David Moreau was the owner of Grumpy’s Coffee and Ice Cream in Riverside, Illinois, originally just across the street from the train depot, so that many, many train riders would drop in for a quick cup and sweetroll on their way to or from work. That included Marlis, and I’d often linger in the shop—sometimes after she’d caught the train, sometimes while waiting for her train to arrive.
David Moreau with Glenn and Marlis Broadhead at Grumpy’s
Some of his friends say that Grumpy’s wasn’t named after David, because he was a kind man. I disagree. He certainly wasn’t unkind, and he wasn’t unfriendly, at least after a breaking-in period. But his standard day-to-day demeanor was grumpy. I admired him for it. I mean, look at the world around us.
I also deeply admired Grumpy’s coffee shop, a warm, aromatic space at the corner of an old Riverside building across the street from the train depot. It was decorated with lots of vintage photos from Broadway shows, radio, and the movies. The sound system, too, always played interesting music—frequently older jazz. What’s not to like?
The original Grumpy’s Sculpture by Gretchen McCarthy
So I gradually tried to ingratiate myself by making unnecessary but what I hoped to be wise, witty, and hip comments about films and jazz when I ordered a cuppa joe. As I recall, this ingratiation process took weeks, but eventually we established a first-name connection, and from then on it was all gravy.
Once established as a regular, you could gradually chip in to the discussions of a wacky cast of regulars. Grumpy collected and nurtured a broad range of friendly and generally opinonated customers. Some of them drove me nuts, but I soon grew fond of Jim Nash and Johnny Simonetta. Jim was a retired engineer and a voracious reader. He once began a conversation with me by saying “I was re-reading Principia Mathmatica last night, and. . . .” Yes, with ME. What a laugh. He’d patiently explain what needed explaining, which in my case was pretty much everything, and I’m sure I never really understood what he had to say about Alfred North Whitehead; but he amiably allowed the chat to drift over to Bertrand Russell, where I at least had a chance. An atheist, he attended church regularly (for his wife’s sake) and would go to Tuesday night church discussions, as he put it, to shake everyone up. He was the absolute antithesis of combative, but look out for inquisitive. He was ever ready to examine any belief from any perspective. Jim loved music, and in his 70s performed a great rendition of “Luck Be a Lady” for entertainment at a charity ball. Once, a gig for my band Safe Sax fell through at the last minute. Since I owed the musicians a paycheck anyway, we went ahead and performed in Jim’s backyard as a birthday present.
Interior of the original Grumpy’s
Johnny Simonetta is a guitar-player, composer, and producer who writes movie scores, commercials, and all sorts of practical, interesting things that an actual working musician undertakes. He’s the son of the wonderful Chicago drummer Mickey Simonetta, so he’s knowledgeable about jazz, but even so would tease me for my old-fashioned ways with my Safe Sax band.
If you wonder why I’m talking about Jim Nash and Johnny Simonetta in a piece about David Moreau, that’s exactly the point. David could hold his own in a discussion about just about anything, but more importantly, his personality exuded interest in the most diverse range of people and ideas. So, while you could get exercized about a point while chatting at Grumpy’s, you couldn’t get mad. That would break the house rules–although I have to say that sarcasm was allowed, and, if apt, even celebrated.
But the kindness thing was true. He was very active with the Riverside Catholic church, and helpful in other charitable ways, too. At one point, I gave him a copy of a CD I’d made with a quintet I called Halfway to Dawn. David digitized it and put it on the coffee-shop computer’s hard drive. Whenever he saw me about to enter the shop, he’d punch a couple of buttons, and by the time I opened the door, my band’s music would be filling the shop as if on an endless loop. Music to my ears.
David died last week, December 2022. I’m pretty sure that, if he could read the praise I’ve tried to convey about him here, he’d have just two words of comment: “Too late.” Grumpy. The best.
This is a short list of the music I’m most glad to have heard in my life. It’s in no particular order, though number one is at the end. Writers are so manipulative.
At a Music Educators National Convention in Los Angeles in 1958, I heard my lifelong friend Bob Winn perform as principal oboist in a national high-school honor orchestra, playing Howard Hanson’s SONG OF DEMOCRACY as conducted by the composer. It was only the second performance ever of that piece, which incorporates text from two poems by Walt Whitman. The orchestra was huge, and there were several hundred young people in the choir, so the sheer sound of the final measures was heart-stirring. Like everyone else in the concert hall, I leaped to my feet, overwhelmed. Every so often, I play a recording of that piece, and every time, I am moved to tears–partly because of Bob, partly because I believe in democracy, and partly because I was a writing teacher: “Only a lot of boys and girls? Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes? Only a public school? Ah more, infinitely more.”
In a hotel lounge at Green Lake, Wisconsin, with just four other people in the room, I heard pianist John Harmon play “A Child Is Born,” solo, in his own world, playing for the music, not for the audience. As a person, I’m hardly spiritual, but the music was.
John Harmon
At the Blue Room in Kansas City, not long after moving to the Kansas City area in 2010, I played baritone sax with Kent Rausch’s Vine Street Rumble big band in concert, so I had the gift of hearing that hard-swinging music from inside the band. Of course, this was also probably my worst musical experience ever, since I was only able to play at most 70% of the music while sitting next to the masterful lead-alto player Mike Hererra, who I knew was aware of every bad note I played and every good note that went by too fast for me to play. Yet he very kindly gave guidance and encouragement throughout the night. A really good musician cares most about the music, and Mike Herrera is a really good musician. The last chorus of One O’Clock Jump is always thrilling to hear, but to hear it while playing it in that band simply cannot be described.
Inside Kent Rausch’s Vine Street Rumble at the Blue Room
At the Old Coast Hotel and Restaurant in Fort Bragg, California, in the 1990s, I heard pianist Kent Glenn playing “It Might as Well Be Spring.” Kent could be a difficult person to be around sometimes, but his playing of that ballad was always tender and exquisite.
Kent Glenn and Pete Gaeley, drawn by Bob Ross
At the Casper Flats Inn on the North Coast of California, in what was as much a public workshop as a playing gig, I played “These Foolish Things,” accompanied only by Kent Glenn. When we finished, he said, “Do you know what you did going into the bridge?” I thought a moment and said “No.” He said, “I didn’t think so. But it was pretty good.” At the mid-way point during this ballad, a drunk stumbled over from the bar and tried to throw a few coins into the tip jar, which was sitting on a small stand in front of the band. He only managed to knock it over, so that a large batch of coins made a racket hitting the floor. My life in music. Still, hearing myself play the melody of a beautiful song while Kent Glenn made it wonderful was really something.
