I called Mariana Moran, a freshman at Smith College, long distance from Dartmouth College to tell her that I was canceling our date for Winter Carnival. I told her that I had fallen in love with another girl, a sophomore at Smith named Joan Bryant, and wanted to take Joan to Winter Carnival instead of her.

The conversation was uncomfortable. I had to screw up my courage to make the call, but I did it. Mariana was gracious; she said politely that she understood and was glad I had called and told her. That was it. Not so bad, I thought cynically, “She’s gorgeous and will find another date.”

I had already invited Joan Bryant to Winter Carnival, so I didn’t have to make another call and invite her. Now, I had only one date and that one with Joan Bryant, the second love of my life at the time.

I had made a concerted effort to woo Mariana Moran, one of the most beautiful debutantes in Washington, DC, and one of the most elegant. She had gone to the hoity-toity Holton Arms School and was the most desirable girl on the deb circuit my senior year at St. Albans. She had been given the nickname of “Meathead Moran” by my pal Tyler Abell (or perhaps by Ralph Pagter) because, in typical teenage fashion, we tended to give nicknames based on polar opposites.

Mariana was gorgeous. She put the other debutantes to shame. Her father, as I remember, was Liquor Commissioner of the District of Columbia, and that alone would make her a sought-after date. He was Spanish or South America — a high-class patrician from one of the South American countries that was changing dictators all the time, so he was on the A-List socially, of course. He was an elegant, probably corrupt, father, and her mother was a beautiful, fussy American woman who dressed her daughter to the nines. In other words, a typical Washington, DC debutante in 1950-51.

Mariana was not only beautiful, but she was also smart, which we overlooked at that time because she was so great looking and dressed so well. All the guys said she was a dead ringer for Elizabeth Taylor, built like her and about the same age, too. Therefore, in the fall of 1951, I was a freshman at Dartmouth and she was also a freshman at Smith, and I had chased after her hard and copped a date for Winter Carnival. We had necked a lot; however, I had bigger plans for her for Winter Carnival. She was to be my date for the big event. Winter Carnival was even bigger than New Years Eve; it was the biggest event in the Ivy League.

I had met Joan Bryant in the summer of 1951 when I had graduated from St. Albans and was headed for Dartmouth in the fall. I had just come back from driving West with Tyler Abell and Bob Alvord and was working at the Republican National Committee. One hot night I went alone to a bar in Washington to hear some Dixieland jazz. I noticed a group of Ivy Leaguers at a table – three guys and one girl. I think I might have known one of the guys, but the girl was something special, and I fell for her instantly.I went over to the table and horned in. It was all in fun,or so the other guys thought. I drank beer with a purpose, to meet her, to get her phone number, and make her like me.

I was different. The three guys were all Princetonians and from the same class – preppie upper – which, of course, made me even more competitive. I drank them under the table, charmed her, and got her phone number.

Joan Bryan was tall, flat-chested, and had short blonde hair. She had a long, patrician face and talked with a modified lock-jaw upper-class accent that wasn’t as pronounced as were the accents of the three Princeton guys, who were stuffy, silly, rich, and naïve about why I was there. Joan had pale, white, lovely skin. I’ve read somewhere (Fitzgerald maybe) that “She looked like she was photographed through gauze” or “had translucent peach skin.” She looked like a blonde and narrow-faced Ingrid Bergman and reeked of class and old money. I later learned her mother was a Barnes and that her grandmother’s maiden name was Whitney.

When she stood up, I almost fell off my chair – she had gorgeous, perfectly formed, long dancer’s legs. As my dad would have said, “She was split up to her navel.” I loved those legs. The only legs I have seen like them were in a poster for a James Bond movie that was shot from behind and between two perfect legs (I later read a newspaper story about auditioning for the legs – I would have killed to have the photographer’s job).

I was hooked. I fell for Joan Bryant. She was my age (I was no good in school and was kept back a year at St. Albans, so I graduated when I was 19), but Joan was a sophomore at Smith and I was going into my freshman year at Dartmouth. I felt really inadequate (I’ve never told anyone that I ever felt inadequate or, worse, certainly never acted it). She had was upper class, patrician, sheltered, unsure of herself, not really beautiful, but to me fascinating. She had been at the jazz club the night I met her more as a pal of the guys and not as a date, as a social equal of these effete Princeton snobs, not as a date, more as an exclusive hanging out together. She acted like a pal and even said she wanted to be a pal and not have dates, but I knew that she wanted to date and be treated as a girl, not a pal. She wanted to be pursued and charmed.

But I must have felt inadequate, because when I first went down to Smith from Dartmouth, I naturally looked at the Smith facebook and picked out the prettiest freshman face to pursue – Mariana Moran – who I already knew from the DC deb circuit instead of looking for Joan. I pursued Mariana hard for the early weeks of my freshman year. But one evening in November, I went to Sessions House at Smith to wait for a ride back to Hanover and ran into Joan Bryant.

She was glad to see me. I couldn’t believe it. We talked and had a good time; we connected. From then on, every weekend I went down to see her…weekdays too. We’d go to Rahar’s basement rathskeller and sip on beers for hours at a time. I forgot about Mariana Moran. I even went to one of Joan’s dance concerts at Smith. All I remember is that I couldn’t take my eyes off her perfectly formed long, long, muscular dancer’s legs–large, well sculptured calves and thin ankles.

Joan had never been pursued before, I don’t think, and I wooed her to the best of my ability. She was great. She even wrote me thank-you notes in poetry. After I read her notes, I would jump around my room crazed and try to touch the ceiling. I asked her to Winter Carnival, of course. Eventually, it occurred to me that I had two dates for Winter Carnival, so I had to call Mariana and cancel my date with her.

I spent every weekend staying in Tyler Abell’s dorm room at Amherst. His roommates were Fred Werner, Pete Amacher, Don Lindberg, and Ralph Pagter from St. Albans. The room was in Pratt Hall, and I slept on the coach, often staying until Wednesday or the next weekend so I could see Joan.

While I was in Amherst the week before Winter Carnival, it was snowing. I bought a 1939 white Packard limousine for $150 to take Joan to Winter Carnival. We traveled to Hanover with Pete Amacher and Joan in the limousine, which was full of beer and great cheer and songs and her long legs.

I had canceled a date with a beautiful girl because I had asked Joan. And on a romantic whim, I had bought a 1939 Packard limousine to take Joan to Dartmouth’s Winter Carnival. I got what I wanted and I did it impulsively with romantic panache and without caring whom I hurt. That’s who I was – impulsive, self-absorbed, romantic, sex-obsessed, selfish, and thoughtless of other people – and I stayed pretty much that way for over 40 years.

If any story defines me in broad strokes, this one probably does. So now you know the way I was.

When my son, Chas, first asked me to write “all your great stories down for us,” I demurred because I didn’t think my life was all that interesting or instructive. I’ve made a lot of bad decisions and been guided by too much hedonism and ambition to be an admirable model for my children. A little over a year later my son, Sean, again asked me to write down the stories he’d heard all his life, and again I demurred. But Sean was persistent and said, “You’ve got to write down your memories. Your stories are great and you have to share with your children and grandchildren what you’ve learned. They love you; they’ll want to know all about you.”

I told Sean that I’d think about it. At first, my attitude was that I didn’t want to look back on my life – I wanted to look ahead. I have always been an optimist, always been fascinated with the present, never wanted the future to become the past without me noticing or being part of it, and wanted my dreams to be of future possibilities, not mired in past what-could-have-beens. My dreams have nourished me for over 70 years, so I was a little worried about going on a diet of past memories.

Then I remembered my pal Jerry Nachman’s stories about capers that he regaled us with when he came to the Management Seminar for News Executives that I ran in the 1990s when I taught at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Jerry was the most popular guest we had over a period of seven or eight years. The news directors and students who attended the seminars loved Jerry and his funny, instructive, tales. No one wove a yarn better than Jerry, and the one he told about capers at the annual Bar-B-Que dinner was the one I recalled when I was weighing whether or not to write about my life.

I’m sure I can’t do justice to Jerry’s story, but I’ll try. He said that there will come a day for all us when we are lying on our death bed with a dozen IVs and tubes sticking in us and shoved down our noses and throats. We’ll be drooling uncontrollably and only be able to groan and mumble incoherently. The only thing we’ll be able to do is to play back in our heads the video tapes of our memories, and the memories we’ll be able to play back with any vividness will be the great capers of our lives. The capers will be the only things really worth remembering, for they are the ones that will make us smile and, thus, make our life worth remembering.

So I’ve decided to write about some of my most memorable capers — my biggest smiles. I went to Answers.com to get the definition of a caper:
“ca•per (kā’pər) n.
1. A playful leap or hop.
2. A frivolous escapade or prank.
3. Slang. An illegal plot or enterprise, especially one involving theft.
intr.v., -pered, -per•ing, -pers.
To leap or frisk about; frolic.”
I’ll use caper to mean playful leaps, frivolous escapades or pranks, and frolics, especially romantic frolics (although these are not at all frivolous).

Capers

Jerry’s caper story was set in the 1980s at the Ground Floor, the bar and restaurant located on the ground floor of Black Rock, the CBS headquarters building on 52nd Street and 6th Avenue in New York. In those days ABC’s headquarters building was across the street on the corner of 53rd and the Avenue of the Americas, but no one called it that –- it was then and still is 6th Avenue. NBC had its headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Rockefeller Center at 51st and 6th. So, everyone called NBC “30 Rock,” CBS “Black Rock,” and ABC “Hard Rock” (because WABC-AM was a Rock ‘N Roll station, and generally #1 in New York at the time). All the CBS guys (no women in sales or management then) met at the Ground Floor after work to guzzle and gossip (I was a regular from 1967 to 1972).

One night, one of the regulars, I think it was Phil Cohen, who had been a news director, was being promoted to V.P. and General Manager of the CBS O&O in Philadelphia, WCAU-TV at that time. He wasn’t at the bar at 6:00 p.m. but was up on the 35th floor of Black Rock having the obligatory and cursory interview with Tom Wyman, the CEO of CBS. All new TV station general managers had to go meet Wyman. The way Jerry told it was that the new GM would be ushered into Wyman’s lush office and that Wyman would smile, hold out his hand, and say, “Congratulations…” look down at a typed 3X5 index card “…Phil. “We’re delighted you’re going to be our new GM at…” glance down at the card “…WCAU in Philadelphia. It’s an important station for CBS and I know you’ll uphold CBS’s sterling reputation there. Do you have any questions for me?”

The new GMs had all been well coached for these meetings, and the proper answer to Wyman’s perfunctory question was to mumble something like, “No questions, but you can rest assured I’ll do everything in my power not to let you down and make CBS look good.”

But Cohen was neither a proper nor a usual guy. Instead of the humble, expected reply, Cohen said, “Thanks for your confidence in me.” Then he added with concerned, sympathetic awe, “Yes, I do have a question. You’ve got the most important, difficult, and demanding job in broadcasting – probably in business in America. How do you do it? How do you keep a balance between your business and personal life? It must be enormously difficult and draining.”

Wyman, who was normally stiff, distant, and in a hurry to get these interviews over with, motioned Cohen to sit down on his plush couch and began an hour-long unloading of his frustrations to his new-found, sympathetic pal. Back at the Ground Floor, when Cohen hadn’t returned by 6:40 from a meeting that always took ten minutes, the guys got worried. What had happened? Had Cohen screwed up, asked a dumb question, and was he receiving a tongue lashing? When he finally appeared at 7:10 p.m., the guys asked, “What happened?”

