Job of the Future

The day after Ronald was admitted to the hospital, I left with Sonja Kebbe for a visit to Philadelphia. While there I signed up to attend the I.B.M. Automation Division of Florence Utt Schools, Inc. The course was designed to teach me to be a TAB Operator and Programmer. I didn’t know it when I handed them my first tuition check, but I was putting my toe in the first wave of the computer industry.

It was only a six-week course. My classroom was on the fourth floor of a building on East  Market Street in Philadelphia, almost next to City Hall, in the shadow of William Penn's hat, as they say. We were directly across the street from John Wanamaker’s Department Store. I had been to the city several times growing up, but always with a family member taking me. This was my first excursion alone. (By the fall, when Richard Ray Miller asked me to accompany him, I was a seasoned veteran, which is why he called me in the first place.)  Every weekday morning I caught an early Reading Train at the Pottstown Station (pictured right). My class ran from 9:00 to noon. My train rides started at 7:00 and ended around 2:00.

The first day everybody arrived and waited in a hallway for the instructor. There was a clump of fellows next to me talking in somewhat hushed tones about some Western film actor. One of them was saying, “Yes, he is.”

“Yeah,” said another. “He walks like one, too.”

“That’s right,” said the first. “They only shoot him walking from the waist up so nobody notices.”

I figured out eventually from their conversation that they were talking about Randolph Scott, but I had seen a number of Randolph Scott Westerns, probably only second to John Wayne westerns and was pretty sure I saw him walking, legs and all. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but they had a mocking tone. (Photo left is Randolph Scott and Cary Grant.)

The Instructor showed up and led us into the classroom. It was full of I.B.M. machines. The devices circled around several desks with 024 and 026 Keypunches on one end and continuing in a clockwise direction to a 604 Calculator (pictured right). The instructor began with an overview of what he would be teaching. He followed this with a lecture on 80-Column versus 96-Column punch cards. Here is my question never asked. Why were the 96-Column cards smaller by half than the 80-Column cards? That was a mystery to me.

There was a young man sitting in the desk next to me. He was my height and build, had lighter curlier hair and looked to be my age. I introduced myself at the first break. His name was Tom Newman from Clementon, New Jersey and he was my age. He too wanted to be a cartoonist. He was also studying art through a correspondence school. He was with the Famous Artists School, the biggest rival to Art Instruction, Inc. My school was represented by Charles Schulz, his school by Norman Rockwell. Tom and I became instant friends.

How far along he was in his lessons I don’t know. In my own opinion Tom was probably a better artist than I was. He had a flow of line that was smoother than my own. I was more deliberate in my sketching. We did have a similar sense of humor, though. The doodling on the left is the only example I have of Tom’s style. On the right is a sample of my sketching.

I found the IBM classes fascinating. The first lessons were on the keypunches, which were really glorified typewriters. Instead of putting ink on paper they punched holes in cards. You had thirteen rows on the 80-Column card. The first 10 were 0 through 9. The last three allowed you to punch letters. A hole in Row 1 and Row 11 of Column 1 equaled an A, for instance. A hole in Row 1 and Row 12 would be a K, and so forth.

The 96 column card worked basically the same, except it was far smaller than the 80 column card.

All the other machines in the room ere for reading the cards.

Feeding the cards over a metal surface beneath an electric circuit did this. Punching a hole in a column allowed the circuit to be completed and the machine read the character. Just like computers to come, everything was binary. It was either on or off. There were Interpreters, Collators, Accounting machines, Sorters and the Calculator to learn. Each machine did a separate function of a process. All read cards, but without a program could do nothing with the information.

You preformed programming on control panels using plug-in wires. First, the instructor gave you a job to program, say print an accounts receivable report. You wrote the logical steps on a flowchart. You then drew your program wiring on a schematic grid. Finally, you plugged wires into entry and exit ports of the board (pictured left a 402 Accounting Machine Board). There were no storage capabilities on these early machines. You had to tell each machine what to read (entry ports) and what to do with it (exit ports). The test was easy. Program your board, stick it in the machine and if it did the job, then you did it right. You knew it if you did it wrong. One poor chap plugged an entry into an entry and the bloody machine shrieked as if in agonizing pain.

