The Remnant Of The 1960s Folk Minute-With Scattered To The Wind Coffeehouses In Mind

The Remnant Of The 1960s Folk Minute-With Scattered To The Wind Coffeehouses In Mind

By Laura Perkins

Funny when I was a young girl, maybe in early high school in the very late 1960s, I gravitated to the then ebbing folk music minute of the earlier part of that decade. Previously I had been tied up with the Bobby Vee/Sandra Dee, as my companion Sam Lowell calls it, “bubblegum music” before the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who and the rest broke the spell and revived rock and roll as it should have been and was meant to be back in the classic mid-1950s when it was youth rebellion music. (That folk drift also broke the George Jones/Loretta Lynn country twaddle spell which my father had been addicted to and would only allow on the farm house radio. Later some of that country sound, the early country sound of groups like the Carters and individuals like Hank William would be reprieved.) The most amazing thing though was that while I had grown up on that farm not ten miles from the place, from Café Lena in Saratoga Springs, one of the totem pole places of the folk music movement, I had never heard of it (and would actually not go there until many years later after owner Lena Spenser had passed away). Didn’t know either about the whole Greenwich Village/Harvard Square/North Beach explosion which produced a crop of folk singers, some of who are still at it like Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, and Joan Baez and others like Eric Von Smidt, Geoff Muldaur and Jim Kweskin of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band who gave it up once they couldn’t stay with the pace (although the latter two have returned after a long hiatus), they developed other interests or there were dried up dough problems. How could I out in that isolated cold world of the farm and its eternal drudgery not aided by that tyrannical father.

Once I had heard Joni Mitchell on a friend’s radio (we were not allowed to have our own radios or record players since dear father did not want to hear the “noise” he called it) I think or maybe a young Rosalie Sorrels (who I found out later but then unknown to me had stayed at Lena’s for various periods of time as had her friend folksinger/songwriter/genial anarchist Utah Phillips) I was hooked and have paid attention to the ebbs and flows, mostly ebbs, since then. A lot of what kept me going on the folk jag once I shed my two ex-husbands who were both serious rockers of the Tom Petty (the late Tom Petty) type, I don’t know how many times I heard his Saving Grace around those respective marriage houses until I went crazy, was when I started hanging around with Sam Lowell who also writes here and who knows a million things, a million songs about folk music having a been a music critic here and at the Folk Almanac. (Sam in what under the previous regime was titled emeritus status when he retired but now just a vanilla occasional writer under the new regime which he had helped bring in. Every chance we got we would try to make folk performances in the area, especially of the aging artists who had names in the 1960s but who were starting to slip away into that good night, raging or otherwise. Checking out guys like Taj Majal, Dave Von Ronk, Tom Rush, and gals like that Rosalie Sorrels mentioned above, Anita Dolan, Etta James to see if they still had “it.” Some did, some didn’t.                

Over let’s say the past couple of decades though, almost as long as Sam and I have been companions, though except in old time coffeehouse hang-outs like Club Passim (the successor club to the legendary Club 47 over on Mount Auburn Street which I never got to hang out in), The Blue Note, and Café Algiers in Cambridge, a couple places like the Club Nana and Jimmy Swain’s in the Village, Hugo’s and the Be-bop Club in  North Beach the pickings have been pretty slim. You can travel through vast swaths of the country and be stymied in any effort to find such establishments. Although one time we found one in Joshua Tree in California run by a couple of not so ex-hippies who apparently didn’t get the news the folk minute was over but who were keeping the faith and who were able to draw second-tier acts like the late Jesse Winchester, Jesse Colin Young and Chris Smithers out to the palms and desert.

The real nut, the thing that still holds the “folk community” together if we can designate those still standing under that banner is a network of privately run labor of love coffeehouses like that Desert Bloom Coffeehouse out in Joshua Tree just mentioned. How much these places form a conscious network is up for debate since they are scattered around certain urban areas where the folkie remnant live, mainly on the Coasts or nearby. Attending one of these the other weekend Saturday got me thinking about a few things in my now long coffeehouse experiences and this little piece.

This piece brought to life after I convinced site manager Greg Green that this was not a nostalgia trip back to the 1960s but a look at a remnant of that movement that still exists, is still somewhat vibrant today. He rolled his eyes, looked at Sam who I made the mistake of taking with me since he is a hardened veteran, an actual participant in the early 1960s folk minute, which I thought might help my case. Not knowing that part of the change in regimes had been centered on breaking away from the 1960s nostalgia trips they were coming to define this space to the exclusion of the rest of the American left cultural and political historical experiences and hence the rolling eyes. That look at Sam as well as if to say he wanted no nonsense about who or what was in the firmament, folk, rock, hippies, beatniks, dope addicts, summers of love and that whole cartload of things he had come to detest about the 1960s before he took over fully from the previous regime. Only now coffeehouse stuff. Agreed. 

As Sam likes to say here is the hook. Here is the social reality too. Most of these private coffeehouses are housed in churches, church auditoria usually, and put on by church members and their friends. Sam calls the whole network ‘the U/U circuit” since a great number of them in New England at least are in Universalist-Unitarian churches, sometimes with both “Us,” sometimes singularly. Usually they are held once a month and have names like Second Street Coffeehouse, The Turks, Beautiful Day and so on. Everybody committed to these presentations, the volunteers, does “Jimmy Higgins” work turning on the lights, setting up tables and chairs, working the sound system where somehow there is always one technie grabbed from somewhere who rules the roost. Setting up a refreshment stand after all it is a coffeehouse and so you must provide coffee and…to the captive audience.

The question of performers at these events is a separate issue. Some of these are what are in what is called an “open mic” format simply meaning that anyone who wishes to sign up, after paying a nominal cover charge at the door to cover house expenses, can perform usually one or two songs and do so in some kind of order which varies with the venue. You would be surprised how many old folkies who I will discuss in a minute come out of the woodwork at the beck and call of an “open mic.” Some of the more venturesome venues like that Desert Bloom out in Joshua Tree try to lure whatever still standing professional folk singers can be corralled for cheap money (which also allows for higher cover charges-usually not too crazy like big ticket places). Iris Dement, Greg Brown, Tom Paxton, Tom Rush, Taj Mahal acts like that but that is the exception.

What usually takes place in these sites is what Sam and I saw that other week at the Second Coming Coffeehouse down in Carville about forty miles from Boston. The setting a U/U Church naturally. The set-up in the auditorium lights on, maybe fifteen tables four seats to each, sound system checked, coffee and… put out, a small table with CDs for sale, a standard set-up. This night there wa an “open mic” where one of our friends was performing, performing as the “feature” meaning that she got a half hour, maybe eight songs with an encore, for her set. She was sandwiched in between a few one song jacks and janies before her and a few afterward to make the evening complete.

What interests me every time I go to one of these things, and Sam and I have talked for hours about it afterward, is what road did these committed folkie performers take away from making a career out of doing folk venues and recordings. While there are a few duds overall the performance level is high amateur with many seemingly professionally trained voices, interesting lyrics by those who write and test out their own compositions and some virtuosity among the instrumentalist. We know some of the stories somebody like our feature friend Rosalita. We know Rosalita gave up the road after about ten years when her voice just gave out from overuse and so the “circuit” allows her to use it in more measured terms which she tends to her business as a graphic artist. Like every other musical genre, maybe more so as a sidebar genre folk music careers are a very tough dollar to make money at. No matter how good you are in a genre that is not mainstream enough to have more than a few making money at the venture.

Certainly a good number of performers are totally committed to their craft if not their profession. Sam and I during intermissions will ask that very question, asked their stories. The answers are as varied as the interviewees. Wanting to be stable which the road, especially the folk road in small clubs scattered all over forbids one to do, wanting a family, having been trained in another profession which allows for time and space to do this “volunteer” work, to flat out not motivated enough to go the distance. All good answers and true. True too I hope that this little slice of the American life gone a bit by the wayside now as the aficionados get greyer never grows extinct. That the U/U churches never close their doors to the music and the to aficionados.                        

