Those Were the Days

Those were the days, my friend,
We thought they'd never end,
We'd sing and dance forever and a day.
We'd live the life we choose,
We'd fight and never lose,
For we were young and sure to have our way.

Believe it or not, my brothers and I used to play in an old stagecoach. Sometimes in our imaginations it was a stagecoach in the Old West; sometimes it was a spaceship on its way to the outer reaches of the galaxy. When it rained, which it often does in the Pacific Northwest, the roof leaked. It was parked in the parking lot behind Vancouver (Washington) radio station KHFS where my father was a DJ. KHFS was a country-western station at that time, and I suppose the stagecoach was suitable decor. It disappeared around 1959 to reappear at the Oregon Centennial Exposition, while KHFS replaced it with a buckboard.

My father's on-air name was Hoot Howard (according to my best memory and some promotional literature I used to have); my brother remembers him as Lonesome (or maybe Mournful) something-or-other. My impression is that listeners sent in names and then voted on them, or maybe they drew the name out of a hat. A ten-gallon hat, presumably. One piece of promotional literature actually showed my father in western attire, complete with cowboy hat. I don't think I ever saw a less convincing cowboy, but who am I to judge?

The other Vancouver radio station, KVAN, was also country-western. (I'm pretty sure of that; this is all coming through a half-century of fog and mist—I know what I remember, but are my memories accurate?) My father's radio-school buddy Bill Howlett was a newscaster there. Their top DJ was a fellow billed as Wee Willie Nelson. I believe Wee Willie's show was quite successful; my father used to say that other DJs looked up to him.

On occasion they, along with a few other people in the Portland area radio scene, would get together at our house to play cards and do whatever adults did in the fifties (smoke cigarettes, or in my father's case cigars, and drink beer at any rate). The gatherings happened late, after my brothers and I had been sent to bed, but when we got up in the morning we could tell there had been a party. My mother always kept the house in perfect order, but on these occasions there would be overflowing ashtrays, glasses left out (sometimes with small amounts of beer still in them), drawings, bits of paper with arcane calculations. At least once there was an amazing clay alien left on the card table, and I remember one drawing with a spaceship landing on a small planet made of polyhedrons.

Newscaster Bill Howlett was responsible for the clay alien and at least some of the drawings; he had ambitions as a writer and actually wrote a novel (never sold) retelling the Arthurian legend in the modern advertising world. DJ Wee Willie wrote songs and sang in clubs; he even recorded a song that he hawked on his radio program. My father wrote a play, or at least parts of a play (I had it until recently) that showed clearly the influence of George Kaufman and more faintly (I believe) Ring Lardner. These guys had ambitions; they were clearly going places.

Or maybe not. Bill Howlett remained a newscaster, even when KVAN became KISN and turned to rock 'n' roll (a form he detested; he was a Dixieland man from way back). Wee Willie shook the dust from his shoes, split the scene, and never looked back. My father stuck with KHFS as it too went top forty and was reborn as KKEY, but after a couple of years accepted a job as chief engineer at KXL (in Portland) and with considerable relief gave up the DJ business altogether.

Bill Howlett stayed with KISN till the bitter end, when the station died a horrible death. Once one of the Portland area's best-known radio newscasters, he was reduced in the end to taking odd jobs at various area stations. He never sold his novel, but was still working doggedly at it until the day he died unexpectedly of a heart condition he didn't know he had. (At the time he died he was actually living in the room directly above me as I write this, the room that's now my niece's.)

My father's literary ambitions died when I was still a child, and I remember vividly the moment when I showed him a piece of my own work, and he handed me his play and said he was abdicating his position as playwright-in-residence in the family. He moved from radio to television, but stuck with engineering till a bout with giant cell arteritis and a bad reaction to prednisone sent him to his grave.

And Wee Willie—well, now there's the interesting thing. I think it was some time in the 1980s when my father showed me a newspaper item about country singer and songwriter Willie Nelson. "You know," he said, "I'd always wondered about that. It never seemed very likely to me, but—" According to the article American icon Willie Nelson and Vancouver DJ Wee Willie Nelson were one and the same. When I next saw my mother (she and my father had divorced long before this and she was living in Colorado at the time) I asked her about Wee Willie Nelson. She had no trouble remembering him and observed that he used to drop by on occasion. It had never once crossed her mind that he was in any way connected with the country music legend.

