NOTE: the following was later included in Desolation Angels. 

My widowed mother’s name is now “Memère”— nickname for Grandma in Québecois—since her grandson, my nephew, calls her that. It is 1957. I am still an itinerant; Memère and I are going from Florida to try to settle down in San Francisco, our meager belongings following us slowly in a moving van.

Here we are in Florida with two tickets to California, standing waiting for the bus to New Orleans, where we’ll change for El Paso and Los Angeles. It’s hot in May in Florida. I long to get out and go west beyond the East Texas Plain, to that high plateau and on over the Divide to dry Arizona and beyond. Poor Memère is standing there absolutely dependent on me. I wonder what my father is saying in Heaven. “That crazy Ti Jean is carting her 3,000 miles in wretched buses just for a dream he’s had about a new life near a holy pine tree.”

There’s hardly anything in the world, or at least in America, more miserable than a transcontinental bus trip with limited means. More than three days and three nights wearing the same clothes, bouncing around into town after town; even at three in the morning, when you’ve finally fallen asleep, there you are being bounced over the railroad tracks of a town, and all the lights are turned on bright to reveal your raggedness and weariness in the seat. To do that, as I’d done so often as a strong young man, is bad enough; but to have to do that when you’re a sixty-two-year-old lady…yet Memère is more cheerful than I, and she devises a terrific trick to keep us in fairly good shape—aspirins with Coke three times a day to calm the nerves.

From mid-Florida we roll in the late afternoon over orange-grove hills toward the Tallahassee and Mobile of morning, no prospect of New Orleans till noon and already fair exhausted. Such an enormous country, you realize when you cross it on buses, the dreadful stretches between equally dreadful cities, all of them looking the same when seen from the bus of woes, the never-get-there bus stopping everywhere, and worst of all the string of fresh enthusiastic drivers every two or three hundred miles warning everyone to relax and be happy.

Sometimes during the night I look at my poor sleeping mother cruelly crucified there in the American night because of no-money, no-hope-of-money, no-family, no-nothing—just myself, the stupid son of plans all compacted of eventual darkness. God, how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life.

No remedy but in my mind. I raise a fist to Heaven, promising that I shall bull-whip the first bum who makes fun of human hopelessness.

I know it’s ridiculous to pray to my father, that hunk of dung in a grave, yet I pray to him anyway. What else shall I do? Sneer? Shuffle papers on a desk and burp with rationality?

I say that we shall all be reborn with the Only One, that we will not be ourselves any more but simply the Companions of the Only One, and that’s what makes me go on, and my mother too. She has her rosary in the bus, don’t deny her that, that’s her way of stating the fact. If there can’t be love among men, let there be love at least between men and God. Human courage is an opiate, but opiates are human too. If God is an opiate, so am I. Therefore eat me. Therefore eat me. Eat the night, the long desolate American night between Sanford and Shlamford and Blamford and Crapford, eat the blood in the ground, the dead Indians, the dead pioneers, the dead Fords and Pontiacs, the dead Mississippis, the dead arms of forlorn hopelessness washing underneath. Who are men that they can insult men? I’m talking about human helplessness in the darkness of birth and death, and asking, “What is there to laugh about in that?” “How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?” “Who makes fun or misery?”

There’s my mother, a hunk of flesh that didn’t ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who also didn’t ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere.

When Memère wakes up in the middle of the night and groans, my heart breaks. The bus goes belumping over back lots of Crapford to pick up one package in a dawn station. Groans everywhere, all the way to the back seats where black sufferers suffer no less because their skin is black.

And there’s just no hope anywhere because we’re all disunited and ashamed. The only thing to do is be like mother: patient, believing, careful, bleak, self-protective, glad for little favors, suspicious of great favors, make it your own way, hurt no one, mind your own business, and make your compact with God. For God is our Guardian Angel, and this is a fact that’s only proven when proof exists no more.

#

THE BUS ARRIVES in New Orleans at noon, and we have to disembark with all our tangled luggage and wait four hours for the El Paso express, so Memère and I decide to investigate New Orleans and stretch our legs. In my mind I imagine a big glorious lunch in a Latin Quarter restaurant among grillwork balconies and palms, but when we find such a restaurant, near Bourbon Street, the prices on the menu are so high that we have to walk out sheepishly.

Just for the hell of it Memère and I decide to walk into a New Orleans saloon that has an oyster bar. And there by God she has the time of her life drinking wine, eating oysters on the half shell with piquante and yelling crazy conversations with the old Italian oyster man. He gives her a free wine. “Are you married, ey?” No, he’s not married, and would she  like some clams now, maybe steamed? And they exchange names and addresses but later never write. Memère is all excited at being in famous New Orleans at last, and when we walk around she buys pickaninny dolls and praline candies and packs them in our luggage to send as presents to my sister. A relentless hope. Just like my father, she won’t let anything discourage her. I walk sheepishly by her side. And she’s been doing this for sixty-two years; at the age of fourteen there she was, at dawn, walking to the shoe factory to work till six that evening, till Saturday evening, seventy-two-hour work week, all gleeful in anticipation of that pitiful Saturday night in old New Hampshire, and Sunday when there’d be popcorn and swings and singing.

We get back on the El Paso bus after an hour with standing in line in blue bus fumes, loaded with presents and luggage, talking to everybody, and off we roar north and then across the Louisiana plains, sitting in front again, feeling gay and rested now, Partly because I’ve bought a little pint of port wine to nip us along.

“I don’t care what anybody says,” says Memère, pouring a nip into her ladylike portable shot glass, “a little drink never hurt nobody!” I agree, ducking down beneath the range of the driver’s rearview mirror and gulping a snort. Of we go to Lafayette. Where to our amazement we hear the local people talking French exactly as we do in Québecois. The Cajuns are only Acadians. But there’s no time, the bus is already leaving for Texas.

In reddish dusk, were rolling across the Texas plains, talking and drinking. but soon the pint runs out and poor Memère’s sleeping again, just a hopeless baby in the world, and all that distance vet to go. And when we get there. what? Liberty, and Houston, and Sealy, the dull bus stops, the sighs the endlessness of it, only halfway across the continent, another night of sleeplessness ahead and another one later, and still another one.

We are finally bashing down the Rio Grande Valley into the wink of El Paso night, all 900 miserere miles of Texas behind us, both of us completely bushed and numb with tiredness. I realize there’s nothing to do but leave the bus and get a hotel suite and a good night’s sleep before going to California more than another thousand bumpy miles.

In the meantime I will show my mother Mexico across the little bridge to Juarez.

#

EVERYBODY KNOWS what it feels like after two days of vibration on wheels to suddenly lie in still beds on still ground and sleep. Right next to the bus station I got a hotel suite and went out to buy chicken-in-the-basket while Memère washed up. She was having a big adventurous trip, visiting New Orleans and staying in hotel suites ($4.50) and going to Mexico for the first time tomorrow. We drank another port pint, ate the chicken and slept like logs.

In the morning, with eight hours till bus time, we sallied forth strong. I made her walk the mile to the Mexico bridge for exercise. We paid three cents each and went over.

Immediately we were among Indians in an Indian earth. Among the smells of mud, chickens, Chihuahua dust, lime peels, horses, straw, Indian weariness. The strong smell of cantinas, beer, dank. The smell of the market. And the sight of beautiful old Spanish churches rising in the sun with all their woeful, majestical Maria Guadalupes and Crosses and cracks in the walk.

“O, Ti Jean! I want to go in that church and light a candle to Papa!”

#

WHEN WE GO IN we see an old man kneeling in the aisle with his arms outstretched in penitence—a penitente. Hours like that he kneels, old serape over his shoulder, old shoes, hat on the church floor, raggedy old white beard.

“O, Ti Jean, what’s he done that he’s so sad for? I can’t believe that old man has ever done anything really bad!”

“He’s a penitente,” I tell her in French. “He’s a sinner and he doesn’t want God to forget him.”

“Pauvre bonhomme!” And I see a woman turn and look at Memère thinking she said “Pobrecito,” which is exactly what she said anyway.

But the most pitiful sight suddenly in the old Juarez church is a shawled woman, all dressed in black, barefooted, with a baby in her arms, advancing slowly on her knees up the aisle to  the altar. “What has happened there?” cries my mother amazed. “That poor li’l mother had done no wrong! Is it her husband who’s in prison? She’s carrying that little baby! Is she a penitent too? That little baby is a penitent? She’s got him all wrapped up in a little ball in her shawl!”

“I don’t know why.”

“Where’s the priest that he don’t bless her? There’s nobody here but that poor little mother and that poor old man! This is the church of Mary?”

“This is the church of Maria de Guadalupe. A peasant found a shawl in Guadalupe, Mexico, with her face imprinted on it.”

“And they pray to Marie? But that poor young mother is only halfway to the altar. She comes slowly on her knees all quiet. Aw, but these are good people, the Indians, you say?”

“Oui. Indians just like the American Indians, but here the Spaniards did not destroy them. In French: “Ici les Espagnols sont maries avec les Indiens.“

“Pauvre monde! They believe in God just like us! I didn’t know that, Ti Jean! I never saw anything like this!” We crept up to the altar and lit candles and put dimes in the church box to pay for the wax. Memère made a prayer to God and did the sign of the cross. The Chihuahua desert blew dust into the church, the little mother was still advancing on her knees with the infant quietly asleep in her arms. Memère’s eyes blurred with tears. Now she understood Mexico and why I had come there so often even though I’d get sick of dysentery or lose weight or get pale. “C’est du monde qu’ils ont du coeur!” she whispered—these are people who have heart!”

“Oui.”

She put a dollar in the church machine, hoping it would do some good somehow. She never forgot that afternoon: in fact even today she still adds a prayer for the little mother with the child, crawling to the alter on her knees: “There was something was wrong in her life. Her husband, or maybe her baby was sick. We’ll never know. But I will always pray for that little woman. Ti Jean, when you took me there you showed me something I’d never believed I’d ever ever see.”

Meanwhile the old man penitente still knelt there, arms outspread. All your Zapatas and Castros come and go, but the Old Penitence is still there and will always be there, like Coyotl Old Man in the Navajo Mountains and Mescalero foothills up north.

#

IT WAS ALSO VERY FUNNY to be in Mexico with my mother, for when we came out of the church of Santa Maria we sat in the park to rest and enjoy the sun, and next to us sat an old Indian in his shawl, with his wife, saying nothing, looking straight ahead, on their big visit to Juarez from the hills of the desert out beyond. Come by bus or burro.

Memère offered them a cigarette. At first the old Indian was afraid, but finally he took a cigarette. She offered him one for his wife, in Québecois French, so he took it, puzzled. The old lady never looked at Memère. They knew we were American tourists, but never tourists like these. The old man slowly lighted his cigarette and looked straight ahead.

Memère asked: “They’re afraid to talk?”

“They don’t know what to do. They never meet anybody. They came from the desert. They don’t even speak Spanish, just Indian. Say Chihuahua!”

Memère said “Chihuahua” and the old man grinned at her, and the old lady smiled. “Good-by,” said Memère as we left.

We went wandering across the sweet little park full of children and ice cream and balloons, and came to a strange man with birds in a cage, who yelled for our attention.

“What does he want?”

“Fortune! His birds will tell your fortune. We give him one peso and his little bird grabs a slip of paper and your fortune’s written on it.” “Okay! Seenyor!” The little bird beaked up a slip of paper from a pile of papers and handed it to the man. The man with his little mustache and gleeful eyes opened it. It read as follows:

You will have goods fortuna with one who is your son who love you. Say the bird.

He gave the little paper to us laughing.

“Now,” said Memère as we walked arm in arm through the streets of Old Juarez, “how could that silly little bird know I have a son, or anything about me? Phew, there’s a lot of dust around here!” That million-million-grained desert blew dust along the doors. “Can you explain me that? And the little bird knew all that? Hah? That guy with the mustaches doesn’t know us. His little bird knew everything.”

She had the slip of paper in her purse.

“And the little bird picked out the paper with his crazy face! Ah, but the people are poor here, eh?”

“Yes, but the government is taking care of that a lot now. Used to be there were families sleeping on the sidewalk wrapped in newspapers. And girls sold themselves for twenty cents. They have a good government since Aleman, Cardenas, Cortines…”

“The poor little bird of Mexica! And the little mother ! I can always say I’ve seen Mexica!” She pronounced it “Mexica.” I think because of the little mother. ◊

Note: Alfred Bester, senior editor of Holiday, encouraged Benchley to turn this article into a novel; Benchley took his advice and wrote Jaws.

ONE WARM SUMMER DAY I was standing on a beach near Tom Never’s Head on Nantucket. Children were splashing around in the gentle surf as their mothers lay gabbing by the Styrofoam ice chests and the Scotch Grills. About thirty yards from shore, a man paddled back and forth, swimming in a jerky, tiring, head-out-of-the-water fashion. I had just remarked dully that the water was unusually calm, when I noticed a black speck cruising slowly up the beach some twenty yards beyond the lone swimmer. It seemed to dip in and out of the water, staying on the surface for perhaps five seconds, then disappearing for one or two, then reappearing for five. I ran down to the water and waved my arms at the man. At first he paid no attention, and kept plodding on. Then he noticed me. I pointed out to sea, cupped my hands over my mouth, and bellowed, “Shark!” He turned and saw the short, triangular fin moving al­most parallel with him. Immediately he lunged for the shore in a frantic sprint. The fish, which had taken no notice of the swimmer, became curious at the sudden disturbance in the water, and I saw the fin turn inshore. It moved lazily, but not aimlessly.

By now the man had reached chest-deep water, and while he could probably have made better time by swimming, he elected to run. Running in five feet of water is something like trying to skip rope in a vat of peanut butter, and I could see his eyes bug and his face turn bright cerise as he slogged along. He didn’t look around, which was probably just as well, for the fish was no more than fifty yards behind him. At waist depth, the terrified man assumed Messianic talents. He seemed to lift out of the water, his legs churning wildly, his arms flailing. He hit the beach at a dead run and fled as far as the dunes, where he collapsed. The shark, discovering that whatever had roiled the water had disappeared, turned back and resumed his idle cruise just beyond the small breakers.

During the man’s race for land, the children had miraculously vanished from the surf, and now they were being bundled into towels by frenzied mothers. One child was bawling, “But I want to play!” His mother snapped, “No! There’s a shark out there.” The shark was out of sight down the beach, and for a time the ladies stood around staring at the water, evidently expecting the sea to regurgitate a mass of unspeakable horrors. Then, as if on mute cue, they all at once packed their coolers, grills, rafts, inner tubes and aluminum beach chairs and marched to their cars. The afternoon was still young, and the shark had obviously found this beach unappetizing (dining is poor for sharks closer than a half a mile off the beach at that part of the south shore of Nantucket). But to the mothers, the whole area—sand as well as water—was polluted.