“Turn My Nightmares Into Dreams”-The Rolling Stones’ “Sister Morphine”-For The ‘Nam Brother Slade Jackson With The “Burns-Novick “Vietnam War” Documentary In Mind

“Turn  My Nightmares Into Dreams”-The Rolling Stones’ “Sister Morphine”-For The ‘Nam Brother Slade Jackson With The “Burns-Novick “Vietnam War” Documentary In Mind   

By Bart Webber

(If you have tears now is the time to weep-RIP, Slade Jackson, RIP)

Slade Jackson always had a running nose these days, always sounded like a foghorn too. Yeah, you don’t even have to think another thought because you know without blinking an eye that the brother, the broken down from hard times in Vietnam brother, is up against a big fat jones and does not know how, does not care to know how to break the fucking habit. Funny in ‘Nam (only guys who have actually been there are entitled to use that shorthand for the hellhole as a few of his friends from the old days, from the old neighborhood, like Ben Bailey learned when they tried to emulate him on that sacred term and got nothing but icy stares for their efforts) Slade had been among the “alkies” and not the “dopers” in the division of the who did what to take away their pain, take away their constant fears, take away the dirt and grime too in the company out in the “boonies” of the Central Highlands of stinking ‘Nam.

Slade had almost naturally been revolted by the mostly black brothers and Hispanic hermanos when they lit up their damn blunts and he would get the second-hand smoke in his face when they wanted to taunt the alkies. Otherwise he got along with the brothers and hermanos, he had to almost every one of them were better soldiers than he was and a couple wound up saving his young white ass when the deal went down. Had naturally been back in the old neighborhood around 1965 when it became time for the young bucks to come of age in the drinking world attached to whiskey and beer. And deeply imbibed the alkie culture that went alone with the booze. But enough of that because this story is about dope, dope pure and simple. Yeah, Slade and his corner boys had laughed about the stupid beatniks and their dope who had better not come around their neighborhood, or else. (On that beatniks thing the inner suburbs were well behind the time since what they were objecting to were the early hippies on Boston Common with their long hair, beards, guys, weird clothing like granny dresses for women, their vacant dope-tinged stares and their free love, free sleep out on the Common, pan-handling ethos, and not the beats who were by then with their cold ass jazz, berets, black attire and indecipherable words passe, ancient history, gonzo.)                 

But that was then and this was now, the last four years now he had descended to the pits of hell (his term in his more lucid moments less frequent now), had run to sweet cousin cocaine, the good girl, and an occasional jolt of horse, the bad boy, when the money was fresh, or when he could cadge some credit from the “fix-it” man (also less frequent now). The trail down had started simply enough after coming home, coming back to the “real” world after the hellhole of Vietnam (also a term reserved for those who had been there although Slade would not give the icy stare when those who had not been there said the word), after the few months in the hospital at Da Nang recovering from that bastard Charlie’s stray spray of bullets that caught him, purple heart caught him, in the left thigh and had left him with a lifetime limp and some pain on wet or humid days. He had come back expecting no hero’s welcome after all his years were 1969 to 1972 long after almost everybody but the weird generals had given up the ghost of war and heroes, had received none but almost from day one back he was anxious to get away, anxious not see family and the old neighborhood boys. Had moved on in his head, moved on in his pain. Needed to seek kindred, needed to have some fucking peace in his head if anybody was asking  (when he went to the VA for some help he put the matter more elegantly although with results that made it clear it did not matter if he said “fucking” or “go fuck yourselves”).      

So Slade had drifted away from hometown Riverdale a score or so of miles outside of Boston, had had one job after another until he hit the West Coast, the place where he had landed after having come back to the real world and had thought about when decided he needed a fresh start. Trouble was he couldn’t find any work, couldn’t find any unskilled work for which he was fit having dropped out of school in the eleventh grades except maybe bracero work in the fields which was below his dignity (he told somebody that he had had his fill of “spics” in the Army anyway and hoped he never saw one again although as soldiers they were fine, better than him anyway), couldn’t hold the few day labor jobs that came his way. Started drinking heavily, mostly cheap day labor wines (“What’s the word, Thunderbird, what’s the price, forty twice”), and hanging around parks with guys, some fellow vets from ‘Nam but mostly older guys who had been around the block one too many times. A loser only made worse by his thigh pain acting up more and only made worse by his deeper alienation from the real, real world.

One day he was in San Luis Obispo having hopped a series of local freight trains working his way down from Salinas (where he had done stoop labor with the “braceros” after all so you know where his head and soul were at just then) when he stopped in the “jungle,” the hobo, tramp, bum hang-out along the railroad siding when he met John Arrowhead (an appropriate moniker for a man who was one hundred percent Native American, indigenous person, an Indian), who had served in ‘Nam with the 101^st Airborne who told him he was heading down to Westminster south of L.A. to join what he called the “brothers under the bridge.” At first Slade did not understand what John was speaking of, though the cheap wine he was drinking and cheaper marijuana he was smoking had fogged up his head. Then John explained that there were maybe one hundred, one hundred and fifty guys, all ‘Nam guys who could not face the real world coming back and had joined together under a railroad bridge and created their own world, their own commune if you wanted to put the situation that way. (John did not, could not express his thoughts that way but that was how Slade explained it to Ralph Morse, an old high school corner boy and fellow veteran, one night when he had come back to Riverdale because he had no other place to go to “die” as he said to Ralph when asked about why he had come back to town). 

Slade decided that he would hobo his way down to Westminster with John to see what was up, to see if the brothers under the bridge could make him feel like a man, like a human being again. The night before Slade and John left John passed  Slade his cheapjack joint and while in the past Slade had passed a million times when a joint or pipe had been passed around that night he was feeling so blue about his prospects that he did his first weed. Nothing to it but he slept soundly, or as soundly as anybody sleeping on the ground in a hobo camp could, for the first time in a long time.

A few days later arriving in Westminster after having flagged down three freight trains to get there and warding off a bunch of punk kids in El Segundo who wanted to “hassle the bums” Slade could not believe that these brothers under the bridge had created their own world outside of town. Had created a tent city but more importantly for the first time in a long time he felt at home. So when somebody passed him a joint, a “welcoming joint” the guy had called it (a guy from the notorious 23th Division in ‘Nam) he took a handful of tokes without a second thought. That, when somebody had asked him later when he made his first of about ten tries at “detox,” was when he charted the beginning of his slippery slope ride down to the gates of hell. There had been so much dope at the tent city (brought in by guys who had connections in Mexico and old connections to the Golden Triangle opium trade in Vietnam) that it became impossible for him to resist if he had wanted to resist when the dope train started.              

Slade went along okay for a while, felt at home, felt he finally belonged somewhere, and fuck, finally found some relief for his physical pain that was acting up the longer he suffered under it. Got some relief for the pain in his head, something to put out the fire in his head (not his way of expressing the matter but Ralph’s shorthand way of putting it many years later when the subject of Slade Jackson came up among the surviving corner boys who had known Slade in sunnier days). He worked hard to help keep the place in shape, in as good shape as any band of brothers living out in the winds could do. Then one freaking night (Ralph’s expression, not Slade’s) the whole world collapsed, the cops from about seven different units local, county, state who knows maybe federal this before every law enforcement agency had the particular agency emblazoned on their slickers so it was hard to tell descended on the camp and ran everybody who could be run off the hell off, ripped down the tents and communal dining areas, everything. Arrested a few guys who had outstanding warrants against them and that was that. Gone.

