Tape 8, Side A
[Begin Tape 8, Side A]
We’re interviewing Michael Conkin out here at the Moffitt Library. He’s got his cigar, ready to fire it up. We were in Van Nuys, though we may have a little time traveling, a little doubling back to do, but we’ll soon see.
Well I figured I couldn’t really get to Van Nuys and leave high school yet and leave this phase of Hermosa Beach life and Manhattan Beach life without saying a couple of things, some other experiences that occurred to me after our last torture—ah, narrative session.
[Laughing] It was a little cold out here.
It was cold. Well I mentioned The Lighthouse as a magnet and a focus for the jazz music and the stuff that was going on around that time, but there was another club down there in Hermosa Beach that was equally if not even more of a magnet, more of a strange far out place, and this was The Insomniac. This was one of the great, oldest Southern California coffee shops, café/coffee shops. They had some in Venice and they may have had something in Santa Monica, but I don’t think they had anything else like this anywhere else in Southern California. Probably in San Francisco it was very common, although even now you can’t see anything quite like this. This was a coffee shop with like a little club attached to it, and it was open all the time; it was open till like 3 am, hence the name I guess. Anybody could go in there because it was also a bookstore, it was like a café cum bookstore cum chess place cum club, and lots of people hung out there, people in their twenties and thirties that I didn’t know. They were probably Beat, or Beat wannabe, or just Beat intellectuals. The first, I mean people… guys with beards and shades, walking around at night with shades on. And I think that’s probably where I saw my first man with a ponytail, you know like in 1964.
Yeah, that’s pretty wild for that time.
I said: Wow, that’s far out. You know you could go in there, even kids could go in there. I was what, sixteen or something. Kids could go in there. It was very wide open, I mean they didn’t have an entrance or anything like that. It just opened onto the sidewalk, great big entrance, I guess maybe it was like a sliding gate or something like that ‘cause they’d open it up and there you’d be walking down the sidewalk and then you’d be in The Insomniac. It was probably like a wider spread out version of City Lights or something like that, ‘cause they had independent press stuff, they didn’t have bestsellers and paperbacks like that, but they had poetry and philosophy, existentialist stuff, you know, and Asian philosophy stuff, and they had art on the walls, you know, crazy far out abstract art, and they served—they had a little bar there—and they served the coffee, the cappuccino! you know which was nowhere except there. I didn’t know what that was. I thought they invented it.
I mean now everyone knows from cappuccino, but not in those days.
And next door was the club. I don’t think I could get in there except certain times. I think there was like a door charge. They served liquor drinks in there too, but they served coffee drinks, I think, when I could get in. I just wasn’t interested in the music that they were featuring there, but it was like folk music, Trinidad steel bands, you know, that sort of stuff: Olatunji, Odetta, you know, whoever was big and was folky was there, but also, like, local groups. But between that sound and the sound across the street I was gravitating towards the stuff across the street, but I just enjoyed the atmosphere there, and, you know, sometimes if I was up late you could just walk down there and walk on in; that was the only thing that was open anyway. So I wanted to mention The Insomniac. It shut down shortly thereafter.
Tell me was it hard for--so you were sixteen or seventeen through most of this—was it hard for you to hang out in such places? Were you looked at like just a kid, which of course you were, or was it pretty open?
It was pretty open, I mean they didn’t discourage you. Nobody talked to me either. You know they were all busy reading their books and playing their chess. They probably were hopped up on marijuana or some other kinds of stuff too. I don’t know. I was just interested in being there and I didn’t want to talk to anybody anyway [laughter]. I was just digging the whole scene.
So you had big eyes and you were just checking everything out?
Whatever seemed really interesting and off the wall. I liked that off the wall stuff. I guess maybe they had zoning problems or something like that. They weren’t doing that much business; it was never very crowded in there, and you know chess players don’t generate a lot of activity at the bar ‘cause they’ll just occupy a table and sit there over a cup of coffee.
It sounds like the kind of scene that can only happen when the economics are right: the rents are not too high and they don’t have to push too many drinks or have a big cover charge to make a go of it.
Yep. Yeah, and probably it was in a real old dilapidated structure because when it went they just tore it down. For a while it was just an empty lot and then they put some boutiques in there.
That area became trendy?
It became a little trendier, yeah, a little, but it was still kind of a beachy area because the traffic that went in and out. I just went back recently and it’s not so funky and run down and a lot of the old places are gone but it’s still has a beach character. Still some of the things that were there then are still there now, like The Either Or Bookstore. That was a great place and its character is pretty much the same now as it was then. They had an occult section and a philosophy section, and that sort of thing, not a regulation bookstore, more the kind of bookstore you’d see around here. That’s still there, and Greeko’s Sandals, they’re still there.
