CHAPTER 105. BIG BOULDERS ROLLING MY WAY 1963- 1964
You write a white paper
And ask if I recall
The years that have left us
So different and all.
***
Sure, I remember those green years flavored peppermint
Down in the town where the factories were in Downing.
I remember how in my own quiet way I probably loved you,
But not in the way your own words of love are sounding.
You write a white paper
And ask me to forgetPoetry Vortex
Dallas Kirk Gantt, Editor
Wilmington, Delaware
2007
The years have changed you.
I haven’t changed that far yet.
From “White Paper” (LEM 1964)
Poetry Vortex
Dallas Kirk Gantt, Editor
Wilmington, Delaware
2007
In my Collection: In Other Words
This chapter is difficult to write. There are moments we regret. But we can’t pretend they never happened. Still, although muddy water over the dam has long washed away in the currents of life, writing about this will be as comfortable as picking at old scabs.
1963 began promising enough. A year of great promise for this country and certainly one of great promise for us. Lois and I were very happy sliding into the new year and we were making enough money together to enjoy life. I had completed a novel in January (Come Monday). My Manager at Atlantic picking me to assist in the conversion to Speedaumat led to a promotion and raise. Lois was pregnant and looking forward to being a mother. (This would not quite happened.) And in December, the Army had discharged Ronald Tipton.
For a while, after hanging up his combat boots, lived in Pittsburgh, but now as winter neared, he moved back to our area and I looked forward to continuing our friendship. It was already a longstanding friendship, began in third grade now we were 23. We had been best friends for over 13 years and we had done everything together. We had shared comic books, biked together, hiked together, explored and double dated and searched for jobs together. We had done everything together until Ronald joined the Army, but even then we wrote each other constantly and got together to do the things we had always done when he was home on leave. He was to be my Best Man, but the Army interfered with that, but now he was coming home and the Army was no longer in the way. God was in his Heaven and all was right with our world.
However, pressure was building like water on a hot stove. For a time the water is calm and clear, but then a bubble appears and another, and if the heat isn’t turned down it boils over. By the fall of 1963 bubbles were rising around me.
The first ripple was the Zip Code forced re-do of much finished work. I added heat to the pot by starting evening college that summer. The extra duties and the extra studies were simmering enough, but Lois lost the baby and that brought the pot close to boil. She was fighting depression, which was understandable, but she snapped out of it surprisingly energized with a determination to have another child some day.
Then She came home with news she had lost her job shortly after Thanksgiving. She said it was office politics. Some one was trying to undermine her boss. This someone arranged for her firing to hurt her boss. It was a garbled account and didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Later she gave different versions to people. Over time I came to believe she had quit her job as manifestations of her manic-depression occurred. She talked of being a stay-at-home wife and having a family even before we married. Fired or quit the result would cause us financial difficulties. This was a decrease of over half our income. We went from $132 a week to $64.
In between this loss of the child and loss of the job, we visited Ronald in Coatesville. We left his place with a strange story. We came away from our visit a mystified and had several conversations about it.
My first reaction was blasé. It meant nothing. He was lonely or bored. A friend gave him the name of this club. He had gone, discovering it was all men, who danced with each other. He joined in and enjoyed himself. He would get over it and probably not go back. Besides the club was in Pittsburgh.
We talked more and Lois asked, “Could Ronald be a homosexual.”
I shook my head no.
You have to understand this was not a common subject of discussion
in those days. During the 1950s there were barely discussions about sex between a married man and woman, let alone between people of the same gender. My knowledge of homosexuality was very limited. I knew what it was. I knew the military did not accept homosexuals, so how could Ronald be one? There were guys around the office saying they’d pretend homosexuality if drafted so as not to go.
My second reaction was denial. I told Lois how on dates Ronald was more awkward around girls than I was. My theory became one of circumstance. Ronald was shy. Ronald was away from home in the Army. Barracks life was mostly with men. He had made friends with someone who talked him into going to this club. He wasn’t really homosexual; he was just confused.
