CHAPTER 113: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE GRUNGY DAYS AND HIPPIE NIGHTS 1967

 CHAPTER 113.  A WRITER APPEARS.   1967-1968

 

No one really knowns anyone. Not even a spouse really knows the person they married. We have a closet of suits for every occasion and that is what others see of us, our suits – costumes, if you wish. Most days I would wake up and put on my work suit. Now for many decades my work suit was an actual business suit, pants, jacket, vest, necktie and shirt. It was deeper than just the clothes I donned, though. There was a whole persona that said, “right now I am a business man.”  When I came home and on weekends I put on my “husband-at-home” suit. We need to understand we all live different lives every day. During some periods we interact with others in a certain way and during other periods we interact with others entirely differently. These persons we become seldom meet and all the people in our life know us differently. 

 On the left Lois is coming out of a store in Philadelphia. I guess she is  in her young suburban housewife “out- shopping” suit. On the right is Lois in her “hippie“ suit, which is another person she she became in 1967. 

We had our secret identities, like

Batman and Robin. By day we were grunts earning a living; by night we turned into Hippies, and the moon didn’t even need to be full.

As I previously explained, Atlantic finally kept their promise and gave me the Level 6 Job of Ledger Clerk in Accounts Receivable, a department with about 54-55 clerks working in it. Meanwhile, Bob Kane got my old position as Group Leader in Addressograph. As I turned over the keys to that kingdom, so to speak, I would meet with Bob over a couple weeks to show him the ropes. During this period he would sometimes mutter a complaint or two about his editing “The Communicator”. 

“I can’t get enough well written pieces to fill the paper,” he said. “There just isn’t that much talent available at the school.”

 Community College of Philadelphia is a two-year school leading to an Associate Degree. Today in has nearly 35,000 students, but in early 1966 it was a brand new institution. It was founded in September 1965 locating its campus in the old Snellenburg Department Store’s Men’s Annex on 11^th Street. It may have still been getting its feet wet in the academic world. I do not know what enrollment was in those beginning semesters. Maybe it was still small in number that it didn’t have students interested in writing for the paper.

Nonetheless, I mentioned to Bob that I was a writer. I really didn’t have much in the way of credits to offer. I had written several things in high school, I won a prize in Writers Digest’s Short Fiction Contest and attracted the attentions of a well-known agent on the recommendations of “Redbook” editors,, but beyond that I hadn’t actually published anything. I could show him a drawer full of rejection slips, all neatly ordered, but I didn’t. He simply accepted my claim and my offer to write for his paper.

 There was one hitch. My life is a whole slew of hitches. I couldn’t write as myself because only students of the college were allowed to write for the newspaper. So, okay, I needed to write under some kind of non de plume. Now, non de plume is French. I could have said a Pen Name, but I had three years of French in high school, so let’s make some use of that, although just about everyone already knows the term nom de plume and didn’t need all those hours of congregating and memorizing vocabulary. Nom, of course, means name. No mystery there. “De” means “of” and that the word is masculine. I never understood how words could have a sex. Perhaps it is because they were Romance Languages. Anyway, “Plume” does not mean “Pen”.  French for pen is stylo. “Plume” means “feather”. Non de plume is “name of feather”. Perhaps they had a quill in mind when they coined the phrase.

I needed a “feather” name so no-one would really know who I
was. When I began in Accounts Receivable I was introduced around and one of the Ledgerman, a fellow who fancied himself a wit, greeted me as “Larry Looper”, a pun on the name of a deep-voiced singer on the Lawrence Welk TV Show named Larry Hooper (right). That was all it took, too. That stuck. I could not escape him or any of the Ledgermen calling me Larry Looper forever and a day, except over time the nickname got a nickname and I became plain Loop.

I don’t know, Loop seemed like the perfect feather name for this assignment.

   Now what I needed was subject matter to scribble about. I began to think about hot topics with college students. There were three issues getting a lot of attention; the growing Viet Nam war, drug use and the God is Dead Movement.  I was well aware of this as a student at Temple and because I lived just off the campuses of Penn  and Drexel Institute. There was a good deal of activity around these controversieson any of Philadelphia’s campuses. I saw the rallies and protests signs tied to the trees up at Temple and Penn as I came and went to work or class. Basely, the college crowd was against the Viet Nam War, for drug use and believed God was indeed dead.

