RIP George Bookless

 

I learned recently from the Knox College alumni magazine of the death of George Bookless last spring.  George was a senior in my first year, 1964-5.  He was one of the older students known on campus as what was then called a public intellectual--someone involved in campus and political discourse as well as in their field of endeavor. Along with those known as literary writers,    they were role models.

There were others I remember.  Some, like Gordon Benkler, I knew of mostly through his writing and speaking, or Jim McCurry as a literary writer and scholar.  Others I knew a little, like the well-known wild man Cecil Steed, or the poet and editor of the literary magazine Jay Matson.  And others treated me as a friend, even if I was still a little in awe, like Gary McCool and Mary Jacobson. (Mary was in her third year then, so I got the chance to know her better the next year, along with Judy Dugan, Bob Misiorowski, Kevern Cameron, Gerry Roe, James Campbell and others.)  

In that first year experience, George Bookless was somewhere in between. I remember him as a public presence, but also as a witty and affable raconteur who was often in the company of Gary, Mary and their friends.  In fact, Mary Jacobson is the source of two memories.  She joked with him that after he became a great success in the world, he should endow a library for Knox, but insist they name it the Bookless Library...  It was funnier in those pre-computerized days than it is now.

The other is one of those stray memories--in the Gizmo, with the new Beatles song called "Yesterday" playing often on the jukebox, Mary laughed at the line "I'm not half the man I used to be," something George used to say that she thought was ridiculous but endearing.

But the direct memory that has stayed with me is from a day that spring, shortly before graduation when for various reasons the campus was in tumult.  I was staring at the bulletin board near the entrance of the student union after dinner when George surprised me by stopping to speak with me.  Exactly how he knew I was an aspiring literary writer I no longer recall, but he talked to me about that, quite seriously.  He offered advice and encouragement.  (The one specific piece of advice I remember is the one I didn't take--to write about my early adolescence rather than my life now, because I was too close to it.  He was right of course, but I was too emmeshed in the fast changes of the moment to yet be gripped by anything else.)

These many years later I am still astonished by the attention these older students paid me, especially this spontaneous moment with George Bookless.

The last I remember hearing of him was that he'd joined the Peace Corps, as did may Knox students I knew over the next years.  According to his extensive online obituary, he quickly wound up being witness to a civil war in Nigeria, and in essence a part of the government.  Though he was an English major with biology minor at Knox, he'd learned photography from his father, who had served in the Army Air Force photography unit.  Photography and related activities became his profession.

George visited historic Galena, Illinois on the Mississippi River to photograph eagles, and decided to make his life there.  He became an Alderman at Large and worked on many civic projects including downtown reconstruction, consistent with his advocacy and activism at Knox. 

He seems to have led a full life, with family (including two children and I count four grandchildren), a civic and community life, and life outdoors, camping, hiking and canoeing. He displayed a talent for cooking, and in their tributes, one of his children and one grandchild offered that a dish he learned to make in Nigeria remains their favorite.  I admire all of it more than I can say.

But the best image I have is of George as storyteller, which both of these tributes and the obit mention. I'll remember his kindness to me and I wanted to acknowledge it here, as well as the kindness of those other older students.  But I'll want to remember George Bookless like that: out on his Galena front porch, telling tales.

Origins: Chewing Gum

ad from the 1930s

 Every year, for who knows how long, Knox College seniors in Galesburg, Illinois (though apparently only men) would receive a mimeographed note in their campus mailbox.  I got one my senior year of 1967-68.  It read:

  “ Mr. Lester Smiley, Vice-President of the American Chicle Company, will be on the campus Friday, February 23.  He would like to hold a group meeting for those men interested in a job opportunity with their company. The interviews will be held on Friday, February 23 in the College Placement Office.  Mr. Smiley is a Knox College graduate and, as you know, we have placed many Knox graduates with American Chicle.”

 I can quote this notice so precisely because I experienced it as a bit of found poetry, and literally stapled it into the draft of the play I was writing, “What’s Happening, Baby Jesus?”  When the play was performed that May, freshman Michael Shain came out in a business suit and recited it, with the cheerful addition: “So come on out and keep America chewing!”  It got one of the bigger laughs of the show.  

Rockford High yearbook 

For decades, American Chicle made chewing gum in Rockford, Illinois, and (at various times) in Newark, Brooklyn, Cleveland, New Orleans, Portland, Oregon and around the world. They don’t make so much of it anymore (in fact, after being swallowed up by a succession of bigger companies—even though swallowing is something you shouldn’t do with chewing gum-- a company by that name no longer exists.) Chewing gum has apparently dropped out of fashion, at least for awhile. But for a long time, America kept on chewing.

 “Chewing gum” as we know it began in the USA, though humans everywhere have been chewing stuff without swallowing it for a very long time.  Some Indigenous peoples in South America (for example)  chewed particular plants for energy and stamina, and/or to get high.  Chewing tobacco is another such instance.

 People chewed various leaves, nuts, twigs and gummy substances for millennia, as breath sweeteners and digestive aids, to stave off hunger and thirst, and just for the fun of it.  Denizens of the far north chewed whale blubber, and Europeans chewed animal fats, sometimes in social hours at the end of meals (hence, perhaps, the expression “chewing the fat” to mean convivial—and trivial—conversation, though the origins of this phrase are obscure, based on what seem to be barely educated guesses.)  By the nineteenth century in America, chewing wax was the popular if not entirely satisfactory favorite.

 But the substances we know as chewing gum had their origins in the 1850s.  For some of us you could say the story starts with Davy Crockett.

 Just about anyone who went to Knox College—or any college-- in the 1960s would have experienced the Davy Crockett craze of the 50s, centered on TV films starring Fess Parker, shown endlessly on the Disneyland anthology hour.  The last of the three supposedly biographical tales was about Davy Crockett joining the heroic band defending the Alamo—150 or so men facing 1500 Mexican soldiers.  After holding the Alamo for ten days, Davy Crockett and his compatriots were all killed in the battle or executed afterwards.  The general of the Mexican forces, who was named but never seen in the Disney film, was Santa Anna.  We knew that name. 

 Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was not only the General of the army ruthlessly intent on putting down a rebellious attempt of Texas to secede from Mexico—he was also at the time the President of Mexico.  In fact he was President of Mexico at least five times.  He was also the General that soon after the Alamo, was defeated by Sam Houston’s forces, and thereby lost Texas.  Later he was the general (and president) who provoked and then lost a war with the entire United States. 

 Santa Anna’s career was marked by idealism, hypocrisy, vanity, charm, chicanery, avarice, incompetence and betrayal, and by a remarkable ability to survive.  He was also in it for the money.  His brief last term as president was a mockery of a monarchy.  After he was deposed he went into exile, and ended up for a time in—of all places-- Staten Island in New York, where he cultivated a partner in a get-rich-quick scheme.

 There are several versions of this story. In one, he brought with him about a ton of chicle, the sap of the manikara zapota or sapodilla tree, an evergreen found in jungles of southern Mexico and Central America.  His American partner (or employee or go-between-- the exact relationship varies with the telling) was Thomas Adams, a photographer and inventor.  Santa Anna liked to chew the chicle, so Adams was tasked with finding a market for it—as the basis for rubber tires attached to buggy wheels.  Santa Anna convinced him it was a great idea.

  No one was interested.  Then Santa Anna decamped, leaving Adams with a ton of chicle.  He recalled how one of his sons picked up the habit of chewing it from Santa Anna, and got another son, a traveling salesman, to try selling it as a chewing substitute for paraffin wax.  Probably unbeknownst to him, the product had been test-marketed for ages by the Aztecs, who chewed this chictli.  But after a little success, Adams gave it the American mass-production spin by inventing a machine in 1871 that divided the chicle into strips. He also invented the first gumballs. 

An enterprising druggist in Kentucky began adding flavor to the gum, though the taste was medicinal.  Adams then created a licorice-flavored gum he called Black Jack. It was the longest surviving brand of chewing gum, still sticking to the bottom of movie theatre seats almost a century later. Adams sold Black Jack and another venerable brand, Tutti Frutti, through vending machines in New York.  Later he would market Chiclets.   

In the late 1880s, a candy store owner in Cleveland named William J. White, who supposedly invented chewing gum all over again when he mistakenly ordered a barrel of Yucatan chicle, added a peppermint taste. Then other brands familiar to my generation began arriving.  Physician Edward Beeman began processing pepsin for its stomach-soothing properties, and heeded a suggestion to add it to chewing gum: Beeman’s Pepsin Chewing Gum. It was still marketed as such in the 1950s and possibly longer.

 In 1890, Adams brought together several existing manufacturers, including Beeman and White, to form the American Chicle company. Eventually it would become an international giant. Together with production and product refinements (the first Adams chewing gum was the consistency of taffy), chewing gum became a lucrative product. 

Helping that popularity along was a former soap salesman named William Wrigley, Jr., who introduced his Spearmint gum in 1892, followed by Juicy Fruit in 1893.  Wrigley was also a pioneer in advertising and publicity—perhaps giving rise to the expression “selling it like soap.” 

 Wrigley headquartered his own company in Chicago, which became enormously prosperous, presenting the city with the Wrigley Building and the classic ballpark Wrigley Field for his Chicago Cubs baseball team. 

Another company that formed around this time was Beech-Nut, which started out as a baby food company but soon branched out in some weird ways, into chewing tobacco, for instance.  Beech-Nut also entered the chewing gum market with their peppermint, spearmint and Doublemint brands.    

 Like the first manufactured cigarettes and American chocolate bars, the presence of chewing gum in the rations of American soldiers during World War I created a larger market when the soldiers returned, in addition to giving Europe a taste of America. So it was in the 1920s that chewing gum began to be a defining feature of American life, and began its spread to Europe and beyond.  Even Coca Cola briefly got into the act with its own gum.

 By my childhood in the 1950s and adolescence in the early 1960s, chewing gum was a somewhat controversial but still ubiquitous part of the every day.  The brands we knew and chewed included some of the age-old: many early brands failed, but bright yellow Juicy Fruit packages were everywhere, and Black Jack and Cloves rattled down from the lobby vending machines at the movies. 

Chewing gum brands were heavily advertised, including on television (Double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint Gum!) Though chewing gum became associated with rebellious teenagers (teachers generally frowned on it, and institutions hated the mess) it was mainly marketed to adults.  New additives, it was claimed, helped clean teeth and breath as well as calm nerves. If a stick of chewing gum stuffed in your mouth seemed too vulgar, there was cinnamon flavored Dentyne, in a different sized package and divided in petite pieces, marketed as a dental—and mental--health aid.

 There was chewing gum for everything: Aspergum contained aspirin, there were nicotine gums; my father regularly chewed tablets of an antacid gum called Chooz.  By the 1970s there were sugarless gums, marketed as dieting aids. 

My generation got the gum habit from childhood bubble gum.  It had a separate and later history, because it took longer to create a gum that produced durable bubbles. But the techniques were finally perfected, and the Fleer Company began selling Dubble Bubble in the 1930s, though with sugar shortages it devoted its entire production to the armed forces in World War II and didn’t resume domestic sales until 1951.  Around then, Topps began selling Bazooka bubble gum.

 In my childhood we got Dubble Bubble and Bazooka in small, fat squares, wrapped tightly and individually. Both brands were wrapped on the inside with paper containing a comic strip or panel.  For Bazooka it was the adventures of Bazooka Joe.  Dubble Bubble’s hero was called Pud.  Both also included fortunes; Dubble added interesting “facts.”  

In the 1930s, Fleer also started selling packages of bubble gum with cardboard photos of major league baseball players.  By my 1950s childhood, Topps had joined and perhaps surpassed them.  Those packages were single thin rectangles of gum slightly smaller than the cards that we all collected, treasured, traded and played with.  It was also our early form of gambling, as you did not know what players you were getting in each package.

