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Ian died during the 1971 New Year’s weekend. The apartment building lost heating just after Christmas caused by the heavy snow and it was out for a week. The temperatures ending the year were in the low teens, the highs being 15 degrees. It began snowing on New Year’s Eve and continued well into the day of the First.

Iguanas are tropical beasts native to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Ian caught a respiratory infection and although we gave him some medicine, terramycin it did no good. He died in my arms. He was nine years old and in captivity should have lived twice as long. Our little (5 foot-long) perfect apartment pet was gone. I sold an article by that title a few years later to “Animal Lover’s Magazine”

Lincoln Bank moved its operation center at the end of 1970 to a location in Center City. We were now on Sansom Street between 12^th and 13^th Streets. We had left behind the parking lot at 33^rd and Cherry for a parking garage downtown; yes, we were in the basement beneath yet another and larger parking lot. We entered through a door between the garage and this brick building next door, going down a flight of stairs and through a door at the bottom. It reminded me of entering a speakeasy.

It was a roomier place and brighter inside than our old operation center. There were some offices down the side to the right of the entry door, then it L-ed into more open space. My desk was right at the angle of the L.

There was a technology firm that the bank contracted with to upgrade the bookkeeping system. Like at Atlantic with the conversion to Speedaumat, I got the assignment to work with this vendor and oversee the conversion. It was something new, a mag-card system. All the data would be entered on these strips about the size of an IBM card, but instead of punching holes the information was recorded as magnetized impulses that this machine could read, store and produce reports from. This was sort of a transition technology between the punch card and the desktop computer. It eliminated all our  manual bookkeeping journals and ledgers.

There was a hitch along the way. The vendor did the conversion and setup a demonstration run, but nothing balanced. The tech guys, who installed the system, were at a complete lose. I went in and did an examination and the answer was painfully simple. The installers had no understanding of accounting and had programmed the assets and liability entries to act in the same way; that is, in assets the debits add and the credits subtract from the total, in liability accounts this is the opposite. Their system programed debits to always add and credits to always subtract.

Once the system was corrected and installed, I was put in charge of it and promoted to Operations Accounting Supervisor.

In mid-January, I registered at Temple for the Spring semester. Registration this year didn’t bode well. As I wrote Joe Rubio:

I screwed up this year, though. I went up on Wednesday, the first day of registration, taking off from work and getting there at 3:00. You have to get there early or too many classes are filled. I had planned my courses from the bulletin and figured I’d just get the class cards and then come back Friday to finish out. Once you have class cards you’re safe. I was going to take Advanced Composition, Interpretation of English Fiction, Interpretation of English Drama and American History from Reconstruction to the Present.  Well, first off Advance Comp. wasn’t offered at all.  Then the two Interpretation courses were scheduled at the same time.  So I selected Shakespeare and Religion I as substitutes. I was then informed of an error and had to wait about until 6:30 to see an advisor, who sent me to the Assistant Dean.

More bad luck. According to the registrar I hadn’t attended since 1968. They seemed to have misplaced my records. She (the Assistant Dean) said they’d fix things up and okayed my roster, except for changing Shakespeare to a sociology course. It was now twenty to eight. I went back and the Soc and Religion classes were filled. So I am only taking two subjects.

Those two subjects were Interpretation of English Literature – Prose and U. S. History since Reconstruction. I got an A in the Literature course and a C in History, which was taught by the same Marxist professor I had for United States History I. As it was, this proved to be my last semester at Temple. When those courses ended I dropped out. I had 49 Credit Hours and a Grade Point Average of 2.95.  My Grade Point Average had been steadily rising when I dropped out. It would have been higher, but easier on I had withdrawn from French, but never went through the proper paperwork, so they gave me an F.

Sometime in this period I ran into Ronald Tipton on the

street during lunch break and we stopped to talk. It was cold and snow was turning dirty in the gutters. We had bumped into each other one or two other times downtown since we had our misunderstanding in 1963.

We were both working at banks at this time, I at Lincoln and he at Girard. He had continued exchanging Christmas Cards with my parents over the years and I believe he began this conversation mentioning getting a card and nice note from my mother. He suggested we get together for lunch and we set a date. We decided on the next Tuesday and would meet in the City Hall courtyard.

