From the Snows of the Himalayas to the Rails of Sudden Death

There were four bedrooms on the upper floor of the swamp house. The Kid's parents had the master, naturally, although his mother slept alone four to five nights a week depending upon his dad's schedule. The Kid had the back east-corner room for sleeping. The other back bedroom, the west, was his playroom.

Ah, there are advantages to being an only child. Not only don't you have to share a bedroom or bed, but where there is a spare room, you can claim it as your sanctuary and spread out your toy trucks and soldiers. You never have to squabble over territory or maneuver for your mother's attention. You can't blame your sibling for your misdeeds either, but those who have that opportunity probably get caught in the lie and doubled down on the punishment.

This left one more room upstairs and this became a store room, not that his folks had very much to store. There were, however, some things stacked in the middle of the room that caught his attention.

There were tall mounds of comic books. Who knows how many, but at least two piles as tall as he was. Considering their thinnest, even in the days when they bragged of having "52 pages", that was a lot of comic books. These must have been his dad's, for he had never seen his mother read a comic book and it was doubtful some previous occupant had left them there.

These were an eclectic collection, somewhat historic even then. If The Old Goat had them now he could make a small fortune on eBay. There were among these publications the originations and first adventurers of some of the superheroes still in print today, Superman and Batman. There were also comics of characters probably no one remembers, because there were some of the earliest comic books created in those piles. There were comic books in black and white and there were comic books that were collections of the newspaper strips of the 'thirties.

Although comic books were to play a roll building relationships in The Kid's near future, it was the other pile in that room which grabbed his attention even more. These were strange books. They were an inch or so thick, but not very wide or high. When you flipped through there were a lot of illustrations, even stills taken from movies. Some books had famous names and portraits on the covers, others had garish scenes of World War I fighter planes in combat or cowboys chasing stampedes or beautiful damsels in distress. These were called "Big Little Books" and there were a ton of them.

These were what belonged to his mom and he began asking her to read them to him at night. He quickly found he could read along with her well enough that soon he was spending hours alone honing his reading ability. The Kid was especially drawn to the adventure books, the explorations of unknown parts of the world. He was most enthralled by several baring the name "Frank Buck" on the cover. Frank Buck was famous once. He was an actor, a writer, a trainer for the Ringling Brothers and even more impressive an explorer who captured wild animals for zoos and circuses. He was known as "Bring 'em Back Alive" Buck.

Here was this man traveling the world; here was The Kid stuck alone in a swamp. Frank Buck brought home lions and tigers and hippopotamus in cages; The Kid brought home tadpoles in jars and snakes on sticks. People celebrated what Buck brought and paid to see the beasts; The Kid's mom always made him dump his menagerie back in the marsh.

"She can't stop me from growing up someday," he thought, "and when I do, that's what I'll be, a world-renown explorer. I'll go on adventures in darkest Africa, searching for King Solomon's Minds or lost tribes of headhunters." And after hearing about some strange creatures on radio, he decided he would be the boy...uh...man who would capture the Yeti.

There was irony to such a goal for The Kid. The Yeti, better known as "Abominable Snowmen", did not lurk on some savannah in Africa or hide in Amazon Jungles. It dwelt in the highest mountain range in the world, the Himalayas. You could only reach the Yeti with pickax and rope and Sherpa guides.

And The Kid was afraid of heights.

This fact did not daunt his dreams of capturing the Yeti someday, but these books also inspired him to more immediate boldness in exploring the surroundings of his own backyard. It was those explorations that brought him to the place where for the second time he almost died at that place in the swamp.

Remember the cornfield behind the house, the hill where The Kid used to sled. He was told never to crest that hill. He was a boy and alone. Who would ever know, so of course, he did. After all, Frank Buck would have went over that hill to see what was on the other side. So one day he went up and over the ridge.

Beyond the top was a gully cut through the hills in which was laid the mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Past these tracks was nothing to see but woods. The Kid crossed the tracks anyway.

There were two sets of rails parallel to each other, one for the eastbound traffic, the other for the west. As he crossed he could hear the trains. One was coming from each direction toward each other and he was in a gravel strip between the two sets of rail. He froze, afraid to move when he saw them closing upon from the two distances. Soon they whizzed by him, front and back, blowing his clothes and hair, and the scream away from his mouth. As quickly as they had came, they were gone, and The Kid ran across the remaining rail bed and dashed home where he never mentioned the incident, never, ever, until now.