A few days later Slade having lost contact with John Arrowhead found himself in El Cajon down south of San Diego in a rundown rooming house filled with stinking braceros and street winos who had enough dough for a flop for the night. He had been busted up some by a night stick-wielding cop with nothing but rage on his face so Slade was in some pain. He asked one guy, a dark Spanish-looking dude if he had any dope, weed, to clear his head. No weed. This was in the days when cocaine was just coming up the Mex pipeline in big bricks, kilos rather than ounces. That dude connected with somebody he knew and a few hours later he was back showing Slade how to cut the stuff, how to do blow by using a mirror and a razor blade to cut it up and taking a rolled dollar bill and snorting it up your nose. Slade’s first reaction was a jolt, a rapid beating of his heart like he was going to have an attack. That jolt did not last that long but after that first attack subsided he felt no pain in his thigh, felt no anger in his heart. He grabbed the razor blade and diced up another line. You know the story from there, or can guess it. Know the end too.                              

But no you don’t know. Don’t know how sweet cousin made his days go by faster, made the ‘Nam nightmares that had plagued him, had robbed him of his sleep, had made the night sweats go away for a while (even he admitted before he got to be a too far gone daddy in the days when he at least accepted the idea of “de-tox” that it was only for a while, only until the effect subsided). Then reality hit, the reality that to keep an even keel he needed more dope and more dope meant more money, and there was not enough money in the world to curb his hurts. He hustled first cons, then himself. Became a sneak thief and stole everything that was not nailed down. Finally winding up as usually happened with a guy with a big habit acting a stupid “mule” for Ronnie Romero, the big connection guy in El Cajon.           

One night he had been out at a park after bringing a load of goods over the border when a middle-aged guy, a be-bop kind of guy, what in the old days in places like New York City and Frisco town they called a hipster, hipster meaning cool back then sized him up and asked him if he wanted to “get well.” Get back on top. Slade, now so deep into the drug scene that he was game for anything said sure. That max daddy hipster put the first, although not the last needle in Slade’s arm. He had a rush ten times greater than any cocaine boost had ever given him. Somehow he knew for a while that he had better not go to the mat with horse, with boy. And for a couple of years he would do a hit on occasion while working for that hipster around town selling his wares. But in the end he forgot the first rule-the seller does not test the merchandise. And so there was a direct correlation between his increased horse use and the lessening of his cousin.          

No one knew Slade was dying when he came back to Riverdale after many years absence, after shedding a pants full of weight, after failing his last chance “de-tox” at Smiley VA Hospital in Frisco. But Slade knew before the end because he told Ralph one night that he had heard the “noise of wings,” a phrase he remembered from a childhood hymn, Angel Band, that had always impressed him because previously he had believed that those angel wings were silent. One night they found one Slade Jackson, purple heart Vietnam War veteran in a back alley humped up in a pile. The cause of death-heart failure. The real cause-Slade Jackson could never get enough dope in his system to turn his nightmares into dreams.       

The Rise And Fall Of The Shamus Game- Frank Sinatra’s “Tony Rome” (1967)-A Film Review

The Rise And Fall Of The Shamus Game- Frank Sinatra’s “Tony Rome” (1967)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Bartlett Webber

Tony Rome, starring Frank Sinatra, Jill Saint John, 1967 

I am an old-time black and white film noir private detective, shamus, gumshoe, key-hole peeper, whatever you want to call guys who do the public coppers’ dirty work for chump change and a few lumps on the head, kind of guy. Have built a reputation in the cinematic and literary critics’ world for pushing up and pulling down the private eyes who filled up the screen when the film adaptations of guys like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain in an off moment ruled the roost and made many an audience forget their woes for a while in the 1930s Great Depression days and the waiting by the home fires for the other shoe to drop during the 1940s European and Pacific Wars. To give you an example, a famous one that others like the legendary film critic Sandy Salmon have commented on, I have taken Hammett’s classic Sam Spade from out his The Maltese Falcon and run him up the pole as super-hero that no DC or Marvel comic holy goof could even stand in his shadow, could beat with that ten foot pole, or have placed him down in the mud with the other geeks playing a bit role (picked out of the Frisco town telephone book to boot) against the real action between Brigid O’Shaughnessy and the “Fat Man.” I could give more but that should suffice.  

So it came as a challenge, what would have been a freak of nature thing under the old regime on this site of Allan Jackson, when new site manager, Greg Green, not knowing of my area of expertise, assigned me this Tony Rome private detective film from the 1960s. I had at first refused, had put my foot down, when Greg essentially ordered me to do the review to “broaden my horizons.” The coup de grace though was when he threatened me with having to do one of those super-hero comic holy goof reviews which he has foisted on virtually everybody under the false impression that his target audience, the younger crowd, even bothered to read hard copy or on-line reviews. Could give a fuck about such views. (He still believes social media, the real way that crowd forms a critical mass for anything these days, is just a passing fad like the hula-hoops of my youth.) As you can tell I have if under protest succumbed to his blandishment.         

Frankly it is hard to see what makes the post-World War II Technicolor private detective tick. What makes Tony run. A guy like Sam Spade, Phil Marlowe, hell, even Lou Dalton grabbed a case, a murder case usually although real private detectives mainly did, do, key-hole peeping and re-po work, maybe a security breech problem on an off-day, bang-bang the bad guys and went under the satin sheets with whatever femme was still standing. But most days they were sitting in some run down ill-kept small office in some seen better days office building filled with failed dentists, unlicensed quacks, re-po men, junk jewelers, insurance salesman and quick change artists reaching periodically for that low shelf whiskey bottle in the bottom drawer of that paper-strewn desk trying to figure how to keep this dunning fools away from his door.   

This Tony Rome, played by East Coast cool and collected Frank Sinatra last seen in this space playing Oscar-worthy Maggio the platoon wise ass who got tumbled by a sadistic prison guard in the film adaptation of James Jones’ From Here to Eternity, I can’t figure. Worked out of Miami in the post-Cuban Revolution days not a bad locale but too much sunshine and blue ocean seas floating out high white notes for serious detection world like in fog-bound San Francisco. Lived off a boat, dressed like a sportsman (complete with soft hat an emblem of a by-gone era), drove a swanky car and not a clunker like most key-hole peepers who are one step ahead of the loan company’s re-po man, and had an office that Sam, Phil, Lou would have died for. Where is there room for a low rent desk and sipping out of low shelf pint whiskey bottles in all of that. To boot our man Tony has a gambling jones that keeps the wolves at his door and the need to grab some kale on the off-track days. A man with feet of clay, an everyman.    

Even the caper Tony gets involved is a laugher of sorts. A cheapjack case that wouldn’t draw breathe one from the old-timers. Some young curvaceous dippy dame had about seven too many drinks and wound up passed out on a motel bedroom. Bad for business anyway you look at the matter so Tony does his old ex-partner a favor taking the nymph home to rich father and mother. The old man wonders what happened to his daughter and hires our man to figure on what was what. The key, a missing diamond pin “misplaced” by said dippy daughter, gives Tony an excuse to hunt high and low for that damn thing. Then the bodies start to pileup as his ex-partner, a fence, a jeweler and his bodyguard are wasted.   

Tony then spends the rest of his time trying to figure out what was going on since that so-called diamond pin was bogus, was glass. After some more shootings and mayhem it turned that the rich man’s daughter was hocking her step-mother’s jewelry to give some moola to his drunken sot of a mother and her ne’er do well husband what actually ordered the various and sundry killings to keep the cash cow coming. The hook? That step-mother was previously married to one of the bad guys and had never gotten a divorce so the squeeze was on when that bad guy hit town looking for the big pay-off. Instead getting lead, plenty of it. In the end the bad guys took it on the head and that was that.     

