An
Encore Salute To The Untold Stories Of The Working- Class 1960s Radicals-“The
Sam And Ralph Stories”-
Hard Times Come Again No More -From The Sam
Eaton-Ralph Morris Series-From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Allan Jackson, editor The Sam And Ralph Stories -New General Introduction
[As my replacement Greg Green, whom
I brought in from American Film Gazette
originally to handle the day to day site operations while I concentrated on
editing but who led a successful revolt against my regime based on the wishes
of the younger writers to as they said at the time not be slaves to the 1960s
upheavals a time which they only knew second or third hand, mentioned in his
general introduction above some of the series I initiated were/are worth an
encore presentation. The Sam and Ralph
Stories are one such series and as we go along I will try to describe why
this series was an important testament to an unheralded segment of the mass
movements of the 1960s-the radicalized white working- class kids who certainly
made up a significant component of the Vietnam War soldiery, some of who were
like Sam and Ralph forever after suspicious of every governmental war cry. Who also
somewhat belatedly got caught up in the second wave rock and roll revival which
emerged under the general slogan of “drug, sex and rock and roll” which
represented a vast sea change for attitudes about a lot of things that under
ordinary circumstances would have had them merely replicating their parents’
ethos and fate.
As I said I will describe that
transformation in future segment introductions but today since it is my “dime”
I want to once again clear up some misapprehensions about what has gone on over
the past year or so in the interest of informing the readership, as Greg Green
has staked his standing at this publication on doing to insure his own survival,
about what goes on behind the scenes in the publishing business. This would not
have been necessary after the big flap when Greg tried an “end around”
something that I and every other editor worth her or his salt have tried as
well and have somebody else, here commentator and my old high school friend
Frank Jackman, act as general introducer of The
Roots Is The Toots rock and roll
coming of age series that I believe is one of the best productions I have ever
worked on. That got writers, young and old, with me or against me, led by Sam
Lowell, another of my old high school friends, who had been the decisive vote
against me in the “vote of no confidence” which ended my regime up in arms. I
have forgiven Sam, and others, as I knew full well from the time I entered into
the business that at best it was a cutthroat survival of the fittest racket.
(Not only have I forgiven Sam but I am in his corner in his recent struggles
with young up and coming by-line writer Sarah Lemoyne who is being guided
through the shoals by another old high school friend Seth Garth as she attempts
to make her way up the film critic food chain, probably the most vicious
segment of the business where a thousand knives wait the unwary from so-called
fellow reviewers.) The upshot of that controversy was that Greg had to back off
and let me finish the introducing the series for which after all I had been
present at the creation.
That would have been the end of it
but once we successfully, and thankfully by Greg who gave me not only kudos
around the water cooler but a nice honorarium, concluded that series encore in
the early summer of 2018 he found another way to cut me. Going through the
archives of this publication to try to stabilize the readership after doing
some “holy goof” stuff like having serious writers, young and old, reviewing
films based on comic book characters, the latest in video games and graphic
novels with no success forgetting the cardinal rule of the post-Internet world
that the younger set get their information from other sources than old line
academic- driven websites and don’t read beyond their techie tools Greg found
another series, the one highlighted here, that intrigued him for an encore
presentation. This is where Greg proved only too human since he once again
attempted an “end around,” by having Josh Breslin, another old friend whom I
meet in the Summer of Love, 1967 out in San Francisco, introduce the series citing
my unavailability as the reason although paying attention to the fact that I had
sweated bullets over that one as well.
This time though the Editorial
Board, now headed by Sam Lowell, intervened even before Greg could approach
Josh for the assignment. This Ed Board was instituted after my departure to
insure the operation would not descend, Sam’s word actually, into the so-called
autocratic one-person rule that had been the norm under my regime. They told
Greg to call me back in on the encore project or to forget it. I would not have
put up with such a suggestion from an overriding Ed Board and would have
willingly bowed out if anybody had tried to undermine me that way. I can
understand fully Greg’s desire to cast me to the deeps, have done with me as in
my time I did as well knowing others in the food chain would see this as their
opportunity to move up.
