The Growth Of Cool

This is the "Best Summer" contribution submitted by my husband Doug, who spent his last two years of high school  at an American School in New Delhi, India.  His parents were living in East Pakistan at the time, where his dad worked in international aid.

I'm hoping that you are working on your best summer story.  If you send it to me I'll post it on my blog.

-Mary

Growth of the Cool

Greg Cookson was the coolest guy I’ve ever known; also a good friend and, all-around, a good guy. Eric Webber tried to pick a fight with Greg over Debbie Blowers, the belle of AIS (American International School) in New Delhi, where Eric and I went to high school.  Greg didn’t go to AIS, though.  His parents sent him to Woodstock, a British school mostly for children of missionaries.  They must have thought the Delhi kids were too wild. Greg’s folks and mine lived in Dhaka, Bangladesh (then it was called Dacca, East Pakistan); Eric’s lived in Rangoon and he and I were boarding students and roommates my Junior year.

Back then we thought that cool was a kind of supreme confidence, but with a dash of creativity. Cool was the key to all successes, and we desperately cultivated it.  This many years later, the cool as we sought it then, seems more like your basic car wax. By now, my cool has rubbed off and it’s just me here.  But maybe there’s another kind of cool and maybe I can still cultivate that. 

In the summer of 1966, I graduated from high school and left home to pursue the cool on my own. That summer I opened the door and walked out into the world and never looked back.  It was the most memorable, vivid, summer of my life so far.  The best?  Maybe so.

We lived in a big house near Dhanmondi Lake.  They’d whitewashed the outer walls, but the ongoing battle with the tropical molds was mostly futile. I’d walk through the back yard, past the little concrete bunker where the servants lived, step behind the banana trees and climb over the back wall to Greg’s house. 

In those days, it was cool just to be an American. True, Lyndon Johnson had already started escalating the Vietnam War, sowing doubts, but the rest of the world mostly believed in the innocence and benevolence, the Cool, of Americans then. 

Greg and I took judo lessons at the Japanese consulate for a couple of weeks. There were long periods of warm rain and the sky was always full of elaborate flowing cloud sculptures.  One day crossing the railroad overpass, we saw a yellow dog in two pieces on either side of the track. 

We went with Greg’s parents to the Chittagong Hills and took a boat jaunt on Kaptai Lake.  The skies were blue and clear and the jungle was recently cleared and raw looking.  I still have a picture of Greg with a cast on his arm, standing next to an old Burmese man in a loincloth.  Last I heard, in our 20s, Greg had left school and was working as a carpenter in Phoenix.

The plan was: I would go back to the States by myself ahead of my folks. They’d circle the world, returning to Dhaka, and I would stay Stateside, a college freshman at Santa Barbara. We’d meet in London, then in Oregon. I got a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day.  Sounds cheap today, but air travel at that time was very costly and beyond the reach of most Americans.

I flew first to Beirut; a gem of a city and the capital of the Middle East before it was pounded to bits by civil war in the 1970s.  I met a bearded English engineering student who told me of his ambition to invent a 3-wheeled motorcycle/automobile hybrid.

Plane-hopping through Athens-Rome-Naples-Munich-Geneva-Vienna-Paris-Amsterdam-Copehagen-Stockholm-London, I met other travelers in the youth hostels and pensiones (a shared accommodation) and wrote their names inside the back cover of my Frommer’s. We visited the sites or museums together, then back on the plane and off to the next city. 

I took a boat to the popular and picturesque island of Mykonos and, from there, to the small, rocky island of Delos, the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, abandoned and pockmarked with ruins.  I saw great monuments of western civilization (Parthenon, Coliseum, St. Peters, Eiffel Tower), the great paintings (Mona Lisa, why the fuss?), and great sculptures (Pieta, Moses, The Thinker, the Little Mermaid). 

I shared a Roman pensione with Henry Kurz, a bearded fellow from New York City who wrote for the New York Times Magazine. We sat in one of the sidewalk cafes on the glamorous Via Veneto, watching people.  I saw one starlet put 16 spoonfuls of sugar in her coffee, then eat it with a spoon.  Coolin’ with the jet set.