Well almost “that was that” because have you noticed something missing. Unlike in a Sherlock Holmes story line where Danny Moriarty (an alias for reasons he can explain if you run across him in this space) has been running a campaign to debunk the Englishman as a serious detective bringing up of late the question of his and Doctor Watson’s sexual preferences since neither has been seen lately with a dame, even a one night stand, Tony is strictly a lady’s man. Or so that is the way he wants to see himself in the private detection world where every male P.I. is chasing skirts and nobody thinks anything of it. Except Tony is not really chasing any dame, not even 1960s eye candy Ann Archer, played by Jill Saint John, whose only purpose is to do the other end of a lot of sexual foreplay and innuendo but no silky sheets. Yeah, not your grandfather’s shamus, no indeed.   

In Defense Of Consumer Spending- With The Film Adaptation Of Sophie Kinsella’s “Confessions Of A Shopaholic” (2009)-A Film Review

In Defense Of Consumer Spending- With The Film Adaptation Of Sophie Kinsella’s “Confessions Of A Shopaholic” (2009)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Seth Garth   

Confessions Of A Shopaholic, starring Isla Fisher, Hugh Dancy, from the novels of Sophie Kinsella, 2009

I can’t believe that I have been given an assignment dealing with the addiction of shopping, girl’s stuff, Confessions Of A Shopaholic starring Isla Fisher as Rebecca, a girl’s film that should by right be done by somebody who knows something about the subject, about shopping. For myself I am like the guy, like Luke the money magazine editor, played by Hugh Dancy have set world records for shopping and getting the hell out-fast. But this is the genesis of how I got this turkey, turkey for me not for the people who might get a few chuckles out of the film or could relate to this shopping mania. Greg Green, the new site manager who has very different ideas about the way forward for this site, has been looking, has been foundering as far as I am concerned trying to grab a larger, younger audience and has been running a streak of so-called super-hero bang-bang films and now has branched out to this kind of odd-ball comedy to grab the shopping consuming crowd which peaks on Black Friday after Thanksgiving Day I guess. He had originally approached Leslie Dumont but she balked having written two consecutive women-related film review and had expressed in print that she did not want to be tagged as the token “women’s page” writer. Rebuffed then Greg approached me under the principle of “broadening my horizons” and having avoided those super-hero films could not back off. So here we are.       

Here we are beyond the obvious boy meets girl theme which I will address later that Hollywood has been hatching and working for its entire existence. Rebecca is a shopaholic who also happens to be a journalist working for a low-rent gardening magazine who has dreams of working for the bigs, for a high end fashion magazine on her career rise. By hook or by crook she gets a job working for the aforementioned Luke in a smart money magazine owned by the same parent company who owned the fashion magazine. That will start the long haul attraction which will lead to their love affair by film’s end.

Along the way it turns out that the perky, vivacious Rebecca has not only a shopping jones, is purebred junkie, which is probably more common than expected but had been eaten up her credit cards. Proved that her eyes were bigger than her pocketbook. Something had to be done if she was to keep afloat, grab that high end job and grab that poor little rich boy (his parents were super-rich but he wanted to pull himself up by his own bootstraps ) while dodging the repo men, the debt dead beat pursuers. The bulk of the film, including a bout with Shopaholic Anonymous, at first as a lark then more seriously, involves her getting out from under without dear Luke getting wind of the idea. That was not be and the couple went through a period of deep freeze once he found out she was in debt up to her ass. Naturally that freeze would only last for a bit until she got out of hock. Got back to the real world, a world without going crazy over consumer goods. Beyond that the storyline could not carry any additional weight. Greg I have done my duty.             

February is Black History Month-Honor Historian Carter G. Woodson

February is Black History Month-Honor Historian Carter G. Woodson

By Sam Eaton

Normally, unlike guys like Sam Lowell and Frank Jackman that write here about politics and history, I am not interested in the fate of historians dead or alive. They provide valuable material, mostly, but I just am not attuned to history enough to go crazy over any particular one, or any particular morsel they have to serve up. Not so the man we are honoring here Carter G. Woodson (and on Google’s home page doodle as well which is where I got my prompt from). The reason I am more than happy to make an exception is that the good Doctor did yeoman’s work, no more than that, to bring us young white kids who were involved in the black civil rights movement in the early 1960s plenty of information about the history of early black struggles and personalities. Started journals and programs to study the subject. Stuff that we were clueless about despite our avidity to help in the black liberation struggle. Stuff that was not taught in any high school course, hell, any college courses until well after Black/Afro-American study programs were established. So, yes, hats off the good Doctor.     

February is Black History Month-Honor Historian Carter G. Woodson

February is Black History Month-Honor Historian Carter G. Woodson

By Sam Eaton

Normally, unlike guys like Sam Lowell and Frank Jackman that write here about politics and history, I am not interested in the fate of historians dead or alive. They provide valuable material, mostly, but I just am not attuned to history enough to go crazy over any particular one, or any particular morsel they have to serve up. Not so the man we are honoring here Carter G. Woodson (and on Google’s home page doodle as well which is where I got my prompt from). The reason I am more than happy to make an exception is that the good Doctor did yeoman’s work, no more than that, to bring us young white kids who were involved in the black civil rights movement in the early 1960s plenty of information about the history of early black struggles and personalities. Started journals and programs to study the subject. Stuff that we were clueless about despite our avidity to help in the black liberation struggle. Stuff that was not taught in any high school course, hell, any college courses until well after Black/Afro-American study programs were established. So, yes, hats off the good Doctor.     

The Legend-Slayer Cometh -Young Will Bradley Rides Against-Shattering The “Fake News, Alternate Facts” Myth Of Early Aviator Johnny Cielo-With A Vengeance-No Quarter Given-No Quarter Taken

The Legend-Slayer Cometh -Young Will Bradley Rides Against-Shattering The “Fake News, Alternate Facts” Myth Of Early Aviator Johnny Cielo-With A Vengeance-No Quarter Given-No Quarter Taken 

By Will Bradley

Here is genesis. A couple of years ago, at a time when fake news and alternate facts were in their infancy, no, when they surfaced after leading underground cultist existences and “all the news that’s fit to print” was the official mantra I got as one of my first assignments a dueling film review partnership with old-time “corner boy,” meaning one of those present at the creation of this publication when it was in hard copy form, Seth Garth to give our respective takes on one Sherlock Holmes (an alias real name Larry Lawrence but to avoid confusion here I will stick with his more well-known moniker). The original idea was that he was to give his review from an old guy perspective of one who grew up with the legend of this so-called master private detective and I from a young guy who was clueless about the guy perspective. Both of us dug deeply into every aspect, every public aspect and a few private ones of how Holmes’ legend got its start.

What we both found out was that the legend was made out of whole cloth, that Holmes was a fake, a fraud, and much more despite the big press agent, publicity department build-up with which the unknowing British people were hammered with from day one of the press campaign. Led by an English firm called Christie and Doyle at the time, although there were later dummy corporations to make it harder to track the bums down but whatever the name those were just covers for lots of illegal activity to get Holmes’ name in the prints and over the radio and in the movies, television had not come along by then. One example, Winston Churchill, yes, the guy who was President, Prime Minister or whatever the call the kingdom’s top lap dog kowtowing to royalty at every step, received a ton money, thousands of pounds, British money, for saying out loud that he wished some his Scotland Yard coppers were half as good as this Holmes. Another example, one of the Lords, a lord who later turned out to a mouthpiece for the Nazis during World War II took a big pay-off to try to get Holmes a knighthood, a “Sir” before his name, the OBE. One slow news days these flaks were able to get the London tabloids to print whatever swill these bums threw out as press releases usually the paper just cutting off the top putting one of their paid-off reporters names on it and let it fly. All for cold hard cash. And you thought this stuff only happened in long-ago ward-heeling America or in the post-Citizens United. Wise up, please.