At Shelley’s Manhole in LA in the early 1960s, I heard the Modern Jazz Quartet. Sitting just two feet away from Milt Jackson’s vibes, I could see the subtle eye contacts, head nods, and body motions as they signaled one another wordlessly.
At a small concert for 60 or so people in a second-floor room over the Arcadia Music Mart, I sat two feet away from Ben Webster as he played “Danny Boy” without a microphone, accompanied only by pianist Jimmy Rowles. In those days, I only had eyes for Stan Getz and other tenor players of the same school, so I inwardly groaned when this old timer began to play such a corny song. But then, again sitting just a few feet away, I could hear every smeared entrance, every subtle, heart-felt variation of tone, every breathy vibrato continuing after the horn was no longer making a tone. When he finished, I knew I had heard a master.
At Joe Tondu’s elegant jazz bar, The Fox Note, in Wisconsin, I heard my band Safe Sax give a concert of my arrangements, ending with a standing ovation and four encores. The sound of applause after music is definitely something to hear.
Safe Sax, with Steve Magnone, Steve Koerner, Mario Mongello, Mike Daly, Herman Reyes, Bill Red, and Glenn Broadhead
On the first night of my first year at the Tritone music camp, I didn’t know anyone (because Joe Tondu had not yet arrived), so I started out of the lodge to drive back to my motel room. In the short hallway by the door, a guy was crouching down and playing an acoustic guitar, so I stopped to listen. It was hard to process the complexity that I was hearing. The guy finished playing a song, looked up at me, and said “Know that one?” “My One and Only Love,” I said. This was repeated for nearly an hour. Since I love songs even more than I love jazz, I felt very pleased with myself for knowing each tune he played, until I finally missed one. It was “Traumerei,” which I still feel was cheating, although it was recorded by Claude Thornhill. That was my introduction to Gene Bertoncini: my own private concert from one of the greatest and most unique guitarists who ever played jazz.
Gene Bertoncini at Tritone Jazz Camp (photo by Don Jackson)
In those early days of the Tritone jazz camp, the lodge had only one grand piano, located in what was at the lodge’s auditorium/dining room. One afternoon, when nobody was in the room, I sat down and started noodling some songs in my non-pianist way. After a while, I played my own song, “Only Halfway to Dawn,” several years later re-named “Evening Star” when I added lyrics. As I played, I was not aware that Bertoncini had come into the room and stopped to listen. When I finished playing, he came over to the piano. “What was that?” he asked. “It was a song of mine,” I said. “Play it again,” he said. I did, and when I finished, he called across to John Harmon, who had just entered the room. “Listen to this,” Bertoncini said, and asked me to play it again. Harmon liked it, too, and asked me to give him a lead sheet. I have always be struck by the fact that, when you decide to play a record you like for a friend, you hear it more critically than you ever have while listening on your own. In this case, hearing yourself play your own song while master musicians also listen is. . .complicated. But definitely nice.
Still at the Tritone camp, but several years later, I heard my friend Lucy Horton sing “Evening Star” at a Tritone concert, accompanied by Harmon. Her cabaret-style voice thrillingly filled up the room. Afterward, Harmon came over to me and said, “You know, unfortunately, I don’t think it’s likely you’ll ever make a nickle from the songs you write. But people like us really appreciate them.” People like us. My life in music.
Lucy Horton singing “Evening Star” at Tritone, 2019, accompanied by John Harmon
Even so, the thing that I am most grateful to have heard occurred on the Mendocino Coast very early in the 1990s. My youngest daughter Emily was in a school play for her first-grade class at Mendocino elementary school. Dressed as a green frog, she sang “Bein’ Green.” Unfortunately, I was unable to see the show because I was at a College of the Redwoods meeting in far-off Eureka, CA. Emily has always acted as if I had been drunk at Fort Bragg’s Tip Top Bar or, worse yet, simply grading papers in my college office. Whatever. At the end of that week, though, or soon after, I was “playing piano” at a Fort Bragg Center for the Arts First Friday show. These were held in a magnificent old wooden building with, inside, a huge open space like an atrium with a broad interior balcony running along each wall. The downstairs was a department store, but along each wall of the indoor balcony were displayed paintings, photographs, ceramics, and fine furniture by local artists. At one corner was a raised platform with a grand piano. There I would play simple chords with the left hand and pick out a melody with the right hand. If people were drinking and talking, they might think I was “playing piano.” At these affairs, few attendees would stand near the piano platform—not so much as a comment on my playing, I hope, than as a wish to be near the artistic action.
Emily about the age she sang “Bein’ Green.” Frog, witch–does it matter?
I had played for an hour or more, and as I finished one song, Emily suddenly jumped onto the platform, came over to me, and said she wanted to sing “Bein’ Green.” I fumbled through a piano intro, and she turned away from the piano and began to sing toward the atrium in her clear child’s voice. This wonderful natural sound cut through the chatter of the crowd, and gradually more and more people stopped talking and moved over to the platform to listen to her. When she finished, thirty or forty people were crowded in front of her, listening, and she received long, very warm applause—deservedly so, as she had sung with great feeling (to say nothing of timing, phrasing, and intonation). A woman in the audience approached her and said “The man who wrote that song is my friend, and I’m sorry that he wasn’t here to hear you, because I know he would have loved to hear it very, very much.” I couldn’t agree more, then or now. It’s the music in my life that I’m most happy to have heard.
Afterthought on “Knowing the Composer”: How many people could be expected to know Joe Raposo, composer of “Bein’ Green”? Well, if I remember correcty, the woman who liked Emily’s singing of that song turned out to be Susan Jule, the principal writer of Fraggle Rock, and a frequent collaborator with her husband Jerry, who was the screen-writer for The Muppets Christmas Carol (and with Frank Oz was one of the earliest collaborators with Jim Henson).
Jerry and Susan Juhl. No nicer people ever wrote for children in ways that made me and my daughter laugh and laugh.
Back in the 1970s, Wichita Eagle columnist Jon Roe, seeking to describe someone in a dire situation, said that he was “as desperate as an unattached male at last call on a Saturday night at Kirby’s Beer Store.” That would of course be the bartender’s dire announcemnt: “Last call, no shit.”
Some Kirby’s Beer Store Survivors, September 2021
I didn’t read Roe’s article when it first appeared, but some friends told me about it not long after because they knew I hung out there a lot. Located in the northeast part of town, Kirby’s was on 17th Street, just across from Wichita State University, where I then taught. It was a single, small, square, ill-lit room, with just eight or ten tables with chairs and ten or twelve stools along the bar opposite the entrance. It served beer with a state-regulated 3.2 percent alcohol content, as opposed to 6.0 for hard liquor bars, where at that time you needed a club membership to purchase booze—although you could bring your own hooch and just order a set-up (tonic water, soda water, 7-Up, whatever) for the cost of a drink anywhere else in the country. It was not uncommon in those days to see men in tuxedos entering the swank downtown Petroleum Club, escorting elegantly-clad ladies with one hand and holding a brown paper bag that contained a bottle of Scotch or wine in the other.
