This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Trump declared a national emergency to fund his racist, xenophobic, and unpopular wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. We know that Trump is making up this "emergency" to get his way, and we refuse to stand for it. Nor will we stand for the “bipartisan” agreement on border security which funds Custom and Border Protection, ICE, more detention beds, more family separations, and more barriers. Join Cosecha Massachusetts and other organizations to say NO to the emergency, NO to the wall, and YES to permanent protection, dignity and respect for all undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers.
People probably saw that presidential candidate Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has introduced a bill in Congress to prevent US from withdrawing from INF. I saw an excerpt from her press conference on CNN yesterday but have only been able to find brief references to this on RT and Reddit, not on mainstream media. since. Interesting.
"Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has introduced a bill to Congress which would prevent President Donald Trump from withdrawing the US from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF).
Speaking at a press conference on Friday morning, Gabbard said that Trump’s decision to pull out of the 1988 treaty was“reckless,” was “exacerbating a new Cold War” with Russia, and could spark another arms race.
"The bill would prohibit “a single taxpayer dollar from being used for weapons that would breach the treaty,” she said. The bill is co-sponsored by three of Gabbard's House colleagues including freshman congresswoman Rep. Ilhan Omar.”
*Poet's Corner-Langston Hughes' Tribute To John Brown- "October 16" http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/canam/hughes.htm Click on the title to link to an online biographic sketch of the life of the great Afro-American poet and militant Langston Hughes. February Is Black History Month October 16-Langston Hughes Perhaps You will remember John Brown. John Brown Who took his gun, Took twenty-one companions White and black, Went to shoot your way to freedom Where two rivers meet And the hills of the North And the hills of the South Look slow at one another- And died For your sake. Now that you are Many years free, And the echo of the Civil War Has passed away, And Brown himself Has long been tried at law, Hanged by the neck, And buried in the ground- Since Harpers Ferry Is alive with ghost today, Immortal raiders Come again to town- Perhaps You will recall John Brown.
Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes- “50-50”
50-50
I’m all alone in this world, she said, Ain’t got nobody to share my bed, Ain’t got nobody to hold my hand— The truth of the matter’s I ain’t got no man.
Big Boy opened his mouth and said, Trouble with you is You ain’t got no head! If you had a head and used your mind You could have me with you All the time.
She answered, Babe, what must I do?
He said, Share your bed— And your money, too.
Langston Hughes
The whole world knew, or at least the important parts of that world, that summer of 2012 downtown Boston world (near the Common say from the Public Gardens to Newbury Street but also near birth place Columbus Avenue), knew that Larry Johnson was Ms. Loretta Lawrence’s every day man (and it goes without saying her every night man too). Make no mistake, girls, women, even though they didn’t hold hands in public or throw public kisses at each other, and Loretta at five-ten and rail thin, fashion model day thin didn’t look like trouble, keep your hands off. And they did, those in the fashion industry, mostly her fellow models, and maybe a few longing sidewinder guy designers too. But somebody had Larry’s attention and Loretta was going to get to the bottom of it.
It all started back in February when Larry asked her for a hundred dollars one night, out of the blue. Now Larry had been on a tough stretch ever since the financial collapse in 2008 (although it only bagged him in early 2010) when the markets went crazy and he got caught short, and since business was bad he eventually got that old dreaded pink slip. And nobody was hiring so he had just been kind of living off his old time bonuses, and a little of this and that.Funny they had met at a bar down in the financial district where he had stopped off for a drink after passing his resume around for about the umpteenth time and she had just finished a shoot (for a cosmetic company that had keyed on her for her ravishing dark looks, brown hair, brown eyes, brownish high cheek-boned skin as they were trying to expand their markets) down near the water at International Place and her photographer had offered to buy her a drink. His eyes met hers, her eyes met his in return and before anyone really knew it he had moved in on her like something out of one of those old time novels that you read and at the end both can’t believe that you spent you r good hard-earned rest reading and cannot believe that the “she” of the story would be so stupid in the end to have gotten mixed-up with a wacko like that.
