MY RACKET
BY JACK FROST
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 THE COLD WAR
Chapter 2 THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
Chapter 3 YOUTHFUL IMPRESSIONS
Chapter 4 TENNIS
Chapter 5 THE TRUMAN YEARS
CHAPTER 3
YOUTHFUL IMPRESSIONS
I was born in Monterey in 1934 in the hospital owned by the Dormody brothers. They, along with most other Anglo families who could afford it, eventually settled in Carmel or Pebble Beach. We stayed in Monterey, and we always thought of ourselves as Monterey people.
At night my father always built a fire, and it was a matter of some importance. He would go outside and bring in the kindling and the oak logs that he had chopped and stored, and he would rip old newspapers into long strips and lay that down first and then put twigs over those and then the kindling and finally the logs and when he lit it and it got going he’d pronounce on whether or not he thought that it was a good fire. After that he would read to us from Kipling or Scott, or more often than not he and my mother would talk to us about how their families came across the plains to California in the wagons.
There were many boxes in our attic that were filled with family letters and photos and albums that my mother and father had saved, and on occasion we would bring those down and pore over them. There were hundreds of letters from Ireland sent to my mother’s grandfather, an Irish immigrant surgeon in Sacramento, telling him to never forget where he was from and to promise to send his children back so that they would know the Old Country. And my father had lots of photos of his people, who had settled in Healdsburg.
My mother and father also had saved many photo albums of their early married life together in Monterey during the ‘20’s and ‘30’s. There were some photographs of the Abalone League softball days in Carmel, my father standing with teammates Byington Ford, Doc Staniford (the pharmacist), Tal Josselyn (a writer), Sis Riemers (the girl on the team), and others. There were also a few of my father standing on the roof of a cannery in his suit and and tie and racing cap watching two of his men mop on the boiling hot asphalt that they had brought up a ladder in buckets from the steaming kettle two stories below. I must have been five or six when I first ascended a ladder onto the top of one of those roofs on Cannery Row and my father not liking it when I showed fear of the height and when I said that I was afraid that he would fall off as he stood on the ledge.
My father had left the ranch in Healdsburg to serve as an officer in World War 1. Afterward he took his degree from the University of California, came down to Monterey to put on roofs, and married my mother. He opened a small shop on Webster Street and soon enough a few people were working for him. The Dormody brothers, who had built the hospital, had also been his fraternity brothers up at Cal and were his friends, and he quickly met other people. My father knew how to play tennis, and Sam Morse and Allen Griffin, owner of the local newspaper, invited him to play out at Pebble Beach at Griffin’s expansive estate. They also invited Monterey architect Walter Snook and realtor Bill Dekker, John Steinbeck’s brother-in-law. When Charlie Chaplin, a tennis fan, spent the summer at Pebble Beach in the mid ‘30’s my father played tennis often with him at the Griffin estate.
My father was not a socially ambitious man. He was actually shy, but he was very anxious to be popular, and he joined the Rotary Club and attended the American Legion meetings, and later in the ‘30’s he was elected to the School Board and Airport Board and the City Council. He liked running for office and never lost.
In 1939, when I was four-and-a-half years old I had the first experience of my father’s big and romantic thinking. We were still in a depressed economy, and while we had kept our heads above water, we were still very much a part of the Depression. We turned off lights when we left the room, ate everything on our plates, had our shoes half-soled when they were worn through, and my mother cut our hair. But Dad thought it would be a good idea for us to go back East and pick up a car and then drive around the western states. We left on the 4th of July by bus to Salinas, then sitting straight up for three days and nights we took a series of wonderfully sounding trains to Chicago: the “Daylight” to San Francisco, the “Challenger” to Ogden, the “Pony Express” to Denver, and the “Burlington Zephyr” from there on in.
We went up to Kenosha and picked up our Nash with small windows and a running board, bought some camping gear, and lit out across Wisconsin and Minnesota to South Dakota and its Badlands. We slept out under the stars and sometimes in the Nash, and when we came to a river or a lake we swam in it. Gasoline cost 20 cents a gallon, and we never spent more than five dollars a day for food for the four of us.