But at Kirby’s, you only had to be able to push open the front door. In the afternoon, it was a hangout for off-beat WSU graduate students, older undergraduates not long returned from Vietnam, and quite a few WSU teachers—as well as a range of non-academic misfits with some time on their hands. As a sign on the wall said, WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO SERVE REFUSE. It was a good place to be if you were comfortable with the implicit conditions. I think never before this very moment have these conditions ever been made explicit, but here goes. Male or female, you had to like beer. You had to enjoy conversations that ranged from stimulating to mindless (or at least sit quietly and drink your beer if you didn’t). You had to appreciate the hundreds of bizarre, smoke-dyed photos, posters, newspaper clippings, bar napkins, street signs, and trivial artifacts that adorned its dingy walls. And, at not at all least, you had to be able to tolerate what must have been the foulest men’s restroom outside of the Black Hole of Calcutta. The ladies room was apparently one small step for mankind higher.
I can’t account for the restrooms, but the alternately languid and spirited wide-ranging conversations as well as the delight in the bizarreness of everyday things were reflections of the fertile mind of the bar’s founder and owner, Jim Kirby, an auto-didact who could chat about lots and lots of things with lots and lots of people, and who enjoyed singularly interesting personalities so long as their behavior did not become confrontational or abusive. Not hipsters, not beatniks, not hippies, not bikers—they were just a jumble of people who, for better or worse, and in one way or another, were ambling down a less-traveled path. In every sense, it was a very funny place to hang out—at least in the afternoon. At night, things tended to get drunker and wilder, with a much different feel.
But in the light of day, the multi-interested, 30-ish Kirby drew scads of individuals to chat with him and with one another. The diversity was reflected in the eclectic jukebox, which offered at least one sop to anyone’s taste: Martha and the Vandella’s “Heat Wave,” Linda Ronstadt’s “Midnight at the Oasis,” Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” Maria Muldaur’s “Richland Woman” (“if I can make a dress out of a feed sack, I can make a man out of you”), George Harrison’s “Something (in the Way She Moves),” Jessie Colter’s “I’m Not Lisa,” Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” Vaughan Monroe’s “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” the Bellamy Brother’s “Let Your Love Flow,” Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” and probably the most frequently played, Jimmy Buffett’s “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw?”
There was a student (former, I thought then, but maybe just intermittent) named Greg who would usually drink his beer quietly, but would sometimes offer hair-raising insights from his relentless readings about Germany in particular and World War II in general. I usually wasn’t interested, and would edge away if he began a rant, especially if his shirt was decorated with Nazi insignias. But one afternoon, with only a few people in the quiet bar, he suddenly began to speak to no one in particular in a clear, reflective, yet authoritative voice. “I remember as if it were yesterday,” he began out of nowhere. “Madge and I were just finishing breakfast on the veranda of our cottage in the naval officers quarters at Hickam. Suddenly, just as I was beginning to apply a last spoonful of marmelade to one of Madge’s delicious scones, I heard the faint drone of engines in the western sky.” He went on in this mode for nearly an hour, describing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor comprehensively and in vivid, apparently personal detail, as if he had in fact been a lieutenant commander caught up in the maelstrom of the aerial attack, struggling to grasp the reality, yet drawing on his years of experience to spring into the defense of his country and his fellows. Seeming to be addressed an audience other than the astonished afternoon slackers who surrounded him, it was by far the most remarkable impromptu narrative I ever heard—funny, sad, exciting, horrifying, clinical, gripping, full of details, but never losing the big picture. I believe Greg later became a college-level teacher, but I may just be trying to upgrade your opinion of the profession.
On one rare day when the small black-and-white TV was on and tuned to a local news station, an anchor described a fire engine crew’s rescue of a cat from a tree. Billy, a young, daily customer, sputtered a few colorful obscenities and concluded “What a waste of time.” “What’s wrong with saving a cat?” said another patron from his barstool. “They come down when they’re ready,” said Billy. “Did you ever see a cat skeleton in a tree?”
Another vociferous disagreement drew to an abrupt close with one of the most remarkable sentences I’ve ever heard: “Listen, if you can drive a feather through a brick wall, you can shoot a chicken through pane of plexiglass.” The dispute had begun when somebody reading a copy of the Wichita Eagle noted that the SPCA was suing Boeing to get it to cease its method of testing the effectiveness of new materials and design for cockpit windows. Boeing’s technique, apparently, was to use an air cannon to propel live chickens at high speed through plexiglass. Like most arguments at Kirby’s, the issue was not whether the testing was humane, but rather whether the methodology was practical—that is, whether you could actually fracture a thick window with a chicken. The conclusive comment drew upon a truism among residents of Tornado Alley—the feather through the brick wall. This was an article of faith that could not be challenged, so, from the perspective of argumentation theory, it was brilliant and irrefutable.
One of my favorites among Kirby’s denizens was Dennis, a county health inspector who would come by not to examine the place, but just to enjoy a draw or two with friends every few weeks. He was a warm, amiable bear of a guy, and great laugher who told wonderful stories, including an account from his teen years when he had drunkenly crashed his parents car. When they came to his hospital room the next morning, he was so afraid to face the consequences of his transgressions that he pretended to have amesia. “Do. . .do I know you?” he asked, pitifully—in every sense of the word. His parents were ever-after opposed to any form of alcohol, and his father would rebuke him for going to Kirby’s. One afternoon, Dennis brought his father to Kirby’s to convince him of its social acceptability. So Dennis conducted his dad around the room, making introductions to various college profs. “Dad, this is Dr. Broadhead in English. . . .this is Dr. Griese in geology. . .this is Dr. Greenburg in psychology. . .” and several others. Later, as they walked outside to their car, Dennis said “Well, what do you think, Dad?” His father replied “That’s exactly what I’ve tried to warn you about.”
My parents, too, came the bar one afternoon while on vacation from their home in California. They sat imperturbably for a while as a steady stream of characters came by to chat with them. And why not? My dad was always stoic—a listener, not a talker—and my mom was game for any good time. One of my friends, McDonough, said “Mrs. Broadhead, did you ever spank Glenn?” “Why, no,” said my mom, “I don’t think we ever did.” “Well,” said McDonough, “you should‘ve.”