So, since this was the popular college kids’ stand on war, drugs, and God I would do a series of articles on these issues, but would I justify the stance of the students? No way, Jose, you can bet your sweet bippy on that. Just to rattle everyone’s cages I would take an opposing view.

 

The first article I wrote was “A Work in Needlepoint”, which belittled the taking of drugs.

I followed up with support of our troops in Viet Nam in “Be a Man, My Son”. 

Finally, I turned theologian and did a piece called, “God Resurrected”.

Did I believe everything I wrote in my articles? No,  not really. I didn’t care really. I could look at an argument and like Joni Mitchell see both sides now and in many ways I was a blank slate. I didn’t hold strong opinions on any of these issues — yet anyway. As far as Viet Nam, well I had already been classified at 1-Y, man. I was safe. I was removed from that skirmish and my article neither defended nor condemned the war. It really tried to tell people to cool it on attacking guys in uniform.

And that is the truth, I suppose.  They are just boys.  The generals and war correspondents are wrong.  They must be wrong.  In this country, we must have a better rule for judging manhood than how many friends he has seen killed, how many bullets he has had tear through his flesh, how many he has killed.  A person does what he must do, but that does not determine manhood, many people in this country still believe it does.

                                (From Be a Man, My Son, 1966, The Communicator, Philadelphia)

As for the “God is Dead” thing? We’ll be back to that whole faith thing soon, because I was on the verge of losing what little faith I had and it wasn’t that I would turn to any philosophy saying God had died. I would simply reach a point where I didn’t believe God ever existed.

Well, I can’t report first hand on the viewing.  I missed that, but I imagine it was typical of wakes: solemn, religious and with the departing attendants murmuring about how good the old guy looked, just like he was asleep. Why he looked in his prime, it’s a shame he was struck down so soon. Then they would say: Perhaps the truth of the matter is he had grown somewhat senile in the later years. Somebody was probably quick to point out that he had lived a more secluded life in recent years. And then, I am sure; the mourners all went to some cloister and talked in hushed tones of rebuilding their lives without him.  Perhaps it was in these sad moments they recalled that the deceased had a survivor, his son.  They decided to make the son feel the lost less by paying him some honor and respect, and then regulating him to a silent partnership.

                       From “God Resurrected” 1967. The Communicator).

 

I did have convictions about drug use. They weren’t for me. I
never took drugs. It had nothing to do with morals. It had much to do with ego. I believed I was pretty smart and rather creative. I had no intensions of doing anything that might mess up this glorious brain; therefore, I never experimented with, tried, tested or took drugs, even while LSD was all the rage. the heck with anything Timothy Leary (right)was spouting.

Alcohol? Well, that was a different horse that I would ride.

Meanwhile, a great opportunity blossomed after my articles began appearing in “The Communicator”. I don’t know if Bob Kane spread the word or what, but people began coming to me for writing advice. Soon it went beyond just advice and became a business proposition. For a small fee I would write your college essay, term paper, whatever. Loop became a full-blown ghost. 

It was a cheat, but for these guys and gals who took up my services it paid off. Everything I wrote earned them an A. These people were getting better marks on their papers than I was getting on my own. I was taking Composition at Temple and getting mostly Cs, but at La Salle and St. Joseph’s University I was a straight A student, even though I wasn’t really there. (My own English grades would jump up to “A” once I was finished with Composition.)

I viewed myself as a mercenary, a gun for hire; have typewriter – will travel.

The other benefit was I was becoming part of a group. We were much alike, in age  certainly, but also that we all worked a day job, then went to college at night and we all wanted to make it in The Arts someday. And when the sun went down, we considered ourselves part of the street scene and we gravitated toward the Hippies, for the Hippies had arrived.

The ads for a new film invited the public for “an evening at George and Martha’s for fun and games”.  But with this movie, the fun and games come afterward, when you sat in your darkened bedroom, relaxed and released from the stun of the evening.  That is when you try to reconstruct what you have heard and seen in that violent living room or that empty roadhouse or that misty back yard.

