CHAPTER 98. THOSE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR. 1961 - 1962
The Lutz’s, our new next door neighbors, came over and introduced themselves. They seemed nice enough, but Bill Lutz was a fanatic about his yard. He immediately advised me on how I should tend mine, especially to keep down pesky weeds like dandelions.
I didn’t have much interest in how the lawn looked. I kept it mowed (or many times my dad came and did this) and that was about it. We most likely were spreading those dandelion seeds far and wide as we mowed. I probably drove Lutz up a wall thereafter. He would be out in his own yard with some sort of blade on the end of a pole like he was lining up a putt on the golf course. He would even lie down on the ground and look to see if the tops of grass were even. If he saw a too tall blade he would whack it with the golf club shaped sickle.
Mrs. Lutz seemed nice enough, but since Lois was working at this time we didn’t see much of her. They had a teenage daughter, whose name I forgot. I did see a lot of her, a real lot!
the east front side. The second bedroom was to the east rear side. We put a daybed in that room and designated it as a guest room, although we seldom had any overnight guests to use it, except for my grandmother occasionally staying in it.
The living room was the largest room. It was on the west front. There was a large picture window, one with a view of The Great Valley. The stairs to the upper floor was right off the front of the living room.
were two large bedrooms upstairs. I made the west bedroom upstairs my den and office. That was where I went each night to write. There was really nothing in the east upper bedroom. We put a table over on one side and displayed some of the things we had gathered on our honeymoon (pictured below right).
One night I finished writing. The stairwell was between the two
bedrooms and there was a small hallway between them, but no doors. When you walked to the stairs you could see directly through the second room and right out the side window when the curtains were pulled aside. When I walked to the top of the stairwell I could see into the upper west bedroom of the Lutz. This was the daughter’s room and there she stood just behind the window undressing. She had her shade all the way up. I paused and went down the steps assuming this was just an oversight on her part, but I soon found it was a regular thing. Every night She would undress directly framed by her unobstructed bedroom window. It struck me how well her timing was.
I didn’t keep some rigid schedule when I wrote. Some nights I worked late, some just for an hour or so. Yet whenever I knocked off for the evening and headed for the stairs, there she would be. I can only guess that she watched for me to turn off my light as a signal to disrobe. I tried not to look, but it was difficult not to pause and glance over there, I had to look that way when I reached our stair. This was not some kid next door. She was a young woman, a teenager of high school age, but given the circumstance of her behavior I hesitate in calling her a young lady.
In the beginning of the year the breakdowns in the car picked up. I would have it in a garage near my parents a good many times during 1962. On January 12, we had to take a taxi to and from the Paoil station since our car refused to start. My family came down the next day and dad determined I needed new spark plugs. My grandmother brought a cake she baked for the occasion. I guess dad bought me new plugs and installed them, because the thing ran and on the 20th I took it into a garage for service.
I did not help the car situation on February 14 when driving us to the train I put us in a spin and hit a tree. It had snowed the night before. Lois took the train on to her job, but I stayed behind with the broken vehicle. Whether as a result of the accident or not, we began giving taxi services more business. On the 19th the car wouldn’t go, so I called a cab and again on March 6 when we returned in the evening and couldn’t get the car out of the Paoli lot.
Despite these growing car issues, I trusted it to take us on a long day trip on March 17. One place I had long wanted to go was Gettysburg. In March Lois and I took off on a Saturday and drove to the battlefield. We looked very dressed up for such a field trip, especially Lois in her black dress and big white pocketbook. In the photograph
of Lois, she is sitting on a rock that forms the base for the statue behind her. Next to her is a small black sign. I did not take any notice of it when I asked her to pose for this picture. We have been back to Gettysburg a few times since then and in 2005 I finally read that little sign. It said, “Keep off this rock”.
I stopped by the Visitors’ Center for information and discovered you could rent a personal guide. I paid the service fee.
A Park Ranger came out and got in the back seat of our car to direct us. He was not a young man. I would say his Ranger duties were probably limited to telling tourists the history of the place. He looked old enough to have fought in Pickett’s Charge. He rode with us and pointed out all the important sites of the battle, but he did have a habit of repeating himself, especially one phrase as we twisted and turned on the roads through the park.
