jewish residents—one a block away that seemed entirely Catholic, with kids going to the local parochial school—the neighborhood connected to the public school was almost entirely Jewish, and middle class. It was a very homogenous, protective environment to grow up in.

Dick in first grade at Ellwood

And Ellwood School was the center of our childhood. The Philadelphia school system was still on the A/B system at that time—first grade, for example, being One A and One B, second grade being Two A and Two B, and so forth. The classes at Ellwood were so small they had to be combined and most of the time my class was always in the same room with the next half grade above us. There were about 20 or so students in my grade, and maybe 10 or 11 in the half grade above. Between first and sixth grade then I went to school with the same 20 or so classmates, in a little protected pocket in the City of Philadelphia. Because many of my Ellwood classmates later went on to Central High with me, I have been able to learn about the later careers of many of the boys. They became professors, dentists, psychologists, engineers.

Of all of my friends from Ellwood, I reconnected with two of them when I looked for my friends from high school: Alan Needleman, who was my very first friend in the first grade, who became a professor of engineering at Brown, and Kenneth Stow, who was my best friend from 2^nd until the 6^th grade and we ran against each other for captain of the safety patrol, and who became a professor of Jewish history at the University of Haifa.

I did win the election and became Capt of the safety patrol, and Alan Needleman was elected lieutenant. While nearly all the other boys in the 5^th and 6^th grade stood on corners near the school, for the half hour before school started and the half hour after school let out, Alan and I got to ride our bikes (or walk in bad weather) from corner to corner making sure everyone was on duty and being a good safety. We got to hand out demerits for poor work, improper dress, and the like. AND we got to salute the principal of the school every time we saw him. Yes, kind of weird, but it was the fifties. Alan and I gave so many demerits to the class bully, Ronald Brown, that he was bumped off the patrol. It was a victory for me, since he had terrorized me in the third grade.

This is what my Mom remembers of my life at Ellwood:

Ellwood shut down for lunch time, and because it did not have a cafeteria, children were sent home for an hour and a half, from 12 to 1:30. Most mothers were stay-at-home mothers in those days, but children who had mothers who worked had to find friends to go home with. Dick’s friend Kenneth Stow came to eat lunch regularly at our house, and at some point in the first grade Dick organized the Firecracker Club, a group of friends from his class who came to our house once a week to eat lunch. The group included Kenneth, Alan Needleman, Eddie Landau, Ronnie Roman, and Bruce Diamond. This lasted through the third grade when Si couldn’t take the food throwing any more. When it was time to return to school, I remember the club leaving the kitchen in single file with each boy putting his hand on the shoulder of the boy in front of him and marching off singing “We’re Off to See the Wizard, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

Dick was quite shy until the third grade when his teacher Miss Klein appointed him to everything she could, including captain of one of the boys’ dodgeball teams. She said he was obviously capable and the logical choice. Dick lost his shyness. Dick and Bill went one summer to art camp at Cheltenham Art Center and Dick did a series of very impressive paintings on newsprint with show card colors. Mr.Goldman the teacher wanted to keep some of them but Si wouldn’t permit it.

Dick had problems keeping Bill out of his room and out of his things and we put up a latch between their two rooms. Bill admired Dick of course and wanted to do everything he did. Because Dick learned how to head and used to read aloud to us, Bill also learned how to read, although we didn’t know it until he read us Make Way for Ducklings after we had read it to him many times when he was 4. And so when he got to Miss Gable’s kindergarten, Bill read her the instructions on the blackboard about what to do during a fire drill (something like—The Kindergarten class will form a line and exit the west door in an orderly fashion and assemble in the yard at the foot of the steps…). And so she used to send Bill around to other classes to read to them and to spur them on to renewed exertions.

I remember that Dick outgrew a bathrobe. He folded it neatly, put it in a gift box, tied it with a ribbon, and presented it to Bill who was overwhelmed with happiness. Dick became a very capable kitchen assistant from the time he was 2 ½. He stood on a chair beside me, with an apron, and added ingredients, stirred, beat, mixed, and shaped things. By the time he was in elementary school he was cooking spaghetti sauce on his own.

At some time in Dick’s elementary school years, the father of a classmate appeared at Ellwood and offered accordion lessons. Dick loved the introductory lessons and practiced diligently, but after these were over it became clear that we would need to purchase a big heavy and expensive accordion. Si went to the recital that Dick and the other children gave at the teacher’s school and came home with descriptions of how the children staggered up the aisle with their 120 key instruments. Si also spoke to someone he knew who played an accordion and he said that all accordionists developed bad backs. So although it made Dick very unhappy, he had to discontinue lessons and return the learner instrument. Dick eventually took up the clarinet and played in the Wagner Junior High School orchestra.

In 1953 Patti Page sang How Much is that Doggie in the Window?

How much is that doggy in the window

Woof woof

The one with the waggly tail

How much is that doggy in the window

Woof woof

I do hope that doggy's for sale

This passed as music. It was the moment before Rock n roll.

Eisenhower beat Stevenson in 1952 but I was not paying attention. By 1954 I had started to pay a little attention to politics, in large measure because some of it started to show up on TV, especially the Army McCarthy hearings which were filled with bad guys and good guys. Mostly in 1954 I read comic books (which politicians worried would destroy my morals)

Senator Joseph McCarthy

Eddie Fisher sings Oh My Papa

Mr. Peepers on TV

And in 1954, not that I noticed, the French were defeated in French Indo-China, and were replaced by the Americans in Viet Nam. I could sing “Oh My Papa” however. Does this count?

Daily Life in the 1950s

My father was very nervous about television sets and the dangers they presented to his children’s mental and physical health. And so we had very strict rules during my childhood: no more than one hour of television watching a day, so our minds would not decay, and a lamp on in the room with the television set, if it was dark, so our eyesight would not similarly decay. I’m not sure how my father picked up these fears, but they were real enough. These were very strictly enforced rules throughout my childhood, although when I think about it now it seems that my brother Bill and I must have found ways to watch more than an hour a day--sometimes at least. Mom certainly ran interference for us. It didn’t help that my father’s business, the wholesale distribution of art supplies, took place from our house and garage, so he really was around a lot.

When my father felt we had watched enough, or tried to watch too much, we would be ordered to read a book. Often of course we could claim we had nothing at home to read, a gambit that never worked. I remember very vividly having to walk to the local library, the Oak Lane branch of the Free Library of Phila, a short block away, with tears in my eyes at the injustice of my father’s rules, sitting down at a table, and reading. It is hard to focus on the words on a page when there are tears in your eyes. A short time later I would hear the phone ring at the librarian’s desk, and would hear her reassure my father that I was indeed sitting down in front of her, reading. When my hour was up, I was allowed to walk home.

This is a much more recent photo of the Oak Lane branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, but it has hardly changed at all since the fifties—the loss of a large tree in front the only thing I notice. It is here that I learned about books as the alternative to TV.

My father’s notion of the library as penitentiary would not seem to have been a good method of producing a child who loved to read, and since I did become a reader by the time I was an adolescent, I have often thought about this moment of nuttiness in my upbringing. Years later my mother and I decided that what made me a reader had nothing to do with this method at all, but the fact that her mother, my grandmother Hermina Weitzenfeld, was a much beloved high school English teacher, and it was her model as a lover of literature, and reading, that led me to become an English teacher and reader in my turn.

I can’t leave the topic of television in the 1950s without connecting it to one more story about my childhood. Ellwood, the elementary school I attended was also one block away, and it occupied a small 19^th century stone building with few modern amenities. Certainly it had no television set, and when the school district broadcast educational programs for the schools, the children at Ellwood would walk to the homes of students who lived nearby and had television sets.

These were high prestige big deal social events, and although I lived closer than anyone else in my class, we didn’t have a television set for the longest time—certainly not until I got into the 2^nd or 3^rd grade. My class thus always walked PAST my house, and around the corner to the home of a classmate with a television. This was always deeply humiliating, and thus when my father broke down and purchased a television, it was a cause for celebration!

My class did start coming to our house, and for many years my parents saved the thank you notes that all of my classmates wrote to my parents, for allowing them to come and watch, and for serving them candy! At some point not too much later the school actually purchased its own television, and while it hurt some, I had had the moment of glory.

This didn’t mean that my father ever came to trust television however, even though he loved watching baseball games and the Friday Night Fights. One day when I was in the 9^th grade the television broke, and my father wrapped it neatly in brown paper and carried it down into the basement where it sat for many years next to the skids of art supplies. I went through high school without television, and while I missed some programs a great deal—mostly the comedy of Ernie Kovacs—I compensated with FM radio and records (I owned by that time a portable record player). It meant I couldn’t talk to my high school classmates about what had been on television the night before, but after a while it didn’t seem particularly important. FM radio was moving into its own, and there was always plenty that was interesting and worth listening to.

We had a Grundig radio that looked exactly like this one.

There was at least one other unusual compensation in our house, the presence of a large number of paintings and prints by local artists, friends and customers of my father who was a wholesaler of art supplies. The walls were covered with original art, most by people I met from time to time, some of whom came to dinner. This added a cosmopolitan note to my childhood, since these artists were always full of talk to trips to Italy or France, critiques of other artists or architects, and explanations of their current projects.

Here are the 3 who were most important: Morris Blackburn, Sam Brecher, and Julius Bloch

Susan by Julius Block Lighthouse by Sam Brecher

Mummer by Leon Karp

Provincetown Mass by Nancy Ferguson

Beyond those personal meetings with accomplished and successful artists, I was exposed to all the arts that Philadelphia had to offer on a regular basis during my childhood: the Philadelphia Orchestra (My grandmother Hermina took piano lessons from Louis Gesensway, a member of the orchestra who was also an accomplished composer); a great many wonderful Broadway plays and musicals in tryouts (on their way to New York); countless art gallery and art museum exhibitions, including of course, those by all my father’s friends. (It was no accident that I became, in college, a playwright for a time.)

Art Museum Academy of Music

Pauline Simon

My father’s mother Pauline lived with us on 12^th street for part of the years between 1951 and 1956 (when she died of breast cancer). The other part of those years, the winters, she spent in Florida with her daughter Esther. My mother writes the following: Pauline moved in with us in April of 1951. This created the opportunity to learn patience, among other things. She liked to hold forth at dinner and thought children should be seen but not heard if grownups had anything to say. Since she was a non-stop talker and needed an audience, we provided it to that extent that Bill once held up a sign at dinner saying “Nice to have mushrooms” and “Can I be excused?” He must have been about seven.

Here I am getting hugged on the front porch of the 12^th Street house with Pauline. I remember that she spent much time crocheting potholders, and once when Mom’s clothing caught on fire at the kitchen stove, Pauline beat out the flames. I used to go to movies with her—Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Lili, Three Coins in a Fountain are the ones that stand out in my mind. She was also the only religious member of our family: she lighted Friday Night Candles, and Mom had to cook kosher food for her. The religion didn’t rub off on the rest of us.

PIPPIN

We also had a dog for some of those years, a sweet beagle named Pippin who lived in the house for a while but was then permanently moved to a kennel in the backyard, and a dog house winterized in the cold months, after my father found a flea in bed. Pippin was a joy—but because she howled, and outside all of the time, began to howl a good deal and annoy the neighbors, my father eventually found a home for her on a farm. And yes, I was heartbroken.

My mom with Pippin in winter. Then Grandma Pauline, Rhoda, and Pippin in front of the garage, along with leading edge of my father’s 1953 Pontiac Station Wagon.

Noble dog

This is pretty close to the actual bike I got in 1955 or 1956, a Schwinn Tiger, which looked nearly identical to the Schwinn Corvette in this ad.I named my bike Weitzenfeld (my mother’s maiden name). It was a great joy to ride around the neighborhood, and made me feel quite special.Yes I probably had an expression like the kid in the picture.

Bike was essential in the 6^th grade at Ellwood when I was captain of the safety patrol. I could not find an image of the Capt badge on the web but I did find an image of the Lt. Badge, and the Capt badge was very similar. Blue rather than red in the middle. Etc. Our safety belts were white rather than yellow, as in the drawing here, and Ellwood did not allow girls to be on the safety patrol either.

Hermina Keller Weitzenfeld

My grandmother Hermina was an important influence on me (and Bill) throughout my childhood and early adolescence. (She died when I was in college). She took me to plays and concerts in downtown Philadelphia, and when I got older, to political rallies as well(for the United World Federalists where I heard Clement Atlee speak; for the kick off campaign for Joe Clark running for the US Senate). We would go shopping, eat in downtown restaurants, and inevitably, someone would stop her on the street and thank her for being a wonderful teacher. (She taught English at South Phila High School for Girls until retiring in the middle 1950s). My own sixth grade teacher, Rose Stow, the mother of my best friend Ken, had been one of Hermina’s students. When Bill and I got old enough Hermina would take us for trips to New York City, to visit her brother and sister, Frank and Regina, and to Albany New York (95 Winthrop Avenue), to visit her sister Sarah and Sarah’s daughter Ethel. All of these members of the Keller family were extremely interesting and loving human beings. Hermina was my model when I became in turn a teacher. I dedicated both of my books to her, as well as to my parents and Kathy. (Second book also to Noah)

Hermina, Sarah, and Ethel, on a boat on Lake George New York. I took this photograph, probably in 1957 on one of my trips to Albany with Hermina

SUMMERS

We spent part of many of the summers of my childhood at Beach Haven, and at other small towns on Long Beach Island, on the New Jersey shore, and also at Atlantic City where my great grandmother Lena lived year round

LONG BEACH ISLAND

The first photo was taken at the “Cake Box” our unusual summer rental in 1952 at Beach Haven. We listened on radio as Dwight Eisenhower won the Republication nomination to run for President of the US.

Barnegat Lighthouse

Here I am in Beach Haven with Pippin, maybe 1957 or so

At Beach Haven, the Lucy Evelyn was a ship set on land and turned into a truly impressive visitor’s site and gift shop.

I loved it

Here I am in 1952 or so, photographed in front of the Lucy Evelyn with my grandmother Hermina, her sister and my great aunt Regina, her brother and my great uncle Frank.

We rented houses at Beach Haven, but in later years stayed in many of the motels, including the Engleside, above, and the Coral Seas, to the left.

Downtown Beach Haven

Morrison’s Seafood Restaurant from the air

ATLANTIC CITY in the 1950s

My grandfather Jacob, my great aunt Ida, my great aunt Rose, and their mother, my great-grandmother Lena Weitzenfeld. On the boardwalk in Atlantic City.

My grandmother Hermina with her mother in law Lena.

Because my great grandmother Lena Weitzenfeld lived in Atlantic City at the Breakers Hotel for much of my childhood, we were there a lot too. A parade of relatives from around the country came to visit Great Grandma and stopped at our house in Philadelphia to say hello

Color Photo from the sixties, a little bit after my prime vacationing time in Atlantic City. Black and White photo is closer to what I remember. Three significant stores: Fralinger’s which had great salt water taffy in many amazing flavors, Gray’s, which had huge corned beef sandwiches and gigantic buckets of pickles and cole slaw on the table, and Planter’s, where a mechanical gigantic Mr. Peanut was the stupendous apparatus in Atlantic City. All of this was only a short walk from Great Grandma’s hotel, the Breakers.

DICK TRAVEL DIARY Saturday August 31 1957

Trip to Atlantic City with my grandmother Hermina Weitzenfeld

Earliest preserved sample of my own writing (I was 12)

“After breakfast we met Great Grandma on the benches near Fralinger’s, Boardwalk at Virginia. We ate at Gray’s.

By 1:30 pm Dick and Hermina were on our way to the Steel Pier, The Show Place of the Nation. We walked into the run down dungeon, looked at the vaudeville program, continued through a dark and dreary alley of concession stands and went to see the “home of the century.” Then to the seal house as we went through a dirty alley with three seals biting each other. Then we saw the outdoor sports show with the high diving horse, a human monkey who scared the audience, 2 tame bears and some divers and acrobats. Then we saw the General Motors exhibit and Ripley’s believe it or not.

We continued on the boardwalk and got caught in Maxwell’s auction (one of many) and we stayed one and a half hours to get our prize. The time was spent listening in which a man insulted everyone including Grandma. Some of the bargains they got rid of are a $1150.00 tea set for $145.00 a $145.00 watch for $19.00 and a $3000.00 dollar ring and a $2000.00 watch both for only $250.00 Finally we got our gift, a relish tray.

We ate at Child’s Plain and Fancy, then we went to the Breakers Hotel and found Great Grandma at the television room, and accompanied her upstairs. This time we had an even harder time disposing of Gr Gr’s gift of smoked fish sandwich (kept cool since breakfast on the bathroom window) two rolls and many antique menus and Jewish institution booklets and appeals. The food we left on a park bench (in a bag). The literature in an overfull rubbish can. Then to bed.”