That part I had no problem with,
told Greg exactly that. What bothered me was the continuing “urban legend”
about what I had done, where I had gone after that decisive vote of no
confidence. Greg continued, may continue today, to fuel the rumors that not only
after my initial demise but after finishing up the Roots Is The Toots series I had gone back out West to Utah of all
places to work for the Mormons, or to Frisco to hook up with my old flame
Madame La Rue running that high-end whorehouse I had staked her to in the old
days, or was running around with another old high school pal, Miss Judy
Garland, aka Timmy Riley the high priestess of the drag queen set out in that
same town whom I also helped stake to
his high-end tourist attraction cabaret. All nonsense, I was working on
my memoir up in Maine, up in Olde Saco where Josh grew up and which I fell in
love with when he first showed me his hometown and its ocean views.
If the reader can bear the weight of
this final reckoning let me clear the air on all three subjects on the
so-called Western trail. Before that though I admit, admit freely that despite
all the money I have made, editing, doing a million pieces under various
aliases and monikers, ballooning up 3000 word articles to 10,000 and having the
publishers fully pay despite the need for editing for the latter in the days
before the Guild when you worked by the word, accepting articles which I
clearly knew were just ripped of the AP feed and sending them along as gold I
had no dough, none when I was dethroned. Reason, perfectly sane reason,
although maybe not, three ex-wives with alimony blues and a parcel of kids, a
brood if you like who were in thrall to the college tuition vultures.
Tapped out in the East for a lot of
reasons I did head west the first time looking for work. Landed in Utah when I
ran out of dough, and did, DID, try to get a job on the Salt Lake Star and would have had it too except two things somebody
there, some friend of Mitt Romney, heard I was looking for work and nixed the
whole thing once they read the articles I had written mocking Mitt and his
white underwear world as Massachusetts governor and 2012 presidential candidate.
So it was with bitter irony when I heard that Greg had retailed the
preposterous idea that I would now seek a job shilling for dear white undie
Mitt as press agent in his run for the open Utah United States Senate seat.
Here is where everybody should gasp though at the whole Utah fantasy-these
Mormons stick close together, probably ingrained in them from Joseph Smith
days, and don’t hire goddam atheists and radicals, don’t hire outside the
religion if they can help it. You probably had to have slept with one of Joseph
Smith’s or Brigham Young’s wives to even get one foot in the door. Done.
The helping Madame La Rue, real name
of no interest or need to mention,
running her high-end exclusive whorehouse out in Half Moon Bay at least
had some credence since I had staked her to some dough to get started after the
downfall of the 1960s sent her back to her real world, the world of a high
class hooker who was slumming with “hippies” for a while when it looked like our
dreams were going to be deterred in in the ebbtide. We had been hot and heavy
lovers, although never married except on some hazed drug-fogged concert night
when I think Josh Breslin “married” us and sent us on a “honeymoon” with a
fistful of cocaine. Down on dough I hit her up for some which she gave gladly,
said it was interest on the “loan: she never repaid and let me stay at her
place for a while until I had to move on. Done
The whole drag queen idea tells me
that whoever started this damn lie knew nothing about my growing up days and
had either seen me in The Totem, Timmy Riley’s aka Miss Judy Garland’s drinking
with a few drag queen who worked and drew the wrong conclusions or was out to
slander and libel me for some other nefarious reason. See Miss Judy Garland is
the very successful drag queen and gay man Timmy Riley from the old
neighborhood who fled to Frisco when he could no longer hide his sexual
identity and preferences. To our great shock since Timmy had been the out-front
gay-basher of our crowd, our working-class corner boy gay-bashing crowd. I had
lent, after getting religion rather late on the LGBTQ question, Timmy the money
to buy his first drag queen cabaret on Bay Street and Timmy was kind enough to
stake me to some money and a roof before I decided I had to head back East.
Done.
But enough about me. This is about two other working- class guys,
Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris, met along life’s road one from Carver about fifty
miles away from where Seth, Sam, Timmy and a bunch of other guys grew up and
learned the “normal” working-class ethos-and broke, tentatively at times, from
that same straitjacket and from Troy, New York. Funny Troy, Carver, North
Adamsville, and Josh’s old mill town Olde Saco all down-in-the-mouth working
class towns still produced in exceptional times a clot of guys who got caught
up in the turmoil of their times-and lived to tell the tale. I am proud to introduce
this encore presentation and will have plenty more to say about Sam and Ralph
in future segments.]