Once the Coors representative dropped in with a then-famous athlete in tow—I think maybe Steve Williams, who had just tied the world record in the 100-meter dash. On small cards supplied by Coors, he would scrawl “Steve Williams, 9.9.” I urged Kirby to give him a bar napkin autographed “Jim Kirby, 3.2,” but he wouldn’t. I’m still disappointed.
Another of my favorite guys in the bar was named Ron. Among a smoke-filled roomful of people who could hold forth on myriad topics, Ron had a monopoly on the Wichita State University Shocker’s basketball program. He once drove to Denver to scout a high school player he thought might help the local team. Of course, he had no authorization to do so, and received no compensation—if, in fact, anyone at WSU ever actually took time to listen to his opinion. But on game nights, the WSU arena was stuffed to the brim with fans who freely expressed their opinions without being asked and without compensation. So it was not really out of character one night at Kirby’s when a drunken stranger in the bar started loudly cursing at and banging on a pinball machine he was playing poorly. “Take it easy, take it easy,” Ron said to the guy, hardly bothering to look back at him. “It’s just a game. It’s not basketball.”
Actually, there were two pinball machines at Kirby’s, one across the room from the another. The one near the bar was a player’s dream. You could could bang it, shove it, or shake it (within reason), and it still would’t tilt, so you could always win free games from it. If you knew how, you could even catch the ball with one flipper and hold it steady while lining up your next shot. Or, alternatively, you could hold it steady while trying to flirt with one of the girls looking on, as I was doing one night. Pretty soon, somebody behind me said “Shoot the ball, turkey.” I puffed up with self-importance and replied, enunciating super-clearly, “That’s Doctor Turkey.”
A surprising number of people continued to call me that the rest of the time I lived in Wichita. And probably still do.
Oh. One more thing about that jukebox. One afternoon, as five or six guys sat lounging at the bar, an emaciated, weirdly-dressed woman with orange-ish hair—one of the regulars—stood in front of the battered Wurlitzer. She had put in a quarter, and had made two of her three selections, but now was stumped. “What do you want to hear?” she asked of nobody in particular. Billy, at the bar, replied with a sentence that even I cannot bring myself to repeat in this public space, but it referred to a sound that, let us say, could only occur during an unusually acrobatic sexual encounter. The orange-ish woman paused for one beat and said “What number is it?”
Jim Kirby long ago sold the bar and moved on to successful and rewarding work in pubic relations, film-writing, entrepreneurship, and God knows what else his flexible brain has ever thought of doing. But Kirby’s Beer Store is still on 17th Street, and, the last time I checked, so is the jukebox. There have been several owners since Jim, but each new one has insisted that the previous owner leave the place as is, including specifically all the sepia-tinged junk on the walls. They’re not buying a location, a space, or even a bar. They want to own Kirby’s Beer Store.
Mom at Don Ho’s bar, Dukes, at Waikiki. See what I mean? Always game.
A girl whom I regularly bought shoes for just asked me to talk about this. Lots and lots of shoes.
My father, Sheldon, who was born in 1907, grew up on a family ranch near Four Mile Creek in Utah, about ten or fifteen miles south of Nephi, which itself is about 90 miles south of Salt Lake City. With two brothers and four sisters, he grew up working hard on a working ranch, growing wheat, raising farm animals, mastering the many mechanical tasks needed to keep a ranch going, and absorbing the value of self-sufficiency.
Sam, Sheldon, and Rulon harvesting wheat at Four Mile Ranch
I was born in 1942 at Queen of the Angels Hospital in Los Angeles, California, and when I was about three we moved to a one-acre lot about 20 miles outside of LA. World War II was still raging, and income from Dad’s job as a machinist needed to be supplemented for our family of four: Dad, Mom, my older brother Hal, and me. Around that time I was usually called Gravy, except by Mom, who, when I had done something wrong, would call me with increasing frustration “Shelly. . .Hal. . .Glenn. . .dammit!” When not in trouble, I whiled away most of my daylight hours playing “little cars” in the dirt beneath the the trees near our house. My mother continually had to sew patches on the knees of my jeans.
To make good use of the property, Dad put in a half-acre of boysenberries when we first moved in, as well as two large patches of raspberries—one of black, one of red. He lined our long driveway with four apricot trees. By the time I was six, we’d sometimes sell berries and apricots at a tiny mom-and-pop grocery that we could walk to, always referred to as “the little store.” But usually Mom and Dad would can stuff so we didn’t have to buy it at a store. My main assistance to these projects was to tinker with the lids to Mason jars and to run and jump behind Dad as he walked behind our two-wheel tractor, guiding its plow or tiller to make long furrows for planting and watering. Yes, I was literally a clod hopper.
Gravy
At some point, Dad decided to expand our self-sufficiency horizons by growing rabbits, which he put into a row of cages in a shed behind our garage. Though he had a commercial goal in mind, such a possibility never occured to the six-year-old me. I thought of the 20 or so rabbits as interestingly furry playmates—especially the friendliest hare at the end of the row of cages, whom I called “Ralphie.”
One Sunday afternoon, without a hint of ominous warning, we all sat down at the kitchen table for a meal that Mom had prepared. There was a couple of dishes of vegetables, and, in the middle of the table, a plate with an unrecognized object resting on it.
“What’s that?” I asked.
After a pause, my Dad said “It’s chicken. Have some.”
My brother, older by five years, then spoke up.
“It doesn’t look like chicken,” he said. “It looks like. . . .”
An aching silence fell over the room.
Gradually, my childish mind began to connect the numbers, until at last the jagged picture was revealed, and with a quivering voice, I shouted:
“Ralphie!”
And I began to cry. And my brother began to cry. And my Mom began to cry.
And my Dad continued to mutter, until at last he said, “Jesus Christ,” but not with anything like a prayer in mind.
Mom removed the carcass of the bunny. My father shook his head and continued to mutter. My brother and I whimpered for a while more. We all dined sadly on boiled carrots and mashed potatoes without gravy. Even Dad.
Our Cub Scout den had two Den Mothers. The first was Mrs. Winn (“Francis” to adults), Bob Winn’s mom, who was efficient, practical, and fun, and always helped us work on interesting projects. I can still see her smile and hear her encouraging laugh, which sometimes teased but never mocked. We looked like this:
L-R: John Bloker, Neil Elliot, Brad Thompson, Alan Snyder, Bob Winn, me.
Apparently, Alan’s was the only family that did not buy jeans good for two or three years of growth. Or perhaps he was at the end of a spurt. My neckerchief slide, representing a steer’s head, was fashioned by my mother with longhorns sculpted from soapstone that my brother Hal had collected on Catalina Island.
Under the guidance of Mrs. Winn, our presentations at Pack meetings were culturally valuable and, it might be said, decent and well-behaved, as in this clarinet trio, which played “White Christmas.”
