50 Years Gone The Father We Almost Knew One Jack Kerouac Out Of Merrimack River Nights-Searching For The Father We Never Knew-Scenes In Search Of The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- High Street Hank’s Ode To Railroad Bill, The Hobo King

50 Years Gone The Father We Almost Knew One Jack Kerouac Out Of Merrimack River Nights-Searching For The Father We Never Knew-Scenes In Search Of The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- High Street Hank’s Ode To Railroad Bill, The Hobo King

By Seth Garth, known as Charles River Blackie for no other reason that he can remember at least than he slept along those banks, the Cambridge side and some raggedy ass wino who tried to cut him under the Anderson Bridge one night called him that and it stuck. Those wino-zapped bums, piss leaky tramps and poet-king hoboes all gone to some graven spot long ago from drink, drug, or their own hubris which they never understood gone and the moniker too.  

Here is the way High Street Hank told the story one night, one 1979 November night,  as best I remember it, the story of the famous hobo king (real title, no kidding, they have their social gradations, hobo, tramp, bum royalty just like the rest of us), Railroad Bill, who even I had heard of  previously in some mist of time way, told the story one campfire cold sludge coffee stew broth boiling in the kettle night, one miserable hell foggy raw under the bridge Frisco town night, make that Golden Gate Bridge with friendly tress not concrete foreboding Bay where even rummies and long gone winos fear to trend, maybe a half dozen guys (Spokane Spike, Portland Phil, Graybeard Gary, and I forgot who else, me, then moving around under the moniker Charles River Blackie long gone now but then got me some cache around the Western hobo jungle camps courtesy of a guy named Echo Eddy who they all knew) gathered close around to keep warm against the Pacific squalls, and to share the bottle night (Thunderbird, what’s the price, forty twice, so somebody had dough, had been successful panhandling that afternoon down the Embarcadero, or had cadged it, otherwise Tokay was the cheapjack beverage of choice among winos of all social gradations),  yah, Hank told the Railroad Bill story, the story of a prince of the American road, of the long vanished race of master-less men.

[That master-less men now a long-gone tradition in immigrant hungry America from early on when half of England was exiled to these shores and not always for religious reasons. Many a man who had worn out his welcome in some dank county headed across the ocean either just before the law was ready to pounce or as a result of some grievous crime against the monarchy and faced with the hangman’s noose and exile chose the latter. But those were strange sorts of men (and some women) who unlike the religious brethren who had plans and dreams only wanted to keep on the move, keep heading westward in this country until there was no more west except water. The master-less men deserve their acknowledged places in the American creation and explosion but for now know that such men not all that long ago roamed freely by their terms and such types no longer do so replaced by stone-cold rummies and winos, maybe a few junkies but that is a tough road for them.]

Railroad Bill, real name Theodore Greene, from one of the branches of the Greene family that used to run, or thought they used to run, Albany, although like Hank  kept saying  don’t hold him to the truth of that real name of that late knight, first- class, of the road since these guys were clumsy with names, aliases, addresses, mail-drops and stuff like that, nine to five stuff that keep the rest of us going, and connected, when  he did some begging around looking for Bill’s roots after he passed on, not to inform any kin of his passing but just so  he would know that Bill wouldn’t wind up in some potter’s field nameless, numbered,  simple county-paid pine box, unadorned and un-remembered,  like a million other hoboes, tramps, bums, winos, con men, grifters, sifters, and midnight drifters  he had run into in his time, and with the idea that maybe too when old High Street Hank, (his road moniker, although  he used others like every guy on the road but that one stuck more often than not and after a while gained a certain privilege, a certain “sure, come on in and have some stew or a swig , brother,”  when uttered after some serious time in the jungles), passed on some roadie would  wonder, wonder, curious wonder,  big time and think big thoughts about his roots and about what he did, or did not, bullshit about, and maybe beg around a little to find out where he came from, or where he had been, but maybe too Railroad Bill the name Hank knew him by was just good enough and the rest was what Hank called his mind, the nine-to-five mind part of it, working overtime), now the late Railroad Bill,  always  laughed that he had never worked, and he never will (and now won’t), never had a steady job for more than a few days at a time and not many of them either (mainly washing dishes, pearl-diving he called it, some bracero hot sun work out in the California fields when he was high on some hot tamale dark-eyed mex dame, some senorita all dark and with Spanish dancing eyes and ready to take him around the world [ you figure it out] for a dollar and a quarter and couple of shots of tequila, and mex dope), never worked for a check (cash only, no deductions brother, or else, and Bill was big, and tough, tough enough to enforce that against almost any guy, sometimes guys), hell, never cashed a check ( a real check, although for a while he kited a few, and did some time for that little effort, a few months, maybe a year, guys were always a little shaky on their time after they got out and sometimes built it up a little to impress the new guys, up in Shawshank in Maine) and never, never had a master over him, the kiss of death for any self-respecting ‘bo (and he was a ‘bo, hobo in  the “class” structure of the railroad jungle, ahead of  tramps, bums, con men, grifters, and bottom-feeding midnight sifters). 

So Hank said this was to be  Railroad’s story, nah, sketch, or something like that, he said, a story would make you think it was just for entertainment, and this one was about times when honest men (sorry there wasn’t much room for women except whorehouses, slave tents, houses, and getting knocked around by “what the hell” angry men, sorry too) hit the road just to hit the road, and not to write talk-talk immense books about it, literature,  or get a feel for the great American night before heading back to academia and attend delicious cozy little conferences for the next fifty years about the plight of the master-less men, 20th century variety [or to write down told homey little sketches told by campfires about hobo kings after coming off the minute road either-SG]. A time when if you didn’t have what it takes, if you weren’t strong enough to shimmy yourself on some box car to ride the rails, if you weren’t fast enough to outrun some bull railroad cop with a billy club with your name on it, if you didn’t have enough sense god gave geese to “clip” the necessities for the day at some Woolworth’s  (more recently replaced by Wal-Mart and, frankly, easier to do now since nobody cares whether anybody “stole” some gabacho three for a dollar stuff, not the people who work there anyway unlike the child-like fawns who worked for fifty years and a good gold watch for Ma Woolworth), if your talk wasn’t smooth enough to make a few bucks to tide you over pan-handling (and cadge at least a  couple of packs of cigarettes so you didn’t have to constantly roll your own Bull Durham coffin nails), if  you couldn’t dream enough about some phantom  white dress Phoebe Snow to get you through those hard first women-less days, if  you didn’t have enough sense to latch on to some queen of the rails mutt to keep you company (and make “cute dog” hitchhike rides easier on the days when there were no rails in sight), then you would wind up with old Denver Slim (Railroad Bill’s first road brother), or a thousand other guys, buried early under some railroad trestle, down some deserted ravine, or beside some hollows hillside and nameless, nameless forever. And so he talked:    

Hank woke with a start that dreary late October 1976 night when he first ran into Bill, early morning really from the look of the lightened sky, last cold night, or so he thought to himself , before drifting south then heading west to warmer climes for “winter camp.” Yes, he had the routine down pretty pat back then after a few years of scuttling around just short of getting it right, getting away from the damn winter colds that shortened more than one frozen stiff’s life. Summering in the Cambridges away from the congestion of the big towns (downtown Boston and fetid Pine Street Inns or sanctimonious Sallies [Salvation Army] flops , ditto Frisco, ditto L.A., ditto  Chi town), and then wintering in the Keys (maybe Key Largo for the air but Key West if he needed hurry money, or in some Pancho Villa bandito arroyo near the border in desert California, or maybe higher up near Joshua Tree (where he had earlier, before his vagabond wandering days, holed up with a couple of mex senoritas with those sparkling eyes himself, some herb, and a couple of Phoebe Snows too, and with dough to go with the herb, when he rode the merry prankster yellow brick road bus back in the early 1970s). But just that minute that cold dreary morning minute his summer was interrupted by a loud sound of snoring and short breath coughing from some fellow resident who had parked himself about twenty feet from his exclusive turf.