Larry had moved in on her too, literally, after a few weeks of downy billow talk and his argument (which she was okay with, she wasn’t saying she wasn’t) that two could live as cheaply as one (which isn’t true but close enough) and he could cut down on expenses during his rough patch. And it was nice, nice to have a man around, with man’s things, a man’s scent, and a man’s silly little vanities that she had not experienced since Phil (she would not use a last name because Phil was well known, too well-known) had left her a few years back. Every once in a while though she would notice a ten here or a twenty there missing from her pocketbook but figured that either she, spendthrift she, had spent it on some forgotten bobble or Larry had taken it for some household thing and didn’t report the fact (although she, they, had insisted on a collective counting of expenses). Then came the night of Larry’s official request. And she gave it to him, a loan, a loan was all it was. The first time.
After a few more requests for dough, and the granting of those requests, Loretta started to try to figure out what the heck he was doing with the dough (he said it was to help get a job, or he needed new shirts, or something, something different each time). Then she thought about Phil, not about the money part (Jesus, he had thrown his dough at her when he was strong for her, called her his little money-machine and laughed) but as he started losing interest in her he stopped showering the money because he was seeing another woman on the side and showering it on her (that “her” being a friend of hers, and not even beautiful, just smart). And so she started thinking that Larry, Larry the guy who was sharing her bed every night (every night so it had to be a daytime dalliance), was having another affair. She resolved that Larry would get no more money, no more loans, as he called them and if she found out that he was two-timing her that woman had better leave town because, two-timer or not, bum-of-the-mouth or not, he was her man and she had told one and all hands off. And she meant it.
Poets' Corner- Langston Hughes- “Mother To Son”
Clarence Martin knew, knew deep in his bones, that he would now have to talk to his just turned ten son, Lanny (full name Langston, named after the old Harlem Renaissance poet, Langston Hughes, whom he, and the brothers, had learned about and went “max daddy” be-bop hip-hop crazy over in that GED class at Norfolk when he haddone his last stretch,that last and no more stretch for that damn liquor store armed robbery), now that he had made that first midget turn toward“the life” with that foolish “clip” he got caught doing over at Mr. Earl’s Jewelry Store in Roxbury Crossing (he would not tell his son, not for the world, that he too had clipped his fair share of jewelry from that very same establishment although he had never gotten caught in those days before every two-bit place had monitors all over the place). He would have to call his ex-wife, Lanny’s mother, Essie, and make arrangements for them to meet in some neutral place and have it out, have it out about the black facts of life in America, and about taking that midget turn back,back to rolling that rock up the mountain like that old Greek guy did.
As Clarence thought about how to approach his son, about how to tell him about his own troubles with the law that he and Essie had kept from him since Lanny hadnot even been born when, he, young wild buck he, got his wanting habits on and caused his own Mama and Papa some serious hell. He figured that he would just lay it on the line, man to man, even though at ten Lanny might not understand the whole thing. He would try to explain about a boy’s wanting habits, a boy fresh up from deep in the Jim Crow south, a boy born on some Mister’s sharecrop plantation and then early on moved up into a northern ghetto (over on Washington Street where his own parents still lived) where it seemed like the streets were paved with gold, although his people had no gold, no gold to satisfy his wanting habits. And so it started, started for him and his corner boys, a hustle here, a jack-roll there, a little time at Morton Street, some street dope, some walking daddy pimp action (of his own girlfriend at the time and her sister for chrissakes), then his graduate education-armed robberies for quick nickels and dimes to feed a burgeoning coke habit, then the big house. Graduated and done. A normal profile for a couple of generations of black boys, maybe three. He wouldn’t hold back (except that silly clip action at Mister Earl’s because he didn’t want any like father like son noise).
