Of 'Pantsing' And Presidents

At what point does a noun become a verb? The plural noun in question is the word 'pants,' meaning trousers and the verb is the very same, meaning to pull someone’s pants down.

   I’m sure that the ritual of 'pantsing' was not unique to Mill Valley in the late 1950s and early 60s but a ritual it was indeed. The victim of a 'pantsing' was never a six foot Clark Kent lookalike. No. It was invariably someone a bit weedy, small and physically immature. During 1960 that someone was me. This would be my thirteenth year alive but to somebody unfamiliar with me, I probably looked between nine and ten.

   Young men of this age are beginning to shave, their voices are deepening and, terribly important to their status in a locker room, they have pubic hair. On all three of these fronts, I was a serious latecomer, a fact which made me burn with self consciousness.

   In my mind I was not a microscopic wimp but rather a dashing and attractive sort of person who had beautiful women fawning over him. The gap between these two realities was the size of an ocean but one should never underestimate the human mind's ability to kid itself.

   There were a fair few young men at school who did fall into the he-man category and they tended to hold court so in this arena I became kind of a court jester. I was always an entertaining character to have around. A little guy with a loudspeaker voice and sometimes witty banter.

   I was in eighth grade and my main teacher was Miss Huguet who I liked. I was no longer a record collector, at least not of pop music, but I did hear all the Top 40 hits on the radio and through the repetition that this kind of brainwashing brings, knew them all by heart.. While Elvis had been in the army it didn't stop his recording career at all but the records he was putting out didn't excite me the way his early material had. Are You Lonesome Tonight? just didn't have the raw fire of All Shook Up or Hound Dog.

   In fact most of the popular music at this time was pretty banal. A few numbers like Save The Last Dance For Me and Poetry In Motion were okay but the majority of the hit records did not excite me.

   This was also the time of the presidential election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.  Kennedy's nomination at the Democratic Convention in July had caught my attention from a couple of angles. One was the daily Chronicle which I was in the habit of reading when the news interested me. The other was what I heard from my parents, Blackie and Beth. Through these two sources I gleaned that John Kennedy's father had bought him the Democratic nomination.

   My father did not hate many people but prominent amongst that small group he did actually despise was Joseph Kennedy. I never interrogated Black about Joe Kennedy but have since learned that he had been appointed to head Roosevelt's Maritime Commission in 1937 which was a time that my father was a prominent and active vice president of the radical National Maritime Union.

   I can only guess at what specifically made Blackie hate this man but hate him he did.

   So it was natural enough that Black would be more than a bit sceptical about young Jack Kennedy and as for Nixon he had utter contempt for him. Nixon had made his name politically as part of J. Parnell Thomas's House Un-American Activities Committee.

   The sight of young Dick Nixon and Robert Stripling earnestly examining microfilm allegedly found inside a pumpkin on Whitaker Chambers' farm is laughable now but in those dark days of the witch hunt, most Americans took this amateur dramatic performance seriously. They also fell for Nixon's 'Checkers' speech in which he skilfully sidestepped all the accusations which had been made against him and concentrated on irrelevant details of his personal finances building to the emotive climax of insisting that they would keep Checkers the dog. The film in which he made this speech went down so well with the American public that he was cleared to remain on the ticket as Eisenhower's V.P. 

   Nixon had been christened 'Tricky Dick' by Helen Gahagen Douglas who ran against him for the California senate seat in 1950 after Nixon had consistently smeared her as "The Pink Lady." His campagn posters all said "The man who broke the Hiss Case!" Nixon's campaugn of innuendo worked and he won the contest.

   Interestingly Jack Kennedy and Nixon both entered national politics at the same time as junior congressmen and they also both ran for the senate in 1950.

   I remember Blackie saying that there were a few good things about these two. They were both young which he said was a good thing and Kennedy, if elected, would be the first Catholic president which he also seemed to consider a good thing.

   I never saw the television debates as we were still living up on Seymour Avenue and didn't have a set but I did read all about them. I took an active interest in the election probably because of my parents whose close friends all constantly talked politics.

   The hand of Joseph P. Kennedy was all over young Jack's campaign. Joe had had presidential ambitions of his own until FDR fired him and from that point on his political focus shifted to his sons. He marketed young Jack like a packet of corn flakes and selling was something the elder Kennedy knew everything about.

   The formula for JFK's campaign was built around image. Jack Kennedy was a good looking guy who spoke well and was the product of the best education that money could buy. In the debates he looked good while Nixon came across as sweaty and unshaven. JFK was also skilled at sounding confident while promising nothing and his example has been replicated ever since by politicians all over the world. In fact when Nixon ran successfully for president in 1968 he had learned all of his old rival's tricks.

   Perhaps it was the dishonesty in the political arena which fascinated me so but my interest in politics was not something I shared with my friends at school. At Edna Maguire my over riding ambition was to be liked.

   There were a few exceptions like the time that Caryl Chessman was executed at San Quentin. I followed this story closely and became a passionate advocate of clemency for this man. I joined in a class debate on capital punishment and, as I recall, we won.

   At some point during my eighth grade year I was part of the school team debating Red China's admission to the UN. John Elder, David Einstein and I won this debate on the side of China's admission even though one of the judges, Miss Huguet, disagreed with practically every political position I ever took, but had to concede that we put our case more effectively.

   I had Miss Huguet for social studies and liked her enormously but we used to have very colourful arguments. She was an unquestioning conservative politically. I remember taking exception to her telling the class that Castro was "just a jerk." One time I arrived late in the morning for some reason to find her prattling on and as I entered, the entire class groaned because they knew I'd argue with what she was saying.

   The reality was that nobody was interested in politics which, I have found, is a pretty universal state of affairs. What my friends were interested in was sex, smoking cigarettes, rock and roll records and cars.

   I longed to be cool but being thirteen and looking nine was a considerable handicap. I was friendly with several of the hard guys at Edna Maguire. Jimmy Tamburini seemed to be top banana amongst them. Jim was tall, very good looking and tough. He and his colleagues all wore a kind of uniform which consisted of jeans, black shoes, a black collarless sweater which was worn over a white tab collared shirt. The shirt was buttoned up and snapped. The crowning effect was the pompador hairstyle kept aloft by much Brylcreem.