As we stood in awe at the base of Mount Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum, who had sculpted it, came over to chat with us. The following day we were in Sheridan, Wyoming at a Cheyenne pow-wow and ate acorn patties. We camped and swam at Yellowstone, came down through the Grand Tetons, lingered at Bryce and Zion in Southern Utah, bought a few items at a Navajo trading post in Northern Arizona, toured the new Hoover Dam, and after almost a month of driving and 4,400 miles on the speedometer, we finished at Yosemite. We spent the rest of the summer camping there, sometimes singing at night around a campfire and watching the ritual firefall.
I could not have known directly how my mother and father felt about the Salinas and Watsonville strikes, but there is no doubt that their sympathies would have been on the side of the growers. My mother, who was reared in Salinas, had gone through school with Bruce Church, the largest and most innovative of the growers, and his wife, Irene, had been one of her closest friends. And when my mother and father married and settled in Monterey they were befriended by Sam Morse and Byington Ford and many others among the Carmel, Pebble Beach and Peninsula prominencia, including artists Armin Hansen, William Ritschel, and Paul Whitman. Apart from any loyalty that might have arisen from these friendships, my father was a small businessman and was naturally hostile to the communist message that capitalism must be destroyed, so when Byington Ford led the conservative majority in their attack on the communist-oriented John Reed Club in Carmel my father’s sympathy would have been entirely on the side of Ford and his followers.
When it came to John Steinbeck it was a difficult and embarrassing matter, because my mother had grown up around the corner from the Steinbecks in Salinas, had been a sorority sister of Mary Steinbeck at Stanford and was best friend to both Mary and her older sister, Beth. Many years later, in 1955, when Rodgers and Hammerstein reworked John’s Sweet Thursday into a Broadway musical called “Pipe Dream,” my mother drove across the country with Mary and Beth for the opening night.
My father was always somewhat jealous of the great author’s success, and, although an educated man himself he unfortunately carried with him the attitude held by many small businessmen of that era which was that writers and male school teachers, among others, were people who couldn’t make it in the business world. In my father’s case this petty and self-serving attitude was far outweighed by the enormity of the positive effort that he contributed to the community.
Toward the end of the 1930’s when war broke out in Europe and Stalin had made a non-aggression pact with Hitler the message out of Moscow, through the Comintern, to the Communist Party in America and its John Reed Clubs was to vigorously oppose a United States entrance into the conflict. Then in June of 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and now American communists were told by Moscow to continue with their espionage while at the same time to encourage American participation in the war. Thus, when the United States went in against Japan and the Axis powers of Europe it was with broad support that only grew as the conflict intensified.
My father had served in the first War and volunteered for this one. He was turned down due to his age so went on the draft board. Their task was to go over the list of eligible young men, determine whose deferments would be allowed, and call-up a quota from among the rest. The call-up process took place very early in the morning, maybe five or six o’clock, at the platform of the train station. My father would shout out the names and there would be some howling and crying from the families of those selected and noises of relief from among those who got to stay. Either before or after the process my father and I would stop at Herman’s, an all-night diner just into Lower Alvarado street. Our friend Harold McLean owned it, and the Wasson brothers were the fry-cooks. We would sit at the counter so that we could watch one of the Wassons cook-up the hash-browns and eggs, and there would be a little chatter. There was a juke-box by the door, and there would usually be something like “Scatterbrain” blaring out from it. Later I went through high school with the Wasson girls. Across the street was Carmelo’s, the Panetta family’s Italian restaurant. A half century later one of the sons served as President Clinton’s advisor and is now head of the C.I.A.
During the War the government extended its control over practically everything, and because canned sardines were considered to be an excellent food for the G.I.’s, it imposed high production quotas upon the local fishing industry. Now with the increased demand on output and men being called away to the War, the cannery owners called upon local women to volunteer to can fish down on the Row. My mother did this from time to time. Sardines were fished and off-loaded at night, and they were canned immediately, so the chesty blast that was heard all over town telling people that the fish were in, occurred while it was still dark and cold. The telephone would also ring, and a voice would simply say “cannery call.”
