Tape 4, Side A
[Begin Tape 4, Side A]
Where we were: You were in the gifted program, and I gather that it was by mutual agreement that you bailed out of it. Did you say: I don’t want to do this anymore, or did they say: We don’t want you anymore?
I don’t remember, but I know I wasn’t doing the work. I wasn’t really doing the work. That was the thing I objected to most, aside from the fact that all these other kids were isolated and treated as though they were special. They were all smart; that’s for sure, but they made them work. I didn’t like that, that part of it. So much homework, and they made you talk in class, and you always had to write, write about, explain this or explain that, or read something and then write about it, and you know I just didn’t want to do any of that, so I never did.
You just simply didn’t do the homework and all?
As far as I remember. So I bombed out on the tests, so I don’t know. All I know is that I wasn’t unhappy when it turned out that… I don’t remember the mechanics of it. I wasn’t unhappy to find out that I was going back to the other school.
That was about eighth grade, seventh grade?
That was like seventh grade, sixth and seventh grade I think, ‘cause I went back to that other school, Clark school for the eighth grade to finish grade school. So there I am, I bombed out. They went out of their way to put me in this special program, and I bombed out of that, and I’m a bit of a troublemaker and an instigator and what was the other thing they were calling me: a showoff.
Instigator was their favorite word I guess.
Well I didn’t know. They accused me of that and I didn’t know whether to cop a plea, didn’t know if it was a fair cop, so they had to explain it to me; and I never really thought I did in the sense that I tried to get other kids in trouble or tried to organize or anything like that. I was happy when the other kids took notice of me and thought I was really cool or whatever for doin’ somethin’ or makin’ some trouble or makin’ somethin’ happen or whatever. But I don’t remember that I really was an agitator or anything like that. I was always looking out for myself.
So your motivation wasn’t to be sort of a leader of men or instigate other people doing things that would put them in…? It was more just your own expression?
Yeah, I think so, as much as I can put any explanation on it at all. There was no plot or anything like that to it. In fact I didn’t like any of the team aspects of anything. Earlier, in other schools and other places I had played football and baseball and all those American things that you do, and I liked some aspects of it, but I didn’t like the part where the coaches would get everybody together and say: You got to pull; you got to do this, you got to pull harder; you got to work together; you’re part of a team. I never… So I stopped doing all those things and just sat around and drew; whenever gym class came around I’d try to scoot away from it.
Were there any sports that you liked: track or the more individual events?
No. I hated the whole idea of gym and sports and exertion.
[Laughs] So you were an early sedentary sort of a guy?
No, I just didn’t like the—I mean I got out, I got around. I did certain little things on my own. I could climb up fire escapes real fast; and I liked to watch baseball, baseball games. They used to take us to Cardinal games in the home. We used to go see Cardinal games and Stan the Man Musial, oh yeah.
Was the stadium fairly close? The old stadiums tended to be in the city, pretty easy to get to.
I think it was. Busch Stadium; I think it was. I think it’s still the same one, as far as I know.
So you’d go out, a bunch of kids…?
And maybe some of the old people. You know they would do a couple of things like this throughout the years. Huge buses would roll up and they’d pack as many kids and old people into them as possible, and sometimes you had to reserve in advance or something like that, ‘cause not everybody could go. But they tried to mount things like that. For example, once a year they would take as many kids and old people as they could out to Washington State Park, which was way far away, out in the Ozarks I imagine. And that was a real treat because just for the whole day you were basically on your own; it was like a big picnic.
What sort of park was it? Was it like Tilden or was it more of a …?
Big, state park. You could get lost, and probably did. Well, the first year I remember they just let us go and so I just wandered around all day, and I think you could find arrowheads. And there were little trails and things like that. I guess it was like Tilden, only bigger, like… I can’t think of any actual equivalent.
I guess I meant is it close to the city? I mean Tilden’s close to the city but it’s fairly wild.
No. It’s far away. It was like an hour’s drive. You’d get up really early.
More like Muir Woods or something.
Yeah, exactly, something like that. So the second year, I remember this very clearly, as soon as the bus doors opened I was out in front of everybody screaming running into the woods. And I knew where I wanted to go; I knew where the trails were; I knew the markings; I knew how to get away from everybody, ‘cause I remembered that from the year before.
So you had really explored the place?
Yeah, I explored it and I remembered it. That was good. And I think I mentioned this: there was a big department store called Famous and Barr, and they would bus people out to that. They would bus people at Christmas time, the Famous and Barr people would let all the homes in St. Louis take over the store and just go roaming up and down, you know, a Santa Claus on every floor.
Did you do Christmas shopping? What were the holiday’s like…
Christmas was cool.
…with your siblings? Did you do family things?
