History of My Reading: The Summer Electric

First, some housekeeping.  One of the virtues of the Internet is that it's easy to change what's been published to reflect new information.  Another is that others read it and offer corrections and additions.  Sometimes I also find notes or documentation that clears up a mystery, corrects a fact or adds something.  So (perhaps contrary to blog tradition) I go back and make those corrections and additions in the appropriate posts in this series.  I consider it all a work in progress.  And a big thank you to those who offer these corrections and additions.  Please keep them coming. 

In May of 1966 I won $75 (or maybe it was $50) worth of books from the Knox Bookstore, as awarded for the best writing in English classes by a second year student.  To understand what a bonanza this was, considering the following:

I don't know all the books I bought immediately but I am pretty sure that this is when I expanded my James Joyce collection with quality Compass Books paperback copies of Dubliners ($1.45), Finnegans Wake ($2.25) and the accompanying A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell (yes, that Joseph Campbell) and Henry Morton Robinson ($1.65.)  I topped that off with a Modern Library hardback copy of Ulysses ($3.25.)

Earlier that school year I'd purchased the Compass Books paperback of A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man ($1.45.)  So that's all of Joyce's fiction for $8.40.

 Which suggests the purchasing power of my prize. Though I've since acquired other editions (especially corrected ones) and have considerably expanded my Joyce collection, I should mention that I've had all of these same copies for more than 50 years, and they're still in fine shape.

 The Compass books are especially praiseworthy: sturdy and all the same vertical length, they are made to be shelf companions for years.  But the Modern Library edition of Ulysses is also made to last.  It has passages marked that I used as quotes in my book, The Malling of America published in 1985.

So my personal library was considerably enhanced, and my summer bright with the possibilities of exploring these books.  I packed much of what I'd acquired so far in a cardboard box I got from the Knox Bookstore, and sent them home. Once back in western Pennsylvania, with a makeshift and mind-numbing job, I eagerly awaited their arrival.  And waited.  And waited.  The box never came.

Efforts to trace it were unavailing, and I had sleepless hours of anxiety and despair over its loss.  I was not going to be able to replace that cache of books any time soon. The mystery was solved unexpectedly when I returned to campus in the fall.  I was in the Knox Bookstore when someone on the staff heard my name--or I was telling someone the story or something--but he remembered a box of books in the back with my name on it.  Somehow my books had been delivered not to my address, but to the Knox Bookstore.  The prodigal books were returned to me, and if there was not immediate feasting, it was because I was in considerable shock.

  However, the prize did result in at least one book that dominated my summer.  I was discussing my windfall with Doug Wilson that May, and he suggested a book that was stirring a lot of controversy called Understanding Media by someone called Marshall McLuhan. The bookstore had it in paperback, and it was small enough to carry with me when I traveled home.  It changed everything, that summer and for years to come.

It's hard to describe--or to minimize--the impact of that book, not only on me but on the academic/intellectual/ book-reading world, and ultimately beyond that to professions, government and corporations. McLuhan was featured on magazine covers and television news programs worldwide.

 A 1967 book I acquired in hardback, McLuhan hot & cool: a critical symposium collected articles and essays on McLuhan by cultural critics Susan Sontag and Dwight Macdonald, literary critics Frank Kermode and George Steiner, art critic Harold Rosenberg, economist Kenneth Boulding, advertising guru Howard Luck Gossage, anthropologist Dell Hymes, Marxist critic Raymond Williams, poet A. Alvarez and journalist Tom Wolfe, among others.

"Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov...?" Wolfe asked, reflecting the hyperbole of the time.

Today he seems largely forgotten, except for his signature phrase "the medium is the message," while contemporary culture has absorbed and assimilated much of what he observed and formulated, especially concerning media and technology.

 And he continues to be misunderstood, as he was for the decades of his academic/intellectual popularity (which provided the comedy for a famous scene in Annie Hall.)  At the time, however, it was all new--and potentially a key to almost everything.  McLuhan and all that he generated, dominated the next five years, and probably overwhelmed me.

