Loop the Mercenary, Your Ghost for Hire

No one really knows anyone. Not even a spouse really knows the person they married. We have a closet of suits for every occasion and that is what others see of us, our suits – costumes, if you wish. Most days I would wake up and put on my work suit. Now for many decades my work suit was an actual business suit, pants, jacket, vest, necktie and shirt. But I was deeper than just the clothes I donned. Yes, there was this whole persona that said, “right now I am a working man.”  When I came home and on weekends I put on my husband-at-home suit. We need to understand we all live different lives every day, sometimes multi-lives in each.  During some periods we interact with others in a certain way and during other periods we interact with others entirely differently. The split persons we become seldom meet and all the people in our life know us generally by but one aspect of whom we are.

For example, in the picture above Lois is coming out of a store in Philadelphia. I guess she is in her young suburban housewife out shopping suit. On the right is Lois in another suit and as another person she became in 1967.

We had our secret identities, like Batman and Robin. By day we were grunts earning a living; by night we turned into Hippies, and the moon didn’t even need to be full.

As I previously explained, Atlantic Refining finally kept their promise and gave me a true Level 6 Job, Ledger Clerk in Accounts Receivable, a department with about 54-55 clerks working in it. Meanwhile, Bob Kane got my old position as Group Leader in Addressograph. As I turned over the keys to that kingdom, so to speak, I would meet with Bob over a couple weeks to show him the ropes. During this period he would sometimes mutter a complaint or two about his problems editing “The Communicator”.

“I can’t get enough well written pieces to fill the paper,” he said. “There just isn’t that much talent available.”

Philadelphia Community College is a two-year school leading to an Associate Degree. Today in has over 34,000 students, but in early 1966 it was a brand new institution. It was founded in September 1965, locating its campus in the old Snellenberg Department Store’s Mens Annex on 11^th Street just off Market. It may have yet been getting its feet wet in the academic world. I do not know what enrollment was in those beginning semesters. Maybe it was still small in number and didn’t have students interested in writing for the paper.

Nonetheless, I mentioned to Bob that I was a writer. I really didn’t have much in the way of credits to offer. I had written several things in high school, I won a prize in Writers Digest’s Short Fiction Contest and attracted the attentions of a well-known agent, but beyond that I hadn’t actually published anything. I could show him a drawer full of rejection slip, all neatly ordered, but I didn’t.  I brashly threw my claim out there and he simply accepted my gracious offer to write for his paper.

There was one hitch. Of course there was. My life is a whole slew of hitches. I couldn’t write under my own name because only students of the college were allowed to write for the newspaper. So, okay, I needed to write under some kind of non de plume.
Now, non de plume is French. I could have said a Pen Name, but I had three years of French in high school, so let’s make some use of that, although just about everyone already knows the term nom de plume and I didn’t need all those hours of conjugating and memorizing vocabulary to know it myself. "Nom", of course, means "name". No mystery there. “De” means “of” and that the word of which nom is of is masculine gender. I never understood how words could have a sex. Perhaps it is because they were Romance Languages. Anyway, “Plume” does not mean “Pen”.  French for pen is stylo. “Plume” means “feather”. Non de plume is “name of feather” or "feather name". Perhaps they had a quill in mind when they coined the phrase. I have no idea how old the phrase is.

I needed a pen name. Now when I began in Accounts Receivable I was introduced around and one of the Ledgerman, a fellow who fancied himself a wit, greeted me as “Larry Looper”, a pun on the name of a deep-voiced singer on the Lawrence Welk TV Show named Larry Hooper (right). That was all it took, too. That stuck. I could not escape him calling me Larry Looper forever and a day, except over time the nickname got a nickname and I became Loop.
I don’t know, Loop seemed like the perfect pen name for this assignment.

