Wednesday, March 31, 2021

CHAPTER 75: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE POET -- WILD BILL & FRANTIC FRANK

 CHAPTER 75   1957 - 1959

 


Hot Rod Richard came a-roaring around the bend

In a souped-up streeter with a sleeked rear end.

Into the straightaway, around a curve again.

He sure does move that mess of tin.


Hot Rod Richard, his car decked and stripped-down,

Going along the road really covering ground.

Fastest wheel-riding cat in all rural Pottstown,

Riding with a loud glass pipe sound.


He is the hot rodder the coolest girls all chase,

For this cat wins in every dragging flat race.

As the hot rodding king, Richard is no disgrace;

He holds the hand with every ace

LEM 1957



 Summer brought a new season of drag races for Richard Wilson and me. It was back to Perkasie and Lancaster, not to mention the streets of Pottstown, but we also were taking in auto shows. There
were two places I remember going more than others, probably because one had a giant bowling pen outside and the other had a giant cow. The bowling pin was at an alley in Stowe, a suburb of Pottstown, and the show was in the parking lot.


The giant cow was in front of a large building along Route 30 as you get up around Paradise, Pennsylvania. The cow place had something to do with farming and I believe held weekly cattle auctions.

 


I don’t know if you have ever been to a cattle auction. My grandfather took me to some auctions a few times when I was a young boy. That auction was just off of Whitford Road. You sat above this pit in a semi-circle, sort of like a miniature bullring. A door would open on one side and men with canes would force a cow or bull into the ring. The auctioneer sat in a booth on the other side of the pit. He would call the bids as farmers seated around the pit would try to buy the animal. They used hand singles, which made it hard to catch who was bidding at any given time. 

This place near Paradise wasn’t auctioning anything when Richard


and I were there. This  large building had a display floor full of customized cars that day. I think Richard had two compartments in his brain that summer, one for girls and one for cars. Cars may have been the bigger of the two.

He still had a while to go before he could get his own driver’s license, not because of his age; he was old enough. His parents wouldn’t  give the approval. That didn’t stop him buying a car. 

Pebbles pinged against my bedroom window early one morning and looking out I saw Richard standing in the back drive. He motioned for me to come down. I hurriedly dressed and met him out back. He asked if I could get my dad’s pickup.


My dad had an old Dodge pickup at the time. It was red with black fenders (pictured left). When he was on the road mom wouldn’t drive it, so no one minded if I did. So after picking up Tommy, the three of us drove out to a community somewhere West of Pottstown. Pottsgrove and Stowe were two communities to the west side of Pottstown along South 422.

There was a 1949 Plymouth Coupe sitting in the front yard of a small, dilapidated house. 

A man came out to meet us. He was old, lean and bearded. He


resembled the old man with the shovel in “Home Alone”. Roberts Blossom (pictured left, March 25, 1924 - July 8, 2011) was that actor and he was also in the horror flick, “Stephen King’s Christine”. I think he may have played the character that sold the kid the haunted car.

Hmmm! Bad omen.

Richard and the old guy walked around the car several times talking in low voices.

It didn’t look like much. It wasn’t even one color. Someone had done some work on the body and left it with three different painted patches and some primer gray. It did have four wheels with four inflated tires, I will say that for it; although much couldn’t be said for the tread or lack thereof.  The wear on the interior wasn’t too bad.

It wouldn’t start.

Richard paid the man $40 cash for it. I felt the guy should have paid us $40 to haul it off his lawn.



Frank turned into a narrow street (down the road to ruin) both sides lined with small boxy houses, painted white with only different colors about the window frames to distinguish one from the next. They were somewhere in South Pottstown, the poorer section of the town.

“Okay, next left.”

The next was identical to the last, except narrower. Each street they took was less wide than the last. Any more contraction the car would not fit. Frank pictured the Pickup stuck halfway down an alley, the tires squished against the curbing.

“Stop by the green house.” 

There were five green houses all in a row.

“Which one?”

“The one with the rose bushes.”

Three had bud-less rose buses. The bushes were neglected. They had been left unprotected through the winter months..Many of the branches were broken off.