Irrational behavior has always been man’s reaction to the presence of sharks. Ever since man first returned to the sea, sharks have held all the terror and fascination of an ax murder. To the Greeks they were sea monsters—indeed, the sight of three or four sharks swimming in line, as they sometimes do, with their tails and dorsal fins weaving back and forth, probably started countless tales of

mammoth “sea serpents.” Linnaeus declared that Jonah was swallowed by a shark, not a whale. They are the largest fish in the world, growing to almost sixty feet and weighing up to fifteen tons. And today, along with large alligators, crocodiles and an occasional nutty lion or tiger, they are the only animals left on earth that pose a major threat to man. (Not that crocodiles and lions are a real threat; rather they have the size and appetite to be hazardous if a man chooses to stick his foot in one’s mouth.) Very simply, sharks exist in an environment that is still alien to man, and many are decidedly anthropophagous—they eat people.

Part of the mysterious intrigue about sharks unquestionably derives from ignorance. No one really knows anything about them, which, of course, has not deterred numerous experts from writing numerous definitive books. No one knows how long they live be­cause they don’t live long in captivity. Teeth, which are normally a useful guideline for guessing the age of animals, are useless in determining the age of sharks because their four or five rows of dentures are constantly folding out to replace missing members. They have no bones (another index of age), but are structured entirely with cartilage. Their top speed has been variously estimated at more than sixty miles an hour and less than twelve. (The estimate cur­rently accepted is that a shark usually cruises at about five miles an hour, can maintain twelve to fifteen for a goodly time, and is capable of achieving over forty in short bursts.) No one even knows the derivation of the name. One theory holds that the name was taken from the German word Schurke, meaning scoundrel. Another holds that scoundrels were named for the fish. It might be a mispronun­ciation of the word “shirk” implying ill temper and sloth.

It’s pretty well agreed that the first true sharks existed in the Devonian Age, some seventy million years ago, and that they’ve changed very little since. They are perhaps a little smaller today; fossilized teeth indicate that prehistoric sharks were 150 feet long. Their only living relatives are the rest of the elasmobranch family—including skates and rays—which also have no bones. And unfortu­nately, they have no natural enemies.

Despite countless documented shark attacks on humans, there are still people who insist that sharks are not dangerous to man, that they’re cowards, that they don’t like human flesh, and so on. For every book that warns against swimming with sharks, another will brush them off as garbage collectors. (One author, who ex­pressed reasonable caution about them, had just finished reading the galley proofs of his book and decided to go shark fishing. His boat was found the next day with the tiller gone and one oar chewed in half. He was never found.) Sharks are cowards in the sense that all animals are cowards. They tend to shy away from strange, apparently menacing creatures of an unnatural size. But the cowardice of a twenty-five-foot shark is not to be relied on. After the initial shock of discovering a diver, a large shark may return out of curiosity, hang around for a while, and suddenly decide that the diver is appetizing after all. The safest generalization is that if a shark is hungry enough, he will attack anything that moves and most things that don’t. Three specific attacks are worth mentioning as examples of the variety of methods sharks will employ.

When a whale has been lying dead in the water for some time, schools of sharks will attack it from below, chewing away the blubber in ten-pound hunks. If a big fifteen- or twenty-foot white shark happens along and finds nothing tasty below the water line, he’ll stick his head out of the water to see what’s left above. If he likes it, he will leap out of the water, grab a piece of whale, and tear it off with violent shakes of his head. Off Long Island, a sport fisherman was playing a small marlin on a line, when the captain looked over the side and saw a monster white shark staring at him. The fish backed away, then came at the boat and rammed the stern. He grabbed the transom in his mouth and shook it, knocking the captain off his feet. The captain got up and proceeded to beat the fish on the head with an ax, which bounced off. The fish backed away and hit the boat again. The captain, who was unwilling to see his boat sunk by the ramming of a beast longer and heavier than a Cadillac limousine, started one engine and tried to flee. The fish followed, bashing the boat. Finally the captain opened up both engines and got away. He later extracted a dozen teeth over an inch long from the stern of the boat.

In another instance, forty natives were crossing between two of the Ellice Islands in Polynesia at night. One of the canoes swamped, and sharks, which had been following and nipping at the paddles, devoured all the natives. If anything turns a shark on, it’s blood, and they became so enthralled with their success that they rammed the other canoes, swamped them, and grabbed the natives. Two men survived.

Lastly, for the skeptic who believes that a shark’s equipment is large enough only to remove a hand or a foot, there is the case of two skindivers who were swimming to the surface off California. One reached the top and looked down for his friend. A twenty-foot shark had apparently approached him from behind and quietly ingested him as he was surfacing, for all the other diver could see were his friend’s head and shoulders protruding from the fish’s mouth. He was bitten in two just below the heart.

There is no way of knowing precisely how many shark attacks have occurred in any given year—or any given decade. For a shark attack to be recorded as such, there must be proof. The fish must be sighted, by the victim or by witnesses, or the bite marks must be unmistakable. A boat capsized off Florida, for instance, and its four occupants were found days later floating around in their life jackets. They had been bitten apart just below the jackets, and their corpses were bobbing like corks. But since they could, theoretically, have been devoured by barracuda (or, I suppose, trolls), sharks were not given the blame for the attacks. It’s likely that a sizable percentage of drowning victims are eaten by sharks before they have a chance to drown, and it’s certain that many of those who are lucky enough to drown first are later consumed by scav­enging sharks.

There are endless arguments about what will make a shark attack, and just as many about what to do if one is attacked. Blood is the only virtual certainty as a lure. Erratic motion is said to make sharks believe the swimmer is a wounded fish. The Air Force urged downed fliers in World War Il to thrash and kick mightily if a shark approached, and the procedure probably scared away a

few sharks, but stirring the water so violently doubtless cost many a limb. Color apparently has no meaning, but brightness does. A gold ring or a brass buckle may be all that a shark, with his terrible eyesight, can see, and it may look like a small fish. If a man is attacked by a shark, there is little he can do beyond the obvious. He can try to stop the bleeding and try to beat the shark away with his fists. If there is no blood in the water, a smooth, even swimming stroke will at least not antagonize the animal. One sage suggests that a swimmer should beat the fish on the snout with a heavy club, hammer or other object, but I’ve always preferred to take my chances and haven’t yet carried a ballpeen hammer tucked in my bathing suit.

No shark repellent has ever been found to be absolutely reliable. Scientists have tried sound, bubbles, dyes, chlorine, fish poisons and copper acetate, none of which conclusively discourages a famished shark. One device that might someday be developed into an effective repellent is a mixture of lye crystals and aluminum shreds, which could give an attacking shark a fatal bellyache.

Of the 250 to 300 species of shark, less than thirty are considered dangerous to man, but those few have been enough to spawn a whole shark mythology. In the South Pacific, shark gods have almost as much stature as sun gods. In Hawaii, the wiliwili season is a bad time of year, because pau ka wiliwili nahu ka mano—“When the wiliwili tree is in bloom, the shark will bite.” Each Hawaiian island used to have its own shark king, to whom all paid homage. The greatest shark king of all, Kamo-hoa-lii, lived off Honolulu Harbor. He could foresee all the dangers that were about to occur on the sea, and he would dispatch a group of minions to guide home a canoe if a storm was brewing.

The Hawaiians indulged in one pastime that is usually attributed solely to the Romans—gladiatorial contests. But lacking both Christians and lions, they used sharks. Long before the first white man settled in Hawaii, a four-acre rock enclosure was created in the bay that is now Pearl Harbor. A gate was left open, and raw flesh was periodically tossed into the pen. When enough sharks had been lured inside, the gate was shut. The lucky gladiator jumped into the water armed with a dagger made from a shark tooth embedded in a piece of wood. The contests were conducted, it was said, with the permission of the Queen of the Sharks, who would hump her back and destroy large parts of the island if she didn’t receive ample pre-game offerings.

#

The International Game Fish Association lists six types of shark as game fish: blue, mako, white (also called man-eater), thresher, porbeagle and tiger, and with occasional exceptions they are excit­ing sport. (A medium-sized blue shark on a line feels like 150 pounds of laundry.) There is also the small dividend of danger. A thrashing mako, recognized as the hardest fighter in sharkdom, has a penchant for “tail-walking”—leaping out of the water and charging across the surface on its tail—and they have jumped into the open cockpits of boats and shattered equipment, woodwork and nerves. On one calm fishing day, a mako leaped into a boat and landed squarely on top of a seasick passenger who had been groaning in the bilge.

Given the chance, some sharks will eat anything and everything within sight or smell. A fourteen-foot tiger shark caught of Durban, South Africa, was discovered to have recently dined on the head and forelegs of a crocodile, a cigarette tin, two cans of peas, three seagulls, and the hind legs of a sheep. Another, disemboweled off Florida, was in the process of digesting a roll of tarpaper and a human forearm and hand. I’ve spent hours waiting for a shark to take a succulent bait, only to have one of the ninnies rise to the sur­face and nosh on a beer can I’d just thrown overboard.

If sharks are indiscriminate eaters of tin cans and people, people are more selective in the eating of sharks. Freshly caught mako, white or porbeagle, can be quite tasty, and the flesh is eaten regularly in the Pacific. In the United States, shark is sold under such disguises as “steakfish,” “grayfish” and even “sole,” and some gourmets on the Eastern Shore of Maryland are mad for it. Otherwise, American diners seldom encounter shark meat except when it is passed off in some inexpensive restaurants as swordfish.

#

There used to be a good market for shark livers, which are large and full of nutritious oil. But after the synthesis of vitamin A in the 1950′s, the market fell off. For a time, shark hides were popular as leather, and they make bovine leather feel like Kleenex. Sharks are without ribs, and thus the muscles attach directly to the skin, which must also act as a supporting skeleton for the body. It is as tough as some modern plastics, and is covered with countless tiny, toothlike denticles. If you happen to have a shark handy, rub your hand down its back. It feels smooth as cream one way, but try reversing your direction. If you do it fast enough and hard enough, you may be able to tear all the skin off your hand. The only other useful commodity that sharks provide today is their fins, which are relished in Oriental soups.

For all the tales of shark attack, these masses of evil ganglia still cause no more concern to most Americans than anopheles mosquitoes. If you chance to be in the neighborhood when one is on the prowl, you might con­ceivably get hurt. However, as the Gulf Stream moves further inshore on the East Coast (as I’m told it’s doing), as more and more people take to the sea for recreation, and as commercial fish­ermen clean out deep-water feeding grounds, sharks will move closer to the beaches looking for food, and bathers will have an opportunity to study them more often. Eventually, I’m sure, some­one will be attacked off Cape Cod or Jones Beach or Westhampton Beach on Long Island, and there will be a great hue and cry to rid the world of sharks. For despite the fact that a bather is more likely to be struck by lightning than attacked by sharks, there will always be something primevally horrid about the sight of the black triangular fin slipping through the waves, and something viscerally terrifying about the choked cry “Shark !” ◊

Any account of the Catskill Mountains must begin with Grossinger’s. The G. On either side of the highway out of New York and into Sullivan County, a two-hour drive north, one is assailed by billboards. DO A JERRY LEWIS—COME TO BROWN’S. CHANGE TO THE FLAGLER. I FOUND A HUSBAND AT THE WALDEMERE. THE RALEIGH IS ICIER, NICIER, AND SPICIER. All the Borscht Belt billboards are criss-crossed with lists of attractions, each hotel claiming the ultimate in golf courses, the latest indoor and outdoor pools, and the most tantalizing parade of stars. The countryside between the signs is ordinary, without charm. Bush land and small hills. And then finally one comes to the Grossinger billboard. All it says, sotto voce, is GROSSINGER’S HAS EVERYTHING.

“On a day in August, 1914, that was to take its place among the red-letter days of all history,” begins a booklet published to commemorate Grossinger’s fiftieth anniversary, “a war broke out in Europe. Its fires seared the world. . . . On a summer day of that same year, a small boarding house was opened in the Town of Liberty.” The farmhouse was opened by Selig and Malke Grossinger to take in nine people at nine dollars a week. Fresh air for factory workers, respite for tenement dwellers. Now Grossinger’s, spread over a thousand acres, can accommodate fifteen hundred guests. It represents an investment of fifteen million dollars. But to crib once more from the anniversary booklet, “The greatness of any institution cannot be measured by material size alone. The Taj Mahal cost a king’s ransom but money in its intrinsic form is not a part of that structure’s unequalled beauty.”

Grossinger’s, on first sight, looks like the consummate kibbutz. Even in the absence of Arabs, there is a security guard at the gate. It has its own water supply, a main building—in this case Sullivan County Tudor with picture windows —and a spill of outlying lodges named after immortals of the first Catskill Aliyah, like Eddie Cantor and Milton Berle.

I checked in on a Friday afternoon in summer, and crossing the terrace to my quarters stumbled on a Grossinger’s Forum of the Air in progress. Previous distinguished speakers —a reflection, as one magazine put it, of Jennie Grossinger, in whom the traditional reverence for learning remains undimmed—have included Max Lerner and Norman Cousins. This time out the lecturer was resident hypnotist Nat Fleischer, who was taking a stab at CAN LOVE SURVIVE MARRIAGE? “I have a degree in psychology,” Fleischer told me, “and am now working on my doctorate.”

“Where?”

“I’d rather not say.”

There were about a hundred and fifty potential hecklers on the terrace. All waiting to pounce. Cigar-chompers in Bermuda shorts and ladies ready with an alternative of the New York Post on their laps. “Men are past their peak at twenty-five,” Fleischer shouted into the microphone, “but ladies reach theirs much later and stay on a plateau, while the men are tobogganing downhill.” One man hooted, another guffawed, but many ladies clapped approval. “You think,” Fleischer said, “the love of the baby for his momma is natural—no!” A man, holding a silver foil sun reflector to his face, dozed off. The lady beside him fanned herself with From Russia, With Love. “In order to remain sane,” Fleischer continued, “what do we need? ALL OF US. Even at sixty and seventy. LOVE. A little bit of love. If you’ve been married for twenty-five years you shouldn’t take your wife for granted. Be considerate.”

A lady under a tangle of curlers bounced up and said, “I’ve been married twenty-nine years, and my husband doesn’t take me for granted.”

This alarmed a sunken-bellied man in the back row. He didn’t join in the warm applause. Instead he stood up to peer at the lady. “I’d like to meet her husband.” Sitting down again, he added, “The schmock.”

There was to be a get-together for singles in the evening, but the prospects did not look dazzling. A truculent man sitting beside me in the bar said, “I dunno. I swim this morning. I swim this afternoon—indoors, outdoors—my God, what a collection! When are all the beauties checking in?”