GREAT GRANDMA LENA WEITZENFELD

Footnote: My great grandmother always took some extra food from the hotel dining room at the Breakers Hotel up to her own room, and kept it warm in winter by placing it on a radiator, or relatively cook in summer by placing it by a window. This food she always tried to push off on visiting relatives, like me. There were of course, in 1957, no such things as small refrigerators that one could have in a hotel room.

Visits to Atlantic City often included a meal at Hackney’s.

Visits also included a meal at Capt Starn’s, and a boat trip out in the ocean from pier.

Rhoda, Me, Bill, and Si--tourists

Boardwalk from a little after my time, but nice sense of the ambiance.

Massive hotels on the boardwalk, from a little before my time

Yes I had at least one memorable meal in the massive hotel.

BASEBALL

Across from Ellwood School was Axelrod’s Drug Store, with a classic soda fountain, and candy counter where my friends and I had cherry cokes, bought Three Musketeers Candy Bars, and endless numbers of packages of baseball cards. We flipped baseball cards endlessly in good weather throughout our elementary school years, even though our team, The Phillies, was almost always heartbreakingly terrible except for 1950 when my friends and I were too young to have paid much attention. The only good player, and our hero, was Robin Roberts, who later made it into the Baseball Hall of Fame, proving there is some justice in the world. Up until 1953 my parents mostly rooted for the Philadelphia Athletics, before they picked up and moved to Kansas City.

FERRIS FAIN

Granny Hamner

Shibe Park, later renamed Connie Mack Stadium

1956 TOPPS Robin Roberts card, the one all of my friends wanted more than any other. We flipped cards in 1956, not thinking for a moment about resale value 30 or 40 years later, so all of our cards got really worn around the edges. And then, a few years later, all of our mothers threw all of our card collections out. Alas.

In 1956 I got my first 45-rpm record player (something like this) and started to pay attention to rock n roll, which was in the process of being invented. Elvis showed up on the Ed Sullivan Show. I learned how to play “Love me Tender” on the clarinet for 6^th Grade parties where we played Spin the Bottle and other kissing games.

OK only on TV but

Annette Funicello….the girl all of my friends had a crush on, on the M I C K E Y M O U S E club television show.

ELVIS on Ed Sullivan

SIXTEEN TONS This was MY FIRST 45 rpm record

Some people say a man is made outta mud

A poor man's made outta muscle and blood

Muscle and blood and skin and bones

A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong

You load sixteen tons, what do you get

Another day older and deeper in debt

Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the company store

I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine

I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine

I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal

And the straw boss said Well a-bless my soul

You load sixteen tons, what do you get

Another day older and deeper in debt

Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the company store

Joe Friday and Frank Smith on Dragnet on TV

Calypso music was everywhere

Hy Lit, major DJ for teenagers on Phila rock n roll radio

I learned how to be a teenager by watching Bandstand, a locally produced Philadelphia teen age dance program that eventually got national broadcasting when it was taken over by Dick Clark.

Life of Riley, on TV

Top Hits of 1956

1. Heartbreak Hotel, Elvis Presley

2. Don't Be Cruel, Elvis Presley

3. Lisbon Antigua, Nelson Riddle

4. My Prayer, Platters

5. The Wayward Wind, Gogi Grant

7. The Poor People Of Paris, Les Baxter

8. Whatever Will Be Will Be (Que Sera Sera), Doris Day

8. Hound Dog, Elvis Presley

9. Memories Are Made Of This, Dean Martin

10. Rock And Roll Waltz, Kay Starr

11. Moonglow And Theme From "Picnic", Morris Stoloff

12. The Great Pretender, Platters

13. I Almost Lost My Mind, Pat Boone

14. I Want You, I Need You, I Love You, Elvis Presley

15. Love Me Tender, Elvis Presley

16. Hot Diggity, Perry Como

17. Canadian Sunset, Eddie Heywood & Hugo Winterhalter

18. Blue Suede Shoes, Carl Perkins

19. The Green Door, Jim Lowe

20. No, Not Much, Four Lads

Paul is born in 1956

My parents really had 2 sets of children: Bill and I, and then Paul and Jeanne. Paul was born in 1956, in November, when I had started Wagner Junior High, so I think of my childhood as being with my parents and Bill. Jeanne was born in 1961.

Paul was born in 1956 which meant that by 1959 or so I had a kid brother at home, to help take care of. I remember Mom and Dad waking me up in the middle of the night one day when I was in high school, to take a turn pushing Paul around the house in a stroller because he was very sick and the movement of the stroller comforted him.

I remember putting Paul to bed at night, making up bed time stories about exploding cantaloupes (an actual cantaloupe had exploded on our kitchen window sill), and having Paul assure me, again and again, that he fell asleep with his eyes open.

By 1957 I was paying attention to major news events.

My Best Story December 30 1957

The story of my Bar Mitzvah is the very best story I have, at least with regards to my childhood.

I had a very unusual bar mitzvah but unless you are familiar with the standard kind of bar mitzvah the nuttiness of mine may need a bit of explanation. What you see here are photographs taken during the rehearsal, since photos are not permitted during actual services.

The Rabbi, Alexander Levine, owned the building around the corner from us on Oak Lane Avenue in Philadelphia, which he converted into a synagogue (an unusual relationship, since rabbis are usually hired by congregations). In this case the rabbi owned the entire congregation! In the photo I stand on a small stage at one end of what once was his living room, behind a large white frame. Please note the large painting of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments to my right, which has just slid out of the frame, revealing me holding the torah. The audience always gasped at this moment when the rabbi yanked the pulley system that operated this bit of theatrical theology. The painting, on runners, was copied by the rabbi’s son, from an illustration from the Passover Haggadah that was widely distributed in Phila by Barton’s, a local candy company, and would have been familiar to every Jewish family. One minute it was Moses in the frame, a kind of candy advertisement, and the next minute it was the bar mitzvah boy. It was quite a moment. You can also see that my father doesn’t look real impressed.

Was the rabbi really a rabbi? Locals swore he had been a cantor in a poor neighborhood, but the rabbi claimed his papers had been lost in a fire in the old country. In any event, the Philadelphia Board of Rabbis never recognized him, but he didn’t care, and he did a great service for our neighborhood, since many old Jewish men made East Lane Temple their second home, and for families like my own—not really religious at all—he offered a way for children to be bar mitzvahed with a minimum of Hebrew School. We admired the Rabbi for a number of reasons. During Bill’s bar mitzvah (3 years after mine) Paul was fidgeting and the Rabbi handed him a coloring book in the middle of the service.

The Rabbi had a truly astonishing and extremely expensive Imperial.

The rabbi had originally purchased the old house on Oak Lane in order to do weddings and the like, but because the house was next door to two churches, one Baptist and one I think Methodist, and because these churches objected to the crowds that would come, they held up the rabbi’s application for zoning with the Phila Zoning Board. It was in fact this organization that caused the rabbi to go for a full synagogue instead (apparently different rules apply to a regular house of worship).

For many years, especially when I was in college, the story of my bar mitzvah was my very best story—it kept all manner of college roommates in laughter and they used to urge me to go on stage doing stand-up. Alas—it was really my only good story. I didn’t have any comparable material.

The theatricality of the Moses picture sliding out of the frame surprised everyone’s relations of course, since no one had ever seen anything like this in any other (real) synagogue. But all of us bar mitzvah boys (in 1957 none of the girls I knew were getting bat mitvahed—that came later) knew the trick and tried to sneak back behind the picture without any of the other bar mitzvah boys noticing (they sat in the back). This involved getting down on your hands and knees, holding up your tallis so as not to trip on it, and crawling like crazy, as low to the ground as possible when the rabbi gave you the hi sign—a little twitch of his tallis as I recall. Once behind the picture I had to get up, dust myself off, and wait till the rabbi waltzed back and made various noises pretending to get out a torah (In actuality of course he was giving me the torah to hold).“Just like in Jerusalem,” he whispered to me as we went through the service. He had only one great sermon which he delivered at most of the bar mitzvahs—less bar and more mitzvah. It also was quite a hit with people who only had to hear it once.

The rabbi prospered in this operation and owned a Chrysler Imperial—in 1957 the breathtaking and amazing looking luxury American car. He soon installed a life size photograph of himself (also in a frame) that greeted everyone walking in the front door of the synagogue.

And—he was having a very public affair with a woman with gigantic breasts who always wore a bright red dress—Mrs. Nussbaum. No one could figure out why Mrs. Nussbaum was always there, along with the 8 or so aged Jewish men who tried to make a Minyan (often having to count the torahs, real and imagined, to get up to ten).

My friends at my bar mitzvah and their future careers

Alan Needleman (engineering prof.), Joel Spector (public school counselor), Ken Stow (prof. of Jewish history) Steve Sher (attorney), Carol Adler (don’t know), Eddie Landau (dentist,) and me at back	Carolyn Steinberg (don’t know), Mike Woal, (teacher), Annette Bender (don’t know), Tony Haftel (doctor). Girls are harder to trace, and all the boys went to Central High so I know that way.

The rabbi lived on the second and third floors of the synagogue, with his wife Ethel and their two not too bright teen-age children. Ethel never came down stairs, and after my bar mitzvah I remember the rabbi calling up the grand staircase: “Ethel throw down the schnapps.” And indeed a bottle of something I know my father had paid for came flying down stairs, which the rabbi caught in his flowing black robes.

The rabbi used to want to hear how well I was memorizing my torah portion, of course, so once a week I would walk upstairs and sing to the rabbi. The time I remember most fondly was a day he was taking a bath and I was positioned on a chair outside of the bathroom and asked to sing my torah portion through the bathroom door.

END of the Bar Mitzvah Story

WHERE were THESE FRIENDS in 2003?

Alan Needleman was a distinguished professor of engineering at Brown, specializing in fracturing. He is standing here with his wife Wanda, a psychiatrist in private practice in Providence and their two adult children Daniel, getting a PhD in physics at UCSB and Deborah, an assistant professor of English at the University of North Texas in Denton. I took this photo in front of our house in San Luis Obispo in August 2003

Here I am with Alan on the Santa Barbara beach a year or two earlier, before I got sick.

Kenneth Stow was a distinguished professor of Jewish History at the University of Haifa, with a specialization in medieval Italian Jewish History. He was the author of many scholarly books and the editor of the journal, Jewish History.

Two of Kenneth’s 4 adult children, Roni and Victor, are shown here with Ken, and Ken’s new wife Estela, a professor of Spanish Literature at Smith College

Here I am with Kenneth in my back yard in April of 2003, just as I was recovering from surgery. Below 1966 announcement of Kenneth’s college graduation.

Meanwhile…BACK TO MY STORY

I am once again 13 years old

TELEVISION WATCHING in Junior High

The Phil Silvers Show

77 Sunset Strip

My Life as a Teenager

1958: I am 14 in the photograph, Bill is 11, and Paul is 2. 1960:

I am 16, and on the Atlantic City Boardwalk with my Aunt Ida, Aunt Rose, Great Grandmother Lena, and 2^nd cousin Carol Cohen. My family is matchmaking.

Dick, Paul, Rhoda, Si

Probably 1957 and 1958

Backyard

Living room

Play room which later became dining room, and central hall. Living room and piano in distance.

Beachcomber Swim Club

We joined the Beachcomber Swim Club in Center Square Pennsylvania when I was in junior high, and this became our summer hang out—though it was at least a half hour drive from home, and I never became a good swimmer, in spite of lessons. I am in shadows next to Rhoda and Paul. In back are Si, Bill and Hermina.

Bill at the Beachcomber diving pool.

TOP HITS of 1958

1. Volare (Nel Blu Depinto Di Blu), Domenico Modugno

2. All I Have To Do Is Dream / Claudette, Everly Brothers

3. Don't / I Beg Of You, Elvis Presley

4. Witch Doctor, David Seville

5. Patricia, Perez Prado

6. Sail Along Silvery Moon / Raunchy, Billy Vaughn

7. Catch A Falling Star / Magic Moments, Perry Como

8. Tequila, Champs

9. It's All In The Game, Tommy Edwards

10. Return To Me, Dean Martin

11. It's Only Make Believe, Conway Twitty

12. The Purple People Eater, Sheb Wooley

13. Bird Dog / Devoted To You, Everly Brothers

14. Get A Job, Silhouettes

15. Little Star, Elegants

16. Stood Up / Waitin' In School, Ricky Nelson

17. He's Got The Whole World In His Hands, Laurie London

18. Twilight Time, Platters

19. Secretly, Jimmie Rodgers

20. At The Hop, Danny & The Juniors

Images of the 1950s

The fifties had a certain shape. For me, it was the shape of certain cars, or parts of cars, the fin of the 1956 Cadillac, the front grille of the 1953 Buick Road master, the nuttiness of the 1959 Chevrolet, or the front of this in your face 1959 Dodge.

1959 Chevrolet and the 1960 Imperial

1957 Desoto

The fifties had another set of images of course, more important political ones—politicians, world leaders, missiles, international crises, domestic crises, and I paid attention to these as best I could. But these car forms were on the streets around me every day

In 1959 my father bought a Pontiac Bonneville Station Wagon, that had more horsepower that a Ford Thunderbird. To my mind, it was his single greatest automotive purchase, and while no photograph of the family car survives, I have found these images of similar cars and include them here. This is the car I learned how to drive on, and the car that, on rare occasion, my dad let me drive while I was in high school.

This was a magnificent car, faster than a thunderbird, even though a station wagon. No cars in 1959 had seat belts.

The Apartment with Jack Lemmon 1960

Some Like it Hot with Marilyn Monroe in 1959

Gunsmoke on TV

Central High School 1958-1962

I attended Central High School in Philadelphia from 1958 to 1962. It was a great school, all academic, but also all boys, which meant that I had very limited (almost no) contact with girls during these formative years of my life. Our neighborhood had few kids my own age, and we did not belong to a synagogue. At my mother’s urging I did join Young Judea, a Zionist youth group, for a few years, but never felt really comfortable in the organization. It meant, in terms of my social development, that when I arrived at college in 1962 I had to learn the kind of social skills that everyone else had mastered in high school.

Part of the 218^th advanced class in a 12^th grade English class. From Left: Warren Weinstein, Mike Woal, Alan Needleman, Ken Stow, me, Joe Becker, Ronnie Eisenberg, our teacher Dr Hamm, Don Smolen, Ricky Share, Rick Dietz, Julian Alkon.

The best thing about Central for me was being in the advanced class, and taking virtually all my classes with the same 30 very smart boys. They were a strong influence on my own development. Many were close friends. Sam Bobrow was the closest from the time we did science experiments together for biology, to the times we went into downtown Philadelphia to see plays. In my senior year I was the editor in chief of the school newspaper, the Centralizer, and made as many of my friends editors as I could. We had a great time.

Some of the Centralizer Staff on roof of CHS

Back: Jerry Harris, me, and Donald Smolen;

Kneeling: Ken Stow, Ron Tauss, and Sam Bobrow

From Left: Noah Baen, our artist, me, photographer Bruce Katsiff above me, Ronnie Tauss, Steve Wartman (ready for tennis), Donald Smolen (Holding typewriter back to camera), Jerry Harris (behind Smolen and the typewriter).

Front: Jerry Harris, Ron Tauss, Don Smolen

Back: Sam Bobrow, me, Steve Wartman, Ken Stow

These are old friends I have to thank for a great many things.

Centralizer 1962-2003

Sam Bobrow Ken Stow Steve Wartman

Steve

Back Sam Bobrow, Dick Simon, Steve Wartman, Ken Stow

Front: Jerry Harris, Ronnie Tauss, Don Smolen

Sam

Ken

Jerry Harris Don Smolen

Don

Jerry

Ron Tauss

In adulthood:

Sam became a clinical psychologist in suburban Philadelphia, and the head of his own clinic

Steve became a doctor and medical administrator, and (as of this writing) the dean of the University of Texas Medical School in San Antonio . He has been the president of the Society of General Internal Medicine.

Kenneth became a professor of Jewish History at the University of Haifa, expert in medieval Jewish history, the author of many scholarly books, and editor of the journal Jewish History

Jerry became a doctor, medical professor, medical researcher in plastic surgery of the eye at the Medical College of Wisconsin (located in Milwaukee), and editor of Ophthalmic Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, the major medical journal in the field

Don became a commodies trader and software developer in suburban Philadelphia. (And even appeared as a contestant on Jeapardy)

(Some of his Grandchildren here)

& Ronnie became a business consultant and antique dealer in New York City

I felt like the underachiever at our reunions. One of the really nice things about these old friends of mine, however, was that they loved me regardless of my career highs and lows.

Don Smolen with his wife Florrie

Steve Wartman with his wife Gina

WHO else had been the editor of the Centralizer immediately before me?

Leo Braudy, literary and film professor at USC; Andy Weil, MD and medical author; and Stephen Poppel, who became an investment banker in NYC

Here I am with Steve Poppel in New York City in July 2004.

Rocky and Bullwinkle

The great TV cartoon of the year

1961 and 1962: Gotta learn how to do the Watusi

Other Central Friends….include

Alan Needleman, who became a distinguished professor of engineering on the faculty of Brown University and an internationally famous researcher

Steve Goldstein became a neurologist in Houston

High school friend and computer wiz Josef Sukonick came to visit in July 2004.

