CHAPTER 81: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE POET -- NOWHERE MAN AND THE WOMEN HE LOVED

 CHAPTER 81.  1959

 It was a lovely drive up her curvy lane surrounded by trees dancing in a summer breeze.  I crossed a bridge over a creek and pulled into a space for cars. They had dammed the left side of the creek to form the swimming pool. When I stepped out of my Ford I heard classical music playing, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake I think. It was a very romantic scene. There was a small patio in front of the house with a large speaker upon it. The tall blond girl was standing there. She was wearing a one-piece bathing suit. It fit her very well.  Her hair was blowing in the soft wind. She wasn’t wearing glasses. She looked absolutely incredible. I walked up to her and smelled the delightful scent of her perfume. Her name was Sonja Katherine Kebbe and I was immediately and hopelessly in love.

We swam in the dam. We floated in inner tubes, splashing at each other like little kids. At one point I swam over and upended her tube, sending her into the creek. She popped up looking angry.

“You scratched me,” she said.

“How.”

 “On the valve of the tube. Right here.” She pulled the one side of her suit high up her body to show me a small red mark on her hip .She gave a little chuckle and wink as she tugged her suit into place back over her bottom.

Her mother came out with a tray of food and called us to eat a

lunch. This was very bad timing for me. After the display just performed in front of me I was not in any condition to climb out of the water. I had to stall around a bit.

 I met mother and dad and her aunt again. Her aunt was very liberal, salty and modern. She was like the character Auntie Mame with a Baltic North European accent. The whole family was exotic to me, one-time refugees who had made a successful life in America.

Her father built the house himself. It was very Avant Gard for that era. There were balconies along some upper rooms. Behind the house sat a single engine airplane. Her father had also built it. When I left there late that afternoon I was in a daze and already anxious to return.

 The girl, I wasn’t sure I’d even call became my obsession. She bore a striking resemblance to the Norwegian Olympic Skater,  Sonia Henie (right). 

Of course, Sonia Henie was only 5 foot inch inch tall, Sonja Kebbe was closer to 5 foot 10.

We were talking on the phone
daily. We were getting together almost as much. She threw a party for some of her friends and invited my friend Ronald and me. There were six couples at the party, counting the two who had come alone, Ronald and a friend of Sonja’s  named Virginia “Ginny” Mourer. 

The Kebbe’s were very progressive, especially her aunt, who
flitted through the room playing host. Not only did she serve trays of food, but also alcoholic beverages. It didn’t faze Sonja’s family that all the guests were under eighteen years old and Pennsylvania law disallowed drinking before age 21. Ronald and I  were only 17.

Neither Ronald nor I drank any booze. By eight or nine o’clock the other boys were sick or passed out. We sat on the living room floor playing Spin the Bottle with all the girls to ourselves. Virginia and Ronald appeared to get along fine. They must have, because they became steadies over the next few months as we did a lot of double dating.

I was still searching for a job and saw an ad in the Pottstown
Mercury classifieds. It said Proctor & Gamble wanted local young men for field marketing. We were to report to the Pottstown YMCA at such and such a time for interviews. I went to the Y and was hired. 

 The job was temporary, the hiring agent made that abundantly clear.  It was an introductory campaign of a new product called Mr. Clean. Every morning during my employ I went to the Pottstown Train Station at eight in the morning. There was a large white van with Mr. Clean splashed across its sides. The van took several of us to a section located in Pottstown and dropped us off at different streets. I carried, as did we all,  a large satchel over my left arm containing 10 ounce bottles of Mr. Clean. As I walked I would pull out a bottle and drop it into a paper envelope. The envelope had a loop at the top. This I hooked over the doorknob of the first house, knocked once, and repeated for the next house and the third and so forth down both sides of the avenue. If someone answered the knock, I just told them it was a free bottle of a new product called Mr. Clean.

      The van would drive around the streets and pick me up at the other end when I had given out my bottles. It would then drop me at a new street with a new supply of samples. Sometimes the van followed me down a street. It played the Mr. Clean jingle repeatedly through a loudspeaker on its roof. On some of the streets young children followed behind me attracted by the jingle. Perhaps they thought it was an ice cream truck. One boy of perhaps ten stayed at my side telling dirty jokes. This was not a very nice section of Pottstown. This urchin probably knew more about sex than I did. “What do you call a cat that falls down a well,” he asked. “ A wet pussy,” he said and chuckled.

