West Philadelphia

Adventures in Marketing: Week 49

Sold one copy of “The Schiz.”

The buyer was a 40-something UC employee. Something in computers.
He is a fan — and unpublished writer — of sci-fi, who had previously bought and, he now told me, been delighted by “Cheesesteak.” It was, he said, “Like a vanished time that will never come again. Did you see the movie ‘Blade Runner’? That was the future, and yours was the past, but, like it, you captured this entire world.”

I, of course, had never seen it that way. The West Philadelphia of “Cheesesteak” was — and is — pretty real and living to me. But I welcomed his enthusiasm.

“This new one,” I said, “is different.”

Adventures in Marketing: Week 28

I.
Sold three copies of “The Schiz” and one of “Cheesesteak.” The first went to two guys and a gal I knew at the French. The last went to someone I didn’t.

II.Tom?” she said.

She had me confused with an (even) more celebrated author who came there. He always wears a watch cap and I wore one that morning. She had wanted to compare knee replacements with him. (Hers had gone well; his hadn’t.) There, I couldn’t help her, but I could have done heart surgery.

Then she saw my cap said “West Philadelphia.” She had lived there in the ’60s, three blocks from my family, while her now ex- was in med school.

“Wanna buy a book?” I said.

II.
The big opportunity I missed was the 50th anniversary party we attended. Philadelphians past and present were there, but I had left my “Buy Bob’s Books” and my wares at home.

I was proud of the discretion I had shown but…

III.
I showed more initiative by placing both books in a store on consignment. One copy of each. 60/me;40/them split. They will display them 60 days and if any sell, take more.

So if you are in Pegasus on Solano Ave….

IV.
After much mulling I took the plunge on this outfit that promises to get your book reviewed. Think of us, they say, as your personal (cheap) publicist. They will pitch a personally-tailored-to-your-book promo to thousands.

I do not doubt they will find reviewers. One of these places even found me. (“Due to your interest in Cold War espionage…”) But do reviews by people you have never heard of sell books by authors you have never heard of?

I am not so sure.

Marketing: Week Six

I sold eight “Cheesesteaks, four to a friend who intended them as gifts, a “Fully Armed,” and a “Pirates/Mouse.” (The last reduced my stock-on-hand to a bare minimum, requiring me pick up a few more from Alibris, which I shall market as “Pre-owned.”)

Three sales went to two strangers buying from my website on the same day, which was itself notable since that about equaled my total web site sales in its years of existence. (I am, by the way, now Google’s third most popular Bob Levin, trailing the investigative journalist/ex-whistle blower/former FBI agent, and the Bob Levin, who is the head of something or other at some movie studio, but ahead of the Bob Levin who advises cat owners and the former Number One Bob Levin, the ex-Yale fullback who’d dated Meryl Streep.) One of my web site shoppers was a retired folklore professor and the other was a 24-year-old, Yugoslavian-born punk musician/cartoonist, which constitutes a pretty impressive demographic spread, if I do say so myself.

One non-purchaser recognized The Checkered Demon on my sign. Another said she’d taught at Swarthmore in the ’80s. One 84-year-old reader revealed that, as an aspiring Beatnik, hanging out in North Beach while attending Cal, he’d been at the first public reading of “Howl.” A poet, disappointed by his own sales record, complimented my originality and “balls,” A professor dropped into his remarks that “Annie Had a Baby” (p. 32) was a follow-up to “Work With Me, Annie.” (I was sure he had it backwards, but, nope, he knew his stuff.) I e-mailed an on line site devoted to current news of West Philadelphia, announcing my book’s availability. It ignored me. Oh well, I thought, probably no one lives there now who lived there when I did.

I decided to work on my attitude for when no one looks or talks or buys. I am not begging; I am offering a rich experience.

Hang Out

Okay, back to 1957, ’58, originally published as “Hanging Out in the ’50s” by the Broad Street Review on May 9, 2009. Got some good reactions, establishing my West Philaelphia street cred, as I recall.