High school friend Harry First with his wife Eve

I backtrack a little

Kennedy Nixon debates 1960

Jeanne is born, 1961

My sister Jeanne was born in August of 1961, and I was the ONLY member of my high school class with a sibling 17 years younger! All my friends wanted to come over the see her. She quickly became the great delight of our family.

Abington Hospital

High School Graduation Picture 1962

Another adventure was waiting for me in Ann Arbor in September of 1962. I won scholarships to Penn, Columbia, and Michigan and took the one to the U of M.

The comics of the late 50s and early 60s that I loved

Jean Shepherd talks late nights on WOR radio New York, creating amazing stories.

TOP HITS 1962

1. Stranger On The Shore, Mr. Acker Bilk

2. I Can't Stop Loving You, Ray Charles

3. Mashed Potato Time, Dee Dee Sharp

4. Roses Are Red, Bobby Vinton

5. The Stripper, David Rose

6. Johnny Angel, Shelley Fabares

7. The Loco-Motion, Little Eva

8. Let Me In, Sensations

9. The Twist, Chubby Checker

10. Soldier Boy, Shirelles

11. Hey! Baby, Bruce Channel

12. The Wanderer, Dion

13. Duke Of Earl, Gene Chandler

14. Palisades Park, Freddy Cannon

15. Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, Neil Sedaka

16. Wolverton Mountain, Claude King

17. Slow Twistin', Chubby Checker

18. It Keeps Right On A-hurtin', Johnny Tillotson

19. The One Who Really Loves You, Mary Wells

20. Good Luck Charm, Elvis Presley

Central High, founded in 1836, the second oldest public high school in the United States (after Boston Latin), is empowered to offer Bachelor of Arts degrees rather than diplomas (from the days when graduating from high school was a really big deal)

MICHIGAN YEARS 1962-1971

The University of Michigan, 1962-1968

COLLEGE

I attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor Michigan from 1962 to 1968, and received a BA in English literature and playwriting in 1967 and an MA in English literature in 1968.

This of course hardly tells the story at all. It might be a fairer statement to say that I got to spend the sixties in college—so it’s kind of a long involved story, with both good and bad things to make sense of.

Ann Arbor in the early 60s was a small Midwestern college town with 24,000 students and maybe 60,000 people

It was often winter in Ann Arbor, from November through March, with at least one heartbreaking snowstorm in the middle of April, just to remind us.

Year ONE 1962-63

I am pictured here at the entrance to East Quad, my freshman dorm. It is May 1963 and my freshman year is over. In the photo below I stand with Paul and Jeanne. My family came out to pick me up and look the place over.It had been a tough year.

Because I was an architecture major, I had been placed in the men’s dorm for architecture and engineering students, and assigned a triple—314 Anderson House. I had two roommates, Mel Hanover from Newton Mass, who was in general a sweet guy but not ready for college in any way, and Lynn Furman, from Sylvania Ohio who played the Sousaphone in the U of M Marching Band, and thought it was okay to practice in our room. He also was a real piece of work, and loved brushing his teeth and then seeing from what distance he could spit into the sink from across the room.

DORM LIFE. Mel did push ups on his finger tips all night long, ten every hour, and so set his alarm clock for an hour at a time, got up, did the push ups, re-set the alarm, and so forth. I learned to sleep through most of this, though Mel of course was tired during the day a lot and did not get to a lot of classes. He flunked out at the end of our freshman year, went to LA, and word had it was working as an usher in a movie theater.

Mel was part of a group of kids on our floor of Anderson House who called themselves the animals, and mostly communicated with a long series of grunts and facial gestures. There could have been 6 or 8 kids in this group, and they came up with the brilliant idea of driving our housemother crazy. This was the time when colleges put grandmotherly women into dorms on the theory this would civilize the place. (Ha!). Some of the animals lived in the room directly above our housemother, and they came up with the idea of having some one bounce a ball bearing on their floor night and day all year long, with the hope that the noise would drive our housemother nuts. They were persistent, and as far as I know did always have someone bouncing a ball bearing according to the plan.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, in between push ups, Mel would come back into our room giggling like crazy, shake me awake and ask me to listen. There would be a muffled boom, and when Mel would stop laughing he would explain that the animals had put a cherry bomb in a toilet or a sink in the bathroom down the hall.

The contrast between my protected and supportive world in Philadelphia and this environment could not have been greater. Since I spent a good many evenings working at the Michigan Daily in my freshman year—it was the place of sanity for me—I would sometimes come back into my room around 2:30 in the morning (The Daily locked its pages at 2 am). And, all too often, I would find Mel and some of his friends having masturbation contests on the available beds in the room: with stop watches they would be timing speed to ejaculation. Lynn (whom I had taken to calling Clod) asked for a transfer to another room during the second semester, and while a number of other people were placed in our room, none lasted for very long. Mel’s lifestyle drove them away pretty quickly. We had a double at the end of the year and I had learned to sleep through all the alarm clocks.

World Events: Cuban Missile Crisis of Autumn 1962 makes nuclear war seem about to take place. Jeez. College was just Starting! And life in Ann Arbor beyond the dorm was almost as stressful. I turned out to be grossly under prepared to enter an architecture program, given the academic classes I had taken at Central, and with so little background in mechanical drawing and art, I often had to do drawings over and over and over again. I remember turning work in covered with stains from my tears, and after the first semester I transferred into liberal arts.

I knew one person at Michigan, a girl named Susan Gadiel from Philadelphia with whom I had gone to junior high, and with whom I started up a relationship in Ann Arbor. She counts as my first important girl friend, but by the second semester she wanted to date older and more sophisticated men (I was too immature she told me), and I was in active despair for a week or two.

I spent most of my time working at the Daily, and would have been a basket case without the friends I made there. I covered the undergraduate student government, and the graduate student government, and made friends with people on these student organizations as well.

MICHIGAN DAILY

Left: Judy Oppenheim and Michael Olinick, who were the editor in chief and the editorial director when I arrived at the Daily and were mentors and role models for me of brilliant writers, crusaders, and human beings. They married, went off to great careers together. The larger photo ABOVE captures ambiance of the Daily very nicely in the early 1960s. Theta Mu Delta was of course The Michigan Daily. Curved desk was where the night editor sat, surrounded by chaos. Look closely to see many empty Coke bottles, since Daily had nickel coke machine at a time when Cokes cost a dime. Sign hung on the wall of the Daily and reminded us of our mission in life.

IN ADULTHOOD: Michael and Judy with their 4 children between them: Eli, Abby, Sasha, Anne in Middlebury Vermont. Michael became a professor of Math and Judy of Russian at Middlebury College.

PHOTO RIGHT is of next year of Daily editors, coming in during Spring 1963. Philip Sutin, far right, was briefly a roommate my sophomore year.

Daily staffers collect in front of Student Publications for the PHOTOGRAPH BELOW.

Detail of the crowd shows two of my closest friends, Carl Cohen, and Michael Sattinger

Michael Sattinger, a sophomore (and thus someone who knew the ropes) had grown up in Ann Arbor, went to many movies with me, did weekly food shopping with me when we lived in different apartments the following year and he had a car and I did not, had a great sense of humor, went on to the University College London, then grad school in Pittsburgh, (where I visited him) and later become a professor of Economics at SUNY-Albany.

The Sattinger mobile

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Michael in adulthood with his wife Ulla and two of their three grown sons Nick (left) and Graham (right)

Carl Cohen, a freshman from Bayonne New Jersey, got into a competition with me early on about who could write the better news story for the Daily, or the larger news story. It was ultimately a draw, and the initial basis for our friendship. He was also a very charismatic friend, the kind of person around whom many people naturally congregate. Many women found him irresistable, and although I tried to copy his techniques, I never had much success.

Carl pictured some years later with his wife Shelley. Carl died in 1972 of an overdose of drugs and alcohol. He was a physician in his final year of residency in New Haven Conn.

This is Mary Markley Dorm, which in 1962 was a women’s dorm, and where Susan Gadiel lived. I used to walk her home (women’s hours were 11 pm on weekdays and probably l am on weekends). The vestible of the dorm, inside the front doors, were crammed with young men, like me, kissing young women, like Susan, goodnight. It was truly a surreal scene. Dozens and dozens of couples in their winter coats, standing and kissing, while gongs or something sounded, letting the women know they had to get in fast. Years later Susan told me she used to climb out the window an hour or two later and have a date with someone else (older and more mature). It was heartbreaking, but what can you do?

We saw the Fantasticks together when a professional acting company came to campus on tour. “Without a hurt the heart is hollow.” Some small consolation.

Susan committed suicide in 1986 or 1987 in Cambridge Mass, the mother of 2 small children. I never learned why. She had been married 2 times.

Engineering Arch, or Engin Arch. No co-ed is really a co-ed, the tradition we were taught goes, until she is kissed at midnight under the Engin Arch.

Susan and I kissed at mid night here. Sure. Sucker for traditions.

The Fishbowl-connector between three major liberal arts classroom and office bldgs

There were 24,000 students at the University when I arrived, and 36,000 when I graduated. In my first few years I felt swallowed up by the indifference of the institution though by the time I finally became an English major in my junior year, I did feel I had found a great home.

Registration before the age of the computer meant wandering through many gyms, standing in long lines, and hoping classes were open.

Ann Arbor downtown

My favorite movie of the year was David and Lisa. A very young Bob Dylan and Joan Baez had begun singing interesting folk songs.

The Temptations Peter Paul and Mary

Trip to Ann Arbor to pick up Dick in June 1963. Excerpts from Rhoda Simon’s Diary.

Monday June 3 – We got off at 10:20, remembered pillows at Ogontz & Chelten & came home for them. Just before we left, Mrs. Lapayowker phoned to ask if I would bake cake for bazaar tomorrow.

Car so full of baggage (ice chest, hamper, picnic jug), 4 suitcases, pillows, coats, jackets, umbrellas, empty cartons for Dick, paper bags of disposable diapers, hatbox of necessities for any eventuality. It rained. Lots of 63 cars on road. Lots of cows on farms. No pigs or chickens. Very few towns visible.

Dinner at Howard Johnson Somerset, stayed at very attractive motel in Beaver Falls, Conley’s. We were so tired I washed the crib 6 or 8 times and we all fell into bed.

6/4 – Up at 7:30, breakfasted from provisions, light rain, left at 9:30 or so. As soon as we got on Ohio tpk and flatlands, weather turned hot and sunny. Arrived Ann Arbor l:30 their time (standard). Dick saw us pulling up in front of East Quad, came down. We went motel hunting, ended up at Inn America, brand new, bulldozers still working, and had a room in latest motel architecture, plus King Arthur motif.—large metal censer on a chain for lamp, and banquet rooms very Tintagel. Lobby in waxed slate (floor) with sunken rug area so all surfaces level.

Dinner at Rubaiyat—chicken Hawaiian (tomatoes, pineapple, carrots, oranges, apricots), veal scallopine with noodles Alfredo etc. etc. Then to the Daily & Jeanne swiveled on the swivel chairs. Philip let the AP wire give us some news, we met Wilton, Denise went by looking thunderous, we visited hospital complex, changed Jeanne’s diaper & disposed of it (this was our first use of disposables), inspected the Hill & North Campus, dropped Dick at EQ and home. About an hour & a half later Sattinger and Dick appeared, and we sat on chairs and table poolside eating ice cream. Philip Sutin & Sattinger extremely nice.

6/5 –Dick called us, we picked him up and had a delicious breakfast at Brown Jug, bought post cards, picked up Dick’s footlocker & took it to 808 Monroe which is very Left Bank and right next to Dominic’s Pizza (open air café with bearded person reading paperback outraged at us tourists), went back and picked up Dick’s luggage (an hour surely) while he packed and brought it down. I gave reinforcement to a lady who said don’t tell me you have a child this age, Jeanne, and a boy in college? Yes. She had 3 in college together and 2 little ones.

Off to Main Campus, in and out of Angell, diag, Mug (where we had delicious ice cream) and followed Ken’s directions on 8 Mile Road to Huntington Woods and Ken’s house, where Dick delivered check & lease and I disgraced whole family by outraging Mrs. Winter more with every ill-considered remark. Off to Stouffer’s for dinner after finding a room at Crestwood Motel (after 20 phone calls by obliging Embassy Motel mgr.) Conventions in Detroit used up all motel rooms. Crestwood right on 8 Mile Road with its amazing traffic.(No public transp in Detroit naturally) 3^rd most fleabag, Si thinks, surpassed only by hotel in Boston and in Beach Haven.

Jeanne very adorable in her pink checked dress. Stouffers Northland having kitchen problems; Si & I took Jeanne for many walks while waiting for food but it was worth it. The manager came by while Jeanne was sitting on Si’s lap and said “She’s Grandpa’s girl, isn’t she?” We tried to figure out how he interpreted us. My best guess: Si and his 4 grandchildren. Dick incredulous.

6/6 – Breakfast at Palmer’s at Northland---best ever with a wonderful waitress who understood children. Then a walk thru the 110 stores, very nice. Lovely sculpture & flowers.And off to the Ohio tpk. First we found Wayne State Univ new buildings designed by a Japanese architect. Wayne is at a dusty cul-de-sac of Detroit. Rain, downpours again as we entered hilly area near Penna. Dick driving. We spent evening at New Stanton at lovely little motel, dinner at Holiday House, everyone walking their dogs on leash between motel and tpk ramp.

6/7 – We had bkfst at Howard Johnson (real plants, limp bacon, buttery omelet) and thru intermittent rain and showers got to A &P on Ogontz Ave by 4pm, home by 5:15. Phoned Bill (who was staying at Grandma’s), he wanted to stay for dinner, likes the food there. If I cooked vegetables like that, what a difference in our meals! Dick picked him up at 7:30. “Best bed of all,” said Paul as he climbed in.

6/8 – Cut Jeanne’s hair. Got a plateful of curls. Threw them out. She’s pleased. So is everyone else. Did 6 or 7 washes, maybe more.

Summer 1963

Following the appearance of this article in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin I got anti-Semitic hate mail on and off for several years

Excerpts from Rhoda Simon’s Diary –

6/27/63 – Temp in upper 90s. Dick spent 4-1/2 hours in cellar cleaning up mess of 15 qts of tempera..

7/3 – Dick counted and sorted things for Si.

7/4 – Si Dick & Bill worked all day rearranging the garage. Dick drove us to 5^th St. in time to see the parade: a police car, 2 boy scouts with Greater Olney Civic Assoc. flag, the community ambulance, American Legion and Gray Ghosts VFW, boy scouts, cubs, girl scouts, brownies, NE Boys’ Band, 2 Mummers’ bands in their smuggling costumes (2^nd act of Carmen), and all the school children with flags. Bystanders fell in at the end and all marched to Fisher Park

7/15 – Dick & Si lunched at new Singing Waters restaurant at motel at 20^th and Market and got a tour of the kitchen too. Very attractive menus full of Steak Diablo, Beef Stroganoff, Shrimp Cantonese, flaming steaks, flaming bananas Abakour etc,

8/5 – Dick & I had a laugh looking thru cartons of old schoolwork & mementos we’re throwing out. (Uncle Charlie per nurse to Willie Katz and ma on pa’s death: sending pretzels from Reading.)

8/17 – Mother took Paul to Playhouse in the Park to see Treasure Island, which Paul loved. Dick chauffeured both ways. Father rode with Dick, they visited Bala Shopping Center, he inspected and admired each aisle of Penn Fruit, they visited Dink at his cash register, had lunch here.

.

.

1963-64 Year Two.

I moved into my first apartment in late August of 1963, at 808 Monroe, directly behind the law school and next door to a great Ann Arbor sandwich shop, Dominick’s. (It proved to be noisy late at night when the garbage got dumped right outside my bedroom window). Here are two of my three roommates, Bob Sheffield, in the beard, and Ken Winter, or Kwinter or Kwint (Daily names) on the right. Tom Copi took this picture several years later but it conveys a pretty good sense of these guys. They were both talented and smart human beings but extremely poor roommates and I only lasted a semester with them. They were a year older than I was, but even at 20 maturity pretty much had escaped them. They were high school friends I think, back in Royal Oak Michigan or some Detroit suburb like that, and they loved throwing food at the walls during meals, especially jello, and so we had petrifying jello all about the kitchen. They also loved asking me, loudly, if I wanted Orange Jews, and . . . stuff I guess they thought was funny. Kwinter was a brilliant Daily writer. I never understood the rest.

Here is Sheffield a few years later.

I resigned from the Daily during the Fall of my sophomore year because it was taking too many hours each week, and I knew that I needed to explore more stuff at college. But I kept my Daily friends.

On the day John Kennedy was killed, I gathered with friends at the Daily and carried copies of this special issue of the Michigan Daily around campus with Michael Sattinger. We distributed copies throughout the law school.