It snowed overnight into that Tuesday and I walked through the freshly white city on still not shoveled walks. The day was cold and gray. I waited in the courtyard and then saw Ronald wearing a long black coat over his tall, thin frame, approaching. We shook hands.

“You ever been to Day’s Deli?”  he asked. “They have great sandwiches.”

We strolled out to 18^th Street and Spruce, where Day’s dominated the corner. You could easily enter from either street. (I tried my best to find a photo of Day's with no success. I believe the photo at the location today is the same building. Where it says cleaners was then a revolving door.)
 We pushed through revolving doors into a garden of fragrances, imported cheeses, spicy meats, fat garlic pickles, horseradish and crusty breads. It was an armada of aroma assailing the digestive juices of mouth and stomach and preparing your boy to attack with gusto. We passed a  long glass counter displaying the sources of these olfactory delights in glorious array and moved to another doorway in the back.

A rather dapper man wearing a large brown bowtie greeted us warmly and took us to our table. He handed us giant golden menus. Soft jazz soothed the room.

“It is a bitter day,” said the host, “may I bring you gentlemen some coffee to warm away the frost?”

We ordered our pre-meal drinks. “I will bring them immediately. Gus will be here shortly to serve you.”

We ordered from Gus, who appeared with the drinks and for over an hour talked about our life and reminisced of when we were boys. It was a pleasant conversation in a pleasant place.

Then we again went our separate lives.

There was an interesting coda to this. That evening I told Lois about the lunch and what a nice place Day’s was. We decided to go there for lunch on Saturday.

We walked downtown from our apartment, we were both great walkers then. It was a chill day, but easy going since the sidewalks were now swept of snow and slush. There was little wind. We walked straight to Day’s and pushed through the revolving door into the hallucinatory smells

“Have you ever been here?” I asked.

Lois said, “No.”

“I think you’ll like it. The food is great and they’re really friendly.”

We waited at the dining room door, and waited, and waited though we could see the host plainly. He saw us, too, but just stood toward the side biding his time. Finally, he snagged up a couple of those big menus and came to us.

“Lunch,” he snapped.

I nodded and followed him to a table near the kitchen. Each time a server went in or out the door banged the back of my chair. I looked over at Lois as we now waited to be served.

“Well, it was friendly enough when I was here with Ron.”

“Larry,” she said, “didn’t you notice?”

“What?”

“Look around.”

I glanced about at the full tables and booths all filled with men. Lois was the only woman in the room. The waiter did finally deign to serve us, but the food proved less than expected, and I despaired that prejudice was always a two-way street.
I had certainly learned that when I went walking with Jane back a couple years, how when among White crowds we got dirty looks and then among Black crowds we got dirty looks. Our friendship wasn’t accepted anywhere because I was a White man and she was a Black woman. Bigotry and distrust because you are different is a terrible waste.

On March 14, Lois entered University of Pennsylvania for an operation, which she had on the 15^th.  One procedure performed was Cervical Cerclage, which was a sewing up of the cervix. It was described as similar to putting a draw string in, it would keep things closed until a doctor snipped it free. 
The other procedure she had repositioned her womb. Her uterus was facing the wrong direction. The doctors advised the operations and cautioned they were experimental, but it was felt this would allow her to carry a baby closer to term so she would not be losing them by the fifth month.

She was recovered enough to be eating the same day after her surgery, but still suffering a great deal of pain. She had a lot of adhesions. She was in the U. of P. hospital until the nineteenth. It was a terrible time for her because of the indifference and inattention of the staff. They were very unresponsive to calls. Often groups would stand talking and giggling even though the patients' call lights were on. Lois was confined to bed, not allowed to get out or walk. On one instance she was brought her meal, but the attendant simply left it down below the foot of the bed where she could not reach it. Though she rang for help, no one came. Finally, the lady in the other bed got up, walked over and pushed her tray table up to where she could eat.