“They must have followed a snake when they laid this road out,” he would say and chuckle.
We discovered they had followed a lot of snakes.
order forming the Peace Corps. Congress got around to authorizing it shortly after our marriage in September. Lois and I were reading about it and decided we wanted to join. It sounded exciting and exotic. I wrote to its director requesting applications, which we received. We filled these out and mailed them.
I don’t know what we were thinking. We were idealistic to a fault. We thought it a great idea to go off to some foreign land and help people in some way. I don’t know how I planned paying my mortgage if I went off for some stipend to the darkest point in Africa.
Nonetheless, we sat back and waited for our country to call us to duty. I didn’t have to worry about it. We never heard back from the Peace Corps.
language I didn’t know and attempting to communicate. I noticed I was having more difficulty talking to people using English. I could communicate my thoughts well enough with my typewriter, but speaking face to face was a different story. With those I knew well, such as Ronald Tipton or Stuart Meisel there had not been any problem, but more and more I became tongue tied around strangers and people I didn’t know well. I was really deadly in large groups. I was certainly not a party animal, unless moles count. In group settings I tended to find a place in a corner and withdrawal from the action. If there was a magazine handy I would bury my face in it from cover to cover rather that converse or cavort with any other guests. This had not caused me any serious problems at work, yet, because my job pretty much allowed me to work in solitude.
Lois was suffering from Bipolar, though we didn’t know it, so the last thing in the world we needed was for me to develop full-blown Social Anxiety, but the markers were falling in place that was where I was headed.
I may have been shy and retiring face to face, but I was anything but when my confrontation could be done through the mail. I was on a kick writing what were very often nasty letters to anyone who I felt I had a grievance with, and if it were a corporation I always looked up the CEO and wrote to the big boss directly. I found you got more attention that way. Actually, I also seemed to get easily annoyed at everyone and everything in those days.
I received an issue of “Life Magazine” in the mail. I was annoyed. A few weeks earlier I had received a bill and sent it back explaining I had never subscribed to the magazine and did not want the magazine. Now they send me the blasted magazine. I wrote to the Circulation Department.
Dear Sir (Madam):
A few weeks ago I returned my bill and with a letter telling you to cancel my subscription. I received John Glenn in my mailbox this week. I am not the Larry E. Meredith who was once a subscriber. I am the honest Larry E. Meredith. I cannot take advantage of a super-special-let's-be-friends-and-buddies-and-back-slappin'-cousins-half-off belonging to a former subscriber who is not me.
It may have crossed your mind or at least your camera that if he had a subscription, he must also had a reason to stop said subscription.
Please do not send any more Life Magazines. Please do not send any more Life Magazines. Please do not send any more Life Magazines.
Not for one year. Not for two years. Not for five years. I do not want Life for life. I want to live Life-less. I can read. I want body to my magazines, like Andy Panda Comics. In other words, something with a larger vocabulary than Life.
Please do not send me any more Life Magazines! Please do not send me any more Life Magazines! I shall begin sending them back C.O.D.!!!!!!! Please do not send me Henry Luce! Please do not call me early mornings.
Please do not confuse me with any more former subscribers. I never subscribed to Life. I never wanted to subscribe to Life. I never shall subscribe to life.
If I receive any more issues I shall stop buying from your advertisers and I shall inform them why.
Yours,
Larry E. Meredith
A Curtis Publication liker.
P.S. Don't, please do not sent me any more Life Magazines.
LEM:lhm
Guess what? I never got another Life Magazine or bill.
And by the way, I never have subscribed to “Life Magazine”.
In May I wrote Ronald. Our correspondence had fallen off in the first part of the year. I informed him that Lois and I were making a combined $190 a week, $9,880 a year. That was the equivalent of over $86,000 annually in 2021 dollars. No wonder we were living it up. I also mentioned that a portion of this was overtime I was earning.
Apparently bragging, I mentioned I had added up all 12 years of marks I received in public school and the average came within one-tenth of one percentage point from an A average.