Hang-Out
The hamburger came with grilled onions and cost 35 cents. French fries cost 15 cents and a coke a dime. Or you could pile into a booth with your friends for nothing. The juke box played “Poinciana” and “To the Aisle” and “Mr. Lee.” You could do that till curfew chased you home.
In the mid-1950s, West Philadelphia, from 63rd to 30th, from Market Street to Baltimore Avenue, became a “changing neighborhood.” Negroes moved in, and whites (mostly Jews) moved out. Since the changes first manifested on the perimeter, in 1957 Barson’s, on 60th Street, ceased to be the area’s main hang-out, and Dewey’s, on Spruce, below 48th, replaced it. I lived three blocks away and, at 15, was entering my hanging-out years.
Dewey’s had a counter, a double row of booths down its center, another row along its west wall. The core of the Dewey’s crowd was from West Philadelphia High School, a block to its north – mostly white kids – and mostly Jewish – like Buzzy Scolnick, the varsity quarterback, still best known for having enlivened a grade school trip to the zoo by lobbing cherry bombs at the crocodiles, and Steven Pomerantz, who already smoked individually wrapped Garcia Vegas and wore a full length vicuna coat and homburg, like his father the bookie, and stylish Sam Goodman, who had made black turtlenecks under blue buttondown shirts de rigeur in certain circles. These luminaries layered upon a contingent of older, even more worldly semi-criminals, like the Egan brothers, Biff and Bow Wow, who consorted with whores; and Cowboy Dineen, who had been thrown out of three schools I knew of despite the ability to hit a baseball over the Passon’s field fence; and Troy Something-or-Other, a swarthy, oily haired, rock-muscled guy, whose girlfriend was Carol Blitz, the prettiest girl in the senior class (Why, I wondered, would she be interested in him, when boys who were going to Penn to become orthopedic surgeons would have given 25 points off their College Boards to date her), and Donny Rumble, who drove a silver T-bird. That was all I knew about him Donny Rumble. Silver T-bird. What else was there? What could better that?
I did not drive. I had never spoken to a whore. I was happy to line a ball past shortstop. I was not exactly at Dewey’s red hot center. I was tall and skinny and wore glasses and shy and, even worse, when I was ten, my parents had transferred me from the public elementary school, where I was about to be taught by Jacqueline Susann’s mother, a ferocious woman with a bun of severely dyed black hair, known for disciplining pupils by having them copy pages from the dictionary, into Friends’ Central, a Quaker school across City Line Avenue. So I was a “private school kid” on top of everything else. I came to Dewey’s because some of my neighborhood friends, like Max Garden and Mickey Kipper, did. Max and Mickey’s own defects left them only a little closer to the center than me, but they had friends who were closer still, and this provided enough rideable coat tails that I could feel comfortable.
The thrill of hanging out at Dewey’s was primarily in the echoes of that “out.” “Out” meant away from the family. It meant away from the confining, conformist, predominant 1950s cultural attitude that scorned all non-grade-bettering, non-money-earning, devil-courting idleness. We might not actually be doing anything at Dewey’s, besides idling, of which the family or the culture disapproved; but at least we were giving ourselves the chance that we might. That counted for something, we believed. We knew nothing of interest was going to happen if we stayed in.
The devil might roll up in a silver T-bird. He might have a dishwater Nash. We just wanted to hear the purr of his exhaust when his motor revved.

The most exciting times at Dewey’s were when news arrived of a party. Someone would have heard from someone in Wynnefield or Oxford Circle or Lower Merion, and we would pile four or five into a car, chip in $2 for gas, and off we would go.
One Saturday evening, in the spring of 1958, word came of a party in Newtown Square. Newtown, ten miles to the southwest, was a long way to go for a party. It was also foreign and exotic terrain. All I knew of it or its inhabitants had come from the arrival at Friends’ Central the preceding fall of a graduate of its high school, Joe “Hondo” Wayne, a crew cut, six-foot-four, 220 pound, All-Delco tackle, whose need of additional education could nicely fill holes in our offensive and defensive lines. He was someone we sophomores regarded with awe – especially those amongst us who were 150 pound JV defensive ends. Who was hosting this party or how word of it had reached Dewey’s I did not know, but Mickey Kipper had his father’s Plymouth, and off we went. (Mickey and I were sufficiently off-center that no one else rushed to join our crew.)
It was a ranch house on a dead end street. Biff Egan and Buzzy Scolnick were drinking Ortlieb’s in the kitchen. Troy Something-or-Other, in a fish net t-shirt, was on the living room couch, his arm slung over a Barbara Steele lookalike in a pink V-neck and slit skirt. The record player was running “I Got a Woman” over and over, and Bow Wow Egan, an upended wastebasket between his knees, was pounding the beat on its bottom. The entire scene was bathed in red light. The cigarette smoke was as thick as mucous. Bedroom doors were clicking shut. I suddenly thought: No parents are home. I had never been at a party when no parents were home. I settled with that revelation into a conversation with Artie Gottlieb, a junior councilor at my summer camp just back from Paris Island, until it became clear he had more important things on his mind than describing the obstacle course to me.
I was staring at the refrigerator, wondering if you just took an Ortlieb’s from it, or if you had to ask someone’s permission, and, if you did, whom you asked, and, if they granted it, how you opened the Ortlieb’s without it spurting all over your Banlon shirt, when it fell upon me that the several cars that had pulled to squealing stops out front had dislodged several sets of running feet that were massing at the front door, and that several of those already in the house, like Biff and Bow Wow and Buzzy, were running toward this mass and that others, like Mickey Kipper, were retreating toward me. It occurred to me that a number of girls at the party were from Newtown and that a number of Newtown guys had arrived to register their objection.
“Vamanos,’ Mickey said.