Henry told me that if I wanted to be a writer (I didn’t), I should read a lot.  I had probably told him that I was a winner of my high school creative writing contest and that one of the judges had been Kushwant Singh, who wrote Train to Pakistan.  The other winner was Hadia Kreisberg, who composed a poem that I didn’t understand about a unicorn living in the lining of her eye. Hadia later worked as an editor at a publishing house in New York.  I had been happy to beat out my best friend Dan Perelli, who I considered very talented. My contribution?—a simple story about an American teenager walking alone in Old Delhi, searching for cool in a place where there could be none, and having a cathartic experience.

Paris was kind of sad because I didn’t meet anybody. I connected in Copenhagen with two University of Pennsylvania architecture students who had a Volkswagen.  They were driving to Stockholm and asked if I’d like to go along, which I did. 

I met my parents in London and they took off Stateside ahead of me.  The last night, I was surprised to stumble onto a statue of Abraham Lincoln at the British Parliament building, and had a nostalgic moment.  I was going back ‘home.’  But it didn’t feel as though the States would be my home.  It was years before it was again. 

I made it to Oregon and joined up with my folks at Uncle Dave’s.  Problem was, I didn’t know what to do next and there was still a month or so before school.  Then Dan Perelli telephoned.  Did I want to come out to Indiana, stay with him and his Aunt and Uncle and maybe work in the steel mills?  Dan’s parents had returned to India and he would be starting college in the fall, too. At the time, this was about the equivalent of Dan saying, “Come on out to Indiana and we’ll spend the summer hanging out at the lake and water skiing.”  I soon learned the difference.

  

When I got to Munster, a gritty steel town, Dan’s Uncle Eiler got me a job fabricating steel beams for Illinois and Indiana highway overpasses.  My job was to scrape rust.  We worked the swing shift 10 hours a day and six days a week and I earned $212 per week.  Go-to-sleep-and-go-to-work.  My co-workers included some hill Williams from Kentucky.  An older gentleman called Missouri, would say to me often as we scrubbed together with our wire brushes, “Duug, are yew goanna do yower work and haffa mine today?”

I got to know a local my age who was a high-school dropout, recently married, with a baby son.  Over bologna sandwiches, he explained to me that being married wasn’t what you’d think.  He asked me if I thought a guy like him could finish his high school diploma.  I said, “Sure, no problem – you can do it.”  Before I left, he told me that he’d enrolled in night school and failed it.

Dan and I took the train in to Chicago on our Sunday off.  We wandered through the windy streets to where the clubs were.  Dan wore his plaid Madras bellbottoms, and we hung out, but there was nothing going on.  “Hot town, summer in the City, backa my neck’s gettin’ dirt and gritty.”  The Good Life in India was gone. The cool was gone.  No servants, no car, no girls, no time, no fun, all work. 

I tell people it took me a month to get the dirt out of my hands.  Mary tells me that she has always thought that my hands have character.  I’ve never understood that.  But I think these hands were born at Munster Steel.

Dan and I headed west, and I went to Santa Barbara and Dan went to Claremont.  Despite the drudgery of Munster, I was ready for school and my brain and all my senses were wide open.  I’d been a prince of leisure and I’d lived as the working poor.  That was motivation. I’d seen the world and I loved it and nothing was going to stop me. 

-Doug 

Greg Cookson, Kaptai Lake, Bangladesh, 1966

Ancient Greek ruins, Island of Delos, Aegean Sea, 1966

Oregon Sea Lion Caves & Other Travel Adventures

Last week Doug and I were up in Oregon.  Our plans included driving down part of the Oregon Coast where the “Sea Lion Caves” are located.  I’d heard Doug talk about visiting them when he was a child.  They are one of those types of places that most children long to visit after seeing signs along the highway on a long road trip.  For me, that place was “Rock City”, in Georgia, on the long rides south from Kentucky.  I don’t think I ever mentioned to my parents that I wanted to stop there, knowing they would nix the idea.  I hated the long road trips with only “potty breaks.”  I never saw Rock City and probably didn’t miss much.  But, here was an opportunity to see the Oregon “Sea Lion Caves.”  Doug had recalled, many times, his one childhood visit there, climbing down the endless steps (before the elevator was installed) into the giant cave filled with barking (and smelly) sea lions.  Oddly, I wanted to share this childhood adventure with him.