I told him I got a prize in a writing contest, that I was buying a movie projector and that I wanted to recommend the following to him:
“Swan Lake”, the ballad suite; the books The Catcher in the Rye and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Finally, I suggested he see the movies, “West Side Story” and “The Children’s Hour”. I ended with a paragraph that I wonder what he made of it, given his own leanings.
“We got two girls in our department at work who can shake you up a little. I mean they love each other. Comprehend? Like you walk by and they’re smooching. Everybody to their own taste.”
Well, there we were playing house for real and feeling pretty grown up. Let me tell you, nothing brings you down from thinking you’re all that then locking yourself out of your home and having to call for your mommy. I’m not exactly sure how we managed this feat, but we did. I must not have kept my house key on the same ring as my car key because we came home, got out of the car and discovered we had nothing to unlock the house with. Lois had not taken her purse with her.
This was kind of humiliating. We went next door to the Lutzes and asked to use the phone. I called home where my mom had our spare key. The whole blasted family drove down with it, mom, dad and grandmom. Thereafter we gave a spare key to the Lutzes. We’d just have to trust them.
There were a couple things I mentioned in my last letter to Ronald I would like to pontificate upon a bit more. I had told him I bought a movie projector. I bought a three-lens movie camera in the spring. Not much good to make movies if you don’t have a projector to watch them on, so I got one of those as well. The little reels of 8mm film ran less than ten minutes at a time. I eventually got a splicer to splice some of my takes together. The splicer also helped if a film broke, which was not unusual given it had to run through a complicated track in the projector.
That track was a constant frustration. It took more time to thread those little spools through to run that it took to watch the result. Sometimes the film’s little guide holes would slip the pins on the feed and the film would tangle or pile up on the floor. Worse yet, sometimes it would catch fire from the heat of the lamp, which would burn a hole through the celluloid.
annual reunion at Bob Wilson’s. The reunions had been held every August since 1957. Bob had a large swimming pool up on the hill behind the house, but Ronald and I choose to swim in the lake that lay in a meadow below it. It may be no one was home and we didn’t want to use the pool without permission.
I took my camera along and we took turns filming each other splashing about in the water. Ronald was as slim as ever, but I had put on some weight since being a skinny kid whose ribs always showed. Now some blubber framed my chest.
There was more motive behind buying the projector than just viewing the pathetic little scenes I filmed. You see, I always wanted to own a film library. Now one could buy Hollywood movies for 8mm projectors, but they were far from the big screen version. They cut down the original to a short, choppy collection of key scenes. An hour and a half movie might run twenty minutes on these retailed reels. They were also silent. They had dialogue cards interspersed like they used to do back in the silent era. Still, it was kind of cool. My film library proved rather slim, however; I only bought three such films.
“Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” was hardly the best of that Universal monster franchise, but I had a fondness for it. Creighton Chaney, billed as Lon Chaney, Jr., who originally created the part in “The Wolf Man” again played the werewolf, Larry Talbot. Boris Karloff had become too big a name by this time, so Bela Lugosi played the monster. Lugosi refused to play the monster in the original Universal “Frankenstein”, objecting to being hidden behind the makeup. His career was on the down slope by 1943 and he couldn’t be as fussy about roles. He didn’t have the ability to give the creature the kind of pathos Boris Karloff brought to the role. This wasn’t the worse for Lugosi. Near the end of his life he was wrestling rubber octopi in Ed Wood flicks.
Continuing down the line of the Universal Monster Franchise, in fact, getting near the end, I purchased “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”. This was one of the best Abbott and Costello comedies. I was a fan of the duo. Lugosi got to put on his Dracula Cape again and show his face and Glenn Strange played the monster. Lon Chaney, Jr. continued in his Wolf Man roll and Vincent Price’s voice made a cameo as The Invisible Man. “Frankenstein Versus the Wolf Man” was okay as a silent film. It was mostly grunts and growls anyway. Abbott and Costello suffered in the format. They were most famous for word play a la “Who’s on First” and that doesn’t work in a silent film.