Hell, Hank laughed, explaining to everyone around that campfire [like we were school boys and couldn’t figure it out by ourselves that he was trying to be funny about it] he didn’t mean to tease us about his itinerary he said (although the gist of schedule was real enough, damn real), or about his “mayfair swell” digs. The fact was that back then he had been in kind of a bad streak and so sweet home Eliot Bridge right next to the Charles River, but not too next to Harvard Square had been his “home” of late then while he prepared for those sunnier climes just mentioned. Those last few previous months have been tough for him though after trying to make a go of  it off the road [like a lot of road guys always try to do whether to beat up some bogus parole trap, beat some promise some family to do better trap, or just beat some road tired trap, except for the serious winos who would not know where to begin, wouldn’t want to begin, or even give it a thought] first losing that swell paying job “diving for pearls” at Elsie’s, the deli where all the Harvard Johns hung out for some real food after they got tired of the frat house/Lowell house fare, then losing his apartment when the landlord decided, legally decided, that six months arrears was all that he could take, and then losing Janie over some spat, and getting so mad he “took” a couple of hundred dollars from her pocketbook as he went out the not-coming-back door that last time. So there he was at “home” waiting it out. But that was his story not Bill’s and so he moved on.

He had a pretty good set-up under the bridge, he thought. Far enough away from the Square so that the druggies and drunks wouldn’t dream of seeking shelter so far from their base. But close enough for him to try to panhandle a stake to head west with in rich folks Harvard Square (although apparently the rich those days preferred to tithe in other ways than to part with their spare change to, uh, itinerants since he was having a rough time getting the bread together). And, moreover, the bridge provided some protection against the chilly elements, and a stray nosey cop or two ready to run a stray itinerant in order to fill his or her quota on the run-in sheet.   

All that precious planning had gone for naught though because some snoring be-draggled newspaper- strewn hobo had enough courage to head a few hundred yards upriver and disturb his home.  There and then he decided he had better see what the guy looked like, see if he was dangerous, and see if he could get the hobo the hell out of there so he could get back to sleep for a couple more hours before the damn work-a-day world traffic made that spot too noisy to sleep in. Besides, as is the nature of such things on the down and out American road (and in other less exotic locales as well), the hobo might have other companions just ready to put down stakes there before he was ready to head west.

He unfolded his own newspaper covering, folded up his extra shirt pillow and put it in his make-shift ruck-sack, and rolled (rolled for the umpteenth time) his ground covering and placed it next to his ruck-sack.  No morning ablutions to brighten breath and face were necessary that early, not in that zip code, he was thus ready for guests. He ambled over to the newspaper pile where the snoring had come from and tapped the papers with a stick that he had picked up along the way (never, never use your hand or you might lose your life if the rustling newspaper causes an unseen knife-hand to cut you six ways to Sunday. Don’t laugh it almost happened to him once, and only once.).

The hobo stirred, stirred again, and then opened his eyes saying “Howdy, my name is Boulder Shorty, what’s yours?” (A rule of the road in strange country was never to give your real moniker straight out but maybe some old time one and for Bill Boulder Shorty was just such a thing from when he first headed out with Denver Slim his first road companion.  Bill later told Hank that he had never been to Boulder, nor Denver Slim to Denver, could not have picked it out on a map if he was given ten chances, and was six feet two inches tall and about two-eighty so go figure on monikers. The way they got hanged on a guy was always good for a story in some desolate railroad fireside camp before Hank got wise enough to stay away from those sites, far away.) He told Bill his, his road moniker, his real road moniker at the time not having been out on the road long enough to get wise to the protective switch-up then, “Be-Bop Benny.” Bill laughed, muttering about beatniks and faux kid hobos in thrall of some Jack London call of wild down and out story or some on the road Jack Kerouac or something vision between short, violent coughs. Funny Bill’s bringing up that last name because Hank, having had a couple of years of junior college on the G.I Bill after ‘Nam, 1968-70,  had gone to the library when he first headed out on the road back in the early 1970s after things first fell apart to read Kerouac’s On The Road and a couple of other books whose names he had forgotten to see if he could pick up any hobo tips, no sale, not for real hoboing, just book hoboing.         

Funny too about different tramps, hobos, and bums (and there are differences, recognized differences just like in regular society). Hank and he, Boulder Shorty, turned real moniker Railroad Bill once he knew Hank was no danger to him after sizing up Hank as a raw kid, and after showing that raw kid a little later when they visited a railroad jungle set up near the abandoned Revere railroad tracks what happens when a six-two wiry guy who had been through it all chain-whipped a guy who was trying to steal his bottle of Muscatel, or whom he thought was trying to steal it, same thing, one campfire night, were hobos, the kings of the river, ravine, and railroad trestle.  Some start out gruff, tough and mean, street hard mean. Others like Bill, kings, just go with the flow. And that go with the flow for a little while anyway (a little while being very long in hobo company) kept Bill and Hank together for a while, several weeks while before that short violent cough caught up with old Railroad (you didn’t have to know medicine, or much else, to know that was the small echo of the death-rattle coming up).  

In those few weeks Railroad Bill taught Hank more about ‘bo-ing, more about natural things, more about how to take life one day at a time than anybody else, his long- gone father included. About staying away from bums and tramps, the guys who talked all day about this and that scan they pulled off in about 1958 and hadn’t gotten over it yet. About how they slipped a couple of shirts under their sweaters or something and walked right out of Goodwill and nobody stopped them. Or about how some padre bought their story about being far from home and a little tough on the luck side and gave them a fiver. Or about how they ponzi’d some scheme and netted about sixteen dollars and change one time. All about 1958, like he said, and a river of dreams, sorrows and booze ago.

[And as if to show the “class” distinction more clearly Hank went into an aside about how Railroad showed him how to hustle for serious dough from the padres (private social service agencies like the Sallys, U-Us, Universalist-Unitarians joined together under one god, and the Catholic Worker-type outfits), fifty buck dough, just by being not too dressed up but clean, and maybe having showered recently, and having a line of patter. Not too strong, not like you overplay you are scamming them (winos need not apply for this high-wire act just keep that empty donation coffee cup out in front of themselves), and they know it too, but with a plausible plan to present to get you “back on your feet” with their little help. Hank said he would tell us about the details sometime, he never did, but he got fifty easy dollars, cash money, thanks to Railroad’s advice. A couple of times, no, maybe a dozen although more than fifty or you would cause a panic in the organization’s treasury.]           