The Kid never crested the hill again, but he had dreams about those trains off and on for years. He had dreams where they blew him over, battering him between them, and dreams where they sucked him under the wheels and cut off his legs, and dreams where an object sticking out from one of the railcars sliced off his head. He carry an edginess when on train platforms from that day forward all his life.

Yet, that stupid stunt was an adventure to treasure in a boy's life. Those train dreams weren't the nightmares that really came to haunt his sleep. The bad nightmare's came from the highway.

The first two illustrations are stock photos of a Big Little Book and a Frank Buck Flyer.

The third photo is not a Yeti, but a heavily doctored photo of a late friend, Tommy. It was not taken in the Himalayas, but in the Poconos (1975).

The last illustration is a stock photo taken near where The Kid lived. It is of a Pennsylvania Passenger train on the mainline rails. The trains which had passed him were freight trains and much longer.

A Lady of Influence

I would like to say a few words about a lady who profoundly influenced my life, although I didn't know it at the time. She is not one who gained fame so outside a certain circle within a small geographic region, she would not be known. Most of the people who truly influenced me fit such a description. Such people are too often lost in the glare of the superficial star of the moment, some Hollywood heartthrob (more likely in these day to be a L.A. train wreck) or a money magnate - a golden idol building towers to himself; even perhaps a politician riding a mount named charisma.

It is not to say people of fame and wealth are necessarily bad and cannot offer good example to us. It is just that glamour, glitz and gilt may cover a lack of character and blind us to what we might have to give up of our soul to be such.

Yet we can find influence in plain wrappers if we would put on sunglasses against the glitter that emanates from the TV tube or movie screen.

Such is Elizabeth Ezra.

Who?

Exactly, who?

Miss Ezra was my third grade teacher and if not for her I might not be writing this Blog today. I was the new kid in the class, joining it after Christmas break in January 1950. It was at this time, in this class, I met and befriended two people who remain my friends still, although at a distance, one in Florida and one in Lower Delaware (the one who writes the Retired in Delaware Blog I mentioned previously.) They too feel influenced by Miss Ezra. I have learned that many feel this way.

Miss Ezra standing behind The Kid, 1950
In third grade she challenged the class to write a short story. She praised my story, put it up on the wall for the world to see and this was the first of few moments I shown in those early years, and I believe this was the seed that grew into a vine entangling my life. I can't say if it produced a garden or a weed patch, but it certainly made me a cultivator of words my whole life.

Miss Ezra never married. Her students were her children and her life. She was a quiet woman, a humble woman and is still. She turned 101 late last year.
Miss Ezra now and then.


My friend, the one in Lower Delaware, and I visited her a couple years back and she was still spry and cognizant. She walks through town each day and is much the gracious teacher she will always be.
My friend Ron and Miss Ezra at her home


I would hope we all have a Miss Ezra in our life, but more importantly, may we all be someone else's Miss Ezra.

Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.Proverbs 22:6

1 comments:

Ron said:

A wonderful thoughtful tribute to a kind and gracious lady. We were very lucky to have such a wonderful woman as our third grade teacher during those important formative years. Miss Ezra celebrated her 101st birthday November 10th at Simpson Meadows Retirement Home in Downingtown, PA. Her health is excellent and she is as sharp as she was 54 years ago.

April 24, 2008 8:29 PM 

Affliction: Another influential person in my life -- Stanley Stein

"If the disease breaks out all over his skin and, so far as the priest can see, it covers all the skin of the infected person from head to foot, the priest is to examine him, and if the disease has covered his whole body, he shall pronounce that person clean. Since it has all turned white, he is clean. But whenever raw flesh appears on him, he will be unclean. When the priest sees the raw flesh, he shall pronounce him unclean. The raw flesh is unclean; he has an infectious disease. Should the raw flesh change and turn white, he must go to the priest. The priest is to examine him, and if the sores have turned white, the priest shall pronounce the infected person clean; then he will be clean." Lev 13:12-17

Once I had an inspirational friend who I never met. I only knew him through letters (this was before email). I didn't even know his real name until sometime after he died. He was Sidney Maurice Levyson, but I only knew him as Stanley Stein, as did the world at that time. It was amazing he was known at all. He was considered a leper. Leprosy was greatly misunderstood and probably still is. The real name for the disease is Hansen's Disease and as horrid as the affliction can be, it is not as infectious as once thought. Most of our knowledge of this disease comes from popular presentation of Bible stories where lepers were normally portrayed wrapped in bandages and crawling out of caves.