Those who had remained behind returned to Dewey’s later, loud, laughing, slapping backs, a legion rotated to Rome after destroying the Goths. I hung on the edges of their conversations, hungry for details. I could not wait for Monday when I could report to classmates at Friends’ Central. I felt like I had hopped a time machine and glimpsed a dangerous future.
It was Wednesday that Hondo raised an arm to stop me on the stairs. “Heard you were at the Omega Drive party.”
“Yes,” I said, hoping he would not smite me to avenge a fallen comrades.
“You West Philly boys are tough.” His smile offered a suit – black leather, gold lame’, or three button worsted – into which I might yet grow.

Top Ten

Here’s the natural follow-up to my prior post. It appeared on-line originally in the November 2010 “First of the Month” and was reprinted in “Perspectives by Incongruity,” DeMott, ed., 2012.

At the conclusion of a dream that included my descending in an elevator with a hooker and leaping a barrier to catch a subway train, I found myself on a park bench taking out a notebook to describe my collection of .45 rpm records to which I have not listened in thirty-five years. When I awoke, it still seemed a good idea. I quote lyrics from memory. I record history from memory too. What are we, if not what we remember?
I acquired most of these records at Treegoob’s, 41st & Lancaster, situated, as its ads proclaimed, “in the heart of West Philadelphia.” Treegoob’s sold used .45s, culled from juke boxes when their plays diminished, for nineteen cents, which was seventy cents below the cost of new ones. The discount was an inducement, but the mile and one-half journey to the store from the safer, whiter shores of our homes, enriched the value of the discs exponentially for my friends and self. Its perceived risks turned our quest heroic and the black circles we retrieved golden rings to win a princess’s hand.
My prime shopping years were between 7th grade (1954-55) and 10th (1957-58). I am uncertain why I stopped, but I suspect the proliferation of Fabian and his ilk, coupled with the rise of Top 40 programming (or even Top 99, which Philly had for awhile), stripped rock of the outlaw edge which had hooked me. Plus, in 1958, my friends and I began turning sixteen, which meant we could drive. And borrowing a father’s car opened excitements to us beyond those available in our rooms with a stack of vinyl.
The records I list below are not necessarily my favorites – and certainly not the era’s Best or Most Significant. But they are those that elbowed to the front of the line once I had awakened.
1. “Annie Had a Baby.” The Midnighters. Federal. Annie couldn’t work “no more. Every time we start to working, she’s got to stop and walk the baby ‘cross the floor.” Uncharacteristically, I paid full price at a South Street shop that Max Garden led me to one day after Hebrew school. But I had to have it. It was not the bad grammar that led to its being banned from air play. The Dictionary of American Slang may not confirm it, but we knew the “working” going on. And the idea that you could sing about it electrified. “Annie” blew the collected works of Patti Page and Eddie Fisher from our minds forever.
2. “By the River.” Wilt Chamberlain. End. “…neath the shady tree.” Just the Dipper, his baby and he. They “kiss, hug, cuddle close…” Absolute pablum, I grant you, but here was Philadelphia’s greatest athlete sticking his toe onto our side of the revolution. Basketball and rock’n’roll – just what little inner city boys were made of.
3. “How Come My Dog Don’t Bark (When You Come ‘Round)?” Prince Patridge. Crest. “He bites the mailman, and he sees him every day, but when you come ‘round, he rolls over to play.” We liked the humor, the implications – and dogs. Plus what kind of name was “Prince” or, for that mater, “Patridge”? Where did he come from and where did he go? If he’d had a past or future, it was unknown to us. Greatness was forever existentially stamped transitory.
4. “Nite Owl.” Tony Allen. Specialty. Here he came, “walking through the front door,” and “Hoo, hoo, hoo” backed up The Champs, adding ornithological depth to the orchestration – or Dada-esq juxtaposition, depending on your point of view. But we all aspired to be what Allen claimed for himself. Out on the dark streets, boldly alone, unfettered by municipal curfew laws imposed to control our disappointingly tame delinquencies.