NOVEMBER 22 1963

Excerpts from Rhoda Simon’s Diary

11/26 – Si took Bill to the bus for Ann Arbor.

12/1 – Sam & Si met Bill at airport at 2:30 and we spent rest of aft asking him questions. He had a fine time. Enjoyed the hungover & profane roommates The pork loins routine and every midnight instant choc cake routine, the dinner at Diane’s in Dearborn (locked up Doberman Pinscher first). Bill gained 7 lbs at that dinner; the football game, party with fraternity and sorority people, dinner of butterfly shrimp at the Union, visit to ZBT house, other campus spots. Couple of friends of Dick’s hitchhiked to Washington to Kennedy’s funeral & were greeted with Aren’t you gonna cry now by their fraternity brothers when they got back. Another friend subscribed to the New Republic and when joined fraternity asked to have it canceled but they kept sending it (more than just embarrassing).

12/9 – Dick would like to move in with some more congenial friends. Depends on what friend’s psychiatrist says.

Jan 1964 and rest of 1964 --Dick Dinky & Ronnie Tauss played Paul’s Lie Detector & Monopoly games for 2 solid evenings in which while playing they spoke of nothing but the game. Eyer spent 3 days in jail in Savannah Ga last summer, 18 hrs in the pit (no food, toilets or water) while working for SNCC. Says Haverford is all right but is considering a year off to hitchhike around the country. Dinky has gotten indefinite leave from Penn, spent this year playing cards in Houston Hall from 9 to 5 every day. Steve Wartman says Cornell expensive but worth it. Steve Poppel is leaving for Hebrew Univ in Israel in June for 14 months. Sukonick talks of Nigeria, Moscow or Harvard next year. Sam has a tremendous collection of classical stereo records.

Michael Sattinger arrived Fri eve from Ann Arbor, Cambridge & NY. He taught us to play various card games, including liar’s dice (pass a poker hand around and only challenge when believe he’s overstated it; understated or true holder wins). Concentration with a deck of cards, a game in which each person gets a suit and bids for each card simultaneously with other players,

Drove out to Haverford which Michael wanted to see. Sukonick came too. Eyer hosted. M thinks Haverford nice except for pile of ordure in middle of quad (cleaning out cesspools). We went to Barbara Nissman’s piano recital at Univ Museum. She is a very good pianist. Met Mr. Livingston, he gave curtain talk. Alums no longer hang together, it no longer means what it used to to go to college, it’s only on acct of middle class affluence, way to get a job.

Next morning (Mon.) snowstorm. By eve I phoned state police. They said snowplowing tpk continually, wind drifts it right back. Took policeman 5 hrs to drive in from Harrisburg. Go anytime but tonight. So they left Tues early aft and got toAnn Arbor by eve. Dick slept on Mike Rosen’s sofa until he found a bed with a classics student (grad?) named Peter Burian of Iowa & NH who makes his own beer –603 Mary Court, and eats with Rosen, whose harpsichord is coming along fine, and Darryl Bem, who will get his doctorate in social psych in spring, a Skinnerian (after Dr Sk of Harvard, a radical behaviorist) whose brown bread experiment is already famous. Bem: children of 2 age groups given movies or movies with questions to answer-all infl, them (like the pigeons Darryl works with to give the right response & get the reward) The right answer always seems to be brown bread. The sisters kept careful records of brown & white bread consumption of both age groups following, and younger group ate more & older group less brown bread.(Retarded children, all). Reaction against suggestion by group too old for the type of appeal.

Darryl was a physics major at Reed, went to MIT for grad work, couldn’t stand the people & shifted to psych. Newcomb is setting up new Social Psych dept at UCLa Jolla or somewhere & Bem wants to go there or Mich or Minn as asst prof next year. Will be so.

Rosen flunked orals for doctorate in philosophy. Philo dept very sadistic. Only passed 2 out of 13 (?) and only encouraged 2 to try again. Not Rosen, who is now considering Law School. (Dad lawyer on LI)

Other grad student who lives at 907 Sybil but doesn’t eat with them is 28, about to remarry (eats w fiancée) and an electronics or engineering genius, who is interviewed for jobs in “dead” rooms, since counter intelligence has devised a mike device or something in a bullet that can be shot into the walls of a room and transmit back.

What shall Dick major in? Amer history he thinks. He moved to lll0 Prospect with Carl Cohen & Grody. He org SGRU with Carl to abolish or reform Student Govt. They all and Thomas Copi, a freshman on the Daily, whose father is in philosophy dept (the logics man), ran for election. Only Cohen made it. The others are fraternity pledges and have trouble taking the pledge class routine directed by a freshman pledge president. Especially the compulsory pranks designed to give pledge class solidarity: chemicals in the water system, locking fuse boxes & cutting off all electricity, removing property, etc., and a compulsory out of state weekend trip to escape repercussions, to a campus now having a chapter of their frat. When the time came they depledged and gave Dick a housing group for next year. Then Copi left home & college for parts unknown.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Later in 1963-64 Carl Cohen and I formed a political party (SCREW-but spelled SGRU given the limitations on free speech in 1963) with Michigan Daily friends, and we ran ourselves as a slate for the Student Government Council (SGC) then the form of student government at the U of M.

Carl Cohen actually won a seat—the rest of us did not—and it was great fun. We started out as total anarchistic comedians but quickly had to take ourselves more seriously as the poster shows. We started out with the slate that asked for the third floor of the Student Activities Building be renamed the second floor.

Tom Copi, a freshman from Ann Arbor in 1963, joined the Daily and became a close friend. He ran on the SGRU party ticket, was a great photographer, and took many photos of me that I use in this memoir.

Dave Block (from Skokie Illinois) was also part of the SGRU ticket. He was also a friend from the Daily, on the sports staff, and was also later a roommate. Later than that he was the only friend I had from Ann Arbor to serve in the military during Vietnam. This photo taken many years later when he had much less head hair and much more face hair than he did in 1963.

Ann Arbor in Winter

No photo available of Bob Grody, the other member of the SGRU ticket.

In 1963-64 I also served as a co-chair of the Conference on the University Steering Committee, a group of students, faculty, and administers who organized a Conference on the University in the Spring of 1964: 3 days of workshops on the problems facing the university. It too was fun, and I got to interact with university big wigs, like the president and vice president for academic affairs.

Right: Harlan Hatcher, U of M President. Far right: Roger Heyns, Vice President for Academic Affairs

In an English class I made friends with John Schoonmaker, whose girl friend Kathy McKevitt, went to a small women’s college in South Bend, connected to Notre Dame. Later Kathy transferred to the U of M.

They were, when I think about it now, my first non-Jewish friends, and perhaps for that reason were extremely difficult for me to figure out. Fortunately they were usually patient with me.

Kathy was so strikingly beautiful that men would sometimes fall off their bicycles as they passed her on campus.

I took this photograph of them many years later, in the late 1970s, at John’s family’s cottage on Crystal Lake in the Northern part of the Lower Peninsula.

John became an attorney, and Kathy the editor of an academic journal at Michigan State.

They divorced some years later.

Here’s Kathy with her new husband Don much more recently.

Kathy in the chorus of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, a student organization that put on a G&S operetta once a semester. I went to them all, and at one time or another dated or tried to date one or more members of the female chorus.

I had many roommates my sophomore year. Few behaved very well, and I kept moving. Finally in the second semester I ended up rooming with Carl and another Daily staffer, and boarding with three graduate students, one of whom, Mike Rosen, I had met while covering the Graduate Student Council for the Daily. One of these grad students was Daryl Bem, shown here in a photo taken recently, who became a famous social psychologist. I watched him do playful psych experiments on his roommates, and was there the day he passed his PhD orals and jumped up and down on the sofa, shouting I Have a PhD!

Daryl BEM

Malcolm X came to campus and spoke to a small group of students maybe 30 or so. I went with Jean Tenander, a friend from the Daily. Malcolm threatened to strangle her with a piano wire, (what we are going to do to white women, he said, come the revolution) and although he was kind of joking, I found it really weird. So weird that I could never get very excited about Malcolm after that.

TENANDER

MALCOLM

Tenander married Peter Steinberger, who later committed suicide. She became a librarian in Fitchburg Mass where she had grown up

IN THE LARGER WORLD

Civil Rights Struggles in the South

New Band: The Beatles

LBJ delivers the 1964 commencement address at U of M, and announces the great society.

Movies: Tom Jones, Goldfinger

SUMMER 1964

Summer of 1964 Jeanne Dick Rhoda Paul on New Jersey Shore

This is the Summer I work for Philadelphia Electric Company. I am 19.

Schwerner

Chaney and

Goodman

3 civil rights workers killed in Mississippi

Summer 1964

FIRST CAR!! I got my very first car at the end of the summer, a used 1961 VW bug, which cost $1,000.00. It looked like this--------

Excerpts from Rhoda Simon’s Diary

June 20, 1964 – Dick is in a green Phila Electric Company uniform, plastic helmet, Bill’s old hiking boots(work shoes to start with) and is a construction helper at $1.91/hr. Up ladders and out on planks that are unsafe because nobody bothers to take the time & trouble to brace them or make sure they are put down with all legs on ground or etc. As the men say as they climb up a 2-story ladder, Well, you can’t live forever.

At the stations there is live steam & coal dust or its by products, puddles of sulfuric acid and everyone: underwear full of holes. But 6 – 15 minute operations per shift. Seems to be the accepted custom. For the rest of the men, mostly with Irish or Polish names, sleep under the pipes or watch the derelicts in Penn treaty park with field glasses. The man who walks over the girders 6 stories up, stops 3 times on the way to work, for a drink. Place they head for after work: home, taproom or vw bar. Dick learning how to look busy. Almost everyone who has between there any length of time has had at least 2 accidents. Signs everywhere and at Budd’s parking lot across the street from the substation, full of safety signs: you got to work safely this morning. See if you can get thru the day safely etc. At substations there is no steam or coal, but you can get electrocuted. The rule is don’t touch anything unless the person who tells you to touches it first.

Tauss got married in Queens last Sunday to Eve, Dinky was best man, only 25 people there, everything very nice. 3 days honeymoon at the hotel Pierre and then to Chicago, job & apt. Friday night the boys gave him a dinner at green hedges & then spent the eve at Sukonick’s apt at 33^rd & arch or somesuch, even worse then 808 Monroe Dick says.

AUGUST 1964

President Lyndon Johnson orders immediate retaliation for the alleged attack on U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin, supposedly by

the North Vietnamese.

U.S. Congress approves Gulf of Tonkin resolution which allows Johnson to significantly escalate U.S. military involvement in Viet Nam.

It is a terrible moment.

At Beachcomber swim club later that week I try to tell Paul (he is 8 years old) that it looks likely that I will be drafted at some point in the not too distant future.

Almost immediately the United States starts bombing North Vietnam

1964-65 Year THREE

1824 Arbordale Ann Arbor

The next moment of almost pure chaos happened at the start of my junior year, in the fall of 1964, when I was living with 6 other friends in a professor’s house at 1824 Arbordale (Don and Edie Peltz of the Psych Dept were on sabbatical). I came down with infectious hepatitis, and spent a couple weeks in isolation in the University’s health service, and during that time, one of my roommates, Harvey Pianin, committed suicide (on my bed).

The Supremes

New group---

The Rolling Stones

Looks peaceful, now….

Carl and I had located a house for rent on a psych dept bulletin board. It had 5 bedrooms, plus a study, and had seven beds, not to mention that it didn’t look at all like a grimy student rental. We met with the psych professor who was going on leave. Carl had just been elected to Student Government Council. I had just been the co-chair of the Conference on the University. And we impressed Don Peltz, who said really he had wanted to rent to grad students.

Carl and I had to locate 5 other people. We recruited friend David Block who was a sports writer on the Daily. Carl knew Harvey Pianin, knew Richard Doctoroff and David Weinstein, and David Block had a friend from Skokie, Neil Pollack, and so we filled the house.

7 of us, all 19 years old.

Oh my god…

CARL COHEN meets ROCHELLE FAYE KESSLER just as all hell breaks loose at Arbordale. (This photo taken several years later)

RICHARD DOCTOROFF is part of the mix at Arbordale. This photo taken several years later, when Doc is looking like one of the Beatles.

Doc late 60s

Harvey had failed organic chemistry which meant that he was not going to go to Med School. But this is all we were ever able to find out as a motive and it never seemed sufficient. Because I got the news when I was seriously ill, and because I was in isolation in Health Service, my roommates had to stand in the hallway and shout the news to me. Harvey picked my bed simply because it was available. The behavior of some of my other roommates following this catastrophe was not good, all of which got reported to me episodically from the doorway of my room: Some laughed at the funeral. Many hid the suicide note from the police and from Harvey’s parents. The Ann Arbor police took my clothing as evidence since it was my room. One roommate, David Weinstein, took financial advantage of the suicide and told Harvey’s parents that he was responsible for a whopping phone bill that was really David’s. Some of the others shot up the prof’s library with BB guns. I was sent home to recover in Philadelphia, and my Dad flew out to Ann Arbor and drove my VW bug back to Phila. Later what my friends said was that no one at the age of 19 was prepared for such a thing. Carl Cohen wrote a psych paper attempting to explain Harvey’s suicide, something that became ironic years later when Carl also killed himself.

Carl and Shelley, late 60s or early 70s

Many years later Shelley told me Carl was bipolar, though I was not aware of it at the time.

SHELLEY in 2003:

An author, married to Mark Gerzon, mother of 3 grown sons

October-Dec 1964

I recover at home in Philadelphia from hepatitis

Letter to Steve Wartman dated November 5 1964

“After 25 days inside a room at Health Service (in Ann Arbor), I flew home (October 13) where I have been ever since, recuperating. I left the house for the first time Tuesday to walk to the local polling place ….(Presidential Election)…I saw my doctor today but no one seems to know yet whether I will be back in Ann Arbor next semester or not.”

“I left my roommates as they were working on a musical comedy based on my other roommate’s suicide.”

Lyndon Johnson runs for President. This was the first election in which I was eligible to vote, and I voted with pleasure for LBJ. The alternative, Barry Goldwater, was clearly crazy but LBJ shortly turned into a creep of the worst kind.

TWENTY FIVE YEARS LATER

REUNION in SAN FRANCISCO many years later: Doc, me, Tom Copi, and David Block, at the bat mitzvah of Doc and Lissa’s youngest daughter Julia.

Jan-May 1965

I returned to Ann Arbor for the winter term at a time when the war in Vietnam was alarming everyone.

HURON TOWERS

University of Michigan Teach-In on Vietnam runs all night, the first such teach in on any campus in the country. MARCH 1965. Political Chaos: The War in Vietnam hangs over my entire generation, and makes all of our years in college additionally troubling.

Photos taken at U OF M TEACH IN.

March 1965 U of M Teach –In. I am somewhere in this massive crowd, along with every other friend I have in Ann Arbor.

April 1965: Lyndon Johnson authorizes US ground combat troops in Viet Name

Win Schuler’s in Jackson Michigan became one of our favorite long drives to a restaurant destination.

If you look closely you can see quotations from famous people written in gold letters on the beams across the ceiling.

Something about the ambiance of the middle 60s in A2 that we would drive so many miles, order the Charles Dickens (Hamburger with bacon on a toasted English muffin) and think we were really in a superb place,

Photo from the Schuler’s in Marshall but they pretty much all looked the same inside.

SUMMER 1965

Summer of 1965. I work as a delivery driver for Staplers Fabric Store in Phila. Here I am in the Phila back yard.

Bike by garage, then Paul’s, was mine years earlier. Only surviving photo of Schwinn.

BELOW with my VW and a flower

Dick Paul Jeanne

Bill Paul Jeanne Dick

I drove the VW into the grass of the backyard for these pictures

I Got You Babe

Sonny and Cher

HER: They say we're young and we don't know

We won't find out until we grow

HIM: Well I don't know if all that's true

'Cause you got me, and baby I got you

HIM: Babe

BOTH: I got you babe

I got you babe

Ann Arbor protests at right

U OF M Central Campus in the middle Sixties.

Philadelphia back yard: with Paul and Jeanne

This Diamond Ring

Gary Lewis and The Playboys

Who wants to bu-u-uy this diamond ri-i-i-ing?