We pulled off the narrow coast road perched high on the cliffs and into the cramped parking lot of the commercially operated “Sea Lion Caves.”  I was excited.  We headed into the gift shop to buy our tickets.  The shop was filled with everything from salt-water taffy and shellacked wooden boxes to mood rings and T-shirts.  At the ticket counter the man was explaining to a group ahead of us that there weren’t actually any sea lions in the sea lion caves that day but…… you could still pay $6 to take the elevator down into the cave and see where they would be if they were around.  He was trying to be bluntly honest about the situation, delivering the news straight out with no apology.  By the time we walked up to the ticket counter a different employee was there, a lady who tried to deliver the news about the missing sea lions in a more sugar coated story like manner.  “The sea lions have chosen to go out and play in the ocean today.”  Doug asked me if I still wanted to go.  I said “yes.”   I had to follow this adventure wherever it led.  Somehow it just seemed part of the whole odd experience that there were no sea lions at the sea lion caves.  It was worth it, because the views from the outdoor walkways down to the elevator were in fact spectacular.  Down in the large sea cave we saw where the sea lions would have been, one sign even pointed out rock formations that were supposedly shaped liked Abraham Lincoln’s head or an Indian princess, which just seemed to fit into the whole kitschy experience.

The Sea Lion Cave visit got me to thinking about family road trips and trips my ancestors had taken.  In the summer of 1936 my father, twelve at the time, took a long road trip out west with his grandparents, Clarence and Maude Merriman.  I don’t know every place they stopped or the exact route they took.  I have a picture of them at Pike’s Peak in Colorado and I know that they also went to the Grand Canyon in Arizona.  I think about how long that road trip that must have taken back then.  His grandfather did all the driving, stopping at small churches or schoolyards in the afternoon, where Dad could play on the playground and granddad Clarence could take a nap.  All three of them carried a $100 bill in their shoe for emergencies and safekeeping.  This was before ATM’s and probably even travelers checks, so it was a way Clarence had devised for them to safely carry some of the money needed for the trip.  This was still during the Depression and you didn’t take risks with money.  At the Grand Canyon, Dad was allowed to hike partway down the Bright Angel Trail.  His grandparents, in their mid 60’s by then, stayed up top and watched him as he wound down the steep trail.  After a while, and with a bit of concern about young Jack, they paid a bit of money to an Indian vendor to look through a telescope and try to spot their grandson.  With the Indian’s help they spotted Dad at one of the resting spots along the trail.  He was sprawled, asleep, on top of a picnic table……with his shoes off.  This caused quite a bit of alarm with his grandparents, due to the concern about the $100 bill.  A hundred dollars in 1937 is worth about $1400 in today’s money.  When he returned back to the top of the canyon rim, the grandparents were much relieved to find that he still had possession of the $100.

Dad’s grandfather, Clarence Merriman, must have been a believer in the value of travel experiences.  He was able to give both his two daughters the adventure of world travel.  I’m not sure exactly the extent of their travels but I found his daughter, Avery (my grandmother) on a ship passenger list from Liverpool to Montreal in 1922.  She would have been 21 and still a single woman.  Her younger sister, Lillian, is on a passenger list from 1925, sailing on the “Aquitania” from England to New York.  Lillian was 21 years old at that time, so perhaps Clarence had a policy of sending each girl on a travel adventure at that age, before they married.  I do recall my great aunt Lillian mentioning that her father had sent her on a trip around the world, and I think she mentioned visiting India and Egypt.   It is likely that these ocean voyages that I’ve found records for were only parts of much longer trips made by each girl.