That summer, reading him was like fireworks going off in my head.  Technology as the extensions of our organs of perception and action.  New media adopts the old media it replaces as content, as an art form.  Electronic media as radically new in comparison with previous media--the overriding importance of what the form did and meant, dwarfing the supposed content it had shaped into something new.

Most--but not all--of my current McLuhan collection

McLuhan's aphoristic style and his way with literary quotes made immediate and dare I say electric connections.  I still have that first copy of Understanding Media, with its underlinings.  One of them was:  "The student today lives mythically and in depth."  Sure sounded like my experience.

 I had problems grappling with the sense of electronic media--principally television then--making the book obsolete.  But I felt this much truth of it: our media environment was changing how we experienced books, as well as how books might be written.

  Understanding Media, like any personally important book, was a gateway drug.  Not only to all the other McLuhan books that tumbled out in the next few years, but to Buckminster Fuller, Edmund Carpenter and other thinkers and writers he referenced. The excitement of McLuhan contrasted with the tedium of my summer life and job. Once again, I did not get the job I thought I was getting this summer.  In fact I thought I'd be spending the summer still in Galesburg.

  At the end of May I'd moved from Anderson House to my first off-campus apartment, in the same West Berrien building as James Campbell's place.  This smaller apartment--two rooms on the second floor around the back with the address of 247 1/2--was the residence of Gerry Roe (who Campbell dubbed "Geroe," a nickname which stuck tight.)  I believe the apartment as well as the editorship of the Siwasher had been bequeathed to Geroe by Bob Misiorowski.

I was moving in, not only for the summer but for the coming school year.

Admiral/Maytag plant outside Galesburg

The plan was to get one of the many temporary and well-paying jobs at Galesburg manufacturers.  There were so many jobs that the employment bureau told us to wait until we were ready to start and they would place us.

The most likely was the Admiral plant. (All of this is from letters I wrote home--I'd forgotten most of it.) But just as I was finishing schoolwork the Admiral plant shut down one complete division--building air conditioners--because, even with at least a hundred students already signed up, they didn't have sufficient manpower to run it.  So we were suddenly unemployed because there were too many jobs.

The other job sources in town quickly filled their vacancies.  Temps were often expendable anyway--subject to being fired at any time if someone permanent was hired. The only work I got was a few days painting a ceiling in Doug Wilson's new house (built in 1874) on Tompkins Street.  Our plans for the summer fell apart.

 Not only that, but so did plans for the apartment in the fall.  We soon realized that the space was too small for three, and somebody else had dibs on the second spot for the school year.  Just before I left Galesburg I was promised an apartment on the other side of campus that a fellow student had leased but didn't want.  It was a couple of rooms on the first floor of a nice house or duplex.  As it turned out I would never live there either, but that's another story.

So I soon found myself back in Greensburg, and cutting grass and doing other menial work for a small complex of apartment buildings. It's hard to explain the enervating and at times maddening effects of such a summer, not only on body, mind and spirit but on identity. (In addition, the "generation gap" was starting to open--this was the summer when hair length started becoming an issue.)  Without the support of the college environment and the people there, the new self I'd been building threatened to leak away.  Leaving me with what?  With who?

Books helped, and letters, and movies, but most important was music.  Music would become the principal support of a generation's identity, and it was becoming mine.

 Key to the summer of 1966 was the release of the Beatles' revolutionary album Revolver, with its first double-sided single  "Eleanor Rigby" and "Yellow Submarine" on the radio.

 Earlier in the summer, their U.S.-only album Yesterday and Today was released, including songs that would appear on the UK Revolver, while others had been on the UK's version of Rubber Soul.  I remember hearing some of them the previous spring in Galesburg, purloined from the UK according to the deejay, on a transistor radio I carried with me to the laundromat.  I particularly remember "And Your Bird Can Sing" and  "I'm Only Sleeping," with its backwards tape sound.  "An early clue to the new direction," as the trend manager says in A Hard Day's Night.

Spring had seen Dylan's Blonde on Blonde (and summer his mysterious motorcycle accident and disappearance) and the Beach Boys Pet Sounds. Also released that summer were Donovan's Sunshine Superman and the first Jefferson Airplane album, heralding the San Francisco sound that would soon help define the psychedelic 60s.