She took it off her finger, now it doesn't mean a thi-i-i-ng

This diamond ring doesn't shine for me anymore

And this diamond ring doesn't mean what it meant before

So if you've got someone whose love is tru-u-ue

Let it shine for yo-ou-ou

1-2-3

Len Barry

1-2-3, oh, that's how elementary it's gonna be

C'mon, let's fall in love, it's easy (it's so easy)

Like takin' candy (like takin' candy) from a baby

A-B-C (A-B-C) fallin' in love with you was easy for me (easy for me)

And you can do it, too, it's easy (it's so easy)

Like takin' candy (like takin' candy) from a baby

Baby, there's nothin' hard about love

Basically, it's as easy as pie

The hard part is livin' without love

Without your love, baby, I would die

It's easy (it's so easy)

Like takin' candy (like takin' candy) from a baby, yay

Side view of the Frieze Bldg where my plays would be produced in the next two years

1965-66 Year FOUR

217 West Madison, near Main Street. I live here in 65-66 with Doc, Tom Copi, and Jeff Urist.

It was conveniently around the corner from the Washtenaw Dairy

When I returned to Ann Arbor in September 1965, I became an English major (it was a long academic journey through many majors) and shortly after I enrolled in Kenneth Rowe’s playwriting class. I wrote a play based on my roommate’s behavior following the suicide and everyone in the class thought I had a fantastic inventive imagination (well…ok, I didn’t make anything much up but I appreciated the praise nevertheless). And I was launched as a playwright. The university produced the play with much fanfare, and I stayed in the playwriting program for 3 years, writing stuff, getting plays published in the campus literary magazine, getting another play produced, and eventually winning the prestigious Hopwood awards in creative writing.

My career as a playwright begins. I finally lose my virginity!

The Dead

Produced by the University of Michigan Speech Dept

December 1965

Some of cast including my roommate Jeff Urist (as jester)

My director, Arnie Kendall, in the middle of the set. I learned a great deal from him.

Photos by Tom Copi

The Frieze Building, where the Speech Dept was located, and where all my plays would be produced in the Arena Theater

Front door of the Frieze Bldg

Next home

TOP HITS OF 1966

1. The Ballad of the Green Berets, Sgt. Barry Sadler

2. Cherish, Association

3. (You're My) Soul And Inspiration, Righteous Brothers

4. Reach Out I'll Be There, Four Tops

5. 96 Tears, ? & The Mysterians

6. Last Train To Clarksville, Monkees

7. Monday, Monday, Mama's & The Papa's

8. You Can't Hurry Love, Supremes

9. Poor Side Of Town, Johnny Rivers

10. California Dreamin', Mama's & The Papa's

11. Summer In The City, Lovin' Spoonful

12. Born Free, Roger Williams

13. These Boots Are Made For Walkin', Nancy Sinatra

14. What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted, Jimmy Ruffin

15. Strangers In The Night, Frank Sinatra

16. We Can Work It Out, Beatles

17. Good Lovin', Young Rascals

18. Winchester Cathedral, New Vaudeville Band

19. Hanky Panky, Tommy James & The Shondells

20. When A Man Loves A Woman, Percy Sledge

Beach Boys

Ann Arbor late sixties

Friends Carl and Shelley move to Detroit when Carl enters Wayne State Medical School, and I start driving into Detroit on a regular basis to visit.

Motown

1966-67 Year FIVE

High School friend Steven Wartman starts to visit Ann Arbor, at least once a year, sometimes two or three times. He is now in medical school.

Excerpts from some of the letters I wrote to Steve between 1966 and 1971 will appear in this memoir in color.

Letter to Steve Wartman dated September 23 1966

“I joined SDS last month, and I wrote away for CO stuff [conscientious objector]. I suspect that by next year things will be much worse than they are now anyway…”

Letter to Steve Wartman dated October 8 1966

“The Michigan Marching Band is playing over and over Hail to the Victors Valiant march march march hail ta ta ta ta ta and the second half of the 1966 Michigan MSU game is getting underway and I’m sure there is an air of excitement there in East Lansing and it’s mainly for the other side and the radio does just as well, considering of course it goes without saying that we are losing. Usually it is the second half that the team goes completely to pieces so I’m listening semi-intently.

Playwriting class workshop performance of a new one act play of mine, modern adaptation of medieval story drama of shepherds finding the kid in Jerusalem or Bethlehem or wherever, went off extremely well last Tuesday night. Expected to be crucified but was not. Pissed off at Victoria who I asked to fix me up last weekend and she did and I ended up taking out this hunchbacked large goldfish.

Touchdown MSU…13-0…there are these Sammies downstairs from me who are always showing up with these really cute blondes with long hair and I generally find it depressing by comparison. Also find depressing the fact that half of my friends are finding these really great girls whom they don’t deserve and the other half are marrying the worst absolute loser imaginable. Ahh…there is goes, the expected Michigan collapse. Another touchdown MSU. Like clockwork.

Letter to Steven Wartman dated November 7, 1966

“I picked up a girl for the very first time in my life last week. She works in this eerie restaurant on campus where you write your order and give it to her, etc. So I walked in, wrote out an invitation to a date, signed it Prince Charming, and shoved it at her. It got a lunch date last week, and a realer date this coming weekend. (I got thoroughly sick of being fixed up.)

9 inches of snow all over the place here. 6 months of winter this year. Hoopla hoopla.”

Drakes is the restaurant mentioned in my letter and here also is the funky interior. Popular for its hand squeezed limeades and pecan sticky buns, it was impossibly retro in the middle 60s, with an upstairs Martian room.

MASON HALL where a great many of my English dept classes took place, including Playwriting (Tuesday nights from 7 to 10).

I live by myself at 502 North State Street in 1966-67. Doc was studying in London for the year and most of my other friends had graduated.

The Speech Dept produces my next play-based on the life of my great grandmother Lena-- And Many Many More

Produced by the University of Michigan Speech Dept Dec 1966

Valentine’s Day 1967 Letter to Steve Wartman

TIMOTHY LEARY

Turn on, tune in, drop out

“I found this good girl, as I might have mentioned in my last letter….I gave her 6 roses and 6 books by Ray Bradbury, today. . . She has these green contact lenses, see, but fortunately her eyes are sort of green anyway….

…

“Timothy Leary held a religious service in Hill auditorium last night (holds 4500 people). He sat on the middle of the stage, in a long white coat … in front of a red candle on a gold plate, with all the auditorium lights out, and chanted for about 2 hours. It was incredible. Mesmerizing experience. A person who you begin to believe is in touch with something important, but somehow the whole experience has not pulled him out into somewhere else that is really is religious and you actually do need faith. Some kind of faith.”

“I have been admitted, to date, by Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Berkeley. Berkeley on the provision that I take French courses in an accredited college this summer…. HILL AUDITORIUM

“I am about to wander off, through two feet of slowly melting snow, to campus, and sit for 3 hours in playwriting, and I think, yell about Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, and maybe yell about other things. . . and tomorrow I will go through a series of classes, Restoration Comedy, India, Modern Drama, and then maybe lunch, and then Modern American Lit, and come home and collapse, and see two one act plays at 4 pm and then prepare myself for a showing of Warhol’s movie Blow Job, which everyone expects the police will attempt to confiscate, as they did to the last experimental movie, and maybe then there will be a riot, that is of course if it’s not too cold outside, since the temperature is going down again, and it was minus 10 last week sometimes but that can’t last much longer, and the movie ULYSSES the word is, is going to play all over the US for 3 days only, and charge 4 dollars for matinee and $5.50 for evenings and one wonders a lot about James Joyce turning over in his grave.”

Judy Goldstein, spirited girl friend from Winter and Spring 1967, with green eyes from contact lenses, is pictured above, left with her roommate Suzanne, and right, with another friend. She called me Heathcliff. I walked through a snowstorm in the middle of the night to get her a pack of cigarettes.

I made another set of good friends in Kenneth Rowe’s playwriting classes, and did think of myself by the time I graduated in 1967 as a playwright. It just turned out to require moving to NY and schmoose with the NY theater community after that, and I was never particularly interested in doing that.

My closest friend from my first year of playwriting seminar was Steve Coffman an English major from South Bend Indiana, shown here with Bobbie Sims, who he was soon to marry.

His play George Anderson’s Funeral was produced on the same bill as my play, And Many Many More.

Steve came closest to anyone I have ever met with having my sense of the comic. We always had a lot to laugh about. Bobbie laughed a lot too, cooked amazing meals for me (and Steve), fixed me up with girl friends, even made a gingerbread woman for me for one of my birthdays.

The photo on the right of Steve and Bobbie was taken many years later in our San Luis Obispo living room.

My favorite Ann Arbor teacher and role model was English Prof. Peter Bauland.. Along with his wife Abby, Peter was a great mentor and support for me. They provided me with a sense of home in Ann Arbor and a sense of connection to family. I ate many dinners at their house, played with their young son David, and talked many long hours.

I also felt Peter’s English Dept office was a great place to talk. I learned, by watching, what life was like for an English professor, and to the extent that I have modeled my own teaching on anyone, it was for sure on Peter’s great style. Peter Abby and David Bauland in 1967

Once, while dating a series of student actresses, I talked to Peter about the problems I was having. The next day in drama class, Peter devoted part of the lecture to the fact that actresses weren’t really people. I felt like standing up and taking a short bow.

Peter and David Bauland in 1968

Me with David and a fez. Peter in background. Probably 1967.

Abby with new baby Amy

PETER in 2003 from his web page

The Bauland family in the spring of 2000.

Amy (married to David), David, Peter, Grandchild Zoe, Abby, and Amy

Rick Stolorow was another close friend from playwriting class with a great sense of humor, and great compassion. I always felt he was a brother.

Photos of Rick taken at Kathy’s and my wedding in August of 1974

Rick in the late 60s or early 70s

Rick with Kathy and me in Santa Fe New Mexico many years after we graduated (in 1980 I think). In the late 60s Rick took me to my first Mexican restaurant (they were rare then), to my first Persian restaurant, to my first peanut shell on the floor restaurant, and also had me eat chili for the first time at a small town café. When he had a white Volvo and I had a green one, we used to wash them together. He was a compassionate friend who warned me about drugs, watched over me as best he could, and was a brilliant comic actor.

It was part of my plan to get a PhD and teach, while trying to be a playwright. But the war in Vietnam intervened and when I was reclassified IA right after getting my MA, I had to find some way to avoid the army.

AVERY HOPWOOD who funded the Hopwood Awards in Creative Writing. I won enough money to buy a new Volvo, along with the trade in value from my aged VW bug

This was a lot of money in 1967. My brand new Volvo cost 3,300.

Dylan Blonde on Blonde 1966

Volvo ads said they lasted an average of ll years in Sweden where there were few paved roads. Mine lasted 11 years in the US and I owned my Volvo until 1978.

Photo by Tom Copi

It is hard to talk about my years in Ann Arbor without considering the war, or the political protests it engendered especially on campuses like Michigan. It was a noisy and chaotic time around me. Students for a Democratic Society had been formed in Michigan, by a group of students around Tom Hayden, who was himself a U of M English major, and Daily editor, just a few years older than me, and the local campus branch of SDS, called Voice, was very active. Many were my friends, and as the war got larger and larger I eventually joined SDS as well (though I resigned in 1968 when SDS turned into the more radical weather underground).

A great deal happened to me between 1962 when I arrived in Ann Arbor and spring of 1968 when I left (to return for visits esp. in the next 3 years when I still lived in the state of Michigan). I think I learned what my parents wanted me to learn when they encouraged me to go far away from home –relatively speaking—and to go to a large state university rather than an ivy league college. But the process was hard. I had 19 undergraduate roommates, for example, and many of them were not always as considerate as I could have wished. Some were great, my friends Carl Cohen, his wife Shelley, and Richard Doctoroff. Doc was my roommate longer than anyone else.

Dope arrives in Ann Arbor about this time. Somebody hands me a joint.

My play, Our Mutual Childhood, appears in the 1966-67 issue of Generation, the arts magazine of the University of Michigan

Sgt Pepper Beatles 1967

1967: Martha and the Vandellas sang Jimmy Mack

BA AWARDED with distinction in English April 1967

Ann Arbor as a winter place

MUCH OF my Ann Arbor life was covered with snow, and often winter lasted six of the eight months I lived there each year. The Summer of 1967 was my first time to see it green and warm and it was great.

How Ann Arbor looked most of the time I was there

Covered with snow, often grey snow

SUMMER 1967

High school friend Steve Wartman came to Ann Arbor for the Summer of 1967. He got a job painting houses with John Schoonmaker while I took French classes in preparation for entering the MA program at the U of M.

We spent a lot of time at Silver Lake, Michigan. The photo of Steve on the Signet 200 was taken quite a few years later (at the time of longer hair) but I include it here because the car was also important. We were of an age when cars mattered a good deal.

SILVER LAKE

This lake was always filled with happy swimming people.

I used to love sitting in Silver Lake up to my neck in water, and watch fish swim by.

But it was a nutty time since there wereRIOTS IN DETROIT (not too far away) SUMMER OF 1967 (summer of love, remember)

Detroit. Actual photograph.

The song of the summer

Detroit riots

And like many college age students who had lived in Ann Arbor for a while, I had friends who went to Wayne State in Detroit, and watched tanks move down the street from their apartment windows. They spent a few days lying on the floor.

Steve and I go with John Schoonmaker to his cabin on Crystal Lake, and then over to Mackinac Island

Crystal Lake in Northern Lower Michigan

Mackinac Island is full of tourist shops, fudge shops, and no cars

Letter to Steve Wartman September 6 1967

On Labor Day at the proper time Silver Lake was only a bit more crowded than it usually was. A few dozen townies. A lake covered with floating vegetation that made swimming difficult. A few rather large fish right in front of me. And so this extremely fine formation of ducks flies over the Lake, and the townies turn to each other. SURE WISH I HAD MY SHOTGUN WITH ME NOW. A few dozen high school kids behaving themselves.

Doc and I wander into Schwabens. Have a beer 75cents. Glasses to pour beer into are free. A little mob scene. A few people dancing.

1967-68 Academic Year:

Grad School, English

Horace Rackham Graduate School U of M

My MA advisor (1967-68) was Art Eastman, another great teacher who took an interest in my career and stayed in touch in all the years that followed. I took this photo in the 1990s.

Doc and I live at 617 Fountain Street, 2^nd floor, in a neighborhood that was nearly all black and poor. This photo from 2003 shows it much more upscale, with flowers.

Laura Belle Ayers and her common law husband lived downstairs.

The war does not go away. Here I am, along with Doc, at an anti-war meeting on campus.

Note the expression on everyone’s face. This was not a happy time.

Photo by Copi

Tom Copi

Letter to Steve Wartman, November 6, 1967

“For the past three weeks I have been dating Carolyn Delevitt, a 4’11” bundle of energy. She comes on like a herd of elephants. She can’t relax except on tranquilizers. She cannot fall asleep except with the help of prescription drugs. She takes ‘happiness’ pills very often. The reason? She is choreographing Gilbert and Sullivan. She got into impossible fights with the girls chorus. They are not professional enough for her”

Kathy McKevitt had fixed me up with Carolyn and they are pictured here with other of Kathy’s friends.

2^nd from right: Carolyn Delevitt

3^rd from right: Kathy McKevitt

JANUARY 1968

Major Tet Offensive attacks on South Vietnamese cities by North Vietnamese and NLF troops.

Letter to Steve Wartman February 4 1968

“I spent most of the weekend zapped out of my mind on…a few cookies…Potent. If I had to pick a word, I’d say potent. Weird. Just pot. The first time I was really zapped. It was just like Captain Video had walked into the room and shot his cosmic ray gun at me, and there was this cosmic ray inside me, fabulating, throbbing. Sitting in a chair, I was. Chair kept feeling different. I was by myself. Later Doc came in (It was Friday night) and we had a conversation. It was a riot, talking, Talking. …

Well three cookies (Friday) lasted one Hell of a long time, and needless to say I was nor recovered on Saturday. I did a little reading. A little Old English. A little Alexander Pope. Drove into Detroit, had dinner with Carl and Shelley. Drove over to Missy’s.

Drove to Oakland University, near Pontiac, and saw a play (fairly bad which I was reviewing for the Daily). After we drove back to Detroit…we saw a midnight showing of The Graduate. She had already seen it. She wanted to see it again. I had one cookie. She had two cookies. One cookie was pretty fast acting, considering my condition. Two cookies did a pretty good zap job on her

The Graduate. Missy is giggling at the cookies. Movie is obviously Nichols’ answer to A MAN AND A WOMAN. Use of several songs over and over, with long periods of no dialogue. Photographic techniques. The race at the end of the movie. The long shots of the car. The message that in a fantasy world, crazy people can win out. You can win the girl by behaving any way at all, because what is wrong becomes right at the end. A few lines I listen to especially carefully. A few shaking hands. I know a few people like the Graduate…Nice little bit of Romeo and Juliet when he climbs over the garden wall. Nice bit of Morgan when he breaks up the wedding ceremony, after the fact. Yes, it was a very fine movie. Yes, I’ll have to talk Doc into buying the sound track.

Letter to Steve Wartman February 11 1968

“Took Out Lissa Matross, the review editor of the Daily, senior honors English major, smart and I think good. Saw this fine play and then went to a new coffee house where this great classical guitarist was performing. He is member of the playwriting class, and acted in one of my plays. So, in I walk, in the middle of a set, between songs, with my date, and as I walk by Peter (the guitarist) he says “For want of anything else, I guess I’ll dedicate the next song to Richard Simon.” I calmly said Thank you, and took a seat. It was very impressive. I was impressive. I said, a little ego building can do wonders. This was on top of walking through the theater in which I know many people all of whom talked to me (the location where I feel the most recognition of anywhere in A2).”