No, no. When my father would come into town, the two or three times he did, it was not during those times, as I remember it; but Christmas was cool because everybody got tons and tons of gifts and goodies and things like that from all these Masons all around the state.
So they’d put out the word to the Mason’s all over the place saying: these poor kids at the home need you…?
Yeah, they must have sent around profiles because these things would be directed to you, or maybe they just gave names out or something like that.
Did they know your interests or anything?
No, not really. I don’t remember anything particular; I just remember there was a lot of it, and then some of the kids, like my sister who became affiliated, who became a pet of some of the other organizations or sub-organizations, they would get, the ones that they knew something about, they would get things tailored to them, like a new dress or whatever. I never got a new dress! No!
[Laughing] You had to wear the old dress.
That’s right. And ah, what was the other thing? That was fun, anything that got you out of the home was fun, and that was the most important thing was to have some fun. These chaperoned trips, they weren’t too bad. I mentioned the trips to the movies once a week, way, way down there. We’d spend our bus money on White Castle hamburgers, you know those little, they’re about the size of silver dollars; you could buy a dozen for a buck. Yeah, you know they’re really tiny little—the land of the giants. Those trips were sometimes chaperoned by just older kids; some of the older kids, they were really old, like seventeen or eighteen, but they were cool because they would let this go on. You know you were supposed to ride the bus back and forth, or the trolley, they had trolleys in St. Louis then, maybe they do now. So those were okay, but… I mean you could string back from the tail of the group or walk ahead and be away, but you’re still going back and forth. And in the wintertime, I guess they had a locked playroom or something like this with stuff in it because you could check out sleds and they would let you go out to the art museum. They had this thing called Art Hill in front of the art museum. It was just this gigantic hill that everybody in St. Louis came to slide down. And there were hundreds of people out there, you know, all up in their winter gear, and they had the sleds and the pieces of cardboard and the toboggans and you’d slide down and go back up, and that was a trip because it wasn’t chaperoned.
Was that kind of winter, all the snow and everything--you’d been in New Mexico, where it would have been completely different--was Kansas…?
Kansas was real seasons. Big snow, big snowmen, so that was just expected, that there would be snow in the winter. They would transport people to the ice-skating rink, to the big municipal ice-skating rink; so there was always something happening; but possibly the neatest thing that happened was camp, because they would let you go, you know when you reached a certain age, to camp for a few weeks, so it wasn’t a Masonic camp, it was just a regular camp. It wasn’t a YMCA camp. There was no affiliation. It was camp whatever; I don’t even know what it was. But you were completely away from the home, completely out of their control.
Was it supervised by anybody in the home or…?
No. They paid for it, or they got a deal or whatever.
Did you get to escape from your reputation?
Ah, no, as a matter of fact, but…
It followed you there?
It was just me. I took myself wherever I went, but I had no reason to really make trouble because first of all they keep you busy, and I was digging all these things, you know: riflery—ah, they give you a gun and let you shoot at things. I can smell that cordite. Yeah. Horseback riding; that’s incredible, you know, way up into the mountains you could go with your horse, and if you got good you could let it go, you could run rip-roaring down the meadows. Archery! Lanyards! Whoa!
So they weren’t always all over you to control it?
No. There wasn’t anybody from the home there. It was just camp, camp counselors, and there was no real regimentation other than the usual camp regimentation. You had to get up at a certain time, and everybody ate together and that sort of stuff, but you could pick your own activities.
And it sounds like while you were doing these activities you could just carry on any way you… once you took your horse out you could go just about anywhere?
Yeah, just about. A lot of it depended on which bunkhouse or whatever it was you got settled into, because you were with maybe a dozen other kids, and which camp counselor you got, and the one year I remember particularly, the camp counselor was this guy, he must have been—he was extremely old—like nineteen or twenty maybe. These were all young adults. He was from South Africa. He was like, a, I don’t know what he was doing over here, but he had that accent, that South African accent, and he was kind of a little, I got the impression that he might have been a mercenary or something, because he did nutty things. He was kind of nutty, and everybody knew he was nutty, at least the kids did.
Was he a white South African?
Yes. Oh no, there weren’t any, I don’t think there were any black kids at this camp. Yeah, none of my friends from school went to this camp in the Ozarks. I don’t know what they did in the summer. But he would do things, I mean there was a boys’ side and a girls’ side, I think it was separated by some water or something like that; he would go over there at night and hang out with the girl counselors.
How did you know that? He told you, or did you go…?
He told us. Other people told us. I mean we could mingle with the girls at some point and we would get that information from them, and it didn’t surprise us ‘cause he’d do things like, I mean, he sleeps in the same bunkhouse with us, so one night somebody taped him on the shoulder—he was asleep—and he leaps out of his bunk from the top bunk and he’s got this knife in his hand [laughs], and then he blinks and he says: Sorry, boys.