When Stanley Stein was diagnosed with the disease, he was immediately removed from society and incarcerated (there is no better word for it) in the Carville Hospital in Louisiana. Not only did he lose his home and family, he even lost his name. He choose his pseudonym to be known by more than a number.

But Stanley didn't disappear quietly into the netherworld of pariahs. He began a newspaper called "Star 66", of which I was once a subscriber. He didn't stop there. he also wrote a book about his life entitled, Alone No Longer. As a young man I read that book and wrote to Mr. Stein and we carried on a correspondence for awhile after that.

TO STANLEY STEIN

You have me in a cave as to save from the grave
YOU from my infection,
Because of a pale blemish that’s diminished the finish
Of my complexion.
I don’t know why this land to a man wants to ban
Me, a tainted fixation.

And don’t call me that word anymore, you’ve
Given me swampland barless prison blues.

You won’t allow me a wife or a life in the strife
Of my growing pockery.
And you put me down in the ground away from town
Under guard, lock and key,
Then you turn tail and run and you shun me, and son,
YOU call this democracy?

And don’t call me that word any more, you’ve
Given me swampland barless prison blues.

And your preachers preach the gospel
And they turn the people rather hostile
Then they collect for the hospital.
YOU call that Christianity?

And every gift that you give me
Is sterilized just to rib me
While you say you want to live. Gee!
YOU do that unanimously.

Then YOU wash your hands off
After waving me to please stand off.
After you’ve burned all the land off
YOU leave me anonymously.

While YOU go back home with your own all alone
Whispering where you’ve been,
Then YOU gasp at the rot at this spot and allow how
We aren’t owning much skin.
After which you sit back and get slack with a snack and
Go back asleep again.

And don’t call me that word any more, you’ve
Given me swampland barless prison blues.