Cohen told the story of his encounter with smug glee and everyone got blasted and went off chasing broads – the two sports of choice in those days. Word got around fast. From that day on, every newly appointed general manager who went to the obligatory meeting with Wyman, when the CBS CEO said, “We’re delighted you’re going to be our new GM at…” glance down at the card “…WXXX in Fairfield. It’s an important station for CBS and I know you’ll uphold CBS’s sterling reputation there. Do you have any questions for me?”, the new GM would come back with a slightly, but very slightly, altered version of the Cohen sympathetic question. Apparently Wyman never caught on, which confirmed what all the guys knew – that they were smarter than any of the CEOs William S. Paley in his dotage had anointed to be CEO of CBS and, more important, they all had a helluva’ lot more fun than the CEO did. It was a caper worth replaying in the video tape of the mind.

I’ll try to put some of the capers I remember into the story of my life. I’m calling these musings the Phoenix Cycle because I’ve been down and come back from the ashes many times – those comebacks are probably what defines me more than anything else. I’ll try not to dwell on the downs, but I will try to give a detailed backstory to my capers because I think it’s important to know and at least attempt to understand what led me to behave as I did and do now.

I was born on February 23, 1932, in the Lying Inn Hospital in Chicago, IL, sometime between 1:00 and 5:00 am. I know this because my father used to tell me that he had always hoped that I would be born on George Washington’s 200th birthday but that I had missed it by a couple of hours. My mother was Helen Bower Warner and my father was Charles Harrison Warner, called Dyp by all those who knew him, and I was named Charles Harrison Warner, Jr. My father and my mother’s sister, Louise Bower, were at the hospital when I was born.

My mother stayed in the hospital for a week, as was the custom at the time, and I was taken home to my parent’s apartment at 11 East Division Street. The last time I was in Chicago, in 2008, the 11 East Division Street four-story tan brick building was still standing — Will and walked by it in 2009. It was a little ratty, but was still in service as an apartment building, just past the corner of Division and Rush Streets, the intersection of two streets packed solid with pick-up and sports bars. The Hall of Fame baseball play-by-play announcer, Harry Caray, was known as “The Mayor of Rush Street,” and this is what Wikipedia had to say about Harry:

Caray made his debut in 1945 with the Cardinals, but was fired in 1969 amid rumors of personal problems with the Busch family, who owned both the Cardinals and the Anheuser-Busch breweries. He always denied any personal scandal, attributing his firing to a long-standing business-related grudge. After a season with Oakland, Caray broadcast for the White Sox from 1971 to 1981, and then for the Cubs from 1982 to 1997.
He was extremely popular among the citizens of Chicago, and was known as much for his public carousing and jovial spirit as for his sportscasting; it was not for nothing that he was proclaimed “The Mayor of Rush Street,” referencing Chicago’s famous bar-hopping neighborhood.

I’ll come back to Harry 42 years later on in this story, but for now let’s leave it that my first home was in what turned out to be Harry’s “bar-hopping neighborhood” — probably twice prophetic.

My mother had a difficult time carrying me (as I was told many times in an effort, I now believe, to make me feel grateful and a little guilty, and to explain why I had no brothers or sisters). When I was born, my mother was 34, soon to be 35 on March 20. She had given birth in Florida in 1930 to a still-born baby boy my parents had named Jacob after my great grandfather, Jacob Bower. My mother and father were in Florida in 1930 on what my grandmother (on my mother’s side), Nano, called a “hair-brained, get-rich quick scheme,” which my father had a genetic tendency to concoct. My grandfather, William (Will) Bower, Nano’s husband, came down to Florida to pick up my mother and the dead baby and take them back to the Bower family home in Ava, IL. I’ll get into Ava, the Bowers, and the Deans later. Jacob was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in the Ava cemetery.

When my mother found out she was pregnant with me, she went to Dr. De Lee, one of Chicago’s most respected and well-known obstetricians. Dr. De Lee said he’d take my mother’s case only if she did exactly as he said. She agreed, and spent nine months virtually all the time in bed. I was told she bled often and was in constant fear of losing me. Dr. De Lee also told my parents that my mother could have no more children.

Therefore, when I arrived, I was not only the first to live, but definitely the last child my parents would have. My mother often said that she would “never go through that again!” She wasn’t terribly good with pain, suffering, or inconvenience. So to say that I was important to my parents was like saying money is important to hedge fund managers.

My father, Charles Harrison Warner, the only son of Perry Morton Warner and Ella Pierce Warner, had both an older and a younger sister who were married (Dorothy Warner Graham and Marion Warner Brown). Thus, as I was told often, I was the only male Warner heir and it was my duty to pass on the Warner name. How I managed to fulfill that heavy obligation includes some behavior I’m not overly proud of but which produced six Warner sons who I am extremely proud of and who will pass on the Warner name quite well. My two daughters have passed on the Warner genes in a strong mix with the Lineaweaver and Sanchez genes. My sons take after their father in that they are not perfect, but each is imperfect in their own unique, special, wonderful, easily distractable way — ADD is definitely inheritable.

Chicago, the First Time Around

I lived in Chicago the first three years of my life, but I have no memories of the Windy City. Years later, in 1970, when I was Vice President and General Manager of CBS Radio Spot Sales (RSS), I used to visit Chicago frequently on business trips because, after New York, Chicago was RSS’s largest office in terms of both salespeople and billing. Also, the office manager, Ron Kempf, had introduced me to Karen K, and she had become my girl in that port. Karen worked in the traffic department of WBBM-TV and had a small apartment on Astor Street, just a block and a half from 11 East “Weshwon” Street (which is what my other told my I called Division Street when I was two years old). I stayed with Karen when I visited Chicago and used to make a point of walking past the Astor Street playground, which my mother had told me I went to every day to ride my tricycle.

On those walks, I would look intently at the playground and the Art Deco apartment building lobbies to see if I could conjure up any hint of recognition; if I could replay just a snippet of the video in my memory of my first three years in the neighborhood. I desperately wanted to believe I recognized the playground, the entryways of the buildings, especially the narrow, three-story building that Karen lived in – I had walked past it every day for the first two plus years of my life. I wanted to bring back the memories of a childhood that I heard so much about and that I knew was a mellow and secure one.

Even though the years 1932-35 were in the middle of the Great Depression, my parents were not destitute. My father was in a partnership with another man in a business called Bondex, which was an index that tracked the performance of corporate and government bonds. During the Depression, bonds were preferred as an investment over stocks, especially after the stock market crash of 1929. He made enough money to live in a nice part of Chicago and to hire a maid to help my mother take care of me and the apartment.

Chicago, Illinois: 1934
Charlie, age 2
No child had or has ever had more life-affirming love and nurturing than I had from my mother, from her sister Louise, whom my cousin Sal and I called Ese, from Sal, and from mother’s sister Margaret. This love lasted unabated for over 65 years. The imprint and affects of their love, understanding, and tolerance have lived on in me, not in my behavior as a person, but in my deep values and image of myself — and probably what I expect from women.

Michilinda, Michigan: 1939
Charlie, Sal, Ese
I realize now that throughout my life that I constructed my self-image and identity based on my relationship with women — from my mother; of course; from Ese and Sal, who were my main love objects other than my mother; and from Aunt Margaret. And after I reached adolescence, from the relationships I had with the girls I chased, wooed, won, and lost.

Because I was an only child and received so much unconditional love, I was secure, but spoiled; self-confident, but self-absorbed; extroverted, but thoughtless; and exuberant, but impulsive. My father tried to counteract some of the effects of the nurturing, unconditional love – oh, hell, let’s call it what it was, spoiling – by being tough. There was no question who was the disciplinarian in our home, or who the boss was. He has a typical Victorian stern father – a father who loved me and I knew it – but who ruled with fear rather than encouragement. That was the Victorian style at the time, the one he learned from his stern, disciplinarian father.

Ava, Illinois: 1932
My father holding me at 10 weeks

Helen Bower Warner was 95 when she died on April 20, 1992, in St Joseph’s Hospital in Murphysboro, Illinois. She had been 95 on March 20, exactly one month to the day before she passed away. I remember that I had a vague sense that there was some significance to the date – a number in the 20s. I was born on February 23rd,  and my mother and father were married on August 23, 1922.

Because all of my eight children called her Gramma, I did too. Life finally left Gramma at 10:10 a.m. as I stood by her bed watching her slowly stop breathing. It was so matter-of-fact. The doctor asked me if it was all right to take her off of her life-support system (we had discussed the situation thoroughly earlier that morning), and I had said, “yes.”

I told the nurse that I wanted to do it, so she showed me the connection in the small plastic hoses to uncouple. I did that and then went back to the left side of the bed where I had a good view of her, picked up her hand, and watched as the grand old girl stopped breathing. That was it. She just stopped breathing without the help of the air being forced into her lungs through the tubes in her nose.

I had tears in my eyes, but I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t sad. I was grateful that I was there to bid farewell. I asked the nurse to leave the room and then I said audibly, with a slight sob, “Good-bye, Gramma.”

I said “good-bye” because when my father had passed away, I hadn’t been able to see him before he died. I had been rushed home from Austria, where I was in the Army, and didn’t make it back before he passed on. I remember calling mother and telling her to get through to him (he was in a coma) and tell him to hold on – to tell him I was coming home. I had gotten angry at mother (it was mother then because I hadn’t produced any grandchildren for her yet), because she was unable to communicate with him and he had died before I arrived. I was upset for some time that I hadn’t been able to say “good-bye” to him.

I felt that a “good-bye” was important as shorthand for “Thank you, I love you. Thanks for always loving me, no matter what.” But you can’t say things like that out loud, face-to-face to your parents. You can’t think about it when they’re dying, so you have to say simply, “good-bye.” They would have known what it meant. Gramma always knew exactly what I was thinking.

I was surprised how straightforward, how simple, how uneventful death was. Five minutes later I was out in the hall talking to the doctor and they were pushing a gurney with Gramma on it down the hall in the opposite direction. She was covered with a sheet and I couldn’t see her beautiful face.

As I walked out of the hospital, I didn’t think “she is at peace now,” or “she’s gone to a greater reward.” That’s silly superstition. I was actually in awe of her. Two nights before, Gramma had been sitting up in bed in the hospital in her pink, quilted, silk bed jacket talking to us: me; Sandie, my wife; Chas, her grandson (age 12); and Sean, her grandson (age 9). She looked better than she had in ten years. She had makeup and bright lipstick on. We were complimenting her on how wonderful she looked. She said to Sean, “Sean, will you draw a picture of me?”

We all laughed, and Sean demurred – no paper and pencil. The next day she was to have surgery on her colon – she had a cancerous growth that was blocking her intestines. I had talked her into having surgery. She hadn’t wanted to go through it, but I told her that we weren’t ready to lose her yet. However, before they operated, Gramma had a massive stroke and left the conscious world.

As I walked out of the hospital that morning, I knew precisely what had happened. Gramma had no intention of being operated on. She had said “good-bye” to all of us. She was going out looking like a million. The next day, having been satisfied with her farewell to her youngest grandchildren, she willed herself to die. Gramma had decided it was time. Her will power had always been strong, but this was awesome. She had defied all of conventional wisdom and caused her stroke. She had willed it.

