CHAPTER 121. PHIADELPHIA HAS A NEW RESIDENT WRITER. 1969
By the end of March 1969 I was working at Philadelphia Gum and doing a lot of freelance writing. I was living at Bucktown back at my parents sometimes, and crashing different places on other nights. Technically I was now dating three women, Mary Ann DiPiti, Janice Griffin and my wife, Lois. I was spending more and more time with Lois trying to convince her we needed to go back together. My only condition was we couldn’t continue to live at her father’s.
I went home on the evening of April 4 and told the family I had rented an apartment in Philadelphia. My mother was very upset because she consider the city dangerous. Now I wasn’t just visiting, I was going to live there. On the 6th I spent the day moving things, kitchen stuff and books, out of my parents’ attic and taking them to the new apartment. Lois was along to help in the evening.
Academy Awards for the year of 1968 were given in 1969. Cliff Robertson won for “Charly, Jack Albertson for “The Subject was Roses”, Katharine Hepbirn for “The Lion in Winter” and 72 year-old Ruth Gordon for “Rosemary’s Baby” The Best Picture was “Oliver!”
the Academy Awards on TV. Academy Awards for the year of 1968 were Cliff Robertson won for “Charly, Jack Albertson for “The Subject was Roses”, Katharine Hepbirn for “The Lion in Winter” and 72 year-old Ruth Gordon for “Rosemary’s Baby” The Best Picture was “Oliver!”
At 2:00 AM the next morning Lois’ maternal grandmother died. She was buried on the 16th.
Zoe Schnell Raab was Lois’ maternal grandmother. After Lois’ mother died, Zoe became a substitute mother and her protector. Lois was only 18 at the time her mother passed from cancer.. Zoe moved into the Cobbs Street house, telling her other daughters, “I’m not leaving that girl in the house alone with Harry.”
Zoe was already aging when Lois was born. She was 60. So by
the time Dorothy Raab Heaney died, Zoe was 78. Her husband, Lois’ grandfather, Maurice Penrose Raab (right )died a month and a half after Lois was born, so Lois never knew her maternal grandfather and Zoe was a widow a long time. Zoe was 87 when she passed away.
Both of Lois’ paternal grandparents had died before 1950 so her memory of them is fairly short. Her grandfather shared the same name as her father. He was the son of an Irish immigrant who settled in Brooklyn and became a policeman. How the senior Harry Heaney met his wife remains a mystery. She was a Native American, a member of the Creek
tribe. One of the problems is the family wouldn’t talk about this fact. They were prejudice against Native Americans and ashamed one married into the family.
We had a big fight with Lois’ father over renting the Philadelphia apartment. He didn’t like the neighborhood; he was a man of many dislikes. He threatened to disown her if she went there with me. He also accused us of stealing from him, which was patently untrue. Lois on the other hand said he had been spying on us, sneaking into our room and going through our drawers. She had remained adamant about this although I never thought he was doing such a thing. At any rate, we left on not the best terms.
We moved onto Chester Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets. This was part of an area known as University City. The campuses of the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University and the University of the Sciences were all nearby. Dorms for the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy (part of the University of the Sciences) were just around the corner from us. Most of our block on our side were apartment buildings and a lot of students lived in them.
Commodore. It was owned by an elderly lady, who did most of her business dealings through the Superintendent, a man originally from Jamaica. The lease was not overly restrictive, but it did contain a clause stating “No pets”.
We owned a hamster and an iguana.
We decided we would sneak our pets into the apartment at midnight when no one was around. We had just come up the steps into the hallway when we heard the Superintendent’s lilting accent talking to someone and coming our way. We rushed to get our caged animals into our apartment before he came into sight. We just made it inside and shut the door as we heard these other people pass by. The Super was helping them move.
“Who moves at midnight,” I asked. Well, we were.
I set the cages down, threw off the coverings.
“Where’s Hammy?”
The hamster cage was empty, I mean the wheel was there and the wood shavings, but no hamster. I dashed to the door and threw it open. There in the middle of the hall carpet was Hammy looking up at me. I scooped him up and in.
This was not the first time we lost Hammy. We hadn’t been there very long when Lois discovered the little Houdini had slipped his cage. We frantically searched the apartment without success, and then we heard a scream. We both looked at each other.