Now what I needed was subject matter to scribble about. I began to think about hot topics with college students. There were three getting a lot of attention around academia, the growing Viet Nam war, drug use and the God is Dead Movement.  There was a good deal of discussion circulating about these controversies on any of Philadelphia’s campuses. I saw all the hand-lettered signs of rallies and protests tied to trees up on Temple's quadrangle as I came and went to class. Generally, the college crowd was against the Viet Nam War, positive for drug use and believed God was indeed dead. In case you are curious about the photo, it is a protester burning his draft card in March of 1966. It was also becoming popular for young women to burn their bras, which may have been an interesting subject to have covered...or uncovered as the case may be.

Anyway, since these were the popular issues that college kids were into I would do a series of articles on the subjects.  Would I justify the stance of the students? No way, Jose!  (Am I gonna get heat from the low-IQ PC crowd for that expression?) Just to rattle everyone’s cages I would take an opposing view.

The first article I wrote was “A Work in Needlepoint”, belittled the taking of drugs. Drugs were beginning to really pop around the cities youth spots, especially something known as LSD. It had even created its own Guru-God, this moron from Harvard named Timothy Leary, he of the "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" stupidity.  Talk about drugs addling the brain, here was a prime case, assuming his brains weren't addled to begin with. 

I followed up with support of our troops in Viet Nam in “Be a Man, My Son”.

Finally, I turned theologian and did a piece called, “God Resurrected”.

Did I believe everything I wrote in my articles? No, not really. I didn’t care really. I could look at an argument and see both sides and in many ways I was a blank slate. I didn’t hold strong opinions on any of these issues, yet anyway. As far as Viet Nam, well I was classified at 1-Y, man. I was safe. I was removed from that skirmish and my article neither defended or condemned the war. It really tried to tell people to cool it on attacking guys in uniform.

As for the God is dead thing. We’ll be back to that whole faith thing soon, because I was on the verge of losing what little faith I had and it wasn’t that I would turn to any philosophy saying God had died. I would simply reach a point where I didn’t believe God ever existed.

I did have convictions about drug use. They weren’t for me. It had  nothing to do with morals. It had much to do with ego. I believed I was pretty intellectual and rather creative. I had no intensions of doing anything that might mess up this glorious brain; therefore, I never experimented with, tried, tested or took drugs. Sometimes having a swelled head can save your head.

Alcohol? Well, that was a different horse that I would ride.

Meanwhile, a great opportunity blossomed after my articles began appearing in “The Communicator”. I don’t know if Bob Kane spread the word or what, but people began coming to me for writing advice. Soon it went beyond just advice and became a business proposition. For a small fee I would write your college essay, term paper, whatever. Loop became a full-blown ghost.

It was a cheat, but for these guys and gals who took up my services it paid off. Everything I wrote earned them an A. These people were getting better marks on their English papers than I was getting on my own. I was taking Composition at Temple and getting mostly Cs, but at La Salle and St. Joseph’s University I was a straight A student, even though I wasn’t really there. (My own English grades would jump up to A once I was finished with Composition.)

I viewed myself as a mercenary, a gun for hire; have typewriter – will travel.

The other benefit was I was becoming part of a group. We were much alike, in age of  course, but also that we worked a day job, then went to college at night and we all wanted to make it in The Arts someday. And when the sun went down, we considered ourselves part of the street scene and we gravitated toward the Hippie Philosophy, for the Hippies had arrived.
I even drove the right kind of car, which almost got me murdered one night in Valley Forge.

Winter Snows of Radicalization

Yes, that is me in my black cowboy hat shoveling the walk in front of the house on Cobbs Street. Look out now, life matters began to pile up faster than the flakes outside. So yippee, let’s scoop!

Snow storms hit from mid-December to the end of 1966. The white stuff pretty much socked us in. Winter kept hitting us andSanta delivered a big blow on Christmas Eve so by Christmas Day couldn’t move my car. We were snowbound. A week before, when there wasn’t yet a blizzard, I had come home in the dark of evening and walked up from the bus stop on the street parallel to us. It was a slight upgrade and a bit slippery and halfway up I went face down. I lay looking straight at the ice and snow below me and then buried in the white I saw some green. I found some twenty dollar bills snuggled down in the freeze thing to keep warm. Wasn't this a fortunate fall. I would keep those bills warm in my pocket. I went the rest of the way home with a smile on my face.