Now in all fairness I don't actually know that the Wee Willie Nelson my parents spoke of and the songwriter Willie Nelson had any connection. Wikipedia adds some support:

In 1956, Nelson moved to Vancouver, Washington, to begin a musical career, recording "Lumberjack," which was written by Leon Payne. The single sold fairly well, but did not establish a career. Nelson continued to work as a radio announcer in Vancouver and sing in clubs.

Right time, right place—but it would have been nice if the name of the station he worked for had been given. And the country legend is a bit younger than I pictured the DJ from my father's account—a good seven or eight years younger than my father, rather than being about the same age, as I'd thought. But there really weren't a lot of Vancouver radio stations in the fifties (and still aren't, actually), and it would be a pretty tall coincidence for there to be two Willie Nelsons in the Vancouver radio scene in the late fifties.

There's no point to this story, no moral to be drawn. If country legend Willie Nelson really blazed like a comet through our little backwater we were entirely unaware of it. He was just one of the guys, another young man with ambition and drive and talent—but ambition, drive, and talent are a dime a dozen. My father said he thought Wee Willie Nelson had a great future ahead of him—in radio. The idea of him making it big in country music apparently never crossed his mind. He seemed pleased enough at the idea of Wee Willie's success, that somebody had emerged from the Vancouver radio cocoon to fly to the stars, but that was about it.

Now my function in all this is as a retailer of slightly used memories. If I ever met Wee Willie Nelson it made no impression on me. Mind you, meeting the flesh people behind the disembodied voices of the airwaves was nothing unusual in our world—wasn't everybody's father on the radio? Still, I remember the overflowing ashtrays, the odd mementos of legendary evenings, the sense of wonder of what it must be like to be an adult and to take part in events like these. But by far my strongest memory of the Vancouver radio scene is sitting inside that stagecoach with the leaky roof, our own futures yet unwritten, as imaginary horses took us on our own private journey to the stars.

Too Depressed to Commit Suicide

But then suicide's a crime
Don't want to waste the police's time
Just quietly do myself in
Like the guy in that book by Solzhenitzyn

The Pee Cees

It's late here, late for me anyway, and it feels like one of those horrible Sundays long ago when KPFM abandoned me at ten and there was nothing to anesthetize me against the hard reality of the new school week beginning inexorably Monday morning. I don't know why Sunday night was so much more bleak than Monday morning—maybe Monday was busier, less time to concentrate on the horror that awaited.

Maybe it was the dread silence from the radio. I had an FM radio in the days when nobody knew what FM was and the entire dial was a wasteland of small-audience stations—religious broadcasts, niche music, public radio, a few simulcasts, and classical music station KPFM. Twenty-four hour broadcasts of music I actually liked, at least till ten on Sunday night. That's when the silence fell. Sometimes I listened to religious shows, just to keep the silence at bay. I'm sure I listened to other things as well, but the pickings were thin, especially as Sunday night turned into Monday morning.

Insomnia was my constant companion in those days. On a good day—or night, rather—I'd drift off early to the sound of Verdi or somebody like that and sleep through the night till the alarm clock went off next morning. More typically I would lie in bed for hours staring at the ceiling, possibly picking up intermittently whatever book I was reading at the time, or writing a few lines of something or other while I waited for sleep to come. Or maybe not. The sleepless nights were probably not as common as I remember them; more likely they just stand out. Even so I remember vividly the cold feeling of looking over at the clock to see that it had turned three, and knowing there was no way I was going to get enough sleep to keep me going the next day. Those hours felt the worst, I think, since my mind was clear and functioning in a way I knew it wouldn't be the next day. It was after a night like that I fell asleep during science class, much to the amusement of my friends and the concern of my science teacher, who asked me several times if I shouldn't maybe see the school nurse.

During summer vacation I would normally stay up till dawn and then sleep till early afternoon. My mind seemed to function best during the hours of darkness. I was told many times that this was all nonsense—that if I simply maintained a regular schedule I would have no difficulty getting to sleep at night. And I could actually make that work sometimes, with a great deal of effort and determination, and frankly, a lot of lying for hours in bed doing nothing but waiting for sleep to come. The only time I really ever managed that schedule thing was for one year at college when I took two morning classes and was determined not to screw things up, but by then I was adult and had learned such tricks as catching sleep during odd hours of the day in case it eluded me at night.

Silence and darkness were the enemies. Silence, with nothing but the inexorable ticking of that damn alarm clock, and darkness, with nothing to see but the shadows, kept sleep away. Hence the damn radio, and that night light my father installed by my bed. The more I think about it, maybe that is why it seemed so goddamn bleak on Sunday night, when the radio station signed off, and I had to face another silent night. No crutch to help me limp into sleep country. Just the ticking of that damn clock, and the luminous dial glowing fitfully in the shadows.