We canvassed all Pottstown, Pottsgrove and Stowe. After that they drove us out to small towns in the area such as Douglssville, Birdsboro,  Boyertown, Gilbertsville and Red Hill. After two and a half – three weeks our territory was completed and the job done. During the last week the crew chief pulled me aside. He told me he saw I was a hard worker and offered me a job on the permanent crew. It would have meant traveling across the country in the van. Since I was only17 I would have to get my parent’s permission. Before the Vietnam War reached the peak of drafting eighteen-year olds, the legal age was 21. You could not do anything if younger than that without your parent’s signatures. On July 1, 1971 the Twenty-Sixth Amendment dropped the legal age to 18. There had been too much outcry about sending people to die who couldn’t vote. However, The drinking age remained at 21 in most states, since war is so much safer than drinking and driving. 

 My parents would not give consent so at the end of the week I was
unemployed again. I wonder how different my life would have been if they said yes. I don’t play “if” games though. People usually assume things would have been better if they made different choices. Maybe I would have climbed the ladder to a high position with Proctor & Gamble.

Yeah, Right!

Or perhaps I would be dead now. It might have been an adventure or a trap. Think of what could happen to an 18-year boy traveling with a bunch of other young men across the nation. The only thing I can really say is my life would have been different.

I thoroughly enjoyed that job. I was out in the air everyday walking. That was what I had enjoyed about being a paperboy. Postman must be the greatest job in the world is what I was thinking at that time. Spend your day walking and sticking mail in mailboxes and trading friendly greetings with the people you meet.

During the time I had this job I bought a record player from Ronald Tipton for $15. I paid him $1.00 down and then the rest in installments. I’m not sure why Ron was selling his record player. It may be he thought he was going to die.

While perusing the want ads I notice a lot of job openings for something called a TAB Operator. I thought it had something to do with telephones. At about the  same time, I notice ads  appearing for a school in Philadelphia. It said, “Become an I.B.M. TAB Operator, the job of the future.”  On June 9 I rode the Trolley to Philadelphia with my grandmother and mother where I caught the El down to market Street and inquired about the school, The Florence Utt Institute for IBM Training. After we got back from that chore the three of us went to the Warner Theater in West Chester, where the trolley line ended, and saw “Some Like It Hot”. (Florence Utt is pictured left.)

I asked my mother if I could go to this school. My mother and my father agreed to pay the tuition for me to go, much to my surprise. They didn’t know what a TAB Operator was, but it had something to do with machines and running machines was a real job. So they gave me an okay.  

Florence Utt was a busy person over her long life. She was born in

1885 and died in Carmel, California is 1986 at the age of 101. Florence  Utt began the Florence Utt Switchboard Schools in 1948 not long after World War II ended. I was living in the Glenloch swamp house at the time. I was seven years old.  As the need for telephone switchboard operator began to wane, she began the Floence Utt Business Schools to teach IBM Keypunch Systems. By the time I started in her schools they were called Florence Utt IBM Tab & Wiring Schools.

After high school with no luck finding a job, Ron Tipton decided
to join the military. He went to 401 South Broad in Philadelphia and took the physical. At the last station of the exam they discovered he had a double hernia. He had been born that way. It was not fully developed. They told him the strain of basic could aggravate it. They would only allow him to enlist if he had it fixed.

  

About this time a tall girl named Lois was starting classes at the Peirce Business School. She had a previous job as a model. I knew nothing of her at that time, the girl I

knew and wanted then was named Sonja.

Even though we had a family celebration on Sunday, June 21, I spent the afternoon at Sonja's and stayed for dinner.  Meanwhile, Ronald was admitted to Chester County Hospital to have the corrective hernia surgery performed. It was a routine operation that almost took his life.

 

The day after Ronald was admitted to the hospital, I left with Sonja Kebbe for a visit to Philadelphia. I signed up to attend the I.B.M. Automation Division of Florence Utt Schools, Inc. The course was designed to teach me to be a TAB Operator and Programmer. I didn’t know it when I handed them my first tuition check, but I was putting my toe in the first wave of the computer industry.