 We also got football cards, with pictures of professional football players (much less popular than baseball players--college and even high school football teams were better known then.)  Eventually there would be cards of many different kinds: from Davy Crockett to the Beatles, Star Trek and Star Wars, and yes (I reluctantly admit) the Brady Bunch. 

A switch from bubble gum to chewing gum exclusively was part of the transition from childhood to adolescence, and the Beech-Nut gums in particular were part of that, if only for sponsoring Dick Clark’s Saturday night music show starting in 1958, which featured many of the current stars lip-synching to their latest singles.  Though this was black and white television, I still remember the dark green package of spearmint gum he would display.

 Chewing gum in a bewildering number of new tastes continues to be sold around the world. Still, as the 20^th century wound down, chewing gum began to lose its cultural flavor.  It was less fashionable, a little déclassé.  Beemans got a boost when the Tom Wolfe book and the 1983 film The Right Stuff revealed it as famed test pilot Chuck Yeager’s favorite ritual before a dangerous flight.  But that didn’t slow the trend downward.

 

Still, even some celebrities kept chewing, if somewhat secretly. One of the last public gum chewers was John Lennon, who famously was seen chewing gum while singing “All You Need Is Love” to an international TV audience.  By the 24^th century, gum is so unknown that when offered a stick of gum by a libidinous desk sergeant in a 1940s holodeck simulation, Doctor Beverly Crusher committed the cardinal rookie mistake, and swallowed it.

 The fortunes of those great chewing gum companies has followed, along with the disappearance of many classic brands.  American Chicle is gone, Beech-Nut is back to making just baby food.  Though now a subsidiary of a candy company, only Wrigley remains an international giant in chewing gum.

 But such is the power of nostalgia for classic chewing gum brands that a wrinkled up package,  a decades-dry stick or related item can fetch tens, hundreds, even thousands of dollars.  And of course it’s become a cliché of my generation to bemoan the bubble gum baseball cards that were thrown away with the other detritus of childhood.   A 1952 Mickey Mantle hauled in $12.6 million. Chew on that awhile.

Gallery

American Chicle Building in Portland, Oregon.

Thomas Adams (and sons) put their name on several products, and the Adams name was used for others long afterwards.  This is one of the brands that didn't last.

Baseball players were known for chewing substances other than chewing gum.  Nevertheless,  Beech-Nut did a series of endorsement ads with prominent players--none more prominent than Stan the Man. 

The classic Dubble Bubble...

In the effort to give chewing gum legitimacy, especially in the early days, companies made various health claims.  Beemans however was sincere--he was a champion of pepsin, and many other companies later used pepsin in their gum, and featured the word prominently in packaging and promotions.

When I tried to recall specific baseball cards I actually had in my collecting years, I could remember of course the prominent names, like Mickey Mantle, Roberto Clemente, etc.  But the actual card?  For some reason the first I recalled was the Gene Baker card with the dark green background.  Gene Baker is a forgotten player from the 50s and early 60s, but his last team was the Pittsburgh Pirates, which I followed religiously, especially in the 1957,58, 59 and World Championship 1960 seasons.  When he came to the Pirates in the Dale Long trade in 1957, I kept waiting to see him but he rarely played, hobbled by injuries and better players in front of him.  He'd been a shortstop, converted to second base in Chicago (sharing the infield with the great Ernie Banks--the two of them were among the first black players in the NL after Jackie Robinson) and a utility infielder in Pittsburgh.  He was on the 1960 team, used sparingly to spell Don Hoak at third and pinch-hit.  He soon retired but stayed with the Pirates organization, and became the first black manager and coach in organized baseball (in the minors), and if only for part of one game in 1963, the first black manager in the Major Leagues.

  

Origins: The Jungle Gym

 The Jungle Gym turns 100 years old this year, sort of.  The patent filed by Sebastian Hinton was approved in 1923, starting off its worldwide replications.  However, Sebastian Hinton was not really an inventor -- he was a patent attorney in Illinois, so he wrote a good patent.

  The idea and the basic structure was dreamed up and built many years before by his father, Charles Hinton, who was an inventor (he created the first baseball pitching machine.  Unfortunately, it was powered by gunpowder.)  Charles Hinton also wrote scientific romances in the era of H.G. Wells' classics, but chiefly he was a mathematician.  And so the purpose of his jungle gym was to...teach his children math.

Charles Hinton came from a radical but highly educated family in the UK.  His mathematical interest was what he called the fourth dimension, within which exist the three dimensions we know.  Or something like that.  (It wasn't the Wells' version of the fourth dimension, which was time.)  In the late 19th century, when he proposed his ideas (more influential now than then), he came to believe that people couldn't understand his fourth dimension because they really didn't know the mathematics of three dimensions.  

So to teach his children how three-dimensional math works, he built a backyard structure to illustrate it, and encouraged his kids to identify the junctures of the x, y and z axes by climbing to each point and calling it out.  They climbed all right, but they ignored the math lesson.

Charles Hinton built his structure out of bamboo, since he was in Japan at the time.  Later he moved to the US, taught at Princeton (where he invented the pitching machine), and worked at the US Naval Observatory and the Patent Office, though he never bothered to patent his "climbing frame."

Years later his son Sebastian suddenly remembered it, and described it to an educator at the progressive school system in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, who encouraged him to build a prototype.  It was tweaked, and eventually kids in Winnetka were climbing on the first jungle gyms (one of which still exists, also made of wood) and Hinton filed his patent.  He didn't personally profit by it or see its success, for this is also the centennial of his death.

The patent referred to the structure as a version of tree branches upon which "monkeys" climb.  Experts say it's really ape species that do this kind of climbing, but kids are often called monkeys. and the name stuck for one part of the jungle gym: the monkey bars.  The jungle gym has been varied over the years, getting more elaborate and more safety- (and lawsuit-) conscious.  But something like the original still features in many if not most playgrounds and a lot of backyards.

There have been a few notices in the media of this centennial, notably the NPR All Things Considered segment by Matt Ozug.  But no one answered the question that I had (nor did they ask it):  The name "Jungle Gym" seems like an obvious pun on "Jungle Jim," of comic strip, film, radio and TV fame.  But is it?

