An
Encore Salute To The Untold Stories Of The Working- Class 1960s Radicals-“The
Sam And Ralph Stories”-
The Angel Of Mercy-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.]
***********
Allan Jackson Encore Introduction
Most of the stories
about Sam and Ralph center on politics or their freaking army time in the fucking
Vietnam War (sorry for the sensitive but that “fucking” is the only way I can
describe the war, the war that bled a generation dry, bled plenty of working-class
kids like me dry as hell and we are
still not right about what the hell it all meant even fifty years later-except
we have been on an eternal tour of ‘getting on the good side of the angels” after
all the hell we brought on people we had not quarrel with). This one is about
personal relationships which if you knew these guys, if you knew me, if you
knew Josh from working-class Olde Saco in Maine or my boys from the working-class
Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville was, is a subject sealed with seven seals.
Meaning about dealing with women which given our collective divorce cohort,
which young Sarah Lemoyne commented on and not to our benefit, we still have
never figured out, had no guidance worth a damn about. But enough of my rant
because Sam and Ralph speak in a way for a whole misbegotten generation of
1960s coming of age kids and I can add nothing essential to what they have to
say.
The Angel Of
Mercy-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 various romantic interests. Never spoke of little rendezvous
or trysts, never spoke of their two divorces much beyond recording the facts of
the disengagements even though Sam had been Ralph’s best man at his first
wedding to Clara, his high school sweetheart from Troy, New York whom he
married after the dust of the 1960s settled down and people, “movement people”
too were going back to some of the old norms. (Sam had been not designated as
‘best man” but rather “truest friend and witness” or something like that
designation since they were beyond bourgeois martial norms at the time but we
will use that former designation here to signify that they were close enough
for Sam to gladly take on that task).
Maybe it was the
Catholic reticence to speak of personal matters, personal sexual manners with
another male (probably female too 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, God no, from the pulpit (even when discussion came up of the obligation
to, unlike the bloody Protestants with their two point three children, of
propagating the faith; having scads of children to bump up the Catholic
population of the world).
Maybe closer to home
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 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 it was the
times they met in “the liberated 1960s” where the Pill (and having capitalized
that word no one should have to ask what pill) had made the whole subject
somewhat bland to discuss (as opposed to doing the act, or as an old friend of
Sam’s, Bart Webber, used to say taking his cue from the old bluesman Howlin’
Wolf “doing the do”) and that extended to the individuals they were involved
with either through those collective four marriages and divorces or other
relationships. It was not, as both were at pains to declare when the subject
came up one recent night which will be discussed more fully below, that they
were not friendly with those respective spouses, or when the spouses left then
the one-night stands, the flings, the affairs to use an old-fashioned word for
it and the flame dreams but their thing had been heavily weighted toward the
male bonding that drew them close together back in the early 1970s.
And maybe it was the
way that they had “met,” 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 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 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 working-class background, their budding politics, and their
desire to “seek a newer world” as some old English poet once said. And so they
stuck together, stuck politically mostly, through 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 as Ralph stayed close to home in Troy, New York working in his
father’s high-skilled 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
working in a printing business that he had started from scratch and from which
he in turn had just turned over to his more modern print-imaging tech savvy
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 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 time to visit each other.
It had been on
Ralph’s last visit to Sam who now resided in Cambridge that he tentatively
broached the subject of whether Sam was “seeing” anybody. Sam had been somewhat
struck by the question since he could not remember the last time that term had
been used by either man. Sam wondered if Ralph was about to tell him that he
was “seeing” somebody or, worse, a thought he kept to himself for the moment,
that Ralph had heard something from somebody about him. Of course all of the
wondering and “liberated” talk about relationships occurred one summer night at
Jack’s, the well-known bar in Cambridge a few streets up from where Sam lived,
while both men were drinking high-shelf whisky, and not sipping so perhaps
neither man should have been surprised when Sam blurred out. “Well, yes I am, I
am seeing an angel of mercy.” (Before we go on that high-shelf whisky reference
should be noted since in the old days when they were “from hunger”
working-class kids drinking rotgut low-shelf whiskies they could not afford to
drink the stuff on Jimmy the bartender’s third shelf behind him on the back
wall.)
Ralph took a
double-take and maybe the liquor getting to his brain a little said, “What are
you dating an ex-nun or something, you old devil I thought you swore off those
Catholic virgins with the big novena book in one hand and the well-worn rosary
beads in the other.” Sam laughed and then explained that his “angel of mercy,” Sarah
Parsons, had been no nun but had saved his soul anyway. Then Sam proceeded to
tell his little story, tell it as best he could as both men were getting a
little drowsy with the hour (another virtue of Jack’s being near-by Sam’s
dwelling when last call came):
“You know I had a
very hard time with that last divorce from Melinda, she tried to take me for
all I had, all I will ever have although Frankie Riley as usual with his sharp
lawyer’s wit eased the sting a little and I survived with the business intact
which Jeff runs now under a trust arrangement that Frankie worked out. What you
don’t know because I never told you and you never asked and if you had I
probably wouldn’t have told you anyway was things had been bad with Melinda for
several years before she left the house three years ago and moved into that
apartment in Plymouth that cost me an arm and a leg to pay for although I did
it gladly at some level.”
“What you also don’t
know is that about seven, eight years ago when I went to my fortieth class
reunion from Carver High I ran into an old flame, a minute old flame whom I
ditched for some other faster girl at the time but whom I would occasionally
think about, think I had been a horse’s ass to dump. We talked into the wee
hours that night, Melinda as usual didn’t want to go to the reunion since she
didn’t want to go to her own Olde Saco High reunion why should she go to mine.
That’s the way Melinda was, particularly the last few years when I think we
both realized we have been ships passing in the night for a long time. Sarah
and I agreed to talk and e-mail each other more and we did. You know the
routine as well as I do, we talked a lot for several weeks and e-mailed cute
stuff or sent links to songs we liked from YouTube, told our life stories since
high school. Sarah too had been married twice unhappily, that twice seems to be
the norm for our “liberated” generation and eventually although she knew I was
still married agreed to a “date.” A great date at a small out of the way
restaurant I know in the North End where I took a woman I had a short fling
with about twenty years ago. And we hit it off, hit it off like we were still
fresh and starry-eyed as in high school. Naturally we went to bed together not
long after that and while she was not happy (nor was I really) with our
“arrangement” she “understood” what was what.”
“And that
“understood” is important because Laura was really an angel of mercy. Maybe
Melinda sensed something was up, maybe she was having her own affair although
she was always home when I called but Sarah kept my spirits up, kept me on keel
and I knew before she did, well before, that I was falling in love with her
even though things looked bleak at home. And even though she was naturally very
hesitant to love me back. Still we knew something was there, some strong bond
which may have been there since high school. I like to think that in my mushy
moments. Well, there are some tender mercies in the world because one day
Melinda said she couldn’t stand the marriage anymore, wanted out, wanted her
own “space” and she got it for my arm and my leg. Like I said Melinda tried to
grab everything and would have if she had known about Sarah but Melinda was
just Melinda in trying to grab everything. Nothing new there. Sarah lives in
Arlington since we still are figuring out about the future but maybe we will go
tomorrow and see her. Okay.”
Ralph answered back,
“Okay” as they exited Jack’s and walked up the street toward Sam’s apartment
and then Ralph turned his head to Sam and said, “Does your Sarah have any spare
‘angels of mercy’ hanging around?” They both laughed as they walked along in
silence after that.