Glenn Strange was a actor in a number of secondary roles in both Hollywood and television. Before the Abbott and Costello farce he had appeared as the Frankenstein Monster in “House of Frankenstein”. He was a big man, 6 foot 5 and over 225 pounds, so he made a handy foil. He did a lot of TV Westerns in the ‘fifties, most notably playing the Bartender at Miss Kitty’s saloon in “Gunsmoke”. He bore a little bit of resemblance to Lon Chaney Jr. His real first name was George, George Glenn Strange.
The third film I bought was the cheap 1955 Sci-Fi, “Tarantula”, starring John Agar and Leo G. Carroll. Actually the special effects were quite good for its time and it stayed away from the clichés of a mad scientist or nuclear fallout. (Leo G. Carroll was not really a mad scientist with evil intent at the beginning of this film.) It was Clint Eastwood’s first film roll. He played an uncredited Air Force Pilot.
As an aspiring author I read a great deal more than I watched
movies. I read novels and short stories constantly, but I also read biographies of famous writers and I followed certain publications on a monthly basis. The two publications I purchased every time they appeared on the newsstand were “The Writer” and “Writer’s Digest”. Both featured how-to articles on the craft and “Writer’s Digest” also included a section of potential markets. “Writer’s Digest” ran some contests during the year.
One of the annual contests was for short fiction. In the latter part of 1961, I mailed off a story and paid the ten-dollar fee. I was certain thousands of people entered and chances of
I didn’t win first prize or any money, but I did get Honorable Mention and a free short fiction-writing course. I took the course, which ran through 1962 and finished with a B+ grade. And like the Art Classes I had taken I did slip in my practice habits at the end. My initial grades were A’s, but in the last months I slipped down to B’s, but unlike the Art School, I did finish and graduate this course.
The tale I entered in the contest was a war story, “Soldier, Soldier”. It was about two soldiers on guard duty overnight, watching out for their sleeping platoon. Their names are “Mac” and “Checker” and they spend their watch arguing over the value of remaining loyal and not going AWOL, since Checker believes the enemy is going to overrun them in the morning. Here is an excerpt, and I’m sorry, but I did use course language in my fiction where I thought it would be the way people talked.
“What the hell are they? Indians, ‘Fraid to fight in the dark?” Checker was a short man,
twenty-one with green eyes and red hair. He was a clown, always ready with a wise-crack, always ready to duck work. He sat with his back to the wall. A mud-splattered rifle lay across his lap.
“Why?” asked Mac. Mac was tall and gaunt, older, dark-eyed with hair the color of dry grain. He was a good soldier, never complained. He was looking over the wall toward the fringe of haze. He was mentally composing a letter to his wife. He told her the night was similar to the night they met and the night they sat in his car on the hill overlooking the town. It had been quiet and dark then too. There had been a distance haze, the lights of the houses in the valley shrouded in a light fog. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her there was a difference. He expected those across the field behind the haze to rise up in the morning and kill him. He looked over to Checker.
“‘Cause they don’t wanna die in the dark, just like Indians, y’know, don’t wanna die in the night, y’know, cause their souls’d get lost or sum’p’tin’. Hey, Mac?”
“What?’
“What’d’ya think of that, huh? You think if we get killed in the night we’d lose our souls?”
“I don’t know nothin’ about souls.”
“Hell, we ain’t gonna get shot at night anyway. They won’t come tonight. They ain’t comin’ at night since we been here. But the days, man, the days are fuckin’ hell.”
Both fell silent
Excerpt from “Soldier, Soldier” (1961)
Writer’s Digest
Honorable Mention
Cincinnati, Ohio
In my collection, Something Like a War (2003)
Sorry, tain’t gonna tell you what happens.
At work a vacancy opened up in Addressograph. Somebody escaped somehow. I believe they left the company to go to collage They promoted a Mail boy out of the mail sorting named Dave Claypoole. (It is a regret of mine that I never got a photograph of Dave. On the left is one of my sketches of Dave).