Another adventure was a trip to Hawaii my other grandmother (Emma) and her older sister (Helen) took in 1924/1925.  The girls were sent on this trip so they could visit their grandmother Fairleigh, who was living with her daughter and son in law, Addie and John McCulloch.  John McCulloch, an Army man, was stationed in Honolulu.  The girls traveled by train to California and from there took a ship to Hawaii.  Can you imagine what a trip that must have been for two girls from Louisville, Kentucky, who were only 18 and 19 at the time?   They are listed on the passenger list of the ship “S. S. Maui” that sailed from Honolulu to San Francisco in February of 1925, their return trip.  Perhaps they began the trip in late 1924 and spent the Christmas holidays in Hawaii.   I’ve heard hints that my grandmother even had a shipboard romance on the ocean voyage, but no one seems to know any juicy details.  Both girls married not long after returning from this trip to Hawaii.  Emma, my grandmother, married Tom, the boy next door.  Helen married Rob, a farmer from the country.  I imagine that, over the years, they both must have looked back on the Hawaii trip as their last bit of freedom, adventure, and luxury before becoming young brides and mothers during the Great Depression years from 1929 to 1941. 

This summer my nephew, Daniel (age 25), is traveling through Asia with his girlfriend.  They don’t have much money, so it is definitely an experiment in traveling on a shoestring.  It sounds fun, but I know I’m too old for that type of travel.  I need a few luxuries these days.  I get email updates from him occasionally, allowing me to taste a bit of his experiences and adventures. 

Whether it is exotic, ordinary, or kitschy (like the Sea Lion Caves), getting out of our routine and jumping out into the world is, I believe, important and good for us.

"One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things." –- Henry Miller

-Mary

View from the Sea Lion Caves, Oregon

Jack W. Riley (dad), Maude Merriman, & Clarence Merriman- Pikes Peak 1936

Anyone know what kind of car that is??

The Best Summer Of My Childhood

Growing up in Pewee Valley, Kentucky was not too different from growing up in Andy Griffith’s “Mayberry.”  Today, Pewee Valley sits on the edge of Oldham County as a mere suburb of Louisville.  It has grown to about 1400 in population now that many old properties have been sub-divided.  But, when I was young it felt much more remote, with miles separating us from the real suburbs.  As a child, growing up in this small town, you might not know everyone, but they sure as heck all knew you.  There was no public library, only the weekly bookmobile in Beard’s parking lot.  The whole Beard family—Mr. and Mrs. Beard, and their twin sons, ran Beard’s Grocery.  Pewee also had one old-fashioned barbershop, a community theater, a beauty shop, a volunteer fire station, one gas station, a tractor and machine repair shop, a small bank, and the Pewee Valley Women’s club where some of our mothers went for luncheon meetings once a month.  Of course, I can’t forget the little post office where we all picked up our mail.  There was no home delivery of the mail.  Mackey Fletcher, our postmaster, a Brown University graduate with a dry sense of humor, sorted our mail and liked to visit when you came in to pick it up each day.

As you can probably guess from my description, there wasn’t a whole lot for kids to do during the summer, except roam the town on our bikes.  So, one summer, when my friends and I were in junior high school, we concocted a plan to visit some of the older homes in town.  The primary motive, initially, as I remember, was to secure trust in the homeowners and then politely ask if we could dig around in the back yards of their property to look for old bottles.  My friend John was a bottle collector and helping him find old bottles seemed just about as much fun as anything else that was available for us to do that summer.

We rode our Schwinn bikes through town, often with a picnic packed so we wouldn’t even have to go home until suppertime.  We would head down the long driveways, confidently walk up to the front doors, knock and wait for the owner to arrive and greet us.  Most of the people in these old homes were elderly and quite thrilled to have some young visitors.   We would explain that we were interested in old houses and then ask if they could tell us about their old house.  Most droned on for a long time with this opportunity for a bit of attention.  Later on, when they felt comfortable with us, we’d spring the part about digging for bottles.

These are a few of the folks we met that summer:

Wilda Martin- Mrs. Martin lived in the oldest home in Pewee Valley and when we met her she was about 80, a widow, and as we realized later, senile.  Her home was called, “The Locust” with a driveway so long that you could not see the house from the main road.  In the serial “Little Colonel” stories, “The Locust” was the fictional home of the Old Colonel.  She liked us and despite our growing realization that she wasn’t playing with a full deck, we visited her several times that summer.  Once, while walking with  us across the gravel drive she stopped suddenly.   She took off her sandal, telling us that she had something fascinating to show us.  She turned the sandal over and we could see that because the heal cap had come off; bits of gravel had gotten stuck inside the heel.  She marveled as she showed us the printing on the bottom of the shoe that said “Made in Italy” and explained that those were Italian rocks!  She wasn’t joking and went on and on about how they had come all the way from Italy.  We played along at being thrilled by this and suppressed our giggles.  She also showed us her bottle collection, lined up against a mirror in her main hallway.  She proceeded to count the bottles, also including their mirror reflections in the count.  Mrs. Martin died the next year.