Both Tom and I graduated ranking first in the class. We each scored 99% for the course. I don’t know how he lost that one point. I had a point deducted because I didn’t write my name on the back of one programming schematic.

During our weeks of training we sometimes visited each other. It was a lot more fun visiting his home because he lived two blocks from the Clementon Amusement Park. When I stayed a weekend there we got up and walked to the park. Wow, I thought, what a place to grow up. A few decades later I would be living just up the road from Clementon at a Ski Resort.

The first Friday I was going to his place we went to John Wanamaker’s right after class. He was buying something for his mom, if I remember right. Since he lived in Jersey we had to catch a Train. It went over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge to cross the Delaware River. It wasn’t called PATCO yet. The tracks had not extended further than 8^th Street the year before. Now the subways and Jersey train all had stations on the basement level of Wanamaker’s.

We were up on the Mezzanine and suddenly found ourselves running late to catch our train. We went dashing through the store looking for a stairway down to those stations, but we were lost. We ran through some doors we thought were an exit, but they weren’t. We ran right into the Ladies’ Restroom. It was huge and full of women doing all the things women do in powder rooms. We rushed in and every woman screamed. We just kept running right out doors on the other side of the room. We found the stairs we wanted and escaped out of town.

Tom and I got our diploma from Florence Utt Schools on August 28. I traveled over to Clementon with him afterward and stayed the night. His mother dropped me off at the Pottstown train station on their way to Hershey the next day. He then rode off into the west and that was the last I ever saw him. My mother and grandmother picked me in Pottstown and he and I returned back to our hometowns and our own lives and soon lost contact. I sometimes wonder how he made out with his I.B.M. training. I especially wonder about his art and did he ever become a cartoonist? By the way, the last time I saw a IBM TAB Control Board was on display at the Smithsonian Institute. My Job of the Future is the job of the past.

Tom and I both being into art we couldn't resist trying out
a couple sketches using all this expensive IBM Equipment. So during some break time or something we managed to sneak through a couple rather simple TAB Operation illustrations. This is a long way from what can be done on simple devices today. Oh, the one on the right is supposed to be George Washington, just in case anyone mistook it for William Shakespeare. Also, I lot more effort went into creating these the it looks.

I myself dropped out of Art Instruction soon after Florence Utt. My marks had dropped from A during my first year to a B level. My last two assignments earned me a C. I wasn’t practicing anymore. My interest was waning. I was simply pulling the assignments out as they arrived in the mail, doing them without practice and sending them back. I wanted to be a cartoonist, not someone drawing vases and cookware for newspaper ads. I did use much of what I learned studying art years later on some of the jobs I held. I used more from that course than from the subjects I had in high school.

During the time I was going to Florence Utt Ronald sent me a story he wrote. He titled it, “The Potato Chip King”. It was really an extended dirty joke, a rather disgusting one at that. I won’t reiterate it here. Ron was to co-write a couple stories with me over the years. One was a Western parody, “Git ‘Em at the Pass” and the other a psychological mystery called “The Wreckage”. Actually, Ronald suggested a story line for that third one and I wrote it into a full tale.

I send one of our stories to a magazine once. It may have been a revamped version of “The Potato Chip King”. I received a handwritten rejection letter from the editor. He said our story had insulted the intelligence of every one living in the Southern United States. Gee, sorry, it was just a joke.

His routine surgery, however, was proving to be anything but a joke.

Where Did All the Flowers Go?

My flower child wife in 1967, during the innocent days of love and peace.

It is hard to pin down that decade. It wasn't really the 1960s. The first few years of the 'sixties were like a slow fade out of the Rock 'n' Roll revolution of the 1950s. Did it begin in February 1964 when the Beatles were the vanguard of the British Invasion upon the musical shores of the United States? This date certainly marked the beginning of a whole new creative breakout within the arts. I'm inclined to place it a bit earlier at the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and end it on August 9, 1974, when Richard Nixon left the White House in disgrace. Those dates certainly seem to border my own entry and exit of the Psychedelic Philadelphia period.