He and I hit it off right away and soon became friends. He was the first new friend I had made since marrying and he quickly filled that role of "best friend". All my past "best friends" had essentially disappeared from my life at this point, except for one. I still considered Ronald Tipton my best friend and looked forward to his return from the service, but Ronald was somewhere else and Dave was here, readily available.
He had a Triumph sports car, it was green, we’d sometimes take rides
in it. I found him easy to talk with, which was rare for me with my growing social anxiety.
Dave had gone to Temple University on a football scholarship. He lived in an off-campus dorm and walked back and forth to classes on those gang-riddled North Philadelphia streets. He lived it up in typical college boy style, partying between classes and engaging in a good bit of beer drinking. One night he left a party in late evening and as he walked up what was then called Columbia Avenue a brilliant idea entered his brain. He could walk on top of the parked cars. He climbed up over the trunk of one such car and then began walking across car roofs, hoods, trucks all down the street. He had went a block or so doing this when he saw the four doors of the last car he crossed swing open. Six large Black dudes climbed out and Dave abandoned the car tops for pavement and ran like never before. He must have been very fleet because he escaped.
In one football game he got injured seriously enough he couldn't play anymore, so they took away the scholarship. Without the scholarship he couldn’t afford the tuition and had to drop out. He worked for a while as a meter reader for the Philadelphia Gas Works. As a rookie he was assigned to, let's say, less than the best neighborhoods. He had a lot of interesting stories about homes he visited to read a meter, everything from your expected angry dogs to infestations of fleas to walking on planks across a sea of writhing worms. Now he was going to Temple again, but as a night student. I didn’t even know they had such a thing as evening college.
Ron Paul was celebrating his eleventh year at Atlantic by growing more moody and unpredictable. He would often lean against his desk, puff his ever-present pipe and glare across the room at Dave and I.
dislike toward him for no reason, unless it was Dave's quick friendship with me. One day Ron was leaning against a worktable in back of the area blowing out smoke rings and Dave Claypoole was running the front Addressograph Machine while talking to me as he worked. Ron suddenly picked up a platen and threw it across the room just missing Dave’s head by an inch or two.
A platen was a metal rod that fitted on the print arm of the machine. It was very heavy. It was what came down and struck the top of the envelopes when they were on top of the plate, forcing the ink to print the address. If Ron had connected with Dave’s head the thing probably would have killed him or at least done serious head trauma.
There were some things getting under Ron Paul’s skin. We had employee statistics. Each week they issued a report showing per hour rates and accuracy score. I was first all the time now. In fact, I was beating the set standards by so much the efficiency department reevaluated our group and raised the standards. Ron Paul was not happy about this.
He also didn’t care for Dave. I’m not sure why. It may be because Dave was going to school or perhaps it was because he couldn’t intimidate Dave. He certainly didn’t like it that Dave and I had become friends.
The biggest thing getting Ron Paul’s goat was the threat of Speedaumat. The Head of the mailroom gathered us all together one day and introduced a salesman from AM Corp. We listened to a lecture on the advantages of the new technology. The man then set a tray of plates on the sample machine top and asked Ron Paul to try it out. Ron refused. He was Supervisor and should have been supporting management in this, but instead he was sulking about it. He had hung back from the gathered group and only half listened to the man’s talk.
Our department was considering upgrading the Addressograph machines to a new system called Speedaumat. A representative of Addressograph even had a test machine installed to demonstrate the new technology.
The representative tried to persuade Ron to try, but Ron just waved him off. The man asked if anyone wanted to try it and I raised my hand and stepped forward.
Ron Paul may not have realized it at the time, but he jumped the shark that day.
As for me, I looked at my situation and I thought, "Life is good". I had no clue that this mix of seemingly unrelated events would somehow alter my life greatly in the next years to come.
I found ourselves living in our own place and very much living as a man and wife. Neither of us was yet officially grownup. We were both still minors of 20. No matter, we certainly felt adult. Lois looked plenty grownup presenting herself on Christmas, that’s for sure. We were engaging in adult things and there was no doubt that over the last few months since we married that an awful lot of our world had changed.