Bill told him about guys who took your money, your clothes, hell, and your newspaper covering in the dead of night just to do it, especially to young hobo kings. And about staying alone, staying away from the railroad, river, ravine camps that everybody talked about being the last refuge for the wayward but were just full of disease, drunks and dips. (He let Railroad  talk on about that although that was one thing he was already hip to, a river camp was where he almost got his throat handed back to him by some quick- knife tramp that he had mentioned before when he talked about disturbing guys while they were newspaper roll sleeping ).  

Yes, Railroad Bill had some street smart wisdom for a guy who couldn’t have been past forty, at least that’s what Hank figured from the times he gave in his stories. (Don’t try to judge a guy on the road’s age because between the drugs or booze, the bad food, the weather-beaten road, and about six other miseries most guys looked, and acted, like they were about twenty years older. Even Hank, before a shower to take a few days dirt off and maybe hadn’t eaten for a while, looked older than his thirty-something years then.) But most of all it was the little tricks of the road that Railroad taught and showed him that held him to the man.

Like right off how Hank’s approach, his poor boy hat in hand approach, was all wrong in working the Harvard Square panhandle. You had to get in their faces, shout stuff at them, and block their passage so that the couple of bucks they practically threw at you were far easier to give than have you in their faces. Christ, Railroad, complete with unfeigned cough, collected about twenty bucks in an hour one day, one day when he was coughing pretty badly. And a ton of cigarettes, good cigarettes too, that he asked for when some guys (and a few gals) pled no dough. It was art, true art that day. Railroad said one girl wanted to take him home, said she wanted to feed him and help him out, implying some big sex wet dream thing out of some mex senorita sparkling eyes past.  But Hank just let it go as so much hobo hot air and bravado.  Still next time out pan-handling Hank made about twelve bucks, a ton of smokes, a joint and some girl went into Cardillo’s and brought him out a sandwich and coffee. Beautiful.  

Or Railroad told him about how a hobo king need never go hungry in any city once he had the Sallies, U/U good and kindly neighbor feeding schedule down. No so much those places, any bum or tramp could figure that out, and wait in line, but to “volunteer” and get to know the people running the thing and get invited to their houses as sturdy yeoman “reclamation” projects. A vacation, see. Best of all as Hank had said before was him showing how to work the social service agencies for ten here, and twenty there, as long as you could hold the line of patter straight and not oversell your misery when the struggle for fifty bucks was too much in your time of sorrows. Hank laughed his good-natured laugh and repeated that -Tramps and bums need not apply for this kind of hustle, go back and jiggle your coffee cup in front of some subway station, and good luck. (When a guy was on his tall tale, maybe a little drunk, worse if he thinking about some Phoebe Snow he would repeat himself but nobody, if the guy had a grasp for his audience took umbrage and interrupt-they would either drift off or fall asleep.)           

[Railroad also taught him the ins and outs of jack-rolling, what you would call mugging, if things got really bad. Jack-rolling guys, bigger and smaller than you but Hank said he‘d rather keep that knowledge to himself especially when the guys around the campfire started looking mean-eyed at him.]

Funny they never talked about women, although he tried once to talk to Railroad about Janie. Railroad cut him short, not out of disrespect he didn’t think, but he said they were all Janie in the end. He said talking about women was too tough for guys on the road with nothing but drifter, grifter, midnight sifter guys to stare at. Or looking too close at women when on the bum was bad for those longings for home things when you couldn’t do anything about it anyway. Although he did let on once that he was partial to truck stop road-side diner waitresses serving them off the arm when he was in the clover (had dough) and was washed up enough to present himself at some stop along the road. Especially the ones who piled the potatoes extra high or double scooped the bread pudding as acts of kindred kindness. One night near the end, maybe a week before, time is hard to remember on the meshed together bum, Railroad started muttering about some Phoebe Snow, some gal all dressed in white, and he kind of smiled, and then the coughing started again.

[Phoebe Snow according to the late hobo king and folksinger Utah Phillips who wrote a song about the situation was “real,” real as anything gets on the winding road. In the very old days when railroads were a hazard to life and limb-and dirty from the freaking coal dust the lure in advertising was to have some beautiful virginal young woman in clean clothes dying to get on the trains. Those ads on the sides of boxcars are what later sustained many a travelling man’s dreams of some earlier Phoebe in his life. No one put any man down for such sentiments, no one.] 

Hank tried to get Railroad moving south with him (and had delayed his own departure to stick with him for as long as he figured he could get south before the snows hit) but Bill knew, knew deep in his bones, that his time was short, that he wanted to finish up in Boston (not for any special reason, he was from Albany, but just because he was tired of moving) and was glad of young hobo company.

It was funny about how he found out about Railroad’s Albany roots. One night, a couple of nights before the end, coughing like crazy, he seemingly had to prove to Hank that he was from Albany. Bill had mentioned that he was mad for William Kennedy’s novels, Ironweed and the like, that had just come out a couple of years before. He went on and on about the Phelans this and that. Jesus he knew the books better than Hank did. He said that is what made hobos the intelligentsia of the road. Some old Wobblie folksinger told him that once when they were heading west riding the rails on the Denver & Rio Grande. [The same Utah Phillips of the Phoebe Snow story. When holed up in some godforsaken library to get out of the weather hobos read rather than just get curled up on some stuffed chair. Yes, Railroad was a piece of work. He was always saying stuff like that.

Then one morning, one too cold Eliot Bridge morning, he tried to shake Bill’s his newspaper kingdom and got no response. Old Bill had taken his last ride, his last train smoke and dreams ride he called it. Most guys would say somebody had “flagged the westbound train” but Bill had his own expressions, and Hank too. He left him there like Bill wanted him to do and like was necessary on the hobo road. He made a forlorn anonymous call to the Cambridge cops on his way out of town. But after that on those few occasions when High Street Hank passed some potter’s field he tipped his fingers to his head in Railroad Bill’s memory, his one less hobo king memory.

A Hobo’s Lament

Only A Hobo by Bob Dylan

Lyrics

As I was out walking on a corner one day

I spied an old hobo, in a doorway he lay

His face was all grounded in the cold sidewalk floor

And I guess he’d been there for the whole night or more

Only a hobo, but one more is gone

Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song

Leavin’ nobody to carry him home

Only a hobo, but one more is gone

A blanket of newspaper covered his head

As the curb was his pillow, the street was his bed

One look at his face showed the hard road he’d come

And a fistful of coins showed the money he bummed

Only a hobo, but one more is gone

Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song

Leavin’ nobody to carry him home

Only a hobo, but one more is gone

Does it take much of a man to see his whole life go down

To look up on the world from a hole in the ground

To wait for your future like a horse that’s gone lame

To lie in the gutter and die with no name?