My third reaction was concern. Whether Ronald was homosexual or not, he was putting himself in a precarious position. This could ruin his life. There were people who might attack and beat him. Homosexuals were prone to blackmail, beatings and worse according to various publications that I’d read. People spoke of homosexuality as a perversion if they spoke of it at all. They called it “The Love that dare not speak its name.” (The court attributed this to Oscar Wilde during his indecency trail, but it actually came from a Lord Alfred Douglas poem called “Two Loves”.)
I wanted to know more about the subject. I bought several books on the issue. Yes several, I have an obsessive nature when I become interest in a subject. Of those I bought I only remember the titles of two. Homosexuality:Disease or Way of Life? By Dr. Edmund Bergler and The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach by Donald Cory Webster (pseudonym of Edward Sagarin). I had at least four other books, all of which were much the same as Dr. Bergler’s.
Bergler and those similar took a behaviorist view of Homosexuality. They preached that it had root causes in the childhood of the subject. An over-protective mother and absent or over-bearing father were sited as contributors along with feelings of alienation from others. They did not blame Batman and Robin. That nonsense was a political thing.
Donald Cory Webster was a homosexual. His book was more
sympathetic than the others, calling for an acceptance of homosexuality. However, Webster still called homosexuality “a disturbance that probably arose as a result of a pathological family situation”.
These books gave me one problem. I fit the profile of what they claimed caused homosexuality. I knew I had neither blatant nor latent homosexual tendencies. I liked women, perhaps more than was healthy.
None of this helped me very much.
I did not know, of course, that Ronald was being honest about himself to everyone. He was actually doing a very brave thing for as early a period as 1963. I also did not know that his family had attempted to “kidnap” him to a hospital for “the cure” when they learned of his orientation.
Ronald did not know about Lois and our lost of a baby.
Perhaps these tensions and traumas in our lives contributed to what happened that December. Certainly my own naiveté and ignorance was a factor. Certainly the odd response from Ronald to my November 24 letter concerning the Kennedy assassination was a catalyst to the nastiness that followed.
I had ended my JFK letter with a bit of hyperbole.
“It’s things like this that make a person wonder if they are a coward. Friday I was shaking from the time I heard he was dead until about nine that night. This is a time, I believe, for one to take an evaluation of himself and decide whether he should follow the average-avoiding-of-all-trouble-path in life or make up his mind to defend his views against all critiques and put an effort in building his ideals with all his talent. It’s easy to make-up one’s mind when he turns to Shakespeare’s “…a coward dies a thousand deaths.”
Ronald’s response on December 3 was like an unexpected slap in the face. It came out of nowhere and it stung.
“Dear Larry,
“Well, I hope I don’t have to wait for the assassination of another president for you to write me!
“When, I repeat when are you ever going to stop being so corny? That little epilogue you wrote on President Kennedy’s death was just a little too much. What do you want me to do with your letter? Frame it and send it to the New York World’s Fair so they can bury it in the Time Capsule so perhaps the people of the future can read your great dramatic account of “how you heard the news”? A president dies and all you do is talk about yourself. The president died as fate has decreed it, let us respect his memory by not thinking if we are cowards or not, and other such trivia,”
I was not one to let such things roll off my back in those days. I wrote back in kind on December 5.
“There certainly was no doubt that Ronald Walter Tipton wrote it, and considering that you could put so many pointed comments so easily formed within your head into such a brief letter, I am certain that you have found your niche in life. You really should write a “Dear Ronald: column in the newspapers. With but a little practice, since you have already accumulated years of biting comment of utter insignificance, you could very possibly improve your right-wrong score by giving a correct critique at least once a year.”
My letter was two pages to his one. These somewhat juvenile jibes escalated through the next three weeks and at least five letters. Each epistle grew nastier and more heated. We both said things we should not have said. I said things that were born of ignorance and he said things born of misinterpretation.
Whether Ronald or I would have come to our senses is an unknown. The content had grown so virulent we probably would not have.
On December 10, I wrote a four-page letter in which I relied heavily on the books I had purchased. I tried to convince Ronald to give up the homosexual life, assuming two things. One, that he really wasn’t a homosexual and two, it was simply a choice he could make.