So you think he was military or had some training…?
He might have been military because, you know, I think he was the riflery instructor too, but he knew about the Mau Maus. And one of the things, you know there was all this competition in the camp between kids in different bunkhouses, you know there was this point system and maybe there were tugs of war, and I don’t remember what it was, but we were feared out of all the rest because he had taught us this bloodcurdling Mau Mau yell that he swore the Mau Maus used. And I could still do it if you want to hear it: A KOOLA LAI MAU MAU! EH! A KOOLA LAI MAU MAU! EH! A KOOLA LAI MAU MAU EH! EH! EH! [laughter] You know it was a dozen little rugrats, little screaming boys and this camp counselor trotting around camp shrieking this out in unison, and they didn’t know what… He finally got bounced, he actually got bounced in mid term. This was completely unheard-of, nobody ah…
So he was too wild for them even?
Yeah, he did something else that we didn’t know about. He did something serious.
That’s kind of interesting though because it sounds like he, in spite of the fact that he might have been a mercenary and involved in the various wars there, it sounds like he had a certain amount of respect for the Mau Mau.
I think he might have, yeah. He just might have. Maybe he got bounced out of there too because he was too pro-native or something; I don’t know. I mean we didn’t really know what all that stuff meant. The Mau Maus were in the news, and in school we knew there was Jomo Kenyatta and all this stuff, but as far as I remember it was the poor white settlers being overrun by these bloodthirsty savages.
And then you learned to scream like the Mau Mau.
Yeah, struck terror into hearts of the poor white settlers. But I liked him because I figured out how I could make him laugh, ‘cause he never, you know he was pretty serious all the time, but I figured out some way; I don’t know how.
Do you remember?
No. It had something to do with… the first time it had something to do with—jeez, what the heck was it? It was in the dining hall, and they would make these bogus announcements over the PA system about what you were supposed to do and how you were supposed to clean things up or where you were supposed to put this, and don’t throw this away, or something like that, and maybe we had a meal with toothpicks in it, and I just said something like: Oh now they’re gonna want their toothpicks back; and he just laughed uproariously at that because all the counselors hated the camp management. It was like that Alan Sherman song, you know [sings]: All the counselors hate the waiters. But I guess he had some issues with the management too because that was unprecedented, sort of towards the end of that particular session we had a new camp counselor in our barn.
So they eighty-sixed him even before…?
Yeah, in the middle. That’s how we knew about it. He just wasn’t there the next day.
Was the other counselor really different?
Yeah, he was one of these, you know, real boring, one-dimensional, probably a Christian; I don’t know. But it was almost over then anyway. And you know, staying up late around the campfire. I never did nothin’ like that there. That was great. Singin’ them songs, singing all the camp songs, you know.
So it wasn’t doo-wop around the campfire?
No, it was like ‘The Titanic’. You know that old song, ‘The Titanic’?
I don’t think I do.
[sings] Oh they built the ship Titanic,
And when they were all through,
They thought they had a ship
That the water’d never go through.
But the Lord’s almighty hand
Said the ship would never stand.
It was sad when the great ship went down.
Oh it was sad (so sad), so sad (so sad), sad when the great ship went down to the bottom of the…[trailing off]
[spoken:] The real thing was [sings]:
Husbands and wives, little bitty children lost their lives;
It was sad when the great ship went down.
[spoken:] But when they’re not looking you sing [sings]:
Uncles and aunts, little bitty children lost their pants [laughter],
Sad when…
[spoken:] And it went on and on and told the whole story of the Titanic, and supposedly there were false Indian songs with weird words, weird syllables, and ah, you know, some of the other camp songs, and, I don’t know, just regulation songs too, like “Oh Susanna.”
Well it sounds like you got into the spirit of that stuff.
Yeah, I liked it. It was all sunny and it was outside a lot, and they even put on a [laughs], they put on a musical, I mean they put on a show at the end of every camp session, and one of the years I was there—I never usually got into it, but this time I got into it—it was South Pacific, you know, with all the kids and some of the counselors doing the songs from South Pacific and various kinds of costumes and whatnot.
You were in the show?
Yeah. I guess I was a sailor or something like that.
Well you’re smoking a cigar now, I guess you could have been, what’s his name?
--Oh, you were in South Pacific too, weren’t ya! I was Bloody Mary, and… So that’s what was fun. That’s what was fun at that time. I was gonna get back to those movies. You asked me what was important, well what was important was having fun. And the movies were—it was nice to get out and go to those movies. We would have gone to anything, in fact I think in many cases we didn’t even know what was playing.
[laughs] Let’s go to the movies, and then you just go, and whatever was there you watched.