It was only a six-week course. My classroom was on the fourth
floor of a building on East Market Street in Philadelphia, almost next to City Hall. We were directly across the street from John Wanamaker’s Department Store. I had been to the city several times growing up, but  always with a family member taking me. This was my first excursion alone. (By the fall, when Richard Ray Miller asked me to accompany him, I was a seasoned veteran, which is why he called me in the first place.)  Every morning I caught an early Reading Train at the Pottstown Station (pictured right). My class ran from 9:00 to noon. 

You went up a dingy elevator run by an operator in bellman’s cap to the second floor classroom. The first day everybody arrived and waited in a hallway for the instructor. There was a clump of fellows next to me talking in somewhat hushed tones about some Western film actor. One of them was saying, “Yes, he is.”

“Yeah,” said another. “He walks like one, too.”

“That’s right,” said the first. “They only shoot him walking from the waist up so nobody notices.”

 I figured out eventually from their conversation that they were talking about Randolph Scott, but I had seen a number of Randolph Scott Westerns, probably only second to John Wayne westerns, and was pretty sure I saw him walking, legs and all. (Come to think of it, John Wayne walked funny, too.) I didn’t know what they were talking about, but they had a mocking tone. (Photo left is Randolph Scott and Cary Grant at a time they lived together.)

 The Instructor showed up and led us into the classroom. It was full
of I.B.M. machines. The devices circled around several desks with 024 and 026 Keypunches on one end and continuing in a clockwise direction to a 604 Calculator (pictured right). The were all blinking lights. The instructor began with an synopsis of what he would be teaching. He followed this with a lecture on 80-Column versus 96-Column punch cards. Here is my question never asked or answered. Why were the 96-Column cards smaller by half than the 80-Column cards, but held just as much information? That was a mystery to me.

There was a young man who sat down in the desk next to me. He was my height and build, had lighter curlier hair and looked to be my age. I introduced myself at the first break. His name was Tom Newman from Clementon, New Jersey and he was my age. He too wanted to be a cartoonist.

He was also studying art through a correspondence school. It is a small   world after all. He was with the Famous Artists School, the biggest rival to Art Instruction, Inc. My school was represented by Charles Schulz, their school by Norman Rockwell. Tom and I became instant friends.

How far along he was in his lessons I don’t know. In my own opinion Tom was probably a better artist  than I was. He had a flow of line that was smoother than my own. I was  more deliberate in my sketching. We did have a similar sense of humor, though. The doodling on the left above is the only example I have of Tom’s style.   

     On the right is a
sample of my sketching.

I found the classes fascinating. The first lessons were on the keypunches, which were really glorified typewriters. Instead of putting ink on paper they punched holes in cardboard  cards. You had thirteen rows on the 80-Column card. The first 10 were 0 through 9. The last three allowed you to punch letters. A hole in Row 1 and Row 11 of Column 1 equaled an A, for instance. A hole in Row 1 and Row 12 would be a K, and so forth. 

All the other machines in the room read these cards. Feeding the cards over a metal surface beneath an electric circuit did this. Punching a hole in a column allowed the circuit to be completed and the machine read the character. Just like computers to come, everything was binary. It was either on or off. There were Interpreters, Collators, Accounting Machines, Sorters and the Calculator to learn. Each machine did a separate function of a process. All read cards, but without a program could do nothing with the information.

 You preformed programming on control panels using plug-in wires. First, the instructor gave you a job to program, say print an accounts receivable report. You wrote the logical steps on a flowchart. You then drew your program wiring on a schematic grid. Finally, you plugged wires into entry and exit ports of the board (pictured left a 402 Accounting Machine Board). There were no storage capabilities on these early machines. You had to tell each machine what to read (entry ports) and what to do with it (exit ports). You stored the board for further use.The test was easy. Program your board, stick it in the machine and if it did the job, then you did it right. You knew it right away if your did it wrong. One poor chap plugged an entry into an entry and the bloody machine shrieked as if in agonizing pain.

Both Tom and I graduated tied ranking first in the class. We each scored 99% for the course. I don’t know how he lost that one point. I had a point deducted because I didn’t write my name on the back of one programming schematic. 

 During our weeks of training we sometimes visited each other. It
was a lot more fun visiting his home because he lived two blocks from the Clementon Amusement Park. When I stayed a weekend there we got up and walked to the park. Wow, I thought, what a place to grow up. A few decades later I would be living just up the road from Clementon at a Ski Resort. 

