Buckeye Grove – Columbus, Ohio

Buckeyes

(1955-1957)

1

  Ralph Freud eases into a large chair behind his desk, sees me in the front row and with drooping eyelids, hones in. “What are you doing here?” he asks. It’s spring, 1954, and I’m seated with a group of several dozen eager actors crowded into a room in one of the prefabs behind Royce Hall for the season’s tryouts.

  Embarrassed, I mumble, “Came back to get my degree.” He smiles—or is he frowning? After almost three years in New York, I’m still reticent to call him Ralph.

  Freud (pronounced “Frood”) is directing more plays than during the 1948-50 seasons. In the fall of 1953, he has directed Carol Burnett in the Mary Martin role in the 1940’s Broadway musical, “Lute Song.”  Carol is still at U.CL.A. in 1954, seen on the arm of boy friend, Don Saroyan, dark-haired, soft spoken, laid-back sort of guy. At C.C. Clarke’s chocolate eatery next to Grauman’s Chinese movie palace, sitting with my new friends, Stan Young and Peggy McKenna, Carol and Don tell us the now well-known story of their recent stroke of luck with the San Diego businessman.

This is how I remember it: Performing at a party in San Diego, they are approached by a man in suit and tie who offers them one thousand dollars if they’ll spend it to go to New York to further their careers. If in one year they make good, they can pay him back—if not, no need to. And Carol, if successful, must promise she will help other struggling actors and performers.

  “We thought he was drunk or something,” Carol says, “but the next morning he called us and said he had the money.”

  When I do return to New York almost ten years later, in 1963, Carol is a shining star, appearing in the television special, “Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett at Carnegie Hall.” By coincidence, in 1963, Frank Dunand and I end up on the same street she had lived on, West 69^th Street, half-a-block from Central Park West. Beverly Dickson, friend from U.C.L.A., lives in the apartment, once shared with Carol. Carol’s autographed eight by ten photo hangs in the window of the block’s dry cleaner’s.

  During the rather lack-luster year of 1954, Katheryn Offill makes another appearance. She now lives in North Long Beach, teaching drama at Lynwood High School. Her boy, Sumner, is ten years old; husband, Don, in a I-want-to run-off-somewhere mode. One day at the kitchen table, as Katheryn prepares her special dish, tuna casserole flavored with a can of cream of mushroom soup, Don directs his dark, intense, somber eyes beneath his equally somber eyebrows, at David and me, suddenly loudly pleading, “Let’s go to Caracas!” He’d spent most of his army career during the war, a captain, at the Panama Canal. Soon he will leave Offill, not fleeing with an army buddy to Caracas, but vanishing into an alcoholic haze with another woman.

  Joe Geers has reappeared, actually in 1953 while David and I are still in New York on East 83^rd Street. The woman he’d run off with has been killed by a car while crossing coast highway 101 north of San Diego. So Mother and Joe remarry. This time they are together some thirty years, to the end of Joe’s life.

  Other events in 1954: the Palm Springs “matter” again surfaces. Jack Forline, Mother’s brother, has been in touch with Leon Parma (married to cousin “Babs,” Aunt Katherine’s daughter) concerning our Palm Springs inheritance. Parma and Babs have been spending an inordinate amount of time coddling Aunt Pearl in Palm Springs.

Mother and her older brother, John McCallum Forline

  Troubled, Uncle Jack invites Mother and Joe Geers to his home near downtown L.A. in a quiet neighbor close to Wilshire Boulevard and the Ambassador Hotel. Joe is, surprisingly, without transportation at the moment, so it’s up to me to drive them—in the green Chevy. A long walk between trimmed shrubbery and newly mowed lawn, bordered by Jack’s meticulously tended tree roses, takes us inside to a small but luxurious home reflecting Uncle Jack’s sophistication—rooms filled with wooden cabinets and book shelves he’s built; crystal chandeliers and a circular staircase; aroma of prime rib roast from the oven.

  Jack, John McCallum Forline, born in Western Springs, Illinois in 1895, is an elegant man, prince nez hanging from a gold chain and usually found on the end of his nose; silent and inscrutable, as if he knows all family secrets (which he does, without doubt). Mother is as proud of her brother Jack as she had been of their father. There’s no hesitation in accepting his invitation—albeit a bit troubled by his declaring on the phone, “It’s time we did something about Palm Springs and our inheritance.” Mother does not like controversy of any kind—especially when it comes to sharing family secrets, but she adores her older brother and will do his bidding.

  Jack recently has been on the radio, commenting on politics and economics. Before the war broke out in Europe in 1939, he wrote to Roosevelt and Hitler, pointing out the terrible mistake they were making in not maintaining the peace. Whether they ever got the letter, or bothered to read it if they did, he would never know. In 1954 he’s quite happy in his third marriage to Peggy, a former secretary, a savvy, petite, pretty woman, and quite elegant as well.