Seth when he has time, or if he can remember, can fill the reader in on what he uncovered, the same basic swill but usually rawer, stuff about getting Holmes’ name into “girlie magazines” to show how virile he and Nigel somebody, his dear friend, Seth’s expression not mine, were to guard against those ever present insinuations that they were more than just dear friends. The best one I remember was the way these hounds were able to drop some poor bedraggled professor from Oxford into the deep blue sea, Moriarty I think the name was, and faking documents naming him as the mastermind of the Gunpowder Plot, or some such evil endeavor against the royal family, King George, at the time. This professor who had trouble tying his shoes or knowing what day it was. Beautiful. The guys and gals who are running big time publicity operations for starlets and reality television show entertainers could learn a few tricks from these guys as much as I hate to say it. The one thing that grizzled old Seth and I agree on.      

The battle between Seth and me which stretched endlessly and mercilessly over something like fourteen films each more cravenly worshipful of Holmes and his live-in dear friend Nigel than the last was a “no holds barred” fight to the end though as far as exposing this bum of the month (and indirectly putting the slams on C&D although those guys were able to ride out the storm grabbing a big contract from clients who wanted to build up the Robin Hood legend to claim some odd-ball inheritance by primogeniture, or some cloudy claim). Seth, maybe reliving some of his youthful anti-gay (then fag, homo, Nancy, “light on their feet” stuff) feelings, concluded that Holmes’ whole legend was the work of what he called the “Homintern” (which he told me was a word created as a take-off on the Comintern which guys he knew like Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender hung around by the English poet W. H. Auden, himself a known gay, or maybe not then but now known, who hung around with the British private school gay cotillion). The idea was to create myths about guys who were gay (I don’t know about lesbians since this never came up in our duel so I will stick with gays) to make them more intelligent, more virile, more cultured than ordinary guys and protect the clan.

Seth’s whole approach was to identify various aspects of Holmes’ life starting with his relationship to his “dear friend” Doc Watson in their little love nest on Baker Street and expose him as a second or third-rate private eye who was clueless about how solve a murder mystery without the aid of a battalion of Scotland Yard agents. He did present some strong evidence including eye-witness account of Holmes and Doc hanging around the notorious KitKat Club and haunting waterfront taverns looking for sailors who were looking for kinky kicks-on land. Something seemed wrong about his gay-baiting approach, something that didn’t seem to jell with the facts once I looked at Holmes’ police sheet (which is how I was able to figure out the Holmes name was an alias and his real name Larry Lawrence and which Seth was clueless about in his quest to discount anybody in the 20^st century because he was gay). Of course one size fits all Seth would not have dreamed of checking police records even if he only was looking to see if he or Nigel had ever been arrested like poor Reading Gaol-bound Oscar Wilde for the “love that dare not speak its name.”

I was thus more than happy to concede that Holmes was gay, that he was playing house with Nigel on Baker Street but what of it. My take from the beginning had been though that Holmes was essentially asexual, was driven more by a lust for gold than for another man’s body, certainly not Doc’s (whose real name if I didn’t mention it before was Nigel something but don’t make a fuss about names because they were changed like underwear). Maybe it was a generational thing but who cared if they slept together or not. The key was an arrest made by the London bobbies when they made one of their periodic raids of the KitKat Club where Holmes and Doc had been hiding out. The coppers found tons of stolen goods, drugs, sexual paraphernalia, pornography, guns. As it turned out, although it was never conclusively proven as to the extend, Holmes was the master thief behind half the robberies, kidnappings, beatings, purse-snatchings and what have you in London. He spent six years in Dartmoor (under the name Larry Lawrence which is why it was originally hard to figure out why the legend was nothing but a press agent’s dream, dreamed up by a guy who worked for the publicity firm, Christie and Doyle who later turned state’s evidence or what every they called the British Empire in court.

But enough of Holmes and his man Doc. What that eye-opening experience led to for me was an extreme interest in finding out about other legends, see what some press agent dreamt up out of the blue to invent guys, gals too but as in much of history mostly guys got their stories told, true or not. Since them I have exposed guys like Robin Hood as a two-bit rack-renting landlord (despite the best efforts of those latter-day clients of Christie who never did prove their right to inheritance but who started a backlash by the descendants of those yeoman and tenant farmers who Hood gouged looking for their family lands back or reparations), Captain Blood as nothing but a dregs Middle Passage slaver (and whose still intact estate in Jamaica is the subject of a separate reparations effort), Don Juan as some convent maiden’s hormonal urgings and so on (no basis for reparations and in any case the initial outburst by that frustrated maiden ignited so rapidly it would be hard to see who to claim reparations from and the only realistic recourse would be to have Don Juan posthumously put in the dock for child molestation and unwanted sexual advances amounting to assault).

The more modern legends like Superman (proven to be a ninety-eight pound weakling who one day found a matchbook cover ad for developing muscles to shed the reputation that girls could kick sand in his face and that kryptonite stuff was just another PR hustle, this time by Mad Men working overtime to create somebody to save the sorry modern world on the quiet) and Batman (who in the end wound up facing charges of sexual assault on his “protégé” Robin and destruction of public property) dismissed out of hand as mutants and foul balls. What has spurred me on, what has let site manager Greg Green let me have free reign and moved me up the food chain in this dog eat dog journalism business is a recent survey conducted by UCal (and supported by the well-respected Harrison Foundation) where as a result of my work, and that of others, there has been a sharp decline in many legends. I take this as simple proof, contrary to what most of the writers here had expected, that at least some people are beginning to rebel against fake news and alternate facts, which is what legends live on that I have been successful.         

Moreover, as I have recently demonstrated with my defense of the Green Lantern, both the individual and universe-wide organization which is protecting us even I as write and of the luscious Red Sparrow, the Russian espionage agent who is keeping a check-up on things under Putin I am not dismissing all legends out of hand. Only those which are fake, made up, undeserved. I have worked out, no, am working out a kind of guideline to determinate who or what deserves legendary status.

The pro-legend cases just mentioned can serve as an evaluation tool for such efforts. The Green Lantern, organization first, is pretty much of a no-brainer, a motley band of citizens of the universe, 3600 in all earthlings take notice with your bloated military and security budgets that protect no one from serious harm by evil forces, have volunteered to protect us all. Hats off. Beyond that they are working in the service of the greater good, the struggle against fear that grips us all at times and which the evil genies depend on to wreak their havoc. As for our section protector Green Lantern, one Hal Jordan, yes, the Hal Jordan who flew, really flew the top of the line fighter planes and broke a million records for speed and altitude his record speaks for itself. While cynics have sneered that he took the Lantern job just to impress his girlfriend and have made fun of the fact that he can as the first earthling since Icarus’ ill-fated adventure fly without some superstructure holding him back, he is the real deal. Hats off again.

The Red Sparrow, the former ballerina turned seriously trained Russian espionage agent who was turned by her revulsion at the current situation in Russia, now working with the CIA via a field operative who went rogue to bring her in from the cold kind of speaks for herself. Every aspect of her case checks out. With those cases in mind I can truthfully say I have been very successful thus far in weeding out the bum of the month crowd from the real stars.  

Except, one big except in the case highlighted by the headline to this piece, the fake legend of one Johnny Cielo whose ratings have actually gone up as a result of my hammering his faded reputation. (I would add that a similar spike occurred in belief in angels which sobered me a little in the belief that people were buying into rational argument across the board. I will investigate the finding on this phenomenon more when I receive the actual data from UCal-maybe it is a skewed sample or maybe we are not further away from the primordial slime than I have led myself to believe.) Yes, Johnny Cielo who I didn’t know from Adam when I started my crusade has defied my best efforts to send him to well-deserved oblivion. Frankly when I started out slaying undeserved legends, I knew nothing about the guy and only half-consciously remembered him as having something to do with early aviation, although even that I was not sure of and had to look up in Wikipedia or one of those other Internet information services.  