“There goes Hammy,” we said in unison.
We thought that was it. People would think he was a mouse and stomp him. Three days later I was making myself a sandwich and there came Hammy, skittering out from under the refrigerator. He was a little greasy, but otherwise unharmed.
The apartment was not large. The rent was $90 a month. We were on the first floor at about the middle of the hallway. Our windows looked out at the side wall of the apartment building next door across a narrow alleyway where the trash cars were kept. This building across the little alleyway was a college dorm for the Philadelphia School of Pharmacy. Our living was done mostly in this room, which served as the living room, bedroom, rec room, meeting room and office, and home to Hammy the Hamster and Ian the Iguana.
may have been used by the Victorians. There was just enough space on the side for a small table and two or three chairs. One of our first tasks was cleaning the kitchen, which contained grease and dust left over from the Continental Congress days. Lois then painted the kitchen a dark blue with some Pennsylvania Dutch designs upon it. It didn’t help very much.
To the right of the entry door was a wall of glass panels behind which was a large closet. You went through the closet to get to the bathroom, and what a bathroom we had. It was nothing to look at, but it had great sound abilities, allowing us to listen to every word and movement of our upstairs neighbor, who happened to be a prostitute. Our bathroom was one of the greatest erotic broadcasting booths in Philadelphia. My question about her was “doesn’t she ever take her shoes off? She must not have had any rugs, just bare floors. There was a constant clack clack clack over head every time she walked. I’m guessing she wore those shoes with six inch heels. working girl footwear.
When she wasn’t walking her bed was squeaking.
It was enough to arouse a guy. When this happened, and it happened a lot, I’d dry off some. Then I’d walk out to the other room still nude and we’d make our own bed squeak.
So, let’s talk about some of the occupants. First of all, there was the Superintendent. He turned out to be a pretty friendly fellow. It didn’t take him long to discover we had pets, though. He didn’t say anything about our animals, although, from time to time he threatened to eat Ian. He said they ate Iguana in his country and it tasted like chicken. It seemed every exotic meat in the world, whether Iguana or alligator or boa constrictor, tastes like chicken. I somehow have my doubts.
The lease may have said no pets, but the interpretation was pretty liberal. There were several beasts in the building, not counting the ones living in the walls. Every day this young couple would come down the stairs from their apartment to walk their enormous St. Bernard. The Commodore is now called The Lexington. Ronald and I visited the area late in 2019 (right) and other than the name it hasn’t changed at all, although the neighborhood looks a bit shabbier.)
least two more plying their trade on our very floor. One night I was awaken by a strange sound. I looked at the clock and it was after 2:00 AM, yet out in the hallway I heard this very distinct “Click-click-click”. It went down the hall, then back up; back and forth. I got up and peeked out the peephole and there was the young son of one of the prostitutes riding a Big Wheels up and down. One of the pedals rubbed against the side and was the source of the clicking I had heard. This kid was plopped in the hall whenever mama brought a client home.
One afternoon I came home and the boy came running out of the doorway just as I got there, almost crashed into me. He went off yelling, “Mama, mama, the cops took daddy away again.” I really don’t know beans about his daddy, never saw the man and don’t know if this was a legal marriage or not.
Other than “working women”, we were generally surrounded by students from the various institutions within walking distance. Most of these I only saw entering or leaving with books under their arms. Most seemed to be female. There was a young couple down the hall from us and I don’t know if they were students or not. Our hallway went straight so far, then it did a kind of dogleg off the to right and continued on from there. This couple dwelt in the corner of the dogleg. Our hallway could be a hotbed of stuff in the night. Besides the kid and his Big Wheel there might be this couple out in the hall. She would be screaming at invisible beings, yelling, “get them off me, get them off me” and he would be wrestling with her, trying to drag her back to their room. The hall always smelled of marijuana every time they were there. I happened to come in one day and their apartment door was wide open. There was no furniture except for mattresses strewn wall to wall across the room.
Despite the level of occupants, I never had any trouble with anyone. I generally felt safe at the Commodore; however, Lois had a constant feeling of apprehension. It wasn’t so much our neighbors than the fact we lived on the first floor in easy reach of anyone in that little back alley.
meetings in our front lobby. I passed through several times and we always said hello. One day they came to my aid and helped me get my refrigerator up the front steps.