   One sign of being cool was to wear horseshoe taps on the heels of your shoes but Edna Maguire had a rule that these could not be worn to school as they would scratch the floors. It was a very distinctive noise made by horseshoe taps unlike the small ones which would go on the corner of the heel.

   Jimmy Tamburini's uniform was worn by a gaggle of guys. Mike Chirco, the Cleland brothers, Wayne and Mike, Garret Testes and Johnny Lem. Whether they were a gang or not I didn't know but they could always be found in a group and usually walked home from school along the railroad tracks at Alto.

   My brother Jim and I usually found ourselves tagging along as we had to go the same way and we were used to walking to school with Garret in the mornings.

   There was never any doubt that we were separate from these guys but for some reason our presence always seemed welcome. My guess is that we were a good audience for the stories these characters would come out with, the veracity of which was always questionable. I know that Jim, in particular, could fall about laughing each time he'd repeat something funny one of the hard guys had said.

   One lazy afternoon brother Jim and I walked down Lomita Drive from the school along with Garret Testes and a few other hard guys. I almost certainly would have pulled my pack of Chesterfields out of my shirt pocket and lit a cigarette. Jim never smoked at this time. Down where Lomita turned left we joined the railroad track and carried on towards the Purity at the junction of Camino Alto and East Blithedale.

   The hard guys were rather thick on the ground this day. Among their number was Craig Bird, Jimmy Tamburini and probably about another seven or so, all dressed in the uniform collarless black sweaters.

   I have no memory of who was boasting but there had to be an entertaining yarn or two being spun to keep this crowd entertained as it moved up Blithedale turning left on Locust and down to Sycamore where another left was taken.

   There was a small wooden house on the right hand side of Sycamore which must have belonged to one of these guys and the crowd, including Jimmy and I ascended the steps and entered. As we walked into the living room somebody said: "Get Myers!" I was grabbed from behind while someone else pulled my trousers and underpants down.

   As I lay, partially naked, on this living room floor I could see the faces of all these guys staring quietly at me. It didn't last long but long enough. I guess they wanted to satisfy their curiosity that I hadn't yet reached puberty.

   As they turned away I pulled my trousers back up and Jimmy and I left. I never heard a single word about this incident from any of the participants or anyone else. It hadn't happened in a public place so if it became public knowledge I certainly never heard about it.

   One of the reasons that I was of interest at school was that I had a talent for drawing. I was also a confident performer of sorts in spite of my size but all of this counted for nothing when it came time to 'pants' me in that little house on Sycamore.

   I was little and they were big and the law of the jungle prevailed. I suspect, though, that their pantsing of me was not something which made them feel proud.

The Week The Beatles Conquered America.

This is a Miller Avenue Musings re-run.

By the beginning of 1964 I had stopped buying singles altogether but this didn't keep me from dropping into Village Music for a regular chat with Sara Wilcox. I did buy records at this time but they tended to be comedy or film soundtracks.

   The shop had moved from the Sequoia Theater building up to one of the new units on Blithedale just about where it made the transition from East to West.

   Sara was the nicest person that I ever encountered in any of the stores in downtown Mill Valley. She was smart, funny, beautiful, impeccably dressed and it didn't matter to her whether I bought anything or not. She enjoyed telling me all about the record company parties she regularly attended and her yarns were never dull.

   She spoke the jargon of professional sales and of the business she was in but her syntax was original and her stories were very funny.

   John Goddard, who I didn't know at this time but who subsequently bought the business from her, tells me that she was a reliable and entertaining source of dirty jokes and I certainly would have been open to hearing them and maybe I did but it isn't a detail which sticks in my memory. What I do remember was that she was constantly amused by the ludicrous lengths the record companies would go to in promoting their products and, as she was regularly attending record biz shindigs she always had a new tale to tell.

   My singles buying fizzled out throughout the year of 1958. I know I bought Tequila by the Champs and loved its infectious rhythm. I also had a few discs by Chuck Berry, The Everly Brothers and Jerry Lee Lewis but by 1959 I simply heard the records on the radio rather than buying and collecting them. This didn't prevent me being brainwashed with all the new releases, some of which I liked and many of which I didn't. It is with profound irritation that I know many of these songs by heart to this day. Top of my 'Most Hated' list would have to be Tell Laura I Love Her by Ray Peterson. I despised everything about this song: The shameless melodrama, the whining crybaby voice and the ghastly use of sentiment combined to make it totally loathsome. It was, however, a well crafted number which got in your head and wouldn't go away.

   The early sixties played host to a mix of popular musical styles. Folk music was represented by the Kingston Trio as well as Peter, Paul & Mary. Surf music came in the form of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean and there were dance crazes like the twist and mashed potatoes but, though I heard all this music on the radio I had become a passive listener.

   I remember being surprised by the film of Bye Bye Birdie which came out in early 1963 as it reminded me of the hysteria which had surrounded Elvis around the time he got drafted. Screaming girls were not something which accompanied any of the popular music of the early 1960s and Bye Bye Birdie reminded me that such a phenomenon had once existed.

   So I popped into Village Music one day after school in early February, 1964 and what should Sara be telling me about but this new British band on Capitol called The Beatles. She'd been to a reception and been given this roll of stickers with four mop topped hairdos and the slogan: The Beatles Are Coming!

   I had a look at the album cover and was immediately struck by the fact that the four Beatles all had haircuts like Moe Howard in the Three Stooges. That took a bit of getting used to as Moe was my least favourite Stooge. He was the bully amongst them who was constantly dishing out hideous punishments like eye jabbing and hitting over the head with hammers.

   The photo on the back had their names and I saw that Paul McCartney looked very much like my school friend Johnny Lem. Also the drummer was named Ringo like Ringo Hallinan. In fact another Ringo had been in the charts recently which was a single by Lorne Greene the star of television's Bonanza.