  Jack was old enough, thirteen, to remember when their mother died, minutes past midnight in Redlands, California, November 21, 1908. He had stood up for his mother’s younger sister Pearl when she married Austin McManus in May, 1914, a few days before their grandmother Emily McCallum died. Emily’s death was at the heart of things concerning the inheritance. As we would discover a few years later, Emily had signed a quit-claim deed on her deathbed, giving Pearl title to all the land in Palm Springs—the deed was signed with an “X.”

  Joe Geers quickly secures a strong mutual-respect with Jack, “man-to-man,”  even though Joe is a fiercely loyal member of the Teamster Union, while Jack is a corporate vice president for labor relations, previously for Douglas Aircraft, now for Richfield Oil (later Arco). Joe’s loyalty for the Teamsters would last until his retirement, even during the troubled years of Jimmy Hoffa’s rein.

  Aunt Marjorie, mother’s younger sister, also is present at the dinner, and to no one’s surprise proceeds to get loaded on Jack’s twelve-year old scotch. Dinner itself is medium rare prime rib with an abundance of side dishes; the prime rib sliced at the table by Jack. Vintage wine with a cork in the bottle. But Jack’s plan to unify the family isn’t working. Mother is, as always, totally agreeable to any and all plans her older brother may wish to instigate with the indomitable and unapproachable Aunt Pearl. But Marjorie is not.

  “I think we should all put our heads together and do something about Aunt Pearl’s responsibilities to the family,” Jack begins. I see a tiny red light on the front of a large cabinet. Later Mother will tell me she noticed it too. Is Jack recording the session?

  “It is quite certain how Aunt Pearl got the land by diverting titles and other shenanigans,” he says. “If we  confront her together, with one voice, perhaps it will spell dividends.” (He doesn’t tell us he’s been in touch with Leon Parma, and that Leon has been looking into all matters re Pearl’s estate—another bit of the puzzle we’d learn in a few years—after Jack’s death.)

  “What about Katherine?” Marjorie asks. “She’ll never agree to anything. Leon is her darling.”

  “We’ll cross that road when we come to it,” Jack says.

  Marjorie trots out her time-worn story of Grandmother Emily’s “grocery bill” and how she had given the ranch to Pearl with the promise that Pearl “would take care of May’s children.” She lashes out at Aunt Pearl. Pearl ruined her life, forced her into living the high style in Palm Springs, making up to the wealthy Stuart Abbott and other rich men who frequented the Tennis Club, preventing her from marrying the only man she’d ever loved, an accountant who Pearl felt socially beneath Marjorie.

  “It’s our mother’s fault,” Marjorie slurs. “Why did she do it?” Silence at the table; I hold my breath, focusing on my plate, a remnant of prime rib staring back at me. This is the great family secret not even Mother has revealed—I’d heard the story from my father by way of his brother, Tom.

  Jack glances at me furtively. “I don’t know about that,” he replies. Marjorie does an about face—a sudden flip-flop. “I won’t do anything to hurt Aunt Pearl. You can count me out!” she cries.

  “Why not at least look into it?” hearing my voice coming from another world. I must be nuts in this gathering of the clan, putting my two cents in.

  Marjorie turns, head wobbling, eyes blurred, focusing more or less, at me. “Aunt Pearl thinks you’re a fairy.”

  Jack glowers. “We’ll have none of that kind of talk.”

  And that’s that. No chance of “getting together and doing something about Palm Springs.” A subject closed forever. Jack will make no further attempt to get his sisters to confront Aunt Pearl. In two years, he’s gone, and in another five years Leon Parma is continuing his investigation of Aunt Pearl’s holdings and how she acquired them at the expense of her nephew and nieces, and their offspring.

  On that fateful summer night, 1954, as Marjorie reels off down Sixth Street in her lumbering Lincoln Continental, any further attempt on the part of May’s children to “correct” the injustice her sister Pearl had visited upon her descendents, fades to silence, accompanied with the screech of Marjorie’s tires as she swings around toward Wilshire  Boulevard and vanishes.

  New friends at U.C.L.A., Peggy McKenna and Stan Young, meet Aunt Pearl. Peggy, a blonde Irish woman with large eyes—not a raving beauty—is determined to get me into the sack and eventually the altar, whichever comes first. I assure her this will never happen. Stan, on our first meeting, knows all about my past history in U.C.L.A. theatre, 1943-1944, 1948-50, seeing me as “Great-Actor-Returned-from-Golden Age.” We become inseparable. He’s young, “schoolboy good looks, chiseled features, smiling, open countenance, soft brown hair and lingering brown eyes.

