Getting Here Part VII: Hippie Writer

When I was twelve I decided to be a writer. I had some success with this in grade school and in sixth grade my friend Stuart and I published a newspaper, using the school's mimeograph to print it. Writing during junior high became an escape from the slings and arrows thrown my way by other kids and my resentment and fear of my father. Stories were a world I controlled and I could get lost in my imagination.

However, in high school something quite extraordinary happened. My writing made me popular. I was entertaining and funny and people didn't mind me being around. I did a poetry reading and a story reading. I became an actor in comic sketches written with two friends, I was a stand-up comic and a DJ at dances.

I wanted to pursue a career as a writer, but it wasn't encouraged. I was told I would get over such nonsence and what I needed was a job, a real job, which I got at ARCo. But I wrote every night anyway and sent manuscripts out to magazines. The year I married, as mentioned before, I won a runner-up in the Writer's Digest Writing Contest. (The story was called "Soldier, Soldier" and concerned two soldiers arguing over whether to desert their post.) In the next few years, as we lived our perfect little suburban life, not much was happening with my writing. I was writing a lot, but no one was buying. I was contacted by Scott Meredith (no relation, in fact his real name was Arthur Scott Feldman), to whom I had been recommended by the editor of Redbook. Scott Meredith was one of the most prominent literary agents of the time and his company still is. He represented such people as Norman Mailer, P. G. Wodehouse and Arthur C. Clarke, but I turned him down. This was probably one of the poorer decisions of my life.

But after we moved to my father-in-law's I began to find outlets. The first was as a ghostwriter for a number of people going to college. I wrote term papers, essays and speeches for a fee. (They got A's, so they got their money's worth.) The fellow who took over my old position in Addressograph was also going to community college and was the editor of of the school paper. He complained there wasn't enough talent to fill his paper and he hired me to write articles. I wrote these under the byline Loop because I wasn't really supposed to write for that newspaper not being a student of the school. On top of this I had a friend named Jane, a artist attending the Philadelphia Institute of Art. She kept trying to urge me to trust my talent and write full time, but I didn't, at least not right away. She and her boyfriend were black activists (later defecting to Cuba) and he was a photographer in the underground press that was popular in the sixties. Jane introduced me to an editor and I began writing in the Undergrown Press as "Eugene Lawrence". The picture top of this post is of the periodical.

In the meantime, Lois and I were developing a clique of friends, all with ambitions in the arts. They were writers, poets, artists, composers and actors. This was the beginnings of the "Decade of Peace and Love" and Hippies, which we were.  Our time was spend with these people in Jim's basement (that is Jim holding bongos in the picture with me) talking about the great things we were going to create while we drank Screwdrivers and smoked. If not at Jim's we would gather in Rittenhouse Square and hang around with the other street people all night. We frequented the coffeehouses (Trauma, Kaleidoscope, Main Point) or went to concerts, Bob Dylan, Tim Buckley, Elizabeth, Jim Kwiskin's Jug Band with Maria Muldour and many other groups of the time.

While our group continued to talk about doing, I started to get published more. I did some ads for the Philadelphia Enquirer and Daily news, my poetry was picked up by the radio program "Personal Poetry" and I got a regular gig writing articles for "Philadelphia After Dark."

Life was not going as well at home. Lois and I were having a hard time communicating under her father's roof. She went to work for Delaware County Hospital and met an orderly there. I found out and we decided to separate. I went home to ma and pa. I began to date other women, even went to a ski resort with one, but somehow I could not get any real feeling for anyone else. I also quit my job at ARCo to write a novel. I would go to Lois' father's place during the day with my portable typewriter (I still had a key) and then leave before her or her dad got home. I took a part time job with Philadelphia Gum.

I couldn't stand not being with Lois. I began to court her again and we went back together on the basis we move out of her father's. We moved to a cheap apartment in University City in Philadelphia. I left Philadelphia Gum with the move and she got a job as a secretary in the chemistry department of the University of Pennsylvania. We lived on her salary and my money from the ARCo Thrift Plan. Our apartment was small, had roaches, with a Hippie crash pad down the hall, a doped-up girl screaming in the hall some nights, a Black Panther group meeting in the lobby and a prostitute living above us. A perfect place for a Hippie writer who was just beginning to sell short stories to the pulp magazines under my own name.

We had registered to vote right after we moved. I listed my occupation on the form as Writer. Politically I was far left and I generally voted for third party candidates in those years. (I voted for Dick Gregory in the 1968 Presidential race.)

One day I came home and there was a subpoena in the mailbox. It accused me of registering to vote under false pretenses. It said a witness saw me engage in some kind of shenanigans with the registrar. The witness had a nearby address. I walked to it and found a vacant lot. It turned out hundreds of we University City residents had received these. Frank Rizzo was running for Mayor and was unpopular on college campuses. They were trying to take the college kids vote away and since I had simply registered as Writer they netted me as well. Our lawyer, supplied by the Democrat party (which is what I had registered as then) said we had to go to court or they would take away our right to vote.