***********
Hard Times Come Again
No More -From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris
Series
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
As long as Sam Eaton
and Ralph Morris had known each other they never spent much time or effort
discussing their early lives, the events and happenstances of their coming of
age. Maybe it was because they shared many personal similarities. Like their
doggedness in pursuit when something important was on the line as it had been
when Sam had vowed to fight against the war in Vietnam after his best friend,
Jeff Mullins, who had been killed on the benighted battlefield there begged him
in letters home to tell people what was really going on if he did not get back
and Ralph having served in Vietnam had turned against the war that he had
fought and tried to stop it every way he knew how and both men now in their
sixties having put their lives on the line back then had stuck with the better
instincts of their natures and were still fighting the good fight against the
American government’s endless wars. Like their willingness to forgo life’s
simple pleasures in order to provide for their families, a trait they had
picked up from their own hard-working if distance fathers (they in turn if
truth be told, or if you asked the collective broods of Eaton and Morris kids,
courtesy respectively of two marriages and two divorces apiece, were
hard-working and distance as well, more than a couple of them mad as hell about
it too and the cause some periodic mutual estrangements). Like, to speak of the
negative side, to speak of the effects of their hard-scrabble existences and
the pull of other guys when they were young their delights in the small
larcenies of their high school corner boy existences in their respective
growing up towns in order to satisfy some hunger. Those “sins” (since both had been
brought up in the Roman Catholic religion, a religion known for categorizing
sins, great and small), made a close call, six, two and even, whether they
would succeed or wind up in some jail doing successive nickels and dimes in the
“life” (really not so small larcenies when one realizes that these were
burglaries of homes, one of which in Sam’s crowd had been committed with at
least one gun, if in the pocket, at least at the ready).
Maybe it was the
Catholic reticence to speak of personal matters, personal sexual manners with
another male (probably Catholic female too on that side but let’s stick to male
here) both having come up “old school” working-class Catholics when that meant
something before Vatican II in the 1960s when the “s” word was not used in
polite society, not used either, God no, from the pulpit (even when discussion
came up of the obligation to, unlike the bloody Protestants with their two
point three children, propagate the faith; have scads of children to bump up
the Catholic population of the world). Maybe closer to home, to domestic home
life, it was the “theory,” probably honored more in the breech that the
observance, of “not airing one’s dirty linen in public” drilled into them by
their respective maternal grandmothers, especially when the “s” word was
involved (certainly no parents gave the slightest clues on that subject
probably assuming that the birds and the bees story line would suffice and both
men learned like millions of their generation of ’68 kindred about sex on the
streets, most of it erroneous or damn right dangerous).
Maybe,
and this was probably closer to the core than the other possibilities, men of
their generation, men of the generation of ’68 as Sam, the more literary of the
two called their generation after the decisive year when all hell broke loose,
for good or evil, mostly evil, did not as a rule speak much about private
hurts, about personal issues unlike the subsequent generations who seemingly to
both men’s amazement (and occasional
chagrin) kept their lives as open books in a more confessional time. That
“generation of ’68” designation by the way picked up from the hard fact that
that seminal year of 1968, a year when the Tet offensive by the Viet Cong and
their allies put in shambles the lie that we (meaning the United States
government) was winning that vicious bloodstained honor-less war, to the
results in New Hampshire which caused Lyndon Baines Johnson, the sitting
President to run for cover down in Texas somewhere after being beaten like a
gong by a quirky Irish poet from the Midwest and a band of wayward troubadours
from all over, mainly the seething college campuses, to the death of the
post-racial society dream as advertised by the slain Doctor Martin Luther King,
to the barricade days in Paris where for once and all the limits of what
wayward students could do without substantial allies in bringing down a
reactionary government, to the death of the search for a “newer world” as
advertised by the slain Robert F. Kennedy, to the war-circus of the Democratic
National Convention in Chicago which put paid to any notion that any newer
world would come without the spilling of rivers of blood, to the election of
Richard Milhous Nixon which meant that we had seen the high side go under, that
the promise of the flamboyant 1960s was veering toward an ebb tide.
So the two men never
spoke of various romantic interests. Never spoke of little rendezvous or
trysts, never spoke of their two respective divorces much beyond recording the
facts of the disengagements, and the animosity of the settlements which made
nobody happy except the lawyers (although neither men were gripping since Sam’s
old corner boy leader Frankie Riley performed “miracles” to get both men out
from under the worse initial terms). Never spoke much about the difficulties of
fatherhood for men who were so driven by the “big picture” world around them
and, never spoke about the deep-seeded things that drove them both to
distraction. At least that stance was true in their younger days when they had
more than enough on their plates to try to keep the dwindling numbers committed
to an all-out fight against the American military behemoth that had in a
strange manner brought them together.