I decided to take a stroll before dinner. The five lobbies at Grossinger’s are nicely paneled in pine, but the effect is somewhat undermined by the presence of plastic plants everywhere. There is plastic sweet corn for sale in the shop beside the Olympic-size outdoor pool, and plastic grapes are available in the Mon Ami Gift and Sundry Shop in the main building. Among those whose pictures hang on the Wall of Fame are Cardinal Spellman and Yogi Berra, Irving Berlin, Governors Harriman and Rockefeller, Ralph Buche, Zero Mostel, and Herman Wouk. The indoor pool, stunningly simple in design, still smelled so strongly of disinfectants that I was reminded of the more modest “Y” pool of my boy­hood. I fled. Grossinger’s has its own post office and is able to stamp all mail “Grossinger, N.Y.” There is also Grossinger Lake, “for your tranquil togetherness”; an eighteen-hole golf course; stables; an outdoor artificial ice rink; a ski and toboggan run; a His ‘n Hers health club; and of course a landing strip adjoining the hotel, the Jennie Grossinger Field.

The ladies had transformed themselves for dinner. Gone were the curlers, out came the minks. “Jewish security blankets,” a guest, watching the parade with me, called the wraps, but fondly, with that sense of self-ridicule that redeems Grossinger’s and, incidentally, makes it the most slippery of places to write about.

I suppose it would be easiest, and not unjustified, to present the Catskills as a cartoon. A Disneyland with knishes. After all, everywhere you turn, the detail is bizarre. At the Concord, for instance, a long hall of picture windows overlooks a parking lot. There are rooms that come with two adjoining bathrooms. (“It’s a gimmick. People like it. They talk about it.”) All the leading hotels now have indoor ice skating rinks because, as the lady who runs The Laurels told me, our guests find it too cold to skate outside. True, they have not yet poured concrete into the natural lakes to build artificial filtered pools above, but, short of that, every new convenience conspires to protect guests from the countryside. Most large hotels, for instance, link outlying lodges to the main building through a system of glassed-in and sometimes even subterranean passages, all in the costly cause of protecting people from the not notoriously fierce Catskills outdoors.

What I’m getting at is that by a none too cunning process of selected detail one can make Grossinger’s, the Catskills, and the people who go there appear totally grotesque. One doesn’t because there’s more to it than that. Nothing, on the other hand, can prevent Sullivan County from seeming outlandish, for outlandish it certainly is, and it would be condescending, the most suspect sort of liberalism, to overlook this and instead celebrate, say, Jennie Grossinger’s maudlin “warmth” or “traditional reverence” for bogus learning.

Something else. The archetypal Grossinger’s guest belongs to the most frequently fired-at class of American Jews. Even as Commentary sends out another patrol of short story writers the Partisan Review irregulars are waiting in the bushes, bayonets drawn. Saul Bellow is watching, Alfred Kazin is ruminating, Norman Mailer is ready with his flick-knife, and who knows what manner of tripwires the next generation of Jewish writers is laying out at this very moment. Was there ever a group so pursued by such an unsentimental platoon of chroniclers? So plagued by moralists? So blamed for making money? Before them came the luftmenschen, the impecunious dreamers—tailors, cutters, corner grocers—so adored by Bernard Malamud. After them came Philip Roth’s confident college boys on the trot, Americans who just happen to have had a Jewish upbringing. But this generation between, this unlovely spiky bunch that climbed with the rest of middle-class America out of the Depression into a pot of prosperity, is the least liked by literary Jews. In a Clifford Odets play they were the rotters. The rent collectors. Next Jerome Weidman carved them up and then along came Budd Schulberg and Irwin Shaw. In fact, in all this time only Herman Wouk, armed with but a slingshot of cliches, has come to their defense. More of an embarrassment, I’d say, than a shield.

Well now, here they are at Grossinger’s, sitting ducks for satire. Manna for sociologists. Here they are, breathless, but at play, so to speak, suffering sour stomach and cancer scares, one Israeli bond drive after another, unmarriageable daughters and sons gone off to help the Negroes overcome in Mississippi. Grossinger’s is their dream of plenty realized, but if you find it funny, larger than life, then so do the regulars. In fact, there is no deflating remark I could make about minks or matchmaking that has not already been made by visiting comedians or guests. Furthermore for an innocent goy to even think some of the things said at Grossinger’s would be to invite the wrath of the B’nai Brith Anti-Defamation League.

At Grossinger’s, guests are offered the traditional foods, but in superabundance, which may not have been the case for many of them in the early years. Here, too, are the big TV comics, only this is their real audience and they appreciate it. They reveal the authentic joke behind the bland story they had to tell on TV because Yiddish punchlines do not make for happy Nielsen ratings.

The “ole swimmin’ hole,” as one Catskill ad says, was never like this. Or, to quote from an ad for Kutsher’s Country Club: “You wouldn’t have liked The Garden of Eden anyway—it didn’t have a golf course. Kutsher’s, on the other hand . . .” There are all the knishes a man can eat and, at Brown’s Hotel, they are made more palatable by being called “Roulade of Fresh Chicken Livers.” In the same spirit, the familiar chicken soup with lockschen has been reborn as “essence of chicken broth with fine noodles” on yet another menu.

The food at Grossinger’s, the best I ate in the Catskills, is delicious if you like traditional kosher cooking. But entering the vast dining room, which seats some 1,600 guests, creates an agonizing moment for singles. “The older men want young girls,” David Geivel, the headwaiter, told me, “and the girls want presentable men. They want to line up a date for New York, where they sit alone all week. They’ve only got two days, you know, so they’ve got to make it fast. After each meal they’re always wanting to switch tables. The standard complaint from the men runs . . . ‘Even when the girls are talking to me, they’re looking over my shoulder to the dentist at the next table. Why should I ask her for a date, such an eye-roamer.’”

I picked up a copy of the daily Tattler at my table and saw how, given one bewitching trip through the hotel Gestetner, the painfully shy old maid and the flat-chested girl and the good-natured lump were transformed into “sparkling, captivating” Barbara; Ida, “the fun-loving frolicker”; and Miriam, “a charm-laden lass who makes a visit to table 20F a must.” I also noted that among other “typewriter boys” who had stayed at “the G.” there were Paddy Chayefsky and Paul Gallico. Dore Schary was a former editor of the Tattler and Shelley Winters, Betty Garrett, and Robert Alda had all once worked on the special staff. Students from all over the United States still compete for jobs at the hotel. They can clear as much as $150 a week and, as they say at the G., be nice to your busboy, next year when he graduates he may treat your ulcer. My companions at the table included two forlorn bachelors, a teenager with a flirtatious aunt, and a bejeweled and wizened widow in her sixties. “I hate to waste all this food,” the widow said, “it’s such a crime. My dog should be here, he’d have a wonderful time.”

“Where is he?”

“Dead,” she said, false eyelashes fluttering, just as the loudspeaker crackled and the get-together for singles was announced. “Single people only, please.”

The teenager turned on her aunt. “Are you going to dance with Ray again?”

“Why not? He’s excellent.”

“Sure, sure. Only he’s a faigele.“ (A homosexual.)

“Did you see the girl in the Mexican squaw blanket? She told her mother, ‘I’m going to the singles. If I don’t come back to the room tonight, you’ll know I’m engaged.’ What an optimist!”

The singles get-together was thinly attended. A disaster. Bachelors looked in, muttered, pulled faces, and departed in pairs. The ladies in their finery were abandoned in the vast ballroom to the flatteries of staff members, twisting in turn with the hairdresser and the dance teacher, each of whom had an eye for tomorrow’s trade. My truculent friend of the afternoon had resumed his station at the bar. “Hey,” he said, turning on a “G-man” (a staff member), “where’d you get all those dogs? You got a contract with New York City maybe, they send you all the losers?”

The G-man, his manner reverent, told me that this bar was the very place where Eddie Cantor had discovered Eddie Fisher, who was then just another unknown singing with the band. “If you had told me in those days that Fisher would get within even ten feet of Elizabeth Taylor—” He stopped short, overcome. “The rest,” he said, “is history.”

Ladies began to file into the Terrace Room, the husbands trailing after them, with the mink stoles now slung nonchalantly over their arms. Another All-Star Friday Nite Revue had finished in the Playhouse.

“What was it like?” somebody asked.

“Aw. It goes with the gefilte fish.”

Now the spotlight was turned on the Prentice Minner Four. Minner, a talented and militant Negro, began with a rousing civil rights song. He sang, “From San Francisco to New York Island, this is your land and mine.”

“Do you know ‘Shadrack’?” somebody called out.

“‘Old Man River’?”

“What about ‘Tzena Tzena’?”

Minner compromised. He sang “Tzena Tzena,” a hora, but with new lyrics. CORE lyrics.

A G-man went over to talk to my truculent friend at the bar. “You can’t sit down at a table,” he said, “and say to a lady you’ve just met that she’s, urn, well stacked. It’s not refined,” He was told he would have to change his table again.

“All right. O.K. I like women. So that makes me a louse.”

I retired early, with my G. fact sheets. More than 700,000 gallons of water, I read, are required to fill the outdoor pool. G. dancingmasters, Tony and Lucille, introduced the mambo to this country. Henry Cabot Lodge has, as they say, graced the G. roster. So has Robert Kennedy. Others I might have rubbed shoulders with are Baron Edmond de Rothschild and Rocky Marciano. It was Damon Runyon who first called Grossinger’s “Lindy’s with trees.” Nine world boxing champ­ions have trained for title bouts at the hotel. Barney Ross, who was surely the first Orthodox Jew to become lightweight champion, “scrupulously abjured the general frolicsome air that pervaded his camp” in 1934. Not so goy-boy Ingemar Johansson, the last champ to train at Grossinger’s.

In the morning I decided to forgo the recommended early riser’s appetizer, a baked Idaho potato; I also passed up herring baked and fried, waffles and watermelon, blueberries, strawberries, bagels and lox, and French toast. I settled for orange juice and coffee and slipped outside for a fast cigarette. (Smoking is forbidden on the Sabbath, from sunset Friday to sundown Saturday, in the dining room and the main lobbies.) Lou Goldstein, Director of Daytime Social Activities, was running his famous game of Simon Says on the terrace. There were at least a hundred eager players and twice as many hecklers. “Simon says, put up your hands. Simon says, bend forward from the waist. The waist, lady. You got one? Oi. That’s bending? What’s your name?”

“Mn Mn,” through buttoned lips.

“All right. Simon says, what’s your name?”

“Sylvia.”

“Now that’s a good Jewish name. The names they have these days: Desiree, Drexel. Where are you from?”

“Philadelphia.”

“Out.”

A man cupped his hands to his mouth and called out, “Tell us the one about the two goyim.”

“We don’t use that word here. There are people of every faith at Grossinger’s. In fact, we get all kinds here. (All right, lady, sit down. We saw the outfit.) Last year a lady stands here and I say to her, What do you think of sex? Sex, she says, it’s a fine department store.” Goldstein announced a horseshoe toss for the men, but there were no takers. “Listen here,” he said, “at Grossinger’s you don’t work, You toss the horseshoe but a member of our staff picks it up. Also you throw downhill. All right, athletes, follow me.”

I stayed behind for a demonstration on how to apply makeup. A volunteer was called for, a plump matron stepped forward, and was helped onto a makeshift platform by the beautician. “Now,” he began, “I know that some of you are worried about the expression lines round your mouth. Well, this putty if applied correctly will fill all the crevices . There, notice the difference on the right side of the lady’s face?”

“No.”

“I’m sure the ladies in the first four rows can notice.”

Grossinger’s has everything—and a myth. The myth of Jennie, LIVING SYMBOL “HOTEL WITH A HEART,^“ as a typical Grossinger News headline runs. There are photographs every­where of Jennie with celebrities. “A local landmark,” says a Grossinger’s brochure, “is the famous smile of the beloved Jennie.” A romantic though mediocre oil painting of Jennie hangs in the main lobby. There has been a song called “Jennie” and she has appeared on This Is Your Life, an occasion so thrilling that as a special treat on rainy days guests are sometimes allowed to watch a rerun of the tape. But Jennie, now in her seventies, can no longer personally bless all the honey­moon couples who come to the hotel. Neither can she “drift serenely” through the vast dining room as often as she used to, and so a younger lady, Mrs. Sylvia Jacobs, now fills many of Jennie’s offices. Mrs. Jacobs, in charge of Guest Relations, is seldom caught without a smile. “Jennie,” she told me, “loves all human beings, regardless of race, color, or creed. Nobody else has her vision and charm. She personifies the grace and dignity of a great lady.”

Jennie herself picked Mrs. Jacobs to succeed her as hostess at the G.

“God, I think, gives people certain gifts—God-given things like a voice,” Mrs. Jacobs said. “Well, I was born into this business. In fifty years I am the one who comes closest to personifying the vision of Jennie Grossinger. The proof of the pudding is my identification here.” Just in case further proof was required, Mrs. Jacobs showed me letters from guests, tributes to her matchmaking and joy-spreading powers. You are, one letter testified, T-E-R-R-I-F-I-C. You have an atomic personality. “There’s tradition,” she said, “and natural beauty and panoramic views in abundance here. We don’t need Milton Berle. At Grossinger’s, a seventy-five dollar a week stenographer can rub shoulders with a millionaire. This is an important facet of our activities, you know.”

“Do you deal with many complaints?” I asked.

Mrs. Jacobs melted me with a smile. “A complaint isn’t a problem—it’s a challenge. I thank people for their complaints.”

Mrs. Jacobs took me on a tour of Jennie’s house, Joy Cottage, which is next door to Millionaire’s Cottage and across the road from Pop’s Cottage. A signed photograph of Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel, rested on the piano, and a photograph of Jack Benny, also autographed, stood on the table alongside. One wall was covered from ceiling to floor with plaques. Interfaith awards and woman­of-the-year citations, including The Noble Woman of the Year Award from the Baltimore Noble Ladies’ Aid Society. There was also a Certificate of Honor from Wisdom maga­zine. “Jennie,” Mrs. Jacobs said, “is such a modest woman. She is always studying, an hour a day, and if she meets a woman with a degree she is simply overcome . . .” Jennie has only one degree of her own: an honorary Doctor of Humani­ties awarded to her by Wilberforce University, Ohio, in 1959. “I’ve never seen Jennie so moved,” Mrs. Jacobs said, “as when she was awarded that degree.”

Mrs. Jacobs offered me a box of cookies to sustain me for my fifteen-minute drive to “over there”—dorten, as they say in Yiddish—the Concord.