I had just started working for North American Publishing as a circulation manager, although I talked them into letting me write book reviews for their education magazine, "Media & Methods". Now in my first week I had to take a day off and go to City hall to an overstuffed courtroom. It was July. There was standing room only and it was terrible hot. There was no actually judge. Committeemen of the Republican Party sat as Judges. They kept telling our lawyer to shut up. I looked about and most of the contested voters looked to be college kids, but not all. There was an old man with a long white beard (they subpoenaed Santa Claus) and a group of middle-aged Black women as well. The witnesses sat along one wall. My guess is they were paid off with a bottle of wine.

It was a long morning. At noon we were told by our lawyer that anyone with a valid Pennsylvania Driver's License with their current address should go to a clerk during the lunch break. If you had this, which I did, you would be dismissed and retain your vote. These things turned me sour on politics. Although in the two instances I cited last time and this were with the Republicans, I've had my taste of corruption with the Democrats as well. I don't particularly like politicians of any stripe today.

I was getting published regularly and Lois and I were closer than ever. Our group was beginning to break apart and we were spending less time hanging about in the park. We still made the coffeehouses every weekend, but these weren't my only hangouts during this period. The others were something else entirely.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Getting Here Part VI: Change is Blowin' in the Wind

1965 was a pivotal year. Time fired change our way with the rapidity of a machine gun. Rat-a-tat-tat, we were hit by another blast. We had lost our house, been threaten and moved in with my father-in-law, an uncomfortable situation. Within the course of those months I was to be drafted, have four separate jobs, something of a nervous breakdown, give up totally on religion and have a dust-up with the powers that ran Upper Darby. Change wasn't just blowin' in the wind, it was a bloomin' hurricane. No wonder we were wondering where in the world we were.

It wasn't long after we moved that President Johnson, near the end of August 1965, ordered the drafting of married men. (I wonder how many marriages that broke up? A number of men had rushed into marriage during the early years of the Vietnam War because marriage gave them a deferment.) Funny how the letter started off with "Greetings" as if it was a Christmas Card. I had to report to 401 North Broad Street for a pre-induction physical. I wasn't thrilled about this. I knew exactly where I would end up and it wasn't a safe place. However, to make a long story short, I suffered from psoriasis. It had appeared in childhood. At this time it was pretty light, but there was one patch on my shoulder and that was enough to get me classified as 1-Y. [Registrant available for military service, but qualified only in case of war or national emergency. Usually given to registrants with medical conditions that were limiting but not disabling (examples: high blood pressure, mild muscular or skeletal injuries or disorders, skin disorders, severe allergies, etc.).] I would have been the rare bird thanking God for a skin disease, except back then I didn't thank God for anything. In fact, around that time I pretty much dismissed God altogether from my life.

Lois and I began looking for a church. Things had obviously went a little south in our lives and suddenly we got interested in religion. But we weren't so much seeking God as a sanctuary from reality. We were looking for a warm and fuzzy place, not a Savior. After all, we were very nice people a bit down on our luck and in need of some commiseration.

We didn't find it. We didn't find anything. We started by visiting a number of "mainstream" churches in the area (Presbyterian, Baptist, Episcopalian) and one big Methodist Church, even though we were trying to avoid the denominations of our parents, which were Methodist and Lutheran. These churches were not very welcoming. They were actually rather intimidating. No one spoke to us. Some people even glared at us. Was it my long hair? I don't know, but we distinctly felt unwelcome.

There was a large Roman Catholic Church a few blocks from where we lived then. I began to go there in the morning before work and attend Mass. I bought a book on Catholic beliefs, a Rosary, a miraculous metal. This was what religion should be, I thought, all this ritual and objects to handle. I felt since I was doing something I was earning my way to Heaven. We ( I talked her into it) decided to join the Catholic Church. I knew this would give both our families fits, but by this time I was doing a lot of stuff for just that reason, to gave my family fits.

But the night the Priest was supposed to meet with us to start the process he didn't show up. He stood us up without so much as a phone call.  So that was it for Catholicism. If the Priest doesn't care, why should we?

Our search didn't end here. We just moved a bit further from the religious center. The Unitarians were our next stop. I had no idea what that name meant, but a church was a church to me as long as it claimed to be Christian,  but that requirement ceased with the Unitarians. This was a church in downtown Philadelphia. We attended their service, but this was really a big pep rally for the next protest to be held. We sat on the floor in a big room and talked strategy for our march for civil rights or against the war or to save the earth or to save a rare flea endangered by a highway project, whatever was that particular weeks reason for anger. Now Lois and I were already getting involved in protests we didn't need more. This wasn't what we wanted from a church.