That lady was released before Lois and she got a new roommate, who was something of a religious fanatic. When Lois was finally allowed to walk, she went into the bathroom where she was in distress and in great pain. Lois was calling for help. She looked over and the roommate was kneeling in the bathroom doorway praying her Rosary. Finally, a nurse came in and asked what she was doing. The lady said my wife was having difficulty so she was praying. The nurse told her, “Don’t pray, call us, we’re right here.” Here was a case of a person “so Heavenly minded they were no earthly good.”

After she came home from the operation, things returned to a kind of normalcy. My dad picked us up for Easter because I still had car troubles. We were stuck on the Schuylkill Expressway, though, for hours due to an accident. (They didn’t call it the Schuylkill Parking Lot for nothing.)

We had our group birthday bash at a Conshohocken

Restaurant in mid-June, a converted warehouse called, oddly enough, The Warehouse. It cost $65.30 for 5 people. It was a white table-cloth place, too, not some dive.

On the 25^th of June , I bought a new car as a birthday present to myself. I had had it with the VW not running. We brought the new car up and put it into my parent’s garage until I could get the license. It would sit there for a month.

The year before, two guys came by and told us they had bought The Commodore from the Old Women from whom we originally rented our little studio apartment. They said they were renovating the place and talked us into moving to a one-bedroom flat at the rear of the first floor. Well, they were true to their word about renovating. They put in updated kitchens and baths, painted the rooms and did other nice adjustments. The new apartment looked very nice.

What they didn’t do was fumigate. We had had some roaches visit in our first apartment, but nothing like in the new. The renovation activity must have stirred the little buggers up and they were now grazing in herds. If I went into the kitchen at night and turned on the light I would see them scatter in every direction and worse, hear their footsteps -- skitter, skitter, skitter. It was like a scene from a horror movie. I had never even seen a roach until I moved to the city and now I was surrounded by an army of them.

We had little choice but to endure and then one night I was in the kitchen and heard a strange noise.  Something was in the wall between kitchen and bathroom and decidedly much larger than any roach. I stood there listening and then it began pushing against the pipe panel on the kitchen side of that wall. The plywood covering was actually bulging in the middle. I feared whatever this monster might be it was about to break into the apartment. I shoved the kitchen table up against the panel and it eventually ceased its attempts to enter.  

I walked into the living room and said to Lois, “That’s it. We’re getting out of here!.

She didn’t object. The new apartment was at the rear of the building and our living room and kitchen had windows overlooking a parking lot behind. Lois was always nervous about this, feeling it would be easy to break into our place. Besides, we both hated the roaches.

We found a new, newly built and new to us complex in Aldan, Pennsylvania called The Lansdowne Towers. We didn’t realize the change this would make in our social and sexual lives.

Suburbiaterranean Life

“It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”

That is a line in the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. 1964 was somehow that way. It was a year that nothing much happened, but much happened that setup the immediate future. We floated on the current of life’s stream, but there were undertows threatening to pull us down.

I had registered for another semester at Temple, again a heavy schedule. I took the maximum four courses, the second part of Modern World, Introduction to Psychology Part 1, Social Problems and Introduction to Archaeology. It was heavy enough that combined with my job made for a difficult schedule. I wouldn’t do as well this period as I had last, especially in Social Problems, which was part of my Major requirements. I’m not sure why, since I actually enjoyed the class. Perhaps it was because I was having social problems of my own.

I first became aware of my problem while talking in the hallway at work. It was nothing but a casual conversation with an acquaintance. I ran into the person while on break and we began speaking of nothing in particular, the weather, how it was going, that type of thing. After a while, my friend segued into something of a more serious nature. I don’t remember what anymore. Whatever, it was nothing extraordinary or unusual for two people to discuss.

As we talked I noticed an odd feeling. I was shaking or at least it felt that way. I detected a wavering in my voice when I spoke and after a bit I couldn’t bring myself to speak at all. I thought my words weren’t understandable with my quavering speech. I told my friend I had to get back to my job and hoped to catch up again soon, and I hurried away.