Maybe too it could
have been the way that they had “met,” that strange manner, a story that they
have endlessly repeated in one form or another and which had been told so many
times by Sam mostly in the old days in small alternative presses and magazines
and more recently in 1960s-related blogs that even they confessed that
everybody must be “bored” with the damn thing by now. So only the barest
outline will suffice here since their meeting is not particularly relevant to
the story except to help sort out this reticence about relationships business.
Sam, an active opponent of the Vietnam War, and Ralph an ex-soldier of that war
who had turned against the war after eighteen months of duty there and become
an anti-war activist in his turn with Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW)
after being discharged from the Army “met” in RFK Stadium in Washington on May
Day 1971 when they were down there with their respective groups trying to as
the slogan of the time went “shut down the government, if the government did
not shut down the war.”
For their ill-advised
efforts they and thousands of others were tear-gassed, billy-clubbed and sent
to the bastinado (ill-advised in that they did not have nearly enough people on
hand and were incredibly naïve about the ability and willingness of the
government to do any dirty deed to keep their power including herding masses of
protestors into closed holding areas to be forgotten if possible although Ralph
always had a sneaking suspicion the government would not have been unhappy
seeing those bodies floating face down in the Potomac). Sam and Ralph met on the
floor of the stadium and since they had several days to get acquainted were
drawn to each other by their working-class background, their budding politics,
and their mutual desire to “seek a newer world” as some old English poet once
said. And so they had stuck together, almost like blood brothers although no
silly ceremony was involved, stuck
politically mostly, through work in various peace organizations and ad hoc anti-war committees fighting the
good fight along with dwindling numbers of fellow activists for the past forty
plus years.
There were thick and
thin times along the way as Ralph stayed close to home in Troy, New York
working in his father’s high-precision electrical shop which he eventually took
over and had just recently passed on to his youngest son and Sam had stayed in
the Greater Boston area having grown up in Carver about thirty miles south of
Boston building up a printing business that he had started from scratch and
from which he in turn had just turned over to his more modern tech savvy print-imaging
son, Jeff. The pair would periodically take turns visiting each other sometimes
with families in tow, sometimes not and were always available to back each
other up when some anti-war or other progressive action needed additional warm
bodies in Boston, New York or when a national call came from Washington. Lately
now that they were both retired from the day to day operations of their
respective businesses and also now both after their last respective divorces “single”
they have had more time to visit each other.
It had been on
Ralph’s last visit to Sam who now resided in Cambridge that he tentatively
broached to him his interest in the genesis of a term Sam had always used,
“wanting habits” as in “I had my wanting habits on” when he was talking about
wanting some maybe attainable, maybe not but which caused some ache, some pain,
created some hole in him by not having the damn thing just in the way he said
it. Of course maybe Ralph had been “rum brave” that night since he had asked
the question while he and Sam were cutting up old touches at “Jack’s” in
Cambridge a few blocks from Sam’s place and were drinking high-shelf whisky at
the time. That high shelf whisky detail is important to the story if only by
inference since in their younger days when they were down on their luck or
times were tight they would drink low-shelf rotgut whisky or worst to get them
through some frost-bitten night. Now they could afford the booze from the
top-shelf behind Jimmy the bartender’s back. Of course as well since both men
had been attached to music since childhood the reason besides being close to
home that Sam liked to hang at Jack’s was that it had a jukebox stacked full of
old time tunes that you could not find otherwise outside of maybe Googling
YouTube these days.