  David is not happy. In our game-room abode beneath the garage at Waverly Drive, he lashes out at me, then confesses he himself was never faithful—profligate, promiscuous activities in New York at every opportunity, starting almost from the beginning of living with me in 1950. Oh the time wasted! Still he runs with me and my new found friends, charming as always. We visit Palm Springs in our veteran green four-door Chevy.

  Pearl welcomes us into her home built into the mountain—the grand pink villa next to the Tennis Club—also her creation. She greets me with subdued hostility but at once takes to Peggy. who is not only a woman, but Roman Catholic. Pearl has been flirting with the Church in recent years. We lunch at the Tennis Club, swim in the pool; a grand opportunity for Aunt Pearl to show off. She questions me about my intention to enter graduate school. I mumble something about “seminars” and “history of the theatre.” Obviously my heart’s not in it.

  “What good will that do you?” she demands. Peggy is embarrassed for me and later asks why I don’t stand up to my aunt. Good question. Everyone in the family is terrified of this woman. Too bad. We could’ve learned so much more about the early years in Palm Springs; although many of her stories appeared in several issues of “Palm Springs Life,” over the years, were self-serving. She seldom spoke of her sister May, my grandmother.

  As we leave, Pearl pulls me aside. “Your Aunt Pearl likes it when you bring young girls to see her.” What can I say to that? One more failure to communicate with this strange, silent woman given to migraine headaches. Hardly anyone in the family seemed able to get through to her, much to our regret after he death in 1966.

  Summer, 1954. It’s expected I will at last take the course in Summer Theatre; get my degree and segué into graduate school. I do not, however, enroll in Summer Theatre. David wants to go back to Ohio, and that’s that. The brief affair with Stan is leading nowhere, even though I’ve met his mother, a very young happy woman who has traveled the world. How can I possibly take on the responsibilities of a fresh relationship?

  One ironic twist (historically) in our adventures: Stan drives me home from U.C.L.A. It’s late at night. We pause, parked across the street from the sloping lawn at 3301 Waverly Drive, anticipating a modest and brief, yet passionate, expression of love. A police car rolls alongside. Flashlight illuminates the front seat, and our faces.

  “What are you boys doing?”

  “My friend has driven me home from school—U.C.L.A. I live here. Above, at 3301.”

  “Okay. Sorry to bother you. We’ve had robberies in the neighborhood.”

  When, on August 10, 1969, shocked by the front page of The New York Daily News, headlining Leno and Rosemary LaBianca’s murder—full page picture of 3301, Cadillac and large boat attached to it parked below the house—it strikes me why two guys sitting late at night deserved more attention than a bunch of stoned killers moving through the shadows, to say nothing of the sound of a gunshot. Not a patrol car in sight.

  So it’s off to the Buckeyes—to Columbus, Ohio and bright red cardinals perched on bare twigs in the snow, autumn pumpkin festivals, fodder in the shock, smell of over-ripe apples littering the ground in the apple orchards, Ohio State Saturday afternoon football games. And my first job as a professional writer.

Northern Cardinal

Ohio’s State Bird

2

  January, 1955, in the Buckeye State joining the farm boys—or rather those who sell fertilizer to them—with boss, E.S. Halley, tall Lincolnesque man, Sales Promotion Manager for the Davison Chemical Company, Division of W.R. Grace & Co. Halley owns a hundred or so acres of farmland close by, which he himself doesn’t farm. Somewhat straight-laced, a bit skeptical as to my degree in theatre and from a California university, Halley hires me anyway. A farmer all his life, Halley has a degree in Agronomy from Ohio State.

  We oversee a sales force covering eleven states, Midwestern and border states, including Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, most of my time spent typing crop-yield charts onto stencils and running them off on the A.B. Dick mimeograph machine, as I try to forget, as if I could, I’ve had five years of college. The illusion I’m doing something creative accrues when photographing the fertilizer processing plant and making presentations at sales meetings and designing a logo for the company, figure of a smiling little guy and naming him “Davy Davco.”

  So spring finds this big city boy perched on a mound of hay on a flatbed, riding with Halley and other men through northern Ohio’s Cuyahoga County state university farm, rattling past experimental acres; lunch under huge tents—coffee with meal, not a bottle of beer in site, thank you; fried chicken, mashed potatoes and peas on paper plates. Strangely, I feel right at home hanging out “down on the farm,” learning names for grass crops—lush green fields of birds foot trefoil (love that name), alfalfa; learning to distinguish “field corn” from “sweet corn.” (Am I haunted by a past life, born on a Midwestern farm?)

  Halley retains his stern, distant demeanor during the hay ride—says little, hardly recognizing I exist, even as we sit under the tent devouring chicken legs. We are five hundred miles from the sea, but down on the farm this day recalls “far away places” of childhood dreams, even if I’m not sailing forever around the world. (I’m reminded of a novel read, title not remembered, of a guy wandering through Southern France; also my dad’s geese chasing me around his backyard.)