When I got back to my desk I sat and thought about what just happened. I realized this wasn’t the first time. I had felt this shakiness quite often lately, and it was getting worse. I knew I had a problem. How was I going to progress in my career and at school if I couldn’t talk to anyone on a serious subject? I had long been shy toward strangers, but in those instances I was simply close-mouthed until I knew them fairly well, then I opened up. But I had never had this feeling of my stomach turning to Jell-o and my words into a quavering mush.

I decided to do something about it.

There was a public clinic near work, on Pine Street I think. They were an agency with one of these pay according to ability plans. Naturally I made just enough not to get any discount. I had to pay their full rate. It has been this way my entire life. I was always a little too poor to afford services, but always a little too rich to get any kind of aid. I wanted to find out what was wrong with me, so I made the sacrifice and paid the fee.

This was not anything I ever told my parents. They would have been very upset if they knew I was getting psychiatric help. Such a thing was scandalous in those days. It meant you were a nut case and no one wanted a crazy man in the family. Personally, I just viewed it as getting help for something I didn’t understand that was hindering me socially.

The clinic assigned me a psychologist, not a psychiatrist. The methodology was basically the same. The difference is a psychiatrist is a medical doctor who can prescribe drugs; a psychologist has a PhD in Psychology and can’t prescribe drugs. The psychologist has to work to cure you; the psychiatrist can give you a happy pill and call it even.

I went into an office. It was dark wood, like a man cave, lots of books on the shelves, however.  The Psychologist walked in and sat down. He immediately put his feet up on his desk. He looked like Elliott Gould in M*A*S*H, a lot of dark hair and thick mustaches  He was wearing a tan corduroy jacket with those leather patches on the elbows, a white shirt and tie, blue jeans and these shoes with wide gum soles. The next thing he did was light up a pipe.

They billed me for each hour, but our sessions lasted 50 minutes. The last ten minutes of the hour he sat at his desk after I left and transcribed his thoughts on what we discussed  He seldom shared his thoughts with me. I did most of the talking. He would ask me to tell him about something, my childhood for instance. I would chatter away. He'd make notes on a legal pad. Sometimes he would go, "uh huh". Occasionally he would interrupt and ask me to talk more about a particular incident. I might ask him a question about something, but he seldom gave a straight answer. Usually he asked me what I thought about it.

He was big on dreams. He often started a session asking what I had dreamt the night before. He wanted to know if I had any recurring dreams. I had three. Two were very similar. The only real difference between them was in the beast that threatened me. I had had these dreams for years.

I was always a boy of somewhat indeterminate age in the dreams, probably around 12. I would be playing in the backyard, which was always the one at 424 Washington Avenue. Suddenly I would hear a noise, a snort or a growl. I would turn around and either a bull or a gorilla would charge out of the field next door. I would run and the beast would run after. I would get into the house, but so would it. It would chase me through the house. I would run upstairs and so would it. The only difference was I might find a room where the bull couldn’t get through the door, but the gorilla always could. In either dream I finally came to a place where I could run no further, usually the attic,  and then I would wake up terrified.

The Psychologist told me these dreams showed that subconsciously I hated my father. The bull and gorilla represented my father to me. I was afraid of my father and trying to escape from his influence over me, but I couldn’t. There was certainly some truth to this. Heck, I could have told him that. In the end I began to feel the bull in these sessions wasn't just the one in my dreams. 

He never came up with an explanation of my third recurring dream. I dreamt it long before the ones about the bull or gorilla. I had been having it over and over as far back as I could remember. It was very simple and very strange and had a worse effect on me than any other dream I had. I would be a small child. I was in the back seat of a car driven by my grandfather. We would be driving up creek road alongside the Brandywine. We would go around a curve and there would be a little clearing in the woods. In the middle of the clearing stood a calf with only three legs. I would stare through the car window at this calf. The calf would look at me and I would wake up screaming. I would be shaking and sweating and have a very hard time getting back to sleep. It was the worst nightmare I ever had and I had it often for many years, probably until I was in my thirties.

He couldn’t come up with an answer to that one and neither have I.