How I even got the name was that a fellow reporter, a free-lancer, who has since caught on with the Miami Herald was in that town on a “spec” assignment from the Washington Post about continued CIA attempts to destabilize the Castro regime in Cuba (this before Fidel passed and Raul stepped down). They never showed up at the Flamingo bar where they were to meet my friend. Having been “stiffed” and with time on his hands he bellied up to the bar and started ordering shots of whisky straight up (a bad habit I gave up about three weeks after I came of legal drinking age). A guy, who called himself Billy Bond, as usual don’t make much of names in this legend business or you will go crazy with despair, asked my guy to buy him a drink. He did. They got to talking after four or five shots when this Billy started talking about how when he was a kid he had met the legendary, Billy’s word, Johnny Cielo, who was quite a character and who had flown guns and supplies to Fidel and his crowd back in the late 1950s when it counted. My guy sensing a story to replace the one that had just fallen down kept buying rum-dum Billy shots while pressing for details.     

The gist of what Billy had to say was that this Johnny had been the real guy who had followed Icarus’s dream, had been the first guy to fly and gave some details about places and times. Had been there later when Howard Hughes was ready to make aviation a mass consumer product worth billions of dollars with his TWA operation.

This next part is where things get interesting and where eventually I had to step in to break down this bogus legend which even by duped legend standards was a whopper. Johnny had been running various airmail services, essentially into the ground as I would find out later, when he had to flee the country since guys, tough guys, working for guys who had loaned Johnny money based on his “connections” with Howard Hughes were looking high and low for him. He wound up in golden Barranca in Central America running that airmail service into the ground. You ask so what. Well according to Billy and the other cultist believers Johnny had the real movie icon drop dead beautiful Rita Hayworth on his arm as he entered the country. I will get to debunking in a minute but the final act in the legend, literally, was that bit about Johnny running guns to Fidel over in Cuba. Billy added that Johnny had fallen down into the ocean, into the Caribbean on one desperate flight and that was that for poor Johnny.

After my reporter friend pumped Billy for whatever he could, whatever a dozen whiskey shots got him he left the bar, went to his hotel room and started making plans to verify the story. (Those were the halcyon days when reporters actually verified stuff before sending it along unlike today when everything is made of whole cloth and fast in the 24/7/365 news cycles.) That entailed going to Key West which is when Johnny operated out before he fell into the sea, and where Billy claimed he met Johnny as a kid in the 1950s. And that is where the story began to unravel. Not through refutation by anybody who knew anything there because everybody who knew about Johnny believed the legend intact. By the simple fact that no way Johnny could have been at the beginning of aviation, been with the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. Some cultists had built a shrine to Johnny Cielo, a small memorial with his name and dates of birth on it. Johnny was born in 1910 and died in 1958. It took a minute for my guy to realize that the Wright Brother followed Icarus (without his tragic fate) in 1903. From there everything else fell down, fell like a house of cards. That is when my friend contacted me knowing that I was interested in busting fake and undeserved legends.

Silly me I thought like with Sherlock and the more modern legends I would break this thing like a twig would expose the fakery once I got an handle on how it started, who benefitted from keeping the legend alive. Naturally it was as I surmised a work of an overzealous press agent, publicity guy who had been hired by the crowd of cultists in Key West to keep Johnny’s legend intact. No that was later after Johnny died. Johnny had hired the guy originally when he was in the chips running high-    end passengers from Key West to say Naples up the West Coast of Florida so they wouldn’t have to drive and get all sweaty or something. That is where John Kerr entered the lists in behalf of bedraggled Johnny Cielo.  John Kerr, yes, that John Kerr who had worked as the Society Page guy for the Times is the villain of the piece, is the guy who has through his long-ago work thwarted my efforts to bring some rational thought to the real life bum whose every breathe seemed to be a lie.    

Let me go by the numbers, go in order to yet again try to bring some sense to this damn Cielo legend. I have already mentioned that birth date which precludes Johnny being present at the creation. Funny there are of plenty of photographs of Wilbur and Orville, working their magic, at the museum, shrine whatever you want to call it which is nothing but a gold standard money-maker between the admission fee and the “company store” material for sale but not one picture of Johnny with them. Same thing with the Hughes so-called connection. There is every conceivable photo of the handsome Hughes and his various experimental planes and his first efforts with TWA but not one except one of Johnny working the engine of some beat down plane, some crate that would last about one minute in the air. Checking out employment records from the time, Hughes was a fanatic about many things and keeping tight fiscal accounts was one of them, I found out through the Hughes Archives that Johnny had worked in Omaha for the Hughes corporation but had been let go for stealing tools.

How Kerr buried that is a story I would dearly love to hear. See part, no, most of the roadblocks which I have encountered in busting Johnny’s legend have been set up by John Kerr who is the guy who set up the Johnny shrine in Key West and is the main beneficiary of the dough that comes pouring in from poor saps who don’t know enough history to know Johnny wasn’t even born when the Wrights went skyward. It took me a while, took me to investigating the so-called Cielo-Hayworth romance to realize the ninety-something Kerr was still working his PR bullshit on a gullible public using his former reputation for truth at the Times and rubbing stardust in the eyes to get away with some really crazy stuff.     

The Hayworth “affair” takes the cake. I don’t know all the details about why Johnny had to flee America except he was such a poor manager that he ran every airmail operation, including his brief stint delivering the U.S. mails, into the ground and so he was in hock up to his eyebrows. He wound up in fabled Barranca working for the bigwig postal guy there and since that guy didn’t know about the stuff in America hired him to deliver outpost mail. It didn’t hurt that he had that even now to the eye drop dead beautiful “Rita” on his arm, eye candy for guys away from foxy women for a while. I will tell you right now if you have not guessed already that was not the real Rita on his arm but some whore he met either a bordello or dime-a-dance joint in Hoboken. No question from the million photographs at the shrine although that this woman looked very much like Rita that it was not her, no way. First because even a fairly quick look can tell that she had been beaten down, been working on her ass too long and would not age well, not at all. Secondly, again a blow against alternate facts for what good it has done me thus far, the real Rita Hayworth in the time frame mentioned was playing footsies with a guy named the Aga Khan, a bigwig over in Morocco somewhere. By the way I will forewarn you that the number one selling items at the company store are photos and other memorabilia connected with Rita’s presence on Johnny’s arm.    

Now for the final blow, what should be the final blow, Johnny’s work for the heroic Castro brothers, Che and the fistful of other guerilla fighters up in the Sierra Madres looking to beat down America-supported Batista. The Kerr storyline which even got play in the Times supposedly the place that only deals with “all the news that’s fit to print” but where he had powerful connections from his previous work there, was that Johnny fell down into the Caribbean going on a gun run. Nonsense. Johnny did fall down, or at least I am willing to believe he fell down there in the Gulf of Mexico when his plane, his freaking stupid ass Piper Club ran out of gas and he had to ditch the plane with hm and three high society passengers aboard who were heading to Sarasota. The real deal was that Johnny finally did make some dough, enough to hire John Kerr, in the 1950s by ferrying passengers from Key West to points north. So much for the gun run noise. Never happened, totally made up by one John Kerr when he saw his meal ticket was being punched.  

Okay those are the bare outlines of the Cielo legend. One would think that it would be easy, very easy to just blow that away with the wind. Especially as I have gone way out of my way since my reporter friend tipped me to this story to document stuff. Still the cultists and desperate hero-worshipers have hung on, mainly by the brainwashing from Kerr. Here is what I have done to refute the legend to no avail. I have a notarized photostat of John Robert Cielo’s birth certificate from Elmira, New York his birthplace. I have sworn statements by people who knew Rita Hayworth, knew where she was, and where she wasn’t in the 1940s. I have that Hughes employment and unceremonious discharge record from Hughes Aviation and I have the flight manifests for Johnny’s last flight from Key West to the never gotten too Sarasota.