And you remembered them? Did you wear sandals?
Uh uh, those sandals were expensive. You got me going on buying those little five-dollar Macanudos.
At least fashion to us when I was about that age was extremely important. Did you pay much attention to what you wore?
No I really didn’t, not then because I don’t know, I just wasn’t… I mean earlier I remember in St. Louis it was a big thing, in the fifties, that sort of thing: the vests and the engineer boots and certain kind of clothing it was nice to get so you could show off with the other fellers and the other kids. At that point it wasn’t a big deal I think because of the beach; everybody was just casual ‘cause most of the time they were just walking around in their shorts. Here in a couple three months I started paying attention, ‘cause I was reading these Playboys too all the time, and you know the Playboy Adviser and lots of... My brother was a snappy dresser, always was a sharp dresser; no matter what his circumstances he was always dressing up real nice, and you know trying to get me to too. It was one of the things he thought he should do was educate people, especially me, on how to be more presentable. So no, not at that time. But it was interesting to see those men in their ponytails and sandals, you know where did those guys--and their little goatees. I guess before that the only other personality with a goatee that I was aware of—two of them that I was aware of: on Saturday afternoons they used to have these fifteen-minute shows on television. One of them was Jonathan Winters used to have a little fifteen-minute show. It was slotted for the kids’ time but you know he was pitching it way over their heads. I don’t remember any of the stuff other than that he was a funny guy, but the one thing I do remember was John Nagi, John Nagi’s Learn How to Draw.
Yeah! That was on when I was a kid.
They may have expanded later, but it started out as one of those fifteen-minute shows. In fact I remember sending away for the John Nagi book and John Nagi art instruction thing: Learn how to draw a boxer dog, you know, it started with simple shapes and… Uh oh, digression: Winky-Dink! You remember Winky-Dink?
No I do not.
I think Winky-Dink was a character—I’m going way back now, I’m just a little tyke—Winky-Dink was a character on TV, I think it was a cartoon in the Kaptain Kangaroo program, you know they had Tom Terrific and Winky-Dink and Powwow the Indian Boy who loved all the animals in the woods. Powwow the Indian Boy loved all the animals and the woods. Winky-Dink was this character, you had to send away for a little Winky-Dink kit, because Winky-Dink he would get himself into scrapes, and you, the kids at home, had to help him out. And the Winky-Dink kit was composed of this clear piece of plastic that adhered to your TV screen and a set of crayons. So Winky-Dink would be running around, you know, somebody would be chasing him, and he’d come to a chasm: Boys and girls, draw Winky-Dink a bridge—so it was interactive TV! So you’d put your little thing on the TV, whipped out your crayons and you drew a bridge. They may have indicated some dotted lines with animation showing you how to draw the bridge, or draw a wall or something like that for somebody to smash into. The problem was that I lost the little screen and I drew right on the TV.
Right on the TV. How did I guess? [laughter]
You had to help out Winky! ‘cause he was gonna fall into that chasm or something.
Did that really piss your parents off?
I think that was a bad thing; that’s how come I remember it, it was a bad thing. So John Nagi taught you how to draw. He had a weird goatee. He was probably--it seems like now it’s a Hungarian name--he was probably, you know, ethnic, so he had a beard. But the other cat with a beard, weird with a beard that I remember was Gary Owens. Gary Owens who later became the voice of Laugh In, you know he has that real deep radio delivery voice. But in St. Louis in fifty-eight or so, everybody was listening to the rock-and-roll music on the radio—I forgot the station: KXOK or something like that, or WIL, maybe that’s what it was [sings]: 1430 on your dial, WIL… [laughs] Uh oh, radio jingles [sings]: On Sunday all St. Louis goes to church / to worship at the church of their choice, / and WIL urges you to thank your god for all your blessings, / St. Louis goes to church. That was WIL. One of them was a rock-and-roll station and you know you’d be listening to the music and suddenly the music would stop and this voice would come on and it would say: G. O. is coming, and no explanation. This went on for a couple of weeks and then you see in the paper: G. O. is coming, and it turned out that there was gonna be a new disk jockey in town and it was Gary Owens; and Gary Owens was this, I don’t know what he was, in his twenties probably, had a flattop and a goatee and he would walk around with these—for footwear he’d take white ice-skates and cut the skate part off—so he was really weird! [laughs]
Were flattops kind of hip?
Yeah, I guess they were, yeah. Flattops… When you went to the barbershop you know they had all those pictures with all the different kinds of, you know, and the one I remember was flattop with sidewalls. You know you let it grow long on the sides and comb it back into a DA* and you got a flattop. Maybe that was also a Hollywood or something like that. DA, sure, I had a DA for a while. Yeah but Gary Owens, then he was on the radio and he was a disk jockey and he was just great because he was so funny, and he made fun of all the music, that was great, then he would pretend to read the daily comics but they were all of his own making and they were all parodies, like Rex Migraine, MD, awe you know it was just the height of humor [laughter].