   I don't think Sara played the album for me but I soon heard I Want To Hold Your Hand on the radio and was very taken by it. I'd never come across a song about holding hands before and it seemed to speak to me about being a teenager. I was, at this time, sixteen.

   I certainly wasn't overly fascinated about The Beatles until the Friday night of this particular week. I was at our house on Catalpa getting ready to go out to a dance in Sausalito. I'd shaved what little beard I had and doused my face in English Leather. The television sat right next to our front door and Walter Cronkite was reading the news as I was about to exit. He reported the arrival of The Beatles at JFK Airport. I paused to watch hoardes of screaming girls and these four skinny guys with pudding bowl hairdos running down the steps from their plane. They were all laughing.

   This was the same phenomenon that Bye Bye Birdie had reminded me of with Elvis and had not been seen by me since.

   I delayed my departure long enough to watch all of the report and when it was finished, Walter Cronkite gave a caustic glance to the camera and said: "And that is what some people consider to be news. Good night."

   I have little memory of the dance in Sausalito except that the hall was up the hill above Bridgeway, the main drag through the town. The band might have been The Jesters which my friend Mark Symmes played drums for. If so their repertoire would have included such numbers as What'd I Say by Ray Charles. Within a few weeks that would be turned on its head as all the musical combos in Marin County would struggle to learn every number the Beatles recorded. This, however, was Friday night and the true conversion for millions of American teenagers would not come until Sunday when the Beatles made their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

   The Jesters were a fine group. Dave Shallock played lead guitar, Gary Fay rhythm and Jim Michaelson was on bass. In addition to playing the drums my friend Mark also sang as did, I think, all of them. They looked good and were always highly professional. Another classmate of mine who was a musician and always had a band working the dance halls was Bill Champlin. Bill and Mark Symmes were both dedicated students of Mister Greenwood who ran the music department at Tam High. They were both in his marching band. Another disciple of Mister Greenwood's was George Duke whose jazz trio was working professionally throughout his years as a student at Tam.

   One more schoolmate of mine was part of this musical club and that was Billy Bowen who I'd known well when we were in grade school at Homestead. I remember seeing Bill walking home from Village Music in the late 1950s carrying a Chuck Berry album and when I asked him why he had a whole album he told me it was to practice his drums to.  

   The thing which makes this particular dance at Sausalito something of a mystery to me is the fact that I'm pretty certain I went alone and without alcoholic enhancement. The usual routine for the weekend was to find a way to secure enough booze to become blotto then stagger onto the dance in Mill Valley in the hope that your inebriation would give you the courage to successfully pick up a young lady. The fact that this scenario never seemed to work out in no way discouraged me from trying again and again.

   One of the most stunningly beautiful young women in my year at Tam was Hollis Hite, someone I had an agonizing crush on ever since I had first met her. It must be mentioned here that I was tiny, looked much younger than my sixteen years and had become accustomed to the dreadful syndrome of unrequited love. I was constantly falling in love with unattainable women. Inside I was a handsome athletic movie star but the physical reality of my presence was something less impressive. I was so far from cool it made me ache.

   However, I happened to be pretty good friends with Hollis Hite and simply had to keep my feelings secret. She was, at this time going out with another pretty good friend of mine, Bruce Crawford. Bruce, unlike me, was tall, blond, extremely handsome and easy going in a way that I was not. 

   By the time Sunday came around I found myself up at Hollis's to watch the Ed Sullivan Show. Bruce was there along with Christy Flagg and Chuck Collins.

   Ed Sullivan's show was one of those American institutions in the 1950s and 60s. He had a face like a pickle and the weirdest speaking voice. He always pronounced the word show like 'shoe' and seemed to be the most unlikely fellow to be in the entertainment business but in it he was. He and Steve Allen had a deadly rivalry for ratings being on opposite networks.

   There was nothing remarkable about The Beatles' first appearance on the Sullivan show except the screaming was pretty loud. As the camera did close-ups, the name of each Beatle would appear and I think by the end of the evening I knew John, Paul, George and Ringo by sight.

   They were something totally different. Their press conferences were terribly funny and they took delight in making fun of their inquisitors. In spite of the Moe Howard hairdos they seemed to have much more in common with the Marx Brothers than the 3 Stooges. 

   Their witty replies to the asinine questions of the American press were made all the more colorful by their thick Liverpool accents.

   From my perspective the Beatles seemed to take America in one week and by the end of that week I was, like everybody else, a Beatlemaniac. I bought the LP Meet The Beatles and just loved their songs. Paul McCartney had the most amazing rock and roll voice as demonstrated on I Saw Her Standing There and John Lennon's vocals had such a lyrical quality. Their songs were all about the agonies of teenage love but in a new and original way.

   Coming, as I did, from a highly non-conformist family, I did not often find myself going with the flow when it came to popular culture so it was a strange kind of liberation to be swept along with everybody else in total admiration for the Fab Four.

   I Want To Hold Your Hand went to number one which was soon followed by She Loves You and Please Please Me. 

   Before long the other British bands began landing on our shores. The Kinks were great even though all their songs seemed to have the same riff.  Much publicity was made of The Dave Clark Five but they were so mediocre that they faded fast. The Animals, Gerry And The Pacemakers, Herman's Hermits, Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas, Peter And Gordon, The Zombies and Donovan all came across in what soon was referred to as the British Invasion. I remember a photo of The Rolling Stones was published in the Chronicle under the headline 'Here come five more!' They looked so ugly I couldn't imagine ever liking them.

   It is difficult to under estimate the cultural impact which The Beatles had on the United States at this time and their huge success was to change show business and the media in fundamental ways.

   Probably the most amazing thing about The Beatles was the fact that they kept coming out with amazingly fresh and memorable new sounds for several years to come and, together with Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds and countless sixties groups, provided the soundtrack for my teenage years.

   Of course there was more to come. The Vietnam War and the emergence of drugs within the white middle class of America stirred up a complex brew which gave that time a unique place in our history.

   But The Beatles came along before the confusions of the drug culture wrought such carnage and the horrors of Vietnam got out of control. For that brief moment in time these four giggling Liverpudlians led us, like the children of Hamlin, away from our otherwise undiluted Americanism. We would never be the same again.