Though I didn't yet acquire the Beach Boys and Donovan albums, songs from them were on the radio. The Crosscurrents learned "Let's Get Together" from the Airplane.

Before our school year started in September, the Monkees television show began, and the first of their string of hits ("Last Train to Clarksville") was on the radio. Many of their songs would be written by classic pop composers like Carole King and Gerry Goffin. But this was just the beginning of the counterculture, and the culture it was counter to would make Herb Albert and his easy listening trumpets by far the best selling recording artist of the year in the US, with several albums in the top ten.

 Besides the records and some of the music on the radio, I had the music I was making with my friends in the Crosscurrents.  There is no sustained pleasure like that of creating songs as a band, and few ways to relate to other people so profound as sharing that creation. And then there was this day...one of the strangest of my life.

Three times in the past school year, the two worlds of my life, of Galesburg and Greensburg, had been scheduled to meet.  The first was the Christmas visit to Greensburg of friends from Knox that was cancelled because their car was damaged before they left.  The second was less scheduled than speculative, when my friend Mike was debating at another college in Illinois, but a hoped for visit proved impractical.

 The third time was to be a concert by the Crosscurrents at Knox.  I'd cajoled the powers that be to schedule it in some small auditorium and throw in a little money for expenses.  Mike and Clayton were all set to join me in Galesburg, when intense family pressure descended on Mike, and I got a phone call telling me they would not make the trip.

 But there was a fourth time, that summer, when it actually did happen.  By spring I was seeing Peggy Miller, a junior at Knox who had committed to finishing her degree in San Francisco the following year.  She was spending the summer in Dayton, Ohio with an aunt, a teacher, while working at a restaurant to save money for school.

 In July, her aunt and a couple of other teachers were driving to a conference in Pennsylvania, and would come close to Greensburg on the turnpike.  Peggy could hitch a ride with them, and meet them near that exit for the return in a couple of days.

There wasn't much to see or do in Greensburg, but Peggy was eager to hear the Crosscurrents.  I'd played her a tape and told her about what we were doing.  So I arranged for Mike and Clayton to come to the house, and we would play for her.

Peggy got to Greensburg in late afternoon.  Everyone was nervous, especially my parents.  Peggy and I soon escaped to coffee and a movie.  At some point in the evening, Peggy got a brief headache of a particular kind she had learned to associate with bad things happening to a family member--a premonition.  When we got back she asked my parents if anyone had called her.  No one had, and she was relieved.

 The next morning I awoke with the worst headache of my life. Every sound was torture.  I tried to settle myself down with a cup of morning coffee but it just got worse.  I simply bolted out the back door and began to walk.  Peggy was asleep in my room and I of course had slept in the basement.  I didn't want to leave her marooned there but I was compelled to move.

I walked without thinking, without being able to think.  When I came to myself, I realized I was walking on the side of the highway, near where it met with the road that led to my grandparents' house in Youngwood about six miles away.  I stopped and turned around.  I had to get back.

Late that afternoon Mike and Clayton arrived, and we set up in my basement where we often rehearsed and worked out our new songs.  My parents were out on the patio with another couple, firing up the grill.  Eventually we did one song for Peggy, maybe two.  But then there was a knock at the door.

It was a woman I didn't know, one of the couple on the patio, who said my mother had gotten a call from my grandparents' house and both parents rushed out immediately.  The phone rang soon after and I was told that my grandfather had died suddenly.  Later we learned it was a cerebral hemorrhage.  After lunch he had retired to his favorite living room chair for his customary nap.  That's where my grandmother found him.  He just didn't wake up.  He was 72.

The coincidence of Peggy's premonition and my headache and hypnotic walk that morning did not immediately emerge as memorable, since there was so much to do and so much else to feel.  But it stands out now.

I said goodbye to Peggy the next day and faced the strangeness of the next few days, for this was the first death in my family I'd experienced. I always felt close to my maternal grandfather, and it was years before I realized that I'd never had an actual conversation with him, at least after childhood.  Our relationship was complete without it.  I'd known him all my life.  My first Christmases were at that house in Youngwood, I'd stayed there often as a child.  I'd spent afternoons with him in his tailor shop up the street, though truthfully, much of that time I was reading comic books in the barber shop next door.