I couldn’t be sad; it’s what she wanted. It was selfish for me to want her to go through an operation she didn’t want. It was OK. I felt OK because I had said “good-bye, Gramma,” and I had said it for me. But saying it out loud and one-on-one had made it real, made me whole. She didn’t have to hear it; she knew what I meant, as always.

I drove back to the home in Ava where she and Louise, her younger sister, were born and still lived. In the car I thought how fortunate I was that I didn’t have to deal with a sad death, a death in which someone died who didn’t want to die, whose will was working to keep them alive. My father hadn’t wanted to die, and I was furious for years that he didn’t have a goddammed choice. Gramma had a choice, so it was OK.

It’s not right; it’s not fair that people don’t get to choose. Fate or some supreme being doesn’t choose who will go and who won’t, random viruses and random diseased cells and random crud in the arteries choose. So random death makes me seethe, and it makes me mad when we can’t say “good-bye” to ease our souls. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over not saying “good-bye, Dad.” I’ve said it aloud many times since he died in 1954, but it hasn’t quelled my anger at him going too soon, for not having him around longer.

I’m glad I was there and that I could say “good-bye, Gramma.” It was enough – she knew how much I adored her. And now she’ll never know how much I’ll miss her. The anchor for my soul was gone.

Michilinda, Michigan: 1940
Gramma

When Gramma died, she was living with her beloved sister, Louise Bower, who was two years younger, but they couldn’t have been closer if they had been twins. They lived in the Bower house on Main Street where their mother, Carrie Dean Bower, had given birth to them.

GramWeese 1991

Sal, who was seven years older than I was, and I used to laugh when we said “Main Street in Ava,” because we knew how ridiculously juxtaposed most people’s mental image of a Main Street was with Ava’s West Main Street.

Ava is a tiny hamlet that has varied in population in the Twentieth Century from 400 to 800. It is nestled in the rolling hills of Jackson County in Southern Illinois, just off of Route 4, and everything of any importance was on Main Street – the Post Office, the bank, the drug store, the saddle shop, the hardware store, the saloon, the grocery store, and the train station, when it was in service.

The last time I was in Ava, in 1997, the Post Office was closed, the drug store was closed, the saddle shop building was gone, the hardware store was an abandoned building, the saloon was thriving, the grocery store was closed, and the train station had been torn down because the trains had stopped coming to Ava in the 1940s and the tracks had been ripped up. The bank was still operating, but had moved from the old building across from the Bower house.

I first visited the Bower house when I was 10 weeks old, on Memorial Day weekend, 1932. Practically the whole family was there:

Ava, 1932.
Front row, sitting: Helen Bower Warner, Louise Bower. Middle row: A.G. Brown (in straw hat), Margaret Bower Millis, Allen (“A”) Brown, Sarah Louise (“Sally Lou”) Millis, Carrie (“Nano”) Dean Bower (holding Charlie Warner), Woodney Millis. Back row: William (“Bill”) Brown, Marion Warner Brown, Charles (“Dyp”) Warner, Morton (“Mort”) Brown, Will (“Dado”) Bower (in hat).

In writing this entry, I haven’t been able to decide what to focus on or to write about first, the town, the house, or the family. But “Ava” is none of those, it’s a notion. “Notion” is a good word because according to the Encarta Dictionary, it means: 1. idea – an idea, opinion, or concept. 2. impression – a vague understanding or impression. 3. desire – a sudden desire or whim. Ava is the idea of home and family and the cycle of life and, mostly, love. Ava is an impression of early and mid Twentieth Century rural Midwest corn country and farmers wearing overalls and swimming holes and love. Ava is the desire to melt back into a time of safety and ease and warmth and love and Louise playing the piano and hooked rugs and hot apple pies and home-made peach ice cream and ponies and Tom Mix cowboy suits.

Ava, 1938.
Charlie as Tom Mix

Because Ava is a notion – an idea, an impression, and a desire – I have 65 years of video tapes stored in my head (some much fuzzier than others) that I can still play. I love the concept of “play” because that’s what I remember most. I played with Sally Lou, who from now on I’ll call Sal; I played with Dado’s violin; I played with Frank Cheatam (his father owned the drug store) and Billy Wagner (his father was the dentist whose office was in the only office building in Ava – the Bower building); Aunt Louise, who from now on I’ll call Ese, playing the piano; Chas playing the trumpet while Ese played the piano; playing Monopoly all day in the summer; playing with carbide to make paint cans explode; and dancing with everyone at Sal’s wedding in the Bower house to Ese playing the piano, to Ease playing the piano, to Ese playing the piano.

Going to Ava also meant eating well and music. Ese was a magnificent virtuoso on the piano. She had a bold, strong touch. My father said she played like a man, which was meant to be a great compliment. She played professionally in the Gaslight Club in Chicago during prohibition to make money. She could listen to a song on television and then go to the piano and, first, peck it out and then play it through, and then play it in a perfect arrangement.

Ese had a stack of music that contained cake walks, show tunes, and classical pieces. She taught music to several generations of children – piano, violin, and brass instruments. She practiced every day until she was in her middle 90s. Ese was our entertainment in Ava. Whoever was there would gather around the piano and call out our favorite tunes – mostly show tunes – for her to play, and we’d sing.

The best entertainment was when we were there with Margaret, who from now on I’ll call Honey, and Sal. Honey played the ukulele and mother sang, just like they did when they were little girls and teenagers. Ese was a contralto, Honey a mezzo-soprano, and mother a soprano. They harmonized beautifully as only sisters can and as they sang the enormous smiles on their sweet faces were translated to their voices.

The Girls

“The Girls” as everyone called them, were rarely as happy as when they were singing and playing their instruments. I don’t think those who loved them were ever much happier either because The Girls all were loved deeply by their husbands, children, family, and friends.

Over the years, I’ve realized that writing is more about organizing ideas than about putting down the words that describe the ideas. In mulling over how to organize my memories of Ava, I first thought I’d write about the Bower house, the town, and the extended Bower family, but then I realized that it would be more fun and more instructive to present the notion of Ava in a series of stories – stories in no particular order or structure, just stories as they came to me as I was writing.

The Bower house on West Main didn’t need a number because everyone in Ava knew who lived there and because everyone who was anyone had a little mail box in the one-room Post Office next to the drug store; therefore, there was no need for a mailman to deliver the mail to a street address.

May Gardner, who put her hair up in a bun, wore big dark-framed glasses, and probably had Parkinson’s disease, ran the Post Office for as long I could remember until the late 1960s. She knew everyone in town and would sort the mail every day and put it in people’s mail boxes; so when I wrote Ese or mother, who moved into the Ava house in about 1960, I didn’t have to write an address on an envelope, just “Louise Bower, Ava, Illinois.”

I remember when I was a teenager how neat I thought it was that everyone knew Ese and all I had to do when I wrote her was to put “Louise Bower, Ava, Illinois” on an envelope. Once I wrote a letter to “Aunt Louise, Ava, Illinois” and she got it. I believed you couldn’t do that in any other town in the world. I also remember that I was pissed when ZIP codes were adopted in 1967 and I had to do what seemed then as the enormous imposition of writing 62907 on an envelope or post card. But it was still just “Louise Bower, Ava, IL 62907” – no street address.

All my life I heard Ava stories. Here are a couple of them:

The Hired Girl

Until the 1950s, when Ese needed money and had to sell part of the lot on which the Bower House was located, the lot the house was on was huge – it must have been about 300 feet wide. It had a large, half-oval, gravel drive, and there were six-foot high brick gate posts at each entrance to the drive. I remember using a sledge hammer to take them down when I lived in Ava in the fall of 1954, when I spent a semester at Southern Illinois University … but that’s another story.

On the far east side of the lot before Ese divided it, there was a ramshackled green-shingled house with once-white-then-grey peeling trim. The old house had a front porch that was swayed like the back of a run-down mule. It was the Davis home, and it was torn down just before WWII, but I still remember riding by it on my bike.

Grandpa and Grandma Davis lived in the house, and I vaguely remember Gandpa Davis waving to me with his cane as I rode by. He was in his late 80s and had a wooden leg. Gramma Davis was more lively; she was in her mid 60s and was short and stout – she looked like a fireplug with grey hair. The Davises were not relatives of the Bowers, but everyone called them Grandpa and Grandma, so the Bowers did, too.

They were legendary in Ava because they had 12 children – a fact in itself that is certainly worthy of legend – but it was how they came to bring up 12 children that elevated their story to the status of legend.

In 1890 George Davis headed for his new homestead south east of Ava with his wife, their four children, a 15-year old hired girl, and a wagonload of provisions and tools. It was early spring and the rain had soaked the dirt roads until they were oozy mud and had turned the usually placid Kaskastia River into a swift torrent. Davis had to cross the Kaskaskia to get to his farm, so he picked a spot that was wide and not too deep for his wagon – wide enough so it wasn’t moving too fast to endanger the wagon, he thought.

George considered several options: 1) cross with everyone in the wagon; 2) leave his wife, children and the hired girl on the river bank, tie a rope around a tree on that bank, drive the wagon across alone with the rope tied to the wagon, and if he made it the others could wade across holding the rope with his wife leading the way, then the hired girl could untie the rope and he could pull her across; or 4) have his wife, who was an excellent wagon driver, drive the wagon across and leave him, the children and the hired girl on the bank to cross on the rope. George chose the fourth option because he thought it was the safest.

George’s wife made it about three-quarters of the way across when the right front wheel got stuck and couldn’t make it over a large rock. She tried to get the horses to back up, but was having trouble. George grabbed the rope and made his way toward the wagon and his struggling wife. He didn’t see an uprooted tree in the tumbling water as it came around a bend in the river and headed toward the wagon. The hired girl screamed, “Watch out!”, but it was too late.

The large, heavy, root end of the tree crashed into the wagon, ripping it away from the shaft and trace. The horses broke free and waded to the opposite bank, but George’s wife was thrown into the water, hitting her head on the rock that had stopped them and was killed instantly. George was whacked by several big branches and pushed under the wagon as the tree pushed it over George’s right leg.

The flowing river washed George from under wagon which was still intact, and somehow he managed to hold onto the rope. He almost passed out, but he managed to wave to the hired girl. She has just turned 15 and was no more than five feet tall, but she was stout and strong and obedient. Slowly, deliberately she pulled George to the river bank as the children wept and screamed in terror. George fought off passing out as he told the hired girl to put a tourniquet on his leg above where it was smashed, which she did deftly.

He told her to hold on to the rope and try to get to the wagon. If she got there, she was to then try to get to the two horses on the other side. The hired girl didn’t complain, didn’t acknowledge his instructions, and didn’t hesitate. She grabbed the rope and struggled to the wagon. She didn’t look back at George and the children, who were now huddled around their father, as she jumped into the water, strained against the swift current, and thrashed to the other side. She reined in the horses, tied them to a tree, and finally looked back to the other side. George had passed out.

The hired girl untied one horse and forced it to ride back to the other side. The horse outweighed her by 1,788 pounds, but it was no match for the teenager’s will. When she got to the opposite bank, she dismounted, took the children back into a cluster of trees, told the older two to gather wood and tree branches, and spattered water on George’s face to wake him. She put his arm around her neck, stood up, and together they stumbled to where the kids were. She and the oldest child, a seven-year-old boy, made a fire, rode the horse to the other side and brought back the other horse, and after six hours of silent, chilling, backbreaking effort, managed to hook the horses up to the wagon and bring it back to the fire.