If Jennie Grossinger is the Dr. Schweitzer of the Catskills, then Arthur Winarick must be counted its Dr. Strangelove. Winarick, once a barber, made his fortune with Jerris Hair Tonic, acquired the Concord for $10,000 in 1935, and is still, as they say, its guiding genius. He is in his seventies. On first meeting I was foolish enough to ask him if he had ever been to any of Europe’s luxury resorts. “Garages with drapes,” he said. “Warehouses.”

A guest intruded; he wore a baseball cap with sunglasses fastened to the peak. “What’s the matter, Winarick, you only put up one new building this year?”

“Three.”

One of them is that “exciting new sno-time rendezvous,” King Arthur’s Court, “where every boy is a Galahad or a Lancelot and every damsel a Guinevere or a fair Elaine.” Winarick, an obsessive builder, once asked comedian Zero Mostel, “What else can I do? What more can I add?”

“An indoor jungle, Arthur. Hunting for tigers under glass. On shabus the hunters could wear yarmulkas.” (Skullcaps.)

It is unlikely, however, that anyone at the Concord would ever wear a skullcap, for to drive from the G. to dorten is to leap a Jewish generation; it is to quit a haimishe (homey) place, however schmaltzy, for chrome and concrete. The sweet though professional people-lovers of one hotel yield to the computer-like efficiency of another. The Concord, for instance, also has a problem with singles, but I would guess that there is less table-changing: Singles and marrieds, youngs and olds, are identified by different-colored pins plugged into a war plan of the dining room.

The Concord is the largest and most opulent of the Catskill resorts. “Today,” Walter Winchell recently wrote, “it does 30 million Bux a year.” It’s a fantastic place. A luxury liner permanently in dry dock. Nine stories high with an enormous lobby, a sweep of red-carpeted stairway, and endless corridors leading here, there, and everywhere, the Concord can cope with 2,500 guests who can, I’m assured, consume 9,000 latkes and ten tons of meat a day. Ornate chandeliers drip from the ceiling of the main lobby. The largest of the hotel’s three nightclubs, the Imperial Room, seats 2,500 people. But it is dangerous to attempt a physical description of the hotel. For even as I checked in, the main dining room was making way for a still larger one, and it is just possible that since I left, the five interconnecting con­vention halls have been opened up and converted into an indoor spring training camp for the Mets. Nothing’s im­possible. “Years ago,” a staff member told me, “a guest told Winarick, ‘You call this a room, at home I have a toilet nicer than such a room.’ And Winarick saw that he was right and began to build. ‘We’re going to give them city living in the country,’ he said. Look at it this way. Everybody has the sun. Where do we go from there?”

Where they went was to build three golf courses, the last with eighteen holes; hire five orchestras and initiate a big-name nightclub policy (Milton Berle, Sammy Davis Jr., Judy Garland, Jimmy Durante, etc.); install a resident graphologist in one lobby (“Larry Hilton needs no introduction for his humorous Chalk-talks. . . .”) and a security officer, with revolver and bullet belt, to sit tall on his air-cushion before the barred vault in another; hire the most in lifeguards, Director of Water Activities Buster Crabbe (“This magnifi­cent outdoor pool,” Crabbe recently wrote, “makes all other pools look like the swimming hole I used to take Jane and the chimps to….”); buy a machine, the first in the Catskills, to spew artificial and multi-colored snow on the ski runs (“We had to cut out the colored stuff, some people were allergic to it.”); and construct a shopping arcade, known as Little Fifth Avenue, in the lower lobby.

Mac Kinsbrunner, the genial resident manager, took me on a tour beginning with the shopping arcade. A sign read:

SHOW YOUR TALENT
Everyone’s Doing It
PAINT A PICTURE YOURSELF
The Spin Art Shop
50 cents
5 x 7 oil painting
Only Non Allergic Paints Used

Next door, Tony and Marcia promised you could walk in and dance out doing the twist or the bossa nova or pachanga or cha cha.

“We’ve got five million bucks worth of stuff under construction here right now. People don’t come to the mountains for a rest any more,” Kinsbrunner said, “they want tummel.”

Tummel in Yiddish means “noise,” and the old-time non­stop Catskill comics were known as tummlers, or “noise­makers.”

“In the old days, you know, we used to go in for calisthenics, but no more. People are older. Golf, O.K., but—well, I’ll tell you something—in these hotels we cater to what I call food-coholics. Anyway, I used to run it—the calisthenics —one day I’m illustrating the pump, the bicycle pump exercise for fat people—you know, in-out, in-out—zoom—her guts come spilling out. A fat lady. Right out. There went one year’s profits, no more calisthenics.”

We went to take a look at the health club. THRU THESE PORTALS, a sign read, Pass The Cleanest People In The World. “I had that put up,” Kinsbrunner said. “I used to be a schoolteacher.” Another sign read:

FENCE FOR FUN
Mons. Octave Ponchez
Develop Poise—Grace—Physical Fitness

In the club for singles, Kinsbrunner said, “Sure they’re trouble. If a single doesn’t hook up here, she goes back to New York and says the food was bad. She doesn’t say she’s a dog. Me, I always tell them you should have been here last weekend. Boy.”

The Concord, indeed most of the Catskill resorts, now do a considerable out-of-season convention business. While I was staying at the hotel a group of insurance agents and their wives, coming from just about every state in the union, were whooping it up. Their theme-sign read:

ALL THAT GLITTERS
IS NOT GOLD
EXCEPT ANNUITIES

Groups representing different sales areas got into gay costumes to march into the dining room for dinner. The men wore cardboard moustaches and Panama hats at rakish angles, and their wives wiggled shyly in hula skirts. Once inside the dining room they all rose to sing a punchy sales song to the tune of “Mac the Knife,” from The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. It began, “We’re behind you/ Old Jack Regan/ To make Mutual number one. . . .” Then they bowed their heads in prayer for the company and held up lit sparklers for the singing of the national anthem.

The Concord is surrounded by a wire fence. It employs some thirty security men. But Mac Kinsbrunner, for one, is in favor of allowing outsiders to stroll through the hotel on Sundays. “Lots of them,” he told me, “can’t afford the Con­cord yet. People come up in the world, they want to show it, you know. They want other people to know they can afford it here. So let them come and look. It gives them something to work toward, something to look up to.”

The Concord must loom tallest from any one of a thousand kochaleins (literally, “cook-alone’s”) and bungalow colonies that still operate in Sullivan County. Like Itzik’s Rooms or the Bon-Repos or Altman’s Cottages. Altman’s is run by Ephraim Weisse, a most engaging man, a refugee, who has survived four concentration camps. “The air is the only thing that’s good in the Catskills,” Ephraim said. “Business? It’s murder. I need this bungalow colony like I need a hole in the head,” He shrugged, grinning. “I survived Hitler, I’ll outlast the Catskills.”

Other large hotels, not as celebrated as Grossinger’s or the Concord, tend to specialize. The Raleigh, for instance, has five bands and goes in for young couples. “LIVE ‘LA DOLCE VITA’ ” (the sweet life), the ads run, “AT THE RALEIGH.” “We got the young swingers here,” the proprietor told me.

Brown’s, another opulent place, is more of a family hotel. Jerry Lewis was once on their social staff, and he still figures in most of their advertisements. Brown’s is very publicity-conscious. Instead of playing Simon Says or the Concord variation, Simon Sez, they play Brown’s Says. In fact, as I entered the hotel lobby a member of the social staff was entertaining a group of ladies. “The name of the game,” he called out, “is not bingo. It’s BROWN’S. You win, you yell out BROWN’S.”

Mrs. Brown told me that many distinguished people had stayed at her hotel. “Among them, Jayne Mansfield and Mr. Haggerty.” Bernie Miller, tummler-in-residence, took me to see the hotel’s pride, the Jerry Lewis Theatre-Club. “Lots of big stars were embryos here,” he said.

Of all the hotels I visited in the Catskills, only The Laurels does not serve kosher food and is actually built on a lake. Sackett Lake, But, oddly enough, neither the dining room nor the most expensive bedrooms overlook the lake, and, as at the other leading resorts, there are pools inside and out, a skating rink, a health club, and a nightclub or two. “People won’t make their own fun any more,” said Arlene Damen, the young lady who runs the hotel with her husband. “Years ago, the young people here used to go in for midnight swims, now they’re afraid it might ruin their hairdos. Today nobody lives like it’s the mountains.”

Finally, two lingering memories of the Sullivan County Catskills.

As I left The Laurels, I actually saw a young couple lying under a sun lamp by the heated indoor pool on a day that was nice enough for swimming in the lake outside the picture window.

At Brown’s, where THERE’S MORE OF EVERYTHING, a considerable number of guests ignored the endless run of facilities to sit on the balcony that overlooked the highway and watch the cars go by, the people come and go. Obviously, there’s still nothing like the front-door stoop as long as passersby know that you don’t have to sit there, that you can afford everything inside. ◊

Ronald Searle

Ronald Searle

Ronald Searle

Ronald Searle

What’s the name of the game, Woody?

“Basically everybody is a loser,” Woody Allen, high priest of the cult of the loser, says, “but it’s only now that people are beginning to admit it. People feel their shortcomings more than their attributes. That’s why Marilyn Monroe killed herself, and that’s why people can’t understand it.

“I’m a loser, and that’s been one of the appeals of my stage career. I’m a complainer. I’m more acutely aware of the negative side of life. That’s why I don’t like sunny weather. I like gloomy winter days. I like gloomy weather, period. I’d like to spend a winter in Copenhagen.

“Look at San Francisco. It has the highest suicide rate in the United States. It has perfect weather,around sixty-five degrees all year ’round, and the city is lovely—and everybody jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge.”

In his latest hit, Play It Again, Sam, Woody has written and stars in the role of the popular modern loser. Allan Felix is a mousey movie reviewer for an obscure magazine. He’s a mass of fears, repressions and hang-ups not yet healed by years of psychoanalysis. His wife has divorced him because he’s a dullard, and he is currently flailing around trying to make a connection with a girl—and failing at every opportunity. He is obsessed by his idolatry of Humphrey Bogart (hence the title, from a famous line in Casablanca) solely because of Bogey’s masterful manner with women, at least in the films Allan Felix has seen, and he once sat through Casablanca twelve times in succession.

In his earlier hit, Don’t Drink the Water, he wrote about another loser, an American schnook with a yenta wife on tour abroad, who involves himself in serious trouble with an Iron Curtain country because he innocently takes pictures of top-secret military installations. In his albums, Woody turns losing into a kind of comedy that evokes sympathy and wry laughter, almost precisely the reaction one has when a broken-spirited dog rolls on its back in surrender.

He’s a red-headed, skinny kid from Brooklyn (5′ 6″, 120 pounds), born December 1, 1935, the son of an obscurity who worked at such odd jobs as hack driving and in a jewelry store. Woody went to P.S. 99 and Midwood High School in Flatbush—”They were gruesome experiences”—and was thrown out of New York University and City College “for bum grades and being a non-student.” But he had already started professional comedy writing in his last term in high school. “I wrote for the Peter Lind Hayes radio show, one-liners mostly. I had a contract, twenty-five dollars a week. I was sixteen years old.”

Then he moved on to the Herb Shriner show, Two for the Money, and continued gag writing for the next eight or nine years. His first big break was a TV special he wrote in collaboration with Larry Gelbart (author of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) for Sid Caesar, Art Carney and Shirley MacLaine. That was in the mid-1950′s, and the show won several awards. “We were nominated for an Emmy, but we got beaten out by Fred Astaire.”

“I wrote more specials for Sid and Art, but I had no real interest in TV writing after I got over the glamour. I wanted to be a playwright. I kept going to the theater and reading books. Then a funny thing happened; I began to come up with comedy ideas that could only be expressed in monologues. So I started to do the monologues in a place in the Village called Upstairs at the Duplex. They worked very well and I began to get a lot of bookings in clubs. It turned out to be a ride I couldn’t get off. Then came Don’t Drink the Water in 1966, which ran for a year and a half, and now Play It Again, Sam, which is a solid hit.

“Last summer I wrote, directed and starred in a movie which hasn’t been released yet, Take the Money and Run. It’s a frivolous little comedy about a pathological criminal; strictly an exercise for laughs. This year I’m spending a couple of months writing comic prose pieces. Then I’m going to write a play, a political satire, not for myself, and then I’ll prepare another film script. I’m going to do all this before October first when I leave the play.”

When he does leave Play it Again, Sam, to mount his new play and shoot his new film, he will not yet be thirty-four years old.

#

Woody isn’t a funny man in real life—very few professional comics are. He saves his one-liners for his writing. He’s quiet and serious and rarely laughs. After a prelude of shyness, he reveals a warm ability to relate to people and touching consideration. Yet for a star, which indeed he is, he displays disconcerting insecurity. The first time we had dinner together (he   he was afraid that his clothes (he usually wears a tatty sweater, wrinkled chinos and battered sneakers) might prevent us from getting into a restaurant, and a Broadway restaurant at that. There is nothing about himself that he will not reveal and discuss, openly and frankly. He keeps only one secret from the world, his real name, although he will tell you in confidence. His explanation makes sense; he has spent an entire life building up the reputation of his professional name, and he doesn’t want it endangered by any confusion. Everybody in the entertainment business understands that your one essen­al asset is your credit line.

Asked if his poise and quiet adjustment were the result of his psychoanalysis, Woody said, “No. Psychoanal­ysis is not as fulfilling as I hoped it would be. It’s like when you have your clarinet repaired. When you get it home and play it it sounds good, but not as good as you had hoped. But then, I’ve only been in analysis eleven years.

“Psychoanalysis helps my work quantitatively because I’m liberated; I can get more done. Qualitatively it’s helped because it’s broadened my point of view. It’s made my work more commercial because I no longer have a limited focus. I’m appealing to more people.”

“Do people think the Allan Felix in Play It Again, Sam is really you; a neurotic twitch?”

“Everybody unequivocally confuses he real Woody Allen with the onstage character. Sure it’s me, just like my act is me, but greatly exaggerated. It’s a question of selectivity. I select only those things in myself that make for the best comedy—my most embarrassing moments, my worst fears.”

This was in his dressing room backstage. The most prominent objects on his make-up table were a blender, a can of chocolate syrup, a jar of malted milk and a jar of honey. He’s continually making himself malteds, still trying to but on weight. He swallows honey by he spoonful to soothe his raw throat.

The truth is, Woody as an actor is a complete amateur, unequipped and untrained for projection across the footlights, and his throat suffers from the strain.

#

There were a couple of paperbacks on the make-up table: Selections From Kierkegaard and Basic Teachings of Great Philosophers, the sort of thing you’d expect to see a young intellectual reading on a bus.  We discussed books. “I don’t enjoy reading,” Woody said. “It’s strictly a secondary experience. If I can do anything else, I’ll duck it. Maybe it’s because I’m a very slow reader. But it’s necessary for a writer, so I have to do it, but I don’t really enjoy it. The thing itself is boring.