L-R: Bob Winn, Bill Winn (already a Boy Scout), and me
I was playing a metal learner’s model. Around this time, when Bob was taking lessons from Mel Ernst, a pro who worked at the 7-story Southern California Music Company in Los Angeles, Paul and Francis Winn would also pop me in the backseat or their car for the 45-minute drive to Ernst’s home, where they would patiently wait a half hour after Bob’s lesson for me to take mine. On the ride home, we would sing funny or patriotic songs, or perhaps Mrs. Winn would devise some impromptu game in which we would, say, shout out the names of the capitals of the 48 states. As a Den Mother, Mrs. Winn never closed. Permanently chipper, she was the personification of can-do.
Our den also participated in public events, such as the Arcadia Peach Festival parade:
Bobby Winn the Inveterate Explorer can be seen peeking from the back window.
We participated in useful community services, such as paper drives, collecting and baling neglected piles from dark, spider-infested garages, and then transferring them to trucks for re-cycling (a term then unknown, at least to me):
Atop the truck, Bob is in full uniform
We dined sedately at the annual Blue and Gold dinners:
L-R around the table: Our Scout Chief, Steven something, Bob Winn, Francis Winn, me, Mom, Dad, Alan, Mrs. Thompson, Brad Thompson, Mrs. Bloker, John Bloker’s little brother, John, Mr. Bloker. Not shown: ubiquitous photographer Paul Winn.
Mr. Bloker was a wide-ranging executive with TWA, and for years he would send postcards for my collection from around the world, always signed “Guess who?”
Do you wonder what the hats were for? Me too. But I’m sure we made them for. . .some reason relevant to the dinner’s theme. There are models of airplanes and ships as table ornaments. Were we all admirals? Pirates? Egg salespersons?
At times, our Pack would go on field trips, as laboriously annotated in my Cub Scout scrapbook:
Buster Brown on the radio! Midnight the Cat and Froggy the Gremlin! I believe it was Midnight who first revealed to me the depths of feline evil. Whenever that cat said “Nice,” you knew she was lying. At that time, the brunt of Froggy’s gibes was Andy Devine. For many years, I had a rubber Froggy figurine with a small airhole on the back. If you covered the airhole with your thumb and then squeezed, Froggy would stick out his tongue at whoever stood before you. Infinitely amusing. Hi-ya, kids, hi-ya, hi-ya.
And then. . .thanks to a fortunate entertainment-related segue. . .ENTER BETTY JEAN BROADHEAD!
Some background: A few years after Mom married Dad, she damaged her wedding ring. Like any other resourceful young bride, she finagled a ticket to the “Queen for a Day” radio show, or maybe “Strike It Rich.” That doesn’t matter. It was some show in which contestants offered competing sob-stories for a cash-prize-funded happy ending. What’s important is that, in order to fix her ring, she filled out a prospective participant’s form by asking for “$18 to mend a broken heart.” A phrase with media magic. Maybe the monetary value was greater than that, but it doesn’t matter. The thing to observe here is the masterful TUGGING AT THE HEARTSTRINGS in the setting of ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA. She was on the show! I can’t remember if she won.
Later on, Mom got a picture of her mother, her sister, her, her sister’s daughters, and one of the daughter’s daughters to be shown on the Al Jarvis TV show (featuring a young Betty White). YES! FOUR GENERATIONS IN ONE PICTURE! SEE IT NOW ON THE AL JARVIS SHOW! FOUR GENERATIONS OF FEMALES! ONE PICTURE!
At school functions, such as a Longley Way Elementary School fair, other mothers were ticket-takers, cookie-bakers, punch-providers, helpful guides. My mom was a brassy clown in a puffy, dazzling, parti-colored costume, with painted face and an eye-shocking red nose.
Show-biz has many faces.
Inevitably, at Pack meetings, den-mother Betty Broadhead’s charges put on skits that she wrote, produced, costumed, and directed. Here’s one, for which we made marrionnettes and manipulated them for a (presumably) amusing scene:
The marionnette show
Here’s another, more modestly-costumed extravaganza:
?
Do you wonder what this skit was about? So do I. A musical number? A dramatized joke? Why is Brad holding a tiny umbrella? Very hard to tell. It was the 1950s. Move on.
Eventually eschewing the stage for the Southern California TV scene, Mom finagled us a spot on a popular, daily afternoon show hosted by Doye O’Dell:
Doye O’Dell was a movie actor (oaters exclusively) and country-and-western singer, to say nothing of afternoon kids show host. Here’s his genial mug on an 8×10 glossy:
My friend, Doye O’Dell
And here we are on the set:
At rear, Doye O’Dell. L-R: John, Bob, Alan, Brad, Bill, me
I had recently broken my leg while not quite climbing over a picket fence. Wearing a mukluk on one foot (kind of like Prince, later on) made me all the more endearing.
During the show, according to my brother, I stared lasciviously on screen at some pre-adolescent female singer who performed in front of us while we sat on fake logs. I dispute this.
One of the perks of appearing on TV with Doye was meeting other KTLA personalities:
Stan Chambers was a TV news reporter at KTLA who won several Emmys during a career that lasted from 1947 to 2010.
Dorothy Gardiner was a minor actress and at times an announcer on KTLA’s coverage of the Rose Parade.
Dick Garton was an all-purpose announcer and actor who both appered in and wrote for Betty White’s unforgettable series, “Life with Elizabeth.”
I wish I had gotten an autograph from Dorothy Gardner, shown above with her sister Aleene (Aleene on the left). Dorothy had a daily show called “Handy Hints,” which often featured cooking in the studio’s functional kitchen (kind of like her KTLA colleague of the time, Betty White, in White’s later memorable role on the Mary Tyler Moore show). Dotty, as I have always called her, using the nickname by which she was known among Hollywood insiders, was very beautiful, and nice, and really, really handy–and invited us onto the kitchen set for some cookies that he had just baked. You couldn’t get any more beautiful or handy. Dorothy is the only woman who ever challenged the standing of my kindergarten teacher, Miss Black, as the object of my unflagging devotion, smitten-wise.
And then this:
Slim Andrews was an actor on the Doye O’Dell show and in B westerns of the 1940s and 1950s, almost exclusively as “the humorous sidekick” (like Gabby Hayes and Fuzzy Knight).
Slim
Eventually, our den graduated into Webelos and the earthy challenges of Boy Scouts, and my mother’s entrepreneurial reign over boyhood talent came to an end–and with it any efforts at gaining public attention that I might have sought. Not that Mom couldn’t be impressively emotive on other occasions. But she spruced up awfully well:
The Den Mothers of Pack 3 in Arcadia, 1950-51
Mom is fourth from the right. Nice shoes, Betty Jean. Grand-daughter and semi-namesake Emily Jean-Marie Kuhlman would approve.