Lissa meets my roommate Doc. Here Doc and Lissa are pictured together in Mexico in 1970. They married, had two girls, live happily together in San Francisco.

Doc and Lissa in 1977

With Doc and Lissa in their backyard, April 2003

Doc, Lissa, and their daughters Mica and Julia, Summer 2003, Camp Mather, California

Letter to Steve Wartman February 18 1968

“Please tell me how to stay out of the army.”

Letter to Steve Wartman February 24 1968

Note: QUINCE was my Hopwood pen name, the name I used PETER QUINCE when I entered the manuscripts for the Hopwood Contest.

Quince is driving his car into Detroit. He arrives on Wildemere St about 5 minutes late. It is 5 after 6 pm. He is full of bright things to say, ready for an evening. A little dinner, a few drinks, a little King Lear (which he has to review for The Daily). He rings the doorbell. Missy’s mother answers the door, says Missy is getting dressed. Quince makes himself at home in the Tudor living room. Mother chats with Quince. Mother leaves house. Quince sits at piano, plays Central High school song, the Victors, Once Upon a Time, other standard favorites.

6:30. Time flies. Missy appears. Then the phone rings. It is Missy’s brother. Calling from college, from Oakland University where Missy and Quince are to see Lear and say hello to the brother. Missy talks to brother for 15 minutes and Quince returns to the piano. Missy and Quince leave house. Quince asks where shall we have dinner? Missy is indifferent. Quince suggests Stouffers. Missy shudders and suggests corned beef sandwiches. Little Billy’s. Old 1955 style, small, one third full. Food is fair. Missy has the corned beef sandwich and the hot fudge sundae. Missy and Quince depart. Missy thanks Quince for dinner. Quince says Well it wasn’t really dinner. Missy says you hated it, didn’t you.” Quince does a take and then says no.

Quince drives to Lear. (Upon meeting Missy earlier she had asked if it wasn’t possible to instead go to see Jimi Hendrix Experience. Quince explained that the Daily had gotten free tickets for Lear that night and…) Lear was not bad. Conversation in car on the way was not inspired. Girls who can be gently bitchy by merely disagreeing with little things. Ride back, after, much better. Discuss Lear.

Meadowbrook Theater on the Oakland campus

Missy suggests her house. She is tired, no bars. Quince and Missy discuss play for half an hour. Quince asks her if she would like to come to Ann Arbor next weekend but she says I have plans. Quince promises to send her review of the play and departs. She comes nowhere near him. He has no desire to kiss her on the cheek and so…merely departs. Sad. He drives the ten blocks to Carl and Shelley’s house, finds them at home, talks to them, sleeps over there, till noon. Has breakfast with them. Drives back to Ann Arbor.

The review of Lear I wrote that night for the Daily (or most of it)

Letter to Steve Wartman dated February 26 1968

Reference is what to do if I am called for a physical for the draft

“Shelley suggests losing 50 lbs, shooting heroin, telling them that I sleep with my mother or my sister or my grandmother; Fritz suggests telling them that I am homosexual; Baulands inform me that if I stand inside a dark closet for 48 hours before the physical exam (someone slips me food and water but I remain standing all the time in the closet) it will be sufficient.

Letter to Steven Wartman dated March 13 1968

“Heard Norman Mailer speak here. A beautiful experience, which was at the same time terrifying. He is by far the best speaker I have heard in the last 5 years here, and also had the most compelling things to say. He read parts of his current Harper’s Magazine article. I recommend it. Part of older Cannibals and Christians about Lyndon. And much of an article to be published next month in Commentary, a detailed history of the attack on the Pentagon.”

MAILER in the 60s

“I was sitting there in the UGLI (undergrad library). Two chocolate chip pot cookies. Reading Let us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee. This amazingly beautiful girl walks up to me and says BOO. I look at her and say BOO. She laughs in this all knowing girlish way and walks back to her boyfriend, whom she proceeds to sit next to all evening.

UGLI in the 60s

I wrote a number of movie and drama reviews for the Daily 1967-68

GENERATION Spring 1968. The U of M arts magazine prints my play “For Old Time’s Sake”

Tom Copi took these photographs of me in the Spring of 1968 in the Michigan Daily in Ann Arbor Michigan. I was 23, and about to graduate with an MA in English. I was writing movie and drama reviews for the Daily at the time.

This was the beginning of my cigar smoking years—from about 1968 to about 1972.

Too many of my Ann Arbor friends committed suicide, beginning with my roommate, but including a number of other close friends—some while we were still students in Ann Arbor, some in the years after. My roommate Harvey Pianin; my friend Ron Martinez; my fellow grad student Bob Durgy; and then, after we graduated, my friend Carl Cohen; my first girl friend Susan Gadiel. Was it something about Michigan? Other people did not lose so many friends. It was one of the really dark places of my life.

I eventually felt safe and centered as an English major, and had a number of exceptional good teachers as well, and that was a very positive thing.

Phi Beta Kappa April 4 1968 And on the same day I get Phi Beta Kappa----

Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis on April 4 1968

All hell breaks loose.

June 5 1968 Bobby Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles

All hell breaks loose one more time.

Summer of 1968 : In order to get my MA in English, I take classes in Ann Arbor for the first part of the summer. My hope is that my draft board will allow me to continue in grad school after that. (Fat chance)

U of M

Ann Arbor: The late sixties

Letter to Steve Wartman dated June 17 1968

Written from Ann Arbor

“A nice sultry afternoon. I am near the diag, on the grass, reading Matthew Arnold and having large black ants walk all over me. There is a girl in the grass, maybe 50 yards away. She is sewing (what else?) As I read Arnold (surprisingly easy but even so) I watch the girl. Two kids make moves. One creeps away. Another leaps away with a grin on his face. Look, I say to myself, if it’s that easy….Besides she looks familiar. . . SO I walk over. She is now reading Portrait of an Artist. I look down and her and tell her I am Stephen Daedalus. She says that I am not. I naturally suggest an ice cream cone. She accepts (not the usual course of things). . . . In the following week there was a walk around the Music School Lake, and a lunch. Then she disappeared. She is spending July and August in Mexico. . ..

So the next day found me sitting on the steps of the Grad Library, reading Ruskin this time. A girl walks up to me and says, Aren’t you Richard Simon? I thought this was a particularly bright question and returned a suitable answer. There was an initiation (ice cream cone) and then a movie . She studied over here the next day. Also spending the rest of the summer in France.”

THE GRAD LIBRARY in the sixties

MA AWARDED at the end of Summer 1968 (but I finished with classes in June of 68)

Ok so the MA is big and didn’t quite fit onto my scanner but I got most of it here.

]

Letter to Steve Wartman dated July 15 1968
Written from Philadelphia

“As of July 12 I am IA. I have temporarily stopped functioning. I have 30 days from 12 July to ask for a personal appearance before the local board and or appeal to appeal board.

”I am uncertain as to whether to continue studying for exams, Since it is impossible that I be in the army before the end of August, or out of the country by then…

Me cooking in the Philadelphia kitchen

Letter to Steve Wartman dated August 5 1968

Written from Philadelphia. Reporting on a trip to New York with Doc

“In NYC, 3 hours in the MOMA, a walk from Penn Station to Central Park, to…A night (ll pm to 2:30 am) at the Fillmore East in the East Village, experiencing my first ….light show. Big Brother and the Holding Company, and associated amplifications. Christ….a day on Long Island, from the point to South Hampton, East Hampton, etc. Tom Paine, an interesting Off Broadway experiment….Drinks on the Plaza of Lincoln Center,…a look at Columbia where the buildings will explode in October (Doc reports SDS is practicing demolition in the mountains of Vermont this summer. I walk out of a movie house across from the Plaza Hotel and watch the streetwalkers in front of the hotel. The Plaza for Christ sakes, and they aren’t very good either.

AUGUST 68 Democratic Political Convention in Chicago erupts in RIOTS

1968-69 Academic Year

Northern Michigan University

I started teaching in September 1968, as an instructor in the English Department of Northern Michigan University in Marquette Michigan. This is on Lake Superior, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It’s cold and very sparsely populated. The area is dominated by Americans who emigrated generations ago from Finland.

FROZEN WAVES on the Shoreline of Lake Superior

Interior of THE UPPER PENINSULA

Yes beautiful, but so cold.

I was 23, had been reclassified 1-a by my local Philadelphia draft board, and had luckily found a teaching job to avoid the draft. No one had taught me anything about how to teach. I simply had my experience as a student, role models of favorite faculty, and the opportunity to learn.

My favorite Ann Arbor professor, Peter Bauland, did help. He gave me a copy of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, promised me it was a joy to teach, typed out about 25 topics that were tied to the novel, handed me two or three poems he liked to teach, and gave me 2 bits of advice I always followed: never have sex in your office, and never write a letter to the school newspaper.

Marquette is a small town in a cold, economically depressed part of the world, miles and miles from civilization as I knew it. I didn’t enjoy the location very much and was delighted when I got a job at Western Michigan University the following year and could move to the relatively cosmopolitan culture of Kalamazoo. But I did learn how to teach in Marquette, and I think I did become a teacher in that 1968-69 school year. SO it was a very meaningful year.

Letter to Steve Wartman dated 16 Sept 1968

“Today was my first day in front of a class. In this case it was 3 classes. I am pleased at myself, and I got a higher degree of interest than I expected, considering the course, the material and the students. Milestones: Classified 2A by local draft board!!!!”

Letter to Steve Wartman dated l October 1968

“The day starts. I am on my feet teaching and yelling at my kids from 1 pm to 5 pm with only an hour of break (office hour) between, I come home, cook dinner, eat dinner, read the mail, sleep for 3 hours, get up, prepare what I am going to do for the next day . .. and pass out for the night.

Marquette: Has an airport. North Central Airlines flies in and out twice a day if…The if is…there is NO RADAR. A little rain, a little clouds, a little snow, no planes. Nearest airport with radar is Escanaba, 60 miles south, where in bad weather the planes land. Then they bus you to Marquette, the Queen City (population 22,000) of the UP. . . . The nearest really legit airport is Green Bay, 180 miles south. I think they take jets there.

The Blue Goose of North Central Airlines

Marquette has a huge ice hockey arena. Last year, Martin Luther King’s death was announced to the fans there. They cheered. They cheered. They cheered. It was like a puck for our side. The good people of Marquette have bumper stickers on their cars reading REGISTER COMMIES NOT GUNS. My McCarthy sticker, which you so carefully placed on my car, is now displayed on the inside of my car. All my neighbors have rifles.

Marquette has winter in profusion. Last year the snow melted in May, and the first warm day was June 30. People are crazy about 2 things here—winter sports and ski mobiles ($1000 to buy, they rent at $6 an hour) and hunting. A baby bear cub wandered into downtown Marquette last month and all the townspeople proceed to blow it to pieces.

Northern Michigan University: One third of the faculty quits each year. . . .Library has 90,000 (read no) books…. All undergrads must live in dorms unless they are married.

IF a girl (1) kisses a boy goodnight inside the dorm, (2) allows a boy to put his arm around her shoulder while they are sitting in the lounge, (3) holds hands ‘in an improper manner,” with a boy, *4) walks in the hallways without shoes or if in pajamas without a bathrobe (5) sleeps in another girls room for a night, etc etc, she is campused (i.e. must remain in her room for 24 hours without speaking to another person except by phone). If a girl talks to another girl who is campused, she too is campused. First offense—24 hours. 2^nd offense; 48 hours. Eventually you are suspended from school!

My Students: Of the 90, the 10 best might make it in Ann Arbor. The bottom 10 should be in tenth grade, repeating. The others are in between.

They are not interested in much. Drinking mainly. Not even sex so much. Show no interest in things outside of their world

One thing about my kids, I have about 7 extremely pretty girls. They all sit on the first row, in short skirts, spread their legs, and look up at me with their mouths half open. I nearly started giggling last week.

So far, a complete dead end in finding upper class girls. Was told I would be fired if I dated my own students. All smart students transfer after 2 years to better places. Therefore the problem is complicated. Looking for secretaries but they’re too little. No one lives in the UP between the ages of 20 and 40 if they can help it.

The high spot of the day is the arrival of the mail. The second high spot is teaching, providing it is a day I manage to get my kids to look interested.

Letter to Steve Wartman dated October 14 1968

“The Upper Peninsula: Gets smashed out of its mind every weekend. Respectable mothers and fathers all over. Nothing else to do. High divorce rates.

Local lovelies in the bars are 18-28 year old divorcees (one or two or three times) with children. I was cautioned to be careful of the understandably high VD rate

”I have found no one to go out with. And so I stopped shaving. I yelled at one of my classes today—the one that admitted that it could care less about people being napalmed in Vietnam. They know how I feel about the war now.

Things remain unpredictable in the classes. …A kid asks me point blank if I take pot. I returned a long, nasty stare, and he rephrased the question.

A janitor breaks into my classroom and threatens to report me to the authorities for allowing smoking. I say the words God Damn Bastard in all 3 classes and watch girls bury their faces in their hands. . . . When teaching is good it cheers me up.

Unfortunately learning on the sink or swim method has its bad points—and in a way it is too bad for all my kids this term that I have to learn on them.

One of my friends in the U of M English dept grad program was shot on the diag in Ann Arbor last week at 4 a.m. No suspect, no known motive. The Daily reports that he will probably be completely paralyzed for the rest of his life.”

Northern Michigan photographed in 1969 when I was teaching there. This is the main building where all of my classes met. Behind are newer buildings. For most of the time it was all covered under many feet of snow. This building no longer exists.

I had to learn fast. One of my students tried to commit suicide in the first weeks of the first semester, after talking to me and asking for help. She took the wrong kind of pills, fortunately, and stayed alive, but I was shaken about what I was going to be called on to provide, or at least to be aware of, in my new job.

Another student, inspired by Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which I taught to the class he took from me, kept a girl overnight in his dorm room and was discovered in bed with her at 3 in the morning. Things were different in a small Michigan town in the late 1960s, and he was threatened with expulsion. I had to testify before some kind of hearing that my student was acting under the influence of literature, and was therefore not fully responsible for his actions. My testimony was crucial, apparently, and he was allowed to continue as a student, although he was put on social probation and was required to be in his dorm room every night at some ridiculously early hour.

The lesson here was more complicated than the relatively simple one from the suicide attempt, since after all I was teaching literature for a reason, and did value One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “I am like the chronics in the ward,” that student had told me—before he pulled the stunt that got him in trouble. “Well,” I had tried to explain, “yes…but.” I can no longer remember what I told him, but I am sure it had to have been pretty damn feeble. But I can certainly date to that moment my lifelong interest in the impact of storytelling on human beings.

MARQUETTE MICHIGAN
One of the essays in the freshman reader I used concerned the murder in Queens of a woman on a public street, a woman who cried out but no neighbor came to her rescue. My Upper Peninsula students, confident they were different from depraved New Yorkers, told the class that someone like that could never happen in the UP. As luck would have it, one of my students was the son of the campus police chief, and with his cooperation, he asked if he could bring in a hunting rifle, argue with a friend in the class, and fire (a blank) at him. HE would run out, I would chase him, and we would see how the class responded. Remember I was 24 years old. “Great,” I said, after having a long talk with the campus police chief, who also thought, for some reason, that this would be a terrific idea.

So it happened, exactly as we planned it. Rifle, argument, shot in room, large quantities of gunpowder, a chase. My student and I ran out of the room and waited in the hallway. The rest of the students did nothing. When I returned, they told me that they saw no blood, so knew it was a fake, or that they were too scared. “Can we do this again?” one of them asked. “No,” I said. “This was the final. And all of you flunked.”

JACOB VINOCUR tried to teach me a few things: I got into trouble with Jacob Vinocur, the vice president for academic affairs once that year in Marquette but it was not for the gun shot incident. It was for poetry, specifically for a few poems that had four letter words in them, or were about sex, all poems by major American poets you understand but not what you would find in high school. I had the university duplicating office make copies of a handful of poems, and someone in the office complained to the Vice President. He called me in, told me this was a confidential, off the record meeting because he was not violating my academic freedom, but that I would be fired if I continued to make trouble this way. (I was already in the final stages of negotiating a job at Western Michigan, so I was simply amused). Here we were, the spring of 1969—all hell was breaking loose around the country, and, and this…I quit the job, though not that day, and thought of myself as standing up for academic freedom against the creeps who would stifle it. (And yes I would be denied tenure at Texas in 1986 in a situation that is anticipated in this moment). Was there anything else weird about this? Yes—the vice president was an English professor who had come from Montana where he claimed at least to have been a friend of Leslie Fiedler.

Other people were much nicer.

Here’s one: Zach Thundy, (photo from 2002) who was a Roman Catholic Priest when he arrived at Northern, and a medievalist. We called him Father Zack. After I left Zack married a NMU student, left the priesthood. He outlasted almost everyone else I taught with at NMU.