5. “Pledging My Love.” Johnny Ace. Duke. “Forever, my darling, my love will be true.” That silky, seductive voice. The promise of that eternally heated heart – set beside the chilling reality of Ace’s fate at the hands of Russian roulette. The hammer and the spinning chamber. The fickle, random universe at play. “What I want to know,” Georgie Woods, our favorite disc jockey inquired, “is did he win or lose?”
6. “Sixty Minute Man.” The Dominoes. Federal. “…fifteen minutes of teasing and fifteen minutes of squeezing and fifteen minutes of blowing my top.” Released before my time, but on a cross-country trip in 1963, Davey Peters and I stopped in a town in South Dakota because he wanted a pair of black jeans which, as I recall, he had seen James Dean wear, but which no place in Philly stocked; and in a five-and-ten I found a stash that contained this ribald classic. Maybe the last .45 I ever purchased. In the preceding few months I had acquired “My Favorite Things” and “Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” and was on my way to other things.
7. “Smokey Joe’s Café.” The Robins. Atco. “From behind the counter, I saw a man. Chef’s hat on his head and knife in his hand.” Early Leiber & Stoller (and wasn’t that really The Coasters, pseudonym-ed up for obscure contractual reasons?) An entire saga in under three minutes: a hint of sex; a threat of danger (we knew they had to be related); a bit of humor – served up over a plate of beans. Masterful.
8. “Speedo.” The Cadillacs. Josie. “Bum-bum-bum-bum-bop-bop- doodly…” His real name not “Joe” or “Moe” but “MISTER (emp. supp.) Earl,” and how cool was that? We knew no one named “Mister Bob” or “Mister Max.” Even our fathers weren’t “Mister Herb” or “Mister Sam.” When Stanley Kessler and I compared lists of Best Songs Ever at Camp Tacoma in 1957, I went heavy for super-charged do-wop like this and “Come Go With Me” and “Strange Love.” He out-sophisticated me with ballads: “Earth Angel,” “To the Aisle,” “Soldier Boy.” But it was to be expected. Stanley, the veteran of many more make-out parties, even claimed to have scored bare tit from Cookie Yosowitz (not her real name).
9. “W-P-L-J.” The 4 Deuces. Music City. “You shake it up fine. Get a good-good wine.” A tribute to the power of drink. More that the future promised but the present denied. And on the flip side (I kid you not), “Here Lies My Love” by Mr. Undertaker. Huh? What was that about? Was the universe trying to warn us about where such dissolution led? As if we didn’t have enough inhibitions snarling our progression.
10. “Zindy Lou.” The Chimes. Specialty. “…a girl that come from the hills and, oh hot dog (something about “thrills” or “chills” or even “I think that she will”). One of those girls we knew were out there and hoped to meet but wondered if we ever would. It didn’t help that her name, like Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline” or The Valentines’ “Lily Maybelle,” was one that had never been called in any of our home rooms. Nor that the number became a dance contest song in the early days of “ Bandstand,” co-mingling with another land of exotically named, beyond-our-reach damsels: Justine and Arlene and Big and Little Ro.
Honorable Mention. “Jam Up.” Tommy Ridgely. Atlantic. Georgie Woods opened each show on WHAT with it. When he switched to WDAS (or was it vice-versa), he didn’t, and when Max Garden called to ask why, he learned the station’s library lacked a copy. So Max borrowed my copy and brought it to Woods in order that tradition be preserved.
At least, I think that happened. Max is dead, so I can’t ask him. And Davey’s dead, so I can’t confirm that part about James Dean – or if it was South, not North Dakota. And Stanley’s dead, so I don’t know if he is sticking to his story about Cookie Yosowitz. My dream had summoned me to reflect upon my friends, cup our history in my hands, and craft it for my purposes. All pasts lie forgotten in closets and on shelves, crumbling to pieces, some of which may be salvaged and refashioned to construct a present and, hopefully, influence a future.

Rock’n’Roll

This originally appeared, entitled “The Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” on-line in THE BROAD STREET REVIEW of Sept. 1, 2009. Because of the REVIEW’s proscription against using pseudonyms and my refusal to abide by it, I did not identify my fellow seekers by name. But they were Max Garden, Davey Peters, Mickey Kipper, and, maybe, Fletcher Sparrow.
So…