They stayed in the trees for two days until George decided to try to cross the river, which had gone down, and go to the farm, only a couple of miles away. When they got to the farm, the hired girl and the two oldest children unloaded the wagon and set up the small, dilapidated frame house. George was running a high fever and saw that the wound in his lower leg was turning black. He knew his leg had to come off and that there was no time to ride over 50 miles and back to get a doctor.

George gave explicit instructions to the hired girl and his oldest son what to do. They were to sterilize all the instruments and tools, including the saw that the hired girl was to use to amputate his right leg just below the knee. He would drink most of the bottle of whiskey and then his son was to continue to feed him as much as it took until he passed out and then hold him down while the hired girl sawed off his leg and cauterized the stump.

Just as the hired girl and the son had done their job with quiet determination back at the river, they carried out the operation as they were told and as they knew they had to. There was no choice.

George woke up the next morning with a terrible hangover and excruciating pain in what was left of his right leg. But he managed to smile and say, “Thank you, son, and thank you Emma. You did good.” It was the first time in two months he had spoken the hired girl’s name.

The family went about its work, with Emma and Will, the boy, doing most of the labor, but with George helping as much as he could – and he was helping surprisingly well with the aid of a wooden leg he had made with Will’s assistance. After dinner one evening, as Emma was cleaning up, George said to her, “Emma, you’ve been real good with the kids. But they need a proper mother, so you and me are going to get married.” It wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t a request, it wasn’t what a 15-year-old girl had dreamed about, but that’s what she had to do. There was no choice.

“Yes, Mr. Davis,” Emma said.

“Later in the summer, we’ll go to the church in Ava and have the preacher marry us. Will can be the best man,” George assured Emma.

“Yes, Mr. Davis.”

George and Emma Davis were married in the church in Ava and had eight children of their own, sold the farm after the youngest child left home after she graduated from high school, moved to Ava, and bought a house next to the Bower House. Emma continued to call George “Mr. Davis,” but it was a term of endearment and, perhaps, irony.

Dope

My mother and Ese loved to tell stories about Ava … about anything for that matter.  They just loved to talk.  I spent hours as a boy raptly listening as they told their stores over and over as my father sat nearby reading a newspaper or magazine.

We subscribed to The Saturday Evening Post, the Readers Digest, the National Geographic (yes, I knew which issues had the pictures of bee-stung nipples), Look, Life, Vogue (yes, I read every issue and masturbated to the pictures of the models).

My father had a dry, often caustic, sense of humor, and he often kidded about “the girls,” as he called them, talking too much.  When Sal came to visit once with her one-year-old daughter, Becky, mother and Ese were trying to teach Becky some rudimentary words.  My father said, “Oh, for God’s sake Hon, please don’t teach her to talk.”  “Hon” was  short for “Honey,” and was his preferred term of endearment.

Sal used to love to tell that story on my dad, because it was typical of his bi-polar sense of humor.  My father loved my mother and Louise and loved having them around, but he also loved kidding them about talking, talking, talking, talking.  Sal and the girls knew he wasn’t complaining and loved his sense of humor.

One of the stories the girls told was about Dope – Dope Simpson – who had been one of Ese’s many suitors/boyfriends/friends.  I always loved the name, Dope, it sounded funny; it elicited an image of Dopey in “Snow White” – a goofy, lovable clown.

Apparently, Dope was a good-humored joker (today I’d probably call him a smartass) who pursued Ese for years and asked her to marry him many times.  Ese loved him and loved having him around and laughing at his jokes.  Once, after several years of pursuing her, Dope stopped by the house in Ava to see Ese and announced that he had gotten married.

Ese was a little shocked, but said something like, “Oh, how nice.”

Dope, as the story goes, replied, “Yeah, you’ll like her.  She’s white.”

When the girls told the story, they would all laugh gleefully and repeat the punch line, “…she’s white.”  In reading this, the punch line is out of context and doesn’t read as very funny, but to them it was.  The joke was typical of a joker/smartass who loved to shock people and make them laugh – that’s what a good joke is, a surprise, and Dope understood that.

He also understood the inherent racism extant in Southern Illinois and in the Dean/Bower clan.   I adored my mother and Ese, but they were born and brought up in a Victorian culture (mother was born in 1896, Ese in 1898).  Blacks were servants who had recently been slaves.  And although Abraham Lincoln was from Illinois and it was a Northern state in the Civil War, Southern Illinois and Jackson Country, where Ava was located, was the racist South.

Mother and Ese simply couldn’t imagine associating with blacks or servants; it simply wasn’t done.  They were untouchables.  I think Dope recognized their prejudices and she was making a joke and a dig at the same time.  The girls got the joke, but not the dig – it wasn’t their nature to engage in self-examination, to confront their beliefs, to change their basic values.  They were true children of the Victorian Age.

Ese did eventually meet Dope’s wife, and Ese liked her.  Dope and his wife dropped by Ava from time to time to visit Ese and they were welcome because she was, in fact, white.  Had she not been, she would not have been welcome.

Dean

Dean Smysor was the only child of Elizabeth (Bess) Dean Smysor and Walter Smysor.  Dean’s first name was the maiden name of Bess and Carrie Dean Bower, my mother’s and The Girls’ mother.

Bess was the youngest daughter of William and Elizabeth Dean, who everyone in the family called Gramma and Grampa Dean.  Grampa Dean was Scotch-Irish and was the richest citizen of Ava.  He owned the mill, which was in the western part of the village, called Deanville.

He owned several thousand acres of rich Mississippi River bottom land on which he had tenant farmers.  The land was referred to as “the bottom” and had thick black soil that was so rich and fertile that my father claimed anything planted in it would flourish. “If you planted nickels in it, they would grow,” he used to say.

My father also claimed that Grampa Dean was the laziest man in the world.  He was grossly fat and could barely move.  Around the turn of the century, perhaps 1903, Grampa Dean bought the first car to appear on the roads in Ava, an open Ford that had to be cranked to start.  Grampa Dean would pay a couple of local boys a nickel each to crank up the car and drive it around to the side of the porch, lift him into the high seat, and then drive him around town.

1903 Ford Model A Runabout

Gramma Dean was a tiny, thin woman, who was by all accounts a dictatorial, mean shrew.  Gramma and Ese (Chas, as soon as he learned to talk, referred to them as one person, which they clearly were, as GramWeese) told stories of Gramma Dean teaching her granddaughters how to sew and embroider.  She’d sit them in chairs in a row and walk behind them barking instructions.  If any of girls made a mistake, even a slight one, Gramma Dean would thump them hard on the head with her finger that had a big, heavy thimble on it.

Gramma and Grandpa Dean’s house was the biggest and grandest home in Ava.  It was on Main Street, across from the small red-brick Citizen’s National Bank building, where at one time Russell and Glen Brown had worked.  The house was a gingerbread encrusted, turreted Victorian classic.  Grandpa Dean built a clone of his magnificent home on a big lot next door and gave it to his daughter, Carrie, and her husband, Will Bower, as a commodious home for their four girls.

I don’t know the details, but I have a clear sense that building that house for Carrie and the girls was the shot heard around Jackson County and the incident that brought the simmering hatred between Carrie and her younger sister, Bess, out in the open and into a full-fledged passive-aggressive war.

But it wasn’t really a fair fight.  Carrie, who we all called Nano (Will Bower was called Dado), was a sour, cranky, mean-spirited woman, and was no match for Bess, who was the nastiest human being not only in Jackson County, but probably in Illinois and probably even the whole Midwest.  I have never met or been around anyone as awful.  She was a quadruple threat: mean, stingy, greedy, and ugly.

Even though the details were always fuzzy, it seems that after Grandpa Dean gave the house next door to Carrie and after he died that Bess finagled a deal with her mother to change her will and give her, Bess, the biggest and most productive farm in the bottom when Gramma Dean died.  And that’s what happed.  Bess and Carrie divided the farm land in the bottom, with the best farm going to Bess.  They also co-owned a 2000-acre island that was farmed — it wasn’t really an island, but a large piece of land outside of the high levee on the river.

Nano had a stroke in about 1939 that left her partially paralyzed on the left side so that she dragged her left foot when she walked and her speech was slightly slurred.  Will Bower died in about 1940, so Ese lived in the house in Ava with Nano and took care of her, which was not easy.  Nano was a tough cookie; very demanding, whining, and vengeful.   She hated her sister for screwing her out the good farm and used to complain about Bess constantly.

But they were sisters, and Victorian convention made them act in a civil manner to each other.  So on holidays they exchanged presents and had meals together, which were like battling armies who slaughtered each other every day, but on holidays would call a truce and eat together.  You get the scene, the two sides at the table toasting to each other’s health as they looked around wondering which one they’d kill in battle the next day.

In addition to the dinner table, the other Smysor/Bower battlefield was the island.  Bess Smysor had won the battle over the division of the farmland, so she concentrated on winning the battle over the co-owned island.  The two sides had tried to work out deals to sell it to each other, but Bess didn’t want to sell and offered too little to the girls for them to sell it to Bess.

I later figured that this was the strategy of Bess’s only son, Dean.  Dean was born in 1923 or 1924, I think (which would have made him a couple of years older than Sal).  His father, Walter Smysor, died before World War II, and Dean lived in Murphysboro, about 11 miles from Ava, where  his mother lived.

Dean graduated from the University of Illinois and was a pilot in World War II.  Actually, he was a pilot trainee, and got in a wreck while trying to land his trainer.  The accident had left his face smashed in so that his nose was crooked and flattened and his upper lip had a nick in it that made him look like he had a repaired cleft lip.  The wreck made an ugly man uglier.

But if Dean was ugly, and he was, he wasn’t as ugly as he was mean, nasty, and dishonest.  He drank too much, joked about niggers, and cheated The Girls when he managed the island.

Dean would have been nine or 10 years older than I was, and we didn’t have a lot of contact.  But what little we had was unpleasant.  When I lived in Ava for three months in 1954 when I attended Southern Illinois University for a quarter, I saw Dean occasionally when I had to accompany the girls to have dinner with him and Bess.

I went to SIU because Ese had a old boyfriend, Bernie Shryock, who was head of the Art Department, and who helped me get in.  At that time, a soldier could get out of the Army up to three months early to go to college.  I tried to go back to Dartmouth, but its semester began the first week in September, and the earliest I could get out of the Army was the first week in October, and Dartmouth wouldn’t let me in that late.  SIU was on a quarter schedule and started classes the first week in October.  Therefore, when I was mustered out of the Army in Ft. Sill, OK, I drove to Ava and matriculated the next day at SIU.

While I was at SIU, I met Laurie Koons, a stunning redhead a year older than I was.  We were introduced by Bernie Shryock, and Laurie’s father was the president of a local coal company.  Laurie and I dated regularly and had a great time together.  She was lovely and very smart, and there weren’t a lot of 20-year olds in Carbondale who were able to talk about Faulkner and Hemingway and had been to parties in Georgetown, so she stooped to date me.  Even though there was no sex or even necking, Laurie was a great date and refreshing after the Army and the local girls I dated in Ft. Sill.

One night Laurie and I went dancing at one of the few road houses in Southern Illinois that had a band.  I was a dive, but the only place in over 100 miles where you could get a beer and do a little dancing.  Because it was the only dive anywhere near Carbondale or Murphysboro, of course Dean was there, and, of course, he was drunk and awful.  So, how did he show his respect for his younger cousin?  He slobbered over Laurie and tried to snake her from me, not smoothly, not elegantly (there wasn’t an elegant gene in his family’s DNA), but crudely and obviously.