“Which bush, Eric?”

“The one you just passed.”

Frank backed, his tires bumping off one curb or the other. Once he jumped the concrete curb and drove across a grass patch, falling back to the street surface with a jarring bump. Frank backed pass the indicated rose bushes, then pulled forward into a gravel driveway. At the end of the drive was a wooden garage propped up with clothes poles.


Except from my Novel, Forty-Dollar Car (1969)

 

Richard had tossed a thick rope in the truck bed and he got it out


now. He tied the front end of the Plymouth to the back bumper of the Pickup. Tommy and I got in the pickup and Rich got in the Plymouth. I towed him a few miles down some back road, peering behind occasionally in the rearview mirror. After we went a ways I noticed a  fog developing around the back end of the Plymouth. The further we drove, the thicker it got.  Sticking my hand out the window, I singled him to stop. I pulled onto the shoulder.

Tommy and I got out and walked back to Rich. The Plymouth now stood hidden in a pillar of smoke. Rich forgot to release the emergency brake and we burned out that brake towing the thing. Well, at least we knew one thing on the car worked; not so much anymore, though. 


(Pictured right is what the Plymouth should have looked like in perfect condition.)

He released the hand brake, not that it mattered much anymore and I towed the car to the foot of Rich’s driveway. We started the pull up that steep hill. Halfway up the Plymouth cut loose and Rich stopped just short of the highway.

“Rope musta broke,” said Tommy.

We got out of the truck. That Plymouth was a heavy car, but it didn’t snap the rope. Oh no, it simply pulled the rear bumper off the truck. Oh, yeah, dad’s gonna love this.

We tossed the bumper into the truck bed and tied the rope to the frame. This time we got the beast up the hill and into the Wilson’s parking area. We unhitched and managed to push it into the garage. Rich and I practically lived in that garage for the next few months. I don’t doubt Richard slept in there sometimes.

I give Richard a lot of credit. He did know his mechanics. He tore that engine apart and put it back together. In the meantime, we visited a lot of Chester County junkyards scavenging parts. Everything that worked on the old engine we washed in a bucket and kept; everything else we scrounged up somewhere. He actually got it to start after a few weeks. We backed it out of the garage and drove it across the field next to his house, bouncing over the ruts, cutting tight  circles around the orchard trees and scaring up rabbits and squirrels right and left. 


Richard had an off-and-on motley crew helping him. His brother Tommy occasionally, but Tom did little more than lean on the workbench and eat anything we brought to snack on during the day, often heckling his brother through a mouthful of foodstuffs. Rich didn’t call on me to do much except run back and forth fetching tools or lending a hand lifting heavy objects. Jim Whitlach came by sometimes and he did some minor repairs, though he did more cursing and complaining than actual work. Tom Frame was the real helper. He really knew auto mechanics and would jump right in on any tricky problem. It was Tom Frame and Richard more than anyone else that got that car running again.  (Pictured with the Plymouth from l. to r. Me, Tom Frame and Jim Whitlach.)

Rich bought another transmission for the car at a junk dealer. We used my dad’s pickup to retrieve it. We didn’t bust anything this time. It wasn’t a Plymouth transmission, but Rich got it because it was supposed to be better. Tom Frame had his hands full helping on this one. He had to retrofit the transmission to the Plymouth, which took some doing, but he did it.

When Richard was satisfied we had all the mechanical bugs worked out, he began improving the body. He took off the chrome and smoothed down the metal, removed the trunk lock and ran a cable like we did in the Ford and put in lowering blocks. He primed the whole car to a uniform gray. He left most of it just primer, but he painted the front end to look like flames were shooting back across the fenders and hood. He didn’t think to get heat resistant paint. After we ran it around his neighbor’s field a few times the paint cracked, bubbled and peeled.  

And of course it had red wheels with no caps.

Richard was having a rivalry with a kid at school named Bob


Browler (pictured right). Browler was the type of hood Richard pretended to be. He was as big as Rich, maybe a bit heavier. They had gotten into words over a girl (isn’t it always). I am pretty sure it was not Lenore. The war didn’t heat up until Rich had his license, so Lenore was out of the picture by then. Rich used up girls rather quickly, although Lenore stuck with him longer than most. I think the breakup was in the fall, so this was most certainly over another girl he was interested in.  I think Netty Shumate had returned to him.

