Writing about the Mill
Valley, Marin City and Sausalito of the 1950s and 60s poses certain
problems.
Sociologically the Marin County of today is very different from what we knew growing up. In Mill Valley the mountain and the
high school campus remain largely unchanged but that's where the similarities
end.
I personally find popular culture helpful in
recapturing that about the society which was fleeting. Pop music, movies, comic
books and candy bars are all good markers and in remembering them you often
recall other things too.
In this instance I'm hoping to recapture the autumn of
1959 so I'm going to start with Bobby Darin's recording of Mack The Knife which came out while I was in Mr. Healy's seventh
grade class at Edna Maguire. I had no context for judging this song, being
totally ignorant of The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. I simply fell in love with the
swinging big band sound of Darin's record.
Oh the shark, babe, has such teeth dear,
And he shows them pearly white,
Just a jack knife has old Mack Heath, babe,
And he keeps it out of sight,
This record was, for me, the most exciting thing to
hit the top 40 for a long time as was Poison Ivy by The Coasters. By this time I was no longer a
record buyer or collector but mainly someone who heard these songs on the radio
and the Top 40 at this time was an interesting potpourri.
El Paso
by Marty Robbins, Neil Sedaka's Oh! Carol,
Running Bear, Teen Angel and Sweet Nothin's by Brenda Lee. Elvis Presley released Stuck On You and Alley Oop was a hit for the Hollywood Argyles. Johnny Mathis gave us Misty and Sam Cooke sang Wonderful World.
Don't Know much about history,
Don't know much biology,
Don't know much about a science book,
Don't know much about the French I took,
But I do know that I love you,
And I know that if you loved me too,
What a wonderful world it would be,
These were just a few of the
great records which came out during my time in seventh grade.
Mr. Healy was one of the best teachers I ever had and
I do wish I had encountered more like him but, alas, I did not. He taught
English and History and for him I worked hard and enjoyed it. I remember he
drew armies of stick-men on the blackboard while explaining the Russian
strategy for defeating the Germans in WW2. He also printed neatly in capital
letters, a habit I picked up from him. For more years than I care to remember I
copied Mr. Healy's style of printing in capitals. The habit was finally broken
when I took a French evening class in the 70s which required me to revert to
upper and lower case.
Making the transition from Alto to Edna Maguire was
exciting. For the first time we had two teachers. Our home room teacher was
Mrs. Gustavson who taught maths and science. She was okay but didn't get my
attention the way Mr. Healy did. In fact the things which really got my
attention at this time were movies, pop music, Uncle Scrooge comic books and
MAD magazine. I had been an avid reader and collector of MAD since 1956 and I
loved its anarchic humour. At this time I didn't know anyone my age who read
it. Mr. Healy's wife worked in an advertising agency and he told us that her
colleagues were all overjoyed when one of their ads was lampooned by MAD.
Although Elvis Presley had been in the army for over a
year he was still producing records like A Fool Such As I and A Big Hunk Of Love. Over the summer vacation Ray Charles released a
record which was to become a must for every band playing dances in Marin: What'd
I Say with its infectious oohs and
ahhs.
Among my favourite movie stars was Jimmy Stewart even
though I knew about his right wing politics. We received all our Hollywood
gossip from the Hallinans who tended to describe movie stars with liberal
political leanings as "good guys." So actors like Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Henry Fonda and
Gregory Peck were all good guys while John Wayne, Robert Taylor and Ginger
Rogers were not.
Jimmy Stewart's performance in Otto Preminger's Anatomy
Of A Murder was absolutely fantastic
and I loved that movie but his next one, though entertaining, caused me to be
unsettled.
In Mervyn LeRoy's The F.B.I. Story, Stewart played the fictitious federal agent Chip
Hardesty in one of the most blatant pieces of political propaganda Hollywood
ever produced. Without giving any proper context we saw Stewart and his
colleague, Murray Hamilton, rounding up a truck load of Ku Klux Klansmen,
arresting a banker for exploiting Native American Indians and closing in on
John Dillinger.