Yeah, sure, right; you watched or you didn’t, you messed around and played around or ran up and down, or you didn’t stay for the whole movie, but you did stay, you know, the best movies, the far out movies, the bizarre movies. The late fifties were a great time for the science fiction. Them, with the giant ants, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Fly, and The Return of the Fly…
Do you remember seeing Invasion of the Body Snatchers and some of those?
Yes, that was extremely scary.
Did you get spooked by some of ‘em?
Uh uh. Not in that way, I mean it was like allowing yourself to…
Not where you were afraid to turn the light off at night?
No. Earlier I got spooked by stuff I’d seen on TV, but these movies, they were scary but they were also funny, you know.
Kind of kitsch.
What was the other…? oh well, you know, Forbidden Planet, because it was in color. That was really great production values. Those monsters from the Id, the imaginary monsters. And then of course there was The War of the Worlds. That was also in color, and that was a real good one. But you know, if Tammy was playing we’d go see Tammy, or Gidget or whatever they were. I can’t think of the serious or non-sci-fi movies that were out there that I really remember, except you know there were some movies with rock-and-rollers in ‘em, like High School Confidential. I don’t remember if that was out there, but there were a couple of movies with Pat Boone. By then Elvis Presley was making movies, but they weren’t any good. We’d watch ‘em though [laughter]. But radio; that’s when radio really started making a difference, and that was kind of important because we could all have our own radios, and there were rock-and-roll stations. Before, I guess I first started paying attention to the music that was coming out of radios, or music in general, like pop music, was earlier, when I was in Colorado, because of jukeboxes. And I used to be alone, by myself a lot, so I’d hang out in soda shops and pizza places, and they had the big jukeboxes and then they had the little jukeboxes, on your table, at your table. And you could hear stuff on the radio, but they didn’t have really rock-and-roll stations then or DJs, it was kind of all mixed up; they were trying to get Elvis Presley in with Perry Como, Fats Domino and Patty Page, but there was stuff on the jukebox you couldn’t hear on the radio, crazy stuff, stuff like ‘Alley Oop’! Whoa! ‘Transfusion’! You know those were the kind of things I liked.
I don’t know ‘Transfusion’.
By Nervous Norvis? ‘Transfusion’…’Transfusion’. One of the things, besides just the straight rock-and-roll—you tell me when to stop—there was all these novelty songs, and I liked them too, like the ‘Flying Purple People Eater’ and ‘The Witch Doctor’, and some of them were borderline, like, you know, The Coasters, they were the champions of this; they had all those songs that weren’t really, I mean they were…
‘Charlie Brown’.
‘Charlie Brown’. They were amusing but they weren’t novelty but they were funny, but they rocked too: “Charlie Brown” and “Long Tall Jones” [sings]: And then he tied her up! And then he turned on the buzz saw! And then, and then, [speaking] and then along came Jones. Well ‘Transfusion’, it was before that, it was Nervous Norvis, and it had to do with automobile crashes. The chorus was a guy asking for a transfusion.
Really? Sounds kind of serious [laughs].
Yeah, but it was mad. It was—I’ll have to get a record of that though and listen to it again. He’d be telling a story about how he was driving down the road and he decided to push it up a little and then comes the horrendous sound of a car crash, and then a pause, and then it goes into the chorus [sings]:
Transfusion, transfusion,
Doc I’m gonna make a new resolution.
I’m never, never, never gonna speed again.
Put a gallon in me Allan.
[spoken] And each time it would be something different, you know, it would be [sings]:
I was drivin’ down the highway doin’ a hundred and five.
(And then the car crash, and then a beat:)
Transfusion, transfusion….
Something something something…
[spoken] I can’t remember any more. But the tag line was always [sings]:
Shoot some juice to me Bruce….
[speaks] It was always different. He was always gettin’ some more blood.
[laughing] Now what our listeners can’t see is that you’re smokin’ a cigar [laughter] and you’ve got your shades on and you look like kind of an insect [laughing], and you’re leaning into the mic, and he’s got a kind of wild look in his eye and it’s pretty scary.
[sings] Transfusion, transfusion.
Oh Doc I’m gonna need…
[speaking] I wish I could remember more now, but that was great. There was nothin’--I’d never heard anything like that.
It occurs to me that being born in 1946—we’re gonna have to turn the tape over in just a second but—that being born in 1946 you were on the edge of this wave of the baby boom really, so all this stuff was happening…
Yeah.
…I mean rock-and-roll becoming, I mean the invention of rock-and-roll, the whole teen culture, the whole car culture seems to be growing out of that too. It’s interesting, and the whole thing of radio. Radio was kid-driven it seems, or rock-and-roll radio let’s say, was definitely kid-driven. Let me turn the tape. Sorry.
No, not at all.