But everything about that white Christmas wasn’t worth dreaming about. Mr. Bing Crosby could you shut it down it for a while? I'm dreaming you'd shut up.

Now lets be brutally honest. We did not live in the preferred sections of Drexel Hill with its large, stone Tudor homes. We lived in the more humble blue-collar, just-making-it-by worker’s abodes; twin homes and narrow streets with back alleys lined by dented trash cans. Those trash cans were now overflowing.  With the snows came certain inconveniences for everyone, but the Township did plow out those fancier streets and those people’s trash and garbage did get picked up. Not so much along our more modest patch. Somehow the plows couldn’t meander down our way and because the streets weren’t plowed, neither could the garbage trucks meander our way either. Soon we were buried in snow and garbage.

Everyone was frozen in. To get to anywhere we had to hike down to one of the main thoroughfares and catch a bus to 69^th Street where the stores were or where an El Train could be taken into the city. My wife was setting off for some last minute Christmas shopping in 69^th Street. She had not stepped far from our house, only a couple of lot lengths, when flop, she fell down.
It was an ordinance of the township that a homeowner clear the pavements before any domicile within 24 hours of the end of any snow fall. Yes, that was clearly the law and it keep my shovel, and me, from drying out. Where she fell was the only house on our block that shoveling had not occurred, not only not within 24 hours, but never, ever.  When my wife went a-wandering nearly a week had pasted since that particular storm. Where she skidded was now packed down ice. You know how unshoveled snow can become as people slough through it. Tramp! Trap! Tramp! Pack1 Pack! Pack! It was not a matter of ignorance of township rules on the part of the homeowner neither. He was without excuse.  He was the Republican Committeeman for our Ward in that very solidly (at the time) Republican district. Wild cacti were more common in those days than a stray Democrat within the district.

Now take note, this was the beginning of the radicalization of myself, my swing to all things left and the baby steps into the dark side.

I was angry about this uncleaned sidewalk. If I had fallen, no big deal, maybe I’d found more money, but this was my wife who fell. This was the women who announced near the end of October that she was pregnant for a fourth time. This was a woman with a history of problems when preggers, mainly losing the babies halfway through the term. A fall could not be taken lightly.

Still I may have let it go by, being the sort of laid back fellow that I am,  if not for the Christmas incident. What was the Christmas incident, you ask? I will tell you gladly.
During Christmas week the high temperatures stalled out in the low 20s. It began snowing again at 2 AM on Christmas Eve and wouldn’t stop. I think even Santa got stuck. Eight tiny reindeer on the roof spinning their hooves, ho ho ho! We had a white on white Christmas and were snowed in. I could not dig the car out, besides the roads were in terrible shape.  My mother considered it a blue Christmas because Lois and I couldn’t make it to Bucktown that year as tradition dictated. Christmas was delayed a day.

On the 26^th my father came down, professional driver that he was, and picked us up. We headed around the block. At that time traffic flowed in the opposite direction on Cobbs than it does today.  The unplowed streets made driving tricky. Dad turned up Bond Ave toward Penn. One week earlier the stop sign on Bond at Penn had been knocked over and was still not replaced. My dad did not know there was a stop on Bond, so he continued straight into the intersection and we almost collided with a car coming down Penn.

It was the combination of these things that led to the confrontation. The missing stop sign, the unplowed streets, the overflowing garbage, and my wife’s fall on the Republican Committee Man’s sidewalk. Lois’s relatives, several of whom also lived on Cobbs were also incensed by the township government ignoring the needs in our neighborhood all the time in favor of the more money endowed a few blocks south. They might have a lot of dough, but our snow was just as cold and deep as theirs. Lois' cousin Margie (On right) began rallying the street and she suggested we all write letters to the township counsel and tell them what we thought of them, with a civil tongue, of course.

Big talk and after the promises to do this, little action.  Nobody wrote, except one person.

Me.