So did he write the stuff up? It sounds like he did.
Yes he did, and later on when I was in Sunnyvale he was on a radio station in San Francisco, more middle-of-the-road; and then when I was in L.A. he was on a radio station in L.A. too. It was KMPC, it was MOR stuff, it wasn’t rock, but they had a couple of disk jockeys on there who would play some decent stuff. Gary Owens would play—it didn’t make any difference what Gary Owens played, you know, you listened to him to see what he would do. He was still doing his comic strips and still making fun of… There was Less Brown and His Band of Renown, right, so he’d play a cut by Sammy Kay: That was Sammy Kay and his band of Rene. Another high point, another humorous high point. He would invent words and make up his own commercials. That was pretty good. Yeah, that was a middle of the road station but they did have one disk jockey on late at night, Johnny Magnus: the host who loves you most, and he would play some jazzy stuff, you know, mostly big band stuff, but he had a very cool delivery for AM radio, for AM middle of the road radio, but he was swingin’, you know, he always played a lot of Plaz Johnson, who was a studio saxophonist, you’d hear him, he was the guy who was on The Pink Panther [hums opening notes], then he’d play lots of Plaz Johnson’s other stuff. And his thing was Weather with a Beat. You know you had to do the weather so he used as a background Neil Hefty’s ‘Cute’, it’s a song that goes: [hums melodic phrase] then there’d be a silence where in the background maybe you’d hear a little brush work on the cymbals [imitates sound and hums tune with breaks] in between the spaces he would give the weather report for cities around the country, you know, so he’d go: It’s time for weather with a beat, with Johnny Magnus, the host who loves you most: [hums tune] St. Louis: 25, you know, whatever it was. And Gary Owens even made fun of that. They were on the same station and he would do Weather with a Carrot [laughter] or Weather with a Rutabaga or something, I don’t know. Every now and then some Gary Owensism will pop into my head that I haven’t thought of for years.
It seems like it used to be thought of as an art, and I remember through the sixties and into the seventies DJs who could really improvise…
That’s right; that’s absolutely right.
…and do live humorous stuff and ad lib, and it was really… I guess it was when the play lists kind of took over where it became so structured, what you had to do and the commercials and everything was pretty set.
That’s right, every rotation, and that’s why I listened to KMPC because of the guys who were on, I mean the music wasn’t that interesting—some of it was, I mean you didn’t hear Morgana King, for example, on the rock-and-roll stations, but they’d play Morgana King, that was good; I liked Morgana King. But they had a certain amount of freedom, but in between that they would goof off. Like there was a… I wish I could remember it, I know I really loved him then but I can’t remember anything at all, but there was a guy named Bob Arbogast and he was just really wild and wacky for that time, and in the morning there was Dick Wittinghill, and he use to talk, you know just talk, and then he’d do little things like, my favorite thing was the story record. People would call in and submit all these things for him to do a story record, and the story record the way it went was he would recite this story and the end of it, the punch line of the story would be some phrase from some currently popular record, like I can’t even think of any, but some of ‘em were real good, and he picked ‘em so… But it would always be: Then she said [sings]: I wish you bluebirds in the spring… from the record, whatever it was. Some of ‘em were kind of risqué because he was kind of naughty on the air. The guy in the sky, you know the guy in the chopper, his name was Panther Pierce, you know, like panther piss, Paul Panther Pierce. So yeah I think all that individuality is gone now unless Gary Owens is on somewhere now, or Johnny Magnus. But also the other thing I wanted to mention about then was I had these summer jobs. The guy next door, in Manhattan Beach I think--I don’t know if he was responsible for both of these but certainly the one--he had a janitorial service.
Is it in addition to your drugstore job or after?
Yeah, I guess it’s, I’m not sure, it’s mixed up in there somehow, or before it or after it, I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure it was in the summer. Maybe he had a lot of irons in the fire, but one of the things was this janitorial service, and the headquarters of it was down in the Mutual of Omaha building down at Wilshire and La Brea, so that’s where everybody operated out of, and somehow I had to get there and usually, I often went driving with my brother Gene because he’d go in the morning to his job and drop me off there, and that was a nice trip because he never used the freeways; he was always using this long stretch out from La Tijera Boulevard through Baldwin Hills, up over the hills and down into this residential area, so that was really nice, every day was, every one of those rides was cool. I didn’t like the freeway.
Is that why he avoided them: he didn’t like them either?
Oh I think it was faster.
Just ‘cause the freeways were jammed up?