[End Tape 4, Side A]
Where we were: You were in the gifted program, and I gather that it was by mutual agreement that you bailed out of it. Did you say: I don’t want to do this anymore, or did they say: We don’t want you anymore?
I don’t remember, but I know I wasn’t doing the work. I wasn’t really doing the work. That was the thing I objected to most, aside from the fact that all these other kids were isolated and treated as though they were special. They were all smart; that’s for sure, but they made them work. I didn’t like that, that part of it. So much homework, and they made you talk in class, and you always had to write, write about, explain this or explain that, or read something and then write about it, and you know I just didn’t want to do any of that, so I never did.
You just simply didn’t do the homework and all?
As far as I remember. So I bombed out on the tests, so I don’t know. All I know is that I wasn’t unhappy when it turned out that… I don’t remember the mechanics of it. I wasn’t unhappy to find out that I was going back to the other school.
That was about eighth grade, seventh grade?
That was like seventh grade, sixth and seventh grade I think, ‘cause I went back to that other school, Clark school for the eighth grade to finish grade school. So there I am, I bombed out. They went out of their way to put me in this special program, and I bombed out of that, and I’m a bit of a troublemaker and an instigator and what was the other thing they were calling me: a showoff.
Instigator was their favorite word I guess.
Well I didn’t know. They accused me of that and I didn’t know whether to cop a plea, didn’t know if it was a fair cop, so they had to explain it to me; and I never really thought I did in the sense that I tried to get other kids in trouble or tried to organize or anything like that. I was happy when the other kids took notice of me and thought I was really cool or whatever for doin’ somethin’ or makin’ some trouble or makin’ somethin’ happen or whatever. But I don’t remember that I really was an agitator or anything like that. I was always looking out for myself.
So your motivation wasn’t to be sort of a leader of men or instigate other people doing things that would put them in…? It was more just your own expression?
Yeah, I think so, as much as I can put any explanation on it at all. There was no plot or anything like that to it. In fact I didn’t like any of the team aspects of anything. Earlier, in other schools and other places I had played football and baseball and all those American things that you do, and I liked some aspects of it, but I didn’t like the part where the coaches would get everybody together and say: You got to pull; you got to do this, you got to pull harder; you got to work together; you’re part of a team. I never… So I stopped doing all those things and just sat around and drew; whenever gym class came around I’d try to scoot away from it.
Were there any sports that you liked: track or the more individual events?
No. I hated the whole idea of gym and sports and exertion.
[Laughs] So you were an early sedentary sort of a guy?
No, I just didn’t like the—I mean I got out, I got around. I did certain little things on my own. I could climb up fire escapes real fast; and I liked to watch baseball, baseball games. They used to take us to Cardinal games in the home. We used to go see Cardinal games and Stan the Man Musial, oh yeah.
Was the stadium fairly close? The old stadiums tended to be in the city, pretty easy to get to.
I think it was. Busch Stadium; I think it was. I think it’s still the same one, as far as I know.
So you’d go out, a bunch of kids…?
And maybe some of the old people. You know they would do a couple of things like this throughout the years. Huge buses would roll up and they’d pack as many kids and old people into them as possible, and sometimes you had to reserve in advance or something like that, ‘cause not everybody could go. But they tried to mount things like that. For example, once a year they would take as many kids and old people as they could out to Washington State Park, which was way far away, out in the Ozarks I imagine. And that was a real treat because just for the whole day you were basically on your own; it was like a big picnic.
What sort of park was it? Was it like Tilden or was it more of a …?
Big, state park. You could get lost, and probably did. Well, the first year I remember they just let us go and so I just wandered around all day, and I think you could find arrowheads. And there were little trails and things like that. I guess it was like Tilden, only bigger, like… I can’t think of any actual equivalent.
I guess I meant is it close to the city? I mean Tilden’s close to the city but it’s fairly wild.
No. It’s far away. It was like an hour’s drive. You’d get up really early.
More like Muir Woods or something.
Yeah, exactly, something like that. So the second year, I remember this very clearly, as soon as the bus doors opened I was out in front of everybody screaming running into the woods. And I knew where I wanted to go; I knew where the trails were; I knew the markings; I knew how to get away from everybody, ‘cause I remembered that from the year before.
So you had really explored the place?
Yeah, I explored it and I remembered it. That was good. And I think I mentioned this: there was a big department store called Famous and Barr, and they would bus people out to that. They would bus people at Christmas time, the Famous and Barr people would let all the homes in St. Louis take over the store and just go roaming up and down, you know, a Santa Claus on every floor.
Did you do Christmas shopping? What were the holiday’s like…
Christmas was cool.
…with your siblings? Did you do family things?
