CHAPTER 88. 1960
February 27, 1960 was my last date with Pamela Wilson. The Sunday evening after that I hosted a sub-district meeting of the Methodist Youth Fellowship. I was still President of the group at Bethel. There were over 200 attendees.
Way off in other places, a young man named Robert Zimmerman shuffled onto a small stage at The Ten O’clock Scholar coffeehouse in Minneapolis and was introduced as Bob Dylan. He wouldn’t be moving on to Greenwich Village until 1961
In November of 1960 a young lady of Mexican descent, who grew up on Staten Island, recorded an album of traditional folk songs for Vanguard, the first product of a blossoming career. Her name was Joan Baez.
Meanwhile, really far off in
Hamburg, Germany a small band is gradually forming itself. They have been playing with some shifting personnel under the name, The Quarrymen, now they decide to become the Silver Beetles, but shortly changed the spelling to Silver Beatles
My friend, Stuart Meisel was a sophomore at Franklin & Marshall College (left, at Franklin & Marshall). He chose to major in Russian Area Studies. He got word in 1960 that his father was dying of cancer and there was no hope. It sent him spirally into depression and he admits much of the year “was spent drinking beer, Old Southern Comfort, and Purple Jesus, and driving my car, a light blue 1954 Chevy. The fog of despair was omni-present, but kept at a tolerable distance by the alcoholic beverages.” (Stuart Meisel, My Story, p. 51
)
friend and mother both died around her high school graduation, had gone on to Peirce Business School. She would graduate in January 1961 with an Associate Degree in Secretarial. While studying at Peirce she got a job at Atlantic Refining. In 1960 she went from the Messenger Pool to a clerk’s position in Accounts Payable on the 16th floor.
Across the hall from Accounts Payable, I was working a lot of overtime at Atlantic Refining. Sales Accounting’s work had picked up over the winter months, especially the Burner Oil business. I didn’t like doing overtime because it limited my writing time, but the paychecks looked nice.
I used my pay, padded with the extra overtime bounty, to refurnish my bedroom of used and mismatched everything. I had been sleeping on the same bed as far back as I could remember, maybe since I left my crib. It had a pipe-like dark brown metal frame with tan highlights. My other furniture was just a mishmash, mostly very dark. I bought a matching bedroom set of lighter colored maple. It wasn’t fancy, but had a contemporary design; in other words, it had a clean, but boring 1960 look. There was a single bed with a bookcase headboard, a bureau with drawers, small nightstand and a desk with chair. It cost $400. I must have been flush at the time. The same suite would cost $3,519 today. My grandmother painted my room and I bought a new carpet.
speakers in my Ford and bought a stereophonic record player for my room. Wow, it was amazing hearing sound in 3D. The first stereo record album I played was “Bob & Ray’s Stereo Spectacular;” it may have come with the player. It was a 33 1/3 album featuring music framed between Bob & Ray comedy bits. The purpose was to show off the effects of stereo. It was pretty neat. Hearing records in stereo for the first time was like that moment in “The Wizard of Oz” when it goes from black and white to color. It was an Ooooh! Moment.
I was no longer hearing anything from Stuart and hadn’t since he went off to college. Ronald and I wrote to each other regularly. He was finishing up Basic Training at Fort Dix that March. He dropped his tray at lunch and brought the whole mess hall to a stop while he cleaned it up. By April he graduated and got his orders for M.O.S training (Military Occupation Specialties).
He was shipped out from Fort Dix in New Jersey to his next stop in “seeing the world”, Fort Devens, Massachusetts. He was there for his career training. Within a week he was already facing an unexpected crisis at his new base, toilets.
“I spent a week in processing,” he wrote. “The barracks there were worse than the ones at Fort Dix. The latrines were the worst. No tile showers. Just sheet metal showers. No partitions between the toilets. They were out in the open side by side. Six of them in a row.”
There are some things in life where one does want privacy. I remember the photo of military toilets that was one of the reasons I dreaded the idea of being drafted.
Fortunately for Ronald, orientation was over in a week and they moved him to his school barracks. They completed these new facilities only three weeks before placing him there.
“They were 3-story very modern buildings. Our mess hall is a
modern paradise. The latrines are huge with very modern convenience (sic). The toilets are completely enclosed and even have a latch on the door.”
Ronald learned institutions don’t always do what they promise.
