The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (61 page)

* You can explore these radio shows by ? HYPERLINK “http://www.trevanian.com/radio/radio.htm” ?clicking here?

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19. '...give the nickel to me' (p. 131)

The nickel was the standard unit of wealth for kids during the Depression: a real nickel, with an Indian on the face and a buffalo on the reverse. Back when a penny would send a postcard anywhere in the United States and a local telephone call cost a nickel (Hence, the wise-guy practice of snatching up a phone and saying, “It's your nickel, pal.”), the usual tip a kid got for doing an errand was a nickel, which was what a bottle of pop (or soda, or tonic, depending on your part of the country) cost, as did any large candy bar, a comic book, a jam cruller, or a box of Cracker Jack (universally pronounced with a non-existent 's' on Jack). Cracker Jack not only offered a toy with its caramelized popcorn and peanuts but it was my first dizzying encounter with the concept of infinity... in this case, with the infinitely small, because on the box there was a little boy in a sailor suit who held in his hand a box of Cracker Jack, on which there must be a boy holding a box of Cracker Jack, on which.... and my mind went skidding into infinity.

A single dip ice cream cone cost a nickel, and a double dip was a dime, but only an adult would be dumb enough to spend a dime on a double dip cone. Kids were cannier; if they had a dime for ice cream, they would buy two nickel cones, thus getting an extra cone to eat for free.

Through the addictive gimmickry of word processing, I have discovered that the word 'nickel' appears fifty-two times in this book... evidence of the coin's erstwhile role as a kid's basic unit of wealth.

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20. '...flint against steel' (p. 138)

Random thoughts about words:

The capacity of nouns or verbs, either as sounds or as letter arrangements in print, to transport things and actions from page to mind or from one mind to another is a wondrous thing; but nouns and verbs are petty parlor tricks compared to the preposition, that subtle indicator of relationships between and among words, simple relationships of space or time, as in 'behind' or 'after, and the more abstract and sophisticated relationships involved in 'of' or 'through'. Children just learning to speak use no prepositions because prepositions occupy an altogether higher plane of abstraction than do nouns and verbs.

Adjectives and adverbs can be addictive and dangerous; dangerous because teachers often praise and reward novelty and originality when what is needed is precision and economy, and addictive because the use of modifiers can become the lazy writer's crutch. The use of three or four modifiers to warp a weak word towards the intended meaning almost always signals that the writer didn't choose the best word in the first place. A small building intended for individual family residence is probably a 'house'; and a person who walks haltingly, painfully, jerkily is probably 'limping'.

A quality in words that particularly enthralled me was what I eventually came to call 'affective onomatopoeia'. Beyond onomatopoeia's simple echoing of the sounds things make, like 'splash', or 'growl', or 'crunch'; there are words the sounds of which evoke the basic character of the reality for which they stand: like 'quick', which starts and ends with a sharply cracking k and has a short i in the middle, or 'slow', with its chubby ou diphthong after a mushy sl, or 'ugly', with its repulsed 'ugh!', or 'blowsy', in the very saying of which your cheeks and tongue become slack and untidy. It is hard to imagine a swifter word than 'swift', or a more lugubrious one than 'lugubrious'. Despite the example of 'lugubrious', English's affective onomatopoeia resides largely in its Anglo Saxon roots. Relatively few of our Latin-Norman words possess this ancillary quality of reinforcing tonality that I call affective onomatopoeia.