Browler came around a couple times with his little posse (although we didn’t use that term back then). They always stood by the garage door and hurled a bunch of insults aimed at the car.

It’s a piece of junk that’ll  never run. You got a real dog there, woof!, Rich you don’t didn’t anything about cars, etc.

It nearly came to blows right there in the garage one day, but Browler pulled back and left before we got into it. He did challenge Richard to a race if he ever got the thing to work. They went at each other for months, but the race never came off. I think Richard just lost interest in Betty gain and Browler went away with her feeling victorious.

This was all good for me. I got a short story out of this little dustup called “Moon Was  Cloudy”. My story didn’t end because of competitor disinterest as it did in real life. No, in my tale they not only did do the challenge race, they ended up in a knife fight at the end. I was still writing my Evan Hunter Jungle Kids and Blackboard Jungle influenced stuff along with my horror tales.

Although I used Bossler’s real name in my story I changed Richard’s to Eric.


Bossler stood in front of the fruit stand to the right of steps leading down to the sub-basement shop. Walking around the corner a block away came Eric. He saw Bossler.

Amused, Bossler watched him come until Eric stopped just short of him. They stared at each other.

The end of chiming brought a dead silence. Eric leaped at Bossler, who stood ready for a charge. His arms encircled Eric’s waist, lifting the smaller boy off the ground with a bear hug.

“I’ll kill you!” Eric shouted.

Bossler snorted. Was this all the guy had, this weak oath? “Yeah, right, punk.” Bossler squeezed harder and laughed.

He didn’t notice Eric’s hand sunk deep in his right coat pocket. The hand came out and five inches of thin steel went into Bossler’s side.

The arms went limp. Bossler dropped to the sidewalk. Eric watched his foe crawl on his stomach with the knife handle protruding as a long slash of blood trailed beneath him. Bossler crawled to the curb, where his head dropped over and his body quivered. Everything became still.

Eric was silent for a second, and then laughed a sick, high chuckle, which turned to moans and his moans became noiseless tears. He looked at the dead boy halfway in the street. Eric felt weak. He had an upset stomach. He reached back and leaned on the wooden rail along the steps to the basement shop. His legs shook. He let his weight fall against the wood for support


The bodies were found at dawn.

A policeman on early store check saw Mike Bossler in a pool of drying blood. An ambulance was called and it’s siren led a sleepy-eyed crowd of town people to the scene. They came to watch the removal of the maimed. By the time Don and Frank arrived, they had removed Bossler’s remains and were bringing Eric’s broken shell up the steps. It was difficult to determine whether the cause of death was the broken neck or fractured skull.

Excerpt from,”Moon Was Cloudy”, (1957)

From my Collection, Sins of the Sons, (1962)



Yes, Richard’s automobile adventures proved a literary treasure trove. Besides the short story, I also wrote a novel based on Richard’s getting that Plymouth, but I wrote in as a comedy with only the car coming to a bad end, not any of the characters. In other words, like reality, no knife fight, no blood, no deaths.  The novel was Forty-Dollar Car.


“I’m not going to school today,” Eric said.

Frank blinked. This was not news. This wouldn’t be the first day Eric chose to bag school and doubtlessly wouldn’t be the last.  It was not early-wake-up worthy news. It was not something to rob him of another hour in a warm bed or chase the birds from their daily repast. Frank turned back toward his house.

“Wait.”

Frank paused. “What? You got something else just as commonplace as you skippin’ class?”

“This is diff’rent.”

“How so?”

“’Cause you ain’t goin’ to school today either.”

Frank started to speak, but closed his mouth. He hadn’t missed a school day in three years. He was proud of his attendance record.  He was the iron man of Holmes high.

Eric grabbed his arm.

“Let me go.”

“Sum’p’tin big came up and I need you.”

“Need me?”

“I need you to drive me somewhere.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see when we get there.”

“I’m going to school.”

“You can’t. You won’t.”

