CHAPTER 118. A HOLLY DOLLY CHRISTMAS 1967-1968
Living is a sort of continuum; that is, it is a flow of events that are related to each other, have a certain cohesion, but vary from hour to hour as life progresses. It is possible for changes to occur and not even be noticed until some future point when you can look back upon them. Think of your looks. We all have in our heads an image of ourselves and each morning when we awake and stare in the mirror we see that
image.
The couple in that first photograph certainly look different from the couple a year before. This picture of Lois and I together was taken in June of 1967, we were probably at my parents for one of our family birthday gatherings and my mom was probably glad to see my current appearance. The long, sometimes shoulder length hair that both Lois and I sported previously was gone (See left and right.). We both had shorter dos now. My hair was still fashionably long. Its length constantly changed. Our outfits had become pretty pedestrian, although Lois looks a little Maoist in her brown suit.
The fact that we looked less rebellious in 1967 than in 1968 is a delusion for our appearance was deceiving. The life lived throughout 1967 continued on, seemingly the same, but wasn’t. I was still working at Atlantic Richfield as a Regional Ledgerman, promoted to that position just that January. I was still doing my writing on the side. I was still an Atheist and we still took occasional parts in protests. We still did a lot of sponging off my parents for meals. In other words, time went by and we carried on as usual, at least we did as we entered 1968. Except our hair was growing back.
This is what makes writing an autobiography difficult. Each day may be different, but not by much. You don’t want to be writing, “I got up this morning. Drove to Paoli and rode the Pennsylvania Mainliner into Philadelphia. Walked several blocks to the ARCo headquarters where I spend several hours sifting through and matching up IBM punched cards. Went home by the same route in reverse. Had dinner with Lois. Spent a couple hours alone in a room with a typewriter producing a new story. Went down stairs and spent the rest of the evening with my wife.” That account was a typical day, but nobody wants to read page after page of a typical routine day. Therefore, you mention your daily life and then concentrate on those matters that weren’t routine. Amidst the daily grind, this was to be a most dangerous year.
It was certainly a most dangerous year for the country. The changes in the air were signaled on the last day of 1967 in the New York flat of Abbie and Anita Hoffman (left). There along with the Hoffmans were Nancy Kurshan, Jerry Rubin and Paul Krassner and they formed a new group they called “The Yippies”.
Yippies stood for the Youth International Party and in 1968 they
The country was torn by the Vietnam War and the divide was growing. There had been assurances that we had the Viet Cong on the run. We were told they were in a weakened state, when on January 30 there was a mass coordinated attack made on 100 South Vietnam cities by the North. This became known as the Tet Offensive, and although our troops went on to to defeat the North in this attack and drive them back, the massive surprise attack broke the U. S. Morale and more and more people turned against the war.
He was doing quite well in the first primaries, but then Lyndon Johnson proclaimed on March 31 that he would not seek another term as President. This threw things into turmoil. Robert F. Kennedy, President JFK’s brother had stayed on the sidelines, but now he jumped in with both feet and began building a heavy following.
On April 2 Robert Kennedy campaigned in Philadelphia. He had a stop scheduled at noon at the Democratic Headquarters, which was located at 15th and Chestnut streets. I walked down to the intersection on my lunch hour. The place was packed, with wall to wall people on both streets. The sidewalks were totally blocked and people kept spilling out onto the street. Philadelphia Police kept walking up and down along the crowd yelling at everyone to stay on the sidewalk. They were none too delicate about it. They were referring to the pedestrians as Assholes and using the F-bomb profusely.
I came up behind the crowd on South 15th Street and pushed myself into the melee. In those days I was bigger than your average bear at 6 foot and near 200 pounds. There was ahead of me a small woman, who was being battered by the crowd and at one point with the cops herding everyone up against the buildings, was in danger of being crushed against the stones of whatever structure lined that area. I stepped to her side and created a shield with my body to keep the surging crowd off her. I could withstand their shoving and pushing, but it was obvious she couldn’t and it was also obvious she was frightened. I’m pretty sure if I hadn’t done that she would have suffered some kind of injury.