In the middle of page two I said,
“Why fight it (homosexuality)? Because the risk is so great to remain as such. Is it the happiness of the masses, which you wish me to seek, to hide the facts of my life from society in fear of losing my job, being banished from my home, being put into prison? And the ‘Gays’ argument that these things should not be, you know, I’m sure! Let me alone and I’ll come home wagging my happiness behind me. Come on, Ronald! You always showed a good degree of above average intelligence. You’ve read enough books. A homo’s whole personality is warped. He is just a sick person, unglorified (sic), not superior to anyone sexually, and would be just as unhappy in a free existence as he really is, whether he feels so or not in his hide and seek life.
“Of course you may not end up in prison or losing your job or even being banished from your home, but you may have to protect yourself by paying blackmail threats off.”
I am certain the last part of this must have angered him. I had a concern for his well being in mind, but I accepted the premises of the books I had read that homosexuals were sick and unhappy people who could change. I became impertinent, insulting and condescending throughout this letter. The worse was yet to come.
A paragraph he wrote in his December 13 letter infuriated my wife and that all but sealed a bad outcome. He dredged up my escapade of running outside nude and urinating in our backyard when I was a troubled twelve-year old. The biggest problem was not the inclusion of this, but the embellishments.
“To relate some past experiences, you Larry, when you were young got great pleasure out of running around in the nude playing with yourself. In fact, one time on one of our ‘hikes’ you asked me to join you……I declined. My father at one time forbade me to be friends with you because he said Mr. Stan Fredericks related to him that he often saw you playing with yourself in the nude in your back yard on Washington Avenue. Obviously you had homosexual leanings then but you have since proved to yourself, if not to me, that you are a ‘man’ by getting married. I sincerely wish you have and will continue to enjoy the sexual aspect of your marriage, but I have always suspected that you haven’t.”
I answered with a seven-page letter and those were the last letters we wrote in 1963. My wife knew about my past indiscretions and felt he had included the paragraph knowing she would see. She felt he was attempting to destroy our marriage and he couldn’t be trusted. We had reached a point of no return and before Christmas of 1963 our thirteen-year friendship crashed horribly.
Apparently I made some overture of reconciliation ten months later. This may have been after running into Ronald on the streets of Philadelphia where we both worked, but I am not certain of that. I only know I received a letter from him dated October 26, 1964 referencing a letter from me.
“Goodness! Was I surprised when I received your welcomed letter. I thought I fell into bad grace with my non-conformist views (if I may use that term. Glad to find out that I was wrong. I am aren’t I?”
It was an amiable short letter. He mentioned my “misfortune about adding a third member to your family.” He may have been referenced the loss of Sean, but probably a miscarriage Lois had later. He wrote of his brother Isaac making him an uncle. He ended the letter this way,
“Oh, don’t forget to vote for Barry Goldwater on November 3rd. Sorry for the short letter, Larry, but you know it is with my best wishes.”
Why nothing followed this exchange I can’t say. We were to meet a couple times, but essentially our friendship went into a 36-year hibernation punctuated with an occasional Christmas card. If we could change the past, this would have been the chapter never written, but we are stuck with what we’ve done in life and must move on from our there.
“It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”
That is a line in the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. 1964 was somehow that way. It was a year that nothing much happened, but much happened that setup the immediate future. We floated on the current of life’s stream, but there were undertows threatening to pull us down.
I had registered for another semester at Temple, again a heavy schedule. I took the maximum four courses, the second part of Modern World, Introduction to Psychology Part 2, Social Problems and Introduction to Archaeology. It was heavy enough that combined with my job made for a difficult schedule. I wouldn’t do as well this period as I had been, especially in Social Problems, which was part of my Major requirements. I’m not sure why, since I actually enjoyed the class. Perhaps it was because I was having social problems of my own.
I first became aware of it while talking in the hallway at work. It was nothing but a casual conversation with an acquaintance. I ran into the person and we began speaking of nothing in particular, the weather, how it was going, that type of thing. My friend segued into something of a more serious nature after a while. I don’t remember what anymore. Whatever, it was nothing extraordinary for two people to discuss.
As we talked I noticed an odd feeling. I was shaking or at least it felt so. I detected a wavering in my voice when I spoke and later I couldn’t bring myself to speak at all. I thought my words weren’t understandable with my quavering speech. I told my friend I had to get back to my job and hoped to catch up again soon, and I hurried away.