Hanging Out At The Old Bus Depot

This is a Miller Avenue Musings Re-Run.

My two sisters probably spent most of their free time at the library up on Lovell but for me the three locations which I returned to with all the regularity of a devoted church goer was Village Music, the Sequoia Theater and the Bus Depot.

   It's interesting to me to see how little is known by the younger residents of today's Mill Valley about the Bus Depot. I suppose my generation of Mill Valley kids were equally ignorant about the trains which originally ran in and out of town. That's the problem with progress. The old gets torn down, built on and a way of life is forgotten forever.

   The main reason I was in the bus depot so much was the comic book rack which sat opposite the main counter as you entered from the Thockmorton side. I bought and collected a lot of comic books but they were only a small percentage of the ones I read for free. I never purchased Archie, Little Lulu, Casper and countless other titles, but I read them all.

   I was also on a first name basis with the ladies who worked there from a very early age. I knew Margo and Brun pretty well and they tended to give me special dispensation with regard to comic book reading whereas most boys were told to put the comics back.

   Over the years I spent a lot of time in the bus depot. Whenever my brother Jim and I found ourselves downtown that's the place we'd hang around.

   Sometime in the very early 1960s Jimmy and I became friendly with one of the Greyhound bus drivers. We got to know him through Margo who Jim thinks had a crush on him. He was a very good looking guy about thirty five and he was always a happy sort. His name was Arleigh. We took to spending Sunday afternoons down around the depot and Arleigh would let us sit in his parked bus while he awaited his next departure.

   Over time when we were off school Arleigh would let us ride into the city and back on his bus but we had to be careful not to get caught because the Greyhound Company hired spotters to ride the buses checking up on the drivers. Arleigh always gave us tickets and we had to pretend we didn't know him on these journeys.

   The usual route was out through Tam Valley, making a stop at Marin City which was where you would change to go north to San Rafael or Novato. The bus would  then continue on through Sausalito and across the Golden Gate Bridge. Once we were through the tollgate, we'd take the second exit off the freeway by the Palace of Fine Arts then on up Lombard Street with its endless parade of motels to Van Ness where the bus would hang a right. Van Ness took us over the hill then it was left on Golden Gate. The final leg of this journey was to cross Market at 6th, go around the corner to 7th and into the depot where there was a special angled parking space for the Mill Valley buses.

   Amongst our toys from very early on was a fleet of small Greyhound buses and I can remember running one of these in and out of Bearville, the imaginary town which my brother and I constructed for our sizeable teddy bear collection.

   I had a medium sized Greyhound Silverside which would come along the top of a concrete wall just below our front lawn and stop for a gaggle of imaginary bears on their way somewhere important.

   Apart from pretty regular car journeys with my father to the San Francisco waterfront on Saturdays, the usual form of transport to the city for us was the Greyhound bus which ran on the hour out of the Depot. Most of our early trips were with my mother Beth who would buy the tickets across the counter. There was a huge stamp that Margo or Brun would bang with their fist once the tickets were within its jaws.

   The drivers all wore a pretty smart military looking uniform. Grey shirt with a tie, matching grey trousers and each man, for I never saw a woman driver, had a military style hat which he would or would not wear. Attached to their belt was a leather holster which held the driver's individual ticket punch. The mark that was made by the punch was never the same and, thus, later identification of the driver could be made.

   Great play was made in Greyhound advertising copy about leaving the driving to them and, doubtless, the daily commute in and out of Mill Valley must have been a relatively painless business. Longer journeys, however, were a different story. I remember becoming impossibly bored and constrained on long Greyhound journeys like one we went on to New Mexico in 1958 .

   It was while sitting in his bus one day that we met one of Arleigh's colleagues who was named Ernst Heinemann. Ernst was very tall, dark haired and German. We learned that Ernst had been in the Hitler Youth as a kid and told us, quite calmly in his excellent English that Hitler had his good points as well as his bad.

   Ernst didn't feel the persecution of the Jews was a good thing but the concept of full employment and sense of purpose he saw as positive.

   Now my father Blackie had a very strong prejudice against Germans in general which was interesting because it was the only nationality he seemed to hold a grudge against. It was clearly to do with the Nazis for he didn't feel that way about the Italians or Japanese. He always told me that the Italians made 'lousy fascists' as their hearts weren't in it, whereas the Germanic character fitted the mold perfectly in his opinion.

   One of the many realities of the 1950s that Black had no enthusiasm for was the post war rehabilitation of the Germans. Werner Von Braun was not seen in our house as a new hero of the space race but as a Nazi scientist who invented the bombs which rained down on Britain during the war.

   One restaurant our family never even considered going to was the Mountain Home Inn with it's Germanic décor and draft beer served in big metallic mugs. I can only guess that Blackie hated the huge success that Volkswagen beetles and camper vans had in America during the sixties.

   I don't believe that either Jim or I ever mentioned our friend Ernst to Beth or Blackie but, I suspect, that if Blackie met him he would probably like him as we did.  

   One of the difficulties of growing up in a family where politics played such a strong role was the fact that most people hardly ever thought about politics at all. It just never came up with my friends at school. So, for me, this bag of political opinions that followed me around, was hardly ever dipped into or used at all, but it was always there.

   It was hardly twenty years since that war had ended and so much had changed for my parents during that time and here we were, no longer in Greenwich Village but in beautiful Mill Valley.

   Mount Tamalpais in all its glory attracted many hikers from around the world. Many would arrive by Greyhound on the weekends and head up Throckmorton to climb up any of the wooden steps which ascended towards the mountain. Quite a few of these hikers were German.

   That downtown junction where Miller ran into Throckmorton always was a nice part of town and on the weekends it was busy but not unpleasantly so. Directly opposite the depot on Miller stood Women's Mayers, a sizeable clothing store while the Men's Mayers was about a third of the way down the block near where Sunnyside joined in. Also along this strip was Meyer's Bakery where I used to enjoy a cherry Coke at their soda fountain.