Nope.  Sebastian Hinton patented what he called the "junglegym" in 1923.  Jungle Jim didn't appear in the newspaper comics pages until 1934.  Jungle Jim was created by comics artist Alex Raymond (with writer Don Moore) as a lead-in to Raymond's other famous hero, Flash Gordon--they both appeared for the first time on the same day.  The other thing that seems obvious about Jungle Jim is true: he was created to compete with the wildly popular Tarzan, who started out in a series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, then swung into the movies (the first Tarzan in silent pictures was Elmo Lincoln, of Knox College) before dominating the funny papers starting in 1931. 

So is it the other way around?  Jungle Jim comes from the Jungle Gym?  The official story is that Jungle Jim Bradley was named after Alex Raymond's brother Jim.  But did the brothers ever play on a jungle gym as boys?  I await the definitive Alex Raymond biography to answer that question.

Thinking of Trains at Three in the Morning

Awake. I can’t get back to sleep.

No whistles sound tonight. There are no Now Arriving

or All Aboard announcements. I’ve missed the train

and I’m stuck at the CB&Q depot back when it 

contained a shoeshine stand in the men’s lounge,

when businessmen wore wingtips and white shirts with ties,

when the newsstand overflowed with multiple papers, 

when the white glazed brick walls of the main waiting room

echoed announcements of 38 arrivals and departures,

every day, people sitting on the huge wooden benches,

the ones with massive armrests to prevent lying down

like tonight as I sit here, isolated with a fool’s reminiscence

and these thoughts tend towards vanished trains. 

 I remember riding on the Zephyr at night from Denver,

 the clicking of metal in motion, the gentle sway of the bed. 

 If I were only on it tonight, I’d be sound asleep.

--Jay Matson

These photos (you can click on them to see them full size) are of the old Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railroad station in Galesburg, Illinois, which this poem describes.  The poet, Jay Matson, lived in Galesburg before and after he attended Knox College, also in Galesburg.  He was a senior when I was first year.  The top photo is from 1961, the one of the waiting room seems older.  (It's a colorized print for a postcard, I think.)  I remember the waiting room as darker and smaller.

My first glimpse of this station and this town where I was to go to college was from the Denver Zephyr to Denver in the spring of my senior year of high school.  In my first college years, I often took the trains from my Pennsylvania home to Galesburg, until there was half-fare flying to O'Hare, and then I took the train from Chicago to Galesburg.   By that time, the mid to late 1960s, the station had probably lost many of its amenities, but it still hosted a kind of diner, famous with students for being open all night and for its blueberry pancakes.   This station was torn down in 1984 and replaced with a smaller one.  Amtrak still runs this route.

 I also grew up with the sound of trains, though our Greensburg, PA station was closed by the time I was five.  (It has since been restored but not as a station.)  All the trains have disappeared from where I live now in far northern California--recently enough that some crossing signals still exist, and until a few years ago, there were abandoned boxcars in Eureka.  When I first got here I did imagine now and again that I heard those whistles in the night.  But not for years.  

This poem is from Jay Matson's latest collection, Old Affairs.

Man in the Landscape

Man in the Landscape

 (for Paul Shepard) 

 At Houghton Point I once thought

 to move through the woods without changing

 them, impossible, but to try,

 to reduce the flattery to a minimum.

 Will the flowers show themselves?

 It is the wrong question.

 Or take the landscape as a whole:

 there’s nothing you can do for a rock

 except at the expense of beetles and grass.

 Hills need valleys, lakes rivers,

 where does the landscape end?

                                        Everything 

wants to grow according to its nature.

Every place is itself a growing thing.

Where I am I am part of the place.

 Moving through the land I am looking for the

 land

 where my tracks will root and grow

 behind me.

 --Samuel Moon

 from A Little Farther: Selected Works of Samuel Moon

 Poet and teacher Sam Moon and ecologist Paul Shepard were friends on the faculty of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, when Shepard was teaching a course called "Man in the Landscape," which became the title of his first book published in 1967. Houghton Point is in Wisconsin, at Lake Superior.

 I’ve mentioned it before (and will again) but it bears repeating in reference to this poem: Gary Snyder (who Sam Moon brought to Knox for a week that changed more than one life there) talks about the Buddhist concept of ahimsa as doing the least possible harm.  It applies to everything, but it is always a matter of individual consideration, judgment, attention and intention.

History of My Reading: To Stony Creek and Buffalo 1969-70

Stony Creek, Connecticut 1969/70.  BK photo.

 After my months in Berkeley, I flew to Chicago in late October or early November 1969.  I visited for a few days with Jeremy Gladstone (a friend from Knox College) who was back from Europe and staying at the family home in Park Forest until he sorted out his next move.  In Europe Jeremy had acquired a taste for Pernod, one of the anise-based French liqueurs, a legal form of absinthe.  He showed me how to drink it over ice, with water.

  One evening he invited a group of former Knox friends, and initiated them as well.  I’m pretty sure Howard Partner was among them.  We sat around a table drinking Pernod.  I think it was on this occasion that I got a better appreciation for how far apart these Chicagoland suburbs really are.  It took longer for everyone to get there and to get back than the time we spent together.

 My next stop was the family home in Greensburg.  This was likely a short visit because I was soon on my way to rejoin Joni in Connecticut.  I got myself there by first going to Washington for the second Moratorium demonstration against the Vietnam War on November 15.  This turned out to be officially the largest Washington demonstration of the war.  I may have gone down with my friend Mike or maybe I met him there because he was stationed nearby.  He had been drafted into the Army the year before.  So I marched against the war in the company of an active duty soldier (or in his case, chaplain’s assistant.) 

Many demonstrators from distant places came on rented buses, and so my plan was to find a bus returning to New Haven and hitch a ride. Not really a mad strategy in 1969.  In any case, the plan worked. Mike and I found a bus going to New Haven and they had empty seats.  I even got acquainted with someone on the bus who offered to put me up for the night when I couldn’t reach Joni upon our arrival.  In the morning I met his wife, and he and I traded versions of Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country” (I knew the Nashville Skyline version in G, he knew the original version in C.) Then I called Joni again and she came to pick me up.