Only a hobo, but one more is gone

Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song

Leavin’ nobody to carry him home

Only a hobo, but one more is gone

Copyright © 1963, 1968 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1996 by Special Rider Music

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A Writer’s Tale-Vincente Minnelli’s Film Adaptation Of James Jones’ “Some Came Running” (1958)-A Film Review

A Writer’s Tale-Vincente Minnelli’s Film Adaptation Of James Jones’ “Some Came Running” (1958)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Josh Breslin  

Some Came Running, starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Martha Hyer, directed by Vincente Minelli, adapted from the novel by James Jones, 1958  

No question I was first drawn to Some Came Running, a film based on the novel of the same name by James Jones whose more famous novel Here To Eternity also was adapted to the screen and stands as one of the great classic films of the modern cinema, by the ex-soldier’s story and then by his plight as a blocked writer. The draw of the ex-soldier’s story reflected something that had been in my own experience about coming back to the “real” world after the military. That seems to be the character played by Frank Sinatra Dave Hirsh’s situation. That inability to go to the nine to five routine, to settle down after military service had shaken him out of his routine rang a bell. In my own military service generation, in my own service, I ran across plenty of guys who couldn’t deal with the “real” world coming back from Vietnam and who tried to hide from that fact as “brothers under the bridges” alternate communities out in places like Southern California. I see and hear about young Iraq and Afghanistan War service personnel having the same woes and worse, having incredibly high suicide rates. So yeah, I was drawn to Dave’s sulky, moody, misshapen view of the world.           

The story line is a beauty. Dave, after a drunk spree, finds he was shipped by bus back in that state by some guys in Chicago to his Podunk hometown in Parkman, Indiana, a town he had fled with all deliberate speed when he was a kid orphaned out by his social-climbing older brother Frank because, well, because he was in the way of that social-climb after their parents die. Dave was not alone in his travels though since he had picked up, or had been attached to, a floozy named Ginny, played by Shirley MacLaine, who will make life hell for him in the end. As he became accustomed to his old hometown and while deciding whether to stay or pick up stakes (the preferred fate of his brother and his also social-climbing wife) he was introduced to a local school teacher Gwen, played by Martha Hyer, who will also make hell for him in the end since he was quickly and madly in love with her but she was seriously stand-offish almost old maid stand-offish since she had had a few tastes of his rough-hewn low life doings. Doings which were encouraged by a gambler, Bama, played by Dean Martin who became his sidekick.        

But here is the hook that almost saved Dave and almost lit a spark under dear Gwen. Dave was a blocked writer, had some time before written a couple of books that were published and had gathered some acclaim, were well written. Gwen attempted to act as his muse, and did prove instrumental in getting a work of his published. To no avail since Dave was not looking for a muse, well, not a muse who wasn’t thinking about getting under the silky sheets. No go, no go despite Dave’s ardent efforts. Frustrated Dave turned to Ginny and whatever charms she had-and the fact that she loved him unconditionally despite their social and intellectual differences. In the end Dave in a fit of hubris decided to marry Ginny after being rebuffed by Gwen enough times. The problem though was that Ginny had a hang-on gangster guy trailing her who was making threatening noises about putting Dave, and or Ginny underground. In the end they were not just threatening noises as he wounded Dave and killed poor bedraggled Ginny.

Watch this one-more than once and read James Jones’ book too which includes additional chapters about those soldiers who could not relate to the “real” world after their military experiences. This guy could write sure write about that milieu based on his own military service. (There is a famous photograph of Jones, Norman Mailer, and William Styron, the three great soldier boy American literary lights of the immediate post-World War II war period with Jones in uniform if I recall.)                

The Wrong Place At The Wrong Time- Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

The Man Who Knew Too Much, starring James Stewart, Doris Day, directed again (first time 1934) by Sir Alfred Hitchcock, 1956   

People, historians, especially counter-historians, often speculate if one little fact was changed then history would have taken a decisive turn the other way. You know stuff like if Hitler had been killed at the beer garden in Munich in 1923 or if Lenin could not have gotten back to Russia in the spring of 1917 on that German pass through train. That idea runs to the personal side of life as well, sometimes with strange results like being in the wrong place at the wrong time as happened with the protagonists in the late Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s off-beat remake of his 1934 classic The Man Who Knew Too Much. So just like with great historical figures and events we can play the same game here what if Ben, played by Jimmy Stewart, Jo played by the late Doris Day in a switch up role from that of the virginal but approachable girl next door in the 1950s Cold War night when such things played a little better and their young son had not been in heading from Casablanca (wondering if they went to meet Rich, of Rich’s Cafe and Louie in their perfect friends boudoir after shuffling off Ilsa on poor Victor Lazlo who only got in the way, in the way of Victor and Rick and Lou) to Marrakesh (don’t forget theta the dope capital of the world with Doris the perfect mule if necessary) on some dusty woe begotten bus and run into a French intelligence agent whose dying words talked of an assassination plot against a big shot foreign dignity in bloody England.      

But, of course, they were and the chase was on from there ruining a perfectly respectable little family vacation and putting Ben and Jo on the edge-to speak nothing of their son who will eventually be kidnapped just because Ma and Pa knew too freaking much. Once the conspirators know they know that young son’s life isn’t worth much, maybe. He is kidnapped to insure Ben and Jo’s silence. But they trace the party to London where the action gets hot and heavy and the conspiracy to kill the foreign big wigs in full gear. Except through keen analysis and some luck Ben and Jo figure out that the plot is going to be hatched, that dignitary is going to be killed while attending a symphony concert at Royal Albert Hall (where else). The long and short of it is that Ben and Jo discover where the kidnappers have taken their son, they struggle to get to him and eventually find out about the Royal Albert caper. They are able to foil the plot by a timely scream from Jo who sights the paid assassin as he attempts his dastardly work. After much ado their son is recovered and they can go on about their average American family life.

But let’s say that big wig was killed maybe there would have been another Sarajevo, 1914. There’s a little history in the conditional for you. See this one it is better that the 1934 version which as Hitchcock himself is quoted as saying was the work of an inspired amateur and the 1956 was done by a master artist, a pro. And that is right.  

Murder, She Wrote-“Shadow Of A Doubt” (1935)-A Film Review

Murder, She Wrote-“Shadow Of A Doubt” (1935)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Si Lannon

Shadow of a Doubt, Richard Cortez, Virginia Bruce, Constance Collier as the personification of Dame May Whitty, 1935

One of the great things I learned from Sam Lowell the now retired former head of the film review operations here (and before that at American Film Gazette) was that murder was too hard a subject to solve to be left to the public coppers. The “publics” who would merely place the hard cases in the “cold files” and move on waiting for somebody, some day to have pangs of conscience and come to the station house dripping in sweat to confess to the heinous crime and with a little “persuasion,” you know the third degree, the bright lights stuff that was supposed to go out with much shredded Miranda and wrap up whatever else was in the files. That seems like a good lesson to have passed on to me. But Sam also taught me (and others) that murder investigations were too hard a subject to be left to amateur parlor pink private detectives either. These reprobates have been skewered many times in this publication by Sam and others and on this occasion in reviewing this film Shadow of Doubt (not Shadow of a Doubt the classic Hitchcock vehicle starring mad monk crazed maniac Joseph Cotton although the same Lowell principle applies there as well) I will take a stab at it as well.  

Sam came of age watching private detective classics Saturday matinee double features back in the 1950s starring guys like Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in the film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s beautiful The Maltese Falcon. In that one all a serious private detective like Sam aside from a fistful of solved murders committed by a gun-simple Sue whom he had to send over or he would have been in the hot seat himself was stiffed by for a retainer although he might have gotten a little something in trade from the frill so not all was lost. Or guys like the aforementioned Bogart and fellow actors Dick Powell and Robert Mitchum playing fast and loose with trigger-happy wild women, bad guy gangsters and other assorted maniacs as Raymond Chandler’s hard-nosed private eye Phillip Marlowe. One night when we were talking over shots of whiskey Sam told me that even serious private dicks like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe had shockingly low rates of successful solutions to hard-edged murder cases.     