You would think that would be enough proof to sink any legend, any legend for guys who at least had done some of the stuff that their press agents distributed. No, all I get is so-called anonymous communications denying that I had the right Johnny, the right Johnny on the birth certificate when they claim he was born in Elmira, Ohio (checked out, no go). That “so what” if Johnny and Howard didn’t see eye to eye when Johnny was trying to save him money on some Golden Goose plane by saying it wouldn’t work, was not economically feasible, at the time. That Rita wasn’t down in Barranca with Johnny didn’t matter, implying that the foxy whore before she ran out on Johnny when he ran out of dough or was run out of Barranca when he ditched the postmaster’s last serviceable plane, was good enough for them to hang onto. Here is the clincher, the one that says it all about whether Johnny ran guns for the Castros or was just a bush pilot running tourist around sunny 1950s Florida went that place was a haven for the rich gringos. They claim that the Stalinists, the Cuban Communist, the “commies” the way one Johnny aficionado put the matter, have kept the archives locked up so we will not know for maybe fifty years what Johnny’s role with Castro boys will turnout to have been. Alluding to the possibility that Johnny at some point helped out the revolution. That has the mark of John Kerr all over it. Enough said.   

From The Living Archives Of Boston Veterans For Peace-They Ain't Your Grandfather's Veterans-By Site Manager Greg Green-First Night Against The Wars In Boston New Years Eve Day-A Ralph Morris-Sam Eaton Story

From The Living Archives Of Boston Veterans For Peace-They Ain't Your Grandfather's Veterans-By Site Manager Greg Green-First Night Against The Wars In Boston New Years Eve Day-A Ralph Morris-Sam Eaton Story

By Site Manager Greg Green  

“Everybody knows the story about how Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton met and how they got there and how they became VFP stalwarts, right?” asked Don Mack, local Boston chapter coordinator just as the post-“First Night Against The Wars” party was about to begin at his house. The event held each year at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve had become a staple of the yearly activities of the organization since it had been formed by a coalition of peace and social action groups about a dozen years before. After what was usually a cold to bitter cold afternoon’s work the participants and other friends and supporters would meet at Don’s house in Brighton for the annual New Year’s Eve party which would bring in the new year in a somber if not sober way.  

The reason that Don had asked if the people present knew of the Ralph and Sam story is because Frank Jackman, usually pretty knowledgeable about the personal histories of the local members had mentioned to somebody at the anti-war stand-out within Don’s hearing that the pair had grown up together in Carver and had both been in Vietnam, although not together and not at the same times. That got Don to realize that Frank either had forgotten the particulars of their story or had had a senior moment, or both. When Don got a mixed set of answers to his question he realized that perhaps it was the time and place to tell the story, or rather have the pair who were present at the party as usual tell the story as a very good way to show a lifetime of commitment to the anti-war and social justice movements and how that came about. Don had remembered that one night when they were at Jack’s over in Cambridge after an anti-Raytheon weapons-maker stand-out that both Ralph and Sam had declared that if had not been for the Vietnam War and their reactions to what it had done to their respective sensibilities that they would not be sitting in that room ready to bleed out once again their collective story.

Here is what Ralph, then Sam had to say that night to the couple of dozen people gathered around their seats:         

I was strictly a working- class kid growing up in the rough and tumble Tappan Street section of then, as now, run down Troy upstate New York right next to Albany, the state capital. Was the son of a then struggling owner of a small high-end electronics components company which my father had scratched to make a go of. Growing up though we were pretty poor before my father caught a few breaks from the major employer in the area, General Electric, GE, when they were starting to outsource high tech electronics stuff. As you know, when Dad retired, I took over after working many years for him and now that I am retired my son, my youngest son since Ralph III didn’t want to do it finding a career as a senior software engineer has taken over.   

The important part of growing up poor, fairly poor if not as bad as Sam who can tell his own story later was that I shared all the prejudices of my father and the neighborhood’s about things like patriotism, the horrible Russians who were ready to take our bread and freedom away, and especially about race, about keeping black people out of the Tappan Street neighborhood. Maybe those ideas were not just among the poor of Tappan Street and more pervasive in society than we thought but they were definitely a driving force on the social front. I am ashamed to admit it now and it is hard to say but the only word I knew for blacks, for black people, before I went into the Army was the “n” word. It was around the neighborhood like that too. The worse though was that when I was in high school I stood shoulder to shoulder with my father and other neighbors when a black family tried to move into the neighborhood. To keep them out come hell or high water, and we did. Did keep them out.

Given what I just said you can probably guess that it was no big deal for me when it came time to go in the Army, especially as I went in during the early days of the build-up of the damn Vietnam War, the war which would turn me around but which then was just something to do to fight the local commies in Vietnam there who wanted to snatch our bread and freedom. My father and most of the neighborhood fathers had been veterans, proud veterans of World War II and so the idea of serving was seen as a duty. I remember my father refusing a neighborhood guy, my friend Jimmy Snyder’s father Rudy a job at his shop because he had not served in their war. After high school having nothing else going and prodded on by my father to go and learn a trade, learn electronics, then pretty primitive compared to now so I could come work for him after the service. As I just mentioned in a round about way I did that except through the GI bill not through “learning” the trade in the Army. There was never any thought about waiting to be drafted or stuff like that. It just wasn’t done among the guys I grew up with. It was more likely that guys would go into the Army after getting in trouble with the law and taking the Army as the “easy way out” when the judge gave them a choice between the military and jail.       

I signed up, signed up under the gentle guidance of that bastard recruiting sergeant who is probably still laughing at me for believing word one about what he had to say. He had promised me that I would get first crack at electronics school which I mentioned was in its infancy then at least as compared to now. My idea, boosted by my father was that I would “learn a trade,” his trade for after the Army. As you also know and this is no lie just then, just 1967 or so the war in Vietnam was getting ratcheted up by Johnson, McNamara and the gang of hawks who ran the show then and the demand for infantrymen, grunts, cannon fodder as I, we, learned to call it later when we finally figured out what the hell we really were I was sent to AIT after basic training down at Fort Dix, down in New Jersey. AIT meaning Advanced Infantry Training, meaning just enough training to put your ass in trouble, big trouble when Charlie, the name we had for the VC, the Cong, the whole shooting match of soldiers under the authority of the North Vietnamese.        

After AIT, after the inevitable orders to report at Fort Lewis in Washington state for transport to Vietnam, that “inevitable orders” just then since Uncle Sam, a mythical figure who actually got his start out in my part of New York, just then was in desperate need of replacements for the infantrymen who were being chewed up and spit out like crazy when Charlie pulled the hammer down. I had no more thought of not going through with my orders than the man in the moon. Although I was uneasy about what I had been hearing as the war dragged on it kind of went over me. There was no way in my life that I would join the various resistance and refusal movements either civilian or military at the time. If anything I saw things the other way, saw the “hippies” and resisters as cowards and unpatriotic. That was then, that was before the baptism of fire.

I won’t go through my experiences in Vietnam, not for this crowd, and I don’t feel any need to. This is how I have put it for a long time. I did things, saw others do things and most importantly saw my government do things to people I had no quarrel with than even now I cannot live down although working the peace movement for this long time helps some. I was pretty shattered coming back to the “real world,” had a very hard listening to guys like my father who were still red meat hawks, hell, he would support the war even after all was lost. Got by some kind of osmosis into something of a semi-hippie mode when I met a girl who was a wild child in Albany. Overall though outside of the drugs and alcohol things were pretty hazy and loose, I was drifting.      

Then in early 1970 I was walking down the street near Russell Sage College, that wild child girlfriend was going to school there, or pretending to, in those days things were pretty loose then on the campuses when I saw, not heard, a group of guys, mostly guys, some in military garb, some looking the classic hippie look of the time walking silently down the street to some kind of marching cadence.