Having believed we had exhausted Christianity at this point, we turned to the Ethical Society. We went to their Sunday morning service. We entered and some music was played as in my old church, a kind of prelude. Some songs were sung at times as well, but none of this music was a hymn. They were Classical pieces. Someone said something corresponding to a prayer, but it was a poem. A text was read, but it was a piece by one of the great philosophers. A sermon was given focused on the greatness of mankind, saying that the problems of the world would eventually be solved by the technological advances made by man. Everything was on the unique quality of humans to do good and save the world, like humans had did such a wonderful job of that so far.

It was all I could do not to laugh. When we left I said it was a joke. If you don't believe in God and think mankind is the end-all and be-all, why are you parodying what could easily be a Methodist service, simply replacing anything that smacks of God with some human produced babble?

There were sudden changes in my work situation during the remainder of 1965 as well. I had been doing quite well and become the supervisor of my unit, but I had grown restless. I had also learned when I first took a job in this unit I had made a tactical error. It was a service division, not a clerical one. I learned from others this was a dead end. There was a stigma against people working in the service divisions and once there it was very difficult to get a position in the clerical areas, but those were the areas where advancement was possible. Of course, I was just eager to make some more money and was getting bored with what I was doing because it had become routine to me. I applied for and got a job as Traffic Control Clerk.

It was a grade level improvement and more money, but it was located in the back of a warehouse at the refining yards. My job was basically handling the paperwork and dispatching the various trucks in and out of the refinery. I was on the job two weeks and I had a breakdown. I am not certain why. Maybe the isolation and dreariness of my office, but more likely I was dealing with men much like my father. At any rate, I came to work one morning and I began to cry and I couldn't stop. Totally embarrassing, especially around the type of men I worked with there. But they didn't make fun of me. They were concerned and the boss sent me home.

I was sure my career at ARCo was done. I was depressed and worried and thought I would be fired. Personnel, (you know, what they call Human Resources today) called me back in after a week. They gave me a job as a Parcel Post Clerk back in the mailroom and told me I would be offered the next Level 6 job that opened. That was the Level of the Traffic Control job, so not only wasn't I fired, I wasn't even going to be demoted.

About a month later I was offered a position in Accounts Receivable. So in the course of less than two months I had been Supervisor of Addressograph, Traffic Control Clerk, Partial Post Clerk and Ledger Clerk.

Then that winter Lois announced she was pregnant again. The Doctor warned her to be careful. Given her history with the first baby and his examination, she had a number of problems that could put the pregnancy at risk.

Near Christmas there was a bad snowstorm. Two blocks away a stop sign was knocked down when a car skidded into it a couple weeks earlier during another storm. Despite the snow my parents came down to visit on Christmas. My father was a professional driver, snow didn't deter him. However, they almost had an accident because of the downed stop sign had still not been replaced. They had no way of knowing the traffic on the cross street didn't have to stop, because it looked like the street they were on was the right of way.

Then a few days later, Lois fell on a sidewalk nearby because it had never been shoveled and the snow had packed to ice. What angered me was this sidewalk was at the home of the Local Committeeman for the Republican Party, which at that time had a stranglehold on the government in the borough. It was the law that sidewalks be cleared of snow within 24 hours of the end of a snow storm. I had shoveled (picture on right is me in that 1965 snow doing just that). Everyone on our street had shoveled, except this politician.

My wife's family (she had several living on the street) were upset. They knew my wife's condition, plus they were also already angry because snowplows had plowed out the streets of the upper-income sections of the township, but not our streets, resulting in the trash trucks being unable to come thought and the garbage was piling up. They said we should all write letters to the Mayor complaining about this Committeeman and the lack of plowing. Well, you know how it goes, I wrote a letter and no one else did. I wrote about the stop sign and the trash and especially about my pregnant wife's fall.

Next thing I know the Committeeman is knocking on the door. He accused me of lying. Then he said I didn't even know where he lived. I said, "Come on" and led him outside and up the street to his house, which still hadn't been shoveled. He was furious. He called me a name and I though he was going to hit me, but he turned and stomped into his home.

Not long after my wife gets a tearful phone call from her aunt. Her uncle had a patronage job with Upper Darby, now someone in government called and said if her niece's husband didn't stop writing letters they were going to fire her husband. She begged Lois to tell me to shut up. I tried to get her family to band together, but in the end I stopped for their sake. This was not to be my last confrontation with bad politicians. (Probably why I don't like them much even today.)

My wife did end up losing that baby, too. It wouldn't be the last.

These winds of 1965 were to blow us in an entirely different direction in our lives and eventually to a very dark place.


TO BE CONTINUED...

Getting Here Part V: Desolation Row

The first few years of our life together went rather smoothly. Both of us were doing well on our jobs. There were promotions and raises. Outside of work we were enjoying something of the good life. Besides eating out regularly, going to dances at Sunnybrook Ballroom in Pottstown and plays at the Valley Forge Music Fair we traveled. We went to Gettysburg, toured Virginia and spend several days in New York staying at the Waldorf-Astoria (that is Lois pictured there on the left in 1962).