I bought my first record when I was twelve: Little Walter’s “My Babe.” The film Cadillac Records reveals him as scotch-soaked, pistol-packing, tragedy-fated. But if I thought of him at all, it was as a tiny guy with the same name as my cousin. No cult of personality compelled the release of my eighty-nine cents. It was entirely the edgy, haunted voice, the scratchy, lilting beat – the sound alone stirring my placid blood. I had no “babe.” I had not transgressed my way into “cheating” – let alone any “midnight creeping” – but I divined a summons onto tempting ground.
Rock’n’roll/rhythm and blues began slipping into my life and those of my friends, drip-by-drip, during seventh grade (1954-55). Songs were popping onto our car radios, like “Sh-Boom” (The Crewcuts neutered version, not The Chords original) or “Ling-Ting-Tong,” causing our fathers to push the buttons to re-establish the priorities of Kitty Kallen and Eddie Fisher. From the play list of “Bob and Sherry,” who tutored us in the rudiments of box step and jitterbug and mambo in the lower floor of Beth Zion synagogue, we could hear, besides “Hey There” and “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll” (Bill Haley, not Big Joe Turner) and “Earth Angel” (Gloria Mann, not The Penguins). I don’t recall who tipped me to WHAT and WDAS and the raw authenticity at the far end of the radio’s dial, but soon I was fighting my father for the car’s buttons, and in my room all I listened to was Kay Williams and Mitch Thomas and, best of all, Jocko (“EEE-tiddleee-yock, this is the Jock”) Henderson and Georgie Woods, “The Man With the Goods,” ringing his cow bell and declaring everything to be “cool, calm and copacetic.” For my bar mitzvah, I requested my own .45 player, handsome plastic, pink and black.

In a recent Wired, J.J. Abrams lamented the loss of the need to leave one’s home in order to buy music – of having to “brave the weather, bump into strangers… (and) earn” it. Well, my friends and I earned the records stacked upon the spindles of our machines.
Treegoob’s, our primary source of supply, was at 41st and Lancaster, which was, in Georgie Woods’s terms, “in the heart of West Philadelphia.” Joseph Conrad could not have put it better. For in those days, Market Street drew a racial divide through our portion of West Philly, whites to the south, blacks to the north; and, from my house, once you crossed the shadow of the el, Treegoob’s still lay one scary mile away.
But every few months, on a Saturday morning, two or three of us made the journey. We did not ride bikes; bikes too strongly tempted brigands. We did not ask our parents for rides. (For out purposes, we probably would have preferred encountering brigands to begging rides from parents.) Across Market Street stretched a vacant block, where weeds sprouted and cabbage moths flitted among the husk of an abandoned Chevrolet. Beyond it lay home-based churches, whose Sunday sermon titles were misspelled in chalk on slate, and storefront emporiums offering sinks and toilets from their pavement or displaying fish we had not heard of from seas we would never troll.
We kept our gaze straight ahead. We challenged no stranger’s stare – and most certainly did not “bump” any of them. In truth, interracial violence, though present, was not extreme in our corner of the world. One boy I knew had been socked in the jaw when he refused to hand over an orange sweater. My brother had been forced to surrender his Halloween candy to a trio of older girls. And once word had reached Lea School that the Black Bottoms, a gang from Sulzberger Jr. High, intended to wreak havoc upon us for some outrage no one could identify. Seventh and eighth graders slid pen knives into their lunch boxes and pool cue butts down their pants legs; older male relations patrolled the perimeter. No auslanders appeared, but, following that threat, the term shvartzes had come into common usage among my peers. Still, in all our treks, over two or three years, the worst inflicted upon us were some muttered oaths and thrown stones.
Treegoob’s primarily sold appliances. But even its EZ Credit terms did not lure us toward console TVs and toaster ovens. We bee-lined for the record department. Overhead, from Riverside and Blue Note covers, Horace Silver and Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk appraised us with indifference. But they were gods in a world more than our allowances kept us from entering. Our goal was the three trays stacked with hundreds of more accessible .45s, culled from juke boxes because their plays had slackened and offered for nineteen cents apiece – the best price in the known world. We fell upon them like harpies at Phineas’s table, fingering rapidly, front to back, in pursuit of the wildly admired, the thoroughly desirable, the trophies which would rain envy upon us. Those searches yielded me “Annie Had a Baby” and “Speedo,” “Smokey Joe’s Café” and “Zindy Lou,” “How Come My Dog Don’t Bark” and “WPLJ,” “I Hear You Knocking’” and “Pledging My Love.”
It was not everything I wanted, but it was a lot.

We were aware that this exercise of our discretionary spending placed us on one side of a cultural divide. We recognized that our position was not championed by any authoritative adult. We understood that ours was a tolerated taste we were expected to outgrow. But each week we checked the Top Ten list at our neighborhood record store and tuned in radio’s Make Believe Ballroom and TV’s Your Hit Parade seeking our favorites vindication. We buzzed with excitement when “Maybelline” surfaced in the line-up locally. But it crept no higher than number nine.
Then, in July 1955, “Rock Around the Clock” became the best-selling song in America. To appreciate the magnitude of this achievement, recognize that, for the previous nine weeks, the bearer of the crown had been “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” – and “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” had reigned the five before that. (Recognize too that it would be another seven months before a record with origins in the black market, “The Great Pretender,” captured the title.)
We knew that we were on the winning side of a revolution. In fact, our suspicions hardened that all our revolutions – even those we had not identified – even those where sides had not been dawn – were ones that we would win.