“The only thing I find interesting today is sporting events. They have everything that great theater should have; all the thunderous excitement and you don’t know the outcome. And when the outcome happens, you have to believe it because it happened. I need something crammed with excitement. I like things larger than life.”

He believes that Stendhal’s The Red and The Black is one of the great fath­ers of modern novels. He says that he hates Terry Southern and had to strug­gle through Phillip Roth’s new novel. “I felt there were many passages that could have been done better. In the masturbation scenes Roth was reaching for wild effects; in fact, I feel that Roth was pandering to the public. His attitude was: ‘All right, I’ll give you what you want.’ Salinger didn’t do that in Catcher in the Rye. His whole book was on a much higher level.”

Woody is hipped on the subject of pandering. “I feel the same way about Lennie Bruce as I do about Roth. Bruce was not particularly brilliant. He pandered. He was and is idolized by the kind of people who must invent an idol for themselves. Nichols and May didn’t do that. Mort Sahl doesn’t do that; he doesn’t pander.”

The name of another prominent comic came up. I said, “Now there’s a no-talent for you,”

“He’s very successful,” Woody said quietly.

“And that’s what amazes me; the number of no-talents who are successful.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “These days everybody’s successful, talent and no-talent.”

#

He lives in a high-ceilinged duplex apartment in a converted mansion just off Park Avenue. “Before I take you around I have to explain,” he said apologetically. “I stopped decorating when I was only half-finished. I’ve decided it’s too much rent and I want to get more for the money—he’s paying close to $900 a month—so I’m looking to buy a co-op apartment or a townhouse.”

“You can get some wonderful places on Central Park West.”

“No, I couldn’t live on the West Side. I have to be on the East Side in the mid-seventies, just about ten blocks away from the mainstream. What do you think about living in the country?”

“Forget it, Woody. You’re a city boy. Not for you.”

“Yes, but I often fantasize about a house or a farm in the country. When I visited Mt. Vernon, with its back porch on the Potomac, it made me imagine that it might be wonderful to live like that. But then I think of the bugs and the mosquitoes and how Washington must have sweltered in the summer, and I get realistic.

“Another one of my fantasies is that I can always move to rustic surround­ings, in the south of France, live like a Tolstoi and write what I like. But I guess you’re right. I’m a metropolitan boy, so I always want to go to a big city when I travel. I want is big city where you know it’s all there. You may not go for six months, but you know it’s there, twenty-four hours a day.”

There’s no doubt that the duplex is underfurnished. One example should be enough. The living room on the main floor is beautifully paneled with, I thought, rosewood, but Woody said oak. There was no way of telling because, when I flipped the light switch, the only thing that turned on was a jukebox in the far corner. “My gift to my wife,” Woody said. There was a magnificent Aubusson rug on the floor. There was an organ in the near corner. “My wife’s gift to me,” Woody said. There was an air conditioner lying in a wicker clothes hamper. There was a movie projector and a screen. Nothing more.

We had dinner in the formal dining room, sparsely furnished with a few ex­pensive pieces, the ceiling pierced with pin-spots to illuminate pictures, but there were no pictures on the walls. We were served vitamin capsules, salad, scrod, peas and a choice of cherry pie, blueberry pie, pudding or cake for dessert. “I can’t handle these decisions,” Woody said. We discussed the problem and he settled for cake. He confessed that he eats fish most of the time, but didn’t say why.

#

His present wife, his second, is Louise Lasser, a talented young comedienne, pretty and petite. “I like pretty little blond girls,” Woody said. You’ve seen Miss Lasser in half a dozen prime-time TV commercials. They were married on Groundhog Day in 1966. He married his first wife when he was nineteen and she was a sixteen-year-old high-school kid. They split up amicably enough, but Woody says the much publicized million-dollar suit she’s bringing against him for telling ex-wife jokes is not a stunt; it’s for real.

“But that’s nothing,” Woody said. “I was sued once by a woman who claimed I was her husband. She said he’d been a garage mechanic who de­serted her, but he made exactly the same kind of jokes I did, and when she saw me on television she knew I was her husband.

“We had a confrontation in my lawyer’s office and she said, ‘Yes, that’s my husband,’ even though her father-in-law was there and said he’d never seen me before. She was around ten years older than me, so if we’d been married when she said, I would have been thirteen years old. All the same she hauled me into court twice.”

We discussed his writing regimen. “I get up around 10:30, shower, have a light breakfast, and work for about six hours. Then I knock off and play the clarinet for a while.” He loves jazz, has a traditional knowledge of it, and owns a clarinet and a soprano saxophone. He says the only real satisfaction he ever had was when he was on the coast and played clarinet with an old-style band.

“After the theater,” Woody went on, “I work from midnight to 3:00 A.M. When I’m writing a play or anything to be spoken, I work at the typewriter, but I write prose in longhand in bed.” He bent over with his nose close to the table. “It’s like working with a finer tool. Your concentration is focused.

“The difference between an Arthur Miller and a comedy writer is that the latter must obey all the structural rules that Miller does and also must keep the audience laughing for two and a half hours. It’s an additional burden.

“But the frivolity attached to laughter prevents people from respecting it and taking it seriously. Laughter under­mines respect. People will laugh at Neil Simon, but they won’t respect him like Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. It’s an easy thing for people to slip into; if a thing doesn’t have obvious importance, like dope addiction or Negro problems, they won’t respect it.

“I’ve been trying to stay in both fields, literature and the stage, because what’s funny to the eye is not funny to the ear, so I’m trying to diversify, and that keeps me interested. I’m looking for the middle line between reportage and humor. Truman Capote achieved that in In Cold Blood.”

#

Walking downtown on Madison Avenue for a visit to his throat special­ist, we discussed the walks that writers have to take when they’re hung up on a story. Woody insisted that he was never stuck, and on those rare occasions when he was, a mere change of scene—moving from one room to another—was enough to get him going again. He said that when he did take walks he preferred Park Avenue because it was so completely dull that it didn’t distract him from his thoughts.

Suddenly he said, “You said once that only a writer can understand a writer.”

“I think that’s true.”

“Then what about that shameful flash of pleasure that comes to me when I hear about someone else’s failure?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “The Germans call it Schadenfreude. We all suffer from that.”

“Schaden? Freude? What’s that?”

“The joy you feel at someone else’s misfortune.”

“At least I can control it consciously, but I only have contempt for my friends who call me up and gleefully report other people’s failures. The nightclub people aren’t like that, maybe because they’re too dumb. Nightclubs are great. All the people are very nice. Those stories about nasty houses and drunks are exaggerated; it happens maybe once a year. The nightclub people—they sit out there and root for you. If you’re sick they go on for you. And they all sing There’s No Business Like Show Business.

“I have great contempt for the theater—for the presumption of the theater. TV is idiot stuff, designed by idiots for idiots, which is why you have The Bev­erly Hillbillies. But the theater puts on such airs—the producers, the directors, the critics—that’s why it’s dying today. And it should.”

We went to the Broadhurst Theater, just across the street from Sardi’s, and Woody began warming up for the evening performance, skipping imaginary ropes and shooting imaginary baskets. He exhorted the cast: “Okay, we’re go­ing to kill ‘em tonight. We killed ‘em at the matinee and we’re going to kill ‘em tonight.” He jogged offstage and said to me, “We should do research on how often a laugh should come. Every minute? Every half minute? I don’t know. Did you clock our laughs the other night?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Sixty-nine in the first act. Sixty in the second. . . .”

“That runs five minutes shorter,” he interposed quickly.

“Twenty-six in the last act. Total: a hundred and fifty-five.”

“Not bad. Not bad at all, but you never know. My club act has forty-five minutes of unrelenting jokes. Some nights some jokes get the laughs, other nights, others. You can never tell about laughs. The phenomenon of getting and losing laughs can’t be understood. It’s a delicate chemistry.”

The stage manager called “Places, please.”

“You know, I didn’t prepare for this show,” Woody said. “Not one jot. And I haven’t tapped my club act at all, outside of failing with women and psycho­analysis and being short.”

He jogged to his position onstage in his tatty sweater, chinos and sneakers, his raggedy red hair disheveled, and sat down to watch the TV presentation of a Bogart film that opens the show. The curtain went up with a creak, and the world’s most successful loser was on.

The name of this game is Masochism For Fun and Profit. ◊

Photograph by Phillipe Halsman

The Pan Am Building is the current king in the city’s line of dominating skyscrapers

Like thousands before him, Tom Kyle came to New York hoping to be­come a stage star, and like thousands before him, he did not make it. So to­day, after years of trying and only a few small parts to show for it, Tom Kyle, at thirty-four, works full time be­hind the information desk in the lobby of the fifty-nine-story Pan Am Building, at Park Avenue and 45th Street. Strangers approach all day with questions like:

“Say, fella, about how many windows in this place?”

“About 8,000,” Kyle says, standing erect in blue uniform behind his desk. “Excuse me,” another man asks. “Where’s Mitsui and Company?”

“Thirty-eighth floor, sir.”

“Pardon me,” says a tall brunette, dressed in a tight-fitting tweed suit. “How do I get to the Sky Club?”

Kyle looks at her. She is lovely and a little out of breath.

“It’s on the fifty-sixth floor, ma’am,” Kyle says, taking her in during the few seconds he has before she disappears. “The elevator is at the far end of the corridor.” he says, a little regretfully.

“Thank you,” she says, smiling again, turning quickly toward the elevator, watched by Tom Kyle.

“Fringe benefits,” Kyle thinks.

Tom Kyle is not unhappy with his job. He has held onto it while ignoring opportunities elsewhere, in fashion modeling and show business, because the Pan Am Building is the swingingest skyscraper in town, and he has become addicted to the action it offers.

It starts at 9 A.M., when the secretaries arrive, swinging their hips, and does not end until midnight, when the charwomen leave, swinging their mops. In between, this big glass skyscraper is tense with 17,000 tenants, sways slightly in the wind, vibrates to the rumble of trains moving through Grand Central Terminal below Each working day it glows with 42,000 lights, gurgles with 60,000 gallons of water, taps with 10,000 typewriters, rings with 18,000 telephones. Its sixty-five elevators, the fastest in the world—they were hopped up a bit to surpass those of the Chase Manhattan Bank downtown—can travel at 1,700 feet per minute, and they slice through the worlds of Japanese bankers, Italian chemists, British steel men, American law firms, advertising agen­cies, stock brokerages, moviemakers, magazine editors, Mrs. America, Inc., and the Association for the Prevention of Drunken Driving, Inc.

The Pan Am swings because it is the largest new skyscraper in New York, the new girl in town, and is in its glory. This is temporary, of course, for in New York all skyscrapers sooner or later fall from fashion. As they get older, they are overshadowed by newer, brighter buildings that attract the more prestigious tenants. Tenants are as fickle as ticket buyers on Broad­way: they want to be in on the newest hit. New York is now filled with sky­scrapers that once were the first of the town but now merely stand, occupied largely by strugglers, not strivers.

Downtown is the Woolworth Building, all the rage a half century ago but now passé as office, address or land­mark. In the 1930′s, the Chrysler Building was fabulous, but today even Chrysler’s executives have abandoned it and moved into the Pan Am. And finally the Empire State, most famous of all skyscrapers, is fighting for its position; there is a plan to build two 110-story skyscrapers in downtown Manhattan. If this succeeds, and it has a good chance, the Empire State will never be the same.

But today it is the Pan Am that throbs with excitement and prosperity. Tom Kyle, from his vantage point in the lobby—giving directions, watching 368 people per minute flashing past his desk—feels he is part of a hit show. He sees beautiful women move by all day, a kind of musical revue with laughs, intrigue, mystery, and all sorts of characters who play themselves.

Through the crowd Tom Kyle spots Charles A. Lindbergh slipping into an elevator to be whisked lip to the forty-eighth floor for a conference with Pan American Airways. A moment later he sees Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton strolling in, about to ascend to the fourteenth to  discuss films in the offices of Seven Arts Associates Corp. Later Kyle may see Richard M. Nixon look around the lobby, glare, then disappear in an elevator up to Coudert Brothers on the thirteenth floor.

Then Kyle sees coming out of an elevator a fat tycoon and a buxom blonde—the same couple Kyle had seen going up in the elevator late the afternoon before. Did they spend the night in his executive suite? Possibly, Kyle thinks, because the blonde is now wearing dark sun glasses, and the tycoon is whistling a tune and trying desperately to seem inconspicuous and innocent.

Maybe Kyle should write a book, as he says, but its success would depend on his ability to pad the story, because his lobby-view of life is full of empty spaces. He overhears only bits of conversations, never sentences. He can only speculate on what is going on in passers’ minds, but he is never sure. This incomplete quality to everything contributes to the mystery and magic of his job—and in a sense, is also representative of the mystery and magic of Manhattan, where nobody is sure, nobody knows all that is going on around him, nobody can say with confidence, “This is how it is.”

For example, the executive from Kenyon & Eckhardt is smiling now as he passes Kyle in the lobby. The executive’s smile inspires confidence. Yet he may have just lost a million-dollar account. The  telephone repairman who stands in the corner of the lobby, studying the wiring in the wall, may be with the F.B.I. on a wire-tapping mission. And this proper executive, Samuel F. Pryor, Jr., who is walking toward the elevator—what does he carry within his attaché case? Top-secret memos? Possibly. But it is equally possible, Kyle has learned, that Mr. Pryor’s attaché case contains miniature dolls. Mr. Pryor, a leading official with Pan American Airways, is also one of America’s foremost doll collectors; he and Mrs. Pryor have about 8,000 of them in their home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Now, up on the eighth floor of the Pan Am, in offices occupied by the Commercial Union Insurance Group, the execu­tives are frowning. It is sunny in New York, the Commercial Union’s offices are bright and the firm is making lots of money; morale should be high. But not today. Word has just arrived that a big hurricane is expected to slash its way up the eastern coast of Florida and may bat­ter some property that just two days ago was insured by Commercial Union.

“Whenever there are storm warnings anywhere in the nation, you can read them on the faces of these top execs,” one junior executive pointed out cheerfully. “You’d see it on my face, too, but I’m not paid enough to worry.”

Strolling up on the fifty-sixth floor of the Pan Am Building, dangling a $16,000 check in his right hand, is a man who is paid enough to worry, but he does not seem worried that somebody will snatch the check from his hand. He is Gene Tunney, former heavyweight champion, here to drop the check off at Hayden Stone & Co. to pay for stock he just bought. After that, he will go to the Sky Club, on the same floor, for late lunch with a few other millionaires, and then return to his own office in the McCandless Corporation on the thirty-seventh floor.