There was a reason I was drawn to Stanley Stein. If he and I had lived in Biblical times, we both would have been visiting the priest about skin diseases. We may have both been branded as lepers in those times and shunned by our community, even though my own affliction is not as serious as his. I have the "heartbreak of psoriasis". It covers most of my body. It is not normally dangerous and it is not at all contagious. Basically it is just ugly, although sometimes it itches and sometimes it hurts, like a bad sunburn.
I first was diagnosis when I was 15, although I am certain I had it several years earlier. There were comic circumstances to the discovery. I was sitting on a hammock with a girl (young sister of a friend) and we lost our balance and were dumped to the ground. She landed upon my face and I bounced up in fear my glasses might be shattered and my eyes might get cut. It was a hot late spring day and we were in bathing suits. When I leaped up to feel my glasses, she asked about a rash on my underarm.
I looked and sure enough, there was this red ring around my armpit. We had just been studying "social diseases" in health class at school and I immediately jumped to the conclusion I had a 'social disease". This was how naive and innocent the times were. Why should I have any of the diseases talked about in that class? I was a virgin. I had never had sex of any kind with anyone. And what would it have been to get a "social disease" in my armpit? Nonetheless, I feared the worse and hid this blemish from my parents.
My grandfather spotted a white splotch on my elbow during a visit to his home shortly thereafter and took me to a dermatologist. It was psoriasis. The doctor gave me a cream that was gray and smelled like a telephone pole. I rubbed this on the splotch and the rash and they cleared up. But soon another splotch appeared on another body part. It was a losing battle and the splotches were small and often cleared up on their own.
I didn't even think about it as a young man. Then came the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson was president and the war was not going well. he lifted the deferment on married men and I got the letter to report for a physical. At the last stage one of the doctors asked, "what is that on your shoulder?" I hadn't been aware of anything on my shoulder, but when I stretched my neck to see, there was a tiny white splotch. This was the only blemish upon me at that particular moment, but it kept me out of Vietnam. I was classified as 1-Y. This meant I was fit to serve, except only if they needed to scrap the bottom of the barrel. I guess they never got to the barrel bottom because I was never called up.
The disease continued to be an occasional spot of white or patch of red until I reached my forties, then it spread like wildfire. It covered me, but only beneath my clothing. As long as I kept my shirt on, I appeared normal.
I went to another dermatologist. He took one look at my condition and his eyes lit up. He told me of a new experimental treatment, which he wanted to try and then had me strip naked to take pictures. I could see what he was thinking. If he cured me with this new treatment, he'd be in the medical magazines, maybe even write a book and I'd be in there too, in all my naked glory.
I never went back after that initial visit.
But then in my late forties, it spread to my face. I sought out yet another dermatologist and he gave me light treatments. Three times a week I had to go to his offices. A nurse would take me to a back room, where I would strip naked and step into this big box. There was a little window in the door. Inside the four walls were lined with lights. I would stand -- nude -- upon this little stool in these lights. It started with a couple of minutes, but eventually worked up to a half hour. I invented games to occupy my mind. I would stand facing the door for so many counts, then turn left on my little stool for so many, then face the rear of the cabinet so many more and so on.
This went on until I received the doctor bill and discovered what he charged for those light treatments. (Medical insurance didn't pay for it in those days, they classified psoriasis treatment as cosmetic.) But tanning salons were just gaining popularity, so I went to one and for $10 not only got a light treatment, but could lay in a bed (that looked like a giant waffle iron) and listen to music.
The blotches did all go away, but after a period returned. I ignored it this time. But the scales became thicker and soon I was in pain. It hurt to turn a doorknob. I would make a fist and the skin would break and bleed.
To a new dermatologist I went. I had developed an extreme case, one which was now life threatening because my skin couldn't breathe properly. Fortunately, the insurance companies now did cover treatment. I was back to standing naked it light boxes, but they had advanced as well. They were now a sleek chamber that looked like something out of Star Trek and you did not have to be cooked as long.
The light box was not the only thing I was subjected to. I was given several ointments and lotions I had to apply at different times of day. I was to take three baths a day and then sit for twenty minutes slathered with a cream. This was not easy when you work. Once my condition was controlled, I stopped all of this and have just lived as I am since.
Very few people have even commented to me about it. Those who have usually mistake my situation as poison ivy. In Florida in 1984, though, I was approaching the elevator bank of a hotel where a man was waiting. He saw me and ran down the corridor screaming, "what do you have? What do you have?" I was tempted to pursue and embrace him and say, 'I don't know, but now you have it too." I didn't. I wouldn't be mean that way.
It is interesting to me that society has overstated the danger of Hansen's Disease to the point they use to lock people away and they have reduced psoriasis to a joke. Although there is no comparison to the seriousness of Hansen's with psoriasis, the one should not cause the panic it has and the other can be more serious than a punch line.
Stanley Stein is gone now. He was born the same year as my late grandmother, 1899. I remain afflicted with my patches and splotches. But in all, I adapt and I adopt Stanley Stein's credo:

“People sometimes ask me if I have a philosophy of life. I do. I subscribe to the concept embraced by Evelyn Wells in her meaningful book, ‘Life Starts Today.’ I try and make the best of each day, not grieving over yesterday, and not being too concerned over what may happen tomorrow. To me, ‘eternity is the moment.”
“Instead of bemoaning the things that I have lost, I try to make the most of what I have left. In his essay on Compensation, Emerson says, “For everything you have missed, you have gained something else.”

"To Stanley Stein" was written by Nitewrit in 1968. It was performed on March 13, 2004 at Franco's at 4W5 by the author. The photograph and quote of Stanley Stein was taken from "Searching for Stanley Stein" by Jerry Klinger, Jewish Magazine July 2007. I have provided a link to the article in my link section.

Another Artist in Passing -- John Updike

John Updike died a few days ago at the age of 76. If my home is festooned with paintings by Andrew Wyeth, who also just died, my book shelf is heavy with John Updike books. He had a great influence on me as a young writer.

Oh, not so much in style. I never used so many multisyllabic words or complex sentences, but in subject and substance. This was because those early works related to me in a very personal way. We grew up not so far from each other. 

He was less than a decade older than I and though he is light years away  as a literary luminary, he was only a few miles distant in proximity of culture, close enough I knew the locales where he set his early work, such as Reading, Pennsylvania.  His boyhood home was in Shillington, mine was in Bucktown. Two nearby Pennsylvania boys who liked words.

In 1963, my wife and I took a journey to his home town of Shillington. I took the photo on the right, which I believe was his home, based on descriptions in his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair.