I saw a huge banner being carried in front by about four guys all in military garb which read “Bring The Troops Home”-signed Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). There were other signs, home-made signs but that one stuck out. As did the only voice you could hear over the megaphone. “Any Vietnam vets who hated the war, hated what they did, join us, fall in.” And without hesitation I did. Right after the march I joined VVAW, learned more about the group, learned about the war I had fought in than I had known before and I had fought there and took part in all the demonstrations and actions they sponsored in Albany or in Washington, the ones I could make since I was taking some classes in electronics through the GI bill. That was why I was in Washington, D.C. during May Day, 1971 when National VVAW called for us to try one desperate attempt to shut down the government if it would not shut down the war. Everybody knows, and if you don’t, I was arrested that May Day and thrown in RFK stadium, the overflow holding area we were put in. That is where I met Sam when he saw my VVAW button and we started talking, talking about how I, and he, had gotten into that jam. Sam can now tell you his story, but let’s take a little break and have some wine and some food.                

And after the break with a couple of people drifting away from the talk Sam gave his story:

Its funny that I am talking about this experience since I thought everybody kind of knew about Ralph and me, thought it was kind of an unspoken legend. But maybe it is good to run this against and maybe since I am the writer of the two of us, although when Ralph gets motivated his can whip my ass writing anti-war stuff sometimes, I will write it up and put it on the website, or in the archives. I really think that one of the things that has held Ralph and me together in this antiwar business is that we came essentially from the same kind of backgrounds, working class, working poor so we knew a few bumps already unlike some of the anti-war activists from other organizations. I grew up south of here, down in Carver, down in what was then called “bog” country, down where they grew cranberries in the bogs used to product the crop.         

They called those who worked the bogs, my family, “boggers” and that was not meant as a compliment, kind of drew what I would later call the class line between us and “them” in town life. It came up in strange ways like I remember liking a girl in high school who also liked me but when she found out I was a “bogger,” or maybe her parents did that was that. Stuff like that.  

The big thing you have to know, the thing that got this whole story business rolling was that while I am a proud member of VFP I am not a veteran, am as you know we have a “supporter” member, an associate. The reason I am not a veteran, although in other circumstances I might have been, was that in 1965 just as the Vietnam War was beginning to take its bite out of a whole generation which can be felt even today my father, my “bogger” father had a massive heart attack and died leaving my mother alone with four sisters and me. I might add that whatever caused the heart attack my father was a drunk, drank away many a dollar in the town bars and elsewhere. Even now I bristle when I say this. In any case I was the sole male supporter of my family and the local draft board of the time exempted me from military service for that reason once I graduated from high school in 1967. The way I supported my mother and sisters was working in Mr. Carey’s print shop on Washington Street during high school and later when I graduated. As some of you know after my “wild days” in the early 1970s I would take over that operation from Mr. Carey when he retired and run it until my son who is much more tech savvy than I could ever be knowing which way the wind was blowing in the printing business took it over a few years ago.         

If you think about it there is nothing in that profile which would lead anybody to believe, to believe today at this far remove, that I would wind up as a long-time peace activist with some arrests for civil disobedience and other things. I, like Ralph, and many others if you heard their stories was as patriotic as the next person, drew in the full propaganda about the red menace and other Cold War bullshit. Believed that we needed to destroy the commies root and branch, go after them to save the world. Believed fully in that domino theory that was touted then as the reason to go to war in Vietnam even if I couldn’t explain the theory then. For me the thing the sole thing that switched me on the war and then on a lot of other things was the death in Vietnam of my best friend from second grade on-Jeff Mullins. Sorry, I still shed a tear every time I say his name, get worse every time I pass the town memorial or I go to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington where his name is etched in black granite with thousands of other names.    

Like I said I had known Jeff from early childhood so I knew him pretty well, knew that when he said something it stuck. He had been gung-ho to go into the service as much for getting the hell out of “bogger” Carver to see the big wide world as he said and away from horrible parents as patriotic fervor but that was serious factor. He also bought into all the myths that I had as I mentioned before. I wish I could talk about him more about his dreams, but you get the idea.  A few months before Jeff was killed down in the Mekong Delta while on patrol, he had sent me a letter, a long letter basically foretelling his doom and his hatred for the lying war. Made me promise that if anything happened to him and he couldn’t get back to tell the real story, his story about the goddam war that I was to do so. Once we got the message that he had been killed I went crazy -and went to work.

Of course I knew there were people against the war, you could not watch the news at least in Boston without seeing somebody demonstrating against the war or resisting the draft which despite my lucky status I still supported or maybe resisting to the thing is what bothered me, but I was clueless how you would contact anybody especially down in Carver where I don’t think anybody was publicly against the war. So I started from scratch a funny scratch when you think about it since what I did was go to Cambridge one Saturday afternoon to see if anybody knew anything about the anti-war struggle. I hear laughing, knowing laughing but like I say I didn’t know anything about what was happening except that something was. I had never been to Cambridge before or at least I wasn’t aware of it so the whole thing was not only an adventure but very informative as well. As it turned out the best way then to find out what was happening was to look at a place like the world-famous kiosk in the Square at the posters that were plastered on poles or anything that would take paper and glue, or wallpaper paste. What I noticed was that there was to be a big SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, meeting later that afternoon to plan something for what was called the Spring Offensive. SDS then pretty notorious and another grouping that I had previously scorned but I figured I was young enough to fit in. 

That was decision was decisive in a lot of ways since at that meeting people were encouraged to speak up about why they were there and what they expected to do for the Spring Offensive. There were probably a hundred people in I think it was Memorial Hall, or a large room off of it and when I stood up and trembling told the crowd my reason, the death of Jeff Mullins I was applauded which I couldn’t understand until later because I thought they would hate the idea that I was doing this to support a fallen soldier. That was one off the great lies of the war that these anti-war people for the most part were hostile to the private solider. Although it would not be until about a year later that there would be any serious attempts to link up to disgruntled and war-weary soldiers. In any case off of that meeting I met Jim Thorn, the big local activist who kind of took me under his wing, taught me plenty about the ins and outs of the war and how it got out of hand and got a lot of young guys who had plenty of other stuff to do with their lives killed for no good reason. Two or three weeks later I went to my first anti-war demonstration in downtown Boston, on the Common, sponsored by SDS and a bunch of other groups, none still around at least in that form. That demo was the first leg of a planned Spring Offensive to stop the war and I was very happy to walk the walk holding a photograph of Jeff with the legend “No More.”        

That is the important part and I would attend many more such events in Boston, New York and Washington. Along the way I got my speaking voice, spoke from the heart about my mission for Jeff, and would sometimes read a few passages of that Jeff letter urging me to fight the good fight if he didn’t make it back. Along the way I got as frustrated as almost every young person and got progressively more radicalized as the Cambridge milieu went further to the left and with more aggressive tactics. That led up to my going to Washington with a Cambridge group called the Red Brigade to stop the government if it would not stop the war. And the fateful meeting with Ralph after seeing his VVAW button. Sometime let Ralph and me tell you about the details of that meeting but tonight we are about how we met. And remember Ralph was the real deal antiwar Vietnam veteran and I was and am a supporter of VFP except not a veteran. Let’s have a drink.       

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Save The Date- First Night Against The Wars Stand-out Copley Square Boston New Year’s Eve Afternoon December 31^st  

The Smedley Butler Brigade, VFP, Chapter 9 has helped sponsor along with other peace and social action groups the annual (this the 13^th year) First Night Against The Wars stand-out at the Boston Public Library entrance across from Copley Square on December 31^st, New Year Eve’s afternoon starting around noon until about five o’clock.

  

Usually the weather is cold on that day so we ask people to volunteer for an hour or two during the day. Dan the Bagel Man has his food for activist operating to keep us in hot drinks. If you are coming and have a flag or a poster please bring whatever you have with you. Hope to see you there.