Thanks so much, Francis and Betty Jean.
What a wasted childhood it would have been without the two of you.
The following account is from “The History of Alice Ann Carter,” compiled by her daughter, my Aunt Faye Lundquist (one of “the twins, Faye and Fern”). In it, Alice Ann recalls how, at the age of 17, she learned to paint with oils and to make flowers out of feathers while living in rural Juab County, Utah, in the 1890s. The narrative, written around 1956, is also included in my brother Hal’s book, OUR PIONEER HERITAGE AND FAMILY HISTORY (2004). One of Alice Ann’s two floral shadowboxes remains with the family of my cousin Ann Bjorklund, Aunt Faye’s eldest daughter, who kindly sent me the photo above.
There was a Catholic nun who had left the Convent in the East and come west, teaching art along the way. She traveled alone in a surrey. My father had heard about this traveling artist, and he engaged her to tutor me in art. She also taught others in our town and stayed at our home for seven weeks. My father fed and cared for her horse. It was gentle and kind, and its name was “Pet.” Father paid $1 for each lesson that I had. After my seventh lesson, she continued on her way.
I was seventeen, and I worked hard and took my training very seriously. The teacher had patterns we could buy, and I later sent to New York and to Canada for others. The initial pattern was ordered from The Modern Priscilla Publishing Company of Boston, Massachusetts. I also sent to the Family Herald and Weekly Star, Montreal, Canada, for a pattern for ten cents. These patterns were soon unavailable, and I’ve had to be most careful with the original ones.
Using the patterns to paint was complicated. A thin coat of white lead was spread over one side of the perforated parchment paper pattern. This pattern was then laid face down on a fine quality velvet fabric. I would then clamp the handle on to the flat iron that had been heated to the desired warm temperature on top of the stove with the wood I had gathered and chopped. I gently pressed over the perforated pattern with the iron, and it transferred a fine white dotted line through onto the velvet. While this was drying I quickly cleaned the paper pattern with turpentine so it could be used again.
Using many fine strokes with the pen point, I could build up the oil to paint and shade the flowers and leaves as I desired. These paintings have won first and second prizes at the Juab County Fair.
I saw some feather flowers, and I wanted to learn to make them. Mrs. Bigler told me she was going to teach a class which would be held in the Excelsior Building. This building was a store with a gallery. People could buy merchandise off the shelf or sit around on chairs. Brother James Paxman managed the store and told Mrs. Bigler she could rent the space above for so many weeks.
The flowers took a long time to make. We stripped the down off the feather, cut and trimmed the feather the way we wanted for the petals for the flower we wished to make. We cut little petals for daisies and sweet peas. We used little scissors to cut the feather petals, and we had to be very careful that we didn’t split the feathers. Then we would come up the quill of the feather and dent it and cut it in the shape we wanted, and make it hollow if we wanted a hollow [pillow] and make it turn out. We had to design our petals and leaves like that before we could make a flower.
Then we needed something to put our petals together. Mr. Wrigley hadn’t made his chewing gum at the time, so we made our chewing gum out of lump resin, which we bought at the drug store. It didn’t cost us very much if we bought it by the lump. We then put water in a pan on the stove and mashed and dissolved the resin. After it came to a boil, we added butter and boiled it until it was stringy like candy. We tested it until it was a soft ball in a cup of water. We would stretch it until it was ready to chew. After chewing, we would make the center of the flower and add the feathers as we wound, adding more stringy resin around each center. Finally the flower was finished, using the resin chewing gum. Keep in mind we had to chew the resin all the time we were making the flower.
Sister Bigler couldn’t help the problem of the down flying around and going down on the dress goods below. When people were buying yardage below, the down would fly around and fall on their material. The clerk had to brush the down off, which was very embarrassing, so Brother Paxman became angry and told her she was doing damage to his business and would have to move somewhere else.
She said, “If you can let me stay here until the week is out, I think I can wind it up.” He said, “I think I can do that.”
She said, “Tomorrow we will have to borrow some ducks because we can’t get any geese in here because they are too big. [They stood as tall as I was, 5′ 1/2″.] Who has some ducks we can borrow, so I can show you where to get the feathers?”
I said, “I’ll get some.” I told my mother about this and wondered if the Prices across the creek would let us have some. Mother said, “I think they will let you borrow some, but how will you get them down there? You’ll need help; maybe Lucy will go with you.”
I said that would be fine, so Lucy and I each took a basket and went to Prices to borrow some ducks. The Prices caught some pretty, white, clean ones, and we put them in the baskets and took them to the store.
Now I had learned to make the feather flowers, I needed more feathers to work with. Mrs. Bigler said there were some geese at Goshen, Utah, near the pond over by Mona Lake. My father said, “If you want to go out to Wanship, you will find some up the river.” I said I’d like to go there.
I took the feather flowers with me to show my cousins. They liked them very much. My cousin George Moore said, “I’ll go up the river tomorrow and find some geese. How many do you need?”
I said, “Two.” He replied, “They are not molting at this time of year, and if you will wait until spring you can have all you want.” I knew it would be a nice summer there.
The next day he went up the Weber River and brought back two beautiful geese as tall as I was. They were friendly geese, and he placed them in the barn away from the house down the road.
One day my friend Mae Judd (Bates), who was working for Uncle George Carter and Uncle George Moore because their mother, Aunt Polly, wasn’t very well, said, “Let’s go out and see the geese.”
So we went out the front door and down through the gate and across the road. The geese heard us coming and were friendly toward us. They made us laugh as they crawled under the fence and came down the road to meet us side by side, talking and chattering to each other like two old ladies. They would look at us and then at each other. When we met face to face we stopped, and I said, “Good morning,” and then they chatted to each other some more.
We laughed and walked back down the road with the geese on each side of us. We came on down the road to Aunt Polly and Uncle Will’s, where we were staying. (George Carter and Will built that home.)
We went in the house, and the geese went around to the back of the house. Mae wanted to go outside to see what the geese were doing. There was a tap with a fabric hose attached to it that lay in a wooden tub that overflowed and watered the strawberries, radishes, and lettuce. One of the geese got into the tub and went round and round with its feet and head out of the water, flapping its wings about in the tub. Then the goose in the tub got out, and the other one jumped in and did the same thing. Now the other one picked up the hose and sprayed the goose in the tub. They looked so pretty and white.
During the summer, Cousin George fed the geese and said he would get them fat for Thanksgiving. We had a good time with our pets.
Finally the time came to molt. Aunt Polly (Mary, as we called her) said, “How are you going to get the feathers off. I’m afraid the teeth are going to bite you.”