I easily identified with those early stories found in Pigeon Feathers, The Same Door, Rabbit Run, The Centaur (my favorite of his novels) and other books. I knew the streets and the types. I wrote about much the same thing.

Like me, he also suffered from psoriasis and wrote about it.

He had early success, becoming a staff writer on "The New Yorker" while very young. He use to write anonymously for the "Talk of the Town" section. His stories then began appearing in that magazine, which was considered high prestige and also paid well. All I have from The New Yorker are rejection slips. 

As he grew more successful, he moved away from his Pennsylavia roots to New England. Although somewhat popular, especially with Rabbit Run, he didn't become a household name until he published Couples, his first novel set in his new home land.

I sort of lost interest after this. Perhaps the new works were removed from my world. I don't know. I have gotten several of them. I really turned away when I read Couples. The book was considered quite shocking at the time it appeared, what with all its portrayals of sex and use of four-letter words. I didn't care for it because it seemed phony to me. The way the characters talked did not come across as how people actually talk, especially in love making. My opinion at the time was he wrote it to get attention.  If so, it worked. 

Updike won many awards, including National Book Rewards and two Pulitzer Prizes for Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. Perhaps there is irony that two books in a series which began with Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux about a character created in his Pennsylvania environs should win his top awards. 

Despite my kind of falling out of love with Updike when Couples appeared,  I always carried a fondness for the man and I truly expected to hear him awarded the Nobel Prize. I guess that won't happen now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the Nobel is awarded posthumously.

John, I thank you for those early stories I couldn't get enough of and the way you once inspired me and rose my level of writing. 

written 1/31/09

How Times Have Changed

This morning I watched a classic film I had never seen.  I had heard of it, of course, seen the poster and stills of the famous subway grill scene, but never seen the film.  It is a funny movie, but it is even funnier reflecting on how perceptions and tastes and rules have changed in the 53 years since it was made.

The little description box on my TV had the viewer warnings at the bottom: V and SD, I believe were the letters, and it said "Intense Violence" and "Intensely Suggestive Dialogue".

I could understand the intensely suggestive dialogue, although in reality it was not very intense compared to what you hear in any present day TV sitcom. There were no "four-letter" words, no graphically described bits of erotica, as well as no nudity or explicit sex. In today's theaters it probably would garner a PG rating, a PG-13 at the most.

Yes, the dialogue was subtlety suggestive, yet "Intense Violence"? Having never seen the film, I kept waiting and looking for this intense violence.  Twenty years ago we had still-beating hearts pulled from chests in an Indiana Jones adventure and that wouldn't measure up to intense violence compared to many of the modern movie bloodfests. What would be intense violence in a 1955 comedy?

It came near the end, in the imagination of Tom Ewell as the man with the seven year itch.  (Shouldn't it have properly been called the 'seventh year itch'? He didn't have an itch for seven years). He fantasizes his wife suddenly coming home and shooting the lock off his apartment door. She menaces him with her pistol and finally shoots him five times on a staircase and twice more after he has fallen.  We hear the gun, see puffs of smoke and watch Ewell stumble about and fall, but we never see any blood or gore. I once played such a victim in a high school sketch. It was comic violence, hardly intense.

And then there are all those stills and the posters of Marilyn standing on a subway grill, her skirt flying high above her waist as Tom Ewell leers at one side. These were shots that upset Joe DiMaggio, but they were shots not taken from the film. Yes, she does stand upon a subway grill and twice her skirt is blow up, but at the angle the scene is shot you only see her legs exposed to just above her knees. Women shop in our malls in shorts that display more leg than this infamous scene.

Speaking of women today and Marilyn, it was striking how she...well...looked plump. Women today would be heading for the diet books if photographs showed them looking as wide across the beam as Marilyn in this film and they'd be concerned about the thickness of their legs as well. 

Another thing that stood out was prices. Ewell has a meal in a restaurant. The waitress enumerates the items he had to eat, which were quite a few, and ends stating it will be a $1.27. At another point, Marilyn complains about the uselessness of an electric fan she purchased and states she will return it to the pharmacy and get her $3.87 back.

It is obvious the film was based on a play. It is not extensively movie-like.  Most of it takes place in Ewell's apartment and consists of two characters. A few scene go outside the apartment and include others, but it is easy picturing it being performed on a stage.