Wartime Monterey was an exciting and memorable time for me. Part of it was Dad’s sense of drama. He had posted a large military map on one of the walls, and in the early and usually cold mornings when my mother rousted us from bed and we came into the living room, Dad would be sticking pins in his map, and at breakfast he would pronounce on events: “Got ‘em on the run,” he would say about the enemy, or something like that. Of course, we had our Victory Garden, and my brother and I saved our comic books for the boys at the front, and we collected great balls of tin foil for the war effort and took our dimes to school to buy stamps toward a War Bond. Around town there were posters urging us not to give away secrets: “zip the lip,” we were told. Or a stern, old bearded man in a red, white, and blue outfit was pointing at us and admonishing: “Uncle Sam needs you.”
There was a very dark side of the War for me, too. In February of 1942 President Roosevelt exercised his authority as Commander-in-Chief to issue U.S. Executive Order 9066, which called for the forcible evacuation of “enemy alien” Japanese, Italians and Germans to detention camps in remote areas of the country. Although the Order affected some Italian families on the Monterey Peninsula and down the Coast, it was devastating to the Japanese. I was in the second-grade at the time, and one day and without warning, my Japanese classmates and friends were gone, taken away to the Salinas Rodeo Grounds and from there to Poston or Gila in Arizona or to some other “relocation center.” When we occasionally drove up the El Camino to San Francisco to watch the Seals play ball out at 16th and Bryant we had to drive by Tanforan Race Track which had been turned into an “assembly center” for Japanese, and I would look out the car window and see the stalag-like board- and- bat buildings with tar-paper roofs and all of it surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and Japanese children hanging on the fencing looking back at me through the car window.
Over the duration of the War the Depression-era hostilities between owners and labor in the lettuce fields in Salinas and the orchards in Watsonville were set aside, and there was a joint determination to produce for the good of the nation. The same was true for the sardine fishing and canning industries in Monterey, although both ownership and labor chaffed at counter-productive government intrusion and demands for unrealistic output. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of the United States had been directed by Moscow to cheer on such productivity, because now that the Soviets were at war with the Germans they were going to need all the support they could get from the West. It was a position that weakened the Party in the U.S., disaffecting those members who had been conditioned to view the war as an imperialist struggle between Bourgeois nations and of no interest to the proletarian Revolution. It also lost them sympathetic support from independent thinkers, such as Carmel poet Robinson Jeffers, who deeply felt the futility of any war.
I was at Monterey High School during exuberant years: the Great Depression was over, and we had united as a people to win a World War. The tremendous barrage of propaganda turned out for almost four years by the film and popular music industries made us feel proud, patriotic, and invincible. Yet, there were serious problems to be addressed if we were to think of ourselves as living in the greatest country on earth and as a part of the “Free World.” Ethnic groups had just been uprooted from their homes and sent to concentration camps, black American troops had been segregated and allowed to fight for their country only on a limited basis, and women who had done their part in the military and in industry were finding it difficult in the post-war to find meaningful employment. Add to this a festering situation in agriculture, interrupted by a few years of war-time cooperation, in which a handful of field and packing plant owners had become wildly rich on the backs of poorly paid and generally badly treated Mexican migrant workers and Okie and Filipino immigrants.
