Short Circuits (19 page)

My parents came down for the play the closing night, and I told David that I wanted to be sure he met them, though he was less than thrilled by the prospect. Just before curtain, one of the girls who had been up for the “weekend from hell” came in to the dressing room to report that she'd looked out into the audience and that my parents were there. “Your dad must really be mellowing,” she said. “He's not wearing black.”

After the show there was a cast party to which friends and family were invited, and of course I'd asked my parents. Dad was, by pure coincidence, wearing a dark grey suit. I'd told him of the story we had given David, and the first chance I got, I went to bring David over to meet him. Poor David had been totally traumatized by this point and didn't know what to expect, but he reluctantly came along.

“David,” I began, “This is my father…” at which point my dad, poker faced, raised his hand in benediction and said solemnly “Peace, David.”

It is one of my fondest memories of my college career.

I miss my dad.

* * *

HARRY MORRIS

I never knew Harry Morris as a person. He was, I understand, the first local soldier killed in WWI. But, from the third to the fifth grade, more than half a century ago, I attended the school named for him, and I still have strong memories of it and the students and teachers who were there when I was.

Dan Sable, a classmate with whom I reestablished contact after more than 50 years, recently visited Rockford and took some photos of the old building, no longer a school, though I forget what he said it was now. It looks pretty darned good for its age.

There were only 68 students in the entire school and, I believe, three teachers, though I only remember the two I had: Mrs. Larson, who bore a strong physical resemblance to Eleanor Roosevelt and was the most memorable teacher I ever had, and Mrs. Heinz, who should never have been allowed near a classroom. All I remember of Mrs. Heinz is her flaming red hair and temper to match, her obvious dislike of children, and the fact that if she ever lent you a pencil, you'd better be damned sure you returned it at the end of class.

I have a couple other photos showing the entire student body, and I still recognize many of them, though I'm less sure on the names. There's Dan and his cousin Marion Bender, with whom I also reestablished contact and met for lunch shortly after I moved back to Chicago. There's Lillian Anderson, and Jean and Jesse Almond, and Dennis Huffel, and Darwin Shores, with whom I had a running feud, and who Dan tells me is now dead—though that's impossible because he's right there in the third row.

I remember the long…probably about a mile…walks to and from school, past a dump where, on the way home, we'd stop and break bottles. I learned to ride a bike around the time I started third grade, but the bike my dad bought for me was really too big for me to reach the pedals comfortably. I was coming down the hill from school one day and couldn't stop as I approached the intersection at the bottom of the hill closest to home, and was hit by a car as I zipped across the street. No damage, but it scared the bejeezus out of me and my parents, and I largely walked to school thereafter.

I made my stage debut at Harry Morris, playing Raggedy Andy in some school production. My father's comment: “Did your voice have to be that high?” And my earliest writing was in the form of the periodically-written “newspaper,”
The Bugville News
, outlining the various disasters befalling the citizens of Bugville. A la Martin Luther, I would post the paper on the front door.

I remember the PTA mothers taking turns coming to the school during the winter to make us all hot soup…tomato and chicken noodle being my two favorites…and half-pints of milk (I always got chocolate), and going to the bathroom in the school's basement during recess and crying because no one wanted me on their team for some game we were playing.

As far as I can remember, I only skipped school once, during my time under Mrs. Heinz's regime. Several of us decided we'd stage a walk out…or rather a “not go in.” We played around somewhere most of the morning and then, around lunch, I went home to ask my mother if I could have some money to go to the movies. That was obviously not the wisest of decisions.

There are far more memories of my days at Harry Morris than I have the space here to relate, but they do go to demonstrate how many things lie just below the surface of our day-to-day consciousness, and how long they stay with us.

* * *

NORTHERN MEMORIES

And life goes on. Last week's aerial shots of the N.I.U. campus, ambulances clustered around a classroom building, had a surreal quality for me, trying to peer through the haze of fifty years and link what I was seeing on the TV to what I remember of Northern when I first enrolled there as a freshman in 1952. Oh, Lord, what a different world!

