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 11th 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.
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).
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.
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