 Joni had found a small place in a village called Stony Creek, directly on Long Island Sound, about eight miles from New Haven.  As I recall, it was three rooms in a building set back from the main drag, Thimble Island Road.  Though oysters and lobster fishing were part of its identity, the “stony” in Stony Creek likely came from the quarry.  Before it closed at the beginning of the 20^th century, it supplied pink granite for the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, and the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Probably Thimble Island Road.  BK photo.

 With a population of about a thousand, Stony Creek was part of the town of Branford, Connecticut.  An article I clipped from the New York Times a decade later began with the quip of an unnamed critic: “Every town has its village idiot, but only Branford has an idiot village.”  This article made much of Stony Creek’s resistance to change; specifically to tourism.  I don’t know if it’s still that way, though photos on line don’t give me that impression.

 The 1979 Times article suggested that many residents were employed at Yale, and perhaps that was the case to some extent also in 1969.  Across the Sound from Stony Creek there were houses where groups of Yale Law students lived.  One of them was named Bill Clinton. His girlfriend Hillary was often around.  Joni’s brother-in-law was at Yale Law, and she attended a party over there sometime before I’d arrived.  Perhaps they met. 

I don't know if it was a cultural high point but in the late 1930s, Stony Creek had a summer theatre, operated by two women who also interned for the legendary Mercury Theatre in New York, run by John Houseman and Orson Welles, often the star in its productions.  This is how Stony Creek hosted a Mercury Theatre show for a week prior to its Broadway debut. Unfortunately the tryout was so dismal that the show never opened--only those who came to Stony Creek, like Katharine Hepburn, ever saw it. She stole one of the actors, Joseph Cotton, for her 1939 Broadway hit, The Philadelphia Story, which revived her career. 

That New York Times article sings the praises of Stony Creek in summer, but I saw it only in the dead of winter, intermittently from November through February (with some time back in Greensburg for Christmas, which extended well into January to avoid Joni’s parents, visiting her and her sister.  They were not my allies.) 

BK

 Still, even though it was dim and frigid (or sunny and slushy) much of the time, I liked our corner of Stony Creek by the Sound. The Sound wasn’t the ocean but it was something, and it was always there.  I wrote this about it:

 Dredging the gray sky,/the winter wind sears home./Against the window/it pours/stinging rain from the sea./Though it does not leap into the warm kitchen/I go out to meet it/greet it/say hello/and come back in.

 Something about that dynamic suited me then, and still does. Besides the Sound, there was very little else in Stony Creek, at least within walking distance, except farther down Thimble Island Road there was a small store--and a public library.  It was (and is) the Willoughby Wallace Library, built in 1956 thanks to a bequest by the eccentric but public-spirited Mr. Wallace, plus an architect’s donated design, and donated town granite.  

So this bright substantial building was pretty new when I discovered it, amazed it was there.  I was inside it just after 3 in the afternoon, and found it was a prime hangout for high school students after school.  They sat around sunny tables, munching candy from the store and debriefing the day: who got in trouble on the bus that morning, who got ripped last weekend, plus demonstrations of how Martha and Jennifer walk. (As well as casting suspicious glances at the possible narc with the long hair, taking notes.)

 Around 4, they were replaced by a noisy bunch of grade schoolers.  “I wonder what menstruation means?”  I watched a third grader look over a Jimi Hendrix album.  Others laughed over the magazines, or broke into whispery, gossipy groups. 

 The library became my regular destination—walking past the abandoned offices of Pacific Sanchero, Permittee, and the house with the multicolored design painted by a summer tenant, who also inscribed on its wall “Latch onto a feather.”  In relatively good weather, I could sit on a stone bench outside, if it wasn’t already occupied by the aforementioned students.

 It was in this library that I discovered an author I would follow for the rest of his life: Ronald Sukenick. Very likely his latest book was on display, with a title bound to catch my eye: Death of the Novel and Other Stories.  (The “death of the novel” was a thing, long before—and much different than-- the death of the author.) 

Sukenick

The stories amazed me—I hadn’t read anything like them before.  Today some might qualify as “metafiction,” or be called deconstruction.  At the time they felt to be attempts to find new forms commensurate with the current fractious and fractured reality, as well as further forays in expanding the possibilities of writing by essentially playing with some of those possibilities.  These stories were basically comic, and in a sense conventional—the experiments were part of the story, as for example, when he includes a transcript of a conversation with his wife with a tape recorder between them.  When the conversation becomes uncomfortable for him, he wants to turn the tape off.  (At least that’s how I remember it, from a re-reading ten years ago or so.)

 So I was delighted to find in the library stacks a copy of his novel, Up, published the previous year.  It also played with narrative—the initial character was a writer, so part of it is about a character he’s writing (Strop Banally), including the changes he’s making along the way (the character’s hair color, etc.)  It also threads other narratives, but again includes critiques of their discontinuities and excesses as part of the story.

 Sukenick seemed only a little older, and I immediately bonded with our similarities in outlook and literary attempts, ignoring many differences.  Writing conventional narrative seemed superficial and false to many in those nuclear psychedelic Vietnam Nixonated days.  I didn’t get all he was doing or trying to do, but I was attracted to the mosaic form and the irreverent style I’d been drawn to in the Beatles, Vonnegut, Donleavy, Joseph Heller, etc.

My Sukenick collection, minus "Mosaic," hiding somewhere

 But Sukenick became a hard author to follow—even as a reader.  Those first two books were from major publishers, but subsequent ones were from small presses, including the organization he helped to start, the Fiction Collective.  At least a few times I found his books on carts of university bookstores sale books.  I found his 1986 novel Blown Away (Sun and Moon Press) deep in a pile of discount books on my last visit to the Harvard Coop bookstore.  But I managed to get copies of all of his novels, and one collection of stories.  I still have most of them, including his last, easily the best fiction I’ve read about 9/11, Last Fall.  I even have his extremely useful book on Wallace Stevens, Musing the Obscure, from his earlier life as a very perceptive and methodical literary scholar.  He died in 2004.