I'm sure I've talked about some of this in earlier blogs, but if you'll indulge me again: When I arrived at Northern in September of 1952, it was one of a group of State Teachers Colleges, and its name was, indeed, Northern Illinois State Teachers College. The total enrollment was around 2,500 if that. Women outnumbered men several-fold. I moved into the just-completed men's dormitory building, Gilbert Hall…which was so new they had not yet finished laying the sod for the spacious lawns in front of the building.

The campus very much resembled a park. In the center of a large pond in the middle of the campus was a small island on which graduations were held.

There were probably 10 buildings on campus: the brand new dorms, Gilbert Hall and Neptune Hall, Adams Hall, Glidden, the beautiful Sven Parson Library, the Science Building (both made of yellow limestone), the Administration building, and McMurray school in which student teachers got to practice what would become their life's work. Reavis Hall was built in the previously empty spaces west of the main campus while I was in service and opened when I returned.

Across the street to the north side of Gilbert Hall were half a dozen long army-barracks type buildings which housed married students and a few offices, including that of the
Northern Star
, the campus paper for which I wrote several articles movie reviews and, after returning from the Navy, had a weekly column.

The Administration Building, with its mediaeval tower which still serves as the campus “logo” contained offices, a few classrooms, the school auditorium and, in the floor of the entry, the school seal, which was, by tradition, never to be walked on.

There was also a small building just on the edge of campus closest to the town of DeKalb which served as the Student Union.

It was an insular world: small, warm, familiar, and comfortable, filled with friends and laughter and, most important of all, an innocence which, for the rest of the world and now for Northern, has been destroyed forever.

Today, there is a 14-story tower which houses the Student Union and a hotel for campus visitors.

The campus has spread out to the west into what was, when I was there, farmland. There's a stadium now and more buildings than I could count. The aerial shots of the campus, showing the Cole Hall, mainly focused on this new part of the campus, showing places that simply did not exist when I was a student. And on the part of the campus with which I was most familiar, the lawns are largely gone. New buildings stand cheek-to-jowl. I have no idea if the pond and the island are still there, but I might tend to doubt it.

Gilbert hall is now an office building, the rooms in which I and my friends lived and gathered and laughed and studied and dreamed are now cubicles for the campus bureaucracy.

It's odd to see Northern now. It's still my school, and I am part of its past. But I am not part of its present. And I know that those attending Northern now…more than ten times the number of when I enrolled…have their own friends, their own places to gather, to talk, to laugh, and, I hope, to build wonderful memories which will last them for the rest of their lives.

* * *

NOW PLAYING

Fairly recently I reestablished contact, after nearly 50 years, with a friend from my grade-school/cub-scout/college days, Ted Bacino. I have often said that the mark of a true friend is the ability, after not having been in contact for years, to effortlessly pick up where it left off. Such is the case with Ted, and I have him to thank for reopening long-closed doors of memory.

We've been, for the past couple of exchanges, talking about our home town, Rockford, Illinois, and what we remember of it in the 1940s?1950s. We got to talking of Rockford's movie theaters, and the nostalgia, for me, is almost palpable.

When we were growing up, Rockford was an industrial town of 90,000; the second largest machine-tool producer in the country, which was a source of civic pride. (Machine tools are the machines that make the parts for other machines.) We had ten movie theaters: The Coronado, Midway, Times, Palace, State, Rex, Capitol, and Rialto, with the post-WWII additions of the Auburn and, in the suburb of Loves Park, the Park. Both the Auburn and the Park were modified Quonset huts.

The Coronado was the city's flagship movie house in the Grand Dame lush tradition of Movie Palaces.

By far the largest of Rockford's theaters, it had a Moorish theme, with a grand, red-carpeted staircase sweeping up to the huge balcony. The walls of the auditorium were made to resemble a Moorish town, with small balconied building facades extending out above the seats. The ceiling was painted an evening-sky blue, with stars.

