Around the Mediterranean in 90 Days at 50

It was 1977, I was about to turn 50, and I was antsy restless. I had been teaching for twenty-five years, from 7th-8th grade English/Social Studies (whatever that was) in East Lansing while I finished my Ph.D. in American Studies, to writing the first curriculum in 1958 for the new Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. There with the chutzpah of an assistant professor without tenure I had hornswoggled the brass into taking my choice for the first dean, Gilbert Seldes. He had turned me on to the serious study of pop culture with his pioneer book, “The Seven Lively Arts” (1924).

And I became his gofer, criss-crossing the USA telling academics and media businessmen how great and unique we were going to be! Talk about thrilling. It led to extra-academic jobs like going into Time Life Films every Tuesday to advise them on which BBC films they ought to distribute on public TV and in the schools. We used to start each Tuesday screening with Monty Python’s Flying Circus—until the boss, Peter Roebeck, showed up one day and warned me that he wasn’t paying me a thousand bucks a month to look at that crap. Feigning chastisement, we managed to let WTTW Chicago see some samples and Monty immigrated to America.

My best student at Annenberg was a media polymath from Texas named John Bigby. In 1975 I had organized a prize competition at the Free Library of Philadelphia for college investigative journalists to honor the ideals of onetime Penn dropout, Isidore Finestein Stone, the greatest investigative American journalist in the twentieth century. (The Izzie, as we called the award, went to Arizona State University for a monthly audit of Arizona Media called “The Pretentious Idea”, that being the response of the editor of the Arizona Republic daily when the students asked him to help!) John asked me to come out to his stomping grounds in Santa Rosa to preach Media Crit to his junior college masses.

What I enjoyed most was a weekly radio series I did for KALW-FM, the public radio station of the San Francisco Unified School District, called “Museroom West”. Its motto was Ezra Pound’s “Literature is news that stays news.” A high point was sitting all night at the Great American Music Hall with Dizzy Gillespie and Kermit Scott, the first man to give him a gig in New York at Minton’s on 52nd Street. Scott had “declined” to a stevedore slot in Oakland’s new Container Port across the Bay from the outmoded wharves of San Francisco. He was eager to show Diz he could still play. His tenor sax was rowdy and completely convincing. Hefting cargoes hadn’t hurt his chops.

Incidentally, Diz was in town because a bureaucrat in the San Fran educational hierarchy fancied herself a blues singer. She got the bizarre bopper a gig at the prestigious Lowell high school—to motivate students to better math! (Oh those Federal grants!) As if anybody had to motivate anyone at Lowell. (Her part in the evening’s music was only C-. But what the hell!) “Museroom” was my (and my friend Mary's) free ticket to all the entertainment and art in the Bay Area. My prize Santa Rosa JC student, Robert Anderson, did the gut work on the tapes.

We did memorable takes on the scat jazz duo Jackie and Roy, a marvelous post production drink in with Peanuts man Charles Schultz at the Barbary Coast, after the premiere of “Snoopy”, his hilarious (albeit flop) successor to the “Peanuts” musical. I had invited out from Philly the smashing nymph who played Patty in the Beaver College production. We ended a glorious evening at the Top of the Mark bar, where I showed her a panoramic view of my Bay domain. And told her the story of its greatest Bay architect, Timothy Pflueger. (I organized an informal society called the Pflueger Pfloggers, to give him the Rep he was disgracefully overdue). Alas, it was not enough to keep her in the Bay. We trudged gloomily backed to the Mark Twain Hotel, where I booked her onto the next United flight back to Philly. (Can’t win em all. But you can have a ball trying.)

That weekend was not a total flop either. The next day, a Sunday, the poet John Beecher was to give him his wonderful return speech at the Unitarian Church. Beecher, the son of an executive at the U.S. Steel mill in Bessemer, AL, had passed his summer vacations making school money at that rolling mill. And he got his first book of poems from those experiences. "Report to the Stockholders” in the late twenties. He went on to work for numerous New Deal agencies to reform some of the deficits he observed watching his fellows at the steel mill.

His leftist politics inevitably snared him in the McCarthy trap, California version. Teaching at San Francisco State, when as Assemblyman he described as a used car salesman from Sacramento, put through the state legislature a loyalty oath for teachers. John told him to stuff it, and was blacklisted for fifteen years until cooler heads prevailed. His “sermon” this Sunday amounted to “Stick by your beliefs but depend on the Constitution.” The State Supreme Court had just ruled that tacky oath unconstitutional, and John had his job back—even though he had to teach with an oxygen tank dragging along behind him because of his emphysema. The “liturgy” that morning was Blake and Whitman. It was the last religious experience that really moved me.

It happened that the next day, December 10, was Emily Dickinson’s birthday. I had planned a Poetry Read Out (the word slam up until then still only referred to doors). I asked him if he’d drive up to Santa Rosa and join the noontime bash. He did, and he was stronger than Mick Jagger in his audience contact. Or the beatific Beatle John. It was such a sweet consolation prize after my former girlfriend fled back eastward with so much dispatch. Santa Rosa was a great experience. Macmillan published a collected Beecher, a great poet who was “silenced” in college classrooms by the boilerplate Anglicanism of the New Criticism. I hope more readers eventually repair this great injustice of timid English professors, afraid to be marked as Marxists.