When I got back to my desk I sat and thought about what just happened. I realized this wasn’t the first time. I had felt this shakiness quite often now, but it was getting worse. I knew I had a problem. How was I going to progress in my career and school if I couldn’t talk to anyone on a serious subject? I had long been shy toward strangers, but in those instances I was simply close-mouthed. I didn’t open up to anyone until I knew them fairly well. But I had never had this feeling of my stomach turning to Jell-o and my words into a quivering mush.
I decided to do something about it.
There was a clinic near work, on Pine Street I think. They were an agency with one of these pay according to ability plans. Naturally I made just enough not to get any discount. I had to pay their full rate. It has been this way my entire life. I didn’t quite make enough to afford things; but always too much to get government aid. I wanted to find out what was wrong with me, so I made the sacrifice and paid the fee.
This was not anything I ever told my parents. They would have been very upset to learn I was getting psychiatric help. Such a thing was scandalous in those days. It meant you were a nut case and no one wanted a crazy in the family. I just viewed it as getting help for something I didn’t understand that was hindering me socially.
The clinic assigned me a psychologist, not a psychiatrist. The methodology was the same. The difference is a psychiatrist is a medical doctor who can prescribe drugs; a psychologist has a PhD in Psychology and can’t prescribe drugs. The psychologist has to work to cure you; the psychiatrist can give you a happy pill and call it even.
I went into an office. The Psychologist walked in and sat down. He immediately put his feet up on his desk. He looked like Elliott Gould in M*A*S*H, a lot of dark hair and a thick mustache. He was wearing a tan corduroy jacket with those leather patches on the elbows, a white shirt and tie, blue jeans and these shoes with wide gum soles. The next thing he did was light up a pipe. People could smoke anywhere in those days.
They billed me for each hour, but our sessions only lasted 50 minutes. The last ten minutes of the hour he sat at his desk and transcribed his thoughts on what we discussed after I left. He seldom shared his thoughts with me. I did most of the talking. He would ask me to tell him about something, my childhood for instance. I would chatter away. Occasionally he would interrupt and ask me to talk more about a particular incident. I might ask him a question about something, but he seldom gave a straight answer. Usually he asked me what I thought about it.
He was big on dreams. He often started a session asking what I had
dreamt the night before. He wanted to know if I had any recurring dreams. I had three. Two were very similar. The only real difference between them was in the beast that threatened me. I had had these dreams for years.
I was always a boy of somewhat indeterminate age in the dreams, probably around 12. I would be playing in the backyard, which was always the one at 424 Washington Avenue. Suddenly I would hear a noise, a snort or a growl. I would turn around and either a bull or a gorilla would charge out of the field next door. I would run and the beast would run after.
I would get into the house, but so would it. It would chase me through the house. I would run upstairs and so would it. The only difference was I might find a room where the bull couldn’t get his horns through the door, but the gorilla always could get in. In either dream I came to a place where I could run no further and then I would wake up terrified.
The Psychologist told me these dreams showed that subconsciously I hated my father. The bull and gorilla represented my father to me. I was afraid of my father and trying to escape from his influence over me, but I couldn’t. There was certainly some truth to this, but in the end I thought the only bull wasn’t in my dreams.
He never came up with an explanation of my third recurring dream. I
dreamt it long before the ones about the bull or gorilla. I had been having it over and over as far back as I could remember. It was very simple and very strange and had a worse effect on me than any other dream I had. I would be a small child. I was in the back seat of a car, usually driven by my grandfather. We would be driving up Creek Road alongside the Brandywine. We would go around a curve and there would be a little clearing in the woods. In the middle of the clearing stood a calf with only three legs. I would stare through the car window at this calf. The calf would look at me and I would wake up sometimes screaming. I would be shaking and sweating and have a very hard time getting back to sleep. It was the worst nightmare I ever had and I had it often for many years, probably until I was in my thirties.
He couldn’t come up with an answer to that one and neither have I.
