Yep… Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles… Neil Armstrong placing one small step for man onto the surface of the moon… Laugh-In making “Sock-it-to-me” jokes… JFK… LBJ… Nixon going away…Viet Nam… Good gawd! I reminded myself that the 60’s happened yesterday… Yes, the 60’s happened yesterday… And I remember what happened. I was there. Four-year-old me to fourteen-year-old me… And it looked like this;
I remember Monkees from the 60’s… Lots and lots of monkeys.
And black-and-white TV… and Red Skelton on Wednesday nights… and civil rights marches… and larches… and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis… and Sherry Lewis with Lambchop… and Kukla, Fran, and Ollie… and Lawrence Welk on Saturday night… and Halloween parties with costume contests at the fire station on Main Street… And the 1957 pink-and-white Mercury of Imagination.
I know that isn’t even 200 words… but this could go on forever if I let it. I was a boy in the 60’s… and that is something not even God can take away from me.
I slept in this morning. Spent another late night doing nothing but watching monster movies. I recently got myself a DVD collection of Hammer Films monster movies from the sixties. I found it in the $5 bargain bin at Walmart, a place I regularly shop for movies.
When I was a boy, back in the 60’s, there always used to be a midnight monster movie feature called Gravesend Manor on Channel 5, WOI TV in Ames, Iowa. It started at 11:00 pm and ran til 1:00 am. I, of course, being a weird little monster-obsessed kid, would sneak downstairs in my PJ’s when everyone else was asleep and I would laugh at the antics of the goofy butler, possibly gay vampire duke, and the other guy who was supposedly made in the master’s laboratory. And when the movie started, I was often scared witless by the black-and-white monster B-movie like Scream of Fear!, or Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, or Eyes of the Gorgon. It was always the reason I could rarely get up in time for church and Sunday school the next morning without complaints and bleary-eyed stumbling through breakfast. I never knew if my parents figured it out or not, but they probably did and were just too tired to care.
It was my source for critical monster-knowledge that would aid me greatly when I grew up to be a fireman/cowboy hero. Because battling monsters was… you know, a hero prerequisite. And I intended to be the greatest one there ever was. Even better than Wyatt Earp or Sherlock Holmes or Jungle Jim.
Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, and the immortal Christopher Lee were my tutors in the ways of combating the darkness. When I started watching a really creepy monster movie, I always had to stick it out to the end to see the monster defeated and the pretty girl saved. And they didn’t always end in ways that allowed me to sleep soundly after Gravesend Manor had signed off the airways for the night. Some movies were tragedies. Sometimes the hero didn’t win. Sometimes it was really more of a romance than a monster movie, and the monster was the one you were rooting for by the end. I remember how the original Mighty Joe Young made me cry. And sometimes you had to contemplate more than tragedy. You had to face the facts of death… sometimes grisly, painful, and filled with fear. You had to walk in the shoes of that luckless victim who never looked over his shoulder at the right moment, or walked down the wrong dark alley, or opened the wrong door. The future was filled with terrifying possibilities.
Now, at the end of a long life, when I am supposed to be more mature and sensible, I find myself watching midnight monster movies again. What’s wrong with me? Am in my second childhood already? Am I just a goofy old coot with limited decision-making capabilities? Of course I am. And I intend to enjoy every horrifying moment of it.
When I was a teenager in high school, PBS began running episodes of the BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who. And back then, the show had already gone through two doctors before I ever saw it. So the first Dr. Who Doctor for me was Jon Pertwee.
Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the whole idea of Doctor Who, a time-travelling fixer of plot holes in history who goes about appropriating young women as companions and travelling through time and space and other dimensions by using a T.A.R.D.I.S. that manipulates “timey-wimey stuff”, I am afraid there is no hope for you here. I am a Whovian and am not inclined to be a chief explainer of all things Whovian to basically non-Whovians, and especially not never-will-be-Whovians.
I was in college already by the time Jon Pertwee was no longer Dr. Who. And though I also loved Tom Baker as the Doctor, I was forever caught by the heart with the first Doctor I watched and will forever hold in my heart the notion that Pertwee is the real Doctor.
And he was a gifted comedic actor that had a long career stretching back to Vaudeville and would also come to be identified with British comedies like Worzel Gummidge.
He had a prehensile face, capable of many comic contortions, and an ability with voices and characterizations that made you think “multiple personality disorder”.