‘Cause he found a shortcut, this particular shortcut. But the janitorial job was great because after the boss left, you know we had our assignments and we had to do them that day and the rest of the time was just spent either in driving around, stopping for lunch or just bullshitting there in the parking garage. Oh I guess he owned the parking garage or he managed the parking garage of the Mutual of Omaha too, you know that building down there, ‘cause I remember spending lots of time just down under in this dank stinky garage hangin’ out with the guys. But we would go out in teams and the guy that I was teamed up with—I wish I could remember his name—all I remember is that he was Sugar Ray Robinson’s brother or something like that. This could be not true, another not true thing, but that’s the way I remember it, he was Sugar Ray Robinson’s brother, Jimmy or Joe or something like that. He was older than me. He might have been older than Sugar Ray, I don’t know. We had to wear our grey coveralls and we went out in the trucks and the cars and we went on various assignments, and our assignments were to homes, private homes, and to buildings, and we did everything from wash the windows in the huge manufacturing buildings out by the airport to just going into little homes and doing the hardwood floors. And one of the homes—and going into ritzy homes--one of the ritzy homes that we went into they told me was Loretta Young’s house, and we didn’t do anything in there, we just went in and stayed in this one room and every now and then they’d bring us stuff, but she had this huge staff of servants, and they really kept the place clean; they didn’t need any extra janitorial stuff but I forgot what the deal was. Never saw Loretta though, and I can’t remember ever being curious enough to actually verify whether this really was Loretta Young’s home or not, but it was a big place, I remember that.
And they didn’t really need you.
Didn’t do anything, and anyway there was a lot of stuff I didn’t do anyway because it was…they had everything under control. But I did learn some interesting things, learned how to get the marks out of a hardwood floor by just dashing some water on it and throwing some steel wool down and kicking them out. You know you just stand up with your hands in your pockets and just kick those, kick those marks out with steel wool; and how to clean windows with just vinegar and water and a squeegee; how to sharpen a squeegee, that’s important: you get a lot of mileage out of those little rubber things if you just sharpen them every now and then; how to operate a floor-buffer. Those are tricky sons of bitches, those floor-buffers, you know, you guide them by going up and down; they can get right away from you, hee hee, and, you know, all sorts of things like that. Plus these guys, you know, they were always, the guys that I was with driving around in the truck, you know, they’d always be checking out all the girls in the--because they were up high in their truck--the girls in the convertible. So I thought that was all funny.
So you were being socialized by the guys.
Yeah. So that’s what you guys do. You guys don’t do nothin’. So I guess that was for a couple of summers, but also in there somewhere, might have been the same guy, I was going out with guys on like a wrecking gang and we’d just go out and tear things down [laughter] you know with crowbars and hammers and shovels and haul things away and it was purely, you know, it was a pure delight: just to go in there and, you know, We’ve gotta wreck this garage, tear that garage down: Okay, have at it. We’d wreck it, take it down to the foundation, cart it. Those guys worked hard, but they took a lot of lunch breaks too, naps.
You were still in school, so this was only during the summer.
Still in school. I enjoyed all that stuff, that’s for sure. I guess that just about covers it. Was there any other high school era beach thing? I don’t remember. I can come back to it?
Any time.
If it occurs to me and if it’s interesting, you know, you can’t get ‘em all. So here I am, I’m just turned seventeen, I’m gonna go out and live with my brother out in Van Nuys, California, in his sprawling multi-room valley house with the great big front yard and the great big back yard and the big two-car garage: he was doing well I guess.
And you said they had kids?
I can’t remember. I think… They may not have at that time, and they may have; I just can’t remember. You know, just preternaturally self-absorbed, couldn’t really focus on much beyond my immediate vicinity, but you know I had this suit left over. When I found out that--I thought it was going to be [Northern English accent] sheer luxury, just lying around and reading and waiting for college to start. Oh, I know, that’s the other thing I want to say: Just as my senior year was dying I did the first actual work that I was interested in in English class. None of the other stuff in any of the other classes—I was making no effort at all, I was just trying to get out of there. But in writing, writing was incredibly pointless to me, writing and the way they wanted you to write, it was always, oh, it was always: Write about the difference between reality and illusion in some story, it was always reality and illusion, reality and illusion, I didn’t even know what they were talking about. They were writing, you know, when I came to Sunnyvale High School I guess they prepared their students along the way for some actual thinking, even though it was a beach high school, and I hadn’t been prepared for any of that, like any expository writing or discursive thinking or anything like that, so I was just stumped with these writing assignments, I just couldn’t…
So would you say that Sunnyvale schools were actually more demanding?
In this one area I think they were, although I missed a lot in between moving around, so I don’t know. I don’t know.
I think we’ve gotta turn the tape over.