What has happened? You are not certain that you know.  But inside something keeps prickling at your mind.  It isn’t the language, never heard before in a movie.  That lost its shock after the opening scene and became a part of the life before you after that.

This is not the place to analyze the underlying meanings.  They are deep, detailed and difficult to put in true perspective, because they are swamping in their ability to dredge up your own doubts and misgivings.  No, this is simply a review to determine the value of the picture to entertain and the abilities of the four principle actors to convince.

Excerpt from: “Movie Review: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” 

Copyright 1966

Writing as Girard Neville  

St. Joseph’s University

October 1966

Philadelphia, Pa.

 In James Thurber’s “University Days” you are immediately struck by his use of the word ‘I’.  But you are struck with laughter. And you are laughing at the narrator; therefore, you cannot think of the ‘I’ as egotistical.  Instead, you think, “that takes nerve”.  The narrator is picturing himself as the classic oddball, the original born loser.  The only person he allows might possibly be mentally inferior to himself is a football player, who has an intellectual level only a degree higher than moronic.  This is where you gain your first clue to the meaning of the piece.  You have known such favored people as the football player.  People, who are worse at some things than yourself, yet are subsidized by some authority because of an extreme talent in a minor area.  This forces you back through the whole essay and your own life.  You suddenly realize that everybody has experienced Thurber’s failings, seen only unfocused milk through the microscope lens.  You understand why the essay is humorous.  It is because you personally identify with the situation.  At the end, you can say, as you read, that you are not reading an essay written in the first person singular.  You are reading a comment written in the second person plural. 

Excerpt from, “On ‘I, James Thurber’” 

Copyright 1967

Writing as James Tweedy

LaSalle College

February 1967 

Philadelphia, Pa.

“Arthur Miller is one of those playwrights, like Thornton Wilder, whose reputation rests on a handful of plays.”₁

Do these two playwrights have anything else in common?  If we compare the most famous play of each, will we find common points?  Many similarities can be found between the plays Our Town by Wilder and Death of a Salesman by Miller, as well as several contrasts. These similarities and contrasts can be found in the views and techniques that the authors used.  It is intended below to clarify these particular points through comparing the views, characters and basic plots of each play.

Both plays experiment with presentation. Each play uses a unique stage setting.  Our Town was acted on a bare stage with a minimum of props, while Death of a Salesman used a single set encompassing transparent canvas walls to facilitate time and space changes.  This was very effectual, because most of those changes occurred in Willie Loman’s mind. In Our Town the scene was not set by the use of devices or props, but by the narrative of a central character called the Stage Manager. This character was interesting in many ways for he was both within and without the action. The Stage Manager also acted as liaison between the audience and the play, and forced the audience to become part of the play and not merely its observer.  Miller was willing to be more conservative and allowed the audience its traditional passivity.  But despite this difference of presentation both plays made us feel deeply and search for the basic truth that would relate them to our lives.  One of the main truths in each play may be the misguided values of the characters.

Excerpt from, “Death of a Salesman and Our Town: A Comparison”

Copyright 1968

Writing as Joseph S. Rubio

St. Joseph University

May 1968

Philadelphia, Pa.

The unique government of the United States is a popular subject for discussion today.  It is almost a national parlor game to analyze its structure and institutions.  Yet the game actually began at the very beginning of the nation, before the Constitution was ratified, and the original players were more serious.  The players were jay, Madison and Hamilton, three men who believed strongly that a new and untried government built on freedom, justice, and a system of checks and balances, designed out of British history and Lockyan philosophy, was needed in America.  The prize they sought was approvable by New York State and the method used was persuasion.  They wrote the federalist papers explaining the need for the new Constitution.

2The Constitution provides for three branches of government, each acting to compliment and check the others. One is the legislative.  Its purpose is to make the laws.  The lawmakers are formed into two bodies, the House of Representatives and the Senate. A second branch is the Executive, where the authority lies to pass the legislature’s laws into practice.  This branch is known to the public in the image of the president.  The third branch of the government is the Judicial, which upholds the laws passed by Congress and the President.