Also in the year we got married I won runner-up in the Writer's Digest Writing Contest. My desire was to become a self-sustaining author. I spent as much time writing as I could. Typically we would get home from work, have dinner and I would disappear into the den to write for the evening. I would come back down around ten and we would talk (or other things) until the wee hours of the morning. We were young, sleep didn't seem high on our list of things to do.

We could always talk. We talked most of the time on our dates. The other thing we could always do was sex. I was a virgin when we got engaged, but I admit I wasn't when we married. There was no way either of us could restrain ourselves for that whole year. We took any opportunity alone to go at each other. This sometimes had funny results. One time we were at my home and my mother and grandmother left for some church function. My dad was on the road somewhere. We waited until mom's car went down the road and then we began undressing. We just reached the state of au natural when we heard the kitchen door open and my mother coming through the house calling my name. We quickly began pulling on clothes. My mom knocked on my bedroom door and I had to let her in. She said they had forgotten something and then they left again.  At the time Lois wore a pair of leopard spotted pedal-pushers. I turned around with a sign of relief and saw her pants were on inside out.

So when Lois became pregnant two years after we married it was sooner than we wished, but hardly surprising. We were concerned about the financial implications, but these were outweighed by the prospect of parenthood.

In August 1963 Lois was home from work. I am not certain why she didn't go in that day. She was in her fifth month of term. I got a call from her later that morning. She said she was losing the baby and asked me to come home.  I asked if she had called the doctor.

"Yes, " she said, " I told him I was going into labor. He said that was impossible. He would send something from the drugstore for my pain and not to bother him again."

I said, "I'm coming home right away."

I said it, but knew right away was not going to happen. I left work immediately, but I still had to walk to the train station, catch the next train, which might mean up to a half hour wait and ride it for an hour, then drive the last few miles. When I finally walked in she was in our bedroom. I entered and she was shivering on the bed. There was blood.

"I'm sorry," she said and began to cry.

"Where is it?" I asked.

It was in the bathroom in a basin. It was a boy. We would have named him Sean.

I called the doctor and he came. He wasn't happy about coming. He went into the bedroom, was there a few minutes and came out.

"How is she?" I asked.

"She'll be fine," he said.

"What should we do with the baby?" I asked.

He brushed by me. "You can throw in the garbage for all I care," he said and left.

I was stunned. Lois went back to work in a few days, but she came home upset and depressed. Despite her own ordeal no one gave her much sympathy. They were too busy talking about and feeling sorry for Jackie Kennedy, who had just lost a premature baby two days after its birth.

Her depression was understandable, but it was a harboring of something that would increase as the years went by that had no relationship to this loss. It is still not clear if this physical loss was a factor in those that would be loss in the future.

Meanwhile, my life had also changed. A fellow my age had started working in my unit and we became friends. He had been going to Temple University on a football scholarship, but gotten injured and loss his grant. He couldn't afford the tuition, but he was now working during the day and going to college at night. I didn't know such a thing as evening college existed. I thought you had to go to a campus and live in a dorm and spend big bucks to attend university. He suggested I try it.

That summer I enrolled at Temple as a non-matriculating student. I took Introduction to Sociology with plans to major in that field if I though I could handle college. I got straight A's in the course and the professor told me I should definitely enroll that fall. I did, taking as many credit hours as allowed to a part-time student. By September I was working full time, often with overtime, and going to school three nights a week. I still tried to squeeze in writing everyday and keep up my time with Lois.

During this same year Ronald finished his term of service with the Army and moved back to the area. He took an apartment in a nearby town and invited Lois and me to dinner. We had a great evening talking about old times. Toward the end of the evening Ronald told us something which at first we didn't quite understand.  He said he had gone to a club in Philadelphia. The address had been given him by a friend. He didn't think he would go, but he did. There were only men in the club and during the night they danced with each other. He danced, too, and he enjoyed it and thought he would go back. He left it at that. It wasn't until Lo and I discussed this that we grasped what he was telling us.

I refused to believe it at first. When we were double-dating during high school I always thought Ron was the most awkward guy I had seen around girls, but I never thought it more than a deep shyness. Homosexuality was not talked about much in the period I grew up. I knew it existed. Guys at school would call someone they didn't like "queer" as the ultimate insult. The only other information I had was from sleazy magazines were homosexuals were either blackmailed or beaten up. I became concerned for Ronald, fearing these things would happen to him. I wrote him a letter. We had an exchange of letters and I in my naiveté and he in a period of sensitivity mistook what we said to each other and as a result stopped speaking.

At this time I discovered an odd thing. When I would get into a conversation with people at work I would begin to shake. I was all right when discussing business, but if the conversation turned to other things and became serious I felt my body was quivering and that I couldn't control my speech. I decided to do something about it and went to a clinic and met with a psychologist. I didn't tell my parents because they would have had a fit. Psychologists and psychiatrists were people only insane people visited. Anyone who went to one for therapy was stigmatized in their world. But I didn't feel this way. I knew I had to do something before this shaking I felt interfered with my job.