Phil Legler (poet, deceased) (no photo available) wrote a poem about me, which I cherished, about my struggle to teach poems that pushed the envelope, and the people who tried to stop me.

The Harbor Northern

The last lesson about teaching that I learned in that first year at Northern was about rock n roll, something all of my students loved but few knew very much about. By the second semester I had begun to understand the need to have the respect of my students, or at least, of as many as possible, and I figured the easiest way was to know about what they cared about: rock n roll. In the second semester I was team teaching a class called (forgive me but this was the late 1960s) Man’s Search for Meaning in the Modern World. A number of young instructors took turns presenting lectures for what was essentially the entire freshman class (maybe 1000 students or so). I volunteered for rock n roll, sat on the edge of the theater dept’s stage, played excerpts from old rock n roll, explained drug references, threw flowers from the stage (I had bags full of old flowers that flower shops were discarding), along with an occasional record or two, and (since it was early May) told everyone to celebrate May day.

What happened was remarkable. Because the lecture was seen by so many students, I became a campus celebrity over night, and people just stopped to look at me as a crossed campus. And…I was propositioned by 3 different women in the 24 hours following the lecture. This was even more remarkable since I was, if not a virgin, hardly a seductive kind of male, and no one had ever propositioned me before. “Oh,” I said to myself. “Rock n roll is a good thing.”

Which reminds me that also in that eventful 1968-69 year, my friend Owen Shapiro, of the Art Department, had made an erection camouflage board for me—a large piece of wood on which were 2 Christmas balls, and the neatly lettered phrase erection camouflage, after I reported to him that I had gotten an erection in class while the sexiest woman student was giving a talk on birth control.

Steve and Bobbie Coffman drove up from Ann Arbor to visit me in Marquette and look the place over. Bobbie was in a PhD program in psycholinguistics at the U of M and Steve had decided to be a writer.

The FOOD of the UPPER PENINSULA is the Cornish Pasty (potato, some inexpensive cut of meat, wrapped in pie dough) brought to the UP by Cornish miners who worked in the iron range, in the mines.

At the end of my 1968-69 academic year job at Northern, my brother Bill got married in Philadelphia to Cindy Weisfeld. It was June 1969. We posed on the driveway of the 12^th street house: My dad Si, me, my aunt Esther from Florida, Cindy, Paul, and Bill. Jeanne is sitting on top of Bill and Cindy’s red Volvo. Bill had graduated from Yale a short time before the wedding.

Summer 1969:

Philadelphia and New York

I do NOT go to Woodstock in the summer of 1969, although I was in New York City at the time, visiting friends Carl and Shelley, and thought seriously about it…until the reports came in about the traffic…pictured here. Summer 69: Man lands on the Moon.

Letter to Steven Wartman dated June 16 1969

“Consumption of LSD and mescaline are noticeably on the increase among assorted people I know in New York City. Even friends who are unwilling to taste a cucumber (ever, even once) are tasting new drugs. Not at all sure why.

Here I am with Paul and Jeanne and my Dad in Beach Haven New Jersey summer of 1969

My parents in the backyard of the Phila house

The 1969-1971 Academic Years

Western Michigan University

Kalamazoo

Kalamazoo was a wonderful, cosmopolitan small city, compared to Marquette and I loved it there. By the end of my stint teaching there I knew I wanted to get a PhD and become a college professor and I knew I wanted to teach the kind of interdisciplinary materials that Western had trained me to try my hand at.

Kalamazoo had restaurants, movie theaters, lots of college activities, a large university, a decent climate, smart people….I was really happy to be there. I also had (over my two year teaching stint there) a core of devoted undergraduate students at Western Michigan University, students who took 2 or 3 classes with me, and formed a cohesive little social and academic group as well. Many are pictured in the photo below right (I am standing on right, with hands raised). Another teacher stands in the center front. My students did many creative projects together outside of class, including a long film about Santa Claus, Miss America, and Superman, that briefly got all of us in some trouble. In the photo below left I am waiting in the hallway outside of a classroom.

Sprau Tower where I had an office in 1969-70, with a great view

I learned much more about teaching and being a teacher in my two years at Western, mostly because I was put on a team of interdisciplinary faculty responsible for teaching experimental variants on a university-wide required course for sophomores, Arts and Ideas. I taught side by side with painters, poets, architects, and other kinds of artists and filmmakers in a group of 6 faculty.

We took our students by bus to Chicago to see Hair (and they danced on the stage with the cast) and to tour the Chicago Art Institute; we went to the Episcopal cathedral of Western Michigan—a striking architectural building--

Cathedral of Christ the King Episcopal Church

We encouraged our students to create their own art. I met Bernie Marek, a talented clay artist who worked at the Gilmore Art Museum in downtown Kalamazoo when our team brought him in to do clay demonstrations for our students. He became a life long friend (Bernie later became an art therapist at Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado)

ALSO exhilarating in 1969-1971: I had finally mastered, or reasonably mastered, dating, girls, and sex. This made life a great deal happier.

Murray Louis

I met nationally famous modern dancers (Murray Louis, pictured here much later in his life; he had hair in 1970) who gave special demonstration classes for our sections, when they were in town to give dance performances for the community. It was exhilarating and absolutely changed me as a teacher. Murray gave me a dance lesson in front of all 180 of our students!

I left the experience absolutely sure I wanted to teach across boundaries and disciplines.

Sangren Hall where I taught many classes

Miller Auditorium on the WMU campus where I drew nearly 1000 students to hear my rock lectures

The rock n roll lectures

My rock n roll lectures got increasing creative, and complex, with slides and an intermission. One performance at WMU in 1970 drew between 900 and 1000 students at the largest auditorium on campus.

Janis Joplin Rolling Stones, Jim Morrison, Beatles, Bob Dylan

ADVERTISEMENT FOR MYSELF and my attempt to get on the larger lecture circuit

It was a noisy time on college campuses, because of Vietnam, and rock n roll of course was part of the noise. In my lecture I played music that contained profanity (inc fuck) and talked about the word fuck. In the state of Michigan at the time it was against the law to use profanity in public (maybe it still is) and I was quite nervous about what would happen when I said fuck in such a large auditorium. In fact two uniformed police did come up to me at the end of the Kalamazoo performance, and I was prepared for anything; instead they just shook my hand.

KENT STATE SHOOTINGS May 1970

Kent State University

OHIO

Students protesting US invasion of Cambodia

YALE MAY DAY

Bobby Seale on trial in New Haven

Yale May Day 1970 Protests

Carl Cohen works as physician there. I come and participate.

National Guard has rifles all over the place.

HURON TOWERS one more time

SUMMER 1970: I live in Ann Arbor (taking over Doc’s apartment at Huron Towers) and write my one and only piece of Rock n Roll journalism for Tom Copi’s magazine, Big Fat.

COPI

Yes once I had flowers in my hair

Here I am in Ann Arbor at the wedding of my friends John Schoonmaker and Kathleen McKevitt in the summer of 1970.

Letter to Steve Wartman dated Wed June 3 1970, from Ann Arbor

“John and Kathy’s wedding: First time I was inside a Catholic Church. There are bars covered in leather for kneeling but there was no kneeling involved in the wedding. A brief ceremony, with most of the people over 50 years old. Then a reception with champagne punch, Ripple punch, and little squinchy things on crackers. Then everyone threw rice at the bride and groom. I threw rice. John and Kathy took off in their rented Nova for Crystal Lake and a 5 day honeymoon.”

Letter to Steve Wartman dated June 22 1970, from Ann Arbor

“ … in my Huron Towers bathtub, taking a bath with a girl, Linda, an event perhaps not worthy of mention except that I never had the experience before. It was the culmination of (1) several hours of listening to comments about my wonderful body and wonderful skin, and (2) more hours of being unable to sleep because she kept waking up because she couldn’t sleep, for the psychological reason of not being in her apartment.”

Letter to Steve Wartman dated August 5 1970

Ref: Beulah is a small town in Northern lower Michigan where John and Kathy Schoonmaker’s family had a cabin on Crystal Lake)

“Beulah is about the same. Nice. This time I drove the boat while John skied behind. An amazing experience for me. We climbed the dunes, threw a Frisbee around on top of them, visited Interlocken, ate hot cherry pies at the Cherry Hut, swam in Crystal Lake, swam in the mouth of the Platte River, as it flowed into Lake Michigan, somewhat north of Crystal Lake. The river was very warm; the lake very cold. We also found a new state park near the dunes where you can duplicate with your own car much of the dune buggy ride over the dines. I was really proud of the Volvo, even though I did have to go up some hills in first gear. That was the second amazing experience. The whole weekend was incredibly restful and exhilarating at the same time. I stumbled over two ex students working in Beulah, one from Northern at the only drug store in town, one from Western at the Cherry Hut. It got so we would walk into a place, and a voice would yell out Mr. Simon! I went with John, Kathy, and Linda (see previous Letter).

Steve Wartman with a girl friend in 1970. I visit Steve at Thanksgiving 1970 in Palo Alto (where he is doing his internship following med school) and get an interview at Stanford PhD program (the reason I think I am later accepted into the program)

Western moves my office to Everett Hall

1970-71 ACADEMIC YEAR

Letter to Steve Wartman September 18 1970

“Next weekend Ann Pomeroy who I am going out with, is running a gestalt workshop with a therapist from Gestalt Institute of Canada and I will take part in as much as I can. Know nothing about it but expect to learn some.

Friends here have house in the woods with a lake, and last week I sat in the middle of a rowboat in the middle of the lake and sat for a long time.

My classes continued doing non-verbal autobiographical statements this week. One boy did a strip tease. One girl squirted everyone with a water pistol. One girl started the class face painting each other. I arranged the entire class into a still life (standing, sitting, lying, touching) and then placed 2 dollars worth of bananas apples and plums around them”

In my Western Michigan University Office in Kalamazoo

SPRING 1971: FILMMAKER

The film my core students and I decided to make in the spring of 1971 (they had all taken an intro to filmmaking class with me beforehand and we were looking for more complex stuff) needed to show Miss America, Superman, and Santa Claus in some trouble, and we had no difficulty showing Miss America baking cakes that did not rise, and superman flying into buildings. For the Santa Claus story we needed children rejecting Santa—not something I thought too hard to arrange. One of my students rented a Santa suit, and we collected broken toys, then set him up outside a public school near my apartment—a poorer part of town, where, to my surprise, the students did not reject the broken cars and doll parts but seemed delighted to have them.

The next week we set up outside of a public school in an upscale part of town, and filmed away. The students there did indeed reject the toys, but upset parents and teachers called the police and I got onto the police blotter and from there onto the national AP wire. The story got front page play on a number of American newspapers (spring 1971) and I started getting hate mail from around the country. I slept one night in the basement of my apartment, just out of a general apprehension for my safety (The mayor of Kalamazoo was a member of the John Birch Society). Fortunately my department chair and my dean strongly stood up for me and the incident faded away. But for a while I was sweating it, afraid even word would get to Stanford and Stanford would have second thoughts about admitting me into a PhD program.

With my sister Jeanne, outside a campus fountain in Kalamzaoo in the spring of 1971.

With Bill’s wife Cindy and my Mom in Philadelphia at the dining room table

In late spring of 1971 my parents came out to Kalamazoo and then to Ann Arbor with Paul and Jeanne for a visit. Here we are standing outside Huron Towers in Ann Arbor where I lived twice.

Laura Nyro

In my Kalamazoo apartment. Picture over mantle is of my great great grandfather

I turned 26 in November of 1970 and according to the draft laws, moved down to a virtually impossible to draft category. That allowed me to apply to grad schools and to plan to resume my education. In Thanksgiving of 1970 I flew to San Francisco to visit old friends Steve Wartman in Palo Alto, and Doc and Lissa in San Francisco. I had an interview at Stanford for a new PhD program called Modern Thought and Literature, and in the spring of 1971 I was admitted.

I also started to have longer relationships with women, and more successful ones, during my two years in Kalamazoo. They were often, but not always, with former students, but I was always careful not to initiate any relationship until the woman was no longer one of my students.

Karen Haske in Michigan

Yumiko Mikame visiting in Philadelphia, with my dad, in our backyard

Goodbye to Michigan, June 1971

Summer 1971 Aldergrove British Columbia

I spent part of the summer of 1971 at a Gestalt Workshop run by Peter and Eva Fleming in Aldergrove British Columbia (a couple hours drive from Vancouver). Nearly everyone was from Michigan where Peter and Eva had run gestalt workshops the previous year, and where I had become involved with gestalt. I thought it was eye opening, and fascinating, though my family was more dubious.

Girl friend Lisa Casalaro, who several months later committed suicide. Gestalt was not a solution to that level of problem.

On right I stand between Eva and Peter Fleming. I later went to Italy to study with them in 1973 but by then there were unraveling, and it was much more difficult.

STANFORD University 1971

New World: I entered Stanford University in the late summer of 1971, driving down from Aldergrove British Columbia where I had spent a month at a gestalt workshop held on a farm. I was one of 3 new grad students admitted into a new interdisciplinary program called Modern Thought and Literature. I lived here at 1305 College Ave, at the corner of Hanover, in a small neighborhood next to Stanford called College Terrace. My apartment was on the ground floor of this building. I started to learn how to be a Californian.

I had many good teachers at Stanford (among them my dissertation advisor Rob Polhemus, and my Henry James professor, Tom Moser) and only a tiny number of bad ones, though they were difficult to deal with. I leave them out of this memoir altogether.

I also made a number of very good friends, many with fellow grad students who taught me as much as my best profs. Mark Freiman went on to become an attorney in Ontario and then the deputy attorney general of the province of Ontario.

Mark in 1977

2003: Mark with his wife Kate, an accomplished author of many popular romance novels

And with their son Ben who owns a bookstore

Other Stanford Friends: Ellen Hawkes became a journalist, wrote a novel about Virginia Woolf and a book about the Gallo family, among other projects. Hunt Hawkins and Elaine Smith married, moved to Tallahassee, where Hunt became chair of the Florida State University English Department and a Conrad scholar. Lowry Pei was to be a friend at UC San Diego, then moved on to Boston and eventually became chair of the English Department at Simmons College and an accomplished novelist. Marianne DeKoven became professor of English at Rutgers, and author of books on modernism. John Foster became professor of English and Comp Lit at George Mason University and Andrea Dimino at New College in Sarasota. David Langston became professor at North Adams State University, in Massachusetts. Susan and Billie Joe Harris became professors at Penn State, Janice Haney Peritz at Queens College of SUNY in New York.

What I loved about Stanford, finally, was the assumption that if you were at Stanford you had to be good. It helped get through the nuttiness of grad school.

Rhoda, Si, Paul, and Jeanne came out to visit me in Dec 1971/Jan 1972. Here we are on San Francisco Cable Cars, and my parents in the center of the Stanford campus.

Being a grad student was very different from being an undergrad and most of the time I really did feel like a grown up, since I had worked on my own for three years.

Above: With by brother Paul, front of my College Terrace apt, Palo Alto, Dec 71

SUMMER 1972 in Philadelphia and visiting friends on the road

Right: With Steve Coffman at his farm- house in Dundee New York, Summer 1972, learning how to replace siding

Steve and Bobbie

Steve may have known how to do home repairs like this, but it was all new to me. This was the first time I had ever held an electric saw in my hands and I was somewhat apprehensive.

Dundee is a tiny town in the finger lakes of New York State, not too far from Ithaca.

Keuka Lake-- one of the finger lakes

In the summer of 1972 there was a massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. It had just taken place when I visited Steve and Bobbie in Dundee.

1972-73 Academic Year

THE 1972 Election. Nixon is re-elected, beating George McGovern.

1973: Tom Copi took this picture of me jumping in front of my Palo Alto apartment

The most important thing though was meeting Kathy Waddell in the Art History Auditorium (Feb 1973) when I was giving a lecture on rock and roll.

Summer 1973 I bring Kathy home to Philadelphia to meet my family.

We are shown at Roman ruins in Southern Italy in the fall of 1973.

Kathy felt that if we could get along in Europe together for three months, with each other all the time, it would be a good test for the future. I proposed to Kathy in Italy in the first month; I simply didn’t see the need to wait till the end of our travels. I knew.

We lived in Montecorice for a month while I attended a Gestalt Institute, then traveled for two months, ending with 3 weeks in Paris.

We returned to Palo Alto in December of 1973, and tried for an ecumenical first Christmas. Note the home made Jewish star on our first tree. I always had trouble with Christmas, but I did my best.

Kathy always loved LARGE plants.

We got married twice, a legal one in San Francisco city hall before a justice of the peace in June of 1974 (so I could apply for landed immigrant status in Canada along with Kathy, who had accepted a teaching job at the University of British Columbia for the fall of 1974) and a family wedding back home in Indiana.

Kathy in a friend’s vintage Mercedes

Kathy in her VW bug

San Francisco City Hall

SAN FRANCISCO CITY HALL: We are newly married. June 1974

Following our wedding at San Francisco city hall, very happy and feeling extremely elated. And a little intoxicated.