Yeah, I wrote my letter and I took to task that township government for their failures, their neglect of our streets and public safety, of the garbage haul favoritism, and not least of all the Committeeman who didn’t shovel his walk in compliance with township regulations him and his cronies help make. I’d hoped the weight of several similar letters would have some positive effect because I still believed government was run of the people, by the people and for the people.

There were no similar letters. My friends and neighbors and relatives had chickened out on writing their complaints and I was left standing alone. Margie was an administrator for one of the large prestigious Philadelphia law firms; you'd though she would write, especially since it was her idea. She didn't. 

One night a few days after the letter was mailed, there was aloud knock on our front door. I flung open the door to see what was the matter. Out pawing the porch was the Republican Committeeman from up the street. He burst angrily into our living room and waggled a finger beneath my nose.
“Who do you think you are?” he said.
He then threatened to punch me in the nose, that must have been his idea of political clout. Ah, my letter must have had some effect!

“I shoveled my walk,” he yelled.

“No, no you didn’t and my wife fell on it. I mean, my wife is a high risk pregnancy and she could have had a miscarriage because you failed to shovel.”

“You…” he blustered, “you don’t even know where I live.”

“Yes, I do. Come on.”

I led him outside and up the street to his house. I stopped in the middle of his still ice-packed sidewalk and pointed to his porch.
"Like to borrow a shovel?" I asked.

He said nothing. His face seemed about to explode and then he stomped up his front steps, entered his house and slammed the door behind.  I'm lucky the snow on the roof didn't tumble down upon me from the vibration. I went back home.

I immediately wrote another letter to the Township Powers-what-be complaining about the confrontation and the threat to my nose. I expected some kind of action and sure enough I got it, if somewhat indirectly.

Lois’ Aunt Sally (left) who lived up the street and whose estranged alcoholic husband, who for awhile lived in their garage and had the habit of shooting off a cannon on occasion, now worked for the sanitation department on a patronage job, called her up blubbering.  He ordered her to tell her (something or other, you can fill in the missing adjectives) nephew-in-law better not write any more (more choice descriptives) letters or the Township was going to fire him and then he wouldn’t have the money to pay her the support money. Well, hey yeah, I was actually ready to write a letter of complain about this blackmail, I was ready to go to the public press, I was ready to carry on the war, but the whole family was begging me to write no more. So, I acquiesced and no more letters.

 My turn to the left and beyond had begun and this would not be my last disillusionment with the government.

(The photo on the right was taken in June 1966, my family at The Warehouse Restaurant in Manayunk celebrating all our June anniversaries. Clockwise: me, my grandmother Esther. my father Bill, my mother Mildred and Lois; sometimes a blond that year.)

But the snows of December and Christmas were not the only things that befell me in 1966. After my breakdown I was bounced about a bit in Atlantic’s mailroom, eventually being given my old job back in Addressograph almost exactly a year, June 1966,  from when I first thought I had escaped it. That was back in July of 1965. Dave Claypoole left Atlantic in the fall and returned to school full time. Ed left at year-end for the same reason, beginning college full time that January, I believe at La Salle. I was left behind having this nightmare that I would forever cut plates and stamp envelopes. It was beginning to look as if those dolts from the Pennsylvania Labor Bureau who came to our school in my senior year might have been correct.

 I was destined to be a machine operator.

To replace Ed, we hired a young fellow named Bob Kane and he and I proved to be pretty compatible. He became my new confidant. He was working his way through evening college, just as I was and he had ambitions to be a writer someday, just as I did. But Bob wasn’t working all day and then plopping down at a typewriter to create stories and adding to a growing collection of rejection letters, as I was. He was actually involved in the craft. He was Editor of the Philadelphia Community College newspaper, called (how imaginative) “The Communicator”.

In April, Atlantic finally came through on their promise of giving me a true Level 6 job I was moved up several floors to Accounts Receivable as a Ledger Clerk. Bob Kane got the my vacated Group Leader position in Addressograph. (He held the position through the summer, then he too left Atlantic to become a full time student.)

Mt time with Bob proved very opportune for me. It was to be the key to my own ambitions as a scrivener. It was to lead to a whole new group of friends and to further radicalization. Loop was born.