No, no. When my father would come into town, the two or three times he did, it was not during those times, as I remember it; but Christmas was cool because everybody got tons and tons of gifts and goodies and things like that from all these Masons all around the state.
So they’d put out the word to the Mason’s all over the place saying: these poor kids at the home need you…?
Yeah, they must have sent around profiles because these things would be directed to you, or maybe they just gave names out or something like that.
Did they know your interests or anything?
No, not really. I don’t remember anything particular; I just remember there was a lot of it, and then some of the kids, like my sister who became affiliated, who became a pet of some of the other organizations or sub-organizations, they would get, the ones that they knew something about, they would get things tailored to them, like a new dress or whatever. I never got a new dress! No!
[Laughing] You had to wear the old dress.
That’s right. And ah, what was the other thing? That was fun, anything that got you out of the home was fun, and that was the most important thing was to have some fun. These chaperoned trips, they weren’t too bad. I mentioned the trips to the movies once a week, way, way down there. We’d spend our bus money on White Castle hamburgers, you know those little, they’re about the size of silver dollars; you could buy a dozen for a buck. Yeah, you know they’re really tiny little—the land of the giants. Those trips were sometimes chaperoned by just older kids; some of the older kids, they were really old, like seventeen or eighteen, but they were cool because they would let this go on. You know you were supposed to ride the bus back and forth, or the trolley, they had trolleys in St. Louis then, maybe they do now. So those were okay, but… I mean you could string back from the tail of the group or walk ahead and be away, but you’re still going back and forth. And in the wintertime, I guess they had a locked playroom or something like this with stuff in it because you could check out sleds and they would let you go out to the art museum. They had this thing called Art Hill in front of the art museum. It was just this gigantic hill that everybody in St. Louis came to slide down. And there were hundreds of people out there, you know, all up in their winter gear, and they had the sleds and the pieces of cardboard and the toboggans and you’d slide down and go back up, and that was a trip because it wasn’t chaperoned.
Was that kind of winter, all the snow and everything--you’d been in New Mexico, where it would have been completely different--was Kansas…?
Kansas was real seasons. Big snow, big snowmen, so that was just expected, that there would be snow in the winter. They would transport people to the ice-skating rink, to the big municipal ice-skating rink; so there was always something happening; but possibly the neatest thing that happened was camp, because they would let you go, you know when you reached a certain age, to camp for a few weeks, so it wasn’t a Masonic camp, it was just a regular camp. It wasn’t a YMCA camp. There was no affiliation. It was camp whatever; I don’t even know what it was. But you were completely away from the home, completely out of their control.
Was it supervised by anybody in the home or…?
No. They paid for it, or they got a deal or whatever.
Did you get to escape from your reputation?
Ah, no, as a matter of fact, but…
It followed you there?
It was just me. I took myself wherever I went, but I had no reason to really make trouble because first of all they keep you busy, and I was digging all these things, you know: riflery—ah, they give you a gun and let you shoot at things. I can smell that cordite. Yeah. Horseback riding; that’s incredible, you know, way up into the mountains you could go with your horse, and if you got good you could let it go, you could run rip-roaring down the meadows. Archery! Lanyards! Whoa!
So they weren’t always all over you to control it?
No. There wasn’t anybody from the home there. It was just camp, camp counselors, and there was no real regimentation other than the usual camp regimentation. You had to get up at a certain time, and everybody ate together and that sort of stuff, but you could pick your own activities.
And it sounds like while you were doing these activities you could just carry on any way you… once you took your horse out you could go just about anywhere?
Yeah, just about. A lot of it depended on which bunkhouse or whatever it was you got settled into, because you were with maybe a dozen other kids, and which camp counselor you got, and the one year I remember particularly, the camp counselor was this guy, he must have been—he was extremely old—like nineteen or twenty maybe. These were all young adults. He was from South Africa. He was like, a, I don’t know what he was doing over here, but he had that accent, that South African accent, and he was kind of a little, I got the impression that he might have been a mercenary or something, because he did nutty things. He was kind of nutty, and everybody knew he was nutty, at least the kids did.
Was he a white South African?
Yes. Oh no, there weren’t any, I don’t think there were any black kids at this camp. Yeah, none of my friends from school went to this camp in the Ozarks. I don’t know what they did in the summer. But he would do things, I mean there was a boys’ side and a girls’ side, I think it was separated by some water or something like that; he would go over there at night and hang out with the girl counselors.
How did you know that? He told you, or did you go…?
He told us. Other people told us. I mean we could mingle with the girls at some point and we would get that information from them, and it didn’t surprise us ‘cause he’d do things like, I mean, he sleeps in the same bunkhouse with us, so one night somebody taped him on the shoulder—he was asleep—and he leaps out of his bunk from the top bunk and he’s got this knife in his hand [laughs], and then he blinks and he says: Sorry, boys.