Of course, Kennedy wasn’t on time, which only made matters worse. The waiting crowd was growing impatient and the cops were growing angrier. People were beginning to defy the officers’ orders and plunge more and more into the street and traffic. Then an hour late Bobby Kennedy and his group showed up. They eased into the crowd on Chestnut to the middle of the intersection. The flood gates opened, cop or no, and people swept into the streets and surrounded Kennedy’s open convertible. Robert stood up on the back seat and gave a speech and everyone just cheered and cheered as I turned back to work. The small woman seemed safe enough. The herd had shifted forward and she had hung back out of danger’s path.
motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. He was assassinated by a fugitive convict from the Missouri State penitentiary named James Earl Ray. Ray had a long criminal history. He was serving time for repeated offenses when in 1967 he escaped from the prison in a bread truck. He moved around the country, underwent plastic surgery to change his face and in March 1968 took a long cross country trip from where he was hiding in Los Angeles to Atlantic, Georgia. He bought a .03-06 caliber Remington rifle in Birmingham and eventually went to Memphis to intercept King. For an escaped convict he seemed to travel around fairly easily. After killing King he drove from Memphis to Toronto, Canada. Two months after the assassination he was arrested in the Heathrow Airport trying to leave Britain. How he got to England I don’t know. He was eventually sentence to 99 years in the pen. He died there in 1998 at the age of 70.
On the day after King’s death we were sent home from work by mid-morning. Tensions were high across the country. 150 U. S. cities experienced riots in the aftermath, and that was the fear that more or less closed businesses down, but a riot never broke out in Philadelphia. Some credit this to a stern proclamation issued under Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo. There were a scattering of a 100 people arrested under this proclamation, but there was no great outbreak of violence.
Broadway, declaring this the “Age of Aquarius” and brought full nudity to the legitimate theater. If “Hair” was a celebration of the Hippie beliefs in peace and love, it wasn’t playing out that way in the real world.
June 5, a few minutes after midnight on the west coast, Robert F. Kennedy was shot several times by Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan in the Ambassador Hotel. Kennedy had just won the California Primary and gave a rousing speech on TV. He left the stage through the kitchen considered a more secure route when 22 year-old Sirhan stepped in his path and shot him with a .22 caliber revolver. Kennedy lingered through the night and emergency operations, but he was officially pronounced dead at 1:44 A.M. Pacific Time on June 6.
Lois and I were watching this unfold on TV at my parents.
Democrats. Senator George McGovern (right) was quick to jump in as a substitute for Kennedy. He split the followers of Eugene McCarthy.
With Lyndon Johnson not
running, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the current Vice-President, decided to leap into the battle. Humphrey eventually won the nomination at the embattled Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
The Republic Convention had taken place
from August 5 to the 8th in Miami. Compared to Chicago it was relatively quiet, although there were some protestors there. Alan Ginsberg and the rock group The Fugs (right) tried to bring the Miami site down with Hare kristna chants.
Chicago was a mess by comparison. It was held from August 26 through the 29 and every day seemed to bring greater violence between protestors and police. It culminated on August 28 when Police began beating a protestor who had lowered the flag in Grant Park. A full scale riot broke out and pushed its way even to the Hilton Hotel where Humphrey was staying. All of this played out before the TV news cameras. Norman Mailer wrote a book about these conventions called Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
The Republicans had nominated Richard M. Nixon (who apparently is my 4th Cousin). His runner ups were Ronald Reagan, Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney These names that would pop up in the future, but 1968 belonged to Nixon.
won 13 percent of the electoral college. He ran on a segregation platform for what was called the American Independent Party. This was former Democratic Governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace. Shown here blocking the doorway of the University of Alabama when it was ordered to admit Black students. Wallace would become a near assassination victim himself. While running again for President in 1972, he was gunned down in Laurel, Maryland. The wound left him paralyzed.
All this was pointless to me. I didn’t like any of them, just as it was last time around. On election day I went to the poles and voted for Dick Gregory and Dr. Benjamin Spock running as write-ins on the Peace and Freedom Party Ticket. Gregory was running nationally, but somehow he had different running mates in different states. In Pennsylvania, where I resided and was registered, it was Dr. Spock as opposed to Mr. Spock. In certain states his running mate was the writer Mark Lane who wrote the critique of the “Warren Commission Report” called Rush to Judgment. In other states it was David Frost, the British TV personally, who had hosted a satirical TV show called “That was the Week that Was”.
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incarcerated at Embreeville State Hospital, Lois took a job at the Delaware County Hospital. We didn’t know the dangers of this at the time. Two days after beginning, she fell and strained her ankle and had to have it bandaged and rested. She didn’t get back to her new job until the 28th, another Monday. This job was to change a whole lot eventually.
On October 21 Lois and I went to my parents so I could tell them I had just sold another story. I was paid for $46.
