Sorry about yesterday- things have a way of getting away from me these days. I bought coal stocks the other day when I heard the George Soros was making a seemingly counter-intuitive move on the market, and what the hell, despite the fact that the market seems to be tanking along with the Chinese. I made a couple bucks on what otherwise is junk with no future in the energy sector. Go figure.
Then the Midway Veterans wanted me to scan the manuscript for Nick Danger, so they can sell it at the gift shop on little thumb-drives, like Hillary’s lawyer has, and that got me completely sidetracked along with the pool stuff that had to be done whether it was crappy weather or not.
Then, I was trying to figure out the schedule for the Amtrak car train to keep the 900 miles between Pensacola and Refuge Farm off the ’59 Rambler and some other assorted issues, as well as following the events of the day, which we are being bludgeoned non-stop as we hurtle toward President Trump, or Sanders or whoever is going to inherit this mess. That was all depressing enough that I wanted to get back to the past where things are safe- or safer- and was searching the archives for the images of some renderings that Dad did to go along with the station wagon.
He was enamored of the motor-camping that the icons of industry had done when cars were new, and he updated some cool ideas to go along with the station wagon concept of the 1950s- the original SUVs. If I can find them, I will do display boards for showing the Rambler Custom, but have not succeeded in finding the pictures yet.
Anyway, I was thinking about Dad and his life and times and discovered something I wrote him when he turned 70. That was 22 years ago now, and I find myself precariously closing in on that age which I thought was so ancient, and marveled at the cheeky tone of the younger me.
It all seems to fit in with the car stories and the rest of it- and is before things began to get all washed out and sad. Anyway, I can only ask your forbearance.
And Frank Sinatra’s, too. Can’t believe that whole world is passing away, almost completely gone now.
Anyway, here it is:
TO DAD ON HIS 70TH BIRTHDAY, 08 AUGUST 1993:
It is a Sinatra song; one of the ones he sung later in the catalog when he knew that even his own wild jitterbug ride had assumed a certain measured tempo.
“When I was seventeen, it was a very good year….”
And was it! It was at the Paramount in the Big Apple that it began to come together as an adult, a bit gawky still, but one who could grab a bowl of the best chowder at the Oyster Bar in the greatest train station that mankind ever made in the most exciting city on the planet.
Maybe the dream began to coalesce before that, the view from Bumblebee lane down the made summer-buzzing New Jersey hills of Maplewood. Late at night watching the infinity of lights glittering across the water from the gables of the impossibly big Victorian house on Sagamore Lane. The pinpoints of color dancing, tantalizing, singing their Siren’s song to you….
“Watson, come here. I need you!”
The underpinnings of the tale begins with your father’s tales of exotic foreign lands and tropical islands, of gentlemen in white linen suits and solar topees and practical matters involving telephone cable and repeaters, telegraph keys and voltage-on-the-line. How things could be made better, part of the unending improvement and progress across the spectrum of modern life. How a trip to a borrowed beach cabin could be turned into a metaphor for how to live. Dad had left the cottage so much improved through his tinkering that the owners were pleased to have you all back anytime.
J.B. was a mythic figure, a gentleman of the old school and Brother Jim supplied a crucial bridge across the years. From the Twins, Jim and Rhoda, came tales of life in wartime. Of fires burning, unsettling, out on the Jersey beach horizon far beyond the breakers when the Kaiser reached out to America across the waves and the tar washed up upon the beach and for years the driftwood bore the marks of shipyards.
The thought of those sailors who died out there on the deceptively gentle waves was a source of wonder for the children who played on the shore.
Later, more Germans would drift through your skies. The mighty zepellin Hindenburg majestically plowed over the house as it coursed inland from the sea and across the piney barrens, where perhaps in fear the ignorant took pot-shots at it. On the gigantic tail was emblazoned the hooked cross in crimson and black; it’s enormity against the sky made you think that technology could achieve anything, overcome all odds. Even it’s awful death at Lakehurst presaged a time scant years later when Oppenhiemer at Trinity Flats could watch the incandescence of the Bomb and recognize that man’s relationship to Nature had fundamentally changed.
“When I was twenty-one, it was a very good year
for small town girls, and soft summer nights….”
Mr. Bell and Mr. Edison were contributors to your patrimony. Orville and Wilbur, too, and through the years they weave around your life and your family, lifting it to the sky with the roar of a mighty radial engine, pulling against gravity itself to lift the Yellow Peril into the pastel sky. So close were the brothers, linked to your brother, that they were the guiding spirits to the Great Game, as it led from fabric to stainless steel to space itself.
It runs quickly, like AVGAS down the line from the tank to the massive cylinders of a Pratt & Whitney. Not over, certainly, though perhaps past its mid-point; well started. Imagine sailing with Grandsons, watching your son and yourself the gestures and movement. The children’s wit and quickness are yours, and their existence the very proof of immortality, of the life everlasting that roars down through the generations. We borrow it’s energy only, for it is only ours to live and to give, never to keep.