“Hey, baby, let me buy you a drink,” Dean slushed.  And, “what’s a beautiful gal like you doing with this college kid?”, or something just as obnoxious.  Laurie was creeped out and asked me to get her out of there, which I did quickly.  Of course I was livid and mortified.  But, fortunately, the incident didn’t affect my relationship with Laurie.

After a quarter at SIU and Christmas in Ava, I returned to Dartmouth for the spring semester of 1955.  Mother was still living in Washington, so in the summer of that year, I took two courses at George Washington University and occasionally dated Laurie, who had moved to Washington.  She had her sights set on marrying someone older and lot richer and more famous than I was, which she did a couple of years later – Robert McNeil of the “McNeil-Lehrer Report” on PBS.

Dean, on the other hand, was not as upwardly mobile.  He eventually got married to a flight attendant.  I’ve forgotten her name, but I vaguely remember what she looked like (I only met her once when, unfortunately, I had dinner at Dean’s house).  She was a dark-haired, thin woman who looked drawn and nervous.

Gramma and Ese talked about how they liked Dean’s wife but that she was miserably unhappy.  Dean treated her like dog and Bess treated her like slave.  GramWeese told stories about how Bess would complain constantly about her and how the distraught woman became a hopeless alcoholic to get away from the intolerable abuse scree byched out Dean and his horrible mother.

Dean’s wife eventually screwed up enough coverage to leave him, in the late 1980s, I think, and then in the middle 1990s Dean did the only decent thing he ever did – he put a shotgun to his head and blew his brains out.  He probably figured it was the only way to get away from his mother.

After Dean committed suicide, the management of The Girl’s half of the island was taken over by two men who rented their farmland – Richard Shields and Homer Bunselmeir.  Richard’s parents had rented farm land from the Bowers for two generations, and he loved The Girls, especially Ese.  In addition to farming the land (they gave The Girls 40 percent of the profits off the crops), Richard and Homer had a successful fertilizer business. Richard and his son, Tom, eventually bought the farmland from The Girls.

Richard and Homer had known for years that Dean had been cheating The Girls when he managed the island.  They said nothing while Dean was alive, but after he did the world a favor and killed himself and they took over the management of the island, they were able to give The Girls two, sometimes, three times the income off the island than Dean had given them.

So, Dean Smysor, my cousin, Bess Smysor’s son, was a mean, nasty, greedy, crook who stole from his mother’s nieces.  And I’ll bet half the rice in China he was explicitly or implicitly spurred on by his mean, nasty, greedy mother who never could forget that her older sister got a big Victorian house next to their mother’s house in Ava.

Envy and venom and revenge, when passed on to the next generation by both nature and nurture, poison and eventually kill the soul and the body.

Some of the poison was washed off when, years later, after GramWeese had passed away, Sal and I inherited about $400,000 each.  I used the money to sustain myself for over a year while I went through a financially disastrous divorce and to buy an Alden 44 yacht in 1998.  I named the boat Helen after my mother, and in sailing it I think some of the Dean poison washed away in the waters of Buzzards Bay.

When I was three, we spent the summer in Gull Lake, near Battle Creek, MI.  We left Chicago because my father got a job as a trust officer of Battle Creek’s largest bank, the Security National Bank, and we spent the summer of 1935 on idyllic Gull Lake before moving to Battle Creek.

Charlie

When we lived in Chicago, my father and another man, I think his name was Dave Smith, started a company called Bondex, which was a service that tracked and indexed the prices of bonds. During the depression, stocks weren’t doing well after the market crash of 1929, so a lot of institutional and conservative private investors put a major portion of their money in bonds.

My father traveled and sold the bond index to customers such as banks, so I suppose the Security National Bank was a customer, liked my father, and hired him.

We had a small cottage on Gull Lake with a big screened-in porch, and, as usual, the entire family visited.  Aunt Louise spent most of the summer with us. Aunt Margaret, Uncle Woodney, and Sally Lou came to visit, as did Marion and Glen Brown.

Marion and Mort Brown, Bob and Dorothy Graham, Mother

In the 1930s we visited our family and our family visited us.  We didn’t go to resorts alone, we visited our family because we liked spending time with them, playing penny stories and jokes.

The cottage had a big kitchen with a tan linoleum floor and a big pot bellied black iron stove.  I remember the stove well.  It had an iron door in the middle of its big belly and a handle to open it that looked like a thick, tapered spring.

In the kitchen, there were several wooden crates full of excelsior, thin curly-cues of wood shavings that were used to pack dishes and glasses in the crates.  The excelsior was extremely flammable and my father had told me never to get it anywhere near the stove in the kitchen.

One morning when it was chilly and there was a fire in the stove, I did what most curious three-year old boys would do, I opened the door to the stove and pushed in as much of the excelsior as I could carry.  It ignited immediately and set fire to the kitchen.  All hell broke loose.

I don’t remember much about what happened, but Louise and Sal told me that I started screaming and mother and Louise ran into the kitchen and started beating out the fire with blankets.  Instead of trying to put out the fire, my father came after me.  Apparently he pulled down my pants and started spanking me.

As my mother was beating out the fire, she screamed at my father, “Dyp!  You’re killing him!”  I was told my father’s reply was, “Yeah, well maybe.  But if he lives, he’ll never disobey me again!”

I don’t remember him ever spanking me again, and I don’t remember ever directly disobeying him again until I became a teenager, and then the inevitable happened.   But until then, I was afraid of him because I knew he “meant business,” his euphemism for corporal punishment.

As I grew up, from time to time when he wanted me to do something or told me not to do something, he would say, calmly, quietly, expressionlessly, “and I mean business.”  I knew what “business” meant, and one spanking was enough for over a decade of strict obedience.  Fear worked (it usually does with the young).

Sal used to say that my father was too tough on me, but I never looked at it that way.  When I was older (probably in my 40s), I realized that my father was his father’s son and that he was probably trying to keep me from being spoiled by my mother and five aunts (mother’s three sisters and his two sisters) and Sal.  I didn’t have any uncles to whip me into shape or be role models, so my father had to do it.

The uncles I had were uncles by marriage.  Mother’s older sister, Josephine, lived in California and had divorced the father of her two children, Jill (Jo Ellen) and Billy.  His name was Al Anderson and he was a terrible drunk.  Fortunately, the only time I ever saw him was at Jill’s wedding, at which he got smashed and was obnoxious.

Mother’s youngest sister was Margaret and her second husband was Woodney Millis.   He had adopted Sally Lou after he and Margaret (whom he always called “Honey”) were married.  Woodney was a great guy and a perfect uncle.  He had a marvelous dry sense of humor and a warm laugh that, when it came over him, rollicked his body and lit up the nearby space.

Woodney loved to tease me and I loved being teased by him.  My father was a tough and serious disciplinarian, Woodney was the ideal jolly anecdote.

My father’s older sister, Marion, was dour and serious and controlling.  She was married to Glen Brown, who was from Ava (which is how my mother and father met), and Glen and Marion had four boys:  Charles (nicknamed Bus and named after my father), Morton (nicknamed Mort and named after my grandfather, Perry Morton Warner), Bill, and A.G. (nicknamed Angel or just A).

My father’s younger sister, Dorothy, was married to Bob Graham and they had two children, Marianne, who was three years older than I was, and Billy, who was two years younger.  I may be off a year, but these ages are close.  We didn’t see as much of the Grahams as we did Louise, Margaret, Sally Lou, Woodney, and the Browns, but we visited them in Greencastle, IN, at least once a year on the way to Ava to see my mother’s family or to Rossville to visit my father’s family.

Uncle Glen was a banker, but not a dour, serious banker.  He was a red-faced jolly (in those days; he later turned sour) man who my father loved and admired.  I called Uncle Glen, “Paw,” and used to say him (I think it started at Gull Lake), “you old Paw, you,” to which he would always chuckle.

But Uncle Woodney and Uncle Glen were not enough bitter tonic to offset the sweet love I got from mother, Louise, Margaret, Sally Lou, and, somewhat, from Aunt Marion, so my father never let up on being tough on me.

Over the years, Sal loved to tell the story about me trying to learn to swim at Gull Lake.  She said that one day while everyone was sunning themselves and chatting, I walked out to the end of the dock and jumped into about six feet of water.  My mother saw me and screamed.  Woodney ran out on the dock, jumped in, and pulled me out as I was flailing and sinking.  When I could talk after spitting out lungs full of water, Sal said that I declared matter-of-factly, “I don’t think I’ll learn how to swim today.”

Sal loved the story because she felt it revealed one of my enduring characteristics – an impulsive recklessness.  Something, I, on the other hand, would interpret as being courageous.  The reality is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of risk-prone or even entrepreneurial.

If we were to put a marker on my life-long characteristic, the one from Gull Lake in 1935 would be impulsive recklessness, which as much as anything else, I think, explains three wives, eight kids, and the financially disastrous DailyComedy.com.  But looking back on it, if I had to do it all over again, I’d still jump in the water of life recklessly because deep in my soul I believe it is better to have jumped and risked and loved and lost than never to have jumped and risked and loved at all.

This may be a rationalization for recklessness and impulsiveness, but I don’t believe you can, over time, change your essential nature…fortunately.

Charlie Surronded by Girls

When I was three in 1935, after spending the summer in Gull Lake, we moved to Battle Creek, MI.

When we first moved, we rented rooms at the Kellogg Inn for several months until my father bought a house that the bank owned — a rundown wooden home on North Avenue that the bank had probably foreclosed on, so I’m sure he got a good deal on it.

My father was a superb carpenter and he renovated the house himself.  I didn’t get the carpenter gene, but passed it on to my sons Perry, and, especially, to Chris and Colin.

My father started by tearing off a rickety three-story back porch, saving all the wood, and storing it above the rafters in the garage in back of the house – a garage that you entered from the alley behind the house.  The house had been painted biege at one time, but it was dirty, faded, and peeling.  My father used a blow torch to strip off the old paint, which was a nasty, blisteringly hot job.

Battle Creek House - Back

I remember seeing him high on a ladder working with the blow torch and a big metal scraper.  He wouldn’t let me near the blow torch or the ladder.  After all, I was an only child he wasn’t taking any chances, especially after I almost burned down the Gull Lake cottage.

North Avenue was a main street in Battle Creek.  Behind the house was an alley, and behind that was College Street.  The back yard went maybe 50 feet back to the alley and had a small hill in the middle that sloped down about three feet to the alley.  In the lower right-hand corner of the back yard there was a clump of bushes and saplings that rose about 15 feet, as I remember.

The Fort and Hiram Coleman

My father built a fort in the bushes for me and my pals out of the wood from the torn-down back porch.  The first floor of the fort was about six or eight feet square and about six feet high.  There was a ladder that led to a trap door that we could open with a pulley and rope and that led to the roof on which there was a railing about four feet high.  On the lower right corner of the roof was a flag pole with a pulley and rope by which we could raise and lower a flag – a scull and crossbones pirate flag my mother had made for us.

For six years my pals and I played in that fort almost every day.  It was our fort, our clubhouse, our pirate ship, and our Viking long boat.  Years later, when I lived in Columbia, MO, and was married to Sandie.  I tried to replicate the fort on the back of a car shed we had built behind our house there.  I remember going into it once when I was in my early 60s, looking around wistfully and weeping a little because it wasn’t a perfect replica and Bobby and David and Pete and Ron and Buddy weren’t there.  As Thomas Wolfe wrote, “you can’t go home again,” but I’ve never learned that lesson.