My mother and father had taught me well, and by the time I reached High School I was an avid reader and clearly ear-marked for higher education. There were about a dozen of us who by our senior year had finished almost all our college preparatory course-work, so the school, in shocking departure from public school tradition, turned most of our education over to a single faculty-member. His name was Harlan Watkins. A slender man, always impeccably dressed with bow-tie, he wore an air of gentle and amused intellectual superiority. We met daily in the home-economics room with its sofas and easy chairs and shag-carpet and were told the first day that we could lie or sit on the floor if we wished. He gave us a list of 400 books that he could recommend and said that we might read from that if we desired to but that we wouldn’t be required to read anything at all. In these class sessions his approach was to point to one of us and ask if we had been reading anything or if we had discovered something that made us think differently. The response would usually trigger discussion. One day he told us that instead of meeting in the room we would walk down to the Bay and prowl around the tide-pools, and another time we went into town to spend the morning at Roland Bartells quirky used-bookstore on Del Monte Avenue, where Bartells sat every day on a stool under a single light bulb in the cramped entrance that led back into the sizeable maze-like area where the books were stacked and piled on the floor.
Several times Watkins announced that there was to be no meeting at all that day, but we would get together in the evening at his place down on Cannery Row. He lived in the dark gray, wooden building with stairs going up to the second floor, sandwiched between canning facilities. For many years it had been occupied by Ed Ricketts and his Pacific Biological Laboratory, both the personage and the laboratory having been central to John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, and Watkins had purchased it from the owner, Yak Yee. On one visit he played recordings of New Orleans jazz for us and related stories about Bunk Johnson, whom had known personally, and spoke knowingly of other early jazz performers. On another evening at the Lab he discussed opera and Vienna, where he had resided for a time.
In that year I read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath about the Okie migrations and the powerful semi-autobiography called America is in the Heart by the Filipino immigrant Carlos Bulosan, and these helped me to modify my uncritical patriotism engendered by the Second World War. Several of us read Robinson Jeffers’ adaptation of Medea for the Broadway stage and we thought it a good idea to visit him over in Carmel, even though it was well known that he did not receive people outside his immediate circle of family and closest friends. In fact, he did agree to see the four of us on the following Sunday, and we spent most of the day with him. We did not know in advance, but his wife had died not long before, and he was really quite lonely. He took us up onto the top of the Tower at his Tor House, which he and a stone mason had built of rocks brought up from the beach just yards away. It was only years later that I really read the work of this kind man who was one of our country’s major poets and who understood and cherished nature and saw only futility in wars and urban civilizations.
BY JACK FROST
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 THE COLD WAR
Chapter 2 THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
Chapter 3 YOUTHFUL IMPRESSIONS
Chapter 4 TENNIS
Chapter 5 THE TRUMAN YEARS
CHAPTER 3
YOUTHFUL IMPRESSIONS
I was born in Monterey in 1934 in the hospital owned by the Dormody brothers. They, along with most other Anglo families who could afford it, eventually settled in Carmel or Pebble Beach. We stayed in Monterey, and we always thought of ourselves as Monterey people.
At night my father always built a fire, and it was a matter of some importance. He would go outside and bring in the kindling and the oak logs that he had chopped and stored, and he would rip old newspapers into long strips and lay that down first and then put twigs over those and then the kindling and finally the logs and when he lit it and it got going he’d pronounce on whether or not he thought that it was a good fire. After that he would read to us from Kipling or Scott, or more often than not he and my mother would talk to us about how their families came across the plains to California in the wagons.
There were many boxes in our attic that were filled with family letters and photos and albums that my mother and father had saved, and on occasion we would bring those down and pore over them. There were hundreds of letters from Ireland sent to my mother’s grandfather, an Irish immigrant surgeon in Sacramento, telling him to never forget where he was from and to promise to send his children back so that they would know the Old Country. And my father had lots of photos of his people, who had settled in Healdsburg.
My mother and father also had saved many photo albums of their early married life together in Monterey during the ‘20’s and ‘30’s. There were some photographs of the Abalone League softball days in Carmel, my father standing with teammates Byington Ford, Doc Staniford (the pharmacist), Tal Josselyn (a writer), Sis Riemers (the girl on the team), and others. There were also a few of my father standing on the roof of a cannery in his suit and and tie and racing cap watching two of his men mop on the boiling hot asphalt that they had brought up a ladder in buckets from the steaming kettle two stories below. I must have been five or six when I first ascended a ladder onto the top of one of those roofs on Cannery Row and my father not liking it when I showed fear of the height and when I said that I was afraid that he would fall off as he stood on the ledge.