  At David’s home we cram into a small bedroom off the living room—tolerable surroundings. David, Sr. and I finding common ground in observing the weather, meteorology already one of my hobbies, as it is for him. I marvel his quietly expressed pride in the vegetable garden he nurtures on a large, oblong lot next to the house the other side of the driveway—strawberry beds, potatoes, rhubarb, tomatoes—even tobacco.

  Mother Florence and I tolerate each other. She spends her time baking roasts and pies and frying chickens, and all the housewifely chores; nurturing poppies and moss roses, her favorite flower; shopping on Saturdays, and going to church on Sundays.

  Florence on the phone: “Oh Evelyn, that’s terrible, how did it happen? Well let me know what I can do. . . What? . . . She didn’t! . . . How awful!  . . . She did? Why?  Well of course I’ll be there.”

  She hangs up. David asks, “Who was that?”

  “Oh that was our Sunshine Chairman” she says.

  Saturday shopping with Florence and David in the supermarket drives me to near insanity as she lingers long over each item before placing it carefully in the cart, or changing her mind replacing it on the shelf. Saturdays has never been bearable for me unless I’m out having fun, like going to a football game, a drive in the country—in California, sun tanning at the beach and riding the waves; or lunch at a favorite restaurant. I hated cleaning the house or washing the car on Saturdays, or shopping for clothes in department stores. Boring.

  Family folk in Central Ohio seemed always to be doing something, seldom seizing the moment to relax or contemplate. Perhaps this is why fishing and rabbitting are popular sports, allowing men to escape from their chores, to get close to nature and dream a little. For the ladies of Ohio in those years, escaping from drudgery seems to have been found in quilting bees, church socials, and bingo.

  How much I would’ve liked to say to Florence, “When do you people relax? You spend April, May, and June taking down storm windows, rescuing geraniums from the cellar for planting, painting the house (a yearly ritual), cleaning, polishing; maybe relaxing briefly in the summertime, except for the logistic nightmare of picnics; forever baking rhubarb-strawberry pies, tossing salads with greens and tomatoes from the garden; in autumn, pickling, preserving, bottling—peaches, cucumbers, tomatoes; shaking out  roots of geraniums, and hanging them in the cellar, along with overflowing baskets of apples for winter storage; fastening storm windows, spreading straw over the strawberry patch, cleaning the furnace. In October, November, December—getting ready for Halloween and Thanksgiving; shopping for Christmas, baking fruit cakes and interminable trays of sugar cookies. When fortunate enough to experience a January thaw, you might find time to take a walk in the woods. Of course, I have to admit, I thoroughly enjoyed the food and the smell of apples, and all the resultant pleasures derived from these activities. And Florence’s pies with strawberries and rhubarb from David Sr.’s garden, smothered with whip cream, sheer heaven.

  One cold, blustery April morning we did manage to get away long enough to hunt for mushrooms, David and I with David Sr., David’s brother-in-law, Norman Link and his two boys, Jeffrey and Michael; while Florence and David’s sister, Emmeline, a robust, earthy woman—Norm’s wife, waited at home to cook them. An amazing experience for a city boy, trudging among skunk cabbages and dead leaves matted beneath our feet under the Buckeye trees; occasional snow flurries filtering down through barren branches, vanishing to reveal cerulean blue sky—and not a mushroom in sight, even though David, Sr. assured us they were there—somewhere; Norm, tall, dark, and amused, looking skeptically at his father-in-law.

  Guess who spotted the first mushroom(s)? Right, this guy from California, a small clump of the little devils near the exposed roots of a Buckeye tree. Sure enough, my find is verified by one and all as safe to consume, and once found seemed to appear everywhere. David, Sr. convinced me I’d discovered real mushrooms—they were not toadstools. Later we enjoyed them at home, fried in butter. Nobody got sick.

  Hunting, rabbitting especially, another story. How despicable, cornering a wild cottontail burrowed into a hole in the frozen ground, staring up at me. I refused to shoot and stormed off the field. The shooting instigated by David’s brother, Jim, true, red-white-and blue, northern redneck (he loved Joe McCarthy), his views supported by his wife who if anything, was more conservative than he was (a kind of Sarah Palin, I  think).

  Fortunately David and I, most off-days, spend time with Emmeline and Norm and their boys. They own a small house north of downtown Columbus near Worthington, the kind of home I used to draw and dream about in grammar school—white frame with gabled roof; eucalyptus trees towering behind it—of course no eucalyptus here, but the intention to plant more trees—a live decorated Christmas tree, not thrown away, but planted  outside. Inside on cold winter nights, David and I bundle into a huge bed in the attic with a mattress we could sink into, smothered with downy quilts, isolated enough from those below to relish our lovemaking. A cellar big enough to stand up in; inviting breakfast nook in the kitchen where we idle away long afternoons and evenings in winter, gorging on “poor man’s hamburgers” and vanilla ice cream, gooey with chocolate syrup.