Then he would point to his own turnaround, his job as head janitor at the John Hancock building in the Back Bay, and the slow and steady rising up of his own life. Nothing big, but he was still alive to talk about it, unlike the five other members of his Uphams Corner jive ass corner boy society who were either six feet under or sitting in some big steel house, mostly the former. He would tell him of Langston Hughes, no not the poet part (although the brother was still the “max daddy”be-bop hip-hop angel high priest) but getting wise in stir, getting wise inside and figuring out after that last stretch that he was either going be dead by thirty or a permanent resident of the underclass either in the big house, or out in some nowhere scene. So he got his GED, picked up some usable trade skills and shook the prison pallor off. And never looked backed, even if the road forward was not going to be blazing guns.
And then he would lay it on the line that ten year old black boys, Lanny black as the night black boys, were born to die at thirty (maybe earlier), were born to have their wanting habits curtailed , were born to spent time in Mister’s steel boxes, were born to wither and die in some sleepy crack house, were as likely to be blown away just for breathing wrong by some blue bastard or some irate honky, as for anything else. He would leave it at that he thought enough to fill up a grown man’s hurts, to fill up a strong grown man’s hurts and sorrows.
A minute later Clarence Martin, father, black father, black father with a story to tell dialed up Essie’s number on his cellphone and when she answered he said , “Hey, Essie, how’s things, I need to talk to Lanny, I need to talk to my son bad… ’’
*******
Mother To Son
Well, son, I'll tell you: Life for me ain't been no crystal stair. It's had tacks in it, And splinters, And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor— Bare.
But all the time I'se been a-climbin' on, And reachin' landin's, And turnin' corners, And sometimes goin' in the dark Where there ain't been no light. So, boy, don't you turn back. Don't you set down on the steps. 'Cause you finds it's kinder hard. Don't you fall now— For I'se still goin', honey, I'se still climbin', And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
I had heard through a
different source that Captain Morgan had although an American been active in
the French Resistance in Martinique and eventually other places in the
Caribbean. I had also heard that Monsieur Gerard was the last link to knowledge
about Captain Morgan’s exploits and more importantly about how Harry and Marie Browning
known affectionately as “Slim” in those days met and got out of Fort-de-France
by the skin of their teeth. I contacted Gerard in Nantes and he agreed to tell
me what he knew about the affair, about the skin of their teeth and about
anything else he might know around that initial meeting since “Slim” had gone
on to be an editor of a high-end fashion magazine after she married Harry.
Harry had become an agent-ambassador for Cunard out of New York. Below is in his
own words the way Frenchie described the meeting and match-up between Harry and
Slim. He did stipulate that I was only to use most of the information after Slim
passed on. She did a few months ago and so here for the first time is Frenchie’s
long ago take that torrid war-time romance which seemed the stuff of legends.
Jasper Jackson]
“I had seen Marie first,
had seen her as she came off the plane from I think that day Cuba, don’t quote
me on stuff before the match-up between Harry and Slim, with a sort of
threadbare tailored suit a little out of fashion that year and a small bag
which told me she was on, how you Americans say her “uppers.” By the way that
Slim and she called him Steve thing was some intimate bed-time talk thing that
I don’t know how it started since I wasn’t there when they messed up the silky
sheets that first time. She was sure slim no question so maybe that is where
Harry got his pet name from. I was an agent for Air Martinique then so I
grabbed her bag and offered to put her up at my hotel. She accepted. My idea
was after she settled in and I had bought her few drinks I could coax her into
helping me out as an exotic flower bar girl for the American tourist who were
flooding Fort-de-France looking for women, kicks, dope, gambling, and some fine
deep sea fishing. I had her all lined up, had my own ideas about jumping under
the satin sheets with although I was married at the time. Yeah, she was that
kind of looker, that kind of dame who guys would take great risks for, would go
to the mat for if it went like that.