It was an eclectic neighborhood; ideal for a writer.
I had told my parents I had rented an apartment back on April 4. I hadn’t mentioned Lois and I were living in it together. I imagine they guessed as much since Lois kept showing up at their place with me. I didn’t tell my parents I had quit my ARCo job and was now making four bucks an hour part time at a Bubble Gum Factory until May 5. That was the same day Lois and I had the big blowout with her father.
Finally, on May 12, Lois began working at the University of
Pennsylvania as a secretary to the two heads of the Chemistry Department, Dr. Donald Fitts (Died March 25, 2020, Age 87) (left)and Dr. Hendrik “Hank” Hameka (right). The pay there was much better than what she made at the Title Company, plus now she could walk to work. I forget her exact salary, I think it was around $90 aweek, but it was what we were basically living on. I wasn’t making a great deal writing.
some lunch at O’Malley’s Grocery on the corner of Baltimore and 42nd Street or at least get a bag of soft pretzels from a sidewalk vender. In 2010 I would do a collection of essays I called “Pretzels for Lunch”.
How did it end, this period of living and working in Philly? For that we must back up a few years.
Living there ended first.
Remember we had moved into an interesting, to say the least, cheap one-room apartment in West Philly, the area called University City. At the time I had no steady job. I had begun to write freelance. My wife took a job as a secretary at the University of Pennsylvania. We had very little money and several times I would go out and walk along the trolley stops of Chester and Baltimore Avenues looking for dropped change to provide some extra food. My lunches were quite often a bag of Philly Soft Pretzels.
We lived like that for several months before I took a job as a Circulation Manager and Book Reviewer for a magazine publisher downtown. Amazingly, I started at a higher salary than I had been making at ARCo. I was also beginning to get writing assignments from a local tabloid, being published in the "Underground" (cover of an Underground Magazine I wrote for on left, one of the few pages I could show here without gaining an X-rating.) and selling my short stories to an international publication. With our combined income, we certainly could afford something better than the small, rundown place we were living.
As good story fodder as our often exotic neighbors were it was bothersome late at night when the prostitute down the hall put her young boy out in the hall to play while she served her client. It was especially so when he began to ride his tricycle with the squeaky wheel up and down at one o'clock in the morning. It became something of a last straw when I came home one afternoon and he came running by almost knocking into me screaming, "Mommy, mommy, the cops took daddy away again!"
I was having trouble with the car. It would not start without a push. Still we went places in it and took our chances. One night we had been out particularly late and we had a different kind of trouble. It was somewhere around 2:00 AM and we were headed home. Our route took us through Valley Forge Park. It was extremely lonely there at such a wee hour of the morning and somewhat eerie. I was coming down route 23 completely alone on the road when from behind came a police car with its lights blinking and its siren breaking the silence. I pulled over on the shoulder and the cop pulled up behind me. He strolled up to my window.
“Do you know how fast you were going?” he asked.
I had no idea. It was a 35 mile an hour zone, but you wouldn’t think it would matter all that much this time of morning. The park was a virtual empty wasteland. “I don’t know,” I said, “maybe 45-50 miles per hour.”
“I clocked you at 90,” he said.
Man, I thought, I don’t think so. I don’t think this Beetle could do 90, especially with the hills around here.
He said, “Just a minute,” and he walked back to his vehicle and got in. I figured he was checking out my license plate or something, but then he suddenly pulled out, swerving around my car and hightailing it down the road. I sat for a few minutes then we left, somewhat shook up by this encounter. I expected I was going to get a ticket in the mail.
We were even more shook up a few weeks later when a rogue cop was arrested. It seems he had recently shot a Rabbi and his wife and then later killed some others driving through Valley Forge late at night. It turned out he hated Hippies and he had mistaken the Rabbi for a Hippie because he had a beard. The Rabbi was also driving a VW. I do not know why the cop sped off when he did, but I have always believed Lois and I were very lucky that night.
Joe wasn’t quite so lucky. He was on a plane flying to Seattle. By
the middle of July, he would be 12 miles north of Saigon in a place called Zion and a member of the 1st Infantry.
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