[End Tape 8, Side A]
We’re interviewing Michael Conkin out here at the Moffitt Library. He’s got his cigar, ready to fire it up. We were in Van Nuys, though we may have a little time traveling, a little doubling back to do, but we’ll soon see.
Well I figured I couldn’t really get to Van Nuys and leave high school yet and leave this phase of Hermosa Beach life and Manhattan Beach life without saying a couple of things, some other experiences that occurred to me after our last torture—ah, narrative session.
[Laughing] It was a little cold out here.
It was cold. Well I mentioned The Lighthouse as a magnet and a focus for the jazz music and the stuff that was going on around that time, but there was another club down there in Hermosa Beach that was equally if not even more of a magnet, more of a strange far out place, and this was The Insomniac. This was one of the great, oldest Southern California coffee shops, café/coffee shops. They had some in Venice and they may have had something in Santa Monica, but I don’t think they had anything else like this anywhere else in Southern California. Probably in San Francisco it was very common, although even now you can’t see anything quite like this. This was a coffee shop with like a little club attached to it, and it was open all the time; it was open till like 3 am, hence the name I guess. Anybody could go in there because it was also a bookstore, it was like a café cum bookstore cum chess place cum club, and lots of people hung out there, people in their twenties and thirties that I didn’t know. They were probably Beat, or Beat wannabe, or just Beat intellectuals. The first, I mean people… guys with beards and shades, walking around at night with shades on. And I think that’s probably where I saw my first man with a ponytail, you know like in 1964.
Yeah, that’s pretty wild for that time.
I said: Wow, that’s far out. You know you could go in there, even kids could go in there. I was what, sixteen or something. Kids could go in there. It was very wide open, I mean they didn’t have an entrance or anything like that. It just opened onto the sidewalk, great big entrance, I guess maybe it was like a sliding gate or something like that ‘cause they’d open it up and there you’d be walking down the sidewalk and then you’d be in The Insomniac. It was probably like a wider spread out version of City Lights or something like that, ‘cause they had independent press stuff, they didn’t have bestsellers and paperbacks like that, but they had poetry and philosophy, existentialist stuff, you know, and Asian philosophy stuff, and they had art on the walls, you know, crazy far out abstract art, and they served—they had a little bar there—and they served the coffee, the cappuccino! you know which was nowhere except there. I didn’t know what that was. I thought they invented it.
I mean now everyone knows from cappuccino, but not in those days.
And next door was the club. I don’t think I could get in there except certain times. I think there was like a door charge. They served liquor drinks in there too, but they served coffee drinks, I think, when I could get in. I just wasn’t interested in the music that they were featuring there, but it was like folk music, Trinidad steel bands, you know, that sort of stuff: Olatunji, Odetta, you know, whoever was big and was folky was there, but also, like, local groups. But between that sound and the sound across the street I was gravitating towards the stuff across the street, but I just enjoyed the atmosphere there, and, you know, sometimes if I was up late you could just walk down there and walk on in; that was the only thing that was open anyway. So I wanted to mention The Insomniac. It shut down shortly thereafter.
Tell me was it hard for--so you were sixteen or seventeen through most of this—was it hard for you to hang out in such places? Were you looked at like just a kid, which of course you were, or was it pretty open?
It was pretty open, I mean they didn’t discourage you. Nobody talked to me either. You know they were all busy reading their books and playing their chess. They probably were hopped up on marijuana or some other kinds of stuff too. I don’t know. I was just interested in being there and I didn’t want to talk to anybody anyway [laughter]. I was just digging the whole scene.
So you had big eyes and you were just checking everything out?
Whatever seemed really interesting and off the wall. I liked that off the wall stuff. I guess maybe they had zoning problems or something like that. They weren’t doing that much business; it was never very crowded in there, and you know chess players don’t generate a lot of activity at the bar ‘cause they’ll just occupy a table and sit there over a cup of coffee.
It sounds like the kind of scene that can only happen when the economics are right: the rents are not too high and they don’t have to push too many drinks or have a big cover charge to make a go of it.
Yep. Yeah, and probably it was in a real old dilapidated structure because when it went they just tore it down. For a while it was just an empty lot and then they put some boutiques in there.
That area became trendy?
It became a little trendier, yeah, a little, but it was still kind of a beachy area because the traffic that went in and out. I just went back recently and it’s not so funky and run down and a lot of the old places are gone but it’s still has a beach character. Still some of the things that were there then are still there now, like The Either Or Bookstore. That was a great place and its character is pretty much the same now as it was then. They had an occult section and a philosophy section, and that sort of thing, not a regulation bookstore, more the kind of bookstore you’d see around here. That’s still there, and Greeko’s Sandals, they’re still there.
And you remembered them? Did you wear sandals?