   This was a time when the stores in Mill Valley had a practicality about them. Lockwood's Pharmacy, Strawbridge's cards & stationery, The Redwood Book Store, Ben Franklin five and dime, Esposti's ice cream parlour and many more.

   Sy Weill, a very tall bald man could usually be seen, immaculately attired, standing in front of his store Redhill Liquors smoking and watching the world walk by. His shop was on Throckmorton next door to the diner which had been known as Stuyvesant's but by the early 60s had become Pat & Joe's.

   I used to hang out around the depot, sometimes sitting on the bench with a clear view of the taxi cabs which parked there. One late afternoon while I sat on that bench I saw Ernst Heinemann wearing his full Greyhound uniform with military looking hat talking to this much shorter man who was dressed entirely in Lederhosen complete with a little cap that had a large feather protruding from it. Naturally they were conversing in their native tongue and they made quite a picture standing by the clock tower with the Old Mill Tavern in the background and the sight of pine trees ascending in the distance. It looked like a Nazi officer conversing with a German citizen during the war in some Bavarian village. I sat and watched them chatting away for some time. The fellow in Lederhosen was much older than Ernst and almost certainly would have been active during the great fracas.

   It must have been at least two years later when I read a story in the Chronicle all about our friend Ernst. He'd been arrested and taken off to the psychiatric hospital at Napa.

   There was a Greyhound driver named Bill Burke who was the father of Patty Burke, one of the prettiest girls in my year at school. Bill was a kind of driver's shop steward and he enjoyed the sorts of privileges which come with seniority.

   So Heinemann turned up on Bill Burke's doorstep one evening carrying a copy of William L. Shirer's Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich and telling Bill: "We must get the men together. We're all meeting up on the mountain."

   Presumably Bill humoured him and, once he'd gone, called the police about it.

   The next incident reported in the story was up in the parking lot at Bootjack Camp where the Marin Sheriff's deputy John Goff, who regularly patrolled Stinson and the mountain, confronted Heinemann near his car.

   When the officer became convinced that Ernst should be taken into custody the big German jumped in his vehicle and raced down the mountain. A high speed chase then occurred and the deputy managed to shoot one of Ernst's tires out, after which poor old Heinemann was, indeed, taken into custody and shipped off to Napa.

   It's rather difficult to find a moral to this sad story. I can only guess that the Nazis had more of an impact on poor Ernst's consciousness than he cared to admit and that, just as I had noticed the similarity between a Greyhound uniform and that of a Nazi officer's, something must have snapped in his mind convincing him he was back in the fatherland in 1942.

   By the time of this incident, we hadn't seen Arleigh in quite awhile and I don't think I ever saw him again.

   It's strange to sit outside what is now called the Book Depot amongst all the flamboyant new citizens of our home town and remember what it was like when big Greyhound buses would come through on the hour and take up a fair proportion of the parking lot.

   Mill Valley is so different these days with its cappuccino bars and herbal emporiums. I remember my brother Jim lamenting the fact that there was only one real café left where you could get bacon and eggs with a short stack without any garnish.

   I understand that change is an essential component of life but I can't help missing Pat and Joe's, all the stores which used to light up downtown Mill Valley and the wonderful old bus depot, comic books and all. 

Of Baseball, Comic Books And Records At Village Music

In March of 1957 I was the smallest child in Mrs. Blaugh's fourth grade class at Homestead School and, though I had just turned ten years old, I probably looked about six.

   Being so tiny didn't bother me too much though the unrequited love of my life, Lily Burris, was taller than me and this may have been why she never gave me the time of day.

   The playground at Homestead was a whirl of contrasting activities. During recess, long jump ropes were wielded by pairs of girls while other kids stood in line to skip into it's constant rotation. Whether their skipping was successful or not, they all sang a counting rhyme as the rope came around with the regularity of a metronome.

   Groups of boys with arms around each other would stalk the playground chanting: "We won't stop!" There was hop scotch, marbles and, of course, sports.

   One of my best friends was Alex Robertson who was big for his age, a keen athlete and had a passion for baseball. My other best friends, Glen Pritzker and Billy Bowen were competent enough athletes unlike myself who was not. Because I was so small it was expected that I wouldn't be any good at sports and, sadly, it was a self fulfilling prophecy.

   At home I would play touch football and softball with my brother's friends but never at school. Whenever I would get up to bat at Homestead the cry would go out: "Myers is up!" At this point the outfielders, chuckling amongst themselves, would walk in past the base lines. The humiliation of this would fill me with a rage which guaranteed that I struck out three times in a row.

   The truth was that I had a terror of the ball. Had I used my time at the plate focusing on it and connecting with the bat I might well have knocked it over the fence onto Montford but instead I surrendered to my rage and didn't approach the situation with any clarity.

   My time out in left field was sadly worse as I spent it dreading that the ball might come in my direction and, again, my lack of focus and terror made me a lousy player.

   At home I wasn't too bad. Our father Blackie had got us a pair of fielders' mitts and brother Jim and I would regularly play catch with a hard ball up on Seymour Avenue just above our house.

   So it was mostly other areas of interest which I shared with my friends. Whenever Billy or Alex visited our house they would invariably lose themselves reading my comic books or listening to my records.

   I was, by now, a committed collector. The 45s and LPs were all kept in their original packaging and the comic books were stacked neatly in chronological order on a piece of furniture I had commandeered. I had Uncle Scrooge, Walt Disney's Comics & Stories, Superman and MAD magazines. My one strict rule was that nobody was allowed to fold back the covers on the comics.

   Glen and I would always make our weekly pilgrimage to Village Music where we'd pick up a copy of that week's Top 40 and listen to records in the sound proof booth. In those days the record shop was in one of the shops which nestled within the Sequoia Theater building. 
   Sara Wilcox was possibly the only adult shopkeeper in Mill Valley who didn't treat kids like second class citizens. A wander into Bennetts Variety store always invited the laser like surveillance of whichever bad tempered adult was on duty whereas Sara was always friendly, funny and never tired of playing us whatever records we wanted to hear.