The Sky Club is another of the building’s wonders. It provides a spectacular view of New York, the food is exceptional, the antique furniture exquisite. Most men who eat there regularly are millionaires, and it is usually 3 P.M., and sometimes later, before they have finished lunch and returned to their offices. However, there are some execu­tives. such as Al Fields of the Universal American Corporation, on the fifty-fourth floor, who do things differently. Mr. Fields eats at his desk. His food almost every day is yoghurt. He keeps it in the refrigerator of his plush office. (The private office refrigerator is the new big-business status symbol, having replaced British-sounding secretaries, who were losing their accents anyway.)

Mr. Fields, like some other executives, lives a hermetically sealed exist­ence; he rarely wanders into the city’s air. In the morning his daughter drives him from his Westport home to the train station and an overheated rail car; he rides it to Grand Central Station, takes the escalator up to the Pan Am’s mezzanine, waves at Tom Kyle, then rides the elevator to the fifty-fourth floor. He never wears an over­coat, even during blizzards. He never needs an overcoat. At 5:30 P.M. Mr. Fields takes the elevator down, catches the train, and is met by his daughter at the Westport station. Should his wife ask him how the weather was in New York, he has no idea.

“We live in a world of boxes,” Mr. Fields says gloomily. “We ride to New York each morning in a rail car, which is a box; take the elevator, which is a box; we work all day in an office building, which is a box; before we know it, we’re being carried out—in a box.” He shrugs, goes back to his yoghurt.

At twilight the Pan Am Building changes in tone and mood. Once the tenants begin to flood through the lobby and depart through the exits, the lights in the floors above begin to flick off: but the building is never completely quiet or lifeless. Detectives patrol the floors, searching for derelicts or thieves who might have slipped in unnoticed. The building echoes with the clanging pails and scrubbing mops and voices of the charwomen, who each night sweep out 40,000 pounds of waste paper and dump it into burlap bags. These are later collected by porters and hauled down to a storage room, where they are left for twenty-four hours ­to provide time for the recovery of valuable papers inadvertently thrown out. Then the haling machines squeeze it all into box-shaped hulks, each weighing 1,000 pounds and wrapped in wire so that it can be lifted into trucks arid delivered to paper and cardboard manufacturers. There it all will become typing paper, envelopes and memos again—millions of memos that will soon come back to haunt the nation’s office workers, including the 17,000 Pan Am people who each day pass Tom Kyle in the lobby and make him feel glad that he is there. ◊

RECENTLY I drove from Garrison-on-Hudson to New York on a Sunday afternoon, one unit in a creeping parade of metal, miles and miles of shiny paint and chrome inching along bumper to bumper. There were no old rust heaps, no jalopies. Every so often we passed a car pulled off the road with motor trouble, its driver and passengers waiting patiently for a tow car or a mechanic.

Not one of the drivers seemed even to consider fixing the difficulty. I doubted that anyone knew what the trouble was.

On this funereal tour I began to think of old times and old cars. Understand, I don’t want to go back to those old dogs. Any more than I want to go back to that old poverty. I love the fine efficient car I have. Rut at least I remembered. I remembered a time when you fixed your own car or you didn’t go any place. I remembered cars I had owned and cursed and hated and loved.

The first car I remember in the little town where I was born was, I think, a Reo with a chain drive and a steering bar. It was owned by a veterinary who got himself a bad name in Salinas for owning it. He seemed disloyal to horses. We didn’t like that car. We shouted insults at it as it splashed by on Stone Street. Then, gradually, more automobiles came into town, owned by the very rich. We didn’t have a car for many years. My parents never accepted the time-payment plan. To them it was a debt like any other debt, and to them debt was a sin. And a car cost a lot of money all in one piece.

Now it took a long time for a car to get in a condition where I could afford it, roughly about fifteen years. I had an uncle who ran a Ford agency but he didn’t give free samples to his relatives. He got rich selling Fords and himself drove a Stutz Bearcat—four cylinders, sixteen valves. Those were proud times when he roared up in front of our house with his cutout open, sounding like a rolling barrage. But this was dream stuff and not for us.

My first two cars were Model T’s, strange beings. They never got so beat up that you couldn’t somehow make them run. The first one was touring car. Chickens had roosted on its steering wheel and I never their marks off. The steering wheel was cracked so that if you put a weight on it it pinched your fingers when you let up. The back seat was for tools, wire and spare tires. I still confuse that car with my first love affair. The two were inextricably involved. I had it a long time. It never saw shelter or a mechanic. I remember how it used to shudder and sigh when I cranked it and how its crank would kick back viciously. It was a mean car. It loved no one, it ran in spurts and seemed to be as much influenced by magic as by mechanics.

My second Model T was a sedan. The back seat had a high ceiling and was designed to look like a small drawing room. It had lace curtains and cut-glass vases on the sides for flowers. It needed only a coal grate and a sampler to make it a perfect Victorian living room. And sometimes it served as a boudoir. There were gray silk roller shades you could pull down to make it cozy and private. But ladylike as this car was, it also had the indestructibility of ladies. Once in the mountains I stalled in a snow stoma a quarter of a mile from my cabin; I drained the water from the radiator and abandoned the car for the winter. From my window I could see it hub-deep in the snow. For some reason now forgotten, when friends visited me, we used to shoot at that car trying not to hit the glass. At a range of a quarter of a mile with a 30-30 this was pretty hard In the spring I dug it out. It was full of bullet holes but by some accident we had missed the gas tank. A kettle of hot water in the radiator, and that rolling parlor started right off. It ran all summer.

Model T’s created a habit pattern very difficult to break. I have told the following story to the Ford Company to prove their excellence. The cooling system of the Model T was based on the law that warm water rises and cool water sinks. It doesn’t do this very fast but then Model T’s didn’t run very fast. Now when a Model T sprang a radiator leak, the remedy was a handful of corn meal in the radiator. The hot water cooked the meal to mush and it plugged the leak. A little bag of meal was standard equipment in the tool kit.

In time, as was inevitable, I graduated to grander vehicles. I bought an open Chevrolet which looked like a black bathtub on wheels, a noble car full of innovations. I was living in Los Angeles at the time and my mother was coming to visit me. I was to meet her at the station, roughly thirty-five miles from where I lived. I washed the car and noticed that the radiator was leaking. Instinctively I went to the kitchen and found we had no corn meal, but there was oatmeal which is even better because it is more gooey. I put a cup of it in the radiator and started for the station.

Now the Chevrolet had a water pump to circulate the water faster. I had forgotten this. The trip to the station must have cooked the oatmeal thoroughly.

My mother arrived beautifully dressed. I remember she wore a hat with many flowers. She sat proudly beside me in the front seat and we started for home. Suddenly there was an explosion—a wall of oatmeal rose into the air, cleared the windshield, splashed on my mother’s hat and ran down her face. And it didn’t stop there. We went through Los Angeles traffic exploding oatmeal in short bursts. I didn’t dare stop for fear my mother would kill me in the street. We arrived home practically in flames because the water system was clogged and the limping car gave off clouds of smoke that smelled like burned oatmeal, and was. It took a long time to scrape my mother. She had never really believed in auto­mobiles and this didn’t help.

In the days of my nonsensical youth there were all kinds of standard practices which were normal then but now seem just plain nuts. A friend of mine had a Model T coupé, as tall and chaste as a one-holer. It rested in a lot behind his house and after a while he became convinced that someone was stealing his gasoline. The tank was under the front seat and could ordinarily be protected by locking the doors. But this car had no locks. First he left notes on the seat begging people not to steal his gasoline and when this didn’t work he rigged an elaborate trap. He was very angry, you see. He designed his snare so that if anyone opened the car door, the horn would blow and a shotgun would fire.

Now, how it happened we don’t know. Perhaps a drop of water, per­haps a slight earthquake. Anyway, in the middle of the night the horn went off. My friend leaped from bed, put on a bathrobe and a hat, I don’t know why, raced out the back door shouting “Got you!”—yanked open the car door and the shotgun blew his hat to bits. It was his best hat too.

Well, about this time the depression came along and only increased the complications. Gasoline was hard to come by. One of my friends, wishing to impress his date, would drive into a filling station, extend two fingers out the window, out of the girl’s sight, and say, “Fill her up,” Then, with two gallons in the tank he would drive grandly away. This same friend worked out a way of never buying a license, which he couldn’t afford anyway. He traded his car every time a license fee was due, but he only traded it for a car with a new license. His automobiles were a little worse each time but at least they were licensed.

With the depression came an era of automotive nonsense. It was no longer possible to buy a small car cheaply. Everyone wanted the Fords and Chevrolets. On the other hand, Cadillacs and Lincolns could be had for a song. There were two reasons for this. First, the big cars cost too much to run and, second, the relief committees took a sour view of anyone with a big expensive-looking car. Here is a story somewhat in point.

A friend of mine found himself in a condition of embarrassment which was pretty general and, to him, almost permanent. An old school friend, rich and retired, was going to Europe and suggested that George live in his great house in Pebble Beach in California. He could be a kind of caretaker. It would give him shelter and he could look after the house. Now the house was completely equipped, even to a Rolls-Royce in the garage. There was everything there but food. George moved in and in a firs flush of joy drove the Rolls to Monterey for an evening, exhausting the tank. During the next week he ate the dry cereals left in the kitchen and set traps for rabbits in the garden. At the end of ten days he was in a starving condition. He took to staying in bed in luxury to conserve his energy. One morning, when the pangs of hunger were eating at him, the doorbell rang. George arose weakly, stumbled across the huge drawing room, across the great hall carpeted in white, and opened the baronial door. An efficient-looking woman stood on the porch. “I’m from the Red Cross,” she said, holding out a pledge card.

George gave a cry of pleasure. “Thank God you’ve come,” he said. It was all crazy like that. It was so long since George had eaten they had to give him weak soup for quite a while.

At this time, I had an old, four-cylinder Dodge. It was a very desirable car—twelve-volt battery, continental gearshift, high-compression engine, supposed to run forever. It didn’t matter how much oil it pumped. It ran. But gradually I detected symptoms of demise in it. We had developed an instinct for this. The trick was to trade your car in just before it exploded. I wanted something small but that I couldn’t have. For my Dodge and ten dollars I got a Marmon, a great, low, racy car with alu­minum body and aluminum crankcase—a beautiful thing with a deep purring roar and a top speed of nearly a hundred miles an hour. In those days we didn’t look at the car first. We inspected the rubber. No one could afford new tires. The tires on the Marmon were smooth but no fabric showed, so I bought it. And it was a beautiful car—the best I had ever owned. The only trouble was that it got about eight miles to the gallon of gasoline. We took to walking a good deal, saving gasoline for emergencies.

One day there was a disturbing click in the rear end and then a crash. Now, anyone in those days knew what had happened. A tooth had broken in the ring gear of the rear end. This makes a heartbreaking noise. A new ring gear and pinions installed would come to ninety-five dollars or, roughly, three times what I had paid for the whole car.

It was obviously a home job, and it went this way. With a hand jack, I raised the rear end onto concrete blocks. Then I placed the jack on blocks and raised again until finally the Marmon stuck its rear end up in the air like an anopheles mosquito. Now, it started to rain. I stretched a piece of oilcloth to make a tent. I drained the rear end, removed the covers. Heavy, black grease ran up my sleeves and into my hair. I had no special tools, only a wrench, pliers and a screw driver. Special tools were made by hammering out nails on a brick. The ring gear had sheared three teeth. The pinions seemed all right but since they must be fitted, I had to discard them. Then I walked to a wrecking yard three miles away. They had no Mormons. It took a week to find a Marmon of my vintage. There were two days of bargaining. I finally got the price down to six dollars. I had to remove the ring gear and pinions myself, but the yard generously loaned tools. This took two days. Then, with my treasures back at my house I spent several days more lying on my back fitting the new parts. The ground was muddy and a slow drip of grease on my face and arms picked up the mud and held it. I don’t ever remember being dirtier or more uncomfortable. There was endless filing and fitting. Kids from as far as six blocks away gathered to give satiric advice. One of them stole my pliers, but pliers were in the public domain. I had probably stolen them in the first place. I stole some more from a neighbor. It wasn’t considered theft. Finally, all was in place. Now, I had to make new gaskets out of cardboard and tighten everything all around. I put in new grease, let the rear end gently down. There was no use in trying to get myself clean—that would take weeks of scrubbing with steel wool.

Now, word got around that the job was done. There was a large and friendly delegation to see the trial run—neighbors, kids, dogs, skeptics, well-wishers, critics. A parrot next door kept saying “Nuts!” in a loud squawking voice.

I started the engine. It sounded wonderful; it always sounded wonder­ful. I put the car in gear and crept out to the street, shifted gears and got half a block before the rear end disintegrated with a crash like the un­loading of a gravel car. Even the housing of the rear end was shattered. I don’t know what I did wrong but what I did was final. I sold the Marmon as it stood for twelve dollars. The junkman from whom I had bought the ring gear hauled it away—aluminum body, aluminum crank­case, great engine, silver-gray paint job, top speed a hundred miles an hour, and pretty good rubber too. Oh, well—that’s the way it was.

In those days of the depression one of the centers of social life was the used-car dealer’s lot. I got to know one of these men of genius and he taught me quite a bit about this business which had become a fine art. I learned how to detect sawdust in the crankcase. If a car was really beat up, a few handfuls of sawdust made it very quiet for about five miles. All the wiles and techniques of horse-trading learned over a thousand years found their way into the used-car business. There were ways of making tires look strong and new, ways of gentling a motor so that it purred like a kitten, polishes to blind the buyer’s eyes, seat covers that concealed the fact that the springs were coming through the upholstery. To watch and listen to a good used-car man was a delight, for the razzle-dazzle was triumphant. It was a dog-eat-dog contest and the customer who didn’t beware was simply unfortunate. For no guarantee went beyond the curb.

My friend in the used-bar business offered a free radio in every car sold for one week. Now, a customer came in who hated radios. My friend was pained at this. The customer said, “All right, how much will that car be without a radio?”

My friend wrote some figures on a pad. “Well,” he said, “I can let you have it for ten dollars extra—but I don’t want to make a practice of it.”

And the customer cheerfully paid.

It’s all different now. Everything is chrome and shiny paint. A car used to be as close and known and troublesome and dear as a wife. Now we drive about in strangers. It’s more comfortable, sure, but something has been lost. I hope I never get it back. ◊

The wondrous devices of Disneyland take on startling importance in the mind of a science fiction seer

Two thousand years back, people entering Grecian temples dropped coins into machinery that then clanked forth holy water.

It is a long way from that first slot machine to the “miracles of rare device” created by Walt Disney for his kingdom, Disneyland. When Walt Whitman wrote, “I sing the Body Electric,” he little knew he was guessing the motto of our robot-dominated society. I believe Disney’s influence will be felt centuries from today. I say that Disney and Disneyland can be prime movers of our age.