Jon left us in 1996, but he has had a new life for me through his son, Sean Pertwee. His little boy is practically a clone, though as far as I can tell, a very serious clone. The comic DNA was apparently forgotten on the laboratory shelf.
Sean Pertwee, The Seasoning House, Sterling Pictures
Generated by IJG JPEG Library
Sean Pertwee is now playing the ninja butler in the pre-Batman show on Fox called Gotham. He has stepped into the role of Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne’s butler, and it’s like having my first Doctor back again.
Now, I admit that this post is mostly just fan-gush about people and characters that are mostly forgotten now. But Jon Pertwee lives on in me. I saw him play the Doctor back when some things in life could still be absolutely perfect just as they were.
Yes, she was a real car. My dad bought her in the 60’s as a used car. But she was a hardtop, not a convertible. She was the car he drove to work every day in Belmond. We called it the “Pink and White Pumpkin”, my sisters and I, referring to the pumpkin in Cinderella which the fairy godmother changes into a coach. But it would only later become the car of my dreams.
You see, she was killed in the Belmond Tornado of 1966. Her windows were all broken out and her frame was twisted. So the pictures of her, though they look exactly like my memories of her, minus the rust spots, are not actual pictures of the car in question. Our next door neighbor, Stan the Truck Man, was a mechanic always on the lookout for salvage parts. He took her apart piece by piece while she sat in our driveway. We continued to sit in her and play in her until all that was left was the bare frame. My friend Werner told me for the first time about the facts of life and where babies really came from in the back seat while she was being gradually dismantled. Of course, I was nine at the time and didn’t really believe him. How could that grossness actually be true?
But she still lives, that old dream car… She is the reason that I objectify my imagination as a ship with pink sails. My daydreams, my creative fantasies, and those long, lingering plays in the theater of my imagination as I am drifting off to sleep all start in the three-masted sailing ship with pink sails. And that dream image was born from the Pink and White Pumpkin. I have sailed in her to many an exotic place… even other planets. And when I die, she will take me home again.
My bedroom walls serve as a gallery of my Paffooney artwork.
I have been collecting pieces of colored-pencil Paffoonery for a very long time now. I am a life-long scribbler and doodler. You are bound to build up an ocean of old drawings that you could easily drown in if you live that way long enough. I recently found a few more in an old scrapbook I had squirreled away in the library between cartoon books.
These are all drawings I did for my three kids when they were little. I suppose that gives them sentimental value. They are all imitations of copyrighted characters. But I am not selling them. I haven’t actually stolen anybody’s intellectual property yet. But it makes a good filler post as I continue to rest and work on other things.
Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich lived on the family farm outside of town, a little more than two miles from the tiny farm town of Rowan, Iowa. I walked it more than once. It was faster to walk the railroad tracks between the two places. About a mile and three quarters as the crow flies… three hours as the boy investigates the critters in the weeds, throws rocks at dragonflies, and listens to the birdsong along the way. But the point is, my maternal grandparents lived close enough to have a profound influence on my young life. Much of what they loved became what I love. And every Saturday night, they loved to watch the Lawrence Welk Show. And that show had highlights that we longed to see again and again… on a show that never really went into reruns. We lived to see Jo Ann Castle play the old rinky-tink piano, Bobby and Cissy doing a dance routine, and most of all… the lovely Lennon Sisters.
I always wanted to be the things they wished me to be in the song “May You Always”. I wanted to “walk in sunshine” and “live with laughter”. They presented a world of possibilities all clean and good and wholesome. As a young boy who hated girls, I had a secret crush on Janet Lennon who was the youngest, though a decade older than me, and on Peggy Lennon, the one with the exotic Asian eyes. They sang to me and spoke directly to my heart.
You have to believe in something when you are young. The world can present you with so many dark and hurtful experiences, that you simply have to have something to hang onto and keep you from being blighted and crippled by the pain. For me, it often came in the form of a lovely and simple lyric sung by the lovely Lennon Sisters. When you are faced with hard choices… especially in those dark moments when you think about ending it all because it is all just too much to bear, the things stored in those special pockets of your heart are the only things that can save you. For me, one of those things will always be the music of the Lennon Sisters… especially when watched on the old black and white TV in the farmhouse where my grandparents lived, and helped to raise me, every Saturday night in the 1960’s.