   One record which came out around this time and I purchased was Perry Como's Round And Round. The simplicity of the song's arrangement appealed to me. It began with a quiet rhythm provided by a drummer using brushes. Then Como's voice came in, very gently.

       Find a wheel and it goes round, round, round,

       As it skims along with a happy sound,

       As it goes along the ground, ground, ground,

       'Til it leads you to the one you love,

It proceeded to build with the addition of male singers and soon after with female voices which intertwined through key changes and a middle eight. The whole thing built to a swirling crescendo then returned to the gentle brushes and Como's quiet voice. I loved this record and played it over and over.

   Perry Como recorded on the RCA Victor label which also had Elvis Presley and Harry Belafonte. Glen and I would study the actual labels which, in this case had a full color picture of a dog gazing into the horn of an old gramophone speaker against a black background. We came to know that the names inside the parenthesis under the song's title were those of the composers.

   The pop music of this time was a very broad church and Glen and I followed the fortunes of a wide range of artists. Tab Hunter had gotten to number one with his version of Young Love which was really inferior to Sonny James' recording of the same song but then Tab was a movie star despite being a completely unnatural singer.

   Another movie star who put out a few singles was Tony Perkins. He had a minor hit with Moonlight Swim that same year. The big difference between Perkins and Tab Hunter was that he could actually sing whereas all Tab could do was a passable imitation of singing.

   I guess it was the success of Tab Hunter's single which prompted the other Hollywood studios to put their juvenile leads into the recording studios as, before the year was out, a disk cut by Sal Mineo came into the charts and, presumably, sold quite a few copies. Keep Movin' was its title and it was not very good.  Like Tony Perkins Sal had a good voice but the song was not well crafted and I would never have bought it.

   I had to really love a record to commit the six bits it cost for a single and that was the beauty of someone like Sara Wilcox because Glen and I would only have to ask to hear something like Party Doll by Buddy Knox and she'd play it for us and the sound proof booth meant that she didn't have to listen to it herself.

   I'm not too sure that I even noticed the overstated southern accent of a singer like Buddy Knox whose pronunciations of words like 'fair' (fay-aire) and 'hair' (hay-aire) were very exaggerated but after Elvis Presley broke out of the south and became the phenomenon he was after 1956 it seemed there was a wave of southern white singers in the top 40.

   Another single I had to have was Butterfly by Andy Williams as well as a peculiar one that I always felt uncertain about which was Teenage Crush by Tommy Sands. I could never make up my mind if it was good or not but I did buy it though I never purchased another Tommy Sands single.

   This was also the time that Fats Domino released the terrific I'm Walkin' and The Diamonds came out with one I loved which was Little Darlin'. The singing voices on this record were so eccentric that they wouldn't have been out of place in a Warner Brothers cartoon. The opening created a visual picture of a waterfall in my mind with castanets clapping like clams as they fell.

   I was, by this time, absolutely enthralled with every record made by Elvis Presley for this was at the beginning of his long career and he was still putting out terrific singles like the next one to come along which was All Shook Up. This absolutely fabulous disk reminded me of Don't Be Cruel which was not such a mystery as, like its predecessor, it was composed by Otis Blackwell.

   I knew nothing of the behind the scenes machinations that Elvis's manager pulled off but the wily old Colonel  Parker formed a publishing company and demanded that song writers like Blackwell sign over the rights to this firm which was the main reason why Elvis had a writing credit on it. Elvis, however, was a demanding perfectionist in the studio and almost certainly made some changes to the lyrics during the thirty or so takes that he did.

   There were always words I couldn't fully fathom on an Elvis recording and All Shook Up was no exception. The line: "My friends say I'm acting as wild as a bug" filtered through to my ears as: "My friends say Mack you're acting queer as a bug."

   The opening beguiled me immediately with its fluid boogie woogie rhythm. The individual notes seemed to melt into each other unlike the bass notes on Don't Be Cruel which were distinct and separate.

   Another disk released on RCA Victor was by Harry Belafonte who was one of my favorites. Banana Boat was a much played 45 in my collection and his next release was Mama Look At Boo Boo which introduced us to dialects and accents we'd never encountered before. His West Indian lingo and lyrics were enchanting to a ten year old.

  

“Mama, look at boo boo,” they shout,

Their mother tell them, “Shut up your mouth,”

“That is your daddy,"

"Oh, no! My daddy can't be ugly so,”

"Shut your mouth! Go away!

Mama look at Boo Boo they."

   1957 was turning out to be rich for popular music as each week brought new delights to Sara's sound proof booth. I already had a few singles by Chuck Berry on the Chess and, unlike Elvis, his diction was crystal clear. His latest release was School Days and the witty lyrics described the drudgery of the classroom giving way to the joys of dancing to rock and roll after school.

   Another singer I had no problem understanding was Pat Boone. His next record which entered my collection was Love Letters In The Sand, which was basically a sad song but there was nothing melancholy about his version.

   Glen and I regularly discussed what we were going to do when we grew up. I was going to be a singer and he would be my manager. I did have a good singing voice and could produce fair imitations of all the records which I listened to. I remember standing on a bench in the playground at Homestead singing Love Letters In The Sand to an audience of probably nobody.

   Unlike me, Glen was a straight A student and by the end of 4th grade he skipped a year, going to Alto then Edna Maguire and ultimately to a prep school in the city so I didn't see him again for many years.  On the advice of his little league coach Glen gave up baseball and took up tennis, becoming something of a star player along with his sister Robin. But I knew nothing of this.

   As for Alex Robertson he was the main reason that I was able to be a loud mouthed little guy for he stepped in on many occasions to protect me from whatever rough justice my big mouth would inspire.

   Billy Bowen I spied leaving Village Music in the early 1960s with entire albums of Chuck Berry under his arm. When I asked why he told me he used them to practice his drums to at home.

   We all went to Alto for sixth grade and for reasons I no longer recall I drifted away from Alex and Billy. New friendships developed and the Top 40 evolved into something less excitng than the early Elvis and Little Richard. Such was the way of things but those years at Homestead retain a special fascination for me.

The Wonderful Worlds On The Backs Of Cereal Boxes.

This is a re-working of a previous posting.