Hiram Coleman lived in a big white house across the alley on College Street directly behind the fort.  Hiram was four or five years older than I was and was a budding inventor.

On the left side of his house there was a driveway that went back to a garage.  To the left of the driveway there was a large, tall oak tree in which Hiram built an elaborate tree house with real windows.  To get up to the tree house, he built a lift that consisted of a board wedged in a large rope, like a swing.  The rope was attached to a motor in the tree house so that when you turned on the motor, the swing seat would go up through an opening in the floor of a porch-type ledge with a railing that jutted out from the main tree house.

We called it an elevator and thought it was the coolest thing in the whole world.  Hiram was a god to us, and the biggest treat we could conceive of was being invited up to the tree house and taking the elevator up to kid heaven.

Hiram also built a bridge out of heavy rope and wooden slats that ran from the tree house across the driveway and into his room in his house.  From our kitchen we could see Hiram and his pals walking across the waving bridge.  Watching from the distance of our kitchen, we couldn’t really see the supporting ropes, so it looked like Hiram was walking on air, which, of course, we absolutely believed he could do.

Hiram had small brass cannon like the ones used by yacht clubs to start races and that was mounted on the rear window of his tree house, and he would shoot marbles at us in the fort.  The “whap,” “whap” of the marbles on the outer walls of the fort sounded like a real war to us, and we loved it.  The Marble Wars only lasted a few weeks, as I remember, because I think Mrs. Coleman, stopped Hiram, to our great disappointment.

In the spring of 1941, when I was nine, my mother and father got a call from Mr. Coleman, Hiram’s father, who was a doctor, to come over to his house because they had some bad news.  We were told that Hiram was making a small bomb (as 15-year-old boys are apt to do), and as he was arming it with a battery, it exploded and killed him.

It was the first time I had dealt with death.  I had no idea what to do or how to act.  Mr. Coleman offered me Hiram’s motor that operated the tree house elevator, but I said “no thank you.”  When we got home, my father gently told me that I should have accepted the motor because it would have been polite to accept the gift as a token of Hiram’s friendship.

I hadn’t realized that Hiram liked me, that liking someone went two ways.  You worship the gods and it never occurs to you that they might like you or care about you, too.

After my father told me this, I cried, not because I didn’t get the motor or because I thought I had disappointed my father but because I realized that I wouldn’t be seeing Hiram again.  I remember crying hard and father holding me.  I don’t remember him ever holding me any other time.  But he was there when I needed him, and he would be there for me often, especially when I was 18.  But that’s another story.

My experiences in Battle Creek when I was between the ages of 4 and 10 embedded patterns of which I was unconscious until I began writing about them.

Now I understand why I had to write about myself – I needed to know who I am.

Girls

I went to Freemont School on East Emmett Street.  Each morning I’d walk two blocks north on North Avenue, past Latta and Woolnough Streets, turn right and walk two blocks east up to school.  My best pals at school were Bobby Baker, David King, Pete Shaw, Ron Harbert, and Buddy Gage.

Bobby Baker lived across the street on North Avenue and I played with him every day, and in kids’ time that means literally every day.  Bobby lived with his grandmother because his mother were father were divorced, which was scandalous in those days.  David lived on Capital Avenue NE in a big English Tutor house (his family owned the local feed store and were rich).  Pete Shaw has lots of brothers and cousins and his family owned the biggest local funeral parlor.  Ron Harbert lived on Freemont Street and he had a pretty older sister (his father sold insurance to everyone we knew).  Buddy Gage’s father owned a stationary store and printing business and visiting the print shop was really cool.

Bobby Baker and Charlie

And whatever we did, we did on bikes.  I got a Schwinn Classic Cruiser when I was eight or nine, and it was the best present I ever, ever, ever got.

Charlie and New Schwinn

When Bobby and David and Pete and Ron and Buddy and I would play, we’d play with wooden guns and wooden pirate swords my father made in his basement workshop.  We’d play in the fort and shoot at Hiram Coleman and his older pals.

But I had some other friends, too – Ann Jones and Mary Elizabeth Snyder.

Ann Jones, Panda, Charlie, and Mary Elizabeth Snyder

Ann was the smartest girl and person in our class(es), and she talked with a slight lisp that made her drool at times.  Mary Elizabeth Snyder was the second smartest girl and person  in our class, and she was the only girl in the class who wore glasses.  I don’t remember the circumstances surrounding Ann and Mary Elizabeth coming over to play, but they did.  The fact that I couldn’t remember is probably telling, because it means that at the time and thereafter I didn’t think it was a big deal or deviant or strange that I played with girls.  It just seemed natural.

Perhaps I didn’t think playing with girls was deviant because my mother had three sisters and my father had two sisters, and my closest relatives, who I played with most often, were, of course, Sal and my father’s younger sister’s daughter, Marianne Graham (three years older).  Also, when I was ill with scarlet fever and was out of school for several weeks, my parents gave me a giant stuffed panda to play with, and my mother, who was an excellent seamstress (Gramma Dean had seen to that) , made clothes for my panda.  She made overalls out of bed ticking so that they looked like Oshkosh overalls.  I think Ann and Mary Elizabeth liked playing with and dressing the panda, which, naturally, I called Panda because it was most like Pooh in mind.

My first semi-sexual encounter was with Ann and Mary Elizabeth – doing a triple at age nine was awesome, and it was my first and only threesome.  We were playing in the top of the garage where my father had stored the lumber from the back porch he’d torn down.  Because it was away from the house and no one could see us or approach suddenly without us knowing, it was the right time to explore.

I remember saying, “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”  The details are fuzzy almost 70 years later, but I think Mary Elizabeth said “no,” but Ann was willing.  She nodded her head, so I pulled down my pants and thrust out my little circumcised wiener (that’s what I called it then, before it became my best friend).  Ann pulled up her dress and took off  her cotton panties.

We looked at each others’ genitals with rapt curiosity, but I don’t remember laughing or being nervous or being revolted; just curious.  But I do remember being somewhat disappointed because there was nothing there but a slit – nothing special, nothing interesting to see.  So, we pulled up our pants and continued playing whatever game the four of us were playing — Panda, of course, was there, too, and was incuriously but fully involved in the game we were playing.  Panda didn’t care much about what was going on because Panda was an it – it didn’t have a wiener or a slit, just several bed ticking outfits.

Looking back, I suppose that what I get from this memory was that I was completely comfortable with girls and women.  They weren’t different, exotic creatures.  They weren’t people to be afraid of or uncomfortable around; they were good pals and warm, cuddly people who played with you, loved you, and took care of you.  And girls your age were fun and if you showed them yours, they showed you theirs.

“What About Art”

In third grade, my favorite class was Art.  The guys, especially David King, and I would spend all the time in Art class drawing airplanes – the fighter planes of the pre-World War II era.  And every fighter plane we drew had —– (dashes) flaring off the wings indicating bullets.  You couldn’t draw an airplane without bullets; it was inconceivable.

I fell off the top of the fort in the back yard and broke my right wrist in the fall of that year.  I had a cast on my arm, and I remember showing it to David King and saying delightedly how neat it was that I had a cast and couldn’t do any writing in school (a real chore) or any homework.  I remember David saying, in his scratchy alto voice, “But what about Art?” with a horrified expression on his face.

As my mother often told the story, when the realization of this disaster sunk in, I sunk down and tears came to my eyes.  I thought I had beaten the system.  I thought my broken wrist was not a problem, but an opportunity to goof off, but the realization that I could no longer do Art was devastating.

Mother retold the story because she thought it was funny that my planned slothfulness had been thwarted and because of David King’s immediate and prescient response.  As I think about it now, I understand how central to our lives creating our art was then and how central to our society art was and is today.

My favorite class at St. Albans (1948-1951) was Art and my favorite teacher was my Art teacher, Dean Stambaugh.  Dean was not only my favorite teacher, but also Bob Alvord’s and Tyler Abell’s (two of my best friends) favorite teacher.  In fact, Art as taught by Dean Stambaugh might have been the only class I liked at St. Albans; God knows it’s the only class I ever got an A in.

I loved Art.  I loved doing water colors.  I painted trees and mountains and colorful, dark, black-outlined castles that were subconscious, simplistic versions of artist Robert Lawson’s castles in Munro Leaf’s Ferdinand the Bull. I was pretty good and talked enthusiastically about art and becoming an artist.

My father, a practical man, was afraid that I might consider art as a career and threw away dozes of my water colors — he would have none of that impractical stuff.  I think he wanted me to be a lawyer or an architect, his secret dream of a profession.

But I was drawn to the arts.  Often on the weekends, from the age of 15 on, I would take public transportation downtown (we lived at 2900 Connecticut Avenue) to the National Gallery of Art and wander through the galleries.  I always wound up in the 19^th Century European Art galleries and would stare in awe at the Monets and Manets.  My favorite was Manet’s The Dead Toreador.

The Dead Toreador

I went to Dartmouth after St. Albans and was lost in girls, beer, and …well, that’s enough.  I went into the Army because I knew I was lost in the fog of independence and rebellion.  After I got out of the Army, I went to Southern Illinois University for a semester and then back to Dartmouth for a semester.  I realized that Dartmouth was not right for me – I thought it had no soul, no artistic soul.

I tried to transfer to Harvard, but couldn’t, so I transferred to Columbia – the Columbia School of Dramatic Arts.  Art again.  The pull of the arts; not painting, but of the dramatic arts – playwriting to be specific – and writing plays for television.  Paddy Chayefsky was my idol.

At the School of Dramatic Arts I took courses in Promotion, Programming, and Radio Sales (the years were 1956 and 1957 and TV was just emerging).  I loved the creative aspect of promotion and programming.  I was hooked on the media.

I got into media sales because I had to make a living when I graduated because I was married and had a baby on the way (actually the order of the two events should be reversed).  But the point is, I was irrepressibly drawn to the creative fields, to the media…to art.

When I got my first job out of college at a television station (WSPA-TV) in Spartanburg, SC, I became involved in Community Theater and had lead roles in two plays.  On summer vacations and in my spare time I often painted.  I even sold several paintings to friends and even had a collage in my office at CBS – it was accepted by the CBS Art Committee.

I revealed my secret ambition in 1964 when I took a personality test at the NAB Sales Management program at the Harvard Business School (sent there by WTOP Radio).  It was a Thematic Aperception Test, and in one part of it I had to choose one of several achievements that I would consider the most important or make me feel the most successful.  The choices were things like having a novel published, founding a company, being elected CEO of a company, and that sort of thing.  One item was having s one-man show at an art gallery.  I chose that one.

So, eight-year-old David King’s comment, “What about Art?” was not just about boys drawing pre-war fighters in Art class, it was about the importance of art and creativity in society and in our then and future American culture.  It was also a strangely prophetic comment, because according to Richard Florida’s best-selling book, The Rise of the Creative Class, there are more workers and more jobs in creative fields than in any other type of jobs. Conceptual thinkers, creators, innovators, and artists are what are driving business growth in the 21st Century.

And one of my favorite books of the last few years is Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist in which he makes a brilliantly crafted case for the notion that art and science are not separate, but are the same field; it is just that the role of art is to explain science in emotionally resonant ways.