I found other pals, and lived out in the woods with one, especially at first, a sassy Okie named Mary Mueller. They called it Camp Meeker, a former Methodist summer revivalist venue. If those Golden Born Again Oldies only knew how we aging hippies misbehaved in their old haunts, they would have nervously shuffled their angelic slippers Upstairs. Mary ran the graphics department at SRJC. She had two perky teen kids, having disengaged herself from a philosophy professor who proved too thoughtful for her Okie elan. Her brother, Billy Epton, who taught art at the Maryland School of Art in Baltimore, was married to one of the greatest realist watercolorist of our era, whose premature NY Times obit made me bawl. My days with Mary would draw me back to Santa Rosa when I decided, after my mother’s death in a nursing home in 1982, to return there to try my luck as a freelance writer.

One morning in my daily read of the San Francisco Chronicle, I saw that a group was forming to study Mandarin in Shanghai. Hmm. The Asian Art Museum was giving that museum its first non-Chinese exhibition ever. Now if I could get a scoop, my local future as a freelancer might be more secure! I had clips from the local Philly dailies, mostly art reviews and Op Eds, and some travel stories for the Christian Science Monitor. I wasn’t exactly a rank amateur. So I signed up. It was the most instructive move I had yet made. And as you shall read, I made the cover of San Francisco FOCUS, the monthly magazine of KQED, which under the leadership of Jim Day, was easily the best local public television station in the country. The second most interesting was when I decided to celebrate my 50th birthday by going around the Mediterranean in 90 days. Not yet a world traveler. But I had created courses in African Lit and Commonwealth Lit at Beaver. It was high time I qualified myself for the task.

So I was reluctant to go back to Arcadia U as a plain old English professor—after all that stimulation. I took a year off. In a nostalgic mood, I called my first girl friend, Fran, then happily married to a Dow Chemical engineer in Midland, MI (with five Ph.D. children!) She met me in Bay City (where incidentally I had spent my first ten years at Holy Rosary Academy) and she drove us to my mother’s Tawas summer cottage, Birchloft, on Lake Huron, where we had courted with the wild abandon of first timers almost thirty years before. (It was my first hint that nostalgia is geriatric sex!) As we looked out on the deep freeze of that beach, holding hands platonically, we both knew we entering a new phase of our lives.

So why the Mediterranean? It had gradually dawned on me that I loved most of all the art forms created along its littoral, from Coptic in Cairo, to Romanesque in Bari, early Christian churches in Larnaca, and of course my then and still deepest passion, the Modernismo of Barcelona. And I had morphed my curiosity about literatures in English other than Am and Brit into a rubric, “International English”, basically Commonwealth Lit and U.S. I had gone with such aroused curiosity to Dakar, Senegal for the First World Negro Arts Festival in 1966 and to Lagos, Nigeria for the Commonwealth Educational Ministers Conference in 1968. These visits had made me curious about Francophone North Africa. So there I was at the Eastside Airline Terminal in New York on the eve of my 50th birthday, being seen off by the MOMA film director Bill Sloan and his librarian wife, who were used to my strange voyages of discovery. After one stop in Madrid, our Iberia jet deposited me safe and sound in Casablanca early on my fiftieth birthday.

I began my lark with my first pigeon (grandly called “columbine” in French, but I could tell) watered down with a very ordinary Moroccan red. My first astonishment was the prevalence of Art Deco architecture in Casablanca, Rabat, and Tangiers. Wherever the French had colonialized—even Port Said, they left their architectural mark. I have been a certified Art Decodent ever since first glancing at the Chrysler Building. I didn’t realize until I read in a local paper that beyond the High Atlas mountains that there was a highly touted Almond Festival in a town called Tafroute that I had spent almost a month in Morocco. I had to pick up speed! So I arranged to take the overnight bus to Tafroute from Marrakech.

It was a night I shall never forget. Innocent as I was about February temperatures in the “High” Atlas mountains, I had put my luggage atop the bus. Mohammed the driver and Omar the baggage master, amused by my pidgin French, let me ride shotgun in the front of the bus for better photos. I was ecstatic about the views until sundown. Then there began a series of meteorological extravagances, first rain, then sleet, finally snow as we climbed higher and higher. The bus slid, bounced, strained its gear shift, all of this perilously close to steep gorges with no guardrails!

I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. And I was freezing to death. The only thing that save me was their chummy pitstops every half hour or so, where M and O chatted up with local friends and gave me eye popping coffees next o open braziers. About three o’clock in the morning when I was beginning to regret I hadn’t gone to Portugal, I looked back from my front seat and there wasn’t a head to be seen. Every wise local was using his jellaba as comfortable peejays. And I emphasize his. There wasn’t a woman on the bus.

Gradually, we descended into the valley of Tafroute and miraculously, broad fields of almond trees with pure white blossoms made the miserable night worth. Not only was the Festival a lark, but I collect animal sculptures for what I grandly call my Hazoo. I have never had such a grand day of collecting anywhere in the world. I still get the shivers as I fondle them in my office, reminding myself of that frigid nightmare.

The only other voyage that competes with Tafroute in my memory is the train from Cairo to Port Suez. First, I was the only “European” on the