Uh uh, those sandals were expensive. You got me going on buying those little five-dollar Macanudos.
At least fashion to us when I was about that age was extremely important. Did you pay much attention to what you wore?
No I really didn’t, not then because I don’t know, I just wasn’t… I mean earlier I remember in St. Louis it was a big thing, in the fifties, that sort of thing: the vests and the engineer boots and certain kind of clothing it was nice to get so you could show off with the other fellers and the other kids. At that point it wasn’t a big deal I think because of the beach; everybody was just casual ‘cause most of the time they were just walking around in their shorts. Here in a couple three months I started paying attention, ‘cause I was reading these Playboys too all the time, and you know the Playboy Adviser and lots of... My brother was a snappy dresser, always was a sharp dresser; no matter what his circumstances he was always dressing up real nice, and you know trying to get me to too. It was one of the things he thought he should do was educate people, especially me, on how to be more presentable. So no, not at that time. But it was interesting to see those men in their ponytails and sandals, you know where did those guys--and their little goatees. I guess before that the only other personality with a goatee that I was aware of—two of them that I was aware of: on Saturday afternoons they used to have these fifteen-minute shows on television. One of them was Jonathan Winters used to have a little fifteen-minute show. It was slotted for the kids’ time but you know he was pitching it way over their heads. I don’t remember any of the stuff other than that he was a funny guy, but the one thing I do remember was John Nagi, John Nagi’s Learn How to Draw.
Yeah! That was on when I was a kid.
They may have expanded later, but it started out as one of those fifteen-minute shows. In fact I remember sending away for the John Nagi book and John Nagi art instruction thing: Learn how to draw a boxer dog, you know, it started with simple shapes and… Uh oh, digression: Winky-Dink! You remember Winky-Dink?
No I do not.
I think Winky-Dink was a character—I’m going way back now, I’m just a little tyke—Winky-Dink was a character on TV, I think it was a cartoon in the Kaptain Kangaroo program, you know they had Tom Terrific and Winky-Dink and Powwow the Indian Boy who loved all the animals in the woods. Powwow the Indian Boy loved all the animals and the woods. Winky-Dink was this character, you had to send away for a little Winky-Dink kit, because Winky-Dink he would get himself into scrapes, and you, the kids at home, had to help him out. And the Winky-Dink kit was composed of this clear piece of plastic that adhered to your TV screen and a set of crayons. So Winky-Dink would be running around, you know, somebody would be chasing him, and he’d come to a chasm: Boys and girls, draw Winky-Dink a bridge—so it was interactive TV! So you’d put your little thing on the TV, whipped out your crayons and you drew a bridge. They may have indicated some dotted lines with animation showing you how to draw the bridge, or draw a wall or something like that for somebody to smash into. The problem was that I lost the little screen and I drew right on the TV.
Right on the TV. How did I guess? [laughter]
You had to help out Winky! ‘cause he was gonna fall into that chasm or something.
Did that really piss your parents off?
I think that was a bad thing; that’s how come I remember it, it was a bad thing. So John Nagi taught you how to draw. He had a weird goatee. He was probably--it seems like now it’s a Hungarian name--he was probably, you know, ethnic, so he had a beard. But the other cat with a beard, weird with a beard that I remember was Gary Owens. Gary Owens who later became the voice of Laugh In, you know he has that real deep radio delivery voice. But in St. Louis in fifty-eight or so, everybody was listening to the rock-and-roll music on the radio—I forgot the station: KXOK or something like that, or WIL, maybe that’s what it was [sings]: 1430 on your dial, WIL… [laughs] Uh oh, radio jingles [sings]: On Sunday all St. Louis goes to church / to worship at the church of their choice, / and WIL urges you to thank your god for all your blessings, / St. Louis goes to church. That was WIL. One of them was a rock-and-roll station and you know you’d be listening to the music and suddenly the music would stop and this voice would come on and it would say: G. O. is coming, and no explanation. This went on for a couple of weeks and then you see in the paper: G. O. is coming, and it turned out that there was gonna be a new disk jockey in town and it was Gary Owens; and Gary Owens was this, I don’t know what he was, in his twenties probably, had a flattop and a goatee and he would walk around with these—for footwear he’d take white ice-skates and cut the skate part off—so he was really weird! [laughs]
Were flattops kind of hip?
Yeah, I guess they were, yeah. Flattops… When you went to the barbershop you know they had all those pictures with all the different kinds of, you know, and the one I remember was flattop with sidewalls. You know you let it grow long on the sides and comb it back into a DA* and you got a flattop. Maybe that was also a Hollywood or something like that. DA, sure, I had a DA for a while. Yeah but Gary Owens, then he was on the radio and he was a disk jockey and he was just great because he was so funny, and he made fun of all the music, that was great, then he would pretend to read the daily comics but they were all of his own making and they were all parodies, like Rex Migraine, MD, awe you know it was just the height of humor [laughter].