Me in my First Communion suit with my grandfather

As would be clear in the ceremonies before and during the funeral, I was the eldest grandson.  At our big family dinners I always sat in the far left corner--partly because I am left-handed, partly so everyone was in range of my one good ear, and partly because I was sitting next to my grandfather at the head of the table.  He would color my glass of 7Up with a cloud of red wine, and over the years, he increased the proportion, until it was all wine.

 Ignazio Severini was born in Manoppello, a mountain town in the Abruzzi province of Italy, near the Adriatic coast.  He was posted in northern Italy during World War I.  My grandmother told me stories that suggested he had not been part of the fighting.  But one of his daughters, my Aunt Toni, told me he had, and that he'd been poison gassed.  She remembered that even when she was a child his digestion was so delicate that my grandmother had to make his meals without tomato sauce or spices. (That changed by the time I came along.)

When I read about the Great War in that region, I realized that he might have been there for some horrific battles. But my grandmother still may have been right.  She said he'd been saved from the front lines because an officer saw how well his uniform fit, and learned he was a tailor.  That he was kept busy tailoring uniforms for officers may indeed have saved his life.

He grew up directly across a narrow street from Gioconda Iezzi, and after he returned from the war he married her.  With two friends and nearly 3,000 other passengers, he sailed to the United States in 1920 aboard the New Amsterdam, the last major ocean liner to carry auxiliary sails.

  I saw one of his companions at his house in Youngwood the day he died.  Vince said he'd intended to visit that evening, because it was the anniversary of their departure.

There were men and families from Manoppello already in Greensburg and Youngwood. He stayed with an older sister and other extended family not far from where I grew up.  Ignazio worked at a tailor shop in Pittsburgh, taking trolleys back and forth the 35 mile distance, and later in a shop in downtown Greensburg, near the train station and the big hotels.

He saved his money, as so many young Italian men did--some to take back to Italy, some to bring their wives and family to America.  His wife stayed in Italy to take care of both of their mothers in their last illnesses.

His daughter Maria Flora, my mother, was born there, weeks after his departure.  She was two years old when she and my grandmother made their ocean voyage to New York, and the train trip to Greensburg.

During the early days of the Depression, a man who couldn't pay the taxes on his house in Youngwood sold it to my grandfather for a song, because--my grandmother said--he liked them.  My grandfather set up his own tailor shop several blocks up the street. He lived in that house and worked in that shop for the rest of his life. It's one thing for his grandchildren to remember him as a kind and loving man.  But it's another for his children to remember him that way.  My mother said it that day, and my aunt was still saying it thirty years later: above all, he was kind.

I saw Peggy again later that summer when I visited her in Dayton.  She worked in a huge, noisy restaurant where the waitresses were guided by numbers that lit up on a strip above the doors to the various rooms.  But she'd been an actress at Knox, and in her waitress uniform she was another smiling version of the maid Sabina in The Skin of Our Teeth.

While I was in that part of Ohio we drove the half hour to Yellow Springs, so I could at least see Antioch College, which had declined to accept me as a transfer student.

We saw a movie playing there, now pretty much forgotten but very important to me at the time.  It was called Morgan! and featured Vanessa Redgrave (who received an Oscar nomination) and David Warner (whose 1966 Hamlet is considered the best of a generation) in their first starring film roles. Directed by Karel Reisz and with a witty, crazy and complex script, it was one of those movies that personalized the 1960s for me.

Those 1960s British films (Richard Lester's The Knack as well as his Beatles movies; Georgy Girl, Poor Cow, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Girl With the Green Eyes, War Game, Doctor Strangelove --which Kubrick made in England while he was living there; Two for the Road, Charlie Bubbles and Lindsay Anderson's If...) were all important to me.  They not only were cinematic companions to the music coming from the UK, they were influencing, for better or worse, my personality and relationships, as well as my writing and my reading.   That would only become more evident in the coming school year.