“Bet I am.”

“No, no, this is too big to miss.”

“What is?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Surprise me after school.”

“Be a buddy, Frank, I need you now.”

“Why?”

“To take me there.”

“Where.’

“To town.”

“How about right after school?”

“No.”

“Yes”

“I’m telling you. You ain’t goin’ to school today.”

“What’s to stop me?”

“Your curiosity.”

And Frank stopped. People said ‘Curiosity killed the cat’. Frank knew the end of the saying: ‘but satisfaction brought him back.” He had to admit curiosity was clawing at his brain.

“You still goin’ to school?” Eric had a smile.

“Maybe…not…”

“Here’s what we do. You drive to my place and pick me up as usual, see, but instead of goin’ to school we go to where I tell you. Now go back to bed like nothin’s different.”

Frank nodded. Eric ran up the grassy back to the side of the house and down the highway toward his own home. Frank went back to bed. The sheets were cold. He had just fallen back to sleep when his mother called him.


Excerpt from Forty Dollar Car, 1969



When Richard finally got his driver’s license he couldn’t wait to show off his car. He picked me up for school instead of the other way around.

Actually, I seldom drove to school because at this point I only lived a quarter mile away. I still had a bus stop, but it wasn’t at the top of our lane any more. It was across from the entrance of Cadmus Road. Cadmus Road intersected Route 100 an eighth of a mile south of my house. If I took the school bus I would walk an eighth of a mile to ride another eighth of a mile to the school. How dumb is that? I generally just walked to school my final year by cutting straight across Bishop’s field. Back the year before they built the new high school and we still went to NORCO I would have picked Richard up and drove us the five miles. 

So that morning, the official launching of the rebuilt Plymouth, we drove up the winding drive to the new school parking lot. As we passed one corner of the building Richard spied some girls walking toward it. He blew his horn to attract their attention. He then hit his brake hard and immediately stomped back down on the throttle to make his tires squeal. His attempt to impress the girls by laying rubber might have worked except for something he forgot. All the time we worked on the car he had the hood removed and leaning against a side of the garage. It made for more room when fiddling with the engine. He was so anxious to show off his car once he got his license we simply dropped the hood back in place. He didn’t want to take the time to fasten the bolts.


So, when Richard hit his brakes hard his Plymouth stopped, but his hood didn’t. When he stomped the gas the hood was suspended midair directly in front of  the car. He had the distinction of a head on collision with himself. 

He impressed those girls, but not the way he intended. The loud crash attracted the attention of every other kid in earshot, too. They were all looking over to see what happened and having a good laugh. 


Richard and I spend days searching wrecking yards for a replacement hood. He finally took one off an old Ford. It fit width wise, but was too long for the Plymouth. He bolted it on anyway, because what else could he do? It gave his car a nice overbite-look.


That summer they elected me President of Methodist Youth Fellowship at Bethel. I took my office seriously as an opportunity. The problem was I wasn’t a True Believer. I was a skeptic. I never had formed a firm foundation of faith. I had went to Sunday school as a child because my parents made me.  I was at Bethel’s MYF because it was more fun than Sunday school or church service and it gave me an hour or so alone on Sunday mornings to pursue my carnal pleasures. 

 Still, I took it on myself to increase attendance at MYF. I succeeded.


Mr. and Mrs. Keene were the advisors for MYF. They were very nice people. I remember when they had us all to their place for a Halloween hayride and cookout. The cookout was hot dogs on a stick over an open fire, but they are good cooked that way. They had a son, Lane Keene (pictured left). He was a great guy. He had been President before me, but he was two years older and had  graduated and left MYF for college.

Lane had suffered a tragic accident


the year before. He was a hunter. He had gone up into the woods outside Pottstown to hunt with a bow and arrow. Somehow the string either broke or slipped the notch. The recoil when the tension was released send the string at him like a whip and it cut his one eyeball in half. He was out alone. He had to hike back to his car and drive himself several miles to the Pottstown hospital all the while holding his eyeball in place with one hand. Lane had a glass eye after that. 