It and its closest rival, The Midway, showed nothing but the biggest, first run movies. The Coronado was on the west side of the Rock River, which cuts the city in half, and the Midway…which had elements of San Simeon in its exterior design…was on the east side, across from the city's largest hotel and tallest building, the 12-story Faust.

The Times, just a block south of the Coronado, had an art deco facade and, while probably only a third the size of the Coronado or Midway, was one of my favorites. It played the less-than-blockbuster first-runs and occasionally a second run of a popular film which had first played the Coronado or Midway.

We had a vaudeville theater, too: the aptly named Palace. I don't know what circuit it was on, but I've read and heard that Rockford was a really tough town to play and was noted in vaudeville circles for the audience “sitting on its hands.” (When I was growing up, Rockford was at least 75 percent Swedish, a nationality not known for its bubbly good humor.) The Palace had seen much better days by the time I came along, but still had vaudeville shows on weekends, between showings of not-quite-stellar films. Ted reminded me that they even had their own version of the Rockettes: the Palace Theater (pronounced “Thee-A-ter”) Adorables, and the orchestra was under the baton of Paul Walker. You could time it to go in in time for a vaudeville show, sit through the movie, then see another vaudeville.

The State, on the west bank of the Rock River and on State Street, Rockford's main drag, was actually two buildings. You entered the lobby, then went down a long hallway to the auditorium in the other building. The State was very popular with kids, since it showed lots of westerns, and on weekends featured cliff-hanger serials like “Sheena, the Jungle Princess” and Gene Autry adventures. One of the first times I was allowed to go to the movies by myself, my mom was furious with me when I sat through the film, short subject, newsreel, and cartoon twice without telling her in advance. Hey, I didn't know I was going to do it!

The other theaters were in a descending order of importance to me, and were largely undistinguished. I don't think I ever went to the Rex, which was far off the beaten path on the city's east side, and the Capitol and Rialto, on the west side south of downtown, were within a block of one another and had a reputation for being rather sleazy.

So, you see how a simple mention of just one movie house so many years ago opened up a floodgate of memories? Oh, yes, and next to the Times was a small Caramel-Corn shop. I can still smell it, and both my mouth and my mind water at the memory.

* * *

THE BITTERSWEET VIEW

Shortly after I started putting up a blog detailing, via letters to my parents, my adventures in the U.S. Navy from 1954 to 1956, I heard from Con Filardi, a former shipmate aboard the U.S.S.
Ticonderoga
(CVA-14), who I'd not known at the time. He'd stumbled across my blog, and we've since established a friendship we never could have had aboard the
Ti
because he was an officer and I a common seaman, a latter-day Icarus fallen from the skies of the Naval Aviation Cadet program.

While I have some great movies of some of my adventures, I didn't have a still camera and therefore don't have all that many still photos of my days aboard the
Ti
, which were, on reflection, among the most memorable of my life. Con, however, took a great many still shots, which he has been kind enough to share with me. He recently found many more in storage, and sent some to me, including the two accompanying this entry (the first photos I've ever attached to Dorien Grey and Me). I am deeply indebted to him. The instant I saw these two photos, I experienced an amazingly powerful bittersweet mixture of joy, anguish, loss, and longing impossible to put into words indescribable. It was as though some invisible hand had reached through my chest and grabbed my heart.

To know that the instant those photos were taken, I was
there
, somewhere on that ship—probably in the commissary office with Nick and Coutre and Chief Sewell—going about my business, utterly unaware that photos were being taken that I would be looking at 53 years later made me so acutely aware of wanting to be there, physically, again, a 22 year old kid. Foolish as it may be to hear, or even to say, I miss it so much it hurts.

Primitive tribes believe that a photograph captures the soul of a person being photographed, and that second of time in which it is taken, and holds it forever. The
Ti
is long and sadly gone, but at the instant shown here, she is alive and vibrant, and I am one of the 3,000 men living within her.