Let me explain about the writing market back then. There was a high strata of magazines that paid a great deal for any story or article. These magazines were certainly what I strove for. It wasn’t just the money; it was also the prestige they bestowed upon the writer. Unfortunately, several of these top line rags did not accept unsolicited manuscripts. If they wanted something from you they came a calling. That meant you had to established yourself as the cream of the writing crop. These magazines included such publications as Playboy and The New Yorker.
I may have dreamed of being in those someday, but the reality was I was down in the lower echelon, so to speak. Oh, it wasn’t really the lowest. I wasn’t writing for anything sleazy, but it was still in what would be called the Pulps. Most of my fiction was being published in Magazine of Horror. This meant I was selling to the Publisher in New York, a place called Health Knowledge, Inc. I am not certain where the health or knowledge came from. They published three mass magazines, “Magazine of Horror”, “Startling Mystery Stories” and “Famous Science Fiction”. All were edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes. They appear to have published something called “Nuts Magazine”, but only in the year 1958. I really don’t know anything about this comic book, except it looks like something on the order of “Mad”
Anyway, I wrote in what was called the “penny-a-word” market. If I received $46 dollars for a tale, then it was 4,600 words long. In todays dollars that would have been the equivalent of about $332. I believe the most I ever received for a story was $64 or what would be today, $462. I guess the payments weren’t bad for the time, but I wasn’t selling enough stories to live full time on the royalties.
There were some distinct problems back in those times. You sold the rights to your story for whatever you received. It then belonged to the publisher and they could do what they wished with it. They could reprint it. They could sell it elsewhere. If some fool in Hollywood decided they wanted to use you story as the basis of a movie, then the publisher got the film rights, not the author. It was stacked against the writer.
reform came too late for me. Not that I cared at the time. I was thrilled to see my stories printed in real publication and to also get paid for writing the tales.
The first story I sold to Magazine of Horror was “Last Letter from Norman Underwood”. The character’s name was a combo. Norman because it was similar to Normal and I was playing off the irony of that. Underwood was the brand of typewriter with which I wrote the story. I loosely based Norman and the Narrator’s relationship on that of my friend Ronald Tipton and I. I wanted to do something on the werewolf theme, but I wanted something different. I thought the werewolf genre had become very set, person is bitten, seems fine until the moon turns full and then look out, the person turns into a wolf. My story seems to lead us down that same path, but then the twist comes at the end. I was a fan of O. Henry, I liked a twist to conclude a story. Norman isn’t a werewolf after all. It is his dog that is a wereman.
This story sold in 1968, but I had written it 10 years prior, in early 1958 when I was 16. Thirty-six years later it popped up on pages 180-181 of a 2004 book printed by the University of Wisconsin Press, Brian Frost’s Essential Guide to Werewolf Literature. I like the fact it was tagged as literature.
Lois suddenly left her job at the hospital. She didn’t give any
reason. On Wednesday, November 27, the day before Thanksgiving, she began working at Wanamaker’s on Market Street in Philadelphia. She took a job there as a Holly Dolly, one of the helpers for Breakfast with Santa.
One of my regrets is I never got a photo of Lois as a Holly Dolly. I have searched, but can’t even find a photo of the Breakfast with Santa. You would think some parents would have snapped a keepsake. I remember I thought it was sexy that she would wear it in to work in the morning, riding the bus and subway. I pictured in my mind her going dressed like an elf in tights, with a Pixie Hat and Pixie Pointed Shoes, but she was supposed to be a doll. Her actual costume had a puffed out short skirt and I believe white tights.
clothes there at work then man a station on the main floor, probably selling perfume. The closer we got to Christmas, the more she complained she was going nuts from listening to the Wanamaker light show. They did this show over and over on a loop the whole season, using the popular Christmas Songs being played on an organ to illustrate the electronic display.. There were fountains about the floor that “danced” to to the music.
She worked at Wanamaker’s until Christmas, then she left her Holly Dolly days behind. On December 30 she took a file clerk job at the same company as her friend Evelyn (left), The Title Abstract Insurance Company. She spent her days helping research deeds.
I opened a drawer in our bedroom one evening looking for something. There were some letters addressed to Lois in there. One was open, the pages sprawled about. I picked it up and read. I suddenly knew why Lois was so anxious to leave that hospital job and why we were getting so many phone calls where no one was on the other end when I answered. Lois was having an affair with an orderly at the hospital and now he wouldn’t leave her alone.
It had proven a most dangerous year for my marriage.
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