“Then Harry entered the
scene and my day dreams were over. He had been out on a fishing expedient with
a client named Johnson, one of those Americans looking for women, dope and some
deep sea fishing, some kind of deep sea fishing if you get my drift. This
Johnson guy had had a shot at grabbing a big swordfish according to Harry but
all he did was lose Harry’s fishing tackle in the bargain. So Harry wasn’t in a
good mood when I asked to go to his room to inquire about using his boat for
some Resistance work that was coming up-bringing in some agents to get the
great freedom-fighter Renoir off of Devil’s Island where he was being held by
the Vichy bastards. He turned me down cold. Wouldn’t touch the thing then,
didn’t give a damn who was fighting who but wanted to keep clear of any
controversy, keep his boat, his livelihood for one thing. So whatever he did
for us later which was a lot didn’t get a leg up until Marie came in view.
“While we Harry and I
were talking a rap came on the door and when Harry opened up the door there was
Marie all dolled up and showered asking if anybody had a match. Harry flipped
her his box of matches. Then she asked if anybody had a cigarette and said it
in such a come hither way in Harry’s direction that I knew I was sunk. Harry threw
her his pack of Luckies (unfiltered in those days) which I got for him on the
black market since they were hard to come by after Vichy took over the black
market trade. She left and after Harry asked me who the hell she was I left
knowing that I was out of luck making a play for Slim. The only benefit I got
was that she did do some very good work for a few days as a bar girl and I got
many dollars as my cut of her action. I swear I could have been a millionaire if
she had stayed on the island. As a cover I also had her singing at night with
Cricket my junkie piano player whose habit was getting him off-track once I found
out in passing Cricket and her that afternoon that she could sing and look good
doing it. That Cricket was a story in himself since he was on the run from some
dope-dealers in the States and laying low in cheap dope Martinique for a while.
He wrote that song that was a hit after the war when all the G.I.s headed back
to America, How Little We Know.
“But enough of Cricket.
Slim went to work after that meeting with Harry. Like I said she was good,
grabbed eight hundred bucks off of that stupid fisherman Johnson, and gave me
my four hundred without a murmur. Harry saw her in action and was sore from what
he told me the next day. Was very sore when that night Marie grabbed some Vichy
naval officer for half the liquor on the island. Called her a tramp, a young pretty
smart tramp but a tramp nevertheless. Here’s how you can never figure dames
though see she was, having seen him for about two minutes asking for that match
and cigarette foreplay, trying to make him jealous. And he was trying to
pretend to be sore. That interchange was if you can understand this psychology
solidified their relationship. That night without so much as a by your leave
they snuck under Harry’s sheets (or was it Slim’s, no, it must have been Slim’s
because I had left a set of silk sheets for her bed when I had my own ideas
about what I would do with her.)
“Of course that affair
business played directly into Harry coming over to work with us. That Vichy
naval officer bitched to Renard, a bastard who was an official in the Third
Republic colonial administration on the island and the day Vichy took over
without missing a beat went to work for them as their hatchet man, and he had
me, Harry and Slim down at police headquarters for a few hours. Took my money, my
four hundred from the Johnson con, Slim’s cut and for good measure Harry’s who
had nothing to do with it. That pissed Harry off. Also helped me rope in Harry
to the deal for his boat since he had no other dough.
“That job should have
been a piece of cake. Meet the agents who were going to get Renoir off of
Devil’s Island in a quiet spot about twenty miles from Fort-de-France, bring
them to town and then transfer them to other agents who would work out the
details of the tough Devil’s Island caper. Of course in those days you took
whoever was not a secret Vichy agent, anybody who had the guts to stick their
necks out for the glory of France but it turned out the guys, or rather guy and
his fucking wife, the Dubois, what was he thinking, that they recruited for the
job had feet of clay, had too much trouble worrying about his fretful wife. So Harry
had run into a Vichy patrol out in the harbor. That patrol shot up Harry’s
boat, shot up this Dubois guy and made things tough for all of us. Harry, no
doctor, had to patch up the guy while holding off his wife from jumping on his
bones. And holding Slim back from scratching Madame’s eyes out.