 Sukenick was a named character in Up, and the novel followed other characters (his boyhood friends mostly) who also were a little older than me.  There were retrospective scenes from their past, though I wasn’t much interested in them at the time. (Now they seem vivid.) What impressed me was that this was contemporary fiction about contemporary times and people.  Characters smoked dope and talked about revolution (though usually their complicated reasons for supporting it and not supporting it simultaneously.)  They were out of school (though some were teaching) and trying to find a place in a society they feared and loathed. That got my attention, as I was just beginning that journey.

 When I wasn’t in Stony Creek, I was in New Haven, a 20 minute bus ride away.  My efforts to find a job—desperate, muddled and halfhearted simultaneously-- were focused there. I checked bulletin boards and the newspapers, including the Yale student paper. 

 In one of those papers I saw an ad for volunteers for a Yale psychology department experiment “in learning” that paid $25 for a few hours.  I called the number and asked for more information on what this experiment entailed.  My first suspicion was that it involved drugs, and at this point in my life I wasn’t eager to let others experiment on me. The female voice on the other end assured me there were no drugs but when I asked other questions she was persistently evasive. That turned my suspicions into alarm bells.  As much as I needed the money, I didn’t participate.

 Years later I realized that this was very probably an early iteration of the famous (or infamous) Milgram experiments. (This was pretty much confirmed for me in a book by psychologist Elliot Aronson when he described what subjects were told the experiments were about—precisely what that ad said.) 

The Milgram experiments were one of the most often cited psychology experiments of modern times.  Participants were instructed to give electric shocks to people in the next room if they answer questions incorrectly.  With each wrong answer the shock is intensified, until the victim can be heard screaming in pain and begging to be released from the experiment. The victims weren’t actually getting shocks—they were in on the con.  The experiments weren’t about learning; they were to see how many people will follow instructions and administer the shocks, even after hearing cries of pain and the begging. 

 The answer was a shockingly high percentage of them.  I first heard it reported as 100%.  Later the figure given for those willing to administer the maximum voltage was 64%.  The experiment is usually said to prove two main points: that people will do what authority tells them to do, and that people will do so in situations even if they believe that they wouldn’t, regardless of their personal ethics.

 But here’s the problem.  To make such an inference about people in general, the participants had to accurately represent the population.  This is the fatal flaw of most such psychological experiments (participants are mostly students who always need money, and overwhelmingly white.) In this experiment, those who actually participated had to be willing to take the unquestioned word of authorities, without knowing what they were getting into, just to walk in the door. So they were self-selected pre-disposed. But how many people like me smelled something fishy and just didn’t participate?  On the other hand, how many participants needed the $25 enough to do what they were told?

 Think about it: this was Yale in 1969 and 1970.  There were antiwar protests on campus.  William Sloane Coffin, an advocate for defying the draft and therefore the authority of the government, was a campus hero.  Part of the huge generation gap was the distrust many younger people had for the honesty and veracity of those in authority in the government, the university  and big business.  Scientific research secretly funded by the military was a big issue on many campuses.

 So if you were against the killing and the maiming in Vietnam, to the extent of resisting the government’s orders to do so, or even if you were a stoned peace and love hippie, how likely is it that you were going to push a button to cause somebody pain?  I’ve seen photos of these experiments—there was no long hair, no countercultural clothing in any of them. 

 (These experiments, now considered unethical, are often cited along with the equally notorious Stanford  experiments that purported to prove that people given the role of prison guard invariably act in sadistic ways towards prisoners.  This was a much-cited finding in the corporate world of the 1980s and 1990s, though the experiments have largely been discredited.) 

My perspective on the Milgram experiments led to my skepticism of many psychological experiments, and books about them.  I found support in the work of eminent psychologist Jerome Kagan, particularly in his book Psychology’s Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back, in which he gently but definitely questioned whether universal conclusions about behavior can be based on small numbers of culturally identical subjects in a laboratory setting.

 In any case, the stark divide in the late 1960s was something I keenly felt.  Even before the Pentagon Papers or Watergate, there was amply evidence of systematic lying in high places.  All our literature, movies and music questioned the moral authority if not the intelligence of those running things.  Apart from my ignorance of how the “adult world” worked, and how I could possibly find my way into the elements of it I still respected, my general attitude was both baffled and adversarial.  How could I make a living, and not lose myself?  I had too much yet to learn.

 “Out of college, money spent,” went the Beatles’ lyric, “see no future, pay no rent/all the money’s gone, nowhere to go.  But oh that magic feeling/ no where to go...”

 Apart from visits to my Knox friend Mike Shain, who for some reason now forgotten was living in a New Haven rooming house, with a sign on his door that said “Home of the Bobby Dylan Conspiracy,” I gravitated towards Yale. The academic campus was still the only industrial site I knew, and where I was somewhat comfortable.  I went to readings and knew how to get myself invited to the parties afterwards.  I believe that’s where I heard poet Kenneth Koch read.

He read a long poem that may have been called “Eyes.” In any case, it was my inspiration for a long poem I later wrote called “Ears,” which was published a couple of times in the mid-70s.

  I heard the poet Bill Knott, who at the time was writing under the name of St. Geraud.  I was astounded by his poems—they were the most unrelenting and mind-blowing surrealist poems I’d encountered. Also very short.  He may have read on the same bill with Koch or perhaps another poet, because I remember him being at the after-party and he left without much notice. Later I happened to be in the living room of this house when the doorbell rang and I answered it.  It was Bill Knott, looking shamefaced about returning.  I laughed.  I loved it.

 I met poet Michael Benedikt and we began a correspondence when he was back in New York.  He was interested in my writing that I sent him. This was some rare encouragement.  I was still sending things out and getting them back.

 Thinking back, it seems obvious that this would have been a good moment for a mentor to appear in my life. But it didn’t happen then, and never happened.  I later depended greatly on the faith of several editors, but they were all more or less my contemporaries.  This, like everything else, was as much my fault as anyone’s, and equally a sign of the times. 