So you think he was military or had some training…?
He might have been military because, you know, I think he was the riflery instructor too, but he knew about the Mau Maus. And one of the things, you know there was all this competition in the camp between kids in different bunkhouses, you know there was this point system and maybe there were tugs of war, and I don’t remember what it was, but we were feared out of all the rest because he had taught us this bloodcurdling Mau Mau yell that he swore the Mau Maus used. And I could still do it if you want to hear it: A KOOLA LAI MAU MAU! EH! A KOOLA LAI MAU MAU! EH! A KOOLA LAI MAU MAU EH! EH! EH! [laughter] You know it was a dozen little rugrats, little screaming boys and this camp counselor trotting around camp shrieking this out in unison, and they didn’t know what… He finally got bounced, he actually got bounced in mid term. This was completely unheard-of, nobody ah…
So he was too wild for them even?
Yeah, he did something else that we didn’t know about. He did something serious.
That’s kind of interesting though because it sounds like he, in spite of the fact that he might have been a mercenary and involved in the various wars there, it sounds like he had a certain amount of respect for the Mau Mau.
I think he might have, yeah. He just might have. Maybe he got bounced out of there too because he was too pro-native or something; I don’t know. I mean we didn’t really know what all that stuff meant. The Mau Maus were in the news, and in school we knew there was Jomo Kenyatta and all this stuff, but as far as I remember it was the poor white settlers being overrun by these bloodthirsty savages.
And then you learned to scream like the Mau Mau.
Yeah, struck terror into hearts of the poor white settlers. But I liked him because I figured out how I could make him laugh, ‘cause he never, you know he was pretty serious all the time, but I figured out some way; I don’t know how.
Do you remember?
No. It had something to do with… the first time it had something to do with—jeez, what the heck was it? It was in the dining hall, and they would make these bogus announcements over the PA system about what you were supposed to do and how you were supposed to clean things up or where you were supposed to put this, and don’t throw this away, or something like that, and maybe we had a meal with toothpicks in it, and I just said something like: Oh now they’re gonna want their toothpicks back; and he just laughed uproariously at that because all the counselors hated the camp management. It was like that Alan Sherman song, you know [sings]: All the counselors hate the waiters. But I guess he had some issues with the management too because that was unprecedented, sort of towards the end of that particular session we had a new camp counselor in our barn.
So they eighty-sixed him even before…?
Yeah, in the middle. That’s how we knew about it. He just wasn’t there the next day.
Was the other counselor really different?
Yeah, he was one of these, you know, real boring, one-dimensional, probably a Christian; I don’t know. But it was almost over then anyway. And you know, staying up late around the campfire. I never did nothin’ like that there. That was great. Singin’ them songs, singing all the camp songs, you know.
So it wasn’t doo-wop around the campfire?
No, it was like ‘The Titanic’. You know that old song, ‘The Titanic’?
I don’t think I do.
[sings] Oh they built the ship Titanic,
And when they were all through,
They thought they had a ship
That the water’d never go through.
But the Lord’s almighty hand
Said the ship would never stand.
It was sad when the great ship went down.
Oh it was sad (so sad), so sad (so sad), sad when the great ship went down to the bottom of the…[trailing off]
[spoken:] The real thing was [sings]:
Husbands and wives, little bitty children lost their lives;
It was sad when the great ship went down.
[spoken:] But when they’re not looking you sing [sings]:
Uncles and aunts, little bitty children lost their pants [laughter],
Sad when…
[spoken:] And it went on and on and told the whole story of the Titanic, and supposedly there were false Indian songs with weird words, weird syllables, and ah, you know, some of the other camp songs, and, I don’t know, just regulation songs too, like “Oh Susanna.”
Well it sounds like you got into the spirit of that stuff.
Yeah, I liked it. It was all sunny and it was outside a lot, and they even put on a [laughs], they put on a musical, I mean they put on a show at the end of every camp session, and one of the years I was there—I never usually got into it, but this time I got into it—it was South Pacific, you know, with all the kids and some of the counselors doing the songs from South Pacific and various kinds of costumes and whatnot.
You were in the show?
Yeah. I guess I was a sailor or something like that.
Well you’re smoking a cigar now, I guess you could have been, what’s his name?
--Oh, you were in South Pacific too, weren’t ya! I was Bloody Mary, and… So that’s what was fun. That’s what was fun at that time. I was gonna get back to those movies. You asked me what was important, well what was important was having fun. And the movies were—it was nice to get out and go to those movies. We would have gone to anything, in fact I think in many cases we didn’t even know what was playing.
[laughs] Let’s go to the movies, and then you just go, and whatever was there you watched.