Then we come to this little oddly interesting film where, in a throwback to pre-hardnosed private detective times ushered in by Hammett and Chandler, a New York blueblood, a Knickerbocker, a Mayfair swell old maid, a parlor pink amateur detective, wrapped up a fistful of cases without working up a sweat. And dangling the clueless public coppers on her keychain. Listen up as you will really have to suspend disbelief on this one. This nephew of the Mayfair swell dowager Sim, played by Richard Cortez, is head over heels for some bleach-blonde weepy Hollywood actress, Trenna, played by Virginia Bruce, who has been on a downward path career-wise but whom he still wants to make an honest woman out, to marry if it came to that. Problem, big problem, since she is holding the keys to the kingdom, holding the serious dough which she thinks Trenna is after now that she is on the slide, is that his headstrong aunt Millie, played by ancient Constance Collier doing the ghost of Dame May Whitty, does not like her. Will throw Sim to the wolves if he marries her.

That’s the starter but follow the bouncing ball please. Trenna, who still thinks she has talent, doesn’t want to marry Sim once he “disses” her about the downward spiral career and decides to make a play for another guy who she thinks can jump start her career. Problem is that guy is tied up, is supposed to marry some Mayfair swell debutante and she nixed the whole deal. There is a confrontation between Sim and that guy, Len something, at some swanking nightclub where a one song Janie torch singer named Johnny is entertaining the upper crust with the song, you guessed it, Shadow of Doubt. She also has a boyfriend, Ryan, a reporter of some sort, who is jealous as hell of that Len.

Are you still following? This no good Len, drunk, suddenly winds up dead, murdered and since the gun used is registered to Trenna she is getting the third degree from the public coppers for the murder. Which makes Auntie very happy and Sim very unhappy. Sim, with Johnny torch-singer boyfriend Ryan in tow, tries to clear Trenna. He is aided immensely by Auntie who after a visit to Trenna is finally convinced that she is innocent. The old battle axe then attempts to move heaven and hell to clear dear Trenna’s name. Especially since the public coppers are seriously looking for her after the very dead Len’s butler had been murdered after trying to contact Trenna about the real murderer. Not to worry, that gun, that murder weapon, had been stolen by Trenna’s butler (you know the old gag the butler did it) and sold it to a party unknown. Well not unknown when Auntie, who hadn’t been out of the house for twenty years still mourning her fateful decision not to marry some fellow Mayfair swell when she could, wraps this one up with a ribbon by faking, or rather having her own faithful and much put upon butler, act as Trenna’s ex-butler who is ready to spill the beans about who bought the gun. Turns out that jealous Ryan was kill-crazy to keep his Johnny cakes and did the nasty deeds. Auntie wrapped this up no problem. The only part that rings true here is that this case, this murder case, was too serious to be left to the whims of the public coppers. Enough said.                

“To Be Young Was Very Heaven”-With The 50^th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love, 1967” In Mind-Frankie Riley's Story

Revised Introduction by Zack James

[I was about a decade or so too young to have been washed, washed clean to hear guys like Peter Paul Markin, more on him below, tell the tale, by the huge counter-cultural explosion that burst upon the land (and by extension and a million youth culture ties internationally before the bubble burst) in the mid to late 1960s and maybe extending a few year into the 1970s depending on whose ebb tide event you adhere to. (Markin’s for very personal reasons having to do with participating in the events on May Day 1971 when the most radical forces tried to stop the Vietnam War by shutting down the government and got kicked in the teeth for their efforts. Doctor Gonzo, the late writer Hunter Thompson who was knee-deep in the experiences called it 1968 around the Democratic Party convention disaster in Chicago. I, reviewing the material published on the subject mostly and on the very fringe of what was what back then would argue for 1969 between Altamont and the Days of Rage everything looked bleak then and after.)

Over the next fifty years that explosion has been inspected, selected, dissected, inflected, infected and detected by every social science academic who had the stamina to hold up under the pressure and even by politicians, mostly to put the curse of “bad example” and “never again” on the outlier experimentation that went on in those days. Plenty has been written about the sea-change in mores among the young attributed to the breakdown of the Cold War red scare freeze, the righteous black civil rights struggles rights early in the decade and the forsaken huge anti-Vietnam War movement later. Part of the mix too and my oldest brother Alex, one of Markin’s fellow corner boys from the old neighborhood is a prime example, was just as reaction like in many generations coming of age, just the tweaking of the older generations inured to change by the Cold War red scare psychosis they bought into. The event being celebrated or at least reflected on in this series under the headline “To Be Very Young-With The Summer of Love 1967 In Mind” now turned fifty was by many accounts a pivotal point in that explosion especially among the kids from out in the hinterlands, like Markin an Alex, away from elite colleges and anything goes urban centers.   The kids, who as later analysis would show, were caught up one way or another in the Vietnam War, were scheduled to fight the damn thing, the young men anyway, and were beginning, late beginning, to break hard from the well-established norms from whence they came in reaction to that dread.

This series came about because my already mentioned oldest brother, Alex James, had in the spring of 2017 taken a trip to San Francisco on business and noticed on a passing Muni bus that the famed deYoung Museum located in the heart of Golden Gate Park, a central location for the activities of the Summer of Love as it exploded on the scene in that town, was holding an exhibition about that whole experience. That jarred many a half forgotten memory in Alex’s head. Alex and his “corner boys” back in the day from the old Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville, a suburb of Boston where we all came of age, had gotten their immersion into counter-cultural activities by going to San Francisco in the wake of that summer of 1967 to “see what it was all about.”

When Alex got back from his business trip he gathered the few “corner boys” still standing, Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the corner boys, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Ralph Kelly, and Josh Breslin (not an actual North Adamsville corner boy but a corner boy nevertheless from Olde Sacco up in Maine whom the tribe “adopted” as one of their own) at Jimmy’s Grille in North Adamsville, their still favorite drinking hole as they call it, to tell what he had seen in Frisco town and to reminisce. From that first “discussion” they decided to “commission” me as the writer for a small book of reflections by the group to be attached alongside a number of sketches I had done previously based on their experiences in the old neighborhood and in the world related to those times. So I interviewed the crew, wrote or rather compiled the notes used in the sketches below but believe this task was mostly my doing the physical writing and getting the hell out of the way once they got going. This slender book is dedicated to the memory of the guy who got them all on the road west-Peter Paul Markin whom I don’t have to mention more about here for he, his still present “ghost” will be amply discussed below. Zack James]              

To the memory of the late Peter Paul Markin on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary year of the Summer of Love, San Francisco, 1967

[Although this small tribute book is dedicated to the memory of Peter Paul Markin from the corner boys days of the old Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville and will have contributions from all the surviving member of that tribe there are other corner boys who have passed away, a couple early on in that bloody hell called Vietnam, Ricky Russo and Ralph Morse, RIP brothers, you did good in a bad war, Allan Jackson, Allan Stein, “Bugger” Shea and Markin’s old comrade, Billy Bradley. You guys RIP too.]          