Despite all this, it is still funny and enjoyable. In other words, it's basic story is timeless.

I'll make one final observation. This film was considered somewhat daring in its day. But it is very, very, very mild indeed compared to where film and TV have went since. This is the subtle way evil creeps further into corrupting our lives. One would be laughed at for objecting to the Seven Year Itch as dirty or sexy or...oh my...intensely violent. The line has moved and it isa perfectly acceptable film for police society. Yet each decade that passes, that line moves further and more things become acceptable. Eventually there will be nothing one can object to and not be thought prudish or judgmental. And then I think we will be morally lost. We may be close. We may be there. 

Those Who Scribbled into My Psyche and Left A mark

Just thinking about J. D. Salinger and considering that Nine Stories and Catcher in the Rye both played some roll in forming my own approach and ideas about writing when I was young, I though I would just list those writers who I believe were influences on me. And none of them would have written such a run-on sentence I'm sure.


Well, William Faulkner might.


I have read a good bit of Faulkner I don't think he had much influence on my style. Perhaps my fictional "Decket County"  and its town of "Wilmillar" were subconsciously inspired by his creating a fictional universe centered around the fictitious "Oxford" and "Yoknapatawpha County", Mississippi as stand-ins for Jefferson and Lafayette County.  


I have had people suggest I use real place names in my fiction and wonder why I choose not. It is very simple. If I used Chester County, Downingtown and Philadelphia (Formton) as my setting, I would be restricted to keeping the reality of those places. By basing purely fictional locations on these very real places, I am free to put sites that don't exist in them or move the boundaries, invent a history and alter the laws to suit my plots. Otherwise there would be the inevitable carping that you couldn't do it that way in Chester County or that building doesn't exist in Philadelphia. 



One would hardly recognize Faulkner without his mustache. he doesn't look bad with out it. I wonder why he grew one? Once he added the mustache he  took on a resemblance to Stalin.

Just for the record, I began reading Faulkner in my early twenties and the first of his works I read was The Unvanquished, which is certainly not one of his better known novels.  Nor was the next one I tackled, Mosquitoes, before moving to As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury.  I followed those with Spotted Horses, Old Man and The Bear before his once scandalous, Sanctuary. I also read his Collected Short Stories and Absalom, Absalom!.

I don't think you will find anything I wrote resembles any of these.

But that is the point. I have read a lot of different authors, some of them quite extensively, but not every writer, even among those one likes, influence one's own style. I have read a lot of Bellows, Fitzgerald, Arthur Hailey and Stephen King, for instance, and would not say any of them influenced my writing per se. Some might think Stephen King did since I had done so much in the Horror genre, but Stephen King came to prominence after I had long been writing such things.

That is another point to make. When some one enters the Arts, whether writing or painting or whatever, they tend to mimic artists that went before who they like. As one develops, other artists begin to be absorbed into one's style, but at some point the person breaks free of all these influences with a style of their own. Now that individual style may be an amalgamation of all those former influences, but it still comes out as something distinct. I stopped mimicking my most current favorite sometime in my mid-twenties, with one exception who I will get to later.

So who did influence me? Here is the list. I have broken it down into four time periods. Some authors overlapped through these periods, but I have grouped them by when they first began to make an impression upon me. I have also listed the particular works that drew my greatest interest, even though I read most of the authors work.

GRADE AND JR. HIGH SCHOOL

The first writer that really grabbed my attention was Edgar Allan Poe and the first work to do this was "The Gold Bug".  I think I was in Third Grade when I heard this story.  A couple years later we studied "The Tell-Tale Heart" in class. Wow, I thought that was great. I began pestering my mother and grandmother for books by Poe. My grandmother gave me a used ten-volume collection called The Works  of Edgar Allan Poe. The fifth volume was missing, but I was thrilled with the nine volumes she gave me. This had been published back in the 1800s. Volume One contained "A Memoir", "The Life of Poe" and "The Death of Poe" as well as three of his stories, including "The Gold Bug".

Volume Ten contained all of Poe's poetry and this was the start of my interest in writing verse. 

During these years one of my friends, I am not sure if it was Stuart or Ronald or someone else, introduced me to H. P. Lovecraft. The first collection of his stories I had was a paperback, Cry Horror!. I followed this up with Colour Out of Space and Dunwich Horror and Others. Some of my friends thought I was odd reading these books, not because of the subject matter, but because Lovecraft used "big" words and they found him hard to understand. I loved Lovecraft even though I could only read his stories in the daytime and even then I would get nervous and jump at shadows. 