The old gang was well split up. Richard Wilson had visited at my parents on Christmas, but after that he went his own way and more or less left my life. Yes, we were all certainly growing up, there were a lot of weddings. May saw Bobby Lukens tie the knot. He and I had been friends a long, long time ago it seemed, back in the days of World War II and a few years afterward. My father had served with Bill Lukens and my parents continued the relationship I guess until
the Lukens passed on. Lois and I went to Bobby’s wedding that May of 1962. Bobby is the boy on the right shouldering the rifle in this childhood photo. They are real rifles, by the way.
Close on the heels of the old shoes tied to the Honeymoon Limousine of Bobby Lukens came the marriage of my little girlfriend from those same long ago days, Patty Lilly. She wed the boy they mixed me up with in the yearbook blurb, Paul Miller. These were our fishing companions, who you might recall towered over us. In this wedding picture they seem level with the entire wedding party until you realize they are standing a step down from everyone else.
second male standing from the right. Paul Miller had been an usher at my wedding and I returned the favor at his. The photo to the right was taken at Paul and Pat’s wedding and it is my Grandmother Esther Brown, me looking especially dorky and my wife, Lois. Despite the preponderance of eyeglasses, this is not an advertisement for Lenscrafters.
Neither of my two best friends had married yet. I really wasn’t hearing anything from Stuart Meisel by 1962. He was in his Senior Year at Franklin & Marshall College, but he might as well have been on the moon. I hadn’t seen hide or hair of him since my wedding. Ronald was still in the Army, but he was home on a number of weekends and we occasionally still went bowling or miniature golfing. On one of his trips home he did come to Malvern and take the tour of our home. I knew he was due for discharge in
1963, assuming he didn’t re-up, and I fully expected our friendship to resume where it left off when he shipped out. I did harbor hopes he would find a nice girl and marry so we could form a regular team, him and his girl and Lois and I. There was no mention of Ginny anymore. I knew she liked him, I could see it in her eyes, but I don’t think he was writing to her anymore.
Lois and I spent much of the year trading sicknesses. I got the flu very badly after being goaded into an anti-flu shot, one of the benefits of working at Atlantic. I passed this misery on to Lois. Her illnesses did begin to separate themselves from mine that year and they were accompanied by bad headaches and low moods. She complained of feeling depressed, something she claimed was common in her family saying her mother often had bouts of depression. She also began to grumble some about her job. She expressed a strong desire to quit working and stay home. She wanted to be a housewife and have a baby, but that was not financially feasible at that time.
Neither one of us was great about the daily demands of home ownership, to tell the truth. I mowed the grass every week or so and kept the outside reasonably presentable. Sometimes my dad came down and preformed this task. I admit I do not like yard work; frankly, I despise yard work and think it was one of the dumbest things man ever did to himself when he invented lawns. Trimming yards may have been one of the curses handed out by God when he kicked Adam and Eve out of Eden. Lois’ father had always threatened to cover his lawn with green cement. I wasn’t going to go that far. I just wanted to let it go to seed and turn back into a meadow as God intended, but I didn’t dare. If I had ignored my grass for long Bill Lutz would have organized a neighborhood posse and tarred me in fertilizer and wood chips.
Although I much preferred to be inside creating a story this aversion to yard work wasn’t laziness. There were some weeks my dad came down and mowed my yard, which may appear he is spoiling me, but you will find I went up to my parents an equal or more times and mowed both their lawn and the big field out back. The thing is I didn’t have my own lawnmower in the beginning, so I would borrow dad’s when I wanted to cut. Now this was not a power mower we had. It was an engineless push mower, a device I would use for many decades to come. It cut as well as anything and the only noise it made was a light click-click-click as the rotors turned.
I didn’t use this to do the big field behind my parents, though. That
would have taken some effort. The area was the size of a baseball field, a couple acres perhaps, and it was tough meadow weeds, not some wimpy green lawn grass. It was the kind of field men use to cut with scythes; you know, like Father Time and Death tote about with them. I had cut grass with those tools as a boy, but fortunately I didn’t have to wield one here. My dad had one of those tractors with blades beneath. You rode that little engine that could around through the thistles and hay. It was slow, but kind of fun to drive it.
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