The older generations gave. What were their stories? Did this part of the adventure begin with some bold peasant who looked at the devastation of the ’45 in Scotland and swore he would not live in a land shackled to the Crown of England? The times would match, for there the doughty Clendenins were in the western marches of the Old Dominion, founding Charleston, West-by- God Virginia. Building their blockhouse to defend against the Indians.
Fighters in the Revolution. Bourgeoisie for longer than there has been a United States, and damned proud of it. Mingling with German stock in the green rolling hills of Pennsylvania, watching the train slowly rolling out of Shippensburg just ahead of the ragged Confederates, who watered (or worse) the sugar and dry goods they could not carry away to the east, in the direction of a crossroads town called Gettysburg. Find yourself in knee-pants at the pier, saying goodbye again to Dad, as the Bell system calls him once more to bring the miracle of the Telephone to another part of the colonial empire.
Later, times hard, Mother said that if you were going to have a sweater, it was going to be a cashmere sweater. Never mind the cost, but just take care of it. Don’t get Pup the Collie’s dog-hair all over it. Tennis at Camp Aldercliff, a leather football helmet. Mom never let you down. The baby of the family, she gave you wings.
Find yourself suddenly at the ’39 World’s Fair, still a bit self-conscious of being jumped a year ahead in school, but practicing the high-stepping gait of the Drum Major. See the miracle of Flushing Meadow and the tantalizing possibilities of the future. Look at the streamlined ocean-liners! The Dirigibles that could carry Doc Savage and his crew high above the Colonies and Protectorates below. The Future is now. The word is challenge to create the great Liners of the sky and the speedy autos we will require to make it all happen.
Sure, there were troubles in Europe, but it was a phony war. A Sitzkreig. Certainly there was a Bund, even here, but even Mr. Lindberg said we should stay out of it. Pearl Harbor. Downtown Manhattan, you are traveling back late in the afternoon to a Jersey that will shortly cease to exist in the same way. The rush to the draftboard, and after beating down it’s initial misgivings, you are selected for the most prestigious and challenging of the Service air Arms; it is only right. Brother Jim is expediting, to get shaped steel to the plants that need it. The pipeline is long and there are bottlenecks everywhere as the nation lurches to full mobilization.
The Navy itself has bottlenecks in the training pipeline. You embark on a training odyssey across America. Tennessee you see, beautiful downtown Millington, and a host of other parade grounds and ping-pong tables. Formations and boxing smokers on the way to a Training Command seat and a Yellow Peril or a Stearman and a chance at the Cadet-of-the-Day Contest, where some hapless young man bought a Cyprus tree up close and personal, or a radio tower or a smokestack in the oppressive Gulf heat. Then the Command sent the telegram and moved on to the next training objective, nothing personal, after all there’s a war on.
Then Europe was finished, Hitler dead in his last bunker and against hope the invasion of Japan was rendered unnecessary by Dr. Oppenhiemer and Dr. Teller and it was over, the most titanic event in the history of human affairs. Your class got it’s Wings of Gold, the third to last before the cadets were sent home with nothing but the mimeographed warm thanks of a grateful nation and a Ruptured Duck. Forever after you were a member of the most exclusive club in the world, the Dauntless Dive Bomber Club, and it’s later derivative, the AD-4J Association: The Greatest Piston Driven Engine That Ever Flew. Even Uncle Dick the Famous Bomber Pilot never had a thrill like that!
The VETS came home. They did pylon-eights in their Hellcats around the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings, where a very attractive Texas Company employee looked out the window at the First City of the First World. Unexpectedly freed from the shadow of the hills around the Valley, the change brought by the War was not yet realized. The bold young heroes did over-and-unders on the East
River Bridges and a generation began to think about Living With the Bomb.
Beer Jackets, the 21 Club and the Rosenbergs. That was all part of the kaleidoscope as the demobilized came home, pockets full of cash. There was a giddy feeling in those days on Manhattan. You knew as soon as you got back. You had some things to catch up on, some learning and living to do. You put away the crisp blues full time and signed on at Pratt Institute.
The demand for goods not painted green or khaki was pent up and ready to be met. They were going to need industrial designers to make the sleek new products of the future; it was going to be a boom market!
There was also a blind date, arranged by Ray Rappaport, who brought to your attention a bright and quite lovely young women with a quiet and fierce determination. The motion pictures of the period record you in sepia, emerging from the Little Church Around the Corner, with a mature but very lovely Hazel in attendance. Life on a shoestring in the Village; amusements changed to focus on a new life as a couple. A Radio Quiz Show brought a little glamour to daily life; the studies of form and shape infusing everything with the concept of smooth and functional line, whether it was pottery or furniture or even steel….