I was afraid, too, because the teeth on the lower jaw were like a little saw, white and sharp like needles. She said, “I know what I’ll do.” She wore a long front apron that tied around her waist with a bow in the back. “I’ll hold my apron over its head so it won’t bite you.”
I picked the feathers from the back between the wings, on its back, and a few near the tail and on the breast. The silk feathers came from the wing. The ones on the breast were wide. The ones further down were all down, and I couldn’t use them. Most of the feathers were easy to pull. The difficult ones had blood on, and the geese made a yell that frightened me. Finally we got the feathers picked, and they were enough for two frames or more.
I made it home with the feathers and made one picture for my mother, and I used the silk feather lilies for my wedding cake. The other frame I made for myself. I finished it the winter before I married in 1901. I didn’t make any after that because I didn’t have any tools—the house caught on fire and burned my scissors and tools.
When I married Sam, my flowers in my hair and corsage were feather flowers I had made—they were white silk lilies. I edged them with fine scissors. Today we would call it “pinking.” They did not have pinking shears in my day, so it was done with small scissors.
Feather flowers for Alice Ann’s wedding to Samuel Broadhead
My wedding cake was three tiered. The first layer was baked in a large milk pan. It was iced with white frosting and decorated with white peppermints. A small vase on the top tier held the white feather flowers. Today you can see them in the center of a large picture of feather flowers I later framed for our home.
Alice Ann in 1952 with her husband, Sam, and kids Daken and Valate (front row), and (at back, left to right) Sheldon, Fern, Faye, Blanche, and Rulon
The Twins, Faye and Fern
Every goofy little kid has to have a hopeless crush on a cousin. My fate was easily sealed.
A few years ago, I got an email from a distant cousin who informed me that the town of Nephi (about 90 miles south of Salt Lake City) had an old cemetery that was nearly full, with room left for only a few family members of those already interred. Would I like to reserve a spot?
As a kid, I had spent many wonderful times in Nephi visiting my Uncle Rulon’s family, especially my cousin Niles, since we were the same age, and also because Niles knew a million places where young boys could play in and around the dirt roads and irrigation ditches of that rural community. Even so, I declined the opportunity to be planted there.
But the email reminded me of an event at my parents’ house in Temple City when I was back visiting home in southern California, I guess sometime in the 1970s. They had invited a bunch of family members to dinner, including my dad’s mother, Grandma Alice Ann, and his older sister, Aunt Valate. This was after Grandma had had the misfortune to develop some kind of heart problem while visiting Los Angeles from Salt Lake City, and was deemed permanently too ill to make the trip back to Utah. So she had moved in with my widowed aunt. At this time, Grandma was in her 90s.
The dinner went well, and afterwards we all sat chatting in my parents’ living room. Eventually Aunt Valate said, solicitously, “Mother, don’t you think it’s about time to go home?”
“Well, all right, Valate,” my grandmother said mildly, “if you’re tired.”
I managed not to laugh out loud then, but I’ve done so ever since, every time I’ve thought of it. I’m laughing now.
The next day, while peeling spuds with my dad for another dinner, I repeated the exchange between Grandma and Aunt Valate, and said to my dad, “Gee, Grandma’s got a bit of a tart tongue, doesn’t she?”
My dad replied immediately, “Well, she’s a Carter.”
I was struck by the fact that, after roughly 75 years of birthing and raising seven kids on an isolated ranch outside of Nephi in Utah, to say nothing of putting up with about a billion other Broadheads, somehow Grandma hadn’t yet gained full membership in the organization. There was still that Carter asterisk. Broadheads are a tough crowd.
A year or so later, I visited Grandma Alice at my aunt’s house in Burbank. She was nearly 96 then, and failing, so that she rarely even recognized my father when he visited her each week. I was on my way home from northern California, and stopped off to see if I could say hello. Luckily, she was on top of her game and in good spirits that day, and we had a nice chat for nearly an hour.
At one point, I asked her how she made the wonderful shadow-boxes that had hung in their house in Salt Lake City, each about a foot and a half wide, maybe two feet high, and a few inches deep–and each filled with brilliantly-colored floral arrangements made out of dyed feathers. I know that this sounds a bit like oil paintings of toreadors on black velvet, but they were very beautiful and subtle. They ought to be in an art museum if they aren’t already.
She was just a young girl when she made them, and she was a bit daunted by the task of fetching a crucial, especially prized, highly delicate feather that had to be plucked from the posterior of a farm goose at the original Four Mile Ranch. Apparently the goose’s artistic sensibilities were not developed enough to make it fully cooperative, and it put up a heck of a battle, continually flapping its strong wings and beating young Alice Ann about the head and shoulders. She said she heard bells ringing in her head for several days afterwards—but she got the feather.
Of course. She was a Carter.
I often told these stories to my daughter Emily, great-grand-daughter of Alice, and apparently she took them to heart. When she gave birth to her second daughter, she and husband Kevin named her Savannah Carter Kuhlman.
Savannah – Alice’s Great-great-granddaughter, and definitely a Carter
In the 1970s, when I was living in Wichita and teaching at Wichita State University, I had a wonderful dentist. Besides maintaining his dental practice, he appeared on local TV once a week at noon and delivered insights into the wacky world of teeth and oral hygiene. He was also very active in the Democratic party, which I guess might have been a demerit. My friend Georgie Cooper once claimed to be waiting in her doctor’s office and found on the coffee table a copy of the New Republic, which to her meant that he couldn’t be much of a doctor, since all doctors worth their salt were Republicans. It was just the way things were.
I’ve always felt that Georgie exaggerated this story, probably. But—possibly not.
Anyway, I liked this dentist. On one occasion, he went through an elaborate procedure to put fillings in two cavities on the back of my upper front teeth. Back then, this involved stuffing my cheeks with many rods of cotton, as well as installing a rubber dam to keep the front teeth dry during the procedure. After an hour so of work, my dentist removed the intricate dam and used mirrors to inspect his work.
This was in the very early days of “white fillings,” applied as goop and then hardened by a curing light. Matching the color of the goop to the color of your teeth was a coveted skill in the dental trade at that time.
He was very satisfied—enough so that he invited his dental hygienist and all of his other aides, including the receptionist, to come in and check it out, so teams of viewers were peering into my mouth. He even set up a couple of mirrors so that I, too, could see the back of my front teeth and appreciate his handiwork.
Eventually, the crowd dispersed and he stood for a while, contented, and then asked what I thought.
Since I still had 10 or 12 rods of cotton in my mouth, I gargled out the question “Wedd gan ih tabe dis goddon aught?” Meaning “When can I take this cotton out?”