My father had left the ranch in Healdsburg to serve as an officer in World War 1. Afterward he took his degree from the University of California, came down to Monterey to put on roofs, and married my mother. He opened a small shop on Webster Street and soon enough a few people were working for him. The Dormody brothers, who had built the hospital, had also been his fraternity brothers up at Cal and were his friends, and he quickly met other people. My father knew how to play tennis, and Sam Morse and Allen Griffin, owner of the local newspaper, invited him to play out at Pebble Beach at Griffin’s expansive estate. They also invited Monterey architect Walter Snook and realtor Bill Dekker, John Steinbeck’s brother-in-law. When Charlie Chaplin, a tennis fan, spent the summer at Pebble Beach in the mid ‘30’s my father played tennis often with him at the Griffin estate.
My father was not a socially ambitious man. He was actually shy, but he was very anxious to be popular, and he joined the Rotary Club and attended the American Legion meetings, and later in the ‘30’s he was elected to the School Board and Airport Board and the City Council. He liked running for office and never lost.
In 1939, when I was four-and-a-half years old I had the first experience of my father’s big and romantic thinking. We were still in a depressed economy, and while we had kept our heads above water, we were still very much a part of the Depression. We turned off lights when we left the room, ate everything on our plates, had our shoes half-soled when they were worn through, and my mother cut our hair. But Dad thought it would be a good idea for us to go back East and pick up a car and then drive around the western states. We left on the 4th of July by bus to Salinas, then sitting straight up for three days and nights we took a series of wonderfully sounding trains to Chicago: the “Daylight” to San Francisco, the “Challenger” to Ogden, the “Pony Express” to Denver, and the “Burlington Zephyr” from there on in.
We went up to Kenosha and picked up our Nash with small windows and a running board, bought some camping gear, and lit out across Wisconsin and Minnesota to South Dakota and its Badlands. We slept out under the stars and sometimes in the Nash, and when we came to a river or a lake we swam in it. Gasoline cost 20 cents a gallon, and we never spent more than five dollars a day for food for the four of us.
As we stood in awe at the base of Mount Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum, who had sculpted it, came over to chat with us. The following day we were in Sheridan, Wyoming at a Cheyenne pow-wow and ate acorn patties. We camped and swam at Yellowstone, came down through the Grand Tetons, lingered at Bryce and Zion in Southern Utah, bought a few items at a Navajo trading post in Northern Arizona, toured the new Hoover Dam, and after almost a month of driving and 4,400 miles on the speedometer, we finished at Yosemite. We spent the rest of the summer camping there, sometimes singing at night around a campfire and watching the ritual firefall.
I could not have known directly how my mother and father felt about the Salinas and Watsonville strikes, but there is no doubt that their sympathies would have been on the side of the growers. My mother, who was reared in Salinas, had gone through school with Bruce Church, the largest and most innovative of the growers, and his wife, Irene, had been one of her closest friends. And when my mother and father married and settled in Monterey they were befriended by Sam Morse and Byington Ford and many others among the Carmel, Pebble Beach and Peninsula prominencia, including artists Armin Hansen, William Ritschel, and Paul Whitman. Apart from any loyalty that might have arisen from these friendships, my father was a small businessman and was naturally hostile to the communist message that capitalism must be destroyed, so when Byington Ford led the conservative majority in their attack on the communist-oriented John Reed Club in Carmel my father’s sympathy would have been entirely on the side of Ford and his followers.
When it came to John Steinbeck it was a difficult and embarrassing matter, because my mother had grown up around the corner from the Steinbecks in Salinas, had been a sorority sister of Mary Steinbeck at Stanford and was best friend to both Mary and her older sister, Beth. Many years later, in 1955, when Rodgers and Hammerstein reworked John’s Sweet Thursday into a Broadway musical called “Pipe Dream,” my mother drove across the country with Mary and Beth for the opening night.