His parents were excited at how MYF grew that year. They never caught on to what I was doing. I had changed the meeting format from lectures to a discussion group. This was supposed to engross the teens more in Scripture by allowing the group to dissect the chapters we read each week. I told them I would play Devil’s Advocate, just to stir up the conversation. They did not catch my real purpose. I was ridiculing the Bible in the guise of leading a study of it. 

Kids never heard this kind of hard questioning in a church. They came to join the arguments. It could get quite lively and that only drew more kids to the Sunday night meetings. I was an agnostic as a teen. I didn’t disbelieve in the possibility of God; I just questioned everything people said about Him. My skepticism would get even worse when I reached my twenties.

I was also learning through this experience that I could lead and manipulate people.


Let’s make an observation about diversity issues. Downingtown had seethed with prejudices underneath its small town peacefulness. Social convention had put Blacks in a separate classroom until fifth grade, sat them in the balcony at the movie theaters and forced them to live in separate enclaves. The greater population looked down on Italians and this ethnic group also lived in a separate section called Johnsontown. In fact, a number of the people around my home took a dim view of any Roman Catholic group. There was one Jewish family, my friend Stuart’s family, and their son was hassled by students and teachers alike. People seldom discussed sex and never mentioned Homosexuality, and friends like Ronald kept such desires secret.

We did not have these problems at NORCO or Owen J. or in this northern district of Chester County. Was it that we were more enlightened? No, it was because so few inhabitants fell into those categories. People may have accepted Italians without any bias as far as I saw, since I seldom saw any Italians. Most of us lived in small villages or farms scattered about the countryside. There weren’t any enclaves, just individual families. I don’t know if there were any Jews. There weren’t any racial problems because there was only one race. There was some whispering going about during my senior year because one new student in the Freshman class was half White and half Black. That was the extent of our Black population. There was still no mention of Homosexuality. I guess we didn’t have any. That last statement was tongue-in-cheek by the way. My French grade was going to make an amazing comeback in Twelfth Grade under the admiring eyes of Mr. Elliot.

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

CHAPTER 74: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE POET -- WILD BILL & FRANTIC FRANK

 CHAPTER 74.  1957 - 1958





 Richard broke up with Barbara Shumate sometime in December., 1957, not for the first nor last time.. Christmas break wasn’t even over before he asked me to drive him up into the countryside above St. Peters Village (pictured left The Village of St. Peters).


 The first time we made the trip he told me to bring my ice skates,
we were going skating on a pond near there. The winter was fairly cold and most area ponds had frozen solid. To me it seemed silly to be driving all the way out to St. Peters just to ice skate. St. Peters was straight down Route 23 to Knauertown, then a right up a sharp hill for a bit. It was about four and a half miles from my house. We had two perfectly good ice skating ponds near us we usually went to. They were literally close enough to walk to if we wished. One was just south of Bucktown in the heart of Pughtown, next to an auto repair shop and café. (Neither the repair shop/café nor the lake exists anymore. A garden center and mulch business sit where they once sat.)



The Pughtown Café was like some out west middle-of-nowhere movie set. Actually, an auto repair shop and café was a pretty good idea in a place without much else around.  You stop in to have your car fixed a
nd have a bite to eat while you wait. I forget the people’s name that owned it, might have been Webber. We would stop there sometimes for a burger. The man ran the auto repair shop and his wife took care of the café. They had a son and he had an extreme case of spinal curvature, much worse than mine. It quite disfigured him.


 The other nearby pond was larger and further south on the Pottstown Pike, but not far. We knew it as Prizer’s Pond because it was just past Prizer’s Appliance and Equipment Store. Prizer’s store sat next to the creek Richard and I use to fish. (Left, Prizer’s, now Little’s of Pottstown.)

 We liked to go down to Prizer’s Pond on winter nights when it was frozen over. There was this island in the middle of it you could skate to and we built a fire on the side of the island to roast hot dogs or marshmallows. We had no idea of this pond being anything more than a patch of country water. I knew there were people named Rodebaugh living in the area, but not much about them. Turns out they owned the property where we skated and lived in a home nearby. They called their place Welkinweir. The lake front area was undeveloped when I was a teen, just fields around the lake. In 1964 The Rodebaughs became founding members of the Green Valleys Association. The place is now the headquarters of that Association and the property, including Prizer’s Pond is part of the Welkinweir Garden and Conservation Park listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

I wonder if you can still ice skate there. I know there was no little bridge over to the island back in the day.