He laughed and said, “You know, I only really forgot about that once. A lady came in at 9:00 in the morning. I finished with her around 10:00, and she went home. Just before 5:00, she called and asked when she could take the cotton out.”
I half-laughed and mumbled, “Uh, and you said. . . .”
“One more hour.”
I have never really stopped laughing. It was the perfect response, since she got a specific time to look forward to, and she didn’t have to regret having that stuff in her mouth unnecessarily for a whole day.
On another occasion, I went in to have my teeth cleaned. This task was performed by a dental hygienist who happened to be female and also happened to be attractive. I would say “very, very attractive,” but someone may read this.
When she had finished scraping and flossing, she said “The doctor will be in soon to examine your teeth. Would like a magazine to read?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Would you like some water?”
“I don’t think so.”
“A soda?”
“No, thanks,” I said again. But she had sounded so much like an airline stewardess that I added, humorously, “Maybe a scotch on the rocks.”
She stood at the door, looking at me, puzzled, her head tilted slightly to one side, and said, “Scratch your rocks?”
Maybe you would have a response to that, but I had none. If I explained what I had actually said, then she might likely realize what she had actually asked. It was an impasse—only resolved when the dentist popped in, saw us eyeing each other silently, and said cheerily, “Hey, what’s going on in here?”
Neither of us had an explanation, so he started examining my mouth.
The kid who gave me a list of stories to write down
I once casually asked my wife’s father Frank Manley how many cars he had owned. I think the number at that time was 52, and he proceeded to fill me in on the details of each vehicle over the next several hours. So you’re probably wondering about my first car.
I got my first car as a sixteenth birthday gift from my parents in 1958, toward the end of my junior year in high school. My father took me out to shop for a vehicle, and we hit many low-rent used car lots around Temple City, where we lived. Shopping with my father was no picnic, as he believed that every salesman was a low-life bastard trying to screw him, so his demeanor ranged from stony silence to terse, caustic remarks to the sales-force felon. At the time, this embarrassed me, as I didn’t yet understand that my father was right. After several high-tension encounters at various car lots, my father settled on a tan 1951 Ford sedan, at a cost of $150, and asked me if I wanted it. By then, I would have accepted a pogo stick if it meant I didn’t have to go to another lot with my father, so I said yes, and we bought it. $150 was a low price even in 1958, but the car had previously been owned by a mailman, who had racked up over 200,000 miles with it. Also, the trunk lid had been damaged and couldn’t be opened, so on the way home with the car, we stopped at a junkyard, where my dad purchased a somewhat rusty, chalky, powder-blue replacement that he installed when we got home. So it was an unconventionally two-toned car. But it was wheels, and it was mine.
Another problem, it turned out, was that the front seat had been worn out during its years in the postal service, so that the seat rolled backward or forward as the car accelerated or decelerated. Since my father’s trunk replacement had slightly unnerved me, I fixed this problem myself by jamming a wooden coat-hanger into the seat mechanism. Worked fine.
The next day, I drove my new car to Arcadia High School (we were in the Temple City mailing district, but the Arcadia school district). As the day wore on, I offered rides home to just about everyone I knew. Um, every girl I knew. Five accepted the offer, and I felt like a teen prince as I slowly inched my carload of chicks out of the school parking lot. I drove up Santa Anita Boulevard and stopped for a red light at the four-lane Colorado Boulevard. When the light changed, I pulled into the intersection, but botched the stick-shift move into second and stalled the car. Other motorists were immediately irked by the delay I was causing and honked at me mercilessly, and a couple of the girls rather stridently urged me to get going. I finally forced the clutch into first gear and stomped the gas pedal to the floor. Unfortunately, the weight of the two girls and me forced the front seat backward, breaking the wooden coat-hanger, so that, while the car started inching slowly through the intersection, I was unable to reach any of the foot controls, and could barely get my hands on the steering wheel. After too many agonizing moments, I got the girls to coordinate in scrunching the front seat forward, so that my desperate feet could once again reach the pedals.
The rest of the trip is still a blur, but couldn’t have been much fun, since a couple of the girls lived in the hilly area toward the north end of Arcadia.
Later, drawing upon valuable lessons learned in shop class during my freshman year, I found a new and permanent solution to the seat problem by using a wire coat-hanger.
Though the seat issue was resolved, other matters occasionally arose to bite me or my passengers in the butt. One summer day, when my life-long friend Bob was riding shotgun, we stopped at a Foster Freeze for a couple of tall cones. As we pulled out of the lot, Bob was holding both of them so I could devote my attention to a left turn through a busy intersection. Midway through the turn, the right door suddenly flew open and Bob tumbled out. He rolled once, but somehow kept the cones upright as he came to his feet. Both he and the Frosties were unscathed. Or at least the cones were. He may have had complaints that he never complained about to me. He was always a good athlete, but in this case, I think it may have been family frugality that was most at play. In those days, those cones must have been 15 cents apiece, at least.
I wonder if I ever had that door repaired. I can’t see how a coat-hanger would have helped much. Probably I just warned people not to lean on the door.
After working at a gas station through the summer of 1959, I had earned enough money for a 1951 MG-TD, an elegant model whose styling was halfway between the super-boxy MG-TC and the sleeker, more modern MG-A. It was maroon, and since it was a version called the Mark II, it had chrome headlights and additional trim. It was the first car I ever bought with my own money, and it cost $500. Being 17 years old, I naturally spent $600 to have black-leather seat upholstery installed. The car looked great.
Unfortunately, oil regularly fouled the sparkplugs—at least once a week—but I was then working part-time at a gas station and could easily clean them myself to keep the car running. Other than that, the car had various kinds of mechanical breakdown about once every few months. Maybe weeks.
When I took it in to the European Motors garage to be worked on for the umpteenth time, the owner/mechanic asked me if I wanted to buy an Austin Healy. I said I loved those cars, but I already had an MG. He said, “Yeah, but if you bought the Austin Healy, you’d have something to drive when the MG is in for repairs.”
When your mechanic makes that kind of joke, you know you’re in trouble. He made a small fortune off of me.
I liked to drive around with the top down, smoking a Crooks cigar, and making an ultra-cool wave to other MGs on the road (lifting up the first finger of the right hand while continuing to grasp the wheel with the other fingers). This gesture was every bit as necessary as my buckled-back driving cap.
I sold the MG when I moved north in 1963 to start graduate school at San Francisco State. My father had convinced me that it rained too much up there for a convertible (not so), but what carried the day was learning what a 21-year-old male would have to pay to insure a sports car in the Bay Area.
So I sold the MG for $1,000, thus losing only about two or three thousand on the deal.
Feathers that Alice Ann Made into Flowers in 1894