The Psychologist was almost a caricature. He resembled Elliott Gould in M*A*S*H (pictured right), the bushy hair and mustache. He wore jeans with one of those corded sports coats with the leather patches on the elbows. Invariably he would enter, sit down and plop his feet up on his desk. He wore these causal shoes with thick crepe soles. I did most of the talking. He asked if I had any recurring dreams. I said I often dreamt I was being chased by a bull or a gorilla. He said these dreams meant I hated my father. O-o-o-k-a-a-ay? My father and I didn't have the best relationship, but I didn't think I hated him. He really took interest when I mentioned buying several books on homosexuality. I explained about Ronald, my fears of what might happen to him and that I wanted to understand it. He decided my concerns about my long-time best friend indicated I was homosexual. If there was one thing  I knew for sure, I was not a homosexual. I stopped going to the clinic.

Oddly, my feelings of shaking during conversations stopped at that point.

These years, though, continued to be a yo-yo of ups and downs. Lois seemed to revive from her loss of Sean all right, but she was beginning to have some paranoia about the neighbors and an occasional bout of depression or migraine that laid her up. Then one day she came home and said she had been fired.

She said there was office politics going on and some manager were trying to "get her boss" and somehow that resulted in her being terminated. Whatever the reason, we now had a financial problem. Our income was more than cut in half because she was actually making more than I was. We went from having luxuries to not being able to meet our monthly bills. After several months we decided we had to sell the house.

We put the house up. There was a real estate slump at the time. Worse, we came under physical threat. A neighbor saw an African-American couple visit the house and the next thing we had a delagation of our "friendly" neighbors threatening to break all the windows in our house if we dared consider selling to a black person. I told our realtor we would sell to anyone who wanted to buy the place. This did not exactly ease the tension, but maybe it sped up the sale. The realtor suddenly found a white couple who purchased the house almost immediately after this confrontation. We sold at a slight loss.

We moved in with my father-in-law, possibly one of the biggest mistakes of my life, but we were naive and didn't know what else to do at the time. It was to be one more address on our journey down Desolation Row.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Getting Here Part IV: All-American Dream Couple

When I graduated high school most of my friends went their separate ways, except for Ronald. I had met Ronald in third grade, who became one of my few friends back in that town and he had remained so even when I moved away again. Through those years we had often double-dated, including my Senior Prom when he helped me take both my girlfriends by pretending one was his. (Okay, that's another story.) Now we sometimes searched for jobs together. (Ronald is on the right in the photo. He was 6 foot 4 in case your wondering.)

I don't think either of us graduated with great prospects. My parents had told me to forget college when I entered ninth grade. They didn't understand why I took Academic, since that was college preparatory. Part of their reasoning was financial, I suppose, but they really didn't believe in higher education, unless you planned to be a doctor. My mother constantly worried because I read a lot. Reading all those books would damage my brain, she once told me. Ronald's parents had also told him to forget college.

Ronald decided early on to join the Navy. This changed by accident to the Army later. He wanted me to join with him on the "Buddy System", but again  not being 21 interfered. My parents, especially my mom, were dead set against my joining the service and wouldn't sign the papers. (At 18 I was still considered a minor in those days.)

Ronald hit a snag at his physical requiring surgery before he would be accepted. His surgery resulted in complications that almost killed him.  He eventually recovered and did join the Army. Meanwhile I went to IBM School in Philadelphia.

I had been studying Commercial Art through a correspondence course since my Junior Year. I had talked my mother into this and she paid for it on the promise we never tell my father. My dad took a dim view of both my writing and my drawing. So why did they loosen up and allow me to go to IBM School? It was because this involved running machines. To them running machines was real work; writing, art and that stuff you learned in college was not.


Florence Utt IBM School was a six week course in programming, wiring and operating everything from a 024 Keypunch to a 604 Calculator and a lot of three digit numbers in-between. I graduated at the top of the class.

This accomplishment did not get me a job. I eventually landed a position as a Junior Clerk in Sales Accounting with the Atlantic Refining Company (Later known as Atlantic-Richfield or ARCo). Why is this important in this series of my becoming a Christian? It is because it set up the next phase of my life and the events that led to that conclusion.

Not long after I began my job I began dating this little red-haired Irish lass who worked on the same floor. (When I say little, I am not talking figuratively. Pat [pictured left] was four foot ten and that may have been with heels.)  Despite this height difference, I was six foot, we seemed compatible in every other way, although there was one I overlooked as unimportant. She was Roman Catholic.

One morning I came to work and she stopped me in the hallway. She told me she couldn't see me anymore. Her parents forbade her because I wasn't Catholic. I was angry. Why should that matter, I was still "Christian". "It wasn't any of her parent's business", I told her.

She ran into the ladies' room.