To the people of the United States, and the world, the main symbol of the United States government is the Executive.  And perhaps this is justified, for this office is touched on both sides by the other branches and has influence over them in many cases.  It is the keystone.

Excerpt from “Executive and The Federalist Papers”

Copyright 1968

Writing as Joseph S. Rubio

St. Joseph University

October 1968

Philadelphia, Pa.

CHAPTER 112: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE HAVE A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS 1966

 CHAPTER 112.  HAVE A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS.   1966

 

Yes, that is me in my black cowboy hat shoveling the walk in front of the house on Cobbs Street. Look out now, life matters began to pile up faster than the flakes outside. So yippee, let’s ride.

 Snow storms hit at Christmas time in 1966. The white stuff pretty
much socked us in. Winter kept hitting us and next thing I knew I couldn’t move my car.

We were snowbound. A few days before, when it wasn’t yet a blizzard, I had come home in the dark of evening and walked up from the bus stop on the street parallel to us. It was a slight upgrade and a bit slippery and halfway up I went face down. I lay looking straight at the ice and snow below me and then in the white I saw some green. I found some twenty dollar bills half buried. What a fortunate fall. I went the rest of the way with a smile on my face.

 

But everything about that white Christmas wasn’t worth dreaming about. Mr. Bing Crosby will you shut up about it for a while?   

 We did not live in the preferred sections of Drexel Hill with its large, stone Tudor homes. We lived in the blue-collar, just-making-it-by worker’s house; twin homes and narrow streets. With the snows came certain inconveniences for everyone, but the Township did plow out those fancier streets and those people’s trash and garbage did get picked up. Not so much along our more modest patch. Somehow the plows couldn’t meander down our way and because the streets weren’t plowed, neither could the garbage trucks meander our way either. Soon me were buried in snow and trash.

To get to anywhere we had to hike down to one of the main thoroughfares and catch a bus to 69^th Street where the stores were or where an El Train could be taken into the city. My wife  was setting off for some last minute Christmas shopping in 69^th Street. She had not stepped far from our house, only a couple of lot lengths, when flop, she fell down. It was an ordinance of the township that a homeowner clear the pavements before his domicile within 24 hours of the end of any snow fall. This was the only house on our block that shoveling did not occur, not only not within 24 hours, but ever. My wife was walking nearly a week after that particular storm when she skidded on the now packed down ice the un-shoveled snow had become. It was not a matter of ignorance of township rules on the part of the homeowner. He happened to be Republican Committeeman for our Ward in that very solidly (at the time) Republican district.

 This was the beginning of the radicalization of myself, my swing to all things left and the baby steps into the dark side.

I was angry about this uncleaned sidewalk. If I had fallen, no big deal, maybe I’d have found more money, but this was my wife who fell. This was the women who announced near the end of October that she was pregnant for a fourth time. This was a woman with a history of problems with preggers, mainly losing the baby halfway through the term. A fall could not be taken lightly.

Still I may have let it go if not for the Christmas incident. During Christmas week the high temperatures stalled out in the low 20s. It began snowing again at 2 AM on Christmas Eve and wouldn’t stop. We had a white on white Christmas and were snowed in. I could not dig the car out, besides the roads were in terrible shape.  My mother considered it a blue Christmas because Lois and I couldn’t make it to Bucktown this year. Christmas was delayed a day.

On the 26^th my father came down, professional driver that he was, and picked us up. We headed around the block. At that time traffic flowed in the opposite direction on Cobbs than it does today.  The unplowed streets made driving tricky. Dad turned up Bond Ave toward Penn. A week earlier the stop sign on Bond at Penn had been knocked over and was still not replaced. My dad did not know there was a stop on Bond, so he continued straight into the intersection and we almost collided with a car coming down Penn. 