“Made Harry something
like persona non grata with Vichy, with Renard too once he figured the
previously don’t give a damn had part in the caper. Renard , the bastard,
figured out a way to prove that Harry was involved in the Dubois caper. Harry
had this old rummy, Eddie, whom must have been his father or something the way
he protected. Renard had picked Eddie up and was holding him in the drunk tank
until he crumbled and told what Harry’s role in the caper had been. Harry flipped
out at this once Renard told him about where the missing Eddie was. With Slim’s
aid he took on Renard and a couple of his henchmen, shot one dead as a doornail
and made Renard after pistol-whipping him order Eddie back to my hotel. That is
when Harry handed over Renard to me and decided that since Martinique was too
hot for him and Slim, and Eddie that he would take Dubois and his wife to
Devils’s Island to get Renoir out. I’ll never forget, have never forgotten how
Slim shimmied her way out the door with Harry and Eddie carrying their bags
behind them after Slim said good-bye to Cricket (and gotlittle stash of opium for the road).
“You know that Harry did
get Dubois to Devil’s Island and that he eventually got Renoir to Europe to
work with Victor Lazlo coordinating the Resistance when it counted. Did lots of
other jobs too with the resourceful Slim in tow before heading to New York after
the war.
“Here’s something Harry
told me before he and Slim left town. That first night they hit the sheets
Slim, with a few drinks in her, was being very sexually provocative, had
mentioned that all Harry had to do to keep her in line was whistle. Then she
said in a unmistakably salacious way that “he knew how to whistle, didn’t he.
Just put lips together and blow.” Harry assumed that she was using a sexual
double entendre. He found out that night just what he meant as she took him
around the world. Damn, Harry.
Oh, Rosalita-With
Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable’s Film Adaptation Of Arthur
Miller’s “The Misfits” In Mind
By Zack James
Maybe it was something in
the drinking water but Louis Lyons was beside himself one he figured out the
real reason why he spent a couple of weekend nights watching a couple of old-time
flicks, films which he had gathered in from his Netflix service. Lou had been
on a long term kick about watching, or rather re-watching, films, mostly black
and white from his checkered seedy random youth. In those days he would have
viewed such films not on his HD television or via the stream of his computer but
at his local theater, The Majestic, in his hometown of Oxford out in Western
Massachusetts now long since closed where he would spent many an ungodly Saturday
afternoonviewing the current fare. The
“ungodly’ part for real his parents were devout Sixth Day Anabaptists whose day
of worship started midday Saturday and ended at dawn Sunday morning and
although they were liberal enough to see that Lou would have snuck out anyway
always cast that epitaph his way when he came sheepishly through the door after
being hunkered with a box of made last popcorn and some candy bars purchased at
Billy’s Variety and “snuck” in under the watch-less eyes of the ushers. Later in
high school, having grown out of kids’ clothing and Saturday matinees about the
same time, he let those epitaphs flow off his back like water off a duck after
coming in late on Saturday nights. Reason: or one of the reasons, Lotty Larson
who was the first girl who accepted his invitation when he asked her the
locally famous, locally high school movie date night, question-balcony or orchestra?
Orchestra meant maybe one date and out but balcony meant promise of anything
from a “feel” inside or out of some girl’s cashmere sweater to a tight space
blow job.
This trip, this diversion
down rural hills nostalgia road, has a purpose since it was on the same track
that was bothering Lou’s old mind. The eternal, infernal, ways of sex which had
one way or another bothered Lou’s mind since puberty, maybe before if Doctor Freud
and his acolytes were right. The association played out this way. On Friday
night he had watched for the umpteenth time one of his all-time favorite films
the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To
Have And Have Not starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. One of the
reasons that he favored that film is that although he did not see it went it
had come out since he was only a dream in his parents’ way of life in 1941 when
the film had come out when he saw it in retrospective in college at the Brattle
Theater in Harvard Square he had told his date, name now long forgotten in
memory, that some of the scenes in that classic were as hot, maybe hotter,
between two people with their clothes fully on than half the porno being
featured in the Combat Zone in downtown Boston. (Lou vaguely remembered that
night was a hot date night with that unremembered young woman when they had
gone back to her place on Commonwealth Avenue.) After that recent viewing
though he had remarked to his wife, his third wife, Moira, that given the best
of it Captain Morgan, Bogie’s role, a craggy sea salt, and Marie, the Bacall
role, that he had to be at least twice her age, maybe more. (He had actually
looked it up on Wikipedia and found
Bogie was forty-five and Bacall nineteen at the time so the “maybe more” was
definitely in play). That started a short discussion between them about younger
women being attracted to older men (as a sign of some kind of distorted social
norm older men being attracted to younger women never made it to the conversation
table). No conclusions were drawn at the time by Lou.