  Television in the living room, black and white: “The Honeymooners,” marveling that Emmeline and  Norm sit through Laurence Olivier’s “Richard III” with us. And  David and I (not so much Norm) watching singer Tom Jones. Emmeline adores him, as did many of her housewife friends, not afraid to admit why they adore him—sporting white pants in those early days of his career, revealing an ample package. Emmeline (oh how I loved her) wasn’t afraid to admit her fascination with  Tom’s bouncing display as he rolled his pelvis into the camera. He could sing, of course—a mellow, starving for love, crooning voice.

  To Norm Link’s credit, Emmeline’s fascination didn’t phase him in the least, although he teased her about it,  secure as he was, phobia-free hetero male and loving husband—a straight man to feel comfortable with. I don’t think he had a single enemy. He was self-contained and centered—not that he avoided voicing strong opinions and points-of-view; nor did he avoid confrontations. Norm worked for the telephone company like his father-in-law and when Halley was out of town, spent his lunch hours with me in my small office, sometimes bringing in sandwiches and coffee. We’d talk about the Worthington Players community theatre group in which all of us were now active; bushels of corn and frozen peach crops in Michigan; Jeffrey and Michael; sometimes gossiping about his in-laws, the Woehrles—as in the current story of Florence on the phone with the Sunshine Chairman.

  He would stretch out his legs, plant his feet on the nearest chair; a regular guy who enjoyed the company of men as much as women, unlike several young married men we knew who were not comfortable in the company of women at all, except in the bedroom, and perhaps not even there; referring here to the “Betty Willis Story” which comes later.

  Emmeline has introduced us to Dell Briggs, and nearly explodes into laughter, telling us one Sunday around the breakfast table that Dell has questioned my lunchtime rendezvous with Norm. Shouldn’t Emmeline be concerned Norm and I having lunch together in a private office? We crack up. Rumor through the years has it that telephone men do fool around a lot on the job, not averse to giving favors to men as well as women.

  As possible as this might have been for Norm (he decidedly gives off sexual vibes), he did not dispense any such favors to me, not that I didn’t think it might be fun. (And what if Halley walked in? Imagine his puzzled consternation!) Emmeline and Norm didn’t need to remind themselves they were still passionate lovers, even after the birth of two sons.

  David, easily compassionate, not one who gave a second thought to being there when he felt he was needed, took on Dell Briggs with gusto, and sad to say (sad, for  me) she wasn’t the first woman who would complicate our life. Dell was totally screwed-up and dangerously overweight, emotional complex, phobia-ridden—I suspect homophobic, although this was a term never used or even known most likely at that time. Her one great passion in life seemed to be to control people, seeing herself as one who has the answer to everyone’s problems. Unfortunately she didn’t seem to have the same gusto for solving her own problems. Me, I worried about her influence on David—a lot. But nothing ever came of it.

  Emmeline and Norm were on the Board of Directors of the Worthington Players Club, Emmeline not one  for quilting bees, Needless to say, David and I soon joined, and the club became the center of our social life.

  I wrote and directed a one-act play, “Madame Theresa” about a black-mailing carnival con artist who fancied herself a medium. For music, an LP vinyl of authentic calliope music. Not recalling the name of the woman who played Madame Theresa—dark and passionate—I do recall we argued and shouted at each other a lot—can’t remember what that was all about!

  But I will always remember Carey Lipitz who played the “romantic lead.” Carey, soft and vulnerable, was a  blend of Laura in Tennessee Williams’ “Glass Menagerie” and Blanche DuBois in “Streetcar Name Desire,” although younger than Blanche. Blonde, introverted, and troubled, like Laura; diaphanous, delicate and ethereal, yet tenacious and given to fits of depression. In fewer words, she was not a happy woman. Her husband, Ben was working on his masters in library science at O.S.U.

  Ben, mild mannered, soft spoken, as dull as an overcast sky, passionately arid, takes pride in showing us page after page of numbers with decimal points he is collating for his masters degree, none of which we understood—perhaps a new Dewey system for cataloguing books.

  A man like David—that’s what Carey desired, someone to turn her life around, and David did nothing to discourage her. It became quite clear she wanted to divorce Ben and run off with him. He would sit up with her all the long night in our apartment (we had moved to across the street from O.S.U.), listening, sympathizing. She failed to get him to bed, eventually drifting out of our lives, nor did she divorce Ben, not while we were in Ohio anyway.