By Francis Xavier Riley (Frankie)

Markin was a piece of work. If not one of kind then close to it and I can still say that some sixty years since we first met. Met in seventh grade in junior high school at the old North Adamsville Junior High. I had been recognized as the leader of a bunch of guys who hung around the traditional junior high hangout, Doc’ Drugstore, which had the added attraction of being not only a place where the ill and lame got their cures but had a soda fountain attached to a jukebox. A jukebox that got all kinds of play from the young bud girls that were throwing their dimes and quarters into to hear their latest for the minute heartthrob. So you mostly know why we hung around that spot just as our older brothers did and maybe some of the fathers even before that.

Markin had come over from across town, from the Brook Meadows Junior High a couple of months into the school year so he already had one strike against him since by then all the social and personal relationships which would last through high school and beyond (beyond in our case enough to have been around when Markin came making his clarion call to head west and see what the emerging “youth nation” was all about in the Frisco Summer of Love). Moreover he was even then kind of a nerdy guy, you know, always spouting odd-ball facts and figure like we gave rat’s ass about any of it. (That “rat’s ass” which I haven’t said in years maybe since Markin’s time was the “in” word we used to fluff off anything that was not important to us-important being mostly girls, cars and how to get money to deal with either, or both.)

His idea, once we became friends and he would confide in me some of his feelings, not a lot, that wasn’t our style, the style, then that the reason he became a wizard at certain things was because he had maybe read that knowing such stuff, like who was who in folk music when that stuck his fancy also something that then the rest of us could have given a rat’s ass about, was the way to meet interesting girls. Or then any girls once his hormonal urges got into overdrive. I would tell you more about Markin’s theory and the reality of his junior high and high school love life such as it was except this is about the Summer of Love where his approach was something like pure magic when he and the young women were stoned, you know high as kites on the drug of the day. On the West Coast they flocked around him like acolytes-and he took full advantage of that luck.

Another strike, and maybe the definitive one once Markin said he had thought about it later, was that he had come from the even then notorious Adamsville “projects,” public assistance housing. Between the large family, four siblings along with him and his father’s lack of education that was where the family was thrown helter-skelter in his early years. Years that formed the hard edge as he said of that “from hunger” feeling that drove a lot of the seamier side of his personality. Strangely most of us in the Acre section of North Adamsville were in some cases poorer, or at least as poor, as Markin’s family but that “projects” albatross designation hanging around his neck in the small one family houses or at worst a double-decker apartment in the Acre caused him some isolation before we became friends. (My mother when things were tough in our family or when one of us went off the rails would spring the “wind up in the projects” on us to try to make us behave which worked when we were younger but was like water off a duck’s back later.) Funny thought when I thought about it later myself we all had that “from hunger” edge, and acted on it. Some of us grew out of it, some didn’t. Markin never had a fighting chance to test that out either way.

So Markin and I met in seventh grade and after a few disputes we became friends and would stay that way for as long as he was in contact with any of us, when he was alive although Josh Breslin who will tell his own story about Markin not I was the last to see him before the fateful drug trip down to Mexico. I could tell lots of things about Markin but what is important for this piece is that he and his odd-ball facts and figures drove him to the conclusion starting I think in tenth grade that there was a “new breeze coming through the land” or that was his idea that he would periodically pound into us on a stray Friday or Saturday hanging out night when other prospects had petered out. Again the rest of us could have given a rat’s ass about it until much later, later when it was obvious even to the socially dumbest of us that indeed a new breeze was in the air. How Markin, a guy from nowhere in the social firmament, from a hick town to boot knew what he sensed is beyond me all I know is until 1967 every time he would begin his rant I would close my ears, close them tight.   

I was shocked, we all were shocked, when Markin told us one day in the spring of 1967 that he was dropping out of school, out of Boston University, where he had a scholarship and maybe some financial aid. All I know is that his family not matter what the tuition had no money, none, to send him, the first in his family to go to college, there. Even in my own case where I went to a branch of State U later my parents were hard-pressed to find some spare dough to send me and I had to work as well all through school. The idea he presented to us was that from what he had heard about what was happening out West that the time of the new breeze had come and he was going to what he called “find” himself.(Of course as Alex James has already mentioned in his introductory piece that fateful decision which sounded good in the short haul especially when we imbibed some weed a habit which Markin had begun to indulge in at college along with about half our generation and introduced us to wound up in the long haul not so good. I won’t repeat here what Alex has said but Markin eventually wound up getting drafted since he had lost his student deferment, getting his ass into Vietnam, and afterward, after coming back to the “real” world he called it, the trip down the slippery slope. The ultimate “from hunger” move that haunted his whole blessed life.)  

Markin would sent back reports about what was happening out West when he finally got out there after hitchhiking out on his first trip. (That first hitchhike road inspired by his inflamed reading of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road in high school and trying. Again just then we could have given a rat’s ass about that.) He wound up in Golden Gate Park where a couple of stray California girls befriended him once they heard his accent and thought it was “cute,” or something like that. That and about ten thousand facts about music and literature, On The Road, finally getting him some positive play when they found out that he had hitchhiked out across the country to find out what was what out West, found out if that new breeze was really here.       

The thing about the spring of 1967 is that like lemmings to the sea lots of young people were heading west (according to Alex’s report on the deYoung Museum exhibit something like 100, 000) and the town was taxed to the limit with so many stray kids, some runaways from Podunk towns like ours, some like Markin looking to “find” themselves so it was fortunate that Markin had run into Aphrodite and Venus (not their real names but I don’t remember them, their real names, and besides what was important at that time was coming up with a moniker to “reinvent” yourself with. Markin was the Be-Bop Kid paying homage to his semi-beat roots and I was Cowboy playing to my childhood love of watching Westerns on television Saturday mornings and later at the Strand Theater Saturday matinees. Others can give their monikers in their pieces if they wish.). They had actually come up from Laguna Beach a couple of months before on Captain Crunch’s converted yellow brick road school bus (Markin’s expression for the vehicle) and that was where after a couple of days of sleeping out in the air on his improvised bedroll in the Park he wound up.

This Captain Crunch was his own piece of work. He was an older guy, older then being maybe thirty or a little younger, who had been travelling up and down the Pacific Coast Highway in his own version of what the author Ken Kesey had started with his own school bus Further On complete with Merry Pranksters who set the tone for the whole West Coast experience of “drug, sex and rock and roll.” Kesey had been the guy who did all the “acid test” stuff that the writer Tom Wolfe would write about later and drive even more kids west (or if not West then to do what was happening there in towns like New York City, Boston, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Madison and any place where there were enough young people to hold the experience together. The Captain knew Kesey and as Alex mentioned we had been to his place in La Honda when we went out and joined Markin on the bus. Reportedly, and in all the time we were on the bus we could never pin the story down fully anyway, the Captain had traded a bag of serious dope for the bus. All I know is that we never lacked for drugs all through the experiences as the Captain always had a ready supply from weed to speed to acid.                 