Saturday night Moira was
out attending her weekly bridge party with some of her girlfriends and Lou
wound up watching the other film the film adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Misfits starring Marilyn Monroe and
Clark Gable (with serious supporting roles by Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach,
and Thelma Ritter). Once again maybe giving Clark, playing Gaye, a decided edge
in the looks department over Bogie and the fact of being a real cowboy over a sea
captain an older man was attractive to a younger woman, Rosalyn, played by
Marilyn Monroe. Lou, a little younger than the older brothers and fathers who
saw Ms. Monroe as the epitome of 1950s sexual allure and beauty, had seen the
film when he was in high school, alone if he recalled.
The question of younger
women being attracted to older men would not have stuck out as much it had
those nights on the first viewing of the films back in the day but since then
there had been Rosalita, his second wife, the wife that Lou had left for Moira.
The main reason, although not the only reason, had been the wide gap in age
between them, Rosalita had been twenty-five and he almost fifty when he spied
her one night in San Francisco at the City Lights Bookstore, the famous one run
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the big “beat” hang-out back in the 1950s when
being “beat” mean something socially unlike later when he tried to emulate them
and got nothing but laughs for digging something so passe. He was trolling the place,
literally, since he had just got divorced back in Massachusetts from his first
wife, Anna, and after the acrimonious settlement decided he needed to head west
and make a new start. Needed the company of a woman as well and somebody he had
run into at Ginny’s Bar in North Beach had told him that if you were looking
for a certain type woman, intellectually curious, maybe a little off-kilter,
maybe easy too then in San Francisco you hit the bookstores and City Lights was
a magnet. (That “custom” was not confined to Frisco Town he had met Moira at
the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston under the same imperative).
Lou had been looking for
a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl
(in a book which came with other poems as well) since that was one of
That afternoon started
their affair but Lou was from the start apprehensive about their differences in
ages which came up often along the way, for example, when he mentioned that he
had been in Washington on May Day, 1971 and had been arrested in the dragnet
that the cops and military had set up that day she didn’t understand, could not
get around the idea that people would try to shut down the government if it did
not stop the Vietnam War. At times they could work through it like that first
day with Ginsberg (she turned out to have been an English major at Berkeley)
but other times, times when she tried to coax him into jogging which she was crazy
about they would fight civil war worthy battles. He always had the sneaking
suspicion that Rosalita was not telling the truth when she mentioned that she
had had trouble with her male peers, boys she called them, and had been
attracted to older men ever since her father had abandoned her family when she
was twelve. She had told him repeatedly that she was looking for the maturity and
security that an older man would bring. Lou could never really get that through
his head and eventually his tilted his behavior toward giving dear Rosalita
reason to boot him out the door. (On top of meeting Moira closer in age to him
at the museum when for one last effect to reconcile they had moved to Boston).
That night Lou though
maybe Rosalita had been just like Marie and Rosalyn needing a safe harbor.
Damn.
Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture” Show In Mind
Ruth Snyder had all the prejudices of any West Texas girl growing up in the hard-scrabble Great Depression of the 1930s when money had been scarcer, maybe more so, than hen’s teeth. Had all the so-called secrets of such girls as well. She had been Anchor City born and raised out in the places where the oilfields out-numbered the number of residents. As part of that Anchor City (silly nautical name for a town out in the middle of Blue Norther country but there you have it. Legend had it that some restless Yankee sea captain who had had enough of the sea had founded the place and in a fit of nostalgia named the town that rather than after himself like half the foolish towns in the state). Prejudice number one, aside from not allowing the “colored” to get a toehold in the town but that was usual all over the South and not Anchor City-bound, was drilled into her by her hard-shell Pentecostal parents who had gotten religion when West Texas was burned over in the Third Awakening, third Texas Awakening and that was marriage was forever. Forever meaning until one or the other of the two contracted parties kick-off. Not before.
So Ruth Snyder, not the prettiest girl in town, not by a long shot, in fact rather plain like some Grant Wood painting, pure prairie plain which was in man-short West Texas (marrying man-short West Texas the other kind as everywhere were plentiful enough) good enough with proper household training to get a man. But get this Ruth Snyder, Plain Jane Ruth Snyder snagged herself a football player, Tom Snyder, who starred for the Anchor City Hawks before heading to Texas A&M and a short career made shorter by a crippling knee injury. Who would have figured that Tom in those brave football days would court Ruth Snyder. Ruth would come to try to figure that one out herself. Tried to figure out that all Tom wanted from a woman, no, a wife, was too just keep his house clean, his socks darned and his rifles well-oiled. While Tom in very West Texas good old boys fashion would head out with his fellow good old boys and proceed to get well-oiled in another way or too.
Married at just short of twenty years of age Ruth was now reaching that funny quirky time, forty. Things had only gotten worse as time went by and after several serious campaigns by alumni Tom had cornered himself into being both the football and basketball coach at old Anchor City High. Thus not only did Ruth suffer the pangs of loneliness during his weekly hunting and fishing trips but for well over half the year he would be too busy with his coaching to pay even minimal attention to Ruth. Not a good thing, not a good thing at all for somebody who was entering funny quirky time.
One of the things that was required of a coach’s wife in those days, those early 1950s days when all the way from kid sandlot football to University of Texas University all Texas was aflutter in football was to attend the Friday night games. Ruth unlike other mothers and wives rather enjoyed watching the game which had been part of the reason that she had grabbed onto Tom with both hands when he first asked her out those many years before. Of late, this season, this season of her reaching forty she found herself looking rather longingly at the young men on the field and thinking of those days when her own heart had been all aflutter when she spied Tom Snyder doing his pre-game warm-ups. In particular this year, this 1951 year when the team was pretty poor even by Anchor City standards she was drawn to two players, Duane, Duane Wilson, and Sonny, Sonny Burgess. Not because they were any great shakes as football players, they seemed to be in way over their heads when matched up against any decent teams but because they had similar physiques to her Tom’s when he was a star (the years of good old boy-dom had not been kind to Tom and he was now a certified member of the pot-bellied, sloughing forty something guys who could not have gotten out of their own ways if something had come up to startle them). Here’ the point though our Ruth started to have certain “improper” fantasies about those two young men. Yeah, that funny quirky forty thing.
When The Thin Man Was
Fat -With The Original Film Adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s TheThin
Man In Mind
By Bartlett Webbert
Recently in a review of
the fourth in the famous Myrna Loy-William Powell seemingly never-ending The Thin Man series, Shadow Of The Thin Man, I mentioned that
a long time ago, or it now seems a long time ago, I had a running argument with
the late film critic Henry Dowd about the alleged decline in manly film detectives
after the time of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip
Marlowe in the 1940s. By that Henry meant tough guy, no holds barred,
non-filter cigarette smoking, Luckies or Camels, bottom of the desk drawer hard
shell whiskey neat drinking, who didn’t mind taking or giving a punch, or taking
or giving a random slug for the cause detectives. He had based his
opinion strictly on viewing the films of the famous detective couple Nick and Nora
Charles.