Movies

This one appeared at The Broad Street Review on October 29, 2009. I had called it, unimaginitely, “Movies.” It called it “’50s Films that Stoked the ’60s.” It’s your call.

In the mid nineteen-fifties, when I was growing up in West Philadelphia, there were six movie theaters withing walking distance of my house. The Byrd, on Baltimore Avenue. The Commodore, on Walnut. And the Locust, Nixon, Rivoli, and State on 52nd Street.
The Rivoli seemed to show nothing but black-and-white films no ten-to-twelve year old would consider: “Niagara,” “The Picture of Dorian Grey.” The Byrd was good for catching up on Francis the Talking Mule or Ma and Pa Kettle. The Locust played sophisticated fare – also of no interest – like “Mr Hulot’s Holiday” or the odd British import. The Commodore was where, during the opening of “It Came From Outer Space,” when the meteor shower rockets in 3-D toward earth, a new boy in the neighborhood, who had seen it before, earned his spurs by flinging a handful of pebbles into the air and setting everyone screaming. The Nixon featured cinematic excellence in the form of “Four Guns to the Border’ and “Riot in Cell Block 11,” and the State had the best Saturday matinee. Admission was fifteen cents. Candy bars were a nickle and a bag of popcorn a dime. You got, maybe, a Joe Penner short, three cartoons, a chapter in a Don Winslow or Dick Tracy serial, and a double feature (“The Crimson Pirate,” “Go For Broke”). Sometimes there were filmed races between funny men in cars or on bikes; and if your ticket stub had the winner’s number, you won a box of jujubes. During yo-yo season, you could come on stage to perform tricks and, even if you lost first round, receive a coupon for an ice cream sandwich.
Once you had attained a certain degree of maturity and wisdom – in my house this occurred between the ages of ten and eleven – you were permitted to take the 42 trolley (later bus) downtown, where another near dozen, mostly first run movies played. The Mastbaurm, Fox, Trans-Lux, Goldman (or was it Goldwyn?)… I forget the rest. Unable to wait for their general release, it was here that my friends and I pinned “House of Wax” and “Rear Window” and “Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Admission cost more and bought fewer extras than in the ‘hood, but Center City offered other treats. Penny arcades filled with pinball machines. Army/navy stores loaded with the surplus of recent wars. Mustard pretzel carts and Horn & Hardarts automats. Book stores, where we peaked at nudist magazines, until the owners threw us out. Downtown took us a lot further from our parents than 52nd Street.
We did not go to movies for cathartic soul cleansing or philosophical challenge or the appreciation of montage and mise en scene. If we saw a comedy, we wanted to laugh. If we saw a western or war movie, we wanted excitement. But we could not help being schooled. We learned patriotism and foreign policy from John Wayne. We were instructed that the FBI would protect us from everything from Communists (“Walk East on Beacon”) to giant ants (“Them”). We understood that while it might be fun to ogle Marilyn Monroe, we really ought to settle down with someone perky and wholesome and steadfast like June Allyson. (I can’t tell you how shocked I was to learn, even fifty years later, that she had been two-timing Dick Powell with, of all people, Dean Martin.) And we knew to a certainty that evil-doers would be punished.
It went down as easily as vanilla.