Anyway, as we drove down this twisty road above St. Peters, Richard pointed out a country pond and said that was where we were going. It was a new one to me and didn’t look as large as our others, especially Prizer’s. I was pulling over to the side of the road, but he directed me to keep going down the road to a lone house I could see in the distance. We went to the door and this slim girl answered. Her name was Lenore and she was Richard’s latest flame. Limousine Larry was putting on his chauffeur cap again for Richard and his girl. 


 I liked Lenore (pictured left) the moment I met her. In all honesty, I wished she was my girl, but I never tried to take her from Richard. Picking up a couple girls on the beach was kind of fair game, but he had already established a relationship with this girl. Yet, I really did like her a lot.

I don’t know how to describe her, except she had a waif aura about her. I don’t mean she was hopeless or abandoned, she wasn’t. She lived in a decent home with her parents. It was just her look, a bit thin with big eyes. It was a look that appealed to me. She was also a very sweet girl. Barbara had been somewhat brash and loud. Lenore was a gentler soul. 


Richard went with her for most of that year, but he wasn’t terribly nice to her. I saw him slap her a couple times. I’m sure it was this kind of thing that broke up his relationship with Barbara. He had this bully streak in him. I really don’t understand why women put up with guys that hit them for one minute, let alone a season or two.

 


Not too distant from Prizer’s was an old house up a hill halfway between Pughtown and  Bucktown. In was renovated in the last decades and you will see a large sign before the lane up to it there along Route 100. The sign announces Meredith

Manor. It is now a historic site, former home of Simon Meredith. I didn’t even know it was there, although it had to be,  when I was a teenager up the hill in Bucktown.

Simon Meredith was a relative of mine, of course, so was his son Hugh. Simon named his son after the namesake for Pughtown, Hugh Pugh. Simon had great hopes for his son Hugh Meredith, but the boy was something of a  wastrel.Simon made a deal with Benjamin Franklin. Simon would finance Franklin’s first print shop if Benjamin would make Hugh his partner. Young Ben needed the funds and though this a fine idea.  Simon, on the other hand, hoped Franklin would straighten his son out. 


This did not happen. Hugh Meredith continued to be a drunkard and carouser resulting in he and Franklin going their separate ways.




In March of ’58  a Blizzard hit the county. There had been a bad blow in February all  ready, but the one that struck on March 19, 1958 was one of the worse ever. It shut down the whole east coast from New England south. The weather was bad across the whole country. Mike Todd (pictured right with Elizabeth Taylor just before leaving on his fatal flight), the filmmaker married to Elizabeth Taylor died in a New  Mexico Place crash.





The plane had iced up. Elizabeth was supposed to go with him on the flight, but she came down with a virus and he made her stay home. Kirk Douglas was asked to go along with Todd, but Douglas’ wife had a premonition and insisted he stay home. 


The storm iced us up as well,


it hit the area hard. The two plus feet of snow that drifted shut all the nearby roads also brought down the power lines. The county contracted Elmer Wilson, Richard’s dad, as a snowplow driver. He had a plow attached to the front of his dump truck, but even he and the other road crews couldn’t get out. The Pottstown Pike totally shut down.


There had been no real prediction of snow in the AM on March 18, in fact, what we were getting was a light rain throughout the morning. The changeover began in the afternoon and by the time the storm basically cleared out of the region on March 23 it had left a good deal of snow behind. I believe the 60 inches that fell in the Poconos remains the deepest single snowfall in the state’s history. 


 We had nothing. The power was out from Wednesday the 19th 


through Sunday the 23rd, and no electricity meant no heat or water either. ( My photo on the right was of our backyard.) We were a country household, which means water was from a well and the pump ran on electricity. We couldn’t bathe or flush the toilet. Mr. Bishop allowed us to use his springhouse to get some water. He sent Dave Bishop through the mess with a coal oil heater we used for heat, huddling about it in the living room.