I did manage a fair amount of writing at Stony Creek. Apart from verse and short fiction, and the usual endless notes on the novel I wasn’t writing, I once simply let go and wrote a sustained prose fiction called “Apostrophe S.”  Influenced by Sukenick but more by Vonnegut in its tone, I wrote it late at night, in the warm quiet kitchen, while Joni was asleep. I often had the company of our two kittens, named Abbey and Rhoda, who prowled around the pale plywood plank I was writing on, and chased my pen across the yellow legal pad.

 What survives of “Apostrophe S” seems to include elements added later.  Perhaps a wise editor could have helped me develop the good parts (some were quite funny) into something publishable, but in retrospect, the best part of it is remembering the experience of writing it. 

 But I did write something while at Stony Creek that was more of an indication of a direction I would later follow.  It’s not much remembered, but in late 1969, there was a brief but intense frenzy over an assertion that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash some three years before, and been secretly replaced by a lookalike.  Then the Beatles had seeded various songs with clues.  This “Paul is dead” theory led to top 40 stations all over America airing the “evidence” as well as lots of Beatles songs.  It made the news (Huntley-Brinkley, Time Magazine) and a New Haven moviehouse advertised a special showing of Yellow Submarine with the line, “Paul is alive and well in Yellow Submarine!”  Sales of Beatles albums shot up.

 But what apparently impressed me most was how seriously the high school students I saw in Stony Creek were taking it.  I realized that this was a contemporary subject of interest to my generation and younger that I knew something about, both in terms of the Beatles and what are now known as “conspiracy theories.”  The long piece I wrote about it, entitled the “The Paul Is Dead Theology,” was the kind of cultural reportage and analysis that in the not too distant future I would be writing and publishing.  But at that moment, though Michael Benedikt especially liked it and tried to get it published, it only joined my manuscript pile of futility.

 The article asserted knowledge concerning what high school students were talking about that I probably didn’t derive just from hanging around the Stony Creek library.  Joni was teaching high school, and we talked about her students.

We had happy times in Stony Creek. The music I associate with those wintry days includes the Band albums and The Papas and the Mamas, especially the song "Safe in my Garden." But our garden was not so safe. Our problem was the future, and the nature of our future together. These issues were the sources of tension, and along with external and internal pressures, were more than an undercurrent to those months.  But as far as I knew we’d come to no conclusion. 

Stony Creek sunset. BK photo.

Apart from manuscripts, I’d sent out various proposals, applications and inquiries.  I applied for a summer arts workshop at Cummington, in western Massachusetts.  I was in touch with Knox friend Steve Meyers who was in graduate school in Buffalo.  He was enthusiastic about the English department there, and urged me to come up and check things out. Perhaps I’d come to the reluctant conclusion that I didn’t know how to do anything that paid a salary except maybe teach, and if I was going to have to make a living that way, I would need an advanced degree.  Or maybe I was just looking for some income for a few years, burrowed into books.

 So one cold March morning I slid a duffel bag and my guitar case into the front trunk of Joni’s yellow VW bug. We drove first to the dump in a frozen field of thin snow, and I unloaded a bag of garbage.  I got back into the car and she drove me to an interstate ramp, so I could begin hitchhiking up to Buffalo.  After a brief farewell, she drove away.  It would be the last time I saw her.

 Shortly after I got to Steve’s in Buffalo, her letter arrived inviting me not to come back.  Over the next weeks we talked on the phone a few times and exchanged letters, but the situation didn’t change.  I was dislocated and bereft on many levels, but I don’t think I really blamed her. I certainly saw the justice of her point of view. 

 If Sukenick’s Up has a theme it would probably be to “be true to the discontinuity of experience.”  Even then, the 60s seemed an especially discontinuous and contingent time, so it seemed writing should express it.  But discontinuity is also a theme of youth.  All experience that falls outside the expected, the changes and rapid twists and turns, especially when moving among “worlds” of what passes for the traditional or normal and what seems to be new, as well as crossing undefined geographical, socio-economic (class) and other borders, is experienced as discontinuous.  It’s only later that it’s possible to sense the patterns, the continuities, even if they never become entirely clear, or they are multiple.

 There may be accidents or missed opportunities or stupid moves and so on, the memory of which may keep us up at night, but ultimately they become elements in the pattern.  For example, had a certain letter arrived a few days earlier when I was in Berkeley, my life might have taken me in a different direction, perhaps to western Canada.  And so on.  Or as we said a lot in those days, so it goes.

 In a way that’s what this project is about: partly through the agency of reading, seeing where things fall into the pattern that time has made, that can only be seen retrospectively.  In a larger sense, that’s a project of old age. 

 Events of all kinds contribute to the pattern—things that happened and did not happen, as well as things read or thought or felt or heard or seen, or desired, or feared. The influence of others at a particular time, or the lack of it. The picture will never be complete, because memory and various kinds of records of the time are almost guaranteed to be incomplete, if not distorting.  But it’s pretty clear what the pattern is of: it’s how you got to where you end up.

Virgil Thomson (r)

 Sometime in the early 1990s, I had the television on, not entirely absorbed in what I think was a documentary film about the American composer Virgil Thomson.  There was a brief scene, apparently filler, of Thomson at a party. He was talking to a young man, who I imagine was troubled about his career or his life.  Thompson was looking at him intently, and said very carefully and earnestly: “The outcome of everything is the way it happens, and the way it happens is the story of your life.”

 It took me awhile to accept this but that’s the pattern.  That’s the retrospective continuity: the story of your life. And as I am finding now, it begins to become visible when the story is pretty much over, and you’re in the coda, or maybe the last act.

 In Buffalo it was still winter.  I slept in Steve’s living room, for longer than I intended.  Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water album had come out, and I learned the first song on the second side, “The Only Living Boy in New York.”  I played it so much that a friend of Steve’s thought I’d written it.  I also liked “Papa Hobo” from that record.  Together they represented my moment. 

Bobbie and Bob Creeley

The only reading I remember was from the bookshelf in that living room: several books by William Carlos Williams, notably his essays In The American Grain.