Herbert Ross:  Mr. Ross was a bit of a mystery to us.  His home was almost invisible from the street and we’d never heard of him or seen him in town.  But, never the less, we trudged up the front steps of his 1870 Italianate home one hot sticky humid day.  For some reason the place seemed a bit spooky to us, so we timidly knocked on his front door.  He came out to talk to us from the top of his front porch steps as we stood down at the bottom looking up.  He told us that he was an artist who had lived in New York City but had recently come back to this, his childhood home, and was now living there with his sister.  We wondered about the sister, who he kept mentioning, but who never appeared, and visions of Psycho danced in our heads.  After going on and on for a while, telling us his story, our eyes began to wander and we all seemed to notice at the same time that the large expansive flower beds in front of the house were completely planted with plastic flowers.  He gave us permission to do a bit of digging but I don’t think he said we could poke around in the small house behind the main house.  We did, and found the tattered and cobweb filled place filled with Mr. Ross’s old paintings.  Moments later we were stopped dead in our tracks by a loud ripping sound.  Sure we had been caught in the summer house, we turned to see that it was only the wind that had blow through the open window causing the peeling wallpaper to rip.  We were relieved that old Mr. Ross hadn’t caught us, and counting our blessings we never returned or saw him again.   Today most of the Ross property is a large subdivision.

Lillian Brackett:  Mrs. Brackett was someone we had heard about because she had just recently moved to town.  She had a home in Pewee, named “Twigmore”, but more commonly know throughout the region as “The Haunted House.”  It had been vacant for years and looked after by her nephew, our postmaster, Mackie Fletcher.  I’d heard stories that Mackie would sit up in the vacant house sometimes on Saturday nights with his shotgun full of rock salt, to discourage unwanted trespassers; often fraternity boys from the University of Louisville, who wanted to get into the house to satisfy a dare.   In Pewee, nobody really thought of the house as haunted.  We all called it the “Ivy House” because it was covered in ivy.  Mrs. Brackett was the widow of Charles Brackett, producer and screenwriter of Hollywood fame.  He was best known for “The Lost Weekend”, “Titanic”, and “The King and I.”  After his death, Mrs. Brackett moved from Hollywood back to her home in Pewee Valley.   She was a kindly lady who took us in as if we were stray dogs, and later in the summer when we did discovered a stray dog she adopted it too.  She delighted in showing us around her home and once fixed a complete formal lunch for us in her dining room.  We visited her often that summer and over the years to come.  Each Christmas, when we would go caroling, we would head across town especially to visit her and she would beg us to sing the carol that “made her cry.”  She could never remember which carol that was, and we didn’t either, so we would have to sing all the ones we knew until we hit it.   As we stood in her living room one Christmas, singing carols, I looked around at all the Christmas cards she had set up, seeing that many were from famous Hollywood stars.  “Merry Christmas, from Jimmy Stewart and Family.”  It seemed unreal to us that someone who had hobnobbed with the rich and famous of Hollywood, was living here in little ole Pewee Valley Kentucky.

We covered miles and miles that summer on our bikes, and found how to make our own fun in a town with nothing to do.  I’ll always remember the people we met and how they welcomed us.  A few years later, when I was about to head off to college, Mackey Fletcher, the postmaster, and his wife “Honey Bunny” invited me over for dessert one evening to discuss my college plans.  Our families weren’t close friends and I only knew Mackey though our visits to the post office, but that’s how small towns are.  He had watched me grow up and therefore had a vested interest in my success.

-Mary

Drive to The Locust, Wilda Martin's Home

Herbert Ross, self portrait

The Ross Home

Twigmore, "The Ivy House"

Gate to Twigmore