Only a few things held my attention as a child. Movies, comic books and recorded music were the most powerful sensations I responded to with total concentration but the backs of cereal boxes were right up there with them.

   My favourite cereal was Cheerios and I had them for breakfast practically every morning, though I tried all the others like Wheaties (the breakfast of champions) and Puffed Wheat (shot from cannons) and definitely knew what they all tasted like.

   Looking at the backs of cereal packs was like gazing into a portal onto other worlds. While chewing my cheerios I'd lose myself in whatever full colour illustration covered the back of the box. It might be a wild west landscape or an illustration of a jungle or something in outer space. It took me into the same zone I visited through comic books or watching the Saturday matinee at the Sequoia.

   The cereal companies, General Mills, Kellog's, Nabisco and a few others all must have done regular deals with toy manufacturers and movie companies as they always had activities which tied in with such products.

   A particular movie might have a background picture for which you had to cut out foreground characters. This was always an unsatisfactory exercise for me as the kinds of scissors we children were allowed to use were not good for cutting the thick cardboard with any accuracy. I remember trying to follow the jagged dotted line around some cartoon character and constantly slicing into the picture. The instructions made it all seem so simple but I was never able to achieve the end result. With hindsight I suspect that you really had to be an adult graphic designer using tools like metal rulers and scalpels, not those clunky little scissors.

   So I would go at these projects full of enthusiasm but soon would find myself frustrated. Such experiences, however, had not the slightest effect on my fascination with the backs of cereal packs. Each new special offer came at me with all the wonder of a spectacular sunrise. Sometimes there would be small plastic figures inside the box. Other times you'd have to send away with a coupon and 25c in coin.

   It was during the year of 1954 that I fell under the spell of the Navy Frogmen. As the Myers household had no television my brother Jim and I had to fall on the generosity of those with TV sets to see programs. Dennis Brogan didn't have a TV either, but his grandfather, old Jim Brogan, did.

   Grandfather Jim lived with his wife in an impressive fairly large house which sat on the corner of Molino and Janes behind a high hedge right opposite our local playground. We would see Walt Disney's Sunday night Disneyland and also used to watch the annual broadcast of Mary Martin playing Peter Pan in a televised stage production.

   There were also after school programs which we would join Dennis to see and somewhere along the way I saw the commercial featuring the Navy Frogmen. After a shot of a miniature toy gunboat steaming through the water we then saw three Navy Frogmen falling effortlessly overboard in formation and descending to put explosive devices on the bottoms of enemy ships. The voiceover told us how they "work swiftly and secretly! Look how real these Navy Frogmen are!" Dramatic closeups demonstrated the frogmen's dexterity as they ascended through the water past large nets. "These miniature navy frogmen swim, dive and surface by themselves."

   As the first of the frogmen reached the water's surface a young boy's hand lifted it gently out. We then saw two of the frogmen lying on a clean table top while the boy's hands, having unscrewed the chamber at the base of its feet, began to shake in some powder. "Look! Here's where your free supply of high performance propellant goes. Ordinary baking powder will work too."

   To get these amazing frogmen all I had to do was cut off a coupon from either a box of Kellogg's Sugar Frosted Flakes or Kellogg's Sugar Corn Pops and send it along with only 25 cents to an address in Battle Creek, Michigan.

   My soul burned with a passionate desire to own these wonderful toys but the obstacles in my path were formidable. If I were to go to my father Blackie and make a straight forward request for them he almost certainly would laugh out loud at my falling for such an obviously commercial bit of trickery. Also there was the problem that neither of the cereals were ones I ever ate. As I've pointed out I was, by the age of seven, a committed consumer of Cheerios and it looked like the only way I could get the frogmen was to convince my father I wanted this new brand of cereal.

   The battleground for this operation was the Saturday morning shopping trip to Safeways. All four of us Myers kids would always accompany Blackie to the Safeway for the week's shopping and, as we approached the cereal shelves, I began enthusing about the virtues of the Sugar Corn Pops. Blackie examined the box and, shooting me a penetrating glance, asked if I'd eat them all up. Of course was my disingenuous reply. I don't think he was actually convinced but decided to get them for me and stage one of the operation was a success.

   When it came to appropriating funds for such activities it was always my mother I turned to. Officially our allowance from Blackie was a mere thirty cents on Saturdays so Jim and I could go to the Matinee at the Sequoia. Admission cost a quarter and the remaining nickel would buy us each a large sucker which lasted longer than most other forms of candy.

   So it was Beth I had to get the twenty five cents plus postage out of and when this was done I filled out the coupon and put it in the mail. Then I waited. Sending away for things always tested what little patience I had to its limit and beyond. Our mailbox was one of about seven which sat nestled in a row on Molino across from Seymour. The first few days I was fine about finding the mailbox empty but by the third day I'd begun stalking it in the afternoon and, since it would inevitably take weeks, I found that disappointment soon became my constant companion. I would develop strategies in which I'd convince myself not to be disappointed but I inevitably was.

   Finally after what seemed like an ice age, the frogmen arrived, all three beautifully wrapped with their little propellant chambers at the base. They were red, yellow and green and the packet of baking powder was also included.

   I immediately set to work in the kitchen, finding a glass bowl my mom used for cake mixes. I filled it with water and then unscrewed the chamber on one frogman and sprinkled in the special powder. In the commercial we never actually saw the frogmen descending, just falling forward into the water and then the camera dissolved to them under the ship. Next we saw them going up and now I discovered that getting them to descend was practically impossible because the baking soda in the base simply made the bottom of the blasted thing float to the top upside down. The best you could do was put them on the bottom of the bowl and let go but every time the frogman would bob up to the surface upside down. It wasn't weighted properly.

   It was a shame that I couldn't share my disappointment with anyone as the entire enterprise had been clandestine. It was probably a bigger shame that I learned no lessons from this experience. I would continue to be dazzled by the neverland promises on the backs of cereal boxes for many years to come.

'Twas The Night Before Christmas...