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21. '...but you forgot just one thing...' (p. 164)

We were sitting in our front room, listening to our radio in the dark, that October night in 1938 when the Orson Welles' Mercury Players presented their adaptation of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds* which they did in a novel 'live newscast' format, cutting in on a program of dance music to say they were interrupting this broadcast to announce that persistant rumors from New Jersey claimed that the world was under attack from Mars. A handful of people, who had tuned in late and therefore missed the opening declaration that the program was fiction, mistakenly thought they were listening to a real newscast of an invasion from Mars. (Some wag from New York City later said this misinterpretation was given credence by the fact that you'd have to be from Mars to imagine there was anything worth conquering in New Jersey.) Mr Welles (whose voice all kids recognized as the new Lamont Cranston, the Shadow, so no child could have been fooled) immediately saw a splendid opportunity for national publicity to help lift the slumping popularity of his Mercury Theater of the Air. The next morning he gave a news conference in which, his hair tousled as though from a sleepless night of worry, his face haggard with concern, he begged the press to believe that he had '...never intended to cause the wild panic that swept the entire eastern seaboard', and thus he cleverly fed the reporters their headline and lead-in. It was a slack news period, so dozens of newspapers quoted almost verbatim Mr Welles' colorful description of the havoc his broadcast had inadvertently wrought. In fact, relatively few people had been tuned to the Mercury Theater because it was opposite America's most popular program of the era, “Charley McCarthy and Edgar Bergen”, which my family never listened to because... well, a ventriloquist on the radio? Come on!

The War of the Worlds broadcast had announced—both at the beginning and at the end—that it was a fiction, but Mr Welles' public relations acumen still managed to give birth to one the most tenacious factoids in the folk history of the 'Thirties. As with most self-generating, self-validating urban myths, the propagators of Men From Mars Panic Myth always claimed that a personal friend or close relative had witnessed the event... in this case, was one of those who had packed his wife and kids into the Model A and had rushed off in frenzied hysteria to escape into the hinterlands of New Jersey. You never met anyone who actually experienced this mass exodus at first hand, but as the tale passed from telling to telling, so did the teller's 'friend' or 'close relative', so no matter how often the factoid was repeated or how far from truth the accumulating embellishments carried it, it remained as unimpeachable as its the teller's relatives, and this eye-witness reportage gave it the weight of fact.

Many years later, I was working with the director/producer of Ed Murrow's ground-breaking television interview program, Person to Person, and over dinner he mentioned that as a young production assistant he had worked on the famous Welles/Wells broadcast and had sat in on the ensuing press conference that Orson Welles had so deftly manipulated as to create 'history' out of whole cloth. I expressed my admiration of Welles' quick thinking, and he agreed, but he said that, in fact, Welles' reaction hadn't been totally off the cuff. During a break in the final rehearsal of the program, someone had suggested that some of the audience might mistake the show for a real news broadcast. Young Welles chuckled and said, “Good. We could use a little publicity!” (As indeed they could. Recall that Welles had recently taken the role of the Shadow... not a thing a successful actor/producer/director would do.)

Because Mr Welles' melodramatic description of events his story was swallowed whole by dozens of representatives of the news-hungry press, the urban myth that the Men-from-Mars broadcast caused mass panic almost immediately developed the armor of verisimilitude that comes from seeming to have many sources, the various newspapers serving to verify one another. And to top things off, avid reporters managed to track down two or three of the pigeons who had actually panicked and fled, so there were a couple of days of follow-up interviews. Meanwhile, on the strength of this one episode, Mr Welles was able to go to Hollywood to make Citizen Kane.

Over the years, Mr Welles himself added to these mythogenic streams. When, in his later career, he was reduced to giving lectures and appearing on late night talk shows, doing hand magic and heavy-handed take-offs on himself, he often found an eager audience for his rambling tales of past glory... including the time he managed to frighten 'half the eastern seaboard'. To this day, there are historians of the media who believe that half of the eastern seaboard was running wildly around in an effort to escape while the other half was cowering in their basements, crazed with fear of green-eyed monsters. Barnum was wrong when he said 'there's one born every minute'. There are thousands.

* You can explore the media mania induced by this broadcast here ? HYPERLINK “http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s/RADIO/WOTW/frames.html” ?http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s/RADIO/WOTW/frames.html?

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22. '...never to be seen again.' (p. 174)

Time is not a constant. There are infinitely long minutes of embarrassment and brief minutes of praise; good years fly by, bad ones crawl. When I think back to my childhood on North Pearl Street I realize that the days were so crowded with incidents and sensations: games, worries, work, chores, new books, new ideas, that the weeks rushed by with never enough time for all I wanted to do. But if the days and weeks of my youth were short, the years seemed interminable. A year. A whole year! A massive chunk of frozen time that melted with glacial slowness. When I paused in my reading and looked back a year, I could hardly imagine that I had once believed that or hadn't yet learned this. And if something was to happen a year in the future, it might as just well have be in the year 2000, or some other weird-sounding Flash Gordon date. A year! Time beyond the ability of a kid to envision, much less to wait for.

But now that I am old, the flux of time has reversed. Now it is the days that are long, and the years short. Viscous ninety-minute hours of survival routine crawl by, while the years flash past so quickly that something I think occurred last year or the year before turns out to have happened ten years ago. One morning you're sixty and you think that maybe you'd better start doing those things you'd always meant to do, then you wake up the next morning to find that you're seventy and it's too late. I suppose a stoic would set the short days and long years of youth against the long days and short years of old age and say that it all balances out in the long run... a stoic with a Jesuitical twist of mind, that is.

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23. '...never fully understand' (p. 174)

When I came across the notion of the Big Bang I dropped it to this last group, but still the concept itched at the back of my mind. I couldn't help wondering: what was it that went bang? I didn't worry about when it went bang or where, because those questions were answered in the definition of Big Bang. (Well, not so much answered as made redundant because time and space were one, so where was when). But I did wonder what went bang, and how. (A philosopher would have wondered why.)

Over the years I followed the fads and fisticuffs of competing cosmological theories. An interesting avenue of hypothesis was opened when String Theory of the state of matter arrived to provide a more flexible way to conceive of matter and dimension than as discrete atomic bundles distributed in space and time. Strugglers at the edge of comprehension suggested that the 'strings' were flattened out into pulsating membranes of infinite variety and that they existed in ten dimensions. Finally (but, of course nothing is really final) M-Theory provided us with an eleventh dimension that accounted for the remarkable weakness of gravitational force and offered us the image of an infinite number of parallel universes produced by the intrusion of one membrane upon its neighbor, which explained 'what went bang' by pushing the dawn of matter and energy back to before our universe's Big Bang, which could have been but one in an infinite number of succeeding universes, each with its own big bang.

But still the questions linger... whence the membrane; and when the intrusion? Prime Cause falls back a couple of infinities, but remains intact and elusive.

I recently encountered another sur-logical phenomenon that I shall never fully understand. But this one is more human and personal, therefore more fun. It is an intriguing system of personal analysis designed to reveal elements of one's character and potential, and also to evaluate the likelihood of successful relationships with other people. It is called 'The Theory of Eight'.

In that its analyses and insights begin with the time and place of one's birth, 'The Theory of Eight' resembles astrology, and I was therefore prepared to dismiss it. But an old friend (and a lifelong debunker of the supernatural) described the insights offered by this Theory of Eight as '...rich, subtle, and uncannily accurate'. My friend went on to claim that the TO8 (she had already developed this chummy nickname) answered the two most vital questions in anyone's life:

What should I do next? And with whom?

Chary though I am of all things extra-logical, my curiosity was piqued by her enthusiasm, so I looked in on the TO8 website (? HYPERLINK “http://www.theoryofeight.com/” ?www.theoryofeight.com?) and I provided it with my birth date and place. The results were intriguing so, by way of a challenge, I posed an idle question about my life. What I discovered about myself was astonishingly, even uncomfortably accurate, although the tone in which the information was supplied was warm and compassionate, with a glow of humor. I had the feeling that someone had private access to my soul. Indeed, so accurate and insightful was it that I decided not to seek similar information about those close to me. I'd rather not know.