The first Friday I was going to his place we went to John Wannamaker’s right after class.  He was buying something for his mom, if I remember right. Since he lived in Jersey we had to catch a Train. It went over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge across the Delaware River. It wasn’t called PATCO yet. The tracks had not extended further than 8^th Street the year before. The subways and Jersey train all had stations on the basement level of Wanamaker’s by 1959.

We were up on the Mezzanine and suddenly found ourselves running late to catch our train. We went dashing through the store looking for a stairway down to those stations, but we were lost. We ran through some doors we thought were to an exit, but they weren’t. We ran right into the Ladies’ Restroom. It was huge and full of women doing all the things women do in powder rooms. We rushed in and every woman screamed. We just kept running right out doors on the other side of the room. We found the stairs we wanted and escaped out of town. 

Tom and I got our diploma from Florence Utt Schools on August

28. I traveled over to Clementon with him afterward and stayed the night. His mother dropped me off at the Pottstown train station on their way to Hershey the next day. He then rode off into the west and that was the last I ever saw him. My mother and grandmother picked me up in Pottstown and he and I returned back to our hometowns and our own lives and soon lost contact. I sometimes wonder how he made out with his I.B.M. training. I especially wonder about his art and did he ever become a cartoonist?  

I myself dropped out of Art Instruction soon after Florence Utt. My marks had dropped from A during my first year to a B level. My last two assignments earned me a C. I wasn’t practicing anymore. My interest was waning. I was

simply pulling the assignments out as they  arrived in the mail, doing them without practice and sending them back. I wanted to be a cartoonist, not  someone drawing vases and

cookware for newspaper ads. I did use much of what I learned studying art years later on some of the jobs I held. I used more from that course than from the subjects I had in high school. Above are some illustrations I drew in ink.

During the time I was going to Florence Utt Ronald sent me a story he wrote. He titled it, “The Potato Chip King”. It was really an extended dirty joke, a rather disgusting one at that. I won’t reiterate it here. Ron was to co-write a couple stories with me. He used the pen name Ron Zorro. One story was a Western parody, “Git ‘Em at the Pass” and the other a psychological mystery called “The Wreckage”. Actually, Ronald suggested a story line for the Wreckage and I wrote it into a full tale.

Berger had hoped the sound of breaking glass had been Jimmy’s shibboleth, the password to his secrets. Perhaps he also hoped it would be his own redemption. Berger wanted the satisfaction of emptying the boy of his nightmare, maybe just to out do Zasaski.

Somehow he had to get this boy to relive the day he lost his parents in a car crash, bring him out of the cage of silence entered a half-year ago.

“Jimmy, what does ‘break’ mean to you?’

The boy turned toward him, his eyes wide. 

“Break,” the boy repeated.

Berger pulled out his pipe. “The hell with the sign,” he said to the boy. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?” He packed his tobacco, then struck a match and waved it across the bowl, puffing.

The boy looked into his eyes. “Father use to smoke a pipe.” Jimmy was fidgety now, his body shook and he squirmed in his chair. “He was smoking it...” he broke off and lowered his head.

Berger chomped on the stem of his pipe. He wanted this. What could he say to encourage the boy to continue? How could he find the way to lead this boy back?

And it wasn’t just the boy he cared about, either. Berger realized that when Zasaski had stomped out of the  room in angry pride. Berger needed to find this boy in order to restore his faith in his own profession. This boy had shaken his faith, had made him doubt psychiatry almost to the extent that science had destroyed his belief in religion.

The doctor puffed softly on his pipe and waited.

The boy’s thin lips, darker then Berger could remember ever seeing them, parted. They paused half open, quivering. Finally they opened fully and the boy said haltingly. “I’d like to say something.”

Berger nodded his head.

“I want to talk about it. I tried to talk about it once...but couldn’t.”

He stopped speaking.

Berger didn’t move, afraid to disturb the moment. “It’s all right,” he said in a rasp. “You can speak here.”

Excerpt from “Wreckage” ( 1961) by Eugene Lawrence with Ron Zorro. From my collection Acts of the Fathers, 1962)

I send one of the stories to a magazine down south . It was a slightly revamped version of “The Potato Chip King”. I received a handwritten rejection letter from the editor. He said our story had insulted the intelligence of every one living in the Southern United States.

Gee, sorry, it was just a joke.