CHAPTER 83 1959
In September 1959 Downingtown, Pennsylvania held its Sesquicentennial Celebration. The incorporation into a borough occurred in 1859. Thomas Downing (1691-1772) who moved from Bradninch, Devon, England to America sometime before 1718, founded the town. He lived in Concord Township, Pennsylvania until 1732. He was a Welsh Quaker. He was a farmer, miller and merchant. Two of his great great great great grandsons, Herford and Ellsworth Downing, married my grand aunts Helen and Clara Wilson.
In her heels she was nearly my height. She bought a light lavender
gown for the occasion. The image that stands out in my mind was not the Ball, but the flying eyewear. Sonja wore contact lens, which were fairly new on the scene in those years. We were dancing cheek to cheek and one of her lens popped out. Contact lens are very small and they bounce. Since they were clear they were hard to spot. We spend a portion of that dance on our hands and knees. We were crawling about between the other dancers searching for her lens. We found it.
That autumn Sonja enrolled in Peirce Business School (now Peirce College) in Philadelphia. She may even have been a co-student of my future wife. My friend Ronald would eventually go to Peirce as well. Sonja went to classes by train same as I did to Florence Utt Schools. These trips to Philadelphia were to prove fatal to our relationship.
this young girl living in Drexel Hill., how these boys attacked her as a young girl, held her down and kicked her teeth out. Also I told how at the age of 12 or 13 she and her girlfriends would run about the streets at night in just their Baby Doll PJs. I should bring us up to date on her, although she is playing no role in my life narrative at this time.
Her teeth were fine. Fortunately, the attack happened before she had her permanent set and her new teeth grew in just fine. By the time she was 16 years old she was a model. Although she was struggling with a poor self-image. She was to suffer some additional tragedies in her senior year of high school.
The day after she graduated from Upper Darby High School her closest friend and fellow graduate, Lynne Martin, passed away. In the photo on the right, Lynne is the girl seated on the far right.
The girl we have been addressing is seated on the far left.
Lynne died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 17.
As if to just add insult to injury and pile on her grief, her mother passed away three weeks after her graduation. Her mother, Dorothy, perished from lung cancer, even though she had never been a smoker and was a strong opponent of cigarettes. (This girl herself had begun smoking around age 12.) Her mother was only 52 when she died. On the left was her mother in 1922 and on the right, her mother the year before she died. Both the girl’s parents were accomplished musicians; her dad also played violin. The girl’s father did not adjust well to the death of his wife.
Why are we concerned with this girl? We’ll soon find out.
Meanwhile, back in my own world.
Sonja had not dated in high school. I opened a new world to her, one in which she was often more aggressive sexually than I was. There was to be no thumb biting on our many Drive-In dates. She tended to be all over me. If there had been any biting it would have probably come from me in self-defense.
This coziness was quite fine during the summer, but when she went to college in Philadelphia she discovered a lot of young men were eager to stare at this tall, slim blond. She began being something of a flirt, I think not seeing the wiles of young men she was being dazzled by the sudden attention. Compared to these big city boys I was the country mouse, less sophisticated and less exciting.
Rodgers”, but there was a definite trace of that character within her. We continued with our dating, but she would talk about this boy or that she had met in class or rode with on the train. I doubt I hid my infatuation for Sonja well. I was completely obsessed with her. I would go into depressions when she went on and on about these Philly boys.
It was very painful when she began being too busy to go out on a date with me. Although she didn’t come right out and say she was going with someone else, she usually claimed school work or something, the next time together I would hear stories about a wonderful Tom, Dick or Harry she had met.
I was very much still infatuated with her and wanted to do whatever I could to hold on to her. Since she was so into music and I was a Broadway musical fan I wrote a musical play to try and impress her. I incorporated my old copyrighted song, “My Little White Lamb” and the one Stuart and I composed, “Ya-Ha-Whoey”. I even named the play, Ya-Ha-Whoey! I wrote lyrics for nineteen songs and the book.
Lonely boy
Is in a whirl.
Going around
Mourning for a girl.
He runs everywhere,
No peace to be found,
Lonely boy
Is going around.
Of course I was the real lonely boy. The play revolved around two friends, based as usual in those day on Richard Wilson and myself who run away to the seacoast at Christmas time, set up a tent on the beach just so the one character can pine for the girl who jilted him.
I can’t imagine who these characters could have been! The play was dedicated to Jeannette Siravo, but it was really written for Sonja.
Not that this made much difference. My play did not impress Sonja
one iota it seemed. It wasn’t full of bounding Bolshoi Boys and Tchaikovsky-like trilling. We continued to occasionally date when she had no better offers, but she was slipping further away from me down that Philadelphia track. One night in a fit of dashed passion I ripped her photo in half, but then as the drooling love sick pup I was, I taped it back together. There was always hope as long as my 3M Magic tape held up.
My box of frustrations was full, stuffed with rejection slips as I continued to mail out manuscripts and all the while searching fruitlessly for what my parents referred to as “real work”.
Ronald was once more back on his feet and as frustrated of the endless job search for employment as I. My own tour of the personnel offices went on and on. I was back to Philadelphia applying at some golf place, but didn’t get the position. A day later I applied for a job at Deloit Manufacturing in Downingtown with no positive result. On November 17th we kind of bottomed out. Ronald and I drove into Coatesville to try to get hired delivering phone books. We came on the wrong day and they were no longer hiring. The day after the phonebook fiasco I received a promising call from a Philadelphia company with an IBM job.
When the sun came out on the morrow, I headed into the big bad city once more and searched out this latest dangling carrot.
supposed to be this high powered employment agency. It wasn’t really that old a company in 1959, but old enough to have built a reputation as successful. It had been founded by a couple, Lou and Gwen Snelling, thus Snelling & Snelling, in 1951. The company was started in Philadelphia at an office on Market Street. I am pretty sure this was the same office I went to and signed my name to some agreements. I wasn’t 21 yet, so the legality of these contracts is in question, but it’s a little late to go back to them now.
The place is still in business with a few changes. I don’t know how they run their operation today or what their terms of acting in the clients’ behalf, but here is what the deal was then. They would connect me with potential employers. I would go interview. I did not have to take any job offered and there was no fee for this part of the effort. However, if by chance, some employer would offer me a job and I choose to say yes, I would owe a fee. This was the equivalent to my first two week’s wage. Actually, it wasn’t equivalent; this is what it was, my first two week’s pay.
Unfortunately, I found myself being sent to a number of prospects where I really wasn’t qualified. This proved to be the case once again when I arrived in Philadelphia and checked in at the company that called.
One catch in the contract I didn’t like was if I found a job on my own, not through them or anyone they sent me to, I was still expected to pay the two-week fee. The Philadelphia company I had went to with very high hopes after the phone call discussion proved to be way out of my level. I had to turn it down, but as I was leaving the Personnel clerk (we called it Personnel in those days, not Human Resources), told me I should try this other Philadelphia Company.
Ronald, meantime, was getting very discouraged about the poor job prospects. His hernias were fixed and he began talking of joining the armed forces again, specifically the Navy. He was itching to get away from Downingtown and he claimed he wanted to join the Navy because he wanted to see the world. His further suggestion was I should enlist with him.
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