I was born in the 1950’s in Mason City, Iowa… the town that produced Meredith Wilson, the creator of the Broadway Musical, The Music Man. Yes, River City in The Music Man is Mason City. So I was born into a unique Midwestern farm-town heritage where swindlers came to town and saved the day with music and an eleventh-hour change of heart. I was born into the land of Chmielewski Fun Time on the black-and-white TV, Lawrence Welk champagne accordion music, and the Beer-Barrel Polka, courtesy of loads and loads of German ancestry. I am that unique crossbreed of Scandahoovian and sqare-headed Deutschmann known by the only slightly racist term of Iowegian.
Corn Country!
Land of Long Winter and the ice-storm breezin’ down the plains.
And if you ask an Iowegian if he loves Iowa, he will answer, “You bet!”
And if you ask a northern Iowegian the same thing, he will say “You betcha!”
Iowans talk funny, don’t you know…
There are still corner stores and farm supply stores, though they have gone to brand names now, like Casey’s, BP, and Tractor Supply Co. You can still find HyVee and Safeway grocery stores. There are still a precious few family farms that haven’t been swallowed whole by big corporations and agri-businesses. If you go to the county fairs, you will still find kids showing the cattle or pigs that they raised for 4-H projects, and if you go into the barns after the auction, they are still producing tearful kids hugging and kissing that calf that won a red ribbon and now has to be sold… and they will never see poor Barney or Moo-berry again…
It is the land of the lonely gravel road… the back-street cattle pen… the Saturday night tornado (nearly every Saturday in Spring)… The VFW and the Lion’s Club Fish Fry at Lake Cornelia….And it is a place where most everything reeks of the past and old ghosts and times long gone, soon to never be remembered because there’s no longer anybody around who is old enough to tell the stories that grandparents and aunts and uncles used to tell. I not only miss it desperately, but I feel deeply saddened by the loss. Would I like to go home again?
One of Facebook’s gifts that I actually appreciate is the connection it has given me to old photos. Being connected to family members and old high school friends that live far away and I haven’t met face to face for a very, very long time gives me access to shared photos that have existed for a very long time. I never would have gotten access to them if somebody hadn’t posted it on Facebook. Example number one is a photo of Son Number One who is now a Marine stationed in (No the government did not remove this portion. That is paranoid old me.) The picture shows Dorin as a ring-bearer at a family wedding in the Philippines when he was not yet two. I was teaching at the time and couldn’t go with them, so, though I have seen copies of this Photo in relatives’ houses, I never had access to it until photo-mania hit Facebook.
Here’s another case in point. There was a time when my Iowegian farm family had lots of four-generation photos and even some five-generation photos. This one makes me a little sad. Only the two little girls in this photo are still living. Great Grandma Hinckley (I can use her real name here because she’s been gone since before desktop computers… who is going to be able to exploit that in any way?) lived to be almost 100 years old. This shows not only her, but her eldest daughter, that daughter’s only son, and that son’s three kids. John was younger than me, but his heart did not last anywhere near as long as mine has at this writing. My own three kids would never have even an inkling of who these people were and their blood connection without the Facebook posts of a cousin who is still kicking. (Thank you for that, Louise.) Four-generation photos have not occurred again in my family for a long time now. And before this photo was taken, Iowans did not live long enough on average to do photos like this. My Great Grandma (who actually was pretty Great and doesn’t get the Great just for being old) took a lot of these, as did both of my Grandmas. Big farming families generate lots and lots of family photos.
The photo from the train station in Yugoslavia was a gift from a time when my cousins hosted a foreign exchange student and the whole family got to broaden its world. I am able to be Facebook friends with the Yugoslavian girl (Whose name translates to Snow White in English) even though she has lived most of her life in Eastern Europe. I can even collect pictures of her grandchildren if I wish. (Can’t return the favor, though, as I don’t have any grandkids and probably won’t for a few years. Mom has to settle for a three-generation picture. And it is harder and harder now to get the whole clan together, (especially since my younger brother has become a Tea Party Republican and swore off both logic and the use of facts in shaping his thinking). But I think the best gift of all is how these old photos can keep my family alive for me in ways mere memory can’t manage. We lost Uncle Larry a couple of years ago now to lung cancer. Still, life and love and laughter live on…
Catch a Falling Star 