A few seconds later this tall dark-haired Irish lass came out of the ladies room and approached me. (This girl was a foot taller than Pat at five foot ten.) "What's wrong with Pat," she asked me. "She's in there crying her eyes out." This girl also worked on the same floor, the sixteenth, and she always said hello to me when we passed in the hall. I always said hello back, but I was shy and a low talker and she never heard me. She told me later that she thought I was the most stuck-up guy on Earth. Her name was Lois. (Pictured right. She was only one-quarter Irish. She was two-quarters German and one-quarter Native America - Creek.) Her family was Lutheran.

None of that particularly mattered to me. She had been kind and she was good-looking and so whether that day or the next I forget, I went down the elevator with her and walked along down Broad Street. At her subway stop, just before she entered the turnstile I asked her to go out next Saturday. I figured if she said no then she would go through to the platform and I'd continue on to the train station and there would be no period of awkward embarrassing silence.

She was coming out of a rough period. Her mother and best friend both died around the time she graduated high school. She was, like me, an only child and there were some similarities in our childhood. She had been forced to go church and didn't want to and her father was constantly ridiculing her, saying she walked like an elephant or she was homely (which she wasn't and in fact had been a teenage model, left). He also told her she couldn't go to college, because college was a waste of time for girls. They only went to find a guy anyway. (She went on her own to Peirce College and earned her Associates.) Her parents were more restrictive than mine. Appearance was very important to them and she not only had to go to church and be in the proper clubs, but was constantly warned about behaviors that might reflect badly on her parents, drinking, sex, etc. This probably was part of reason she began smoking at age twelve.

We went out that Saturday night and yadda-yadda-yadda just before we got married we bought a house.

However dysfunctional our growing up we meshed well as a couple. As adults we were the All-American Dream Couple. (Well, almost adults anyway. One hitch came up at settlement on the house when everyone discovered we were just a couple of teenagers not yet legal age. But it got resolved and we got the house.)

How many people from basically lower-middle class blue-collar families had the start we did?  We entered marriage with a new car (Studebaker Lark) and a new house (four-bedroom Cape Cod atop a hill with a great view of The Great Valley). We both had jobs that paid above average for those days, even if we were in low level positions. Together our salaries not only met our mortgage and expenses, but afford us the pleasures of eating out weekly at good restaurants and yearly vacation trips. I even had it mapped out how much money we'd have in the bank when we turned thirty.

The house was halfway between our families, so there would be no jealousy that we favored one over the other. More important to us was the distance was enough there'd be no regular pop-ins by either side either. And once married no one was going to make us go to church. Church ended when we walked up the aisle after saying our I dos. (Photo on left: Our first Christmas in our first home together, December 1961. We were both 20 years-old.)

Life was great, what more could one want? What could possibly go wrong?


TO BE CONTINUED...

Getting Here: Part III On the Obverse

 When I graduated from high school most people considered me a "good" person. After all, how could I not be, I was President of the Methodist Youth Fellowship. I was not a troublemaker in school. By high school I was popular among my classmates. I was considered smart, funny and only a little weird, I mean, I wrote poetry for Pete's sake. Girlfriends' mothers liked me, sometimes the mother liked me even better than the daughter.

By worldly standards, and what people saw, I supposed I was "good". I was shy and quiet around people. I had worked since in grade school and had a great work ethic. I did anything I could to earn some spending money. When real young I would run to the neighborhood store to pick up milk or bread for people. They might tell me to buy some penny candy for myself. By third grade I was mowing lawns and washing cars around the neighborhood. I cleaned garages and sheds. I washed celery for a greengrocer. I had a paper route. When we left town in my mid teens, I worked on farms in the summer picking crops. I shoveled parking lots of snow in the winter. I worked loading baskets of produce on trucks in Amish country. I hung samples of cleansers on doorknobs. I even babysat.  In other words I wasn't a bum.

I was clean cut, didn't drink, didn't smoke and didn't cuss, which is the me they saw.

But I had a darker side they didn't see. When I was junior high age I was a very trouble youth. My father was on the road so much it was almost as if I was the son of a single mother. When dad came home I was shuttled off to the grandparents. This was fine with me because I both feared and resented my father. I resented him because I had mom wrapped around my little finger when he was gone, but he got all her attention when he came home. I feared him because he was always belittling me, calling me Gertrude or threatening to take me up on a tower because I was afraid of heights or throw me in the deep water because I couldn't swim. "You'll either learn to swim or sink," he'd say.

At school I was constantly dodging bullies or being taunted. I had a few close friends, as I've explained before, but a lot of time I simply withdrew into myself. I read and I wrote, which were healthly outlets, but as I turned thirteen some of my pursuits were less pure.

I had always liked girls. I had friends that were girls and there were girls I had crushes on, but I didn't really know anything about S-E-X. This was the 'fifties and sex was a hush-hush subject around children. When I reached thirteen there was a strange tingling my body experienced around a girl. I also noticed their bodies were looking less like my own. My own  body was changing in strange ways, too. Somethings that happened scared me to death. I thought there was something wrong with me. Nobody had prepared me for these things.