I must have also been reading Robert Creeley’s newer poetry, since he was teaching in Buffalo, and I was seeing a lot of him.  I attended at least one of his classes, spoke with him in his office, and was at an epic party in which, at one end of the host apartment, Robert Creeley held court, surrounded by others, and at the other end, his wife Bobbie Creeley was equally the center of attention.  When Bob mentioned Bobbie's enthusiasm for palmistry and I held up my liberally creased hand, he immediately sent me to Bobbie (later known as writer and artist Bobbie Louise Hawkins), who, as predicted, exulted in the challenge.  

 I was deliberately spending time at the English department building, particularly one long row of offices, belonging to (among others) poet John Logan, fictionist John Barth, and literary critic and gadfly Leslie Fiedler, as well as Creeley.  I learned enough about them to find the ways they decorated the window in the door to their offices appropriately expressive.  Logan’s window looked like stained glass, Fiedler’s was psychedelic, Barth’s was blacked out, and Creeley’s was clear.

 I met a lot of people in the department, as well as other of Steve’s friends, especially at the almost weekly huge communal meals.  Steve remembers that we both brought guitars to a class he was teaching and improvised a song with lyrics by T.S. Eliot.   

 But it was also a moment of crisis for SUNY Buffalo, eventually including street demonstrations.  After awhile police of various kinds were called in, and there was barricades and tear gas.  Steve and I mostly listened to the reports each evening on the campus radio station.  But we also attended meetings, including a big one of the faculty (that included graduate TAs) in the College of Arts and Letters.   The issues were wide-ranging, including academic freedom (unjustified suspensions of faculty) and others I’ve frankly forgotten. 

Leslie Fiedler

 Leslie Fiedler spoke about how serious it was to call for the resignation of a university president—and why he was calling for it now. A resolution of no confidence passed overwhelmingly (according to my notebook.) Then a student came in shouting that police were on their way to a particular campus building, and so all of us marched arm in arm to that building, where nothing happened.

 There was another moment I had reason to remember later.  Before the meeting started, someone behind us cautioned that people chatting with each other needed to be careful what they said because there were probably FBI undercover agents in the crowd.  What seemed a tad paranoid though not crazy turned out to be broadly true, when the extent of FBI infiltration of antiwar and related groups was revealed.  Some agents were even provocateurs, pushing radical groups to violence.

 I’d never entertained participating in premeditated political violence, and I was skeptical of its benefits versus its human and moral costs. My attitudes towards “revolution” were also complicated. I was selective in what I felt needed to change, and how to go about obtaining that change.  Some of these attitudes were not quite conscious, so I learned something from a moment in Buffalo.

 Richard Ellmann, author of the biography of James Joyce that had meant so much to me, was teaching at the university (though I never met him.)  But I read somewhere that his collection of Joyce memorabilia was on display that month at the university library.

When I went to see it, I couldn’t find it.  A library official asked if he could help me, and when I told him, he said that unfortunately the display had to be put back in storage because of the ongoing strife in the streets.  He must have seen my expression of dismay—I’d never dreamed that angry students would sack the library but at the same time, it didn’t seem like an outrageous precaution.  And I suppose that, with my long hair and jeans, I was a bit ashamed to be a cause of such anxiety.  But he saw right away that I was a Joyce enthusiast, and sympathized.  

SUNY Buffalo campus

At some point in my Buffalo exile, I made a trip over the Canadian border for a quick visit with Bill Thompson, my former housemate our senior year at Knox.  I met his friends from the University of Hamilton where he was (or had been) a graduate student.  So cold and insistent was the Buffalo winter that it actually was warmer in Canada.

 It was at the University of Hamilton that I had my first exposure to what was then called Women’s Liberation.  I attended an open forum on the subject, run with  authority by leaders of a campus Women’s Liberation organization.  It was an eye-opener, or as we would soon learn to say, a consciousness-raiser.  A lot of their points I experienced as valid immediately, and others it took a short while to admit.  I was troubled however by how the women leaders treated a woman in the audience, who said she didn’t think women had to have a career to feel liberated or be fulfilled—she felt liberated working in her garden.  They fell on her like a ton of bricks.  Today it seems like a first iteration of the “woke” moment: it’s liberating side, and it’s tyrannical side.

 

I was still in Buffalo in April (where it was still winter), for the very first Earth Day.  Some 20 million Americans marched or otherwise participated.  It was a big deal.  (I wrote more about this here.)  I heard Ralph Nader speak, and engaged a garage mechanic in a conversation about how ecology could generate jobs. 

 In general Buffalo had calmed down in late April, until President Nixon announced the U.S. incursion into Cambodia, widening the Vietnam war. The university, along with colleges across the country, immediately erupted.  On May 4^th, National Guard troops shot and killed four Kent State students.  The war, it seemed, had come home.  There were larger protests at even more colleges, and a national student strike. For those of us a little older, Kent State crystallized a feeling we’d had for years: that we were enemies in our country.

 The University of Buffalo was shut down, and Steve and I spontaneously decided to head back to Knox College in Illinois, perhaps from some homing instinct in this crisis time.

 I had miraculously (and largely through the efforts of Robert Creeley, I’m convinced) been accepted into the SUNY Buffalo graduate English program for the following fall.  But I no longer saw myself staying there. Whatever I was going to do or be next, it wasn’t going to be in academia after all.  In the immediate sense I’d abused Steve’s hospitality for too long.  So I knew I wasn’t going back to Buffalo.

 I had also been accepted at the Cummington, Massachusetts summer arts community, all expenses paid.  Before and after that, I was back to “nowhere to go.”

 We got in Steve’s MG, and by the time we got to Ohio—and drank coffee while being stared at by truckers—we realized that outside of Buffalo, and despite the ongoing crisis, it was spring. 

 The story of that Galesburg visit—including my participation in The Students Are Revolting and the takeover of an administrative office, as well as the political books of the time—is told in a prior post indexed to this series, published on the 50^th anniversary of these events.  Next in this sequence, I’ll pick up the story at Cummington and Cambridge, Massachusetts in the summer of 1970.