It took them five days after the storm passed that Sunday to get the main roads clear and the power lines back up. I was out of school for a week and some of those on the back roads were out much longer, some nearly a month.


We could get water from the Bishop springhouse to drink and I use to carry buckets of water from there to pour into the toilet to flush it. Bathing was also in the cold spring water toted into our house, so we didn’t bathe a lot. Food was sandwiches or anything else we could eat cold.  We’d put some food outside to keep it from spoiling.


When the roads finally got cleared, my Dad and I shoveled out our driveway. This took a while, because the snow was deep and our driveway long. 


But we survived.




Sometime after the Blizzard I saw this little ad in a magazine. It showed a character of Bob Hope and said, “Can you draw me?” I looked at it and  said, “Sure, I can draw that.”


I got some paper and I drew my version of the


figure. I clipped and filled out the coupon with the ad and mailed it with my sketch. In a week I received this Art Test in the mail. I completed it and sent it back. Another week went by and I got the results, which was acceptance into a  correspondence school in Minnesota called Art Instruction, Inc. One of

the members of the Board was Charles Schulz, one of my boyhood idols, the creator of “Peanuts” He  was an instructor for this school before he succeeded as a cartoonist. (pictured left is Schulz leaning on a desk in the back during his instructor days at Art Instruction, Inc).


(By the way, does it strike anyone that the artist in this ad on the
right bears a resemblance  to Hugh Hefner, creator of “Playboy”?)



All a sudden cartoonist was what I wanted to be, as well as a writer. I was already drawing cartoons and I thought studying art might help me do a better job.  The only obstacle was convincing my mother to pay  the tuition.  



By the way, the young girl living in


Drexel Hill, whom I didn’t even know
yet, had some artistic ambitions as well. She wasn’t taking any course, just practicing sketching on her own. Her drawing of a face is on the right.






My mother, who had artistic ambitions of her own as a girl. (I wish her drawings of birds hadn’t got lost over the years;.she  was quite good.) She agreed to do this on condition I didn’t tell my father. Not only would he object to spending the money, he would take a very dim view of his son doodling little drawings for a living.


Soon my first lesson book arrived and I dove into it. I wasn’t doing so hot at NORCO, but for this semester at Art Instruction, Inc. I was doing mostly A-grade work. 



I wasn’t thrilled with drawing so many pots and pans and dishes, but the course was commercial art.  In was a great break when they sent me the lessons of figure drawing. I could draw faces and figures quite well, besides the examples of the female form fit right in with my


lustful desires.



Ever Since I got my driver’s license I had become everyone’s chauffeur. I was taking Richard places, first with Barbara and now Lenore. I was also now taking Ronald to see a girl sometimes. I think her name was Vivian Beale. I remember he was going with a girl older than us. I use to drive him to her house in Unionville and I think even to some dances, where I did my usual stag, by the wall posing while my buddy cut a rug. Ronald liked to dance and was pretty good at cutting a rug.I had a new challenge, find someone for me.



The Junior Prom was approaching and I really wanted  to go, I
mean, the Junior Prom was a big deal, but It was strictly couples. You couldn’t attend stag. If I was going to go I needed a girl to go with me. I am not sure whatever happened between me and Helen Ann Seibold. I believe she may have changed schools, but anyway I wasn’t  seeing her anymore and hadn’t been for a while.


I wasn’t going our with Anna Shantz either now.


So who?


A lot of the girls I knew already went steady. Others were out of my league, at least in my mind. I might become friends with Dorothea Lederer (pictured above

right), Jeanette Richards (pictured left as Homecoming  Queen),or Kathy Davis (pictured right below), but them agreeing to date me would be like Betty or Veronica turning down Archie for Jughead. They were two of the most popular girls in the school, way above my pay grade.


I needed someone who probably


didn’t have a boyfriend, but being as shallow as any other teenage boy, she couldn’t be a complete dog either. I know that’s cruel, but that is reality


That’s how a sixteen-year old boy’s mind worked. He might be a dog himself, but his girl couldn’t be. 



