1957
Whenever
I think back on my childhood, for some inexplicable reason I always think of
the year 1957, when I was 10 years of age. I don’t entirely know why that year
stands out; perhaps it was the purchase by my father of our new, fin-shaped
car, a Ford Fairlane 500 (named, now somewhat uncomfortably, in my current
thinking, after Henry Ford’s Fair Lane estate), or, maybe just because, at that
same year, we moved in Marion, Iowa to
Northview Drive, in a house painted in 
what was
described as “Robin Egg Blue,” where my mother suddenly had the kitchen of her
dreams, decked out with all-steel St. Charles cabinets. My father, recently made
Superintendent of Schools in the suburban community of Marion, Iowa, held a
position that I felt was of enormous importance. And I, apparently, was
beginning to come into the consciousness that only a year later would turn me
into a movie and young theater-going addict.
what was
described as “Robin Egg Blue,” where my mother suddenly had the kitchen of her
dreams, decked out with all-steel St. Charles cabinets. My father, recently made
Superintendent of Schools in the suburban community of Marion, Iowa, held a
position that I felt was of enormous importance. And I, apparently, was
beginning to come into the consciousness that only a year later would turn me
into a movie and young theater-going addict.
That same year, my soon-to-be favorite
Broadway musicals opened on Broadway, each representing a kind of oppositional
view of American culture: Leonard Bernstein’s gang-fighting West Side Story and Meredith Willson’s paean
to turn-of-the-century Iowa life, The
Music Man. Like a Manichean maniac I loved both equally. And both works
would help to develop my love of American musical theater, defining, in part, my
love of the genre.
I didn’t see, as a 10-year old, the
significant drug-themed drama A Hatful of
Rain or the notable love-crossed soap-opera An Affair to Remember, but I probably did see the other Iowa-based
film-musical of the year, The Pajama Game;
and I do remember attending Robert Stevenson’s Old Yeller, with the then-photogenic (which, I certainly recognized
even at that age) Tommy Kirk, and I watched Elvis shake his hips in a Saturday
matinee of Jailhouse Rock. Later,
Walter Lang’s Desk Set, with
Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy might be said to define my notions of life
in that year—forward thinking but domestically inclined.
In those days, 5th grade was
the year in which most teachers begin reading to their students, and Hazel
Snell (an overweight German lesbian, I later realized) was no exception. Just
after lunch, she would hunker down with her students to read out, day after
day, passages from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little
House on the Prairie and Emerson Hough’s The Covered Wagon. Yes, I knew these sagas were pure melodrama, even
back then, but Hazel’s daily reading made me want to read, and I soon sought checked out books from the local
library, including the entire volumes of the Burns-Mantle Best Play Books,
which as I have mentioned elsewhere in My
Year, I gradually memorized. If I was uninterested in Prairie culture, I
was fascinated, already, by the streets of Manhattan, where I would not visit
for yet another decade.
My loving parents often took us off for
family travels during the summer, usually visiting relatives along the way. But
that summer, I believe, they took the Ford Fairlane on the longest journey of
our lives’, clear out to California to visit my favorite uncle and aunt, Bob
and Sue, who was a Colonel in the Air Force, at that time stationed at Edwards
Air Force Base. Despite my ignored pleas to stop and visit every city along the
way, we quickly crossed the endless flatlands of Nebraska, the mountains of
Colorado, and the endless deserts of Arizona, Utah, and lower California before
we reached the water-infused gardens of the Mojave desert community of
Victorville.
After a couple of days of being entrapped in
their air-conditioned home, my uncle and aunt—perhaps a bit irritated by our
entire family camping out in their living room—took us, via two cars, on a long
kind of wagon-trail voyage winding through downtown Los Angeles—which in those
days appeared to me as a small town with its ugly, stubby City Hall—from San
Bernardino county into Orange county, where we visited Disneyland!
Although I felt myself a bit too old to
truly enjoy the Disney wonders, I was immediately attracted to “Tomorrow Land,”
and personally enjoyed the Peter Pan ride. The rest of it, loved by my younger
brother and sister, was something I couldn’t be bothered with. Sue and Bob—with
whom I can now easily sympathize—seemed in a rush to leave the wonderland
confines. But my mother and father, brother, and sister, in absolute bliss,
insisted on making it a long day they would never forget. I must admit, I have never returned to
Disneyland in the 59 years since, despite living only a few hours away during
the last 30. Nor have I ever returned to Victorville. I love the sophisticated
Los Angeles which has nothing at all to do, to my way of thinking, with
amusement parks or desert retreats—or even the mythical Hollywood.
Was that the same year, I wonder—suddenly
recognizing it probably was—that I first encountered, through a wonderful high
school production, of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado—or perhaps that year it was The Pirates of Penzance. Both featured, if I am correct, the wonderful
local talent of Bob Hajnay, whose father I sang with in the Presbyterian church
choir, and whose mother played the church organ. I was too young to really know
Bob, but he was the kind of student who my father and all of his teachers
loved. He later, so I believe, became an
anesthesiologist,
who now lives in Oregon. Bob was also a good athlete, a handsome figure for the
hometown girls, one of whom, Sharon, he married and moved with, after their
Iowa education, to Redding, California.
Those Gilbert and Sullivan musicals changed
my life, guiding me to the Broadway musicals I describe above.
1957 was perhaps the last year before I
was made to start working as a paper boy, delivering the papers every morning
at 5:00 or even earlier through the heavy snows of winter and the steamy days
of summer. I was still young enough to attempt to build a small backyard shack
(I had the wood, but no nails or hammer). I remember being permitted to put
pumpkin seeds into the garden in our back yard, which produced gigantically
deformed squashes that my parent’s applauded, but didn’t have a clue how to
handle. Did we actually carve them out into Halloween jack-o-lanterns? If so,
it was the very last time, my father and mother long after disapproving to the
Halloween celebrations, when schools were draped in toilet paper and often
broken into by celebrating pranksters.
It was a year of the end of my childhood.
By 1958 I was a different person, a young man awed by Hitchcock’s Vertigo; inn my 6th grade classroom, I wrote about the strange culture and religions of
Japan. I no longer could relate to any of my classmates, and dived into those
Burns-Mantle playbooks as if they might offer me a new reality; indeed they did!
We moved into a new house, just around
the corner, especially designed for my parents. But its’ split-level elegance
could never match the simple suburban fantasy of 1130 Northview Drive. I moved
from the bunkbeds of the previous house which I shared with my brother David,
to the basement. And therein I retreated from the entire world for years until
my move to Norway and later graduation. In that basement I read Beckett,
Pinter, and Albee, wrote a musical about the fall of the Belgium Congo, and dreamed
up Brechtian dramas that no one in the outside could possibly comprehend. I
moved, through my imagination, into a world where no one I knew might possibly
enter.
I now realize that 1957 represented the
last year I had tried to engage with the world around me. No wonder I remember
it so fondly. And although, I still love my brother and sister, my now dead
father and my aging mother, they will never be as real and immediate as they
were in that long ago 1957.
Los Angeles,
January 9, 2016