  I associate Carey and Ben with the tantalizing aroma of overripe apples littering the ground in September under the trees of their one-story, ranch style house.

  As for Carey Lipitz—yes, I had my own Carey—Betty Willis. She and hubbie Wally were in the Worthington Players Club—the ideal couple—or were they? Both attractive, Betty beyond reason, with a fine looking, dark-haired son, seven years old, Wally, like his son, pleasant looking with curly black hair. He worked for the telephone company selling space in the yellow pages.

  Betty was, in a  word, movie star gorgeous, tall and amply stacked, a  dark-haired beauty, and like Carey, not happy, possessed of a Marilyn Monroe syndrome, desiring to be with a man who loved her for who she was rather than for her beauty or as a sex symbol. She confessed to me she felt cursed by her beauty, and Wally was not the man to dispel that curse.

  Friday nights were party nights in the Willis home—I mean, all the long night, dancing till dawn in their basement game room; David and I the only men  on hand to dance more than once with the women; husbands holding their buddy-buddy celebrations at the wet bar, swapping hunting stories and baseball statistics. I’m not all that great at dancing (David is Fred Astaire), but Betty falls in love with me, probably because I didn’t put the make on her, and she’s heard our stories about living in New York.

  She wants to abandon her son and run away with me to New York! I  got myself out of this entanglement by saying no, not in a million years—and never trying to hit on her.

  One of our best escapes from  both Carey and Betty Willis came to us with Maxine Davis, another member of Worthington Players. We became a steady threesome. Ah, Maxine Davis, now there was a fun loving woman! Not tall or especially beautiful, blonde, buxom, well-formed package who could toss her head back and roar with laughter. We would play together in Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever,” Maxine as Myra Arundel pursued by married writer, David Bliss—me. Favorite lines: David Bliss-“Myra, you are so tawny.” Myra—“I am not tawny.” Veddy “Noel Coward.”

  Maxine had lost her husband only a year  before we came to Ohio. Owner of an appliance sales-and-service company, he reached around a large air conditioner one afternoon to connect something or other and was electrocuted, dying instantly. Maxine fell apart and began drinking heavily; still a heavy drinker and a chain smoker. Maxine drove a Chevy coupe. How we escaped getting arrested for drunk driving, I’ll never know.

  Just after arriving in Ohio in January, 1955, we learn Daisy Belmore has died the previous December. A letter written to her promising a trip soon to New York soon, is returned with a devastating red scrawl across the envelope—deceased. We’ve heard nothing from her daughter, Ruth, so call her—she lives in California now—and she tells us Daisy died in December. Our dear friend has made her final exit through the window of her room at the Wellington, to make love to the  man in the moon.

  A turning point of sorts for me, recalling the first thought that crossed my mind,hearing the news—Daisy, dead? Impossible! How could such an indomitable spirit—the essence of this rollicking, exuberant, optimistic woman—die? Whatever the true nature of Daisy Belmore—the essence of her humanity would never die—at this moment, the seed of a belief—that such a human spirit is and ever will be indestructible. Years later, studying Buddhism, I would learn to call this indestructible spirit, not soul, but Mind.

  The ax falls at Davison Chemical. After twenty years with them, E.S. Halley is fired. Our parent corporation in New York, W.R. Grace and Company, has decided sales promotion doesn’t sell anything. Halley’s twenty years comes to an end. (Several years later, I will learn from my Cuban born friend, Frank Dunand, that when he was a child in Banes, he had to get permission from W.R. Grace to go to the beach, passed a locked wire fence.)

  For a time, after leaving Davison, David and I knock on doors in outlying Columbus neighborhoods questioning housewives about their reactions to slick adds in phony “new magazines.”  (Oddly I remember only one ad—a huge chocolate cake, probably Betty Crocker.)

  Then . . . interview with Al Schwartz, Editorial Director of Publications and Research at the Ohio Department of Highway Safety; a small, rotund, chubby little man, pleasant enough, if a bit edgy. He’s from Georgia where he served in the prison system—in what capacity, a bit obscure.

  The interview is thorough and a hang up adds suspense—no record of a college degree from U.C.L.A. I have yet to finish the course in summer theatre. I air mail special delivery to Ralph Freud who responds, “I’ve instructed the College of Applied Arts, what the hell, give him his degree.” Arts Bachelor (A.B.) Theatre Department, U.C.L.A., dated August, 1954. Other references check out. I am now “Information Writer” for the Ohio Department of Highway Safety, joining Barbara Goodwin, graduate in Journalism, O.S.U.

  I’m soon convinced Al’s title with Georgia’s prison system must have been “Organizer” or “Categorizer.” Every newspaper and publication in Ohio fill a scattering of rolodexes surrounding him at his desk—sub-divided of course—dailies, weeklies, bi-weeklies, monthlies—each with varying colors to get this or that news release. It’s tantalizing to think what he could’ve done with today’s digital data bases!