Therefore, the answer to David’s question, “What about Art?” is: “Art is life,” and David and I at eight knew that instinctively.

Pearl Harbor Day

On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, Bobby Baker and I were riding our bikes on East Emmett Street.  We stopped at Freemont School and Bobby said to me, “The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor.”  I vividly remember the scene, the place, what Bobby was wearing, my Schwinn bike, and that it was a cold, bright sunny morning – no clouds in the sky – but I don’t remember what my reaction was or what happened after that.  The video playback in my mind stops at the point of Bobby’s announcement and loops back.

I suspect that I didn’t have any idea where Pearl Harbor was, who the Japs were, or, certainly, what the implications of the event were.  But I do know how my life changed after that and what my father did that Sunday night because I’ve heard the story hundreds of times.

My father had an olive green Army trunk in the basement of our home in Battle Creek, and on the evening of December 7, 1941, he sent a telegram to the U.S. War Department in Washington, D.C. that read, “I have trunk that contains detailed maps of the entire telephone communication system of the Japanese Islands.  Please advise.”

The next day my father got a telegram from the War Department that read, “You and your trunk get on a train to Washington today and report to the War Department” and gave the address.  My father, who had been a lieutenant in the Signal Corps in World War I, got on a train with his trunk and went to Washington for the duration of the war, and mother and I followed at the beginning of school in the fall (we were in Michilinda for the summer).

In 1928 my father and mother went to Japan for four or five months because my father was working for the W.H. Gary Company, which held the patent to the dial telephone, and the company thought the Japanese were copying the dialing mechanism and not paying royalties.  W.H. Gary Co. was located in Kansas City and my father’s job was to evaluate and try to purchase local telephone companies or, failing that, to sell them the patent to use dial telephones.

His father, Perry Warner, owned the telephone company in my father’s home town, Rossville, IL before WWI, and so my dad had grown up stringing telephone lines, repairing phones, and installing exchanges.  In WWI he was in the Signal Corps, and he laid down telephone wires between the trenches – one of the most dangerous jobs in the war because the line stringers were favorite targets of German snipers.

He got a Purple Heart, but not for being shot by a sniper, but because his lungs were burnt by mustard gas.  He was in a bombed-out farm house in France when the Germans hit house with a barrage of mustard gas.  He used to tell the story of how he survived.  He did as he had been trained to do in a mustard gas attack: He immediately dropped down on his stomach – he got as low underneath the gas, which tends to rise up, as he possibly could.   He then rolled over on his side, took out his Army handkerchief, urinated on it, put it over his nose and mouth in order to keep the gas from burning up his lungs, and crawled on his stomach to an door outside.  As he was crawling, he bumped into a soldier who had fallen and was unconscious.  My father grabbed his comrade, rolled over on his back, and holding the unconscious soldier close to his own stomach, inched along on his back to the door and got outside.  Once outside, my father dragged his comrade to a nearby trench where both were rescued.

My dad was given a Bronze Star for his bravery and was sent to the Catskills in New York State for six months rehabilitation.  The mustard gas has burnt his lungs badly and burned all the hair off his body.  When his grew back, his formerly straight hair was curly, which he hated and always thereafter tried various methods to keep it straight, including having his hair cut every week to keep it trim. The hair on his chest, arms, and legs never grew back, although he had a small amount of dark hair under his arms and in his genital area.  Also, apparently the mustard gas acted as a carcinogen that doctors felt was the cause of his aplastic anemia, which killed him at age 56.

While he was in the Catskills, as part of his rehab, he did some basket weaving and caning.  He made a floor lamp out of wooden caning material which my daughter Megan has in her living room (as of 2010).

So my father was a hero, not only to me, but a real, certified hero.

In the late 1920s he had traveled to every state in the U.S. for the W. H. Gary Co, and was an expert in telephones and networking.  The company sent him to Japan to see what he could about the situation – to see if the Japanese were stealing the patent and, if so, what could be done.  As part of his investigation, he had acquired detailed maps of the Japanese telephone network.

I remember the maps; they were neatly folded, wrapped in thick wax paper, and stored in the olive green trunk in our basement.

When my father went to Washington, housing was virtually impossible to find, so he rented a room from a nice couple name Levine in Arlington, on Arlington Ridge Road, as I remember.  Mother and I joined him there, where we lived in slightly cramped but comfortable style.  It was wartime and everyone was doing their part to help in the war effort; it was the Great Generation – sharing, sacrifice for the greater good, and patriotic cooperation.

Arlington House

We soon moved into a tiny row house at 733 Columbus Avenue in Alexandria in a development that had just been built to accommodate the swelling wartime population.  I went to the segregated public grade school in Alexandria and got beat up just about every day probably because I didn’t have a Southern accent and didn’t dress like the tough kids on the wrong side of the track in Alexandria.

I missed the idyllic life in peaceful pre-war Battle Creek.  I missed Bobby Baker and David King and Pete Shaw and Ron Harbert and Buddy Gage and Ann Jones and Mary Elizabeth Snyder, and all because of Pearl Harbor.

Satchmo in Concert

When I was a teenager in the late 1940s, I became interested in New Orleans jazz: Jelly Roll Morton, Bunk Johnson, George Lewis, Sidney Bechet, Kid Ory, and, of course, Louis Armstrong. This interest morphed into being an avid fan of the pulsating, simple rhythms of Dixieland. By the time I travelled North to Hanover, New Hampshire, to attend Dartmouth, like all teenage boys, I considered myself and expert and I had entrenched opinions about Dixieland jazz.

In my freshman year at Dartmouth, when I was supposed to be going to class and getting a solid liberal arts education, I traveled south to Amherst, MA to visit my St. Albans friends Tyler Abell and Ralph Pagter who were sophomores at Amherst College. On Friday and Saturday nights we’d go to a crowded club on the Connecticut River with beer-sticky floors where a Dixieland band led by a Princeton clarinet player whose last name was Rubin (first was Dave, I think, but like all memories of those times, his name is very foggy, undoubtedly because they were clouded by uncountable beers). We’d stomp ourselves sore and shout ourselves hoarse as Rubin and his band played favorites like “Indiana,” “St. James Infirmary,” and “King Porter Stomp.” They’d end the evening, of course, with “As the Saints Go Marching In,” as they tooted and stomped through the crowd. It was a miracle that the club shack didn’t disintegrate due the vibrations caused by the ruckus.

On Saturday and Sunday mornings we would wake up late in Tyler, Ralph, Don Lindberg, and Fred Werner’s room in Pratt Hall – a room whose walls were caked in places with small chunks of pineapple from a pie fight that had broken out early in the semester – and have Orange Blossoms (gin and orange juice) and put on Louis Armstrong and his All Stars concert at Town Hall. We knew all the words and sang along with Satchmo and Jack Teagarden.
So, it was with great anticipation that I picked up Terry Teachout’s biography of Louis Armstrong, titled Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, and began to devour it. It was like going back and listening to a once-favorite record album; it brought back wonderful memories. Some of the details of Pops’s life I knew (some from Ken Burns’s great PBS Series, “Jazz”), but I understood much more about Armstrong as a person because of Teachout’s putting the facts of his life into an historical, psychological, and musical context.

I saw Louis and his All Stars (I remember that Barney Bigard and Trummy Young were on stage) in Washington in 1955 or 1956. I remember loving it, loving Satchmo, loving the show and loving the music. What I didn’t know at the time was how hard Louis worked, how hard life was for him as a black man, how much integrity he had for his music, how musically gifted he was.

Teachout is a musician and a historian, so he was able to add detail and deeper understanding to Pops’s musicianship and guts. He overcame an almost unbelievably deprived background, blatant racism, musical fads, nasty mobsters, and greedy managers. He survived on talent, a strong work ethic, and courage.

I’m a product of a loving-family, a privileged-upper-middle class, prep-school, Ivy-League, WASP background. I have done all the course work for a Ph.D. I have had every opportunity to be successful and I have worked hard; but I have not accomplished one-one-hundredths of what Pops accomplished and don’t have one-one-thousandths of the friends and admirers he had. Therefore, when I wept at the end of the book when Pops was ill and died, and when Teachout describes his funeral, I realized I was not crying for Pops, I was crying about my own inadequacies and lost opportunities.

I was sad because I didn’t follow my passion, my talent, my soul’s code. When I was 16, my father threw away all of the watercolors I had done in my beloved art class at St. Albans. He was afraid I might become an artist like my art teacher, Dean Stambaugh. I jokingly called my art teacher a pansy because I didn’t know what it meant or what a homosexual was. But my father did, and he was terrified that I would follow an artistic path and a path I’m sure he thought would lead to sexual deviance.

So, I did what he wanted. He used to say, “I don’t care what you do as long as you’re a regular guy and do what you do well.” I didn’t realize he was homophobic (I don’t blame him; he was born in 1896). I became a regular guy and, eventually, a salesman – something I was good at.

But I didn’t become an artist. I didn’t become a playwright, which is why I went to the Columbia School of Dramatic Arts (transferred from Dartmouth). I didn’t pursue the arts; I pursued commerce. So when I read the end of Pops, I wept. Louis had guts, he had the courage of his convictions, he had artistic integrity, he was superbly human, and most of all he had guts.

Thanks, Pops, for showing the way.

I don’t remember the details, but I think what follows is approximately how it happened that the family went to Michilinda.

In 1938, Nano rented a red clapboard cottage from Ed Wilson, a gristly, tobacco-chewing local man who owned several beach cottages in an area called Michilinda, and my mother, dad, and I visited Nano and Ese, for how long I don’t remember.

Charlie Looking for Pirates

Nano must have liked Michilinda and being near her cousin, Maude, because over the winter she bought two of the cottages – the North Red and the South Cream, so designated because of their weathered red and ochre colors.

The clapboard cottages were built on pilings, which looked like stilts, on top of the dunes about 40 yards from a wide, flat white-sand beach. The sand on these Lake Michigan beaches was very fine grained and squeaked when you walked on it. The cottages closest to the beach and up on the dunes (the North and South Red) were raised three or four feet above the sand so that as a young boy I could walk and play under the cottages.

Ese, Helen, Loretta, Honey, Woodney

We spent eight summers in the little cottages in Michilinda, and they were the happiest times of my young life. My only responsibilities were to play and to be a boy – nothing else. And being a boy in pre-WWII America, in the Depression, meant I had to use my imagination because there were no TVs, no portable radios or iPods, and no video games.

Both Sal and I spent the entire summer in Michilinda. She was seven years older than I was, and we were both only children. We slept on the front screened-in porch of the North Red on metal Army cots, she on the north side of the porch, me on the south side.

Sal and the North Red

Sal’s mother, Margaret (who everyone called Honey) and her step-father, Woodney, had one bedroom in the one-floor cottage; my mother and father were in another bedroom; and Nano had the third bedroom. Ese slept on a cot/couch in the main room that served as both living room, dining room, and kitchen.   My father and Woodney came up on weekends, so during the week I was spoiled by five women – another reason why Michilinda was heaven for a boy whose main duty was to be cute and amuse Nano, mother,  Ese, Aunt Margaret, and Sal, who at the time I called Sally or Sally Lou (her given name was Sarah Louise).

My lack of responsibility and duty only to be cute probably set me up to expect to be the center of attention and to be a smartass the rest of my life.   Also, my distractibility (the clinicians hadn’t invented ADD or ADHD back then) and reading difficulties made me a slow reader and learner, which in turn led me to being a clown, a rebel, and a trouble maker, largely, I suppose, in an attempt to deflect attention away from my not being a good student.  So, cute it was, instead of being smart.