When Aphrodite and Venus introduced Markin to the Captain a couple of days later once they thought he was “cool” the pair immediately took to each other. Had some kind of wavelength thing that I could never quite figure since the Captain had gone to an elite Ivy League school, Columbia if I recall, and had a certain aristocratic sensibility about him. Maybe it was Markin’s ten billion facts, or his enthusiasm, or maybe they were connected because each in their own way were what Alex called small letter prophets the Captain too having sensed early that a new day was coming and had grabbed the bus and all and started to live out the dream. Before Markin would come back to make his pitch in the late summer he had gone with the bus twice down toward Los Angeles and back again. As Markin was at pains to tell us in his pitch every day was another days of drug, sex and rock and roll if you wanted it. (Aphrodite and Venus before they left the bus just before Markin headed East were successively his first two girlfriends out West. They were totally unlike the tight Eastern Irish Catholic girls we grew up with or even like the girls who would hover around Markin at Boston University. They were converted “surfer girls” and had nothing but easy ways and good time delights on their minds. They would Markin thought not make the long road in the search for utopia that was what we were really looking for if you had to give an academic explanation for it  but were a very pleasant diversion along the road.)           

When Markin hitchhiked back from Frisco he was taking no prisoners, not taking no for an answer among the corner boys who were still around (a couple of guys were in the service, in Vietnam where Ricky Russo and Ralph Morse would lay down their heads and be forever etched in black granite down in Washington and at the town square memorial in Adamsville, North Adamsville is for governmental purposes if not for social purposes part of Adamsville proper, and a couple of others had left town for jobs or some other reason but the bulk of us were still attached to the town, a few still are). The breeze was here and whether we liked it or not we were going to check it out. This by the way was very unusual for Markin to assert himself so forcefully since he usually was the guy who proposed stuff to me and I would take it from there in the hierarchy which ruled at the time which was headed by me. Frankly, and this may tell something about why Markin fell down in Mexico trying to deal with organizing something. He was a great idea man for fresh breeze stuff and the stuff that we did give a rat’s ass about which was grabbing dough fast and easy. That is the part of Markin I always appreciated. He always had an idea, maybe ten at a time, on how to get dough fast and easy. He would conger up some scheme and I would lead the operation. The one time he actually did try to lead one of his schemes he almost got us all arrested since he forgot the cardinal rule to have a lookout when you were going through a house not your own.            

As Alex mentioned once Markin got us fired up he and Markin took off for California via the hitchhike trail since Alex had no job to ditch which I had to do before I could head out. I keep thinking today how crazy we were to even attempt to hitchhike across town never mine across the country with all the crazies out there but we did it collectively a couple of dozen times without a problem. There was a point maybe sometime around the exposure of the Charles Manson madness in Southern California when hitching became dangerous and passé but by then we were all off the road one way or another.

In any case my first trip out along with Jack Callahan, the great football player from our high school days who despite that acclaim was nothing but a hardcore corner boy and good to have around since he was as tough as nails (except with his high school sweetheart Chrissie McNamara whom he is still married to all these years later unlike me with three marriages and three divorces under my belt) was via the Greyhound bus. Part of that was to placate my mother who would have run me down all the way to China if I had told her I was hitchhiking. Nevertheless that bus ride was the only time I, we, used that horrible form of cross-country travel. Travel with screaming kids, overweight people sitting next to you or snoring and just the nerve-racking experience of being cooped up in a bus without proper hygiene for five or six days straight. No matter what they say about the health conditions, sanitary conditions, in Haight-Ashbury it was no worse than the damn bus. Certainly when we got onto the Captain’s bus that was clearly healthier if more primitive since the Captain and his lady Mustang Sally made that a condition was travelling with them. Over the couple of years I was on that bus several people were summarily excluded for poor hygiene or not pulling their weight keeping the quarters clean.

I will say that Markin who as you might have suspected of a minor prophet was filled with hyperbole about lots of stuff but he had the skinny on the wild and wonderful scene out in Frisco town (and later on the trips up and down the coast). Now when we were growing up, when we were hanging around the corners of North Adamsville, even the idea of drugs other than the traditional alcohol haze that half the Acre drifted around in was anathema. That stuff was for junkies, guys like Frankie Machine in the film adaptation of Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm but the stuff Markin had us try Columbia Red, good weed, got us all changed around. Needless to say except for LSD, acid, none of us turned down whatever drug was cooked up. That combined with the wild girls, wild girls in comparison the rough bible between their knees Irish Catholic girls who drove us crazy and gave us nothing whatever we might say on the corner about how we scored like crazy with some Suzy.

But it was not just the drugs, the wanton women, the music, or even all of them put together but that new spirit of adventure that took us, us corner boys from North Adamsville out of our ruts and gave us a sense of community which we never had beyond our corner boys’ bondings. On the 50^th anniversary hell I still miss it, still wouldn’t mind  travelling that road again. Yes, Markin, the Scribe, as I dubbed him half in fun when we first met can take a bow even all these years later for that. And yes I still miss the crazy bastard as much as ever. 

 

An Encore -He Saw Starlight On The Rails-With The Irascible Bruce “Utah” Phillips in Mind

An Encore -He Saw Starlight On The Rails-With The Irascible Bruce “Utah” Phillips in Mind

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Jack Dawson was not sure when he had heard that the old long-bearded son of a bitch anarchist hell of a songwriter, hell of a story-teller Bruce “Utah” Phillips caught the westbound freight, caught that freight around 2007 he found out later a couple of years after he too had come off the bum this time from wife problems, divorce wife problems (that "westbound freight" by the way an expression from the hobo road to signify that a fellow traveler hobo, tramp, bum it did not matter then the distinctions that had seemed so important in the little class differences department when they were alive had passed on, had had his fill of train smoke and dreams and was ready  to face whatever there was to face up in hobo heaven, no, the big rock candy mountain that some old geezer had written on some hard ass night when dreams were all he had to keep him company). That “Utah” moniker not taken by happenstance since Phillips struggled through the wilds of Utah on his long journey, played with a group called the Utah Valley boys, put up with, got through a million pounds of Mormon craziness and, frankly, wrote an extraordinary number of songs in his career by etching through the lore as he found it from all kinds of Mormon sources, including some of the dark pages, the ranch war stuff, the water stuff not the polygamy stuff which was nobody's business except the parties involved of those latter day saints.

For those who do not know the language of the road, not the young and carefree road taken for a couple of months during summer vacation or even a Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac-type more serious expedition under the influence of On The Road (what other travelogue of sorts would get the blood flowing to head out into the vast American Western night) and then back to the grind but the serious hobo “jungle” road like Jack Dawson had been on for several years before he sobered up after he came back from ‘Nam, came back all twisted and turned when he got discharged from the Army back in 1971 and could not adjust to the “real world” of his Carver upbringing in the East and had wound up drifting, drifting out to the West, hitting California and when that didn’t work out sort of ambled back east on the slow freight route through Utah taking the westbound freight meant for him originally passing to the great beyond, passing to a better place, passing to hard rock candy mountain in some versions here on earth before Black River Shorty clued him in.