So when Bob Veryzer called from out West to say that the way that consumer demand had mushroomed Detroit was hiring! And before you knew it, it was the heady world of auto design, modeling at Ford, breathing the tangible vision of streamlined speed into the inanimate brown clay. Making it sleek and smooth and alive. Throwing the baseball at lunchtime; marveling at the Rotunda, with it’ ring comprised of segments of all the famous roads of the world, because that is exactly what the Motor City was; the heart of the most dramatic transformation of a Society since the Railroads went West.
You designed it, along with the other bright young men, the Ed Andersons and Lee lacocas and George Romneys. Men with visions and dreams and talent. And “Radar” Reddig was flying still, out of Gross Isle and proudly conducting the once-a-month raid on Toledo’s number one objective, the oil refinery. Returning one hop after a perfectly executed simulated ordnance delivery, you smiled and punched the lighter on the instrument panel to have a victory cigarette, just like John Wayne. Cracking the canopy, you toss the butt out with a nonchalant flick of the wrist…..
Where it delicately pirouettes, flies back in with the slipstream, down between your legs and rests six feet below you atop the main wing spar, smoldering in the high octane gasoline fumes. Lowering the armored seat didn’t work, the tiny time bomb was still out of reach of your desperately flailing foot. There was nothing for it but to unstrap and climb down off the seat, holding on to the stick now above you, unable to see, and finally crushing it out before it blew the airplane to disassociated bits.
It wouldn’t have been the first accident up there for the Reserves; a young Lieutenant named Jansen bought it one afternoon, you heard the radio calls as it went down.
“How was the hop, Radar?”
“Routine, no big deal.”
Children. Your first born in the early summer, this was uncharted ground. Better get down to the cafeteria for a piece of pie to fortify yourself for what could be a long and complicated evolution……
Living in the City itself, the D&W Oil Company just down Kentucky street. Small children now, eating dirt in the backyard and running in and out.
You’ve left Ford and struck out for the greener but riskier pasture of AMC, where a bright young man can get ahead. Then the landlord terminates the lease, they have a new class of tenant who will pay more for the place, and suddenly You and Betty are driving around the northern suburbs. You alight in the old central district of Birmingham, and settle in to the perfect suburban life, an active, attractive wife, three healthy children, a dog, the PTA and everything.
The men nearly falling off the roof on Fall days when the Lions were playing in town, trying to adjust the antenna so you could get Lansing’s week signal, anything to beat the blackout. Listening to Bobby Lane win another one in the last two minutes at Ed Anderson’s place out at Skoll Acres.
Remember it all? The Constitutional Convention, “ConCon,” the Citizens for Romney, the heady notion that citizens really could make a difference. Dick Breck vaulting to the City Commission, the Balloonist Association of neighbors who drank beer in the back yard and painted tomatoes red to claim first honors of the summer, packs of children in and out of the house. Hamsters that could gnaw right through a pair of your dress trousers, a 78RPM record player in the dining room where the children would gyrate to Heartbreak Hotel and the cool jazz of Brubeck and the Australian Jazz Quartette. A child’s arm jammed through a jagged glass sun porch window and a surprising cascade of blood.
JFK shot, and young Capt. Groves from next door organizes a perfect cortege and dies of stress two weeks later himself. The world had lurched into something else, a strange and malevolent period, with RFK and Dr. King to follow, and George Wallace gunned down, something fundamentally changing in the air, plain as the massacre at My Lai in the evening news from the South East Asian War or Woodstock or the riots that ended Detroit as a real town.
“When I was forty-one, it was a very good year……
We’d ride in limousines…..”
But we didn’t know that the decade would be that strange. You were occupied with career, moving up out of automobiles and into the Originals; following the kids sports and school. And devoting a few hours each weekend for the 500 mile round trip to Martin Lake…..Where in the pines of northern Michigan we found contentment and respite from thetempo of the Motor City, and an easy family environment that provided a way to grow and share common interests in a time when so many others were growing apart.
The skiing was the best; from Mike and his Sears Skis to our notched hunting boots. We went downhill fast on that, sliding through the decade of the ’60s and into the ’70s on the Ski Patrol at the lovely Otsego Ski Club. By that time, you had put the kids through college and become the Chief Executive Officer of a major corporation. Everyone finished school, that was a relief, and despite a certain lack of direction, it appeared that they all were on track to go somewhere. By the ’80s, all had married and there even were Grandchildren, the little Hawaiians Nick and Eric, and the Rocky Baby out in Anchorage.
As Betty once observed when one of the kids, fed up with the histrionics of a two-year-old tantrum at the Mall, asked what the toughest stage of a kid’s life was, “Thirty to Forty.” And right she was. The ’90s brings two more grandchildren, Kelsey and Dana to round things out (so far) at five. A fine number, descriptive of five great young human beings.
“But now I think of my life as vintage wine,
From fine old kegs.
From the brim to the dregs,
It pours sweet, and clear.
It was a very good year.”
Love you, Dad.
Vic
Copyright 1993 and 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303