My curiosity about how the girls might be different from me physically was growing stronger. I really wanted to see a naked girl, but how?

Now I was always an honest person. Even as a young boy I would tell a cashier if they gave me too much change. I went to a restaurant after school with some of my friends one day. For some reason the waitress gave everyone a check except me and I left without paying anything. The next day I went back and told the manager what happened, what I had eaten and paid for it. But now with this new desire I found myself with a moral dilemma.

In the local newsstand was a section of magazine and a sign, "Not for sale to anyone under 21". It those days you were not an adult until twenty-one years old. These were "Men's Magazine" and I thought they probably had pictures of naked girls inside (I was actually wrong about this. It those days the pinups were never shown naked. The "naughty bits" as Monty Python called them, were always hidden.) However, I wasn't old enough to buy these magazines. So I glanced around, grabbed a couple at random, stuffed them in my shirt and walked out.

This thievery continued for quite some time. When I had my paper route I would stuff the magazines down in the papers until I reached some private section along the route, then fish them out and look at the pictures. I am not certain what I did with them afterward. I wasn't keeping them at home for fear they would be found. I think I was dropping them in trash cans along my bike route or tossing them away back in the woods.

One day I put three such magazines under my clothes and turned around to leave. The owner of the stand was standing at the counter and he motioned to me. He pointed at my shirt and I put the incriminating evidence down on the counter. He then told me where he was going to put the magazines if he ever caught me stealing again. They would be in a very uncomfortible place where I certainly couldn't read them.  I never stole another thing after that day.

I went home scared to death of what would happen when he called my parents, which is what I expected he would do. I awoke every day for a month waiting for this, but nothing happened. I guess he let it drop with his warning. I didn't go in that newsstand anymore, though.

There was another instance that happened around that time that could have been more serious. I had expected what I did would have gone unnoticed, but the week after at school I was called to the principal's office. When I walked in there was a policeman with the principal. He confronted me and told me I could go to reform school for what I did. This time I spent sleepless nights not only fearing what my parents would do, but also expecting the authorities to haul me off to jail at any time.

Again nothing else happened. Of course, I also didn't do what I had done again either.

Since my crime spree ended I was doing without these magazines; however, I didn't go without for long. A man opened a stall at the nearby farmer's market. He sold paperback books and magazines. His stock was probably illegal. The covers had a portion cut off. I didn't know what that meant until years later when I worked in the publishing industry. These publications were return stock and should have been destroyed. The clipped covers singled they were not for resale.  I didn't know that then, but it wouldn't have mattered. I was interested in the curtain that divided his stall.

I peeked in through a break in the curtain and here were all these "special" magazines and a sign, "Adults Only Admitted". As I stood with one leg slightly across the line I heard a voice behind me. It was the stall owner.

"Interested, eh, kid?"

I expected another threatening warning, but instead the guy says, "I can see you ain't 21 (I wasn't even old enough to drive yet), but you look like a good kid; the kind of kid that wouldn't say anything to anyone." He sold me some of those magazines...every week there after.

They were even more reveling than those I had hooked from the newsstand. They were published in Sweden, even though the text, what there was, was in English. They had titles like, "Artist and Models" and claimed to be for the study of figure art. I hid them in a cubby high up in my bedroom closet. These were the magazines I wanted to be alone with while my folks were at church.

Nobody knew about my growing addiction to pornography. I didn't tell anyone, even Richard, who was my closest friend and the one I was joyriding in "borrowed" cars every Saturday night before either of us had a driver licence.

Nobody knew about our car "borrowing" either.

TO BE CONTINUED

Getting Here Part II: Losing My Religion

Most people are born into a religion. Given the time and place of my birth it is not surprising that religion was Christianity. I was Baptized several months later at the Methodist Church where my parent's had married.

My family had a religious history. My mother's had a long affiliation with the Methodists on her father's side and the Reformed Church of Christ on her mother's.

My father's paternal ancestors had landed on these shores in 1683. They were among the Welsh Quakers chartered part of Chester County, Pennsylvania by William Penn. His mother's side, which had arrived from Scotland in early 1774, were longtime Presbyterians.

Although many of my ancestors were very devout, not much of that religious background was apparent in my life. No one was going to church on any regular basis, perhaps on Easter or Christmas. We said grace at Sunday dinner, a task that fell to me once I was able to talk well enough. My prayers were pretty short and repetitive.


In 1950 we moved back to Downingtown from the swamp.  I had left that town halfway through first grade and came back halfway through third, a mere two years that may as well been 200. These were years during which my old classmates formed cliques and bonding.  I wasn't there thus was left out of that process.  My best friend from earlier days had moved away. The boys I once considered friends now made fun of me, even bullied me.

Some girls I knew from before remained friends, but playing jacks and hopscotch with Iva and Judy hardly won the other boys over to my side. At recess I was one of those left dangling to near the end when sides were chosen for games. I didn't know the fundamentals of most team sports, except soccer for some reason. Soccer was not the game of choice in town; it was football and baseball.