Of course everybody thinks that if you wind up in Utah the whole thing is Mormon, and a lot of it is, no question, but when Jack hit Salt Lake City he had run into a guy singing in a park. A guy singing folk music stuff, labor songs, travelling blues stuff, the staple of the genre, that he had remembered that Sam Lowell from Carver High, from the same class year as him, had been crazy for back in the days when he would take his date and Jack and his date over to Harvard Square and they would listen to guys like that guy in the park singing in coffeehouses. Jack had not been crazy about the music then and some of the stuff the guy was singing seemed odd now too, still made him grind his teeth.  but back then it either amounted to a cheap date, or the girl actually liked the stuff and so he went along with it.

So Jack, nothing better to do, sat in front of guy and listened. Listened more intently when the guy, who turned out to be Utah (who was using the moniker “Pirate Angel” then, as Jack was using "Daddy Two Cents"  reflecting his financial condition or close to it, monikers a good thing on the road just in case the law, bill-collectors or ex-wives were trying to reach you and you did not want to reached), told the few bums, tramps and hoboes who were the natural residents of the park that if they wanted to get sober, if they wanted to turn things around a little that they were welcome, no questions asked, at the Joe Hill House. (No questions asked was right but everybody was expected to at least not tear the place up, which some nevertheless tried to do.)


That Joe Hill whom the sobering up house was named after by the way was an old time immigrant anarchist who did something to rile the Latter Day Saints up because they threw he before a firing squad with no questions asked. Joe got the last line though, got it for eternity-“Don’t mourn (his death), organize!”                   

Jack, not knowing anybody, not being sober much, and maybe just a tad nostalgic for the old days when hearing bits of folk music was the least of his worries, went up to Utah and said he would appreciate the stay. And that was that. Although not quite “that was that” since Jack knew nothing about the guys who ran the place, didn’t know who Joe Hill was until later (although he suspected after he found out that Joe Hill had been a IWW organizer [Wobblie, Industrial Worker of the World] framed and executed in that very state of Utah that his old friend the late Peter Paul Markin who lived to have that kind of information in his head would have known. See this Joe Hill House unlike the Sallies (Salvation Army) where he would hustle a few days of peace was run by this Catholic Worker guy, Ammon Hennessey, who Utah told Jack had both sobered him up and made him some kind of anarchist although Jack was fuzzy on what that was all about.

So Jack for about the tenth time tried to sober up, liquor sober up this time out in the great desert (later it would be drugs, mainly cocaine which almost ripped his nose off he was so into it that he needed sobering up from). And it took, took for a while.        

Whatever had been eating at Jack kept fighting a battle inside of him and after a few months he was back on the bottle. But during that time at the Joe Hill House he got close to Utah, as close as he had gotten to anybody since ‘Nam, since his friendship with Jeff Crawford from up in Podunk Maine who saved his ass, and that of a couple of other guys in a nasty fire-fight when Charley (G.I. slang for the Viet Cong originally said in contempt but as the war dragged on in half-hearted admiration) decided he did indeed own the night in his own country. Got as close as he had to his corner boys like Sam Lowell from hometown Carver. Learned a lot about the lure of the road, of drink and drugs, of tough times (Utah had been in Korea) and he had felt bad after he fell off the wagon. But that was the way it was. 

Several years later after getting washed clean from liquor and drugs, at a time when Jack started to see that he needed to get back into the real world if he did not want to wind up like his last travelling companion, Denver Shorty, whom he found face down one morning on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge and had abandoned his body fast in order not to face the police report, he noticed that Utah was playing in a coffeehouse in Cambridge, a place called Passim’s which he found out had been taken over from the Club 47 where Sam had taken Jack a few times. So Jack and his new wife (his and her second marriages) stepped down into the cellar coffeehouse to listen up.


As Jack waited in the rest room area a door opened from the other side across the narrow passageway and who came out but Utah. As Jack started to grab his attention Utah blurred out “Daddy Two Cent, how the hell are you?” and talked for a few minutes. Later that night after the show they talked some more in the empty club before Utah said he had to leave to head back to Saratoga Springs in New York where he was to play at the Caffé Lena the next night.         

That was the last time that Jack saw Utah in person although he would keep up with his career as it moved along. Bought some records, later tapes, still later CDs just to help the brother out. In the age of the Internet he would sent occasional messages and Utah would reply. Then he heard Utah had taken very ill, heart trouble like he said long ago in the blaze of some midnight fire, would finally get the best of him. And then somewhat belatedly Jack found that Utah had passed on. The guy of all the guys he knew on the troubled hobo “jungle” road who knew what “starlight on the rails” meant to the wanderers he sang for had cashed his ticket. RIP, brother.

From The Marxist Archives-In Commemoration of the Paris Commune by Max Shachtman (When He Was A Revolutionary And Could "Speak" Marxism)

Workers Vanguard No. 980
13 May 2011

In Commemoration of the Paris Commune

(Quote of the Week)

On the 140th anniversary of the Paris Commune, we honor the heroic proletarian militants who seized power in the French capital in March 1871, the first historical expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Two months later, amid a reactionary frenzy whipped up by the bourgeoisies of Europe, French troops drowned the Commune in blood, massacring tens of thousands and imprisoning or deporting tens of thousands more. In a 1927 American Communist Party pamphlet, Max Shachtman, quoting from Karl Marx’s 1871 The Civil War in France, outlined the bold measures taken by the Communards, despite shortcomings, to establish workers democracy and begin undertaking socialist measures. Among the Commune’s best militants were members of the International Workingmen’s Association (First International), of which Marx was a principal leader.

The Commune took hold of the old bureaucratic and militarist apparatus, the bourgeois state, and crushed it in its hands, and on its broken fragments it placed the dictatorship of the proletariat, the workingmen of Paris organized as the ruling class of France. With a single stroke it abolished the standing army of the Second Empire and the Third Republic and replaced it with the people’s militia, a force, directly responsible to the Commune, of all the men capable of bearing arms....

The ruling body was based upon a real proletarian democracy, providing for the recall of unsatisfactory representatives, abolishing special allowances, paying all state officials the wages of workers, and realizing that “ideal of all bourgeois revolutions cheap government by eliminating the two largest items of expenditure—the army and the bureaucracy.” The parliamentarism of the bourgeois society was smashed and the Commune transformed itself into a “working corporation legislative and executive at one and the same time,” and held itself up to the provinces of France as the mirror of their own future. Church and State were separated, ecclesiastical property was confiscated and all education secularized.

The pawned property and furniture of the workers were returned, the workers were relieved of the payment of the overdue rents, it abolished the sickening piety of charity and “relief,” and resumed the pay of the National Guard. Thru Frankel, the Internationalist delegate of labor, it took its first steps, however few and unclear, to destroy the system of capitalist production and socialize it by turning it over to the trade unions; to ameliorate the conditions of the workers; to enforce a “fair wage” proviso in Commune contracts and abolish the abominable system of fines and garnisheeing of wages by employers; it planned the institution of the eight-hour day. Its internationalist character was testified to by the Hungarian, Frankel’s presence as delegate of labor, Dombrowski and Wroblewski, the Poles, in the defense.

Its heroic and noble spirit of sacrifice has been left as a revolutionary legacy to the new generations of the avenging proletariat. The Commune was a dim glass in which was reflected the rise of that greater and more powerful dictatorship of the proletariat, the successful proletarian revolution in Russia.

—Max Shachtman, 1871: The Paris Commune (1927)