My thesis in college, several years later, was a literary biography of Lovecraft, including an extensive bibliography of his work. This was another blown opportunity. The professor wanted to publish my thesis as a book, but I never followed up with him on getting it done. The title was Lurker on the Bookshelf: A Study of H. P. Lovecraft.

The other books I was gobbling up in those years were adventures. I read through Jack London's library in rapid succession: The Call of the Wild, White Fang, Collected Short Stories and The Sea Wolf.

I was a bit disappointed there was no four-legged wolf in The Sea Wolf, but I liked it anyway.

My other favorite was Robert Louis Stevenson. This went all the way back prior to any school. My grandmother used to read me his A Child's Garden of Verses when I was still a toddler. Perhaps poetry was ingrained in me at that time and Poe just pulled it out of me.

I was constantly taking Stevenson's books out of the library, Kidnapped, The Black Arrow, The Wrong Box. I even convinced the Librarian to allow me to borrow The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde despite this was in the adult section and my age was to keep me confined to the Children's Section. My favorite was Treasure Island, which I read four times.

In 1953 when I first declared I wanted to be a writer and wrote my first novel these influences came into play. IT! (which went through several titles over the years as well as shrinking from novel to short story to novella: "Quicksand Island", "Horror of It", "Island of Horror", "Dream of Horror" and finally just Dream.)

The original manuscript was a bricolage having elements of Poe, Treasure Island, Doc Savage and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Poe and Lovecraft continued to fascinate me throughout my Jr. High years. There was one new author I began to mimic in story plots at the end of those years. The first book I read was a collection of short stories called, The Jungle Kids. With that I was hooked on Evan Hunter and over the next several years read most of his early work, The Blackboard Jungle, Buddwing, A Matter of Conviction, Happy New Year, Herbie, A Horse's Head and The Paper Dragon. My personal favorite was Second Ending.

I read a number of his crime novels written as Ed McBain when I was in my twenties, but they didn't influence my own writing as his early novels and stories of juvenile crime had. Some of my stories showing Hunter's brand were "Crime", "Vandals" and "Moon Was Cloudy".

Hunter wrote under several other names, but I am not familiar with those works. When he died a couple years ago I was surprised to learn his real name had been Salvatore Albert Lombino.

SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL

A writer who had a great deal of influence on me in Sr. High School was Henry Gregor Felson.

I got my first Felsen novel through the Scholastic Book Club. We could order and buy paperback books through our school for a dime. The first was probably his most famous, Hot Rod. I just kept ordering Felsen books, Road Rocket, Street Rod, Crash Club, Rag Top. I wrote a poem based on Hot Rod. I even wrote a letter to Felsen, but he never answered it.

Two of my early novels reflect Felsen's influence upon me. These were Come Monday and Forty-Dollar Car.

Another author who captured my imagination at this time was Charles Beaumont. Beaumont was writing a number of the stories on the Twilight Zone TV show. Of all the fantasy, horror and sci-fi writers I was reading as a teenager, he somehow stood out about the rest for me. My favorites were The Hunger and other Stories, Yonder and Night Ride and other Journeys. I also had a nonfiction book by him, Remember? Remember?

Unfortunately, Charles Beaumont died at the age of only 38.

I was also a fan of O. Henry stories.  If you were to read a number of my stories you would easily see the kind of twisted endings that O. Henry was famous for as filtered through those of The Twilight Zone.

I was also writing a lot of humor as a teen. Much of this smacked of Stan Freeberg and those great radio comics, Bob and Ray. But there was one literary figure that I also admired, although I probably came to him more for his cartoons than anything else. Still, I thought James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times was a great book.

And somewhere in this period I read J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye several times. But it was his Nine Stories that send me off in a whole new direction in writing short stories.

LATE TEENS

I had been writing stories about rebellious teenagers, hot rods, crime and horror. But Nine Stories told me one could write about real life in a more subtle way. This was confirmed when one day I purchased a thin paperback of short stories called Pigeon Feathers. I could relate closely to the stories and early novels of John Updike. I knew his "Brewer" because I was familiar with the neighborhoods of Reading. He grew up in my backyard, only a few miles west in Shillington. I knew the environs of Rabbit, Run and The Poorhouse Fair. I quickly read The Same Door and Of the Farm. My favorite of his books is The Centaur. 


