CHAPTER 92: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE POET -- NOWHERE MAN AND THE WOMEN HE LOVED

 CHAPTER 93.   1961 

 It was winging into 1961, as a matter of fact and we had become engaged the previous fall. Now we haven’t touched upon it lately, so let’s talk about sex and where we were at as we began the countdown to our marriage in September. 

I was a virgin and still fairly naïve and
uninformed about the subject. My knowledge had come from one dated sex manual and many, many, many “girlie” magazines. By 1961 I was not buying those more raunchy photo titles from “Ratso Rizzo” at the Farmers’ Market. I’m not even sure he was still operating. I was purchasing the more mainline, if duller, slick magazines sold at the local newsstands, such as “Swag”, “Cavalier”, “High Society” and also “Playboy”. My only images of the female came from pictures. These magazines were not very informative about our  sexual life. If they wrote anything it was usually fairly common and brutal.

Lois, also a virgin, was far advanced of me in sexual matters. She
had not been lying about perusing the photos of Beefcake, although in all fairness there was precious little available of that nature then. There was no Cosmopolitan as it would become in a few years under the hand of Helen Gurley Brown. In 1961 it still was under the banner of “Hearst International”.  There was still a lot of emphasis on quality fiction and little of the sex features that would eventually dominate. By the 1960s it was also tanking.

 “Playgirl” didn’t even yet exist.

But Lois took a more intelligent approach to the subject of sex,
which was something she wanted to know everything she could about. When she headed off to the library to do research and reading for school, she would  wander into the Sexual Materials Section and study the volumes there.

During the time we were engaged, she would write me many letters at the end of the work day, especially on Fridays and pass them to me. This one if fairly typical:

Dear Darling,

I really don’t know how to start this, but I just got off the phone and after taking about you to Ev [Her best friend, Evelyn Weinmann], I find that I miss you so much I want to write to you. Maybe this can take away some of the loneliness.

Oh Larry you don’t know how anxious I am for our wedding day to come. I miss you so much each night it’s getting unbearable. At this moment I’d give anything to look up and see you standing beside me and be able to rush into your arms. I don’t think I’d ever allow you to let go of me.

I don’t know what I’d ever do if you would leave me. It hurts just having to leave you for a few hours each night. It is unthinkable of what it would be like never having you around me and never being in your arms. Larry you don’t know how much you mean to me and how much I really do love you. It’s more than you can imagine. Friday night I felt what it was to really really want you. I know that we must not get too carried away in the future, but I am not ashamed to admit that I enjoyed what went on Friday night (such as it was). I’d certainly never be ashamed to admit that I love you, want you, and need you with every fibre of my being. I hope you don’t think this sounds corny. (Dick Clark says that you should never be ashamed to admit a feeling of genuine affection for another person, and I can’t think of a more genuine feeling of affection than mine for you.)

Well, I feel a little less lonely now. I hope you don’t get sick reading this letter, but I wanted to write you. Let me close by saying that I love you more than anything and want to make you happy.  You are truly a wonderful person and deserve every good thing.

I love you. Lois Jean.

Most were similar in nature, but shorter. When I recently mentioned the similarity of her letters as being nice and flattering, she interrupted to say, “monotonous”, and then she accused me of mocking her. I was not mocking, simply noting that her letters basically said the same thing:

How she was lonely for me.

How wonderful I was (which is fine, nice to hear, even if I don’t think I’m that great.)

How she couldn’t wait for the work day to end.

How she had to close because in was late afternoon and closing time.

There was some variation, such as where she wrote of the discussions going on in her  office, but often such asides were missing. Most of the time these notes didn’t convey our growing passion. The one sited does where she wrote: “Friday night I felt what it was to really really want you. I know that we must not get too carried away in the future, but I am not ashamed to admit that I enjoyed what went on Friday night (such as it was).”

You maybe can read between the lines. Sex was sneaky in the sixties. It was a bit more talked about than in the ‘fifties, but a lot of it was semi-hidden. There was a growing field of sexual subliminal messages being tucked away in the advertisements of those time.

I understand her diaries were a different story  with nothing subliminal at all and I wish I could read them, but unfortunately she shredded them. She says they were too graphic and she didn’t want the kids to read about our escapades. If you remember the instance of the inside-out leopard skin capris, then you know the further our engagement went, so did we, that is further and further. I believed then and believe now that sex should be preserved for after marriage, but sorry kids, we didn’t make it that far. My advice is people should keep their engagements short so they don’t reach a point when their love carries them away. Our engagement was almost a year and that is way too long.

 There were things to do as marriage approached. One of my
considerations was the reliability of my faithful old 1954 Ford. We had planned on a lot of driving for our Honeymoon. I didn’t know if I trusted that car to get us there and back. It was time to buy a new car.

 My father had been a long time user of Studebaker. He took me to his Studebaker/ Packard dealer in Oxford, Pennsylvania.  Now there are two names you don’t see anymore, Studebaker/Packard. Actually 1961 was the last year for the Packard name. The company dropped that division and became The Studebaker Corporation in 1962. Studebaker’s days were numbered too. I traded my Ford in on a 1961 Studebaker Lark. It was this rich dark green color. The car sold for about $2,000.  It would be a bit more that $17,583 in today’s prices, that is, 2020.

I was to have a constant back and forth to Oxford for repairs on that car, which might explain why Studebaker didn’t survive all that many more years. The last United States plant  closed in 1963 and the last actual Studebaker rolled off the assembly line in Canada in 1966.