  Our “newsroom” is large, Barbara and I sharing the large room walled off from Al by a large glass partition. Our desks are close to one another corner near a window. We are housed in a 19^th Century relic, grim and needing a paint job, former state school for the blind.

  April, 1956 births our first issue of a  slick two-column, six-to-eight page magazine “Buckeye Traffic Safety Bulletin.” I’m back at Franklin High School in 1942, associate editor of the Franklin Press! However, at Franklin we were blessed with the wonderful smell of the linotype, laying out our pages in metal forms with dot matrix photos. Here our process is offset, so the smell is mucilage.

  A nifty little rag, considering space limitations; “Education, Enforcement, Engineering, Legislation” proclaims the masthead. Al allows Barbara and me a free hand. Some of the writing isn’t too  shoddy (no bylines, the following by Barbara):

“Shoveled up from the silent banks of the Scioto River here in Columbus several years ago were some unique and intriguing scraps of metal—13 porcelain finished license plates inscribed with the very first numbers ever issued in Ohio. Number One, the records show, was assigned to a United States Congressman from Cincinnati . . .”

And one of mine:

“Drag Racing” on State Highways Curbed,

Special Interceptors Prove Effective

  A warm Saturday evening in a small Ohio town . . . a handful of teenagers gather on the street corner to admire the new rod, freshly customized . . . bulled nose and shaved deck. . . a neat job, but how will she drag? Want to find out? Why not? There’s nothing else to do. . .

  Thus, the dangerous drag race on the open highway is born. . . its ingredients: the surging energy of youth, and the aggressive thrill of competition. The recipe: stir well on a balmy Spring evening in a community which has little or no safely organized activity . . .

  In the Summer Issue, 1956, we feature Mr. Wildcat Driver, and other campaigns, among which, “Slow Down and Live.” Not sure Ohio drivers paid much attention, and today California drivers would consider the slogan something out of H.G. Wells.

  Close to my thirtieth birthday, I decide to quit smoking—forever. David and I have made many previous, abortive attempts. This is not a good time for me to quit—too many pencils to chew on. As a smoker, a cigarette pack and a half a day, preferring real cigarettes, thank you—long Pall Malls in the  red pack, Lucky Strikes. Couldn’t stand the taste of filters. Today, sixty years later, I can still taste those Pall Malls!

  First step, buy a twenty-pack carton of Winston’s filter tips and smoke them all—hated Winston filter tips! – finished in a week. Then, a pipe—why not? mark of the  Midwestern College Professor, tweed coat and leather-patched elbows.

  And so, on a Sunday afternoon sitting in Norm and Emmeline’s kitchen with David and the boys, after exhausting the carton of Winston’s, I puff my last measure of pipe tobacco, tap the remnants into the ashtray and proclaim, “Well, that’s that.” Miraculously it was, although the following year was sheer hell, chewing on endless pencils and consuming countless gum drops. Most amazing, I didn’t know what to do with my hands! waving them in the air as if brushing off flies. But I could breathe fresh air again, and taste buds spiked. For years I would have recurring dreams, quite real, that I was  still smoking.

  Barbara marries a boy she’d known at Ohio State, her last name now Selanders. He couldn’t have been much older than twenty and looked  it—hardly wet behind the ears. He raised chickens and Barbara complained often about frosts and viruses, and that her hubbie spent entirely too many nights away from home with his buddies. I said guys married much too young in Ohio. “If you can’t hitch up by your mid-twenties, people think you’re abnormal.” Her  reply—silence and  knitting her soft, blonde eyebrows. She divorced him after several months—too much time out  with the boys, becoming Barbara Goodwin once more.

  Me? always complaining we should all live in New York—the only place to make it in journalism.

  “What about James Thurber?” she said. Thurber graduated  from Ohio State. The house he lived in as boy later became setting for his delightful short story, “The Night the Ghost Got in.” the old house close by. I passed it many times on  lunch hour walks.

  I answered back, “James Thurber had  to leave Ohio to become famous.”

  Who was I to  complain? I  was acting and directing almost most as much as at U.C.L.A. and at Highway Safety narrating one-and-half minute safety spots that ran on television. (Al Schwartz wasn’t too pleased about this—it wasn’t his idea, and he had no control over the project.)

  At Worthington Players Club, “Hay Fever” is followed by Moliére’s “The Miser,” creating costumes taken from photos of the U.C.L.A. production; Emmeline,  costume designer. I repeat my role as La Fléche; Maxine Davis as Marriage Broker, Frosine. Enter Bill McCormick, another “tall, dark and handsome” guy, an announcer on a Worthington radio station, part-time disk jockey. Betty Willis plays the Miser’s daughter; Wally Willis, the Miser.