Kathy and I were married again on August 25, 1974, in New Harmony Indiana in front of the community of Kathy’s parents’ friends and relations. Since we were already married we had the luxury of being able to dispense with the person who usually marries people, and we could write a script whereby everyone assembled around us in a circle married us. It was quite lovely, wonderful I would say in retrospect. Kathy’s mother Rosie made a wreath of daisies for me to wear around my neck, which I also loved.

New Harmony Indiana: me in a wig, with Kathy’s Mom Rosie; me, kissing Kathy at the wedding ceremony, with my Mom Rhoda looking on.

My beautiful bride in New Harmony

Paul, Rhoda, Me, Kathy, Kathy’s mom Rosie, her dad Artis, Jim Smiley, and Cindy Smiley (K sister)

Vancouver 1974-76

We lived in Vancouver from 1974 to 1976, Kathy taught psychology at the University of British Columbia and I mostly stayed home and wrote my dissertation. We learned how to deal with the Vancouver weather, keep house together, and stuff like that.

Kathy really got into gardening in a big way but we also dealt with the sudden death of Kathy’s dad, the loss of one of our dogs, and other related kinds of bad events. We survived but there were some tough times. Kathy was diagnosed with thyroid disease.

The very English Kerrisdale neighborhood where we lived, near the University

In front of our first house

Garden of our second house

Note Kathy with Zucchini

Here I am at my desk (sort of) in our home in Vancouver

Photographs of two of our Vancouver friends, Louise Ball, who had been Kathy’s student, and Merle Zabrack, who was one of Kathy’s colleagues at UBC.

I harvest dill from our Vancouver garden

Kathy tries to teach me to be a gardener

Encinitas San Diego

County 1976-78

I couldn’t get a job in Canada, even though I had become, with Kathy, a landed immigrant. I did get a job at the University of California, San Diego, located in La Jolla, and in the summer of 1976 we rented a U Haul truck and drove down the coast.

It was great to be back in California. Here I am running on the Encinitas beach with our two schnauzers, Muff and Ikabod. Then walking with Kathy.

We rented a cute beach cottage, with panoramic views of the ocean in Encinitas.

Kathy got a job at the student counseling center and the following year at the VA Hospital. She passed her psych license exams and set up her very first private practice with friends, above a storefront in downtown Encinitas: North Coast Psychological Associates.

We spent a lot of time on the beach and we had lots and lots of visitors. We were finally a destination spot!

UCSD turned out to be a fairly difficult place to work, especially since I had been hired on a temporary budget as an acting assistant professor, but I did love the teaching part. I taught large classes in popular culture and in comedy for the first time, and arranged for my first large scale pie fight with all my comedy students. I was to hold pie fights like this for many years at Texas as well.

This was great fun. My life with pie fights has its origins in a Thanksgiving in the late 60s in Chicago. Steve Wartman and I were staying at the Chicago apartment of Rick Stolorow’s girl friend Jamie (along with many other people). When I got up in the middle of the night to pee, Steve got up too and grabbed a Mrs. Smith’s frozen cream pie he had placed on a radiator, (this was planned) and hit me in the face. It was the middle of the night. I didn’t have any idea what had happened, and we laughed as quietly as possible so as not to wake up all the other people in the apartment

46 Briggs

Encinitas

The UCSD library above: a superb building

La Jolla Shores, immediately south of the University

Kathy passed her licensing exam and opened up her first private practice office, with John and Claudia Andrews.

Star Wars

Saturday Night Fever
Annie Hall

I finish my dissertation and graduate with a PhD from Stanford in 1977

I gave guest lectures at the University of Toronto in January of 1978 through the agency of my Stanford friend Mark Freiman

Austin Texas 1978-1988

State Capitol, view from the UT Campus.

The University of Texas Tower, and Parlin Hall, right, where I mostly taught.

The job at UCSD was never permanent and in the summer of 1978 Kathy and I drove across country with my brother Paul, and we moved to Austin Texas. I had a job as an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas, and within a year Kathy had one there as well, in the Educational Psychology Department.

We didn’t know how long we would stay—since we had been in Vancouver for 2 years and Encinitas for the same. We ended up staying for 10.

Texas is a state of mind, or as the tourist advertisements say, a whole nother country, which is true enough—and constantly surprising. We never quite got used to Texas culture, though some of it was quite lovely, and many of the friends we made were truly wonderful. We did finally feel that we fit in Austin much better than we fit in other places we lived.

The Austin zaniness was always great fun. The roaches, fire ants, and heat were tough, and a small number of my colleagues at the University of Texas were really difficult, but what can you do? This is probably not the place to denounce them.

Chorus to LONDON HOMESICK BLUES by Gary Nunn

I wanna go home with the armadillo

Country music from Amarillo and Abilene

The prettiest women and the friendliest people you ever seen.

Our House at 504 E 42^nd Street which we owned from 1979 to 1988

The country becomes more conservative in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan as president and George Bush as vice president.

We did our best to ignore it.

Reagan and Bush win again in 1984.Not with our vote.

More pressing, politically, for me was the pressure to publish in order to get tenure at the U T English Department, something I failed to do in 1985, and then again in 1986 when my department appealed. National politics seemed far less important than job related politics.

Meanwhile Kathy and I did a lot of fun stuff together in Austin. One of the most remarkable was that we raised two families of orphaned baby raccoons as part of Kathy’s active membership in Wildlife Rescue. It taught me a lot. We loved baby raccoons crawling about. We raised them to be wild animals, in spite of how we first had to treat them as little babies, and we successfully released them out into the natural world when they were ready.

There’s nothing in the world like having baby raccoons crawling on your neck and head, sticking their little fingers into your ear and kneading your scalp, all the time making little churling noises.

The Austin American Statesman, the local newspaper ran a long article about us, and this photograph of us in our backyard appeared with it. We were animal rescue celebrities.

When Noah was born in 1982 we stopped rescuing wildlife. I thought for a while that raising a son would kind of be like raising baby raccoons but this didn’t turn out to be the case. But in a way all these little critters should count as Noah’s brothers and sisters.

We lived in Austin from 1978 to 1988 so lots of things happened. Our lives certainly changed dramatically when Noah was born, and then when I was denied tenure, but we adapted each time, made good friends, learned how to be parents. We never quite got used to the bugs that flourish in Texas inside and out, or to that certain noisy Texas state of mind, but it was ultimately ok. I was especially gratified when a great many of my colleagues in the Texas English Dept stood by me when I was denied tenure, and made several appeals to the university. And because I became Noah’s primary parent for two and a half years, Kathy and I always thought that I gained something priceless in the process.

Noah was born in 1982, on November 20, the day after my own birthday, though 38 years apart, so we were always able to celebrate our birthdays next to each other. Here we are sitting on the front stoop of out house at 504 E 42^nd Street in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Austin, immediately north of the University of Texas campus.

Jeanne, Si, Rhoda, Kathy, Dick, Noah in highchair, Cindy, Jonathan

In Philadelphia

1983

Bill

Rhoda

Si
Dick

In Philadelphia

1986

Dick and Noah in Santa Fe New Mexico

Dick with Noah, Ben, and Jonathan in Chevy Chase Maryland

Dick with Noah

Dick and Kathy on Padre Island Summer 1988.

AUSTIN Friends: Jeff and MaryCris Crawford; Mike and Mimi King (with Noah and their son Devin)

Norton and Rikki Grubb, Alex and Hilary (and Noah); Henry, Robert, and Sasha Bley-Vroman

With Kishka, my favorite dog from all that we had;

Patricia Bauer-Slate, friend and cook extraordinaire

The University of Texas at Austin was sometimes a difficult place to work, and I certainly stumbled more than my share of the time. Still I had some absolutely wonderful and supportive colleagues. Thank you.

Jack Farrell Horace Newcomb

Tony Hilfer

Folklorist Roger Abrahams

Walt Reed

Dagmar and Jeff Barnouw with Noah

Lance Bertelsen

Albert Goldbarth

Larry Carver

Not pictured: Joan Lidoff

San Luis Obispo 1988—

We moved to San Luis Obispo in the summer of 1988 when I got a job at Cal Poly. I had been unemployed for two and a half years and it was a great pleasure to be employed again.

Kathy bought me a tuxedo. We were going to try for the high life which didn’t finally fit who we were. Still here we are.

Bush defeated Dukakis for President in 1988

In 1989 after renting a house in Pismo Beach for a year, we bought this lovely house at 815 Skyline Drive. We had great views of local mountains from our front windows. And I guess you could say we settled down to a fairly quiet life here, with most of the drama being provided by the ups and downs of Noah’s growth and development from age 5 on. Kathy and I entered middle age (as gracefully as possible). I tried to contribute what I could to Noah’s interest in sports.

We drove up to San Francisco as often as possible so Noah could have the kind of cultural experiences that were hard to come by in San Luis Obispo: bookstores, plays, museums, restaurants, and the like. My sister Jeanne moved to California with boyfriend and then husband Neal Hinau; my brother Paul relocated to California, first to Santa Cruz, then to Berkeley; my parents moved to Walnut Creek in 1995 to live near my sister when my father was in failing health. My Philadelphia family had become pretty much a California family. We had our share of loss over our years in San Luis. My brother Bill’s wife Cindy died of cancer at the age of 44 in Chevy Chase Maryland. My Dad died pf Parkinson’s shortly before his 86^th birthday. Kathy’s mother Rosemary died a few weeks later at the age of 81 in Jasper Indiana.

Bill Clinton and Al Gore win presidency and vice presidency in 1992

Kathy, Dick, Bob and Susan Edmondson

STANFORD SUMMER CAMP, Fallen Leaf Lake, California.

We went to the Stanford Summer Camp for 3 summers when Noah was in elementary school, and made friends there with Bob and Susan Edmondson and their sons, Matt, Michael, and Steven.

Noah with Michael

Noah’s first Little League Team, spring of third grade, Noah batting

We also had happy family events. Here my family gathers at Jonathan Simon’s bar mitzvah in Maryland: my brothers Bill, and Paul are in the back row with me; my Dad, Mom, and sister Jeanne are in front.

Jeanne’s wedding to Neal Hinau in Sonoma California. Back: Me, Bill, Paul, Jonathan; Next: Noah, Kathy, Rhoda, Si; Very Front: Ben, Jeanne, Neal

Clinton wins second term in 1996

Back: Bill, Paul, Dick; Front: Rhoda and Kathy, at one of Paul’s softball games in Walnut Creek

Years go by fast. Noah grew up, went off to New Zealand for his senior year of high school, and things got a lot quieter here. Then he went off to the University of Texas at Austin as a college student. We were very proud of him, and of how he had turned out as a much more grown up person, on the cusp of adulthood.

I made some fine friends at Cal Poly. Not all are pictured. Here are a few:

George Cotkin (History) with his wife Marta Peluso; Steven Marx; Harry Hellenbrand

CENTRAL HIGH FRIENDS In 2001: When Noah went to New Zealand for his senior year of high school, I suddenly had a lot of free time on my hand, all that time I had devoted to being a parent. I also, suddenly, had fewer people to talk to. I started typing the names of every old friend into the World Wide Web to see how many I could locate, and I succeeded with a surprisingly large number. My greatest success was with high school friends, and a year or so later my high school class had a reunion in Philadelphia. I continued to stay in touch.

Central High Reunion: Alan Faden, Larry Goldstein, Don Smolen, Steve Wartman, me, Noah Baen, Joe Becker. April 2002.

FAMILY AND FRIENDS 2003

Family visit after my surgery

With Ben Simon, Bill Simon, and Noah, San Luis Obispo April 2003

Family

With Kathy’s sister Nancy McGlothlin and Kathy in San Luis Obispo March 2003

High School friends Sam Bobrow (left) and Ken Stow (right) come to visit in April.

College Friends. Doc and Lissa in San Francisco

May 2003

American Gothic

May 2003

With my sister Jeanne in Walnut Creek May 2003

Noah, my mom Rhoda, and my nephew Jonathan, in Walnut Creek

May 2003

With high school friend (and distinguished doctor) Jerry Harris in Santa Barbara. He was the best death and dying counselor.

May 2003

Dick, Sam Bobrow, Donald Smolen, Joe Becker ---high school friends

Dinner with high school friends in Philadelphia

At home of Don and Florrie Smolen

MAY 2003

Joe Becker, Don Smolen, Florrie Smolen

Kathy and Dick

On to New York----

Kathy Dick Annie and Rick Stolorow in New York May 2003

With Steve and Bobbie Coffman in Philadelphia

With Steve and Bobbie in Phila May 2003

Visit with high school friend Ron Tauss in New York May 2003

June 2003

Friends from the Swim Class in SAN LUIS

Ann Hobbes, Lois Cleworth, Kathy, Daphne Friedman, Naida Simpson

More swim class friends

Leon Goldin, Jerry Friedman, Dick

In Walnut Creek California, July 2003 with old friends from Stanford Summer Camp, Bob and Susan Edmondson

Dick with Bob Edmondson

In San Luis, July 2003 with Jeff and MaryCris Crawford, old friends from Austin

Noah, MaryCris and Jeff Crawford, San Luis backyard July 2003

Noah, Kip, Dick June 2003

Bill and Ben visit August 2003

Bill and Ben Visit August 2003

TRIP THRU SOUTHWEST TO AUSTIN Aug 2003

In New Mexico

Party given for us by our UT Austin English Dept Friends

In San Antonio visiting Steve and Gina Wartman

With Steve Wartman in his home in San Antonio Texas. Steve promises to operate on my esophagus.

Kathy has always been an amazingly patient and loving human being. I lucked out big time when I found her, or maybe it was when she found me, or we found each other.

She’s always been my rock of Gibraltar. Thanks so much babe. Kiss kiss.

Photo by Don and Florrie Smolen

January 2003 in front of the Santa Barbara Mission.

I’d like you to think of me as waving goodbye here, reluctantly to be sure. As I said at the start of this memoir, I’d much rather be around for a lot longer. But all stories come to an end, some much sooner than they should.

Love and hugs,

Richard Keller Simon

San Luis Obispo California

The poem reprinted below was really popular in the sixties. One of my brothers had a poster up on a bedroom wall and Kathy tells me she had one too. I liked the poem at the time, and still like it now when it seems more appropriate than I would like.

The World is a Beautiful Place by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Oh the world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind a few dead minds in the higher places or a bomb or two now and then in your upturned faces or other such improprieties as our Name Brand society is prey to with its men of distinction and its men of extinction and its priests and other patrolmen and its various segregations and congressional investigations and other constipations that our fool flesh is heir to.

Yes the world is the best place of all for a lot of such things as making the fun scene and making the love scene and making the sad scene and singing low songs and having inspirations and walking around looking at everything and smelling flowers and goosing statues and even thinking and kissing people and making babies and wearing pants and waving hats and dancing and going swimming in rivers on picnics in the middle of the summer and just generally “living it up”

Yes but right in the middle of it comes the smiling mortician.

Shalom.

Weeping Angel

Stanford University

POSTSCRIPT

Mesothelioma

I had a pleural effusion in November 2002. Several minor medical procedures followed, and led up to an operation on January 27 2003 at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center in San Luis Obispo. My surgeon was Edwin Hayashi. The operation disclosed that I had mesothelioma, the cancer caused by asbestos. It was inoperable, a tumor wrapped around my esophagus. This cancer typically incubates 35 to 40 years. 39 years ago, in the summer of 1964, when I was 19, I worked for the Philadelphia Electric Company, the electric power company for Philadelphia. I was in a power plant, the Delaware Station, for 3 weeks. There was asbestos dust everywhere, since old boilers were being replaced by new ones. This is the likely cause of my mesothelioma.

THIS PHOTO was taken in our living room the day before I entered the hospital and had the surgery. Late January 2003.

Some mesothelioma victims are able to sue asbestos companies. In my case, I had no legal case. The large asbestos companies were all bankrupt, the Phila Electric Company was protected by Workman’s Comp, and by the statute of limitations which had run out on me, and I could not remember products made by minor manufacturers that might have been handled around me. That there was old asbestos dust all over the place was of no interest to the law, since that could not be traced back to any company now still solvent. I have a good memory, but didn’t know this was to be a key question 39 years later.

I do have memories of that summer job, of the men who stopped in 2 or 3 bars before arriving for work (they drove me to work and I waited in their cars); of their colorful ways of swearing (in initials); of their habits of reading comic books in the pipes and boilers of the power plant; that one was usually watching with binoculars out the side windows of the plant towards the public park next door (Penn Treaty Park) where kids from the local high school used to come to make out. Whenever any action was spotted, everyone came running over to the windows to look.

Kathy Noah and I returned outside to this dreary scene in May 2003 along with my brother Bill and my attorney, to look the place over. It is no longer an operating power plant, and looks like a piece of desolation.

I have told friends that I feel like the doofus walking down the street who is hit in the head by the falling piano. It is kind of like being in an accident in slow motion. It just took 39 years to blow up inside me. When the story of the poisoning of this planet is written, I’d like a footnote.