Although aspects of the movement date back to the Bohemians and the Beats, and small contingents of self-called Hippies exist today, as far as what people call the Hippie years was a very short period. It basically blossomed as a sub-culture with the January 1967 Be-In at San Francisco and the following Summer of Love. Its death began at Altamont in 1970.

The term Hippie was apparently coined in a 1965 newspaper article by journalist Michael Fallon about

the migration of Beatniks into the Haight-Asbury area of San Francisco. The exact meaning of the term is vague and uncertain. If it derived from "Hip" or "being in the know", it was a misnomer. I think Hippies were naive and escapist. The 1960s were hardly the "Decade of Peace and Love ". They were rather chaotic and violent, with police dogs, firehoses, cities rioting as the civil rights movement burned across the nation, and bloody and deadly as the Vietnam War raged overseas. Sticking flowers in the barrels of rifles ignored human nature and eventually someone pulled the trigger. The resulting images of My Lei in November 1969 and Kent State in May 1970 made this all too clear.

I suspected at some point the FBI or some such authority was reading my mail. My envelopes were coming to me opened or partially resealed. Why bother with me, pretty much a nobody. Who knows in those times? My wife and I had attended various protests in the city. We had been on a thing called "Pollution Trail" during the very first Earth day, riding about the area in a bus with fellow demonstrators, stopping at those places we considered the worse offenders against clean air and water, singing at them, shouting at them, getting our pictures taken by the mews media. I was writing for ultra-revolutionary underground publications, as well as letters to the editors of local newspapers, debating ministers and sending angry complaints to CEOs. I had supported and voted by write-in for Dick Gregory in the 1968 Presidential election. I subscribed to left-leaning magazines, such

as "Evergreen Review" and "Avant Garde".

One day I found a subpoena sticking from our mailbox. I was summoned to court on the grounds I had fraudulently registered to vote. This was in August of 1969. I had just begun a new job, circulation manager at North American Publishing Co. (I also wrote book reviews for their education industry magazine "Media & Methods"), and I had to take a day off from work to appear in court. When my wife and I moved to Philly we had registered as Democrats. She did not receive a subpoena, I did. I attributed this to the fact she listed her occupation as "Private Secretary" at U. of P., while I listed mine as "Writer". Arlen Spector was running for Mayor on the Republican Ticket, an office he would lose in a close race. The Republican Party was making an attempt prior to the election to take away the votes of students in the University City area on the belief they were mostly Democratic voters and I was swept up in their net. This event became the basis for my story "Toward Last November".

The people I knew or met and the situations of my life often became stories and that time frame was a productive period for me and 45% of my short fiction was penned between 1963 and 1974. The stories directly concerning my Psychedelic Philadelphia Days were collected in Keep All the Animals Warm (2004).  These were autobiographical  with "Cold", "Singing in the Streets", "Subway Stop", "City Scenes", "Tea and Coffee" and "Toward Last November" being especially so.



So where did the flowers in my bouquet go?

Diane, who wished to be a writer, just kinda drifted away.

Girard was older than the rest of us, married, divorced and father of a daughter who didn't understand the situation. He was a writer and trying to be a free spirit, but never came out into the nights and haunts with the core of our group. His situation with his family became the kernel of my story "Christmas Last" in my collection Daily Rhapsody (1971). It is the danger of being friends with a writer, your life becomes fodder for the mill of the writer's imagination. (Half of the stories in "Daily Rhapsody" were about people I knew at either ARCo ("Beach Boy", "Christmas Last", "Papier-Mache", "Most Admired Man in Rounke's Bar") or Lincoln Bank ("Fat Gal").

I do not know the final destinations of most of the core group, other than some apparently dropped their artistic dreams.

Jane (pictured right), who I often traveled up to Temple University with, for she lived in North Philly, may have defected to Cuba, but I really don't know. She was studying art and was active in the Black activist community. She was the one who introduced me to an editor in the Underground Press. Her boyfriend was a photographer in those same publications and by 1970 he had defected to Cuba. Jane kept urging me to not take day jobs, to trust my talent and live by it. Sometimes, perhaps more so, I wish I had listened to her.

Jim, who wanted us to start the band "Ethereal" became a Doctor of all things, perhaps the last thing any of us would have expected.