My father was always somewhat jealous of the great author’s success, and, although an educated man himself he unfortunately carried with him the attitude held by many small businessmen of that era which was that writers and male school teachers, among others, were people who couldn’t make it in the business world. In my father’s case this petty and self-serving attitude was far outweighed by the enormity of the positive effort that he contributed to the community.
Toward the end of the 1930’s when war broke out in Europe and Stalin had made a non-aggression pact with Hitler the message out of Moscow, through the Comintern, to the Communist Party in America and its John Reed Clubs was to vigorously oppose a United States entrance into the conflict. Then in June of 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and now American communists were told by Moscow to continue with their espionage while at the same time to encourage American participation in the war. Thus, when the United States went in against Japan and the Axis powers of Europe it was with broad support that only grew as the conflict intensified.
My father had served in the first War and volunteered for this one. He was turned down due to his age so went on the draft board. Their task was to go over the list of eligible young men, determine whose deferments would be allowed, and call-up a quota from among the rest. The call-up process took place very early in the morning, maybe five or six o’clock, at the platform of the train station. My father would shout out the names and there would be some howling and crying from the families of those selected and noises of relief from among those who got to stay. Either before or after the process my father and I would stop at Herman’s, an all-night diner just into Lower Alvarado street. Our friend Harold McLean owned it, and the Wasson brothers were the fry-cooks. We would sit at the counter so that we could watch one of the Wassons cook-up the hash-browns and eggs, and there would be a little chatter. There was a juke-box by the door, and there would usually be something like “Scatterbrain” blaring out from it. Later I went through high school with the Wasson girls. Across the street was Carmelo’s, the Panetta family’s Italian restaurant. A half century later one of the sons served as President Clinton’s advisor and is now head of the C.I.A.
During the War the government extended its control over practically everything, and because canned sardines were considered to be an excellent food for the G.I.’s, it imposed high production quotas upon the local fishing industry. Now with the increased demand on output and men being called away to the War, the cannery owners called upon local women to volunteer to can fish down on the Row. My mother did this from time to time. Sardines were fished and off-loaded at night, and they were canned immediately, so the chesty blast that was heard all over town telling people that the fish were in, occurred while it was still dark and cold. The telephone would also ring, and a voice would simply say “cannery call.”
Wartime Monterey was an exciting and memorable time for me. Part of it was Dad’s sense of drama. He had posted a large military map on one of the walls, and in the early and usually cold mornings when my mother rousted us from bed and we came into the living room, Dad would be sticking pins in his map, and at breakfast he would pronounce on events: “Got ‘em on the run,” he would say about the enemy, or something like that. Of course, we had our Victory Garden, and my brother and I saved our comic books for the boys at the front, and we collected great balls of tin foil for the war effort and took our dimes to school to buy stamps toward a War Bond. Around town there were posters urging us not to give away secrets: “zip the lip,” we were told. Or a stern, old bearded man in a red, white, and blue outfit was pointing at us and admonishing: “Uncle Sam needs you.”
There was a very dark side of the War for me, too. In February of 1942 President Roosevelt exercised his authority as Commander-in-Chief to issue U.S. Executive Order 9066, which called for the forcible evacuation of “enemy alien” Japanese, Italians and Germans to detention camps in remote areas of the country. Although the Order affected some Italian families on the Monterey Peninsula and down the Coast, it was devastating to the Japanese. I was in the second-grade at the time, and one day and without warning, my Japanese classmates and friends were gone, taken away to the Salinas Rodeo Grounds and from there to Poston or Gila in Arizona or to some other “relocation center.” When we occasionally drove up the El Camino to San Francisco to watch the Seals play ball out at 16th and Bryant we had to drive by Tanforan Race Track which had been turned into an “assembly center” for Japanese, and I would look out the car window and see the stalag-like board- and- bat buildings with tar-paper roofs and all of it surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and Japanese children hanging on the fencing looking back at me through the car window.
