Peanuts Envy

Sometimes it is a pleasure to remember a real flop in one’s life. Once I had a mad May/December crush on the young woman who played Patty in our college production of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown!” (Some colleagues tut-tutted my calendric understatement by suggesting it was really more like a January/December romance.) After her graduation, she lived briefly with me in my large, recently emptied, divorced house. In 1975 I took up the offer of my former prize Annenberg student, John Bigby, to become the Andreini Fellow in his Media Department for 1975-76 at Santa Rosa Community College.

One of the first efforts I made to justify my free wheeling sinecure was to call Santa Rosa resident Mr. Snoopy himself to see if he would come to my Media class to help me inaugurate a Peanuts video series. To my astonishment, he asked me in a most unfriendly way where I got the videos and was I paying royalties on the showings.

After I recovered from my dumbstruck silence, I explained they were in the files of the Media Department and I considered it “fair use” to use them as documents in my course on contemporary media. Only later did I understand his distemper. First he abhorred to his dying day the Universal Syndicate’s renaming his strip “L’il Folks” as “Peanuts”! Secondly he had been ripped off in his early free lancing days as a hard scrabble cartoonist by another press syndicate which he felt had really ripped him off.

To this ultra-sensitivity in a folksy cartoonist I suppressed my Peanuts Envy until I read in the Sonoma News Herald that Schulz was premiering a followup musical called “Snoopy!” just before Christmas in San Francisco. Ah, Youth! And adjacent senility. I called “Patty” in Philly and urged her to come out for the premiere which I would be reviewing for my weekly radio interview show, “Museroom West,” on KALW-FM, the public radio channel for the San Francisco Unified School District.

I had already Fed Expressed an early Christmas present in the form of a dazzling wraparound skirt designed by a Bay area artist. She complied and the afternoon of the premiere I found myself flying from Santa Rosa dinky airport to San Francisco International—to meet “Patty” flying in on United. Wrapped, it benignly turned out in that wrap around skirt set off gloriously by a black cashmere sweater and her blonde hair. My knees were weak from joy—not osteoporosis!

The musical was a funky romp, and the after party at the most famous nightclub in SF was an interviewer’s dream. Even Mr. Schulz was friendly after our Nordic interview in September. I decided to push my luck (and consolidate our former relationship) by taking her to my favorite watering hole in SF, the Top of the Mark. I ranted on about my newly discovered architect genius, Timothy Pflueger, who had saved a depression era five star hotel, the Mark Hopkins, from banktuptcy by designing the Top. I figured the panoramic views would reignite the coldest heart. “Patty” was suddenly very silent. She was on the verge of tears, my first such lachcrymalic experience in my favorite pit stop.

“I want to go home!” she wailed between gusts of tears. I had booked a place for us to stay in the Mark Twain hotel, symbolic of our former literary past! This final ploy only accentuated our mutual discomfort as I tried like a brother to get her an early return ticket in the midst of a airline strike! I did, as I consoled her through a chaste night that was to have been our renewal. It is crude I know to think of such a catastrophe in fiscal terms, but it did set me back almost $800 once I put her on the limo back to SFO.

Alas, “Patty” was to miss the piece de resistance of our now twice blighted romance—the John Beecher welcome back to SF at the downtown Unitarian Church, a few painful steps from the abandoned Mark Twain. Beecher is the most neglected poet of our generation, because his politics and skeptical beliefs belie the fatuous covert Episcopalianism that corrupted the study of literature in the New Criticism. His disaffection began in the 1920’s where as a Cornell English major he spent his summers working for tuition money in the U S Steel works near Birmingham, AL where, as it happened, his father was the plant manager.

His first book of poems was entitled “Report to the Stockholders” in which he chided the management for their inhumane work policies. Eventually, Beecher became a professor at San Francisco State University where he refused to sign a loyalty oath (“designed in Sacramento,” Beecher sneered, “by a used car salesman”. He lost his job. But two decades later the Supreme Court took his side in an appeal, and he returned to teaching at SF State.

The Sunday service was devoted to his description of his two decades of estrangement, dragging a oxygen tank behind him. The liturgy was by William Blake and Walt Whitman. Beecher’s theme: Believe in the Constitution, but look for work! He had spent most of his time down in Burnsville, N.C. where his wife Barbara nurtured him through some really tough times.

I found his poetry only through sheer serendipity. I was reviewing an exhibition of Southern painters at the Birmingham Museum of Art where the director happened to be the son of the longtime editor of the Atlantic Monthly. So our lunchtime palaver turned to my first career as a professor of American Literature. He allowed as how I ought to go out to Joe’s, a hippie hangout on the rim of Birmingham to talk with Joe about John Beecher.

I did. And that’s how I got my first copy of his Collected Poems (Macmillan, 1976). He was a black hole in the American canon because like another major lacuna, Scots poet, Hugh Macdiarmid; his poetry was too leftist. (I only learned about Hugh through Maurice Lindsay who was running the documentary department of Border TV. I was passing through because the U.S. Office of Education had sent me to find out why British commercial TV had livelier literature programs than American public broadcasting. Lindsay, a free lancer who later became the head of the Scottish Civic Trust, had made a fine half hour about Macdiarmid called “Rebel with a Cause”. The answer to the USOE was simple: put poets like Lindsay in Scotland or John Ormond in Wales in charge of production. Our typical PBSers came from college AudioVisual departments.)

It happened that Beecher’s gig at the Unitarian Church was on December 9. The next day, Emily Dickinson’s birthday, I had scheduled an open noon hour poetry reading at Santa Rosa JC in the Amherst recluse’s honor. After Beecher’s sermon I palavered with him about our imminent outing and asked him if he wanted to join us. He did. And he was a knockout to a group of students now proverbially hip about poetry. John Beecher remains a hero of mine, and one of the missing major figures in our literature.