  As director, I copy much of what’s remembered from Henry Schnitzler’s direction at U.C.L.A. We run three nights with enthusiastic audiences, then take the show on the road to a couple of small colleges. Norman Nadel, drama critic for the Columbus Post Dispatch, gives us a fare review. Later, Nadel will become film and stage critic for New York’s World Telegram and Sun.

  Re-enter, of all people, Ed Ludlum! Neither David nor I had kept in touch with Ed since New York in the fall of 1950. Item in Post Dispatch – Ed will direct a summer of tent theatre, “Playhouse on the Green” in Worthington. When Dell Briggs learns David and I knew him from New York, she springs into action, and calls him. Result is Ed casts me in “Sabrina Fair” as Paul, the “Frenchman with an English Nanny” as the script describes him. My scene is with Sabrina, played by Sally Kemp, daughter of the 1940’s big band leader, Lionel Kemp.

  On the way to first rehearsal up High Street, I run out of gas, so arrive smelling of gasoline. Sally takes a whiff, eyes my Levi’s with suspicion (definitely a hick!)  but soon overcomes her doubts and takes me into the fold—a motley bunch of stoned New York actors, but talented. Although my Actors Equity card is still active, Ed makes me sign a waiver, and I get paid zilch.

  Paul is a thankless part—confusing to the audience since they expect a Frenchman to enter the scene; and here he is with British accent. Sabrina questions the anachronism, and Paul replies, “Oh, I had an English nanny.” It’s a puzzle why the part is written that way.

  Returning to Worthington Players, Bill McCormick directs a production of “Blithe Spirit.” This will be my third time as Charles Condomine—the first of which was the boggled performance on Mackinac Island in 1947; and the highly successful performance at U.C.L.A. in 1950. Maxine Davis and Betty Willis play Condomine’s two wives.

  Then both David and I are cast in “The Male Animal” in Stadium Theatre’s summer season, 1957, a popular theatre venue housed in a ground-floor corner of the Buckeye Stadium. We never make it to the most prestigious theatre, the Players Club in downtown Columbus, but Stadium Theatre runs a close second. David plays anarchic student, Michael, and I, Tommy Turner, English Professor (the Henry Fonda role in the  movie). We play a drunk scene to  the hilt—one of my most exciting and  rewarding theatrical adventures.

  Setting for “The Male Animal” is Ohio State (its author, Elliot Nugent, an alumni). The central conflict evolves when Tommy Turner announces he plans to read the last letter of the anarchist Sacco Vanzetti to his English class. Ultra-conservative rah-rah Neanderthal alumunis are up in arms, and threaten to withhold funds for building a new  football  stadium, and fire Tommy. Michael protests suppression of free speech and  faces expulsion. We bemoan our pending doom by getting drunk—David and I together on stage in a beautifully written scene, thrilling to play.

  Nadel gives us a fairly good review, but complains the negro maid is played too much as stereotype. The cast gets hot under the collar and I fire off an irate letter to him. Fortunately, no copy of the letter survives. I’m sure I would be embarrassed, reading it now.

  We take smaller parts in the next Stadium Theatre production in Jean Anhouil’s “The Lark,” a poetic St. Joan, played by April O’Connell. April tries to get me interested in Zen, my first brush with Buddhism, but it’s much too ephemeral for  me—not down to earth enough, nothing I can hang on to. Haiku is intriguing, but elusive. It takes me another twenty years before Buddhism will take hold of my life, and another thirty before the teachings would thoroughly enrich it.

  Meanwhile, David has enrolled as art major at Ohio State while I continue to  chew on pencils and write for Highway Safety. By fall David is anxious for another change—a return to California. (Why,  oh why didn’t I hold out for New York!)

  In California, sister Alice has her Business Degree from U.S.C. and has passed all her CPA exams and divorced Leno. In her apprentice year at Arthur Young, she will meet and marry William Findley.

  September, 1957, David and I are off to California, this time in our white Mercury convertible. (Yes, in those days, two guys could jointly own a car, no “partnership” required.) I have been in touch with the Helen Edwards employment agency in Los Angeles, hoping that the imperial Miss Edwards will get me a fabulous job with an advertising agency because of my writing and editorial experiences with Highway Safety, and at ABC in New York. Such was not to be.

  And yet . . . little did I know that events and three jobs I did get and suffer through from November, 1957 to July, 1961 would culminate in another appearance in the Pilgrimage Play, this time as John the Beloved, connecting me with  those who will soon wrench me out of the gray 1950s into a life and world I never could’ve imagined—not in my wildest dreams. New Yorker at last!

 

Following – Prelude to the Socko Sixties “When David and I return to California . . .”