 It was the combination of these things that led to the
confrontation. The missing stop sign, the unplowed streets, the piling up garbage, and my wife’s fall on the Republican Committeeman’s sidewalk. Our neighbors, Lois’s relative, several of whom also lived on Cobbs were also incensed by the township governments ignoring the needs in our neighborhood all the time in favor of the more money endowed a few blocks south. Her cousin Margie (On right died 2020)  began rallying the street and she suggested we all write letters to the township counsel and tell them what we thought of them.

Big talk and after the promises to do this, nobody did, except one person.

Me.

Yeah, I wrote my letter and I took to task that township government for their failures, their neglect of our streets and public safety, of the garbage haul favoritism, and not least of all the Committeeman who didn’t shovel his walk in compliance with township regulations him and his cronies help make. I’d hoped the weight of several similar letters would have some positive effect because I still believed government was run fairly.

There were no similar letters. My friends and neighbors and relatives had chickened out on writing their complaints and I was left standing alone.

One night there was a knock on our front door. It was the Republican Committeeman from up the street. He burst angrily into our living room and waggled his finger at me. “Who do you think you are?” he said. He then threatened to punch me in the nose. Ah, my letter must have had some effect!

“I shoveled my walk,” he yelled.

“No, no you didn’t and my wife fell on it. I mean, my wife is a high risk pregnancy and she could have miscarriage because you failed to shovel.”

“You…” he blustered, “you don’t even know where I live.”

“Yes, I do. Come on.”

I led him outside and up the street to his house. I stopped in the middle of his now ice-packed sidewalk and pointed to his porch. 

He said nothing. His face seemed about to explode and then he stomped up his front steps, entered his house and slammed the door behind.  I went back home.

I immediately wrote another letter to the Township Powers-what-be complaining about the confrontation and the threat to my nose. I expected some kind of action and sure enough I got it, if somewhat indirectly. 

 Lois’ aunt, who lived up the street and whose estranged husband worked for the sanitation department on a patronage job, called. She called because her husband had contacted her and said her nephew-in-law (meaning yours truly) better not write any more letters or the Township was going to fire him and then he wouldn’t have the money to pay her the support money. Well, hey yeah, I was going to write a letter of complain about this blackmail, I was ready to go to the public press, but the whole family was begging me to write no more. So, I acquiesced and sent no more letters.

 My turn to the left and beyond had begun and this would not be my last disillusionment with the government.

But the snows of December and Christmas were not the only things that befell me in 1966. After my breakdown I was bounced about a bit in Atlantic’s mailroom, eventually being given my old job back in Addressograph almost exactly a year (June 1965) from when I first thought I had escaped it. That was back in July of 1965. Dave Claypoole left Atlantic in the fall and returned to school full time. Ed left at year end for the same reason, beginning college full time that January, I believe to La Salle. I was left behind having this nightmare that I would forever cut plates and stamp envelopes. It was beginning to look as if those dolts from the Pennsylvania Labor Bureau who came to our school in my senior year might have been correct. I was destined to be a machine operator.

To replace Ed, we hired a young fellow named Bob Kane and he and I proved to be pretty compatible. He became my new confidant. He was working his way through evening college,  just as I was and
he had ambitions to be a writer someday, just as I did. But Bob wasn’t working all day and then plopping down at a typewriter to create stories and adding to a growing collection of rejection letters, as I was. He was actually involved in the craft. He was Editor of the Philadelphia Community College newspaper, called (how imaginative) “The Communicator”.

In April, Atlantic finally came through on their promise of giving me a true Level 6 job. I was moved up several floors to Accounts Receivable as a Ledger Clerk. Bob Kane got the Group Leader position in Addressograph. (He held the position through the summer, then he too left Atlantic to become a full time student.)

My time with Bob proved very opportune for me. It was to be the key to my own ambitions as a scrivener. It was to lead to a whole new group of friends and to further radicalization.

CHAPTER 111: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE BEETLES AND DEER DO NOT AGREE 1966

 CHAPTER 111  BEETLES AND DEER DO NOT GET ALONG. 1966 

On New Year’s 1966, my mother and grandmother came down to visit. This had been a tradition ever since we married. They would come visit to see our Christmas Tree and what presents we got. We got to eat this time, going to a Diner-Restaurant in Broomall, Pa. right along the West Chester Pike, called Country Squire. It was very popular and very good then and maybe still.