This is a Miller Avenue Musings re-run

Christmas time at the Myers house on Seymour Avenue was always fun. Though snow never settled in Mill Valley there was a crisp wintery feel in the air and strangers seemed to be that little bit friendlier when you passed them on the street.

   Of course Christmas, like all the other holidays was sold to people with all the skills that Madison Avenue possessed but in our home it was a little bit gentler partly because my parents didn't have the money to lavish big expensive presents on us. Also there was no religion in our house so the celebration of Christ's birth was simply a charming ritual which children loved.

   Both my parents were political people of the left and in a way our arrival in Mill Valley in 1952 was kind of a refuge from the severe effects of the blacklisting my dad had experienced on the east coast. They had good friends here who all chipped in to help the Myers family out.

   On our first Christmas at 10 Seymour Avenue I was six years old and my younger brother Jim and I both believed in Santa Claus. My parents went to great lengths to make this reality come true for Jimmy and I while Katie, a fourth grader and Nell, a sixth grader, clearly no longer fell for that one.

   One of the great sensations about this time of year was the smell of the tree once it was up. There is no aroma more distinctive or friendly than a Douglas Fir standing upright in your living room. 

   Our decorations, which would come out of storage, consisted of brightly coloured bulbs, candy canes and various little trinkets to hang on the tree and at some stage we would throw freshly purchased thin strips of tinsel at the tree so it hung like icycles.

   When it came to the tree we had to surrender to the dictates of our father Blackie who had two rigid rules. The first was that we couldn't have lights on it and the second was that we were not allowed to decorate it until Christmas Eve. 

   On both these counts we were seriously out of step with everybody we knew as practically all our friends had their trees up and decorated with lights well before the big day. 

   I think my father considered Christmas lights to be dangerous but he almost certainly disapproved of them for being a modern thing. When he was young, people would put candles on trees and doubtless there were many house fires started that way.

   One of the stories he always told us about his childhood in Brooklyn was of the Christmas Eve that his father was unable to afford to buy the family a tree. His solution to this problem was to ask permission to scoop up the offcuts at the tree lot and bring them home. He then whittled several holes into a broomstick and stuck the branches into what became the Myers family tree that year.

   There was always music playing in our household and, though we did have a few Christmas discs with songs like Silent Night, we were not restricted in what we listened to on the record player so the sound of Fats Waller's piano or Ella Fitzgerald's voice fit right in with the seasonal spirit. 

   One of the best days of the season was the Saturday shopping trip to the city with my brother Jim. We'd catch  the Greyhound bus at the stop on Miller just below Una Way and make the journey across the bridge. Jim and I would go to a movie, have lunch at Mannings on Market Street and do our shopping mostly around the Union Square area. Macy's, I. Magnum's, City Of Paris and Woolworth's all saw a lot of us.

   A particular feature of visiting City Of Paris was to take in their absolutely enormous Christmas tree which I believe had to be lowered by crane through the dome topped roof each year.

   Money was always tight in our house but a few of my parents' closest friends were seriously rich and every year each of the four Myers kids would receive a check from one of them which constituted our Christmas shopping money.

   The anticipation which preceded the big morning was intense so after the tree was decorated on Christmas Eve we would go off to bed in our pyjamas. I recall tossing and turning for a very long time, overwhelmed by the excitement, but somehow I always managed to fall asleep. 

   The presents didn't come out of hiding until after we were in bed so that the sight we beheld when we awoke was truly magical. The combination of the tinsel hanging from the tree along with its cheerful aroma and the new addition of a mountain of beautifully wrapped presents under its branches made us all dance with joy.  

   Everything was wonderful until all the presents had been opened. Of course there were new toys to play with, new books to look at and possibly new records to listen to. I remember getting Elvis Presley's first LP one Christmas. 

   There was still Christmas dinner to look forward to but I'm always reminded of a Dennis The Menace cartoon in the Chronicle which featured him surrounded by his unwrapped presents saying: "Is this all?" Somehow this cartoon seemed truthful about the lull which would occur after all the surprises were out and their value was thus diminished.

   Of course the 25th of December meant different things to different people as anyone listening to Stan Freberg's Green Christmas would realise. Set in the boardroom of an advertising executive greeted by his employees as "Mister Scrooge," the disc was a hilarious satire on the way Madison Avenue always used Christmas to make money.

   Two people of my acquaintance actually ran Christmas tree lots. Tom Connell, who we knew through the Dreyfus family ran a lot down by the heliport opposite the Fireside Motel. Tom was many years older than us unlike Jeff Mayer, who was only a year ahead of me at Tam and he also sold trees, I think, somewhere near Alto.

   Jeff was a jolly rotund fellow with greased back black hair who chain smoked and worked after school at the Purity Supermarket opposite Eberhardt's Mobil station. In fact he was a naturally enterprising guy who ran his own car, a 1948 Plymouth coupe, on the proceeds of his various earnings. 

   Jeff was unusual. He was an only child who lived with his mother on the hill which rose above the Alto flats and, precisely where dad was, I never knew, as it didn't come up. He was an entirely independent young man who never, I believe, ever took hand outs from his mom. What he had he made himself.

   I did spend a fair bit of time riding around with Jeff. He was a naturally funny person who always wore a checked plaid shirt which he never tucked into his jeans. The closest thing to a political opinion I ever heard from Jeff was his avowed atheism which he could become quite confrontational about, insisting in very convincing terms that there was definitely no god. 

   I remember him getting up in front of a packed Mead Theater when he was rally commissioner and, realising he had nothing to say, he simply began laughing. Within moments the effect was contagious and crackled through the audience which began howling with laughter for what seemed a very long time. 

   The last I heard of Jeff Mayer was from Jack Benjamin, another Mill Valley entrepreneur, who told me he was working in Hollywood as a comedian.

   So for someone liked Jeff, Christmas was simply a time to make some money but that most definitely was alien to us in the Myers household. 

   When we were little My sisters would take Jimmy and I on a walking tour up and down the hills of Mill Valley, delivering presents to my parents' friends and at each house we would sing Christmas carols and be rewarded with mugs of hot chocolate. 

   Christmas always seemed to bring out the best in people…at least for a little while.