The film was narrated by Stewart in his persuasive
drawl and had as many light moments as serious ones such as Jimmy and wife Vera
Miles decorating the tree at Christmas. The presence of J. Edgar Hoover hovered
over the story like some kind of saint who, when he took over, got the bureau
to shape up and become the brave protector of all that was decent in American
society.
After Stewart and another agent managed to foil some
Nazi plot in South America his voice over returned to tell us that the war was
now over…"But not for the F.B.I. Now the enemy was international
communism. It threatened education, labour and management, church and the home.
And yet, communists could be found in all these places. They gave speeches,
wrote pamphlets, stirred up trouble. Some of them weren't that polite. They betrayed
their country."
What followed this highly convincing narration
was a cat and mouse surveillance of someone involved in espionage. Now I know
that this kind of movie was not a problem for very many of the kids I went to
school with but for my family and all of our closest friends the F.B.I. was not
the great protector that Jimmy Stewart was sawing on about.
One of the most effective and pernicious elements of
the post war anti-communist witch hunts was the equation that socialism,
communism or even liberalism would lead inevitably to totalitarianism.
Movies like I Married A Communist showed a man who tried to leave the party being
dragged off and forcibly drowned. I doubt very many people actually believed
such nonsense but a visit from a pair of federal agents asking questions about
your neighbours could have a pretty unsettling effect.
Just such a visit had frightened our landlady in
Connecticut so badly that we had to leave our house and come west. According to
my mother the woman was very upset and apologetic but these guys scared her.
We also saw first hand the kind of persecution that
befell the Hallinans in the wake of Vin taking on the legal defence of another
family friend, Harry Bridges, so we were all too aware of the role the F.B.I.
played in the cold war hysteria which had engulfed the nation. The cozy,
engaging and noble picture that Jimmy Stewart's movie painted was so far from
the reality we knew about as to be laughable but nobody was laughing.
This was a big budget Warner Brothers production in
technicolor with a musical score by Max Steiner and, as far as I could make out, this movie was a big hit.
They also brought out a Dell comic book to promote it
which I soon discovered at the Bus Depot as I regularly surveyed and read most
of the comics that came in.
The marketing of comic books was not unlike that of
selling movies. The cover had to grab you and the cover for The F.B.I. Story was dramatic with the shadow of a machine gun
wielding federal agent on a door. As I recall it wasn't terribly well
illustrated inside which was the case with many of the movie comics that Dell
produced. There wasn't the kind of consistency you got with Uncle Scrooge.
Dell comics also published Uncle Scrooge, written and
illustrated by Carl Barks but sold to the likes of me as the creation of Walt
Disney. Scrooge McDuck found himself in a contest with Flintheart Glomgold to
be money champion of the universe.
Glomgold was, like McDuck, a waddling white feathered
bird who wore a cap that looked Scottish. He was similar to Uncle Scrooge in
three ways: he had a pair of spectacles which balanced on the bridge of his
beak, he too wore spats over his webbed feet and he, like his rival, did not
wear trousers.
If ever there was a benevolent caricature of
capitalism it was Uncle Scrooge whose avarice was always a source of amusement.
Although Disney himself was very right wing he never
allowed politics to interfere with his story telling. There were war comic
books in the 1950s which often made villains of the Chinese, Russians and
Eastern Europeans but I was never interested in these.
Another movie which came out about this time was Pillow
Talk starring Rock Hudson and Doris
Day. It also had a smaller role played by Tony Randall. I loved this movie
along with millions of others.
Doris Day had been a favorite of mine ever since
Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much
and Calamity Jane.
Thanks to the Hallinans and their Hollywood gossip we
knew that Rock Hudson was gay but that simply made his screen persona that much
more interesting. This movie, all about the idiocies of the advertising world,
was so well crafted in every department and Tony Randall's turn as the poor
little rich kid owner of the agency was hilarious.
So remembering 1959 isn't all that difficult if you
spent as much time as I did watching movies at the Sequoia, reading comics at
the Bus Depot and hearing the latest records at Village Music.