My own stories began to be about instances that had happened, based on people I knew, places I had lived. There was often more between the lines than in the text.

I have written before how I fell out of love with Updike with Couples.

I widened my reading. I explored people who wrote on more varied subjects in different styles and voices, especially short stories. I read the work of Carson McCullers, especially liking The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I read The Member of the Wedding, Clock Without Hands and Reflections in a Golden Eye. Ah, you could write about people who were different.

I went on binges; I read through George Orwell, 1984, Down and Out in Paris and London, Animal Farm and his Collected Essays.

Truman Capote: A Tree of Night, Other Voices, Other Rooms, The Grass Harp, Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood.

Then I turned into Sinclair Lewis. One day I read Arrowsmith and then I couldn't get enough of Sinclair Lewis.  I went through Main Street, Elmer Gantry, Babbitt and The Man From Main Street. I read several biographies of the man. My writing was beginning to look like his, I was turning to social topics. I read every book Sinclair Lewis wrote with the exception of three of his earliest novels because I could never find a copy of Our Mr. Wrenn, The Job or Free Air. I was in danger of becoming a pale imitator of Lewis.


Then the 'sixties happened.

TWENTIES

I had come a long way in a short time. In my teens I just wanted to be published anywhere. I didn't mind the idea of being a hack. I was content to be a pulp writer of horror or crime stories, but by the time I reached my twenties I saw there was a broad spectrum to writing and I didn't care as much about fame as trying to write things that had some meaning. I had a wide stable of writers I was following and learning from.

James Baldwin, especially Another Country, Going to Meet the Man, and Go Tell it on the Mountain, Blues for Mister Charlie and all those essays, The Fire Next Time, Nobody Knows My Name.

Trying to wend my way through James Joyce, I really liked Dubliners, I even took some titles from his work, such as for my story "Pome Penyeach". I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and its prototype, Stephen Hero. Plowed into Ulysses, but bogged down in Finnigan's Wake.

There was the existentialism of Albert Camus in The Plague and The Stranger. I even read his Notebooks.

Andre Gide's The Immoralist. Katherine Ann Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Ship of Fools and Flowering Judas and other Stories.

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

There were the wonderful novels and stories by Bernard Malamud. The first book I read by him was The Fixer. Well, that fixed me all right. I went on to The Assistant, The Natural, Idiots First, The Magic Barrel, The Tenants, Picture of Fidelman and Rembrandt's Hat.

Counterbalancing perhaps the gentler and more delicate style of Malamud was the more in your face hard edge idealism of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged and Anthan.

And then the smell of the earth and the sweat of those who work it and struggle to make ends meet in the books of John Steinbeck. The first novel of his I read was To a God Unknown. My favorite was In Dubious Battle, but I've read most of his work from The Grapes of Wrath to Travels With Charlie, with stops on a Wayward Bus slumping through The Winter of Our Discontent with stopovers at Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat.

And then finally I came to the writer who taught me perhaps more about writing than all the others, Ernest Hemingway. I started with In Our Time. My favorite may be The Sun Also Rises, but I've read most of his work and enjoyed it. The Old Man and The Sea to the strange The Garden of Eden. Hemingway taught me brevity and discipline of words, and that often it was more important what you didn't say as what you did. I think the old bromine of "show don't tell" came clearest to me through the short stories of Hemingway.

Anyway, these were the writers who became my guides to the practice as a boy and young man. Along the way I sometimes morphed into one or the other of them until finally I found my own voice and muse and became independent from them, though indebted to them. Certainly I don't compare myself favorably to any of these great and gifted scribes, but I did become true to my own vision and write what I see as true and honest.

In my later years one more writer pushed into my psyche and altered some of what I wrote, allowing me to ingrain more ethnicity and dialect into my tales of life back when in an older Decket County. This was  Annie Proulx and especially her Wyoming stories in Open Range and Bad Dirt.  her influence can probably be seen in "Ground Dog Day" and "Along the Winding Way".

From the comic seen as the first picture on this page of my character Frantic Frank about to step on a stage to expound on Musick to some one who can write seriously, without ever eschewing humor and humanity. I hope that is me.