I forget how many weeks our sessions went on. We never got around to really discussing my “shaky” problem. What we got around to discussing was Ronald Tipton. I explained Ronald and I were best friends since ten years olds. I told him about Ronald’s recent revelation and how it had led to several nasty letters between us ending our friendship. I mentioned I was reading several books on Homosexuality.

This caught his interest. He even took his feet off his desk for a moment. “Why was I reading these books?” he asked.

I told him I wanted to understand the subject, to know what was going on with my friend and I was very concerned about Ronald’s wellbeing.

At our next session he again brought up my reading these books. He said it was my concerns about my own homosexual tendencies.

Say what?

“Your dreams about the bull and gorilla show your fear and alienation from your father,” he said. “You told about your grandmother and mother’s constant concern you might be hurt and how protective they were of you as a child. Your own sexual feelings toward Ronald are behind your concern.”

I told my wife that night I was through with this guy. I never had any sexual feelings toward Ronald or any other guy. This Psychologist must have gone to the same school as Doctor Edmund Bergler and the other writers of those books I read. Since I had a strongly under protective father and an overprotective mother; therefore, I fit the theory and must have homosexual tendencies. Perhaps I had some unconventional sexual proclivities, but not toward men. I once had an obsessive compulsion to take off my clothes and run about naked in a woods. I once had a bondage fantasy involving wild pirate women, but I never had any attractions toward Ronald beyond friendship.

I decided if I was going to get over my problem I would have to do it myself through will power. Eventually I did after some worse traumas.

Despite my heavy school schedule and my little visits to the Psychologist, my job was going well. After a half year as the Group Leader I had increased the units efficiency from 55% to 139%, ended all overtime and decreased our staff by two. I had established a schedule for turning over work at a faster rate and tracking jobs better. I got a merit increase for my accomplishments.

Lois and I were out shopping one day. We were going though Woolworths and saw this cute little thing in the pet department. It was a tiny green lizard and it fit in the palm of my hand with a tale

running about the length of my middle finger. So we bought an iguana and named him Ian. He was a perfect pet. He used a litter box like a cat. It didn’t take much to feed him, a bit of lettuce or for a special treat, some celery leaves. Little did we know Ian would someday be bigger than my guitar.

We had originally settled on the house in Malvern because it was halfway between my parent’s and her family. We didn’t want to live too close to either. We didn’t want the regular “pop-ins”. It was easier to have some distance. It was approximately a half-hour drive to either, so we did make regular visits, boy did we ever. 

To go to my parents we went down Route 30 a mile and turned onto Rt. 401. If you looked on a map Route 401 would be the sloped side of a right angle triangle with Routes 30 and 100 forming the other sides. We came off Route 401 at Ludwig Corner about four miles south of my parent’s place on Pottstown Pike (Rt.100) if we survived the trip.

Route 401 is a two-lane macadam road, not very wide. In many places the shoulders are narrow or non-existent. On January 23, 1964, we were traveling to my parents on this route when a dump truck came barreling toward us in the other lane. The truck was going at a high rate of speed, certainly above the limit. Several yards ahead of us he hit a bump and this huge rock fell off out of the bed. It tumbled in the same direction as the truck, except it was in my lane.

I turned as far right as I could, off the edge of road surface. I obviously couldn’t turn left into the path of the truck. The truck roared by, but the rock still came. I couldn’t get over any further because of a line of mailboxes.bordering the right.  I had come to a stop, but the boulder didn’t. It slammed into the left front of my car.

I got out to examine the damage. The rock was wedged into the front bumper and fender. I walked back and opened my truck. I then picked up the rock and dropped it into my trunk. The force had bent the front fender against the tire. I reached down and pulled the fender forward enough it didn’t rub rubber and we drove on to my parents.

The adrenalin must have been pumping. When I got to my parents I tried to lift the rock from the trunk and couldn’t budge it. I had to get dad to help and the two of us struggled to remove the rock from the car and put it aside.

My insurance company denied my claim on the body repairs. They said it was my fault; that I didn’t have my car under control. This was ridiculous. I wasn’t driving the rock. I had completely stopped. The rock hit me. There was no way anyone could have avoided that boulder. I got myself a new insurer.

There were bigger boulders rolling our way, though.