“You know this ‘guaranteed choice’ you’re given isn’t so ‘guaranteed’ after all. I wanted business administration but they told me I have 058, which is a school for radio operators.”
Once he got into the training he was glad he had it. He was spending hours listening to Morse code, but unlike some he could take the continuous dot dot dash beeping
He also joined in another aspect of Army life, making the rounds of bars with a couple barrack mates. He found such places as “Wigwam” and “Little Klub” very interesting, but gave no details of why. (These may have been Jazz Clubs in the South Side of Boston i.e. they may have been Gay bars, an orientation he had not yet confessed to.) His bunkmates “Went to Boston this week but [he] didn’t have the guts to go. We already have one kid in our platoon who has V. D.” He followed this with Morse code that spells out “WRINSTHON”, whatever that is. I wonder if he meant, “Write Ron”?
He ended asking me not to let my parents read the letter.
While Ronald was learning his Morse code at Fort Devens, something was brewing in places nobody here ever heard of.
North Vietnam imposed universal military conscription for an indefinite period on its citizens.
At the same time a petition was being send by a group of South
Vietnamese to their President, Diem (pictured right), calling for him to reform his corrupt government. In response Diem closed several newspapers and had journalists and intellectuals arrested.
But so what, as I said nobody here ever heard of these places, who cared? It didn’t concern us. It might have concerned the 900 American Troop stationed there in 1960, however.
The literary agent Scott Meredith was still after me. I sent him a story called, “Moon Was Cloudy”, which was based on Richard Wilson and his rivalry with the boy I called Bob. Mr. Meredith analyzed the story and sent back advice.
My weak points were a shifting point of view. This is something I had to overcome. My strong points were that I was “a possessor of a lively imagination. [I] know how to write a vivid sentence that brings to life the scene [I‘m] describing, and when it comes to writing dialogue [I] show that [I] have an ear for everyday speech and the ability to set it down.”
He didn’t say anything about lacking vocabulary. So take that Mrs. Hurloch!
Again I turned down the offer to go with Scott Meredith as my agent. Probably a huge mistaken on my part. He not only might have helped me develop better plot lines in my stories, he might have altered the plot of my life if I had.
May was not shaping up as a lucky month. A girl, Ruth Dickinson, I knew in high school was killed in a head-on collision. Two people I worked with at Atlantic were also involved in accidents. A car hit John Laven from behind. Bill Jung had a head-on in his new 1960 Chevy.
There had been a wreck the week before that badly damaging his old car. Neither accident was his fault. Both these men had become good friends. John Laven died sometime around 2018.; I do not know what became of Bill Jung.
I was still shy with strangers. I was and am a low talker. So was my father for that matter. You couldn’t always catch what he said. You can’t always catch what I say. There was this tall girl who would pass me in the hallway at work almost every day. She would say hello and I would say hi, but she couldn’t hear me. She came to think I was the most stuck up guy in the world.
This handicap being the case, how did I meet Pat?
Pat worked on that sixteenth floor, too. She worked on the other side of the hall from Sales Accounting in the, Accounts Payable department, the same office the tall girl did. It never crossed my mind to ask that tall girl out even though I passed her almost every day and she always said hello. I don’t remember seeing Pat in the hall that often. Did someone introduce us? Yes, someone did.
On May 24, 1960 I saw Pat during lunch. I was thinking of asking her to go see the Musical “Gypsy” in New York in June, but chickened out . There was an office party at a nightclub coming up on June 3, a closer date, and I was invited to that party by Harry Koons, who was one of the clerks in my department. I accepted, which turned out to be a fortuitous choice.
That same Tuesday I wanted to ask Pat out during lunch and didn’t, I dated another girl in the evening. Anne Shantz (pictured left) was her name and I met her at MYF. I had dated her some when I first came to Bucktown. Anne and I went to a skating party that the Nantmeal Church MYF threw one night. I tried desperately to teach her to skate. Instead, of course, I simply succeeded in pulling us both down and nearly killing us in the bargain. I wish I had a video; it was pretty funny. But videos didn’t exist yet.
me at Atlantic, Arleen Guida (right). Arlene was a cute and perky Italian. A fun person who even laughed at my jokes.
As nice as Anne and Arleen were, Pat quickly made me forget them.