I was sitting in Driver’s Education feeling sorry for myself, not an unusual occupation of mine that year, when I looked over at the girl sitting next to me (pictured right). I knew she wasn’t popular with the boys. She had blond hair, but not a flattering hairdo. She was a bit on the heavy side, not fat, but a shade past what guys considered shapely. She also wore glasses, never a big winner in the dating game during those days. Those glasses were probably her biggest

drawback, says the skinny glasses-wearing dude. She actually was  kind of cute if you looked behind the glasses and hairstyle. I figured she didn’t have a date so I swiveled about in my seat and asked her.


She accepted right away. Her name was Margaret Whitely, but everyone called her Peggy.


I bought her a corsage. I was going for the pin on type, but my mom talked me into a big floppy wrist corsage that I reluctantly agree to. After all, mom was paying.  When I picked her up I discovered her gown was too low for discretely pinning on a beast corsage.


I rented a tuxedo. It had a white jacket and a red plaid cummerbund. It cost $10 for the day. At least I didn’t have to buy a gown like the girls did. I picked her up in my Ford. There was none of this nonsense of today where the guy shows up in a limousine. What a waste.


 I was agape when I walked in and Peggy came out in her gown. I


didn’t know what to say. There was a new style taking hold in the country at the time, but this was the first I had seen a real live person wearing one. First there had been the sack dress followed by the Chemise followed by the Trapeze Dress. Her dress fell somewhere in that line, perhaps a combination. Actually its colors matched up perfectly with my cummerbund and bow tie. Looking at it now I don’t think it was bad looking at all, but in 1959 it was radical. It even inspired me to write a poem, “Walking, Talking Sack Dress”.


I was walking one night a year ago,

Walking down a shady lane

Through the snow.

When I heard something in the brush ahead.

The rustling it made almost scared me dead.

I went closer to it,

Trying to see.

When something jumped out

And headed for me.


It was the worse sight and you know the rest.

It was a walking, talking sack dress!


Oh, is it a monster?

Or is it a disease?

It was a walking,

Talking chemise!


LEM 1958


My next thought was one of relief that mom had insisted on that wrist corsage. As the song “The Mountains of Mourne” expressed it,

 

“Well if you'll believe me, when asked to a ball,

They don't wear no top to their dresses at all.”



There was no top to this thing she wore at all, no straps, no hint of a sleeve. This dress began at the top of her breasts and went straight down from there. Well not straight, she was fairly round in that area. There wasn’t a safe ruffle or flap where a shy guy could have pinned on a flower without a blush 


The Junior Prom was very nice. Peggy favored slow dances more than The Bop or Jitterbug. (I’m not sure whether she didn’t know how to do them or if she just liked to dance close. It was definitely cheek-to-cheek; she was almost as tall as I.) We didn’t have any trouble talking, which is always a good thing. 


 The Junior Prom was rather romantic. It was in the school gym


(where else), but they did a great job of disguise. They called it “Almost Paradise” and gave it a slight French feel. The décor made our tables appear as if sitting at a sidewalk café. There was blue everywhere in the place, even above. They hung parachutes of blue and white cloth from the ceiling, with glittering stars hanging off the material. They even had a big silver moon hanging over the middle of the floor. There was live music from the David Oliver Orchestra, whoever they were.


By the time the David Oliver Band played “Goodnight, Ladies” I had a steady girlfriend.


Peggy’s parents liked me, especially her mother. I don’t know what it was, but girls’ mothers always liked me, sometimes more than their daughters did. It was a good thing they trusted me so much. I had a bad habit of keeping my dates out all night. I think we got home from the Junior Prom at 6:00 the next morning.


It wasn’t that I ever slept with any of my girlfriends or did something untoward. It was only we had a good time and found things to do, sometimes at a distance, or we rode around all night or we just sat somewhere and talked. I never was very aware of the time if things were going well and my parents never questioned or scolded me for late hours. I didn’t give the clock much thought. For some reason the parents of my dates (most, not all) seldom objected either. 


Eleventh Grade came to an end with a sigh from me. It was over and I passed by the skin of my teeth. I had one more year to get through and I would be finished with school forever, so I thought.