Joe (pictured left with my wife) and I had collaborated on a few pieces, but he was never fully committed to the kind of life the rest of us dreamed about. He was content to sit in Jim's basement or go to the Square with us. His number came up in the draft lottery and he ended up going to Vietnam, where he was wounded and heroic. After he came home he married and named his first child after me, stayed with ARCo and moved to Los Angeles when they moved their headquarters there.

I lost contact with him sometime after 1980.

I do not know what happened to Dot, the poet (pictured left), or to Michael and Maureen, the Actors (pictured right). I have googled the
names, but turned up nothing. If Michael and Maureen ever fulfilled their hopes of the Broadway Stage I do not know.

Part of the breakup lies with me. By 1970 I was getting published regularly and had also begun selling stories to the international pulps, "Magazine of Horror" and "Startling Mystery Stories". In a way I had moved beyond the group. The chatter in Jim's basement and around the Rittenhouse Fountain was always about some future time when we'd all be famous in our

fields. It was talk of projects we planned to do. It was talk and not doing. But I was doing. More and more I was writing and less and less going to these get-togethers to gossip and dream.

And then we moved from the city and after that the decade called the "sixties" had disappeared into the mid-seventies and everything changed and new eras began.

We lived during those Philadelphia days near Clark Park. Clark Park had the distinction that Charles Dickens once spoke there on his American tour. The Park was on the edge between the West Philadelphia communities and the Universities. During that decade it was decided to make the park a symbol of Love and Peace. It was the darling of the media for a while, but in the end it remained Clark Park and nothing more. (I based my story "Community Park" on it.)

Writers can't help but write and all the world becomes ink for their pen.

Quiting the Writing Game

Okay, don't anybody gets too excited that they will not have to read anything by me again. I said, " The Writing Game" not writing.

It is easier for an alcoholic to give up drinking than a writer to quit writing. Writing isn't like an addiction; it's more an incurable disease. One doesn't give it up anymore than someone gives up cancer.

I'll continue writing until they pull the keyboard from under my cold, dead fingers. I've been writing professionally for 60 years if you count the newspaper Stuart Meisel and I wrote and sold in the school hallway in 1952-53. It's been 55 years if you count it from the song "My Little White Lamb" my first New York published piece. I have been published somewhere or other in every decade since.

I have written almost every day since I was 12 years old. It may turn into gibberish if I go senile, but someone would have to shoot me to stop me. (Now I fully understand some people may say I already write gibberish. To them I say, "@&#*!" Just typing gibberish, translate at your own risk.)

The Writing Game has very little to do with actual writing. The Writing Game is what you play when fame and fortune is what you think you want. It is the desperate rules you follow to be published and see your name in print. It is the conventions you cow tow to in order to impress an editor. In other words it is pandering to please someone else's dictates of what writing is, but it is not writing.

In every art form their exist a coterie of elitist snobs who claim privy to what is and isn't proper. Well, there is another kind of privy and that is where their opinions really belong. If we depended on the considerations of these mutually declared haut monde of culture we probably would not have the great variety of art we enjoy. Like most elitist these person's main purpose is to keep things to themselves, for to share is anti-privileged  They tend to cling to the last best thing or speak mumbo-jumbo to declare something unfathomable as insightful. We must remember these people generally have stood in the doorway of evolving art for centuries and one wonders how many artists they have killed figuratively speaking over the years.

One must remember Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime. Kathryn Stockett was rejected by 60 agents before one agreed to market her novel The Help. We probably would never have heard of such people as Beethoven, Jack Kerouac, William Faulkner, James Joyce or Jackson Pollack if those elitist who think they uphold the pillars of the media had their way during their times.

Now don't misunderstand, I am not trying to place myself on the level of those I just mentioned. As a teenager I was content to dream of being a hack writer of horror stories. Basically I achieved that and had some success as a pulp writer. If anything I have written rises about that level, then fine. I don't care. I've quit the writing game.