Ah, memories. But here in the real world it's late and I feel half past depressed and lost in the suburbs of suicide city. I know this mood will pass, and maybe by tomorrow, but as my personal eight ball might say, Outlook grim. Give up.

Understanding is a Virtue Hard to Come By

When I was a child I had a 45 player in a red case my father built for me. The record-player died at some point, and my father gave me an FM receiver to replace it. Now in those days FM was unheard of, a sort of cultural wasteland inhabited by religious fanatics, right-wing politicians, and aficionados of obscure music. My station--the one I listened to--played "classical" music. Symphonies, operas, and sometimes jazz. My favorite program was a request show that ran every weeknight from midnight to six in the morning and was called something like "Music out of the Night." "It's midnight here in the City of Roses and lights are going out one by one as a busy populace lays aside the cares of the day and welcomes the stillness of the night." Ken Nordine's Word Jazz, Tchaikovsky's Seventh Symphony, electronica from the Columbia-Princeton synthesizer project, Bach played as written on the instruments the music was actually composed for. Amazing stuff. All kinds of music.

While KPFM was wall-to-wall music most of the time, Sunday was the exception. In the morning came some sort of horrible religious program, or rather several of them in a row, and at ten at night it went off the air for routine maintenance, something I was very familiar with as my father did the same thing for another station. That's when I started tuning across the dial looking for whatever was on.

There were only two FM stations on those bleak Sunday nights, and both were religious. I ended up listening to all sorts of crazy people. One of them was Billy Graham, whose program sent me into hysterical laughter, especially his ritualistic ending, "May the Lord bless you--real good." The fake folksiness of that fatuity fascinated me, as did Garner Ted Armstrong's determined denial of the real world. But mostly I listened to evangelists more obscure and less coherent than these characters.

One night that sticks in my mind--a Sunday night I assume, though at this point anything is possible, memory being what it is--I was listening to this one character on the radio. I don't remember his name, or the name of his show, or his denomination, or much of anything else about him of that sort. He had a kind of Prairie Home Companion feel about him that I enjoyed, often telling stories of this strange backwoods place he'd grown up in, I think in the mountains of Kentucky. Whatever the name of the town was it appeared to have been inhabited entirely by quaint colorful icons of Americana, all of whom read the Bible and played checkers at the local store. Or something like that.

Anyway, it seems that they used to have Bible discussions around the checkerboard, in which particular passages would be thrown out for general comment. There was one fellow there, an old pastor, who sat in the shadows listening, but never contributing. Everybody else was voluble in his opinion, expressing himself at great length and supporting his claims with other passages from scripture, and no doubt those quaint country metaphors we've come to expect from backwoodsy places. On one occasion the discussion became quite heated. Opinions were flying back and forth like barn swallows on a cold October morning. Finally one guy turned to the old pastor and asked him, "Sir, how do you understand this passage?" The old pastor slowly drew himself up to his full height and then said, "Son, I don't understand the Bible. I believe it."

That was it. That was the punchline of this particular story. We should be like the old pastor, believing the Bible without understanding it. In striving to understand something, it seems, we inevitably twist and bend the text to our own preconceptions. Only by avoiding the pitfall of understanding scripture could we embrace its truth and really believe it.

Now this guy may have been making some profound theological point, or expounding a bold paradox, or whatever. I don't know. What I got out of it was more like These radio evangelists have all got a screw or two loose. And some more than others.

Belief without understanding. Yes, "The more people know about what is happening," observed Chinese sage Lao Tse, "the harder it is to control them." Of course it figures that Lao Tse felt the government's job was to keep the people in the dark and feed them bullshit. Ruling class propaganda. Wouldn't the pastor's job be so much simpler if only people didn't question him about all this old gibberish written, as the Reverend Me used to say, by a bunch of babbling barbarians two or three thousand years ago. Believe the bible, stay in school, respect your teachers, even though they be turkeys. Know what to kiss, and when. Remember that two wrongs don't make a right, but three do. What I tell you three times is true.

Okay, I may be veering a bit here, but the question jumps out at me--how in hell can you believe something you don't understand? First comes understanding, and only then can you know whether something is believable or not. Right?

Or maybe not. When you're trying to believe the impossible, maybe understanding does get in the way of belief. Like the White Queen says, it takes practice. If you can believe six impossible things before breakfast, then who knows what you can manage to believe after lunch. It's the perfect training for a nation of dupes; though maybe not so great for a nation of informed citizens in a democracy.