 It is still in business; I’ll have to try it again sometime. It would
be worth going just for their homemade banana cream pie. They had the best deserts.

It was celebrating a new beginning, and why not? You know when walking through the trails of Brandywine Creek State Park, there are ups and downs.  You may be down in a gully, stumbling over fallen trees and other obstacles, but you keep going. You are on a rough narrow trail going up and up and up through the Tulip Poplar Trees and then suddenly you crest the top of another Piedmont mount. You can see where you came, see the sky, breathe fresh air, hear the buzzing and tweets in the forest below you. And you hike on and the trail is easier for now. You hardly notice that the trail is on a slight decline, perhaps part of the reason it is easier, but slowly the trail begins to grow harsher and the surroundings darker. You are about to cross through another gorge.

 This is exactly how life is, gorges and mounts. Some days you are in the valley; other days atop the world. I’d just spent a couple years tripping over vines and fallen logs. I hadn’t taken much notice, but the end of the last year was an upward trail. I was actually getting near the top where I would see a new path to follow in the year ahead. I was getting near the peak on March 3 when I finally got moved out of that mailroom.  I was made a Ledger Clark in Accounts Receivable. It wasn’t really a promotion. I was still a Level 6, but who cared, I was back in a clerical department where opportunity existed.

 I sure didn’t know anything about accounting or bookkeeping when I took this job. I would know a lot by the time I got around to  studying this field in college. Atlantic Refining dominated the oil and gas market along the East coast in close competition with Sun Oil Co (Sunoco) of Newtown Square and Gulf, the Mellon Family oil company headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Of course, overshadowing all was Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, known by its initials, S. O.

Despite many nearby giants, Atlantic really viewed Esso as its
main rival. I never forgot a promotional meeting we had. Esso (now known as Exxon), it was claimed, had not originally intended the tiger to be their symbol. Instead they were going to use a bee. That is until somebody decided the Esso Bee might not work well.

If you worked as an accountant or bookkeeper in a small company, as I eventually would, almost everything regarding the financial records would fall into your lap. You might not be making the investment decisions, but you most likely were tracking and noting each jot and tittle of the business. You would maintain a number of journals and ledgers in your work and among these would be a ledger of accounts receivable, where you would show each customer, what they owed and what they paid.

 

Atlantic was much too large for such a system. They had thousands and thousands of customers and vendors that owed them money, way too many for some poor clerk, such as Bob Cratchit, to sit about and make a jot of each transaction. You really needed a computer, but desktop computers did not yet exist. There were ten-key adding machines and comptrollers on many a desk, but no smart device such as Compaq yet. An apple was something you might bring in your lunch bag, but you couldn’t do any calculations on it.

 Now there was a computer at Atlantic. It was this giant box in a
cold room somewhere on the sixth floor. It took in the impulses from many, many keypunched cards and returned updated cards. The processing of all these cards was done by the TAB Operations Unit of the company. Irony abounds, because it was for a TAB Operator job I had initially applied.  Furthermore, this unit existed on the 6^th floor. An operators job level was a 6. I was turned down for the job there because Atlantic didn’t start new hires at Level 6. Now here I was a Level 6 Ledger Clerk being fed my daily work by this very TAB Operation Unit.

My Ledger Clerk duties were relatively simply. I would receive big batches of punched cards at different times during the day. I would sort these by the Customer Number stamped upon the top and file them into trays stacked in cabinets surrounding our workspace. A secondary duty was sorting mail. 

Mail would arrive about four times a day. Mailboys (there were no Mailgirls, remember) would dump mail in a central location and all we Ledger Clerks would go to a centrally located table and sort the mail by region.  We also went to that centrally located table to do the bank deliveries. Big mail sacks would come in a couple times a day from a Post Office Box. These would be payments, usually a check or checks. We would again sort by region, run adding machine tapes to make certain the total received agreed to a summary sheet supplied by the banks and then send the payment on for processing, which meant

getting them punched on cards.  At the end of the day we would assemble for a last time and match the reports from the Ledgermen to the Summaries from the Banks and hope the final tallies equaled. If there was an unbalanced situation, then we had to stay and find the difference.