So did he write the stuff up? It sounds like he did.
Yes he did, and later on when I was in Sunnyvale he was on a radio station in San Francisco, more middle-of-the-road; and then when I was in L.A. he was on a radio station in L.A. too. It was KMPC, it was MOR stuff, it wasn’t rock, but they had a couple of disk jockeys on there who would play some decent stuff. Gary Owens would play—it didn’t make any difference what Gary Owens played, you know, you listened to him to see what he would do. He was still doing his comic strips and still making fun of… There was Less Brown and His Band of Renown, right, so he’d play a cut by Sammy Kay: That was Sammy Kay and his band of Rene. Another high point, another humorous high point. He would invent words and make up his own commercials. That was pretty good. Yeah, that was a middle of the road station but they did have one disk jockey on late at night, Johnny Magnus: the host who loves you most, and he would play some jazzy stuff, you know, mostly big band stuff, but he had a very cool delivery for AM radio, for AM middle of the road radio, but he was swingin’, you know, he always played a lot of Plaz Johnson, who was a studio saxophonist, you’d hear him, he was the guy who was on The Pink Panther [hums opening notes], then he’d play lots of Plaz Johnson’s other stuff. And his thing was Weather with a Beat. You know you had to do the weather so he used as a background Neil Hefty’s ‘Cute’, it’s a song that goes: [hums melodic phrase] then there’d be a silence where in the background maybe you’d hear a little brush work on the cymbals [imitates sound and hums tune with breaks] in between the spaces he would give the weather report for cities around the country, you know, so he’d go: It’s time for weather with a beat, with Johnny Magnus, the host who loves you most: [hums tune] St. Louis: 25, you know, whatever it was. And Gary Owens even made fun of that. They were on the same station and he would do Weather with a Carrot [laughter] or Weather with a Rutabaga or something, I don’t know. Every now and then some Gary Owensism will pop into my head that I haven’t thought of for years.
It seems like it used to be thought of as an art, and I remember through the sixties and into the seventies DJs who could really improvise…
That’s right; that’s absolutely right.
…and do live humorous stuff and ad lib, and it was really… I guess it was when the play lists kind of took over where it became so structured, what you had to do and the commercials and everything was pretty set.
That’s right, every rotation, and that’s why I listened to KMPC because of the guys who were on, I mean the music wasn’t that interesting—some of it was, I mean you didn’t hear Morgana King, for example, on the rock-and-roll stations, but they’d play Morgana King, that was good; I liked Morgana King. But they had a certain amount of freedom, but in between that they would goof off. Like there was a… I wish I could remember it, I know I really loved him then but I can’t remember anything at all, but there was a guy named Bob Arbogast and he was just really wild and wacky for that time, and in the morning there was Dick Wittinghill, and he use to talk, you know just talk, and then he’d do little things like, my favorite thing was the story record. People would call in and submit all these things for him to do a story record, and the story record the way it went was he would recite this story and the end of it, the punch line of the story would be some phrase from some currently popular record, like I can’t even think of any, but some of ‘em were real good, and he picked ‘em so… But it would always be: Then she said [sings]: I wish you bluebirds in the spring… from the record, whatever it was. Some of ‘em were kind of risqué because he was kind of naughty on the air. The guy in the sky, you know the guy in the chopper, his name was Panther Pierce, you know, like panther piss, Paul Panther Pierce. So yeah I think all that individuality is gone now unless Gary Owens is on somewhere now, or Johnny Magnus. But also the other thing I wanted to mention about then was I had these summer jobs. The guy next door, in Manhattan Beach I think--I don’t know if he was responsible for both of these but certainly the one--he had a janitorial service.
Is it in addition to your drugstore job or after?
Yeah, I guess it’s, I’m not sure, it’s mixed up in there somehow, or before it or after it, I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure it was in the summer. Maybe he had a lot of irons in the fire, but one of the things was this janitorial service, and the headquarters of it was down in the Mutual of Omaha building down at Wilshire and La Brea, so that’s where everybody operated out of, and somehow I had to get there and usually, I often went driving with my brother Gene because he’d go in the morning to his job and drop me off there, and that was a nice trip because he never used the freeways; he was always using this long stretch out from La Tijera Boulevard through Baldwin Hills, up over the hills and down into this residential area, so that was really nice, every day was, every one of those rides was cool. I didn’t like the freeway.
Is that why he avoided them: he didn’t like them either?
Oh I think it was faster.
Just ‘cause the freeways were jammed up?