Over the duration of the War the Depression-era hostilities between owners and labor in the lettuce fields in Salinas and the orchards in Watsonville were set aside, and there was a joint determination to produce for the good of the nation. The same was true for the sardine fishing and canning industries in Monterey, although both ownership and labor chaffed at counter-productive government intrusion and demands for unrealistic output. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of the United States had been directed by Moscow to cheer on such productivity, because now that the Soviets were at war with the Germans they were going to need all the support they could get from the West. It was a position that weakened the Party in the U.S., disaffecting those members who had been conditioned to view the war as an imperialist struggle between Bourgeois nations and of no interest to the proletarian Revolution. It also lost them sympathetic support from independent thinkers, such as Carmel poet Robinson Jeffers, who deeply felt the futility of any war.
I was at Monterey High School during exuberant years: the Great Depression was over, and we had united as a people to win a World War. The tremendous barrage of propaganda turned out for almost four years by the film and popular music industries made us feel proud, patriotic, and invincible. Yet, there were serious problems to be addressed if we were to think of ourselves as living in the greatest country on earth and as a part of the “Free World.” Ethnic groups had just been uprooted from their homes and sent to concentration camps, black American troops had been segregated and allowed to fight for their country only on a limited basis, and women who had done their part in the military and in industry were finding it difficult in the post-war to find meaningful employment. Add to this a festering situation in agriculture, interrupted by a few years of war-time cooperation, in which a handful of field and packing plant owners had become wildly rich on the backs of poorly paid and generally badly treated Mexican migrant workers and Okie and Filipino immigrants.
My mother and father had taught me well, and by the time I reached High School I was an avid reader and clearly ear-marked for higher education. There were about a dozen of us who by our senior year had finished almost all our college preparatory course-work, so the school, in shocking departure from public school tradition, turned most of our education over to a single faculty-member. His name was Harlan Watkins. A slender man, always impeccably dressed with bow-tie, he wore an air of gentle and amused intellectual superiority. We met daily in the home-economics room with its sofas and easy chairs and shag-carpet and were told the first day that we could lie or sit on the floor if we wished. He gave us a list of 400 books that he could recommend and said that we might read from that if we desired to but that we wouldn’t be required to read anything at all. In these class sessions his approach was to point to one of us and ask if we had been reading anything or if we had discovered something that made us think differently. The response would usually trigger discussion. One day he told us that instead of meeting in the room we would walk down to the Bay and prowl around the tide-pools, and another time we went into town to spend the morning at Roland Bartells quirky used-bookstore on Del Monte Avenue, where Bartells sat every day on a stool under a single light bulb in the cramped entrance that led back into the sizeable maze-like area where the books were stacked and piled on the floor.
Several times Watkins announced that there was to be no meeting at all that day, but we would get together in the evening at his place down on Cannery Row. He lived in the dark gray, wooden building with stairs going up to the second floor, sandwiched between canning facilities. For many years it had been occupied by Ed Ricketts and his Pacific Biological Laboratory, both the personage and the laboratory having been central to John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, and Watkins had purchased it from the owner, Yak Yee. On one visit he played recordings of New Orleans jazz for us and related stories about Bunk Johnson, whom had known personally, and spoke knowingly of other early jazz performers. On another evening at the Lab he discussed opera and Vienna, where he had resided for a time.
In that year I read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath about the Okie migrations and the powerful semi-autobiography called America is in the Heart by the Filipino immigrant Carlos Bulosan, and these helped me to modify my uncritical patriotism engendered by the Second World War. Several of us read Robinson Jeffers’ adaptation of Medea for the Broadway stage and we thought it a good idea to visit him over in Carmel, even though it was well known that he did not receive people outside his immediate circle of family and closest friends. In fact, he did agree to see the four of us on the following Sunday, and we spent most of the day with him. We did not know in advance, but his wife had died not long before, and he was really quite lonely. He took us up onto the top of the Tower at his Tor House, which he and a stone mason had built of rocks brought up from the beach just yards away. It was only years later that I really read the work of this kind man who was one of our country’s major poets and who understood and cherished nature and saw only futility in wars and urban civilizations.