Then, on December 30, 1953, a year in which I had rushed to see “Peter Pan,” a movie opened in New York City that would shake the world. I do not recall when or in what theater, I first saw “The Wild One,” but within the, oh, twelve months that I did – a year that also saw me imbibe “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Blackboard Jungle” – the experience, interacting with the hormonal additives by which age had seasoned me, so altered my viewing tastes that I was now plunking down my allowance for admission to “I am a Camera” (at, of all places, the Locust), “Man With the Golden Arm,” “Baby Doll,” “And God Created Woman.”
I doubt market researchers had fingered pre- (or even post-) bar mitzvah Jewish boys as “Wild One” material. Though commentators would link the film to “disaffected youth” and “juvenile delinquency,” Marlon Brando was nearly thirty when he made it; so was Lee Marvin; and Mary Murphy was twenty-three. (“Rebel,” with James Dean at twenty-three, Sal Mineo at fifteen, and Natalie Wood sixteen – though looking older than Murphy – was a closer demographic fit.) It did not bind to us with matching cultural adhesives either. The music on Bleeker’s juke box, to which the gang parties, was an assortment of anonymous instrumentals styled to rouse the temperatures of earlier generations. (“Jungle,” however, blazed with the embedment of “Rock Around the Clock” over its opening credits, a clarion hit of relevancy overshadowing the fact that when the students smash Richard Kiley’s records, they call for Frank Sinatra and Joni James, not Chuck Berry or Laverne Baker.) And motorcycles – motorcycles were about as forbidden to us as swastika tattoos or Gentile girl friends. But for the next decade and a half, when I would strike up a lasting friendship with a boy from Philadelphia or Boston or New York, one point of commonality on our resumes – not always, but often – was repeated viewing of this film, three times, six, a dozen.
It came down to Brando’s Johnny Strabler. He was revelatory: tough; sensitive; tender; cruel; leader of the Black Rebels but always apart; cat nip to the ladies but utterly contemptuous of squares. We were already receiving instructions about the evils of the establishment, the costs of conformity and the dangers of repression from “MAD” and Bob and Ray and Jean Shephard and other resisters of the Eisenhower ‘50s, which, a decade later, would help us establish the parameters of an actual counter-culture; and here was Brando, three years before Jack Kerouac, laying down the ecstasy of the road and the end-all and be-all of “Go.” His lines “I don’t like cops,” “Nobody tells me what to do,” and, most famously, in answer to Peggy Maley’s “Hey, Johnny, what’re you rebelling against?” “What’ve you got?” were catechistic and as valuable to us as Machiavelli’s instructions to the prince. We were assessing, building, equipping ourselves for our own futures with the salvageable and useful, whether we were to eventually to lodge as doctors or lawyers or something even further off the expected grid than tribal chief.
None – well damned few – of us would follow Johnny into the nihilistic pit where Stanley Kramer left him, no family, no job, no girl, not even the stolen runner’s up trophy from a race he had not run. Fortunately, we also had Dean’s searching, struggling, wrenching Jim Stark to draw from. In “Rebel,” it is Corey Allen’s – born, by the way, Alan Cohen – Buzz Gunderson who flaunts the “Wild One” ethic. “Why do we do this?” Jim asks before they race their stolen cars toward a fiery doom. “You’ve got to do something,” Buzz answers. That proves insufficient. “I want to do something right,” Jim tells his parents later. A boy has been killed, and they must not pretend it didn’t happen. “We are,” he says, “all involved.”
That sense of involvement, that wish for proper action would also surface. But first, I needed to get my hands on a motorcycle jacket, hoping its black leather and silver zippered pockets would offset my acne and horned rims.

Puddles

This is an expanded version of a piece that appeared on-line at The Broad Street Review, October 4, 2009, misguidedly titled “For the Love of a Dog,” the second of what became an initially unplanned series about growing up in the 1950s.

Until I was three, we lived with my father’s parents in South Philadelphia, at 10th and Baimbridge. My grandfather’s parents had arrived in South Jersey, with a group of Jewish emigres from Russia, for whom the Belgian-born Baron Maurice Hirsch had acquired land to farm in accordance with Socialist principles, though none of the Jews had ever owned land or farmed. My grandfather ran away as a teenager and worked as a machinist, up and down the east coast. (What he thought of the baron’s principles may be divined from his naming his first born, my father, Herbert Spencer Levin.) When my grandfather returned to South Jersey, he married the first girl in the community to have graduated high school.
She had plans for my grandfather and encouraged – some would say forced – him to become a doctor. This was not as difficult as it sounded since, in those days, there were medical schools which advertised on the equivalent of matchbook covers. My grandfather succeeded and established his offices on the first floor of his house. (I remember only its cabinets, whose shelves were enclosed behind glass doors, which folded upwards and which we inherited and two algae-choked fish tanks which returned, occupied often by mutant albino creatures, in my dreams for decades.) His patients, usually first generation Jews, Italians, and Negroes up from the South, whose ranks included Moms Mabley and Peg Leg Bates, paid him in cash or backyard produce or homemade wine. He was also, I learned much later, a drinker, a philanderer, abusive to his wife and children. But I was his first grandchild, and had favored nation status.
My grandfather always had dogs, usually chows or huskies or a mix, and usually mean. (My father spoke with rare respect and awe of Ming, a black chow from before my time, who, if his basic disposition was any indication, had been named for the villain in “Flash Gordon,” not the dynasty.) I grew up among such beasts. My favorite childhood picture is of me in a box, peering over the edge, surrounded by several drooling pups. I was completely at ease with dogs. I petted every one I met on the street or in Rittenhouse Square. And I loved stories about dogs. Dogs who rescued owners from fires and floods. Who fought off wolves and cougars and bears. Who, stolen or lost or cruelly sold, found their way across vast wildernesses to where they belonged.