This sorting and match, I was good at this. I had been fast and accurate when doing burner oil tickets in Sales Accounting. I had been so with cutting and sorting plates in Addressograph. I was good at this in Accounts Receivable. 

I felt very confident by April and started telling Lois we needed a new car. I was at my parents on April 3 saying this and on April 4 I was at our insurance agent, a former science teacher, named James “Bugsy: Moyer buying insurance on our new 1966 VW Beetle. On the 8^th I stopped at my parents and gave my mom and grandmother a ride. I was careful to pick a night when my father would be on the road. Oh, he was unhappy with me. I Had bought a foreign car’ not just foreign either, but a Nazi Automobile. This was Hitler’s car; he had ordered it up.  My father felt we should buy nothing not “Made in the USA”. The only thing I could have done worse was buy some “Japmobile”. His word, not mine.

 People scoffed at the Beetle. They asked where the peddles were.
Some told me it would not make it up hills. I liked it. Sometimes it ran a bit slow up those Pennsylvania hills, but it always made it up them. Lois and I had our struggles, too, with the hills of life, but we always made it up them.

There were some humorous instances with the VW Bug. One time I came out of my father-in-law’s house and there was this strange guy sitting on the road surface behind my Beetle. (It was dark blue, by the way.) He had the hood up and he appeared to be tinkering with the engine (which were in the rear of Beetles). I walked up behind him, leaned over his shoulder and asked, “What are you doing?”

He picked up another tool and said, “I’m checking out my sister’s car. She’s been having some problems with it lately.”

“That’s nice of you,” I said, “but this is my car.”

He was very flustered and apologetic. I told him not to worry about it, all these VWs looked alike, honest mistake. I said to Lois afterwards, “Maybe I should have let him tune it up before telling him anything.”

 Another time Lois was out in the thing and she picked up some coffee at a deli. She was coming back on State Road when the person ahead stopped suddenly for a changing light and she had to slam on the brakes. When she did, the coffee cups began to flip out of the cup holders and she reached to grab them, let her foot up, and slammed into the other guy’s vehicle. No one was hurt and his car didn’t have any damage so they just went their separate ways, but the VW had a large dent in the front fender.  Lois drove home, went straight into the garage on the back alley and the next day she got a rubber mallet and pounded the dent out. I would have never known if a couple weeks later she didn’t confess it to me.

 Once she was out driving and as she crossed the Trolley Tracks
along Garrett Road the car stalled. She couldn’t get it started. There she was stuck broadside across the Trolley Tracks. On the corner was a pizza shop with a number of its usual local loiters hanging outside. Four of these men walked over, picked up the VW and carried it off the tracks. Then they helped her get it started.

 We were coming home one night, very late. Cruising up West Chester Pike. We had arrived somewhere around the Riddle Creek State Park. The whole area was deserted and dark, except for two eyes staring at me from the middle of the road ahead. It was a very stately Buck standing in the lanes. It wasn’t moving. I pressed hard on the brakes and all would have been well as I came to a stop just short of this animal. But like that infamous rolling rock, the deer did not remain frozen in place. Just as I stopped, it leapt forward, rolled up on the front hood and  then rolled down out of sight

 I bolted from the car to see if it were hurt, but there was no sign of the beast. Apparently it had simply rolled up that rounded slant that was the front end of a Beetle and off again, picked it self up, dusted it self off and took off for places unknown. I drove on and at Newtown Square I spied a police car in a gas station. I went in and told the officers of the deer and then we went home. I am sure that deer was fine, but my VW suffered a huge dent in the truck lid (which is actually the front of that car.) This one Lois couldn’t hammer out.

Other than a few hitches with the car, life was zinging along on a smooth path, but  remember those easy paths so often headed downhill. One of the speed bumps ahead was we had to take Lois’ grandmother, Zoe Schnell Rabb, to the hospital to have her breast removed.

And of yeah, on October 30 we spent the evening at my parents, until 11:00 PM. Lois was announcing she was pregnant for the fifth time.

Happy Halloween!