But before I offer proof, let me sketch my background. At twelve, I owned one of the first Mickey Mouse buttons in Tucson, Arizona. At nineteen, sell­ing newspapers on a street corner, I lived in terror I might be struck by a car and killed before the premiere of Disney’s film extravaganza, Fantasia. In the last thirty years I have seen Fantasia fifteen times, Snow White twelve times, Pinocchio eight times. In sum, I was, and still am, a Disney nut.

You can imagine, then, how I regarded an article in the Nation some years ago that equated Disneyland with Las Vegas. Both communities, claimed the article, were vulgar, both represented American culture at its most corrupt, vile and terrible.

I rumbled for half an hour, then exploded. I sent a letter winging to the prim Nation editors.

“Sirs,” it said, “like many intellectuals before me I delayed going to Disneyland, having heard it was just too dreadfully middle-class. One wouldn’t dream of being caught dead there.

“But finally a good friend jollied me into my first grand tour of the Magic Kingdom. I went…with one of the great children of our time: Charles Laughton.”

It is a good memory, the memory of the day Captain Bligh dragged me writhing through the gates of Disney­land. He plowed a furrow in the mobs; he surged ahead, one great all-envelop­ing presence from whom all fell aside. I followed in the wake of Moses as he bade the waters part, and part they did. The crowds dropped their jaws and, buffeted by the passage of his immense body through the shocked air, spun about and stared after us.

We made straight for the nearest boat—wouldn’t Captain Bligh?—the Jungle Ride.

Charlie sat near the prow, pointing here to crocodiles, there to bull elephants, farther on to feasting lions. He laughed at the wild palaver of our river­boat steersman’s jokes, ducked when pistols were fired dead-on at charging hippopotamuses, and basked face up in the rain, eyes shut, as we sailed under the Schweitzer Falls.

We blasted off in another boat, this one of the future, the Rocket to the Moon. Lord, how Bligh loved that.

And at dusk we circuited the Missis­sippi in the Mark Twain, with the jazz band thumping like a great dark heart, and the steamboat blowing its forlorn dragon-voice whistle, and the slow banks passing, and all of us topside, hands sticky with spun candy, coats snowed with popcorn salt, smiles hammer-tacked to our faces by one explosion of delight and surprise after another.

Then, weary children, Charlie the greatest child and most weary of all, we drove home on the freeway.

That night I could not help but remember a trip East when I got of a Greyhound in Las Vegas at three in the morning. I wandered through the mechanical din, through clusters of feverish women clenching robot devices, Indian-wrestling them two falls out of three. I heard the dry chuckle of coins falling out of chutes, only to be reinserted, redigested and lost forever in the machinery guts.

And under the shaded lights, the green-visored men and women dealing cards, dealing cards, noiselessly, ex­pressionlessly, numbly, with viper motions, flicking chips, rolling dice, taking money, stacking chips—showing no joy, no fun, no love, no care, unhearing, silent and blind. Yet on and on their hands moved. The hands belonged only to themselves. While across from these ice-cold Erector-set people, I saw the angered lust of the grapplers, the snatchers, the forever losing and the always lost.

I stayed in Dante’s Las Vegas Inferno for one hour, then climbed back on my bus, taking my soul locked between my ribs, careful not to breathe it out where someone might snatch it, press it, fold it and sell it for a two-buck chip.

In sum, if you lifted the tops of the Las Vegas gamblers’ craniums you would find  watch cogs, black hair­springs, levers, wheels in wheels all apurr and agrind. Tap them, they’d leak lubricant. Bang them, they’d bell like aluminum tambourines. Slap their cheeks and a procession of dizzy lemons and cherries would fly by under their cocked eyelids. Shoot them and they’d spurt nuts and bolts.

Vegas’s real people are brute robots, machine-tooled bums.

Disneyland’s robots are, on the other hand, people, loving, caring and eter­nally good.

Essence is everything.

What final point do I choose to make in the comparison? It is this: we live in an age of one billion robot devices that surround, bully, change and sometimes destroy us. The metal-and-plastic machines are all amoral. But by their design and function they lure us to be better or worse than we might otherwise be.

In such an age it would be foolhardy to ignore the one man who is building human qualities into robots—robots whose influence will be ricocheting off social and political institutions ten thousand afternoons from today.

Snobbery now could cripple our intellectual development. After I had heard too many people sneer at Disney and his audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln in the Illinois exhibit at the New York World’s Fair, I went to the Disney robot factory in Glendale. I watched the finishing touches being put on a second computerized, electric- and air-pressure-driven humanoid that will “live” at Disneyland from this summer on. I saw this new effigy of Mr. Lincoln sit, stand, shift his arms, turn his wrists, twitch his fingers, put his hands behind his back, turn his head, look at me, blink and prepare to speak. In those few

moments I was filled with an awe I have rarely felt in my life.

Only a few hundred years ago all this would have been considered blasphemous, I thought. To create man is not man’s business, but God’s, it would have been said. Disney and every technician with him would have been bundled and burned at the stake in 1600.

And again, I thought, all of this was dreamed before. From the fantastic geometric robot drawings of Bracelli in 1624 to the mechanical people in Capek’s R.U.R. in 1925, others have conceived and drawn metallic extensions of man and his senses, or played at it in theater.

But the fact remains that Disney is the first to make a robot that is convincingly real, that looks, speaks and acts like a man. Disney has set the history of humanized robots on its way toward wider, more fantastic excur­sions into the needs of civilization.

Send your mind on to the year 2065. A mere century from now set yourself down with a group of children enter­ing an audio-animatronic museum. In­side, you find the primal sea from which we swam and crawled up on the land. In that sea, the lizard beasts that tore the air with strange cries for a million on a million years. Robot animals feasting and being feasted upon as robot apeman waits in the wings for the nightmare blood to cease flowing.

Farther on you see robot cavemen frictioning fire into existence, bringing a mammoth down in a hairy avalanche, curing pelts, drawing quicksilver horse flights like flashes of motion pictures on cavern walls.

Robot Vikings treading the Vinland coastal sands.

Caesar, computerized, speaks in the Forum. falls in the Senate, lies dead and perfect as Antony declaims over his body for the ten-thousandth time.

Napoleon, ticking as quietly as a clockshop, at Waterloo.

Generals Grant and Lee alive again at Appomattox.

King John, all hums and oiled whirs at Runnymede, signing Magna Charta.

Fantastic? Perhaps. Ridiculous? Somewhat. Nonsensical? Vulgar? A touch. Not worth the doing? Worth doing a thousand times over.

For one problem of man is believing in his past.

We have had to take on faith the unproven events of unproven years. For all the reality of ruins and scrolls and tablets, we fear that much of what we read has been made up. Artifacts may be no more than created symbols, artificial skeletons thrown together to fit imaginary closets. The reality, even of the immediate past, is irretrievable.

Thus, through half belief, we are often doomed to repeat that very past we should have learned from.

But now through audio-animatronics, robot mechanics, or if you prefer, the science of machines leaning their warm shadows toward humanity, we can grasp and fuse the best of two art forms.

Motion pictures suffer from not be­ing “real” or three-dimensionally pres­ent. Their great asset is that they can be perfect. That is, a director of genius can shoot, cut, reshoot, edit and re-edit his dream until it is just the way he wants it. His film, locked in a time cap­sule and opened five centuries later, would still contain his ideal in exactly the form he set for it.

The theater suffers from a reverse problem. Live drama is indeed more real, it is ^“there” before you in the flesh. But it is not perfect. Out of thirty-odd performances a month, only once, perhaps, will all the actors to­gether hit the emotional peak they are searching for.

Audio-animatronics borrows the per­fection of the cinema and marries it to the “presence” of stage drama.

To what purpose?

So that at long last we may begin to believe in every one of man’s many million days upon this Earth.

Emerging from the robot museums of tomorrow, your future student will say: I know, I believe in the history of the Egyptians, for this day I helped lay the cornerstone of the Great Pyramid.

Or, I believe Plato actually existed, for this afternoon under a laurel tree in a lovely country place I heard him discourse with friends, argue by the quiet hour; the building stones of a great Republic fell from his mouth.

Now at last see how Hitler derived his power. I stood in the stadium at Nuremberg, I saw his fists beat on the air, I heard his shout and the echoing shout of the mob and the ranked armies. For some while I touched the living fabric of evil. I knew the terrible and tempting beauty of such stuffs. I smelled the torches that burned the books. I turned away and came out for air…. Beyond, in that museum, lies Belsen, and beyond that, Hiroshima…. Tomorrow I will go there.

For these students it will not be his­tory was but history is. 

Not Aristotle lived and died, but Aristotle is in residence this very hour, just down the way.

Not Lincoln’s funeral train forever lost in the crepe of time, but Lincoln eternally journeying from Springfield to Washington to save a nation.

Not Columbus sailed but Columbus sails tomorrow morning; sign up, take ship, go along.

Not Cortez sighted Mexico, but Cortez makes landfall at 3 P.M. by the robot museum clock. This instant, Montezuma waits to be wound-up and sent on his way.

Perhaps out of all this fresh seeing and knowing will come such under­standing as will stop our cycling round to repeat our past.

Do I make too much of this? Perhaps. Nothing is guaranteed. We are wandering in the childhood of machines. When we and the machines ma­ture, who can say what we might ac­complish together?

Am I frightened by any of this? Yes, certainly. For these audio-animatronic museums must be placed in hands that will build the truths as well as possible, and lie only through occasional error. Otherwise we shall end in the company of Baron Frankenstein and some AC-DC Genghis Khan.

The new appreciation of history begins with the responsibility in the hands of a man I trust, Walt Disney. In Disneyland he has proven again that the first function of architecture is to make men over make them wish to go on living, feed them fresh oxygen, grow them tall, delight their eyes, make them kind.

Disneyland liberates men to their better selves. Here the wild brute is gently corralled, not wised and squashed, not put upon and harassed, not tromped on by real-estate operators, nor exhausted by smog and traffic.

What works at Disneyland should work in the robots that Disney, and others long after him, invent and send forth upon the land.

I rest my case by sending you at your next free hour to Disney land itself. There you will collect your own evidence. There you will see the happy faces of people.

I don’t mean dumb-cluck happy, I don’t mean men’s-club happy or sewing-circle happy. I mean truly happy.

No beatniks here. No Cool people with Cool faces pretending not to care, thus swindling themselves out of life or any chance for life.

Disneyland causes you to care all over again. You feel it is that first day in the spring of that special year when you discovered you were really alive. You return to those morns in childhood when you woke and lay in bed and thought, eyes shut, “Yes, sir, the guys will be here any sec. A pebble will tap the window, a dirt clod will horse-thump the roof, a yell will shake the treehouse slats.”

And then you woke fully and the rock did bang the roof and the yell shook the sky and your tennis shoes picked you up and ran you out of the house into living.

Disneyland is all that. I’m heading there now. Race you? ◊

*   *   *

Ray Bradbury, a prolific—and prize­winning—author of science fiction stories and other prose, lives in Southern Cali­fornia with his wife and four daughters.

THE FIRST TIME you tow a house trailer you keep jerking the wheel to compensate for that crazy sway in the back end. It takes a long time to get enough used to it to ignore it. The first haul I ever made with mine—a trip that, although I didn’t know it then, turned out to be the first leg of a junket that would take me clear across the country and back and consume a year and a half—was to Memphis, Tennessee, from my home in Illinois. That’s about 400 miles, and it took me four days to make it. A year and a half later, on my way home from California, I hauled from Tucson, Arizona, to El Paso in one day. I had left a green-eared neophyte, and I was coming back a veteran. There is no pride in the world more rabid than that of a confirmed and dedicated trailerite. The next winter I took my trailer to Florida in four days, just about 1,200 miles.

In between those trips was a year and a half spent living a couple of months in one town after another, one state after another, one trailer park after another, all the way from Memphis to the West Coast, and always in my own home.

On your way somewhere, you roll into a strange town in the evening just at dusk. You know you can’t make the next town before dark, so you find a park. You talk to the man and pay him, park your trailer, connect up your water, sewer and electric lines, step inside and turn on the lights—and discover with a kind of weird surprise that you are home. The same identical home you closed, locked and left this morning. You take the radio and books off the couch (where you have to keep them, traveling) and set them back up on their shelves and look around. No matter how many times you repeat this experience, you never get over that weird surprise at finding everything here, just as you left it. You’re ready to cook your own supper with your own food on your own stove. All around you are people in other trailers, both transients and permanents, doing the same thing. You can’t help but feel a kinship with them. After supper, you can unhitch your car and go downtown to see a show, at home in a strange town you maybe never saw before. And the next time you pass that way, it won’t be a strange town any more.

With a trailer there’s no house-hunting when you move, no high rent stickups. A year ago the average trailer park charged five dollars a week for space. A dollar a day for overnight is standard.

Curiously enough, a lot of people who own trailers don’t have cars and cannot drive. When they move, they hire someone to haul the trailer for them. Many of them don’t even move. Some people live for years on the same lot in the same park and if they ever do move to a new town, they sell the trailer and leave it there like a house and buy a new one when they get where they’re going.

I learned all this at the park in Memphis, where I got my first such hauling job. Mr. Leahy, the rotund but hardheaded little Irishman who owned the park, knew I didn’t have much money and, knowing I was a writer, I think he worried about my ability to come in out of the rain. He put me onto the job of hauling a lady’s trailer up to Blytheville, Arkansas, for her, about seventy-five miles, for twenty-five dollars. That was my start as a professional hauler, and I picked up a good bit at it during the next year and a half.

The lady from Blytheville, it seemed, didn’t get along with her husband. They fought all the time, and he—a crack master mechanic—would periodically go on a great drunk when marriage proved too much for him. She always retaliated by hiring someone to haul the trailer up home to Blytheville where her mother lived. She didn’t go home to mother’s; she took home to mother’s, a much more effective maneuver. The husband would come back to an empty lot and no place to sleep and have to rent a tourist cottage from Mr. Leahy. He would stand this extra expense and lonely freedom about a week, then his pride would vanish and he would go up to Blytheville and get his wife, who was wait­ing for him fearfully, afraid he wouldn’t come, and they would have to hire someone to bring the trailer back. Mr. Leahy always saved their trailer space for them. Ten days after I hauled her up, I made another twenty-five dollars by going up and hauling them both back. They spent the trip in the back seat of the Jeep with their arms around each other. I left Memphis soon after that so I missed the next trip.

Trailer parks differ across the country. In cities and around industrial centers like Memphis they are usually bigger and built for utility; small cities in themselves with miniature blocks laid out along rigid squares of streets, and mostly populated by the skilled and semiskilled labor who have come to work in the various defense industries. Rarely is there a tree in sight. There were a few trees in the park at Memphis, which covered a full city block—mostly old ones along the drive back in to the Leahy’s big home—but space under them required a year or so on the waiting list.