Yeah, sure, right; you watched or you didn’t, you messed around and played around or ran up and down, or you didn’t stay for the whole movie, but you did stay, you know, the best movies, the far out movies, the bizarre movies. The late fifties were a great time for the science fiction. Them, with the giant ants, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Fly, and The Return of the Fly…
Do you remember seeing Invasion of the Body Snatchers and some of those?
Yes, that was extremely scary.
Did you get spooked by some of ‘em?
Uh uh. Not in that way, I mean it was like allowing yourself to…
Not where you were afraid to turn the light off at night?
No. Earlier I got spooked by stuff I’d seen on TV, but these movies, they were scary but they were also funny, you know.
Kind of kitsch.
What was the other…? oh well, you know, Forbidden Planet, because it was in color. That was really great production values. Those monsters from the Id, the imaginary monsters. And then of course there was The War of the Worlds. That was also in color, and that was a real good one. But you know, if Tammy was playing we’d go see Tammy, or Gidget or whatever they were. I can’t think of the serious or non-sci-fi movies that were out there that I really remember, except you know there were some movies with rock-and-rollers in ‘em, like High School Confidential. I don’t remember if that was out there, but there were a couple of movies with Pat Boone. By then Elvis Presley was making movies, but they weren’t any good. We’d watch ‘em though [laughter]. But radio; that’s when radio really started making a difference, and that was kind of important because we could all have our own radios, and there were rock-and-roll stations. Before, I guess I first started paying attention to the music that was coming out of radios, or music in general, like pop music, was earlier, when I was in Colorado, because of jukeboxes. And I used to be alone, by myself a lot, so I’d hang out in soda shops and pizza places, and they had the big jukeboxes and then they had the little jukeboxes, on your table, at your table. And you could hear stuff on the radio, but they didn’t have really rock-and-roll stations then or DJs, it was kind of all mixed up; they were trying to get Elvis Presley in with Perry Como, Fats Domino and Patty Page, but there was stuff on the jukebox you couldn’t hear on the radio, crazy stuff, stuff like ‘Alley Oop’! Whoa! ‘Transfusion’! You know those were the kind of things I liked.
I don’t know ‘Transfusion’.
By Nervous Norvis? ‘Transfusion’…’Transfusion’. One of the things, besides just the straight rock-and-roll—you tell me when to stop—there was all these novelty songs, and I liked them too, like the ‘Flying Purple People Eater’ and ‘The Witch Doctor’, and some of them were borderline, like, you know, The Coasters, they were the champions of this; they had all those songs that weren’t really, I mean they were…
‘Charlie Brown’.
‘Charlie Brown’. They were amusing but they weren’t novelty but they were funny, but they rocked too: “Charlie Brown” and “Long Tall Jones” [sings]: And then he tied her up! And then he turned on the buzz saw! And then, and then, [speaking] and then along came Jones. Well ‘Transfusion’, it was before that, it was Nervous Norvis, and it had to do with automobile crashes. The chorus was a guy asking for a transfusion.
Really? Sounds kind of serious [laughs].
Yeah, but it was mad. It was—I’ll have to get a record of that though and listen to it again. He’d be telling a story about how he was driving down the road and he decided to push it up a little and then comes the horrendous sound of a car crash, and then a pause, and then it goes into the chorus [sings]:
Transfusion, transfusion,
Doc I’m gonna make a new resolution.
I’m never, never, never gonna speed again.
Put a gallon in me Allan.
[spoken] And each time it would be something different, you know, it would be [sings]:
I was drivin’ down the highway doin’ a hundred and five.
(And then the car crash, and then a beat:)
Transfusion, transfusion….
Something something something…
[spoken] I can’t remember any more. But the tag line was always [sings]:
Shoot some juice to me Bruce….
[speaks] It was always different. He was always gettin’ some more blood.
[laughing] Now what our listeners can’t see is that you’re smokin’ a cigar [laughter] and you’ve got your shades on and you look like kind of an insect [laughing], and you’re leaning into the mic, and he’s got a kind of wild look in his eye and it’s pretty scary.
[sings] Transfusion, transfusion.
Oh Doc I’m gonna need…
[speaking] I wish I could remember more now, but that was great. There was nothin’--I’d never heard anything like that.
It occurs to me that being born in 1946—we’re gonna have to turn the tape over in just a second but—that being born in 1946 you were on the edge of this wave of the baby boom really, so all this stuff was happening…
Yeah.
…I mean rock-and-roll becoming, I mean the invention of rock-and-roll, the whole teen culture, the whole car culture seems to be growing out of that too. It’s interesting, and the whole thing of radio. Radio was kid-driven it seems, or rock-and-roll radio let’s say, was definitely kid-driven. Let me turn the tape. Sorry.
No, not at all.
[End Tape 4, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:36 PM
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