Religion started off every day at school.  In those times the school day opened with the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, The Lord's Prayer and a reading from the Bible. No, I wasn't sent to some Christian academy, these were public schools. Any Christian Love espoused by any of those passages didn't last beyond the closing of the Bible and first bell. I remained some kind of pariah to most of these kids.

Also, once back in town, it was decided I should go to church.  Each Sunday I was dressed in my one suit and "good" pair of shoes and sent walking the length of Washington Avenue to attend Sunday School at the Methodist Church. I hated it. For one thing the direct route took me through the territory where a gang of older boys always came after me if I was spotted. For another, no one else in my family was going to church, why me? I found Sunday School terribly boring, plus I wasn't excepted in with the kids there either.

I didn't see much value in any of this religious stuff. It was something to be endured because adults made you do it. God wasn't answering any of my prayers. I woke up in the morning and my enemies were still there.

As I aged it only got worse. I was tall, thin and gangly, with a slightly hunched back. I was sometimes called "Quasimodo" or worse. By seventh grade I also had to wear glasses, so "four-eyes" got added to the insults.

These things drove me more into myself. I was perfectly happy being alone. I began to write and spent a lot of time in the town library. When I began Junior High I stopped going to Sunday School. I just made such a fuss about it my mother gave up trying to force me.

Now, I don't want to paint  a picture of being a totally pathetic figure huddled in some dark garrett. It is not that I didn't make friends, but they were generally considered "different" too. Stu was the only Jewish kid in town at the time, a fact that exposed me to anti-semitism. Ron was as thin and gangly as I and threw like a girl. Dave wore glasses and had weird hair. Franny was black and thus I also became exposed to racism. He wasn't even allowed to visit my home. Bill was small. Sam was a girl; a Tomboy. None of my friends reflected much in the way of religious beliefs, except Stu and his were mocked by my father, who wasn't altogether approving of my friendship with a Jew. He didn't even know about Franny.

Overtime I took part in various activities that I enjoyed, Boy Scouts in particular. I also began going to MYF meetings in Ninth Grade. A boy in my class invited me, but I only went because they were going to a favorite restaurant of mine at the time, Dick Thomas' Brick Oven. I thought I'd go that one time, but I enjoyed the evening and began going regular.

The Pastor decided we should know about different religions and over several weeks a priest, a rabbi, a whatever would come and speak to us about what they believed. I found it very interesting, but it did nothing to bring me closer to God. They all seemed very sincere. How was I to know which was right? Maybe none were? I asked the Pastor one day, "If God made the universe, then who made God?" He gave some stock "with God everything is possible" and left it at that. I thought I had him; I thought I was pretty smart.

Boy Scouts, MYF, Babe Ruth Baseball and my paperboy job all came late in my junior high years and before too many months of involvement with any of them my parents moved us out of town again. After years of living with my grandparents or renting a house nearby, my parents managed to buy a home of their own. It was several miles north of Downingtown out in the country.

I was back into a form of isolation again.

Much to my surprise and chagrin after moving my parents began to go to church, and of course, expected me to begin so again as well.  I was 15 when we moved. I was forced to join them in the pew every week, but when I turned 16 and got my driver's license I made a deal. I would go to Sunday School, but not Sunday Service.

It was not that Sunday School thrilled me. It was even more boring than the one at Downingtown. However, when Sunday School ended I came home to an empty house while my folks were at church. I wanted to have that alone time. I had some special magazines hidden away in a back spot of my closet I wanted to read, or more precisely, magazines with pictures I wanted to look at.

If religion was supposed to make you feel good, then I had a new religion and these magazines were my bibles.

I soon made another deal with my parents. I would go to MYF (Methodist Youth Fellowship) rather than Sunday school. MYF met on Sunday evenings. It was more fun than Sunday school. Yeah, we had lectures about the Bible, but then we played games. Sometimes we had outings, hayrides or cookouts.

As it were, I was elected President of MYF. I actually had power over the agenda of our meetings. I changed the lectures to discussions. I would introduce some Bible story each meeting and then play Devil's Advocate to get the arguments going. The meetings were pretty lively and our membership began to grow. I was being praised because of this, but in reality I wasn't just playing Devil's Advocate, I was trying to ridicule these stories.

The move from Downingtown changed much in my life. My social circle had widened. I still was friends with Stu and Ron, but now I had other friends and we spent our spare time on cars, girls and parties. Days were for souping up our cars and nights were for drag racing up and down Pottstown's main street.

Life had changed for me at my new school as well. The first year I remained a fringe character, although I wasn't being subjected to the constant put-downs I had experienced in Downingtown. I was sitting at a typewriter many nights that first year, typing out short stories and poems not yet knowing this would make me popular in the next year. Writing had been an escape from the world, now it was to become a door into the world.

When you are a loner who has lost your religion stepping through the door into the world can be a dangerous step.