In Colorado Springs at the foot of Pikes Peak, where I moved next, I found a totally different type of park, the “resort” park. Small, with barely space enough for ten trailers (in addition to the half dozen cabins), harder to get in and out with your trailer because of a sharply bent road and a rustic bridge to cross, it had nothing but trees, and catered to people with small vacation trailers and retired “summer visitors” (we try not to call them “tourists” any more) who stay the whole season, and then move south to Phoenix or Tucson to become “winter visitors.” Located at the mouth of Red Rock Canyon, which loomed above it, it more than made up for its lack of trailer-toilet facilities by the grove of aspens it was set in and the rocky mountain stream (the reason for the rustic bridge) which ran down through it, drowning the car noises —and practically all other noises, including neighbors—from the highway.

The owner of this park, a gentleman named Thomas T. Newby, was a long lean dehydrated hunter with a freezer full of game. He impatiently attended his park during the “summer season,” so that he might be financially free to hunt deer, antelope, elk and moose during the rest of the year. I spent more than one long afternoon loafing in Tom’s office with Tom and his son-in-law, listening avidly to their tales; and if I made them unhappy by reminding them of their exasperation with civilization, they more than got even by giving me a love of that peculiarly Western-type hunting which I was forced to carry around for three years before I got enough money to do some of it.

In Colorado Springs it begins getting cold in September. I moved on down to Albuquerque. I was coming more and more under the influence of the resort type of trailering, with its seasonal rhythms, north in the summer and south in the winter. Consequently, I was thrown more and more with the resort type of trailerite. These are older people, usually retired. They have to be retired, or else engaged in a work they can carry with, them, to be able to move around like that.

One of the things about writing that lends itself to trailer living is this fact of being your own boss and able to work as well one place as another, and in addition, requiring very little equipment to carry with you. I knew one man in Florida who had the front half of his trailer fitted up as a machine shop with lathes and drill presses and carried his business with him. He had a big trailer, but it still didn’t make for very comfort­able living. But he was an exception; mostly they are retired.

Of the two types, the skilled- and semiskilled-labor people in the cities, and the retired people in the resort towns, the retired group is the harder to get to know. You can usually meet the labor group and their wives by going to the bar nearest the park and ordering beer. They are a stiff, proud, independent bunch, used to traveling, and inclined to be captious if you’re wearing a white collar; otherwise, they’re friendly. If you’re dressed in a T-shirt and Levis, they like you—even if they know you’re a writer. And if you admire crafts and skills you can’t help but like them. Bricklayers, steelworkers, machinists, they follow defense work or construction jobs back and forth across the country. Many of them have settled into permanent jobs in town and just gone on living in trailers anyway; I suspect it gives them a feeling they can always quit and move on, even though they know they may never do it.

The retired people are much more difficult; largely, I think, because of the fact that they are retired. They may be ex-plumbers or ex-executives, and some have more money than others, but they all have that one thing in common which sets them apart: they are retired; they are no longer part of the stream of building, expanding, fighting life—except in their capacity as Consumers; and the knowledge makes them an intensely proud, tight-knit, jealous, crotchety clan which intends you to know they ain’t askin’ nobody for nothin’. As a group, they haul their trailers slower, spend more time fiddling with their rigs, and watch their money closer. They see a lot of the country and see it cheap. It’s a matter of pride with them to see how cheap they can see it. They can tell you by number the highways in and out of almost any city and where each goes and whether it’s a good road. And if it’s not good, they can tell you which one to take instead. They are often hard to get along with, and almost always hard to make friends of, and whenever you get to know one you invariably like him.

One of the growing hazards of life today is what you might call this “retirement neurosis.” In men, it corresponds somewhat to the nervous disorders caused by the change of life in women. And while it may not be epidemic in Europe or Asia, that doesn’t make it any less epidemic here. The retired people I’ve met living in trailers may not have cured the ailment, but they sure have arrested its development.

About the best way to meet them, I’ve found, is to have something to go wrong with your trailer. Then groups of them suddenly materialize from nowhere with advice and directions. They will usually end up in a violent argument as to which of their methods is the best for you. I remember once I pulled into a park in Marathon, Florida, late at night. My trailer had contracted a weak spring on the right side, but I hadn’t noticed it myself. I wasn’t out of bed next morning before my next-door neighbor, a crotchety old-timer, was over examining it, grease all over his hands. He already had it all settled for me. As I stepped out the door, he told me what was wrong, where to take the trailer to get it fixed, how long it would take and how much it would cost—and offered the additional advice that I ought to get the same thing done to the left side because if I didn’t it would go bad eventually. The group that was forming dispersed regretfully. The old one and I (he was a retired car dealer from Columbus, Ohio) ended up by becoming good friends and I was invited fishing. I probably would never have met him if my spring hadn’t gone bad.

#

I didn’t mean to give the impression that there were only two types of people in trailers. Actually, almost every type of person lives in trailers nowadays. Ten years ago it was assumed that only unshaven fishermen and other failures lived in trailers. Some aspects of this attitude still hang over. For instance, you still don’t find many white-collar people in trailers, but they are getting to be more numerous lately since trailering has begun to be more respectable. When I lived in Tucson I knew a high-school teacher who lived in a trailer. He wasn’t exactly a typical high-school teacher, but he was a high-school teacher.

A big, gentle, bearlike man, he lived with his wife and three small daughters in a big thirty-three-foot Spartan. He had lived and taught in the same small town in Minnesota all his life, until he got the idea that he didn’t know enough about his own country to teach. It oppressed him so much that he finally quit his job and sold his home, packed his family in the trailer, and started out to see the country. He would teach a couple of years in one place and then move on and teach a couple in another. Sometimes he had trouble getting teaching jobs because he lived in a trailer. When he did, he took other jobs. His family loved it all as much as he did; they were seeing the country too. I think he taught civics. But it was probably “Philosophy-Made-Understandable-for-Teen­-Agers” when he got through with it. When I knew him, he had just gotten a job teaching after six months of pushing a concrete buggy on a construction job and was filled with an intense enthusiasm for the build­ing trades and the people who worked in them.

Of course, such a man is rare. Few of us have that much of the idealist in us. Yet I’m about convinced, by now, it’s that same strain of the foolish romantic, though in a lesser degree perhaps, that is working in all of us who get trailers, driving each of us out in search of some private dream. Maybe we hunger to be cosmopolitan and well traveled. Or maybe we just want to live in the Far West where we can wear a big hat, Levis and boots without being laughed at.

I remember one man out in California. He was from Iowa where he had run a small dry-goods store for twenty-five years. He sold it and he and his wife bought this trailer and had it hauled out to the Coast. He had a car but he refused to haul a trailer with it. That was how I met him. We both lived in the Valley Park out on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood, and he hired me to haul his trailer over around Van Nuys for him, where he’d bought a small orange grove. He told me all this in the Jeep going over. You could see he had always dreamed of owning an orange grove, but he was worried because he’d invested all his money in it and hadn’t left himself any capital.

Their plan was to live in their trailer till they made enough to build a house. The other thing that worried him was the mud. It had been raining and he was afraid I couldn’t get the trailer in.

I couldn’t reassure him about the orange grove, but I could assure him that if anything short of a winch truck could get his trailer in, my Jeep could. I got him in, all right; I had to get him and a passer-by to stand on the front bumper to give me traction and put it clear down in low gear, low range in the four-wheel drive, but I got it in, and around among the orange trees, and parked just where he wanted it. By this time he had fallen in love with Jeeps and was going to trade his car in on one. I don’t know if he ever did. I left him there with his wife, who had driven their car out, sloshing around in the mud under his orange trees, getting his trailer set up. He hadn’t come back to the Valley Park when I left California. Maybe he made a go of it. The oranges looked awfully scrawny to me, but I don’t know the first thing about oranges.

Apart from the philosophical considerations, living in a trailer is a lot of fun. There is always a sort of picnic feel, for one thing. A sort of holiday air. It makes you feel you’re living on a perpetual vacation, even if you’re not. You’re much closer to the outdoors than you are in a house. In winter this can be bad, but in summer you have all the fun of camping out, and yet all the comforts of living in, too, such as innerspring mattresses, refrigerator, hot-water heater, stove and bar. Consequently when the weather’s good, you spend a great deal more time outdoors, which is probably good for you.

There is also, in a park, a curious sense of poignancy which is lent to trailer-camp life by the awareness that before long you’ll be leaving. It’s the same thing that makes a man’s life seem more sparkling in a war, simply because he may shortly lose it. And the better you like the park, the stronger the feeling. Even a simple thing like going to the community wash-house for a shower can become an intensely emotional act in a trailer park you like.

One of the best memories I have of trailer-camp life is that park in Tucson where I knew the civics teacher. It was called Princeton Court, because it was located on Prince Road, I guess, and it was the pet and darling of Bob Heinig, who owned it. All Bob’s time and energy went on the park. So did most of his wife Helen’s. Even their two small children did a lot of things around it although, I must admit, somewhat reluctantly.

At the Princeton Court, every trailer space had a concrete patio for an awning “porch.” (That in itself is unusual.) There was a good-size concrete-block recreation hall. Next to it were a couple of shuffle-board courts with night lights, and next to them a playground complete with basketball court. The fixtures in the community wash-houses—for those who didn’t have bathrooms in their trailers—always worked, and were always clean. I had a bath in mine, but I preferred to go over to the wash-house for my shower anyway, and listen to the conversation of the men and boys as they shaved or washed up after work. I knew almost all of them. There was a curious sense of closeness and intimacy about the whole park, and anyone who came there immediately became a part of it. It was the antithesis of a New York apartment house.

In the center of the park there was a remada (Southwestern for roof without walls), with a concrete floor and a Ping-pong table, which was the social center. In the evenings there was always a little group, constantly changing in personnel, to sit in the remada and talk, while the little kids played Ping-pong under the light or “flag raid” all around us in the dark, and the music drifted out to us from the lighted rec hall where the teen-age kids were dancing to the record player. The talk would usually wind up on trailering, but it covered everything.

I remember it was on just such an evening that the civics teacher told me about the social stigma he encountered everywhere because he lived in a trailer. People in a town, especially the teachers, school board and PTA, seemed to think he was unstable and irresponsible, disreputable and vaguely immoral, because he lived in a trailer in a trailer park. He laughed about it when he told me. He wouldn’t live anywhere else.

I don’t know what screwy romantic dream I (like the civics teacher) first had that started me out in a trailer. Probably I had fifteen or twenty; and I don’t think I realized a single one. But I do know that one of the results of chasing them is that I have a lot of fond memories that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Maybe that’s the way it always is with dreams.

Anyway, I know I’ll never go back to any of the places where I lived (or to the states in which they’re located) without feeling in a sense I’m coming home. I remember the profuse woods of Overton Park in Memphis lovingly, and all the neon signs on Union Avenue as you drop down the slope from Main Street and the river. In Dodge City I bought my first Western hat at Eckle’s Dep’t Store. I remember Colorado Springs, where we drove the Jeep up Pikes Peak with the top off and almost froze; and The Garden of the Gods there—long thin slabs of red sandstone thrust up on edge six, eight hundred feet—which I know like the back of my hand because I used to climb all over them in the after­noon to relax from writing. In Albuquerque we hunted jack rabbits from the Jeep with the top off and the windshield down. Tucson means little air conditioners on all the houses, and the trip up to Mt. Lemmon where the big pines are; and Nogales means Mexican food that turns your eye pouches fiery red.

When I left Tucson, I crossed the border at Nogales and went on down through Hermosillo—brown ‘dobe building blocks baking in the sun along deserted streets at noon—to Guaymas, the fishing center on the Gulf of California, stayed there two weeks (I couldn’t afford to fish), then came back up to Tucson and on to California. Guaymas was a hundred calendar paintings come to life, and other people’s fish hung up to show on block and tackle. Hollywood was fast-driving, futuristic “Free­ways” where I learned the art of traffic driving from the experts, and encountered not one single soul who had anything to do with making movies. And then the long trip home, two weeks with the top off driving in a pair of trunks, clear across the desert, up through summer Texas, and on into the gradually greening East with the best tan I ever had.

Not long ago a friend of mine in the oil business was telling me about an old friend of his, a man I didn’t know. Sixty-three, hearty and healthy, a big eater and drinker, with the astute inquisitive mind (that had made him a top executive) still unimpaired by age, he would be retired at sixty-five; and with the fatal date still almost two years off, he was be­ginning to lose weight over it. My friend, whose own rather questionable hobby is the nerve-racking job of supporting and administering a colony of temperamental young writers through those first lean years, and whose work is thus cut out for him when he retires, was worried about his old friend. He had seen them retire before, he said. If they lasted two years, they were lucky.

I wasn’t being asked for advice, but I stuck my oar in anyway. “Hell, that’s easy,” I said. “Tell him to buy a trailer.” I could see my friend was startled by the suggestion, but as I talked on, he began to look elated.

“There are approximately one hundred and seventy-five National Parks and Monuments in this country alone, not counting Canada. And at least twice that many other places that aren’t parks. If he started out to see them all, like they ought to be seen, it would take him twenty years. If he’s a loafer, tell him to go to Florida and make a year’s tour around the coast. They’ve got trailer parks right on the water’s edge from Key West on up.

“Or,” I said, “if he’s the adventurous type, and don’t mind the food, he can make the haul over the mountains from Laredo down to Mexico City.”

That was one of the trips I had always had a hankering to make, and I began to feel that rabid vainglory of the trailerite stealing over me. “Say, did I ever tell you about the time I hauled over Guadalupe Pass in Texas? That’s right on Signal Peak, you know, the highest point in Texas. There were three garages with tow trucks at the bottom. They made their living off of trailers. But I had my little old Jeep. I—”

My friend had to get up and go to work in the morning. Besides, he had heard them all at least twice. After he went to bed, I made coffee and got out my old Rand-McNally Road Atlas I had red-lined all my trips in, and sat up just poring over it. On the big map in the front is a red network of lines clear across the southern half of the continent; but there weren’t any on the northern half—except for Illinois. It got me to figuring.

Maybe this summer I could take her out across the Dakotas and Mon­tana to Seattle. My Jeep’s about through the book, and I traded my old twenty-six-footer in on a big new thirty-three-foot Spartan that I never meant to haul, just live in in the summers up home. But I’ve got a new big car I could haul her with. What I figure, if I was in Seattle maybe I might go on down the West Coast in the fall and cut over to Reno and Vegas for a while. And then this winter I could try that haul over the Sierra Madres down to Mexico City.

Or maybe I might go up through New England, instead. I’ve never been up there.

I wish I’d never started writing this article. ◊