There was a big wooden round table on a single pedestal in the cottage’s main room where we ate and, most importantly, played penny poker every night using wooden match sticks as chips, although I do remember that the second or third summer we used red, blue, and white cardboard chips.    I wasn’t allowed to sit in on the poker games until I was 10 or 11, but until then, I watched ravenously.

My father, who played poker in the Army in the trenches during WWI, disliked wild-card games and would cringe as the women, who he thought were silly and crazy (an attitude he had for virtually all women and government officials), would play outrageous wild-card games such as Baseball (3s your out, 4s get another card), Night Baseball, and Barbara Hutton (5s and 10s wild). Some of the men (Uncle Glen Brown) like to play Red Dog. My father’s attitude toward women, government officials, and poker was my intellectual and attitudinal role model until I was in my late 30s.

Pop on the Beach

My father and Woodney were traditionalists; when they dealt, the games were either “the old Army game,” which my father loved to announce officiously, of five-card draw, nothing wild, or five- or seven-card stud, with nothing wild.   I don’t remember Texas Hold ‘Em ever being played.

The Yacht Club

We weren’t rich, so we didn’t own a boat, but we did belong to the White Lake Yacht Club where they raced Class C and Class A scows, and the younger kids raced Comets. Sal and I would hang out at the Yacht Club and on racing days (Wednesdays and Saturdays) we would try to crew.

Sal generally had regular crew gigs because she was the right weight and, more importantly, was pretty, vivacious, and popular.   Because I was smaller, I only got to be a crew on days the wind was blowing a little harder than usual and the C scow skippers needed a third crew member.

I remember the intense excitement of being chosen to crew – it was better than being picked to be the first kid to go on a flight to the moon – and the intense disappointment of either not being chosen or when the air was light and I wasn’t needed.  But in the crewing process I learned to sail, and I loved it, which, of course made me covet a boat to sail.

The treat other than crewing on a C scow that I remember was devouring an ice cream cone.   The yacht club had three flavors, vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry – one dip on a sugar cone.   The ice cream cones cost a nickel, and Sal and I could only have one a day, which was tough because a lot of the other kids could have as many as they wanted (or at least more than one a day). I had to be strategic in choosing when to have my ice cream cone so I could have it when other kids were having theirs and be one of the bunch.  But Sal had to be around because she had been given the money for cones by Nano.

I loved the yacht club, I loved the boats and sailing, I loved the ice cream cones, and as I got older (12 and 13), I loved the girls at the club.  But I loved Sal most of all.  We did everything together, I followed her like a puppy, and it was puppy love.   As I look back, it was Sal who was my first love and sex icon.  She loved me, she took care of me, and she was my pal.

Because we didn’t live together year around, we didn’t have sibling fights, rivalries, competitiveness, or jealousies.   When we saw each other at Michilinada, we were delighted to be together again.   The seven-year difference was critical, I think, because it made us far enough apart so as to lessen any competitiveness and close enough so that we could communicate as pals, not as her being my baby sitter.

As I look back, I realize that my image of ideal beauty and sexiness probably was modeled on Sal when she was a teenager (16, 17, and 18):: lilting, loud laugh, large breasts, flirtatious, cuddly, open, vivacious, smart, fun, and funny. Sal.

And as I look back, I realize that because we couldn’t afford a sailboat at the White Lake Yacht Club that I have always craved a sailboat bigger than the C and A scows.  I finally got what I wanted when I bought an Aden 44 for $180,000 in 1998 and named it Helen after my mother.

The Wabaningo Club and Sylvan Beach

The other club we went to was the Wabaningo Club which was on Murray Road, just before you got to Sylvan Beach, an exclusive neighborhood of substantial summer houses that were built on high dunes topped by majestic pine trees. The dunes were so high that some of the homes on Sylvan Beach had small trolley tracks that were built next to long wooden staircases. The trolleys would carry groceries and luggage up to the elegant homes (or what seemed to me at the time as elegant).

The Wabaningo Club was used for summer activities during weekdays – knot tying, theater rehearsals, and games for kids – and church services on Sunday which featured the hugely popular and charismatic Presbyterian minister William Hodgson from Wilmette, IL.  Also, in August each year, the club hosted an original, locally written variety show, or revue, put on by adults in the community.  The revue featured a series of skits and dances that featured men, including the Rev. Hodgson, in dresses cavorting and dancing to everyone’s glee. The kids loved seeing their parents acting silly and having fun on stage – it was the biggest event of the summer.

Charlie Rehearsing

The Dune

About 300 yards from the dunes that overlooked the beach was the Lower Red, Ed Wilson’s former cottage that was on the east side of Murray Road on the way to the Wabaningo Club and Sylvan Beach.   Behind the cottage were a couple of sand dunes that rose up from a sandy plain that was littered with ancient grey driftwood washed up by what seemed like century-old storms. Mother and Ese’s friend, Loretta Graham from Chicago rented the Lower Red every summer and lived there with her son, Percy.  Loretta smoked Pall Mall filtered cigarettes, as Ese did, and was very pretty, very rich, and very weird, as was Percy – a wild, spoiled, inventive boy, who was the same age I was, and an a perfect companion.

Ronnie, Denny, Charlie

Every morning during the warm Michigan summer, Percy Graham and I would meet under the North Red after breakfast.   The sand slanted down from the dune on which it stood at a steep angle, and Percy and I could drop our bathing suits (that’s all we ever wore) and shove our small, erect penises into the sand and pee.   We’d then dig hard at the sand under where we had peed and soon a round wet glob of sand about the size of softball would appear and roll down to the sand floor under the cottage. We called these wet urine balls “pee bricks.”

We had enough sense not to throw them at each other, not that we didn’t think of it, but because we wanted to put them up on the boardwalks for people to step on.  Of course, they dried out before any one went out and walked on the boardwalk, but we didn’t care; it was the idea that was exciting.

Once we had strategically placed the pee bricks, we ran off to The Dune .   We crossed the road, ran past the Lower Red, and into the sandy plan.   On the plain, there were small knotty shards of driftwood that served as a wide variety of guns and two large dark grey tree stumps with dead, hard tangled roots sprouting out that ten-year-old boys cold sit on.   The shattered trunk of one large stump pointed up at 45 degrees toward the biggest dune about 30 yards away.   To boys it wasn’t a driftwood tree stump and trunk, it was a huge cannon.   We’d sit on the roots and call out orders, “Raise the angle,” Aim higher,” “Ready, aim, fire.”   We blasted the bad guys in The Dune to kingdom come, and then we would dash to The Dune and scramble up to its sandy floor.

The Dune was shaped like an upside-down ice cream cone.   The bottom ice cream was steep sand slopes.   The floor of The Dune was where the upside-down top of the cone would have been, and the tapered crest of The Dune consisted of trees surrounding a tall, grey dead tree that had been split by lightening years ago and whose top tapered to a sharp needle-like point.  The dead tree was ensnarled with vines and was not connected to the ground, so Percy and I could move it up and down.  We’d pretend The Dune was a tuft of dune grass and we were operators of the sharp needle within the grass that we’d shoot up into bad guys’ bare feet as they walked through the dunes.  We’d hurt them like the grass had hurt our feet.

Before we played our sting-the-bad-guys game, we’d take off our bathing suits and play naked.  It felt so good.   We’d run all through the dune, climb trees, and wallow in the leaves – leaves, it turned out, of poison ivy.

Within a week of wallowing in the ivy, my ten-year-old testicles had swollen to the size of a playground ball and my face was so swollen that my mouth and eyes were mere slits in red face the size of a small basketball.   I couldn’t see and had to be fed through a straw – lots of milk shakes and orange soda.  To ease the itching, I’d take three or four oatmeal baths a day.

Mother, Ese, Aunt Margaret, and Sal would take turns reading to me: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations.  I must have listened to Treasure Island so often that I could repeat it in my dreams.

The first book I remember reading to Will when he was ten and came to spend a month with me and Julia was Treasure Island. I loved reading it to Will and re-living Jim’s adventure with Long John Silver, Dr. Livsey, and Squire Trelawney.  Several years later, I became addicted to listening to books I bought on Audible.com and downloaded to my iPod.   I told people I preferred listening to books rather than reading them because I thought I had an auditory learning style.   Perhaps.  But in may have been because listening took me back to the comfort of listening to books being read by mother, Ese, Aunt Margaret, and Sal sixty years before – their sweet, calm voices penetrating the pain of a poison-ivy swollen head — and no voice was heard more often or calmer than my mother’s.

Memory is especially activated by comfort as well as pleasure.   In fact, comfort might be an even stronger squirt of dopamine-activating juice than cocaine, pleasure, or sex.

The Summer of 1945

The last summer I spent in Michilinda was 1945, when I was 13, and the last year of the war.   It was also the year that I realized that girls were not just silly gigglers, but could be attractive, seductive objects of desire.   That they were also people didn’t occur to me for many years.

The overwhelming instinct that summer was the desire to kiss and touch some of those adorable objects, especially Margot Hodgson, the minister’s daughter.  She was the most popular girl in her group.   She was tall and had short brown hair and a smile that melted me.  I was afraid to talk to her.  All I could do was to act silly to try to get her and the other girls’ attention, behavior that persisted until I was 18, when outrageousness replaced silliness.   But it was all about adolescent, peacock mating strutting, the remnants of which were manifested in later years by wearing Polo ties, shirts, suits, socks, and pants, and sporting Gucci loafers. See me, girls.

The Japanese surrendered when Emperor Hirohito gave a recorded radio address on August 15, that summer.  I remember that all the families that lived in the cottages on the dunes gave a party that evening on the beach to celebrate.  We had hot dogs and marshmallows, and the Thigues were there.

We weren’t crazy about the Thigue family.   They owned a bakery in Muskegon and had three children – Peggy, Neil, and a younger girl.  Peggy was 14, short, with long, curly hair, but a fully developed body.   She had bulbous breasts that seemed to stick straight out and which I couldn’t keep my eyes off of.   We called Neil, “Knee-all,” because that’s what his mother seemed to call him when she summoned him home for meals.   He was small for 11, thin, and had huge buck teeth.  He seemed to take pleasure in annoying anyone near him and he slobbered when he talked.

Late in the evening, after the adults had left the beach, the kids hung around the fire, eating marshmallows and singing songs. It was a little chilly, so we were under blankets. I carefully placed myself under the same blanket as Peggy Thigue, tentatively put my arm around her, and then after no response from her, I began fondling those lovely breasts.

My bliss lasted several seconds, enough for me to firmly imprint the rush of excitement into my young brain, before Peggy realized what was going on.   She hesitated another couple of seconds, I suppose to consciously experience the sensation, then she asked, “What are you doing?” and gently pushed my hands away.  I said, “Nothing,” and stopped.   I turned and we both looked at the fire and continued to sing as if nothing had happened.   But something had happened; I had discovered the excitement of sex, which would, of course, change my life.

The next week, the Thigues went back to Muskegon, and my mother and I went home to Alexandria.   I never saw Peggy again after that evening, which was probably a good thing, because I would have had no idea at that age what to say to her. Years later, when I returned to Michilinda in 1988, and revisited that beach for the first time in 43 years, I thought about that evening in 1945, and know what I should have said to Peggy – “Thank you.”