Pat wasn’t very tall, less than five foot, about the same as Suzy Cannell. She was an Irish lass with dark red hair and blue eyes and cute as a button. I admit I never understood that quotation. How is a button cute? Well, if a button looked like Pat it would be cute.
On June 3 I escorted Pat Gormley to
Sciolla’s Supper Club in Northeast Philadelphia, located in a building that was a speakeasy back in the prohibition days, but became a legitimate business founded by Gaetano Sciolla when the Twenty-fifth Amendment repealed prohibition in 1933. By 1960 ,Sciolla’s ranked as one of the big three of the area night spots along with Palumbo’s in South Philadelphia and The Latin Quarter in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
We went with two other couples, Dolores Muller and her boyfriend and Harry Koons and his wife. Harry’s wife was also a redhead named Pat. It was Larry and Pat and Harry and Pat. I ordered the veal cutlet and Pat had the seafood plate. It was a Friday night, so good Catholic Pat was she didn’t order meat. I was still going to ask her to a Broadway show someday.
A comedian named Johnny Gilbert hosted the show. He would later become famous as the television announcer for Jeopardy. Dolores Muller was a bit put-off by Gilbert’s jokes when they touched on some bathroom humor.
Here is some of Gilbert’s material from that show:
“This Irishman died and the priest wanted to write a eulogy. You know what a eulogy is? It’s a small animal about so long with a head on both ends. It’s the meanest animal in the world. You know why? Because it has a head on both ends and can’t go to the bathroom.
“The priest asked the widow if her husband was a Moose.”
“Nay, ‘E weren’t s Moose.”
“Well, was he an Elk?”
“Nay, ‘e weren’t that either.”
“Well, was he in the Ku Klux Klan?”
“An’ prey tell, what’s a Ku Klux Klan?”
“It’s a bunch of devils under sheets.”
“Ay, that he was, a devil under the sheets!”
There was a record pantomimist, which is the way Jerry Lewis started, by the way, who opened the show. He did “Mambo Italiano” as a big fat Italian woman and then ‘The Old Philosopher”. He finished with a spot on impersonation of Elvis.
After Gilbert, the star came on for the rest of the evening.
the early queens of Rock “n” Roll and put out hit after hit in the late ‘fifties and early ‘sixties. Her real name was Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero. Before her big breakthrough she had dubbed for actresses in Hollywood movies. She did the singing for Tuesday Weld in “Rock, Rock, Rock”.
She made it to the top with a monster hit she released in 1957. The song didn’t go anywhere until January 1, 1958 when it was played on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. It was “Who’s Sorry Now?” By 1960 she had a string of top hits including “Heartaches”, “Stupid Cupid”, “My Happiness”, “Among my Souvenirs” and “Lipstick on your Collar”. In fact, in 1960 she hit Number One on Billboard with “My Heart Has a Mind of its Own”. She was to continue having Top Ten hits through 1962. Her show that night was terrific. Connie could belt out a song with the best of them.
Pat looked lovely that night decked out in a gown-like dress, with
gloves and a new hairdo. She lived in Mayfair, a section up in northeast Philadelphia. I got lost taking her home. I hit a detour going up the Roosevelt Boulevard and we ended up in Center City, but I eventually got her home.
We were quickly a couple going many places together. We went dancing and bowling. She visited my home; I visited hers. Her family was somewhere on a higher economic level than mine. I attended a dinner party at her home and I was nervous the whole time. Everything was so formal. I never saw so much silverware around one place setting. There seemed to be a knife, fork and spoon for every item served. Near my plate was a small round bowl that I was afraid to touch. I didn’t know if it was a clear soup, a short glass of water or a finger bowl.
On June 11, which was my grandmothers 61st birthday, I went out for the evening with Dick Huzzard. I was supposed to be in New York that night. Remember the Broadway Show I had considered inviting Pat to way back in May? I had the two tickets and the show was the big hit “Gypsy”. Only problem, Broadway went out on strike for the first time in 41 years.
Actually, it wasn’t too many miles from her home. It was a very popular place at one time known as “Philadelphia’s Fairyland”, but it no longer exists. There is a shopping mall there today, what else? We tripled dated with four in the back seat. I no longer remember who went with us. It was at Willow Grove that I first took hold of her hand as we walked. She said, “It’s about time!” She gave me a gift of cufflinks on my birthday a couple days later. She was the first girl to give me a present. I wrote to Ronald Tipton, saying, “Maybe she likes me?”