Ten Years Gone By

I dreamed of my father again last night. We were standing in the kitchen of the old Fourth Plain House--actually gone much longer than he has been--and I was explaining to him about this set of glasses I'd bought, now much the worse for wear. "It was actually a set of twenty-four glasses originally," I told him.

Bryce--my father--looked at me in mock-horror. "And there are only nine of them left now?" he said. "What have you been doing with them?"

"I bought them when you were dead," I told him. That whole business came back to me in a flash, when the hospital had lost him somehow, and had claimed he was dead to cover up their mistake. (For some reason my subconscious seems to have evolved this theory to account for Bryce's occasional appearances in my dreams.) "A lot of things happened while you were dead, and some of them were pretty hard on our glasses."

"Electricity is all around us," he said, or something like that.

We called him "Bryce," I guess because our mother did, though I don't really know. Once when we were kids--five and six, maybe, or somewhere in there--our mother took us aside--my brother Bryan and me--and suggested that it was kind of odd that we called her Mom and him Bryce. "People might think he's not really your father. Do you really want that?" Well, no, we didn't. Bryan and I talked it over for some time, and finally came to the conclusion that the only fair thing was to call our parents Ruth and Bryce, which we did from then on. Many many years later Bryan recalled this incident, and said ruefully, "You know, I think we were supposed to choose Mom and Dad."

Bryce was born in Wyoming in the 1920s, but grew up mainly in North Powder Oregon and Grand Junction Colorado. He went to school and joined the Boy Scouts. He displayed his interest in applied science by accidentally blowing up the school bell, and his fellow scouts were arrested for stealing cars, but at least he was in there pitching. He talked his mother into buying a radio in the display window at Sears by appealing to her sense of thrift--it was on sale for two dollars off, I think he said. The case is up in the attic somewhere, if the kids haven't thrown it out.

Radio fascinated him. He listened to radio shows I never heard of, for the most part, though there were some familiar ones. Our Miss Brooks. Vic and Sade. He built radios, and listened to short wave broadcasts.

When he left school he drifted up to Portland to work at the docks and wait to be drafted. The army took him in spite of his appalling vision, and he spent the war--WWII--on a hospital ship named Marigold that plied the Pacific from Honolulu to Japan. He was there playing baseball when Japan surrendered.

Post war he set out to be a writer, turning out several short stories and about a fifth of a Kaufmannesque play, as well as attending community college for three years. While there he met Ruth (later to be my mother). The two of them were married and settled down to teach in a one-room schoolhouse in the Colorado mountains. Well Ruth taught; I'm not sure what Bryce did.

A succession of places follow: Portland, where Bryce went to radio school and his first child (me) was born; Moscow, where he was fired for Thanksgiving; Artesia, where he scanned the skies for flying disks and his second child (Bryan) was born; Vancouver (very briefly); Portland again, where he was living when his third and last child was born, Vancouver (sixteen years); and finally Portland (twenty years). KSVP, KHFS, KKEY, KXL, KOIN, KGW, KWJJ, KOBP--I'm sure I missed some--the radio stations came and went over the years, but he was always working at one or another--and sometimes more than one at a time. When I was extremely young I used to hear him on the radio--when he signed off it meant he would be home soon. For most of his life he stuck to engineering. He designed facilities, build boards, changed lights. In the wind and snow and dead of night he would be out at the station, keeping it on the air or getting it back on the air, as the situation demanded. He stuck with radio for decades before finally getting into television.

He liked earthquakes, volcanoes, plagues, and venomous animals. (I have a childhood memory of him nonchalantly turning over a black widow spider to show us the red hourglass underneath.) Diseases especially fascinated him. "Mad cow disease," he would muse. (I think he liked the sound of the name.) "Now that's a threat to the food supply. We ought to be looking for it. Avian flu in Asia again ... hantavirus in upstate New York ... and the marmots are dying." That was the news for him.

I don't know what his religious views may have been. If he had any, he chose not to share them with me. I know what some of them weren't. I know he didn't buy into any of those anti-scientific notions of the creationist ilk. "Evolution is a fact," he used to say flatly if the subject came up. "Natural selection is a theory that explains how evolution happened, but evolution is a fact." I once asked him what he thought about life after death; he said he hadn't thought about it. I gave him the choice between an afterlife and going out like a candle. He said that if he had to choose, he thought it was more likely that we went out like candles.

He died ten years ago today, on 14 January 1997 at 6:11 in the morning.