The selection on the
juke when Ralph posed the question had been the Mississippi Sheiks’ Rent Day Blues, a personal favorite of
Sam’s, about how the narrator in the song had no chance in hell to make the
rent and the rent collector man was at the door. Ralph had mentioned to Sam
that at least his family had never had to worry about that problem, as tough as
money times were before his father landed some contracts to do electrical work
for the biggest concern in the area, General Electric. Ralph’s family had been
the epitome of 1950s “golden age” working-class attitudes buying into the Cold
War red scare every child under the desk in case the Russkies blow the big one,
the atomic bomb, keep the damn n----rs out of the neighborhood, get ahead but
not too far ahead and all the other aspects of that ethos but they also had
enough dough to not need to have every penny accounted for and begrudged. Sam
looked stunned for a moment as Ralph described his childhood existence and told
Ralph that while they were both working-class guys coming up that his family
lived much closer to the depths of society, closer to the place where the
working poor of Carver met the con men, rip-off artists, drifters, grifters, midnight
sifters and refuge of society, down in the projects, not a pretty place.
Ralph, at first,
could not see where Sam was going with the talk but then Sam let out some of
the details. See his father, Thornton, had been nothing but an uneducated
hillbilly from down in the coalmining country in Appalachia, Kentucky, had
worked the mines himself. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor he had jumped
in with both hands and feet as a Marine seeing action, seeing plenty of action
although Sam who had been off and on estranged from his family for many years
before they had passed away did not find this out until later after his father
died from an uncle, in all the big Pacific War battles they teach in high
school. Thornton never ever talked about his war that much but did say one time
when they were on speaking terms that between fighting the “Nips” (Thornton’s
term popular among American G.I.s who faced the Japanese on the islands) and
the coal barons he would take the former, the former gladly. Before Thornton
was demobilized he had been assigned to the big naval shipyard over in Hingham,
not far from Carver where his mother grew up. His mother, Delores, due to
wartime shortages of manpower had worked in the offices there. One USO dance
night they met, subsequently fell in love and were married and thereafter had a
brood of five boys close together. Maybe not a today story but not that
uncommon then.
But go back to that
part about Sam’s father’s heritage, about coal-mining country. Where the hell
in all the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was there room for a hard-working
coalminer, a coal miner’s son. Delores had made it clear she was not moving
down to the hills and hollows of Kentucky after one brief shocking humiliating
trip there to meet Thornton’s kin, his expression, and he had no feeling for
the place after being out in the big world so their fates hinged on Carver, or
Massachusetts anyway. They took a small apartment in the Tappan section of
Carver, the section on the edge of where the poor, the poor in Carver being the
“boggers,” those who worked the cranberry bogs in season that the town was
famous for, and the, what did Marx call them, the lumpen, the refuge of society
meet. As more boys came they doubled up on everything but there is no air to
breathe when seven people trample over each other in a small space. Moreover
Thornton in the throes of the 1950s “golden age of the American worker” got
left behind; was inevitably the last hired, first fired and was reduced to
whatever was left, including time served in the bogs ( a personal affront to
whatever dignities Delores had since she had been taught to despise the
“boggers” in her polite society home).
That hand-to-mouth
existence took its toll. At some point after repeatedly dodging the rent
collector man the Eaton family was evicted from their small private apartment and
they were reduced to the heap, the Carver public housing projects, the lowest
of the low and recognized by one and all as such. Here is where that view of
the world Sam assimilated got formed. The never having money, the battle of the
six nights straight of oatmeal for supper and no lunch (in those days before
the school lunch programs mercifully spared the worst of the hungers), some
days of nothing to eat but patience, the
passing down of the too larger-sized older brothers’ clothing bought by a
desperate mother at the Bargain Center and which had been out of fashion for
many a year (causing baiting by the non-projects classmates who lived up the
road about shanty Irish and worse, about being a “bogger’s” son).
While Sam was talking
he suddenly remembered, as an example of how tough things were, one time to
impress some girl, a non-projects girl, a daughter of a middle class
professional man he thought, he had cut up his pants to seem like a real farmer
at some school square dance and Delores beat him with a belt buckle screaming
how dare he ruin the only other pair of pants that he owned. And that was not
the only beating Sam took as Delores, who handled discipline, to spare the ever
weary hard-pressed Thornton, became overwhelmed with the care of five strapping
boys. And so Sam graduated to the “clip” at first to get some spare dough and
later those larcenies that almost got him into the county clink doing nickels
and dimes. After that spiel Sam buttoned up, would say no more as if to say
that if he did then he would be far too exposed to the glare of the world’s
eyes even if only Ralph’s.
Ralph, ever being
Ralph, thought for a couple of minutes about what Sam had disclosed and then
simply said-“Sam, you earned your ‘wanting habits,’ earned them the hard way. I
don’t need to know any more” Enough said.
