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
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