I have seen my name in print many times and it is no big deal. I am tired of changing things to suit some editor or to avoid upsetting the politically correct applecart. We have the internet now and the freedom to write what we would write to the best we can write it. If some read my words and enjoy them or think about them that is enough. If people read my words and dislike what I wrote then they are totally free never to read my words again. That won't stop my words.

What finally persuaded me to quit the writing game was some criticism of a story I wrote. It was made by a college professor, someone very much in a position to poison young mind. Her criticism was not of my style or content per se. Her statement was, "You didn't describe if your character was white or black, American or Canadian or whatever nationality or race; therefore, I could not relate to your character."

Is this what we have come to? This kind of bigoted need of superficialities to understand a story? These things did not matter in my story. The main character could have just as easily been of Asian ethnicity. The main character could have been a black man or a Hispanic woman, these random accidents of birth had no bearing on the story. It was about a human being dealing with life. If the color of her skin had a bearing on the plot I would have put it in there.

I thought, "Gimme a break! Are you kidding me?"

No, from now on I write what I write. Read it for what it is worth. If you like it, come back and read some more. If you don't like it, then go away. That is the freedom we all have now.

Toss Away, Toss Away, Wait A Minute -- Stop

Here is something you don't think about when you start off young. Over the course of your life you will gather all kinds of junk like a magnet. It will begin to overflow drawers, clutter up closets and if not whipped back with a super strength of will, wipe out whole rooms. One day you wake up old and you say what in the world am I gonna do with all this stuff?

There is a general rule of thumb, so I have heard, that if you ain't used it in the last six months, toss it out.

Yeah, easy for you with a non-hoarder heart to say.

Dang, I got stuff I ain't seen in six years. In fact, as I just discovered, stuff I ain't seen in six decades.

(That's about how long ago it was someone told me I ain't supposed to use the word "ain't". And as you can see its still cluttering up my grammar.)

Ain't that a shame.

Anyway, the Little Woman and I decided a few weeks ago we ought to get rid of all this claptrap of life. It is a hard thing to do for me. I don't know why. I know it is silly to hang on to things I'll never use.

For instance, I use to have four thousand books. That was just the start in the picture on the right. Bookshelves lined the walls of the family room and we have a large family room.  I had even more, but we had a leak one year and several hundred got ruined.

A couple years ago I gave away about 1,000 books to a local library and I tossed quiet a few more that were damaged or simply obsolete (there are some books that become obsolete, such as computer manuals).

Despite this, I still have way too many books and I should give more to the library, especially the novels. I know full well I am not going to re-read all the novels I own; I couldn't, I won't live that long. But to box them up and haul them away is very difficult for me.

I fight this pack rat urge all the time. The other day I pulled everything out of a big storage closet we have. Among the Christmas decorations, four bowling balls (like we haven't bowled in twenty-five years), 78 RPM records and other miscellaneous antiquities were two cartons of Plasticville buildings. These use to be on my model train layouts when I was a boy; WHEN I WAS A BOY!  Do you understand that my model trains were steam engines when I was a boy? This is how long I have held on to these objects.

I know I am not going to be putting up train platforms anytime again on God's green earth, so I steeled myself and decided they go out with the trash. So I mention this to the Little Woman and what does she say? "Oh, if they don't take up much space maybe we should keep those."

Woman, you aren't helping!

One carton is about three and a half feet high by two feet by two feet. The other carton is four foot long by two feet by one foot. They take up a bit of space and that is all they will ever do now.

Sigh!

Anyway, I pulled a large plastic tub out a few days ago and inside I found a stack of original copies of stories and poems I wrote. In the middle of the stack were some old sketches I did as a teenager, so I pulled these out and scanned them into the computer.  I was going to post them in my  "Tatters" Blog. But this morning I found in another old plastic tub a scrapbook and when I opened it I found a lot more old drawings, going back to when I was 7 years old. With so many old pieces, I decided to give them a separate blog called "Charcoal and Pen Lines".

One of the old drawings I found is the one at the top of this post, a sketch I did of my friend Ronald, known today as Retired in Delaware.  It was drawn in September of 1960.

I took a detail from a charcoal drawing, "Awakening", that I did in 1956 at the age of 15 to use as my banner on the new Blog.  Sometimes even things you haven't seen in six decades you still want to keep.