I forget how many weeks this went on. We never got around to really discussing my “shaky” problem. What we got around to discussing was Ronald Tipton. I explained Ronald and I were best friends since ten years olds. I told him about Ronald’s recent revelation and how it had led to several nasty letters between us ending our friendship. I mentioned I was reading several books on Homosexuality.
This caught his interest. He even took his feet off his desk for a moment. “Why was I reading these books?” he asked.
I told him I wanted to understand the subject, to know what was going on with my friend and I was very concerned about Ronald’s wellbeing.
At our next session he again brought up my reading these books. He said it was my concerns about my own homosexual tendencies.
Say what?
“My dreams about the bull and gorilla showed my fear and alienation from my father,” he said. “You told about your grandmother and mother’s consent concern you might be hurt and how protective they were of you as a child. Your own sexual feelings toward Ronald are behind your concern.”
I told my wife that night I was through with this guy. I never had any sexual feelings toward Ronald or any other guy. This Psychologist must have gone to the same school as Doctor Edmund Bergler and the other writers of those books I read. Since I had a strong under protective father and overprotective mother; therefore, I fit the theory and must have homosexual tendencies. I had some sexual proclivities, but not toward men. I once had an obsessive compulsion to take off my clothes and run about naked. I once had a bondage fantasy involving wild pirate women, but I never had any attractions toward Ronald beyond friendship.
I decided if I was going to get over my problem I would have to do it myself through will power. Eventually I did after some worse traumas.
Despite my heavy school schedule and my little visits to the Psychologist, my job was going well. After a half year as the Group Leader in Addressograph,I had increased the units efficiency from 55% to 139%, ended all overtime and decreased our staff by two. I had established a schedule for turning over work at a faster rate and tracking jobs better. I got a merit increase for my accomplishments.
Lois and I were out shopping one day. We were going though Woolworths and saw this cute little thing in the pet department. It was a tiny green lizard and it fit in the palm of my hand with a tale running about the length of my middle finger. So we bought an iguana and named him Ian. He was a perfect pet. He used a litter box like a cat. It didn’t take much to feed him, a bit of lettuce or for a special treat, some celery leaves. Little did we know Ian would someday be bigger than another purchase
We had originally settled on the house in Malvern because it was halfway between my parent’s and her family. We didn’t want to live too close to either. We didn’t want the regular “pop-ins”. It was easier to have some distance. It was approximately a half-hour drive to either, but we did make regular visits.
To go to my parents we went down Route 30 a mile and turned onto Rt. 401. If you looked on a map Route 401 would be the sloped side of a right angle triangle with Routes 30 and 100 forming the other sides. We came off Route 401 at Ludwig Corner about four miles south of my parent’s place on Pottstown Pike (Rt.100) if we survived the trip.
Route 401 is a two-lane macadam road, not very wide. In many places
the shoulders are narrow or non-existent. We were traveling to my parents on this route when a dump truck came barreling toward us in the other lane. The truck was going at a high rate of speed, certainly above the limit. Several yards ahead of us he hit a bump and this huge boulder fell off out of the bed. It tumbled in the same direction as the truck, except it was in my lane.
I turned as far right as I could, off the edge of road surface. I couldn’t turn left into the path of the truck. The truck roared by, but the rock still came. I couldn’t get over any further because of a line of mailboxes. I had come to a stop, but the boulder didn’t. It slammed into the left front of my car. Lois has always claimed she saw someone in the bed of the truck who pushed the boulder into the road, but she always had paranoid moments like that. I saw no one.
I got out to examine the damage. The rock was wedged into the front bumper and fender. I walked back and opened my truck. I then picked up the rock and dropped it into my truck. The force had bent the front fender against the tire. I reached down and pulled the fender forward enough it didn’t rub tread and we drove on to my parents.
The adrenalin must have been pumping. When I got to my parents I tried to lift the rock from the trunk and couldn’t budge it. I had to get dad to help and the two of us struggled to remove the boulder from the car and put it aside.
My insurance company denied my claim on the body repairs. They said it was my fault; that I didn’t have my car under control. This was ridiculous. I wasn’t driving the rock. I had stopped. The rock hit me. There was no way anyone could have avoided that boulder. I got myself a new insurer. Goodbye to State Farm.
There was a bigger boulder rolling our way, though.
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