‘Cause he found a shortcut, this particular shortcut. But the janitorial job was great because after the boss left, you know we had our assignments and we had to do them that day and the rest of the time was just spent either in driving around, stopping for lunch or just bullshitting there in the parking garage. Oh I guess he owned the parking garage or he managed the parking garage of the Mutual of Omaha too, you know that building down there, ‘cause I remember spending lots of time just down under in this dank stinky garage hangin’ out with the guys. But we would go out in teams and the guy that I was teamed up with—I wish I could remember his name—all I remember is that he was Sugar Ray Robinson’s brother or something like that. This could be not true, another not true thing, but that’s the way I remember it, he was Sugar Ray Robinson’s brother, Jimmy or Joe or something like that. He was older than me. He might have been older than Sugar Ray, I don’t know. We had to wear our grey coveralls and we went out in the trucks and the cars and we went on various assignments, and our assignments were to homes, private homes, and to buildings, and we did everything from wash the windows in the huge manufacturing buildings out by the airport to just going into little homes and doing the hardwood floors. And one of the homes—and going into ritzy homes--one of the ritzy homes that we went into they told me was Loretta Young’s house, and we didn’t do anything in there, we just went in and stayed in this one room and every now and then they’d bring us stuff, but she had this huge staff of servants, and they really kept the place clean; they didn’t need any extra janitorial stuff but I forgot what the deal was. Never saw Loretta though, and I can’t remember ever being curious enough to actually verify whether this really was Loretta Young’s home or not, but it was a big place, I remember that.
And they didn’t really need you.
Didn’t do anything, and anyway there was a lot of stuff I didn’t do anyway because it was…they had everything under control. But I did learn some interesting things, learned how to get the marks out of a hardwood floor by just dashing some water on it and throwing some steel wool down and kicking them out. You know you just stand up with your hands in your pockets and just kick those, kick those marks out with steel wool; and how to clean windows with just vinegar and water and a squeegee; how to sharpen a squeegee, that’s important: you get a lot of mileage out of those little rubber things if you just sharpen them every now and then; how to operate a floor-buffer. Those are tricky sons of bitches, those floor-buffers, you know, you guide them by going up and down; they can get right away from you, hee hee, and, you know, all sorts of things like that. Plus these guys, you know, they were always, the guys that I was with driving around in the truck, you know, they’d always be checking out all the girls in the--because they were up high in their truck--the girls in the convertible. So I thought that was all funny.
So you were being socialized by the guys.
Yeah. So that’s what you guys do. You guys don’t do nothin’. So I guess that was for a couple of summers, but also in there somewhere, might have been the same guy, I was going out with guys on like a wrecking gang and we’d just go out and tear things down [laughter] you know with crowbars and hammers and shovels and haul things away and it was purely, you know, it was a pure delight: just to go in there and, you know, We’ve gotta wreck this garage, tear that garage down: Okay, have at it. We’d wreck it, take it down to the foundation, cart it. Those guys worked hard, but they took a lot of lunch breaks too, naps.
You were still in school, so this was only during the summer.
Still in school. I enjoyed all that stuff, that’s for sure. I guess that just about covers it. Was there any other high school era beach thing? I don’t remember. I can come back to it?
Any time.
If it occurs to me and if it’s interesting, you know, you can’t get ‘em all. So here I am, I’m just turned seventeen, I’m gonna go out and live with my brother out in Van Nuys, California, in his sprawling multi-room valley house with the great big front yard and the great big back yard and the big two-car garage: he was doing well I guess.
And you said they had kids?
I can’t remember. I think… They may not have at that time, and they may have; I just can’t remember. You know, just preternaturally self-absorbed, couldn’t really focus on much beyond my immediate vicinity, but you know I had this suit left over. When I found out that--I thought it was going to be [Northern English accent] sheer luxury, just lying around and reading and waiting for college to start. Oh, I know, that’s the other thing I want to say: Just as my senior year was dying I did the first actual work that I was interested in in English class. None of the other stuff in any of the other classes—I was making no effort at all, I was just trying to get out of there. But in writing, writing was incredibly pointless to me, writing and the way they wanted you to write, it was always, oh, it was always: Write about the difference between reality and illusion in some story, it was always reality and illusion, reality and illusion, I didn’t even know what they were talking about. They were writing, you know, when I came to Sunnyvale High School I guess they prepared their students along the way for some actual thinking, even though it was a beach high school, and I hadn’t been prepared for any of that, like any expository writing or discursive thinking or anything like that, so I was just stumped with these writing assignments, I just couldn’t…
So would you say that Sunnyvale schools were actually more demanding?
In this one area I think they were, although I missed a lot in between moving around, so I don’t know. I don’t know.
I think we’ve gotta turn the tape over.
[End Tape 8, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:28 PM
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