Henry Dowd believed that
with the rise of The Thin Man series that previous characterization
of a model detective, his previous characterization Henry was given to the
imperative tone, switched from the hard whiskey drinking guy to a soft martini
swigging suave guy with a soft manner and an aversion to taking risks,
certainly to taking punches or slugs. Hell, in that film under review at the
time not only had Nick been married to Nora but they had a kid, not to mention
that damn dog Asta, a regular entourage to weigh a guy down. Back in the day what
had surprised Henry in our public prints argument had been when I told him that
the same guy, Dashiell Hammett, who had written the heroic tough guy detective
Sam Spade had also written the dapper Nick and charming Nora characters. Henry
did not believe me until I produced my tattered copy of Hammett’s The
Thin Man which had started the whole film series. Thereafter he kept
up the same argument except placing The
Thin Man as an aberration probably do to Hammett’s known heavy drinking or
that he was trying to soften his own Stalinist-etched persona with such an
obvious bourgeois couple. Jesus.
My objection to Henry’s
“decline of the manly” detective theory back then had not been so much about the
social manners or the social class of the couple in the series, a reversion to
the parlor detective genre before Hammett and Chandler brought the genre out of
the closet and onto the streets, as the thinness of the plots as they rolled
out each new product. I continue to tout the original film in series The Thin Man as the one everybody should
view and take in the rest if you have restless hour and one half or so to
whittle away.
I had held my viewing of
Shadow up as a case in point. I mentioned
above all that the affable Nick and Nora would get involved in the murder case
of a jockey who allegedly threw a horse race. The very notion that anybody,
much less a private eye, would give more than a passing glance to the demise an
allegedly corrupt jockey was beyond me. After all the indignities those curs have
thrown my way whenever I have had a “sure thing” has given me a very cynical
view of these professionals. Has left me teary eyed at my bad luck-or ready to
shot one myself. Of course if you are talking about throwing horse races then
you have to deal with the question of the mob and all the connections to that
organization from law enforcement to track officials. And in a roundabout way
this is how Nick with a little timely intervention by Nora solved that one thereby exonerating that fallen jockey (and a
newspaper guy too). Bringing a high-born connected guy down to boot. Enough
said.
Enough said except that
I also mentioned that if one had just one film in the series then you had to
opt for the original one based far more closely on that tattered copy of
Hammett’s crime novel. Those were the days when Nick, still besotted by Nora,
but not knocked over by her could work up the energy to do more than mix martinis.
(Or to revive the old Dowd argument before Hammett let the bottle get to him or
while working under the umbrella of Popular Front days directed from red
Moscow).
Of course even then Nick
had been softened up a little by some time out in gentle, gentile Frisco town
by once he hit New York he put on his stern working face when the daughter of
an ex-client attempted to find out where her father had taken off too. Taken
off after a couple of murders fouled up the scene. See that old man, that thin
man, had been running around with a dizzy dame who was two-timing him and so
all eyes pointed in his absent direction. Only got more heated when a guy who
saw the murderer got wasted by same.Looked like the old man would take the big step-off, take a last breathe
that he would not like.
Except in those days
although Nick was allegedly “retired” kicked out the jams long enough to find
out that the whole thing was a scam, was all smoke and mirrors by somebody, not
the thin man. Along the way Nick outsmarts the public coppers, not so hard to
do when the put their two and two together and it came up five. Two murders and
a missing boyfriend, the old man, and they had him all wrapped up and tied with
a ribbon. One little problem: the old man, the thin man, this Wynant to give
him a name was dead, very dead and had been so of a couple of months after Nick
(okay, okay with a little sniffing help from Asta) so the public coppers had
egg all over their faces. You might be surprised by who actually did the deed,
did the three murders and would surely take the big step-off, be gasping for
breathe at the end, but you can watch the film to see that worked out. What is
important is that Nick, drunk or sober, dapper or not, seemingly lazy or not,
too laid back or not grabbed the right person, solved the damn mystery without
working up serious sweat. And without getting bopped on the head, or taking
some slugs. Enough said.