Despite my lack of elegance, Pat fell in love with me. There would be no bitten thumbs when my arm encircled her shoulders, no threatening teeth when I kissed her.
The final days of June were always a busy time in my family. My mom had her 40th birthday and they had their 20th wedding anniversary, plus Father’s Day, and then came my birthday. On June 26 I went swimming with Tommy and Suzy Wilson in the afternoon. Tommy and I went bowling that evening. The next day, my 19th Birthday, it was back to work, where I got 10 cards and a box of candy. At home I received a jacket, shirts, ties, socks, a record and $5.00. On the 28th I went to the movies with Melvin Moyer (pictured left), another friend from MYF.
Life was floating along and seemingly good, if somewhat uneventful or exciting. But after the fireworks on Independence Day would occur some events that again changed the course of my life.
I had fished the French and Brandywine Creeks with Richard Wilson and with my dad, but I always found it boring. Never caught very much, I think I only pulled in some Sunfish. Mostly we either slushed out into the current or sat upon the shore and watched the current go by. I would have rather been home reading. However, I got very excited when Dad offered to take me deep sea fishing over the Fourth of July weekend.
It wasn’t so much the fishing as the boat ride. I always enjoyed being out in a boat. We left at midnight Friday evening in order to set sail very early on Saturday morning. It was almost a three-hour drive from our place to where the charter was docked. Once there we grabbed some breakfast at a 24-hour Diner and then began getting out gear on board. We set sail (not that we had a sail, this was completely a motorized jaunt) from lower Delaware through the Indian River Inlet into the Atlantic Ocean (Right, Indian River Inlet in 1960).
We spent the day catching tuna. Our party caught six. I landed the first one. My father caught one.
I came to work as usual after the Fourth of July holiday. Little had
changed in my life since meeting Pat, but It was about to.
Patricia Ann Gormley and I became very serious in our relationship. She was very much in love with me and this had become apparent to everyone around us. There were bets I would be proposing to her in the not too distant future. I walked hand-in-hand everywhere, and although we did not engage in sex, we cuddled when we could and drifted off to dark corner where we sometime talked in whispers and sometimes just leaned against each other.
But when I stepped out of the elevator that July 5 morning, Pat was waiting in the hallway for my arrival. She said she had to talk to me. We walked down to the cross corridor where there was a little privacy. The first words out of her mouth were, “I can’t see you anymore.”
“Why?”
“It’s the too far distance,” she mumbled or something similar. She was in tears. I could barely understand her.
“What?”
“I’m sorry,” she muttered through sobs and ran into the Ladies Room.
I stood there stunned.
A few seconds clicked off and then that tall girl who always said hello to me in passing came out of the Ladies. She walked over to me. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“Pat is in there crying her eyes out.” They worked in the same department, so were acquainted with each other. She told me what happened. “Her parents won’t let her see you anymore because you aren’t Roman Catholic.”
“What?”
I probably sounded as angry as I was. My parents forced me to church growing up leaving me with no strong religious convictions. Religion was a series of philosophical arguments to me. I didn’t see what difference it made that she was Catholic and I was not. We both were Christian, right? I felt our love was none of her parents’ business.
“Are you okay?” she asked again.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine,” and went back to my own office. I was in a daze the rest of the morning.
It was just past the Fourth of July and already over between Pat and I. I couldn’t even talk to her because she went out of her way to avoid me after that stunning morning. If she saw me she hurried away, always with a glint of tear in her eyes. I have no idea what happened to her after Atlantic. I assume Pat met a nice Catholic boy, got married and had lots of children.
Peppy died that Thursday morning, the Seventh of July. This was the pup my grandfather had given me before I started Grade School. Peppy was 15 or 16 years old. I believe she developed cancer during that year and my mom put her down in the basement because she was bleeding and leaving spots about the house. She died shortly after that. My dad buried her down in the field next to Topper. It was as if he was burying my boyhood along with her. She had slept in my bed aside me for almost all her life, which meant most of mine as well.
My grandfather was dead. Both of my dogs had died. All my girlfriends had bid me goodbye. I heard that Sonja had broken up with the boy she had dropped me for back in early June. I wasn’t sure I wanted to stir up that fire again. I was hoping for a change of luck.
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