The Avanti lived off and on, going through several reincarnations, but it too finally come to an end in 2006 (Pictured left is a 1978 Avanti II)

 

I was still reading while riding the trains. My tastes were ever

expanding. In August of 1961 I was reading T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, probably the best presentation of the king Arthur Myths I’ve ever read, Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, The Unvanquished by William Faulkner, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and a lot of Edgar Allan Poe. 

I was writing my own stuff in the

evenings. I put together the volume Little Plays that year, a collection of the skits, sketches, plays, music satires, monologues and other bits. Some were performed at Owen J or local venues as stand-up comedy, others just as party humor. I wrote the bulk of these, but did have some co-authors such as Ray Ayres, Richard Ray Miller and Richard Allan Wilson. I also produced another collection of poetry called “From a Further Room…”, a title taken from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.  Alfred Prufrock”. 

For I have known them all already, known them all;

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a further room.

So how should I presume?

T. S. Eliot (1915)

 

Lois and I escaped the pressure a couple times by driving to her

Uncle’s cabin on the Sassafras River in Maryland. There we spend the day swimming in the river. There were tiny fish in the water. They would swim against you and press mouths on your skin. They didn’t bite; it was just an odd sensation, little fish kisses. 

Also on August 19 I made another deep sea fishing trip with my dad. This time Lois came along. Joining us was a long-time friend, a girl I had known since I was in early grade school, Patty Lilly.  She came with and her boyfriend, Paul Miller. Paul was in my class at Owen J. It  was his description they also printed as mine. His father and uncle were close friends of my dad. Paul’s father George also drove a truck out of the same Honeybrook terminal that my father now hauled from, in fact, I believed the Millers owned the business. They may be giants, note the picture. I was six foot and Lois was five foot ten, but both Patty and Paul towered over us (picture left). They eventually married and Paul also served as an usher for my wedding.

 

Lois was not use to being out to sea. She was game to try her luck
at fishing, though, and she caught the first tuna of the day. From that point on she was seasick. I was never very susceptible to motion sickness, but I began to feel a bit woozy myself trying to comfort her. I think it was sympathy sickness. But we survived and had a nice haul to bring back to dock. We even caught the largest tuna landed by the fleet of charter boats that day, one over 90 pounds.

The only effect on me was not being able to eat a tuna fish salad sandwich for about the next six months. This photo of Lois, with her hair caught in the sea breeze, is one of my favorites.

But I had bigger fish to fry than tuna. I had decided to buy a house. People didn’t think I could pull it off, but at the time I had my life well planned. I figured on buying a house for us to start out in and I expected to have at least $10,000 saved by the time I was thirty. I would get a modest starter house, hold onto it for fifteen years and then move to something larger.  

We began house hunting in April. Alice Downing, my first cousin who once babysat me and whom I was closest to in age, was married to a realtor at that time, Granville Cantrell. Alice was ten years older than I. That is her and I in the picture on the right when I was little. Her husband assisted in finding a place I could afford.

We quickly narrowed our search down to the Paoli area. We felt this would cause the least friction between the families. It was almost exactly halfway between my parent’s home in Bucktown and Mr. Heaney’s house in Drexel Hill. If we bought a place there no one could claim we were playing favorites. We also felt the distance was such there would not be a lot of pop-in visits from either side.

On one of our searches we were joined by another first cousin, Richard Brown and his wife,  though we didn’t know he had a wife. He told us they just got married in May right after they graduated from West Chester High. The photo on the right is how he looked at that time.

On June 9, my mother, grandmother, Lois and I found a place we liked. We went up to Drexel Hill and brought Mr. Heaney back to look at it.

 It was a Cape Cod in General Warren Village. They had built the houses in the mid-to-late fifties starting around 1955. The one we were buying was one of the last built and it sat atop the hill facing out toward the Great Valley. You could look out the living room picture window and see for miles. Besides the living room there was a kitchen, bath and four bedrooms, two downstairs and two upstairs. The two upstairs were very large. It had a full basement. The house sat on 3,000 square feet of ground. It was a lot 100 feet wide by 300 feet deep. The house sat back from the street at the end of the first 100 feet. The other 200 feet ran up the hill to its crest. There was a back yard level from the back door step, and then it went up a steep embankment to a grove. Beyond this plateau it sloped upward with woods. I went to Alice Downing Cantrell and gave her a deposit on the place.

 I paid about $12,000 for it ($106,4627 in 2021’s money.). My

mortgage payment was $98 a month, which included principle, interest and insurance equivalent to $871 per month today. . This was very affordable for us. I was making $60 a week and Lois was earning $64. $124 dollars a week easily covered the mortgage and car payments.

On June 20, I met Mr. Heaney and Lois at Paoli and we went and paid. the down payment. On June 23 I went home with Lois from work to her place. Mr. Heaney brought me home, but we had to stop on the way in Berwyn at Cantrell’s office to sign the papers for the mortgage. Settlement on the house was scheduled for July 3 in New Hope.

The only hitch came at settlement. It wasn’t any problem with finances or down payment. We had gathered in Cantrell’s office to finalize the papers. Lois, her father and I were there. A lawyer was representing the seller. Signing those papers was the first anyone realized I had just turned twenty years old and Lois was still nineteen. We were not twenty-one. We were minors. We could not sign contracts without an adult co-signer. Fortunately, Lois’ father was willing to do that.