After my sister Susie was born, we moved into a row house in West Philadelphia, on 46th Street, off Pine. (My grandmother, I also later learned, was to come with us, but she died shortly before the move took place.) When my Uncle Manny came home from World War II, he lived with us. So for a while did my Aunt Esther and Uncle Bernie and their baby daughter Elizabeth. My brother Larry arrived a year after that. One of my earliest correctives to my erroneous thinkings occurred in our first years on 46th Street. Because Susie was blonde, I had reasoned that was what distinguished boys from girls. No one had bothered to correct, but then I met a five-or-six-year-old boy who lived across the street, a Quaker, who was even blonder, so I had to reconsider the issue.
One day, I’m unsure when, my grandfather arrived unexpectedly and announced he had a present for me in his overcoat pocket. I pulled out a squirming, yipping ball of fur. Uncle Bernie, reacting to one of the puppy’s primary proclivities, named it Puddles. Puddles grew into a handsome dog. He had a barrel chest, a thick reddish brown coat, with a white ruff and white paws. He was intelligent, loyal, trustworthy, reverent, clean (within limits), obedient (ditto), and, I am sure, had we only been able to recognize it, as witty as Oscar Wilde. I certainly found him a more valuable addition to the household than my sister or cousin or brother. Then my grandfather arrived to borrow him. (This was not discussed with me at the time either, but Puddles had become old enough to breed.) He put him in his car and off they rode. But when my grandfather opened the door on 10th Street, Puddles, recalling who knows what traumas of his youth, or what confidences his mother may have shared with him, bolted.
There were no tracers-of-lost-dogs then. No one festooned fences with flyers or organized phone banks of inquiry. My parents, exercising the proper standard of care, alerted the pound. My grandfather was remorseful, and I was bereft. “He has tags,” my parents said. “Someone may call.” But when the phone rang, it was only Mrs. Kipper or Mrs. Hartz to discuss ORT with my mother. Then, several days later, the sun not yet risen, Uncle Bernie, readying for work, heard a scratching at the door. A somewhat thinner, somewhat bloodied Puddles, relying on some blend of instinct and intuition and the knowledge gained in his one journey to our house as a six-week old and from it on the occasion of his (to his mind) abduction, had found a street that crossed the Schuylkill and made it the four miles back. He had not crossed the Great Plains or the tundra, but in our lives he loomed heroic.

Puddles lived with us another two or three years. It was a time without leash laws, and urban dogs roamed free to ravage garbage cans, risk crossing Walnut Street, rendevous with one another, and encounter mankind’s varying dispositions. And one day an older, red-headed boy, whom I knew from the Lea School playground, where I was not in attendance, said Puddles had bitten him. Uncle Bernie, Puddles’s greatest champion, could hardly bring himself to think what the boy must have done to have provoked the attack. (For decades, when revisiting the story, he would link it with his walking into the living room and seeing Elizabeth gripping Puddles’s tongue in both hands, seeing how far she could stretch it, and Puddles stoically communicating his wish that this experiment be concluded.) But biting dogs could be gassed upon an unverified accusation and a magistrate’s order.
Somehow, my father brokered a deal. It may have involved payment to the bitten boy’s parents. It may have involved the political capital he had accrued as a Democratic party loyalist. By then Uncle Bernie’s family had moved to Overbrook Park, which was far enough away that Puddles would not endanger the red-headed boy or anyone else within the magistrate’s jurisdiction. It was agreed that if Puddles was banished, charges would dissolve.

I was sorry to see Puddles go, but I recognized the greater good. His new home abutted Cobbs Creek Golf Course, which provided eighteen holes to explore, a rivulet in which to splash, an actual patch of woods with rabbits to chase and skunks by whom he would be saluted. (Hell, at seven or eight, I could have enjoyed such a life myself.) For a time, we visited nearly every weekend, and I believed myself remembered and welcomed. I had other dogs, though none attained his stature. (The most notable was a fox terrier-like mutt who once demonstrated her regard for me by delivering three puppies on my bed without disturbing my sleep.)
Puddles lived a full and happy life. In the end, as with Rocky Raccoon (almost), Jay Gatsby (indirectly), and Stanford White (but without the kinkiness), it was love that did him in. He and a neighboring boxer regularly fought for the affections of a local chippy. On the last occasion, the boxer nearly chewed off one of his ears. After its repair, Puddles developed an infection of the brain. He was old then, and, following the vet’s recommendation, Uncle Bernie and Aunt Esther had him put to sleep.
They wished later they hadn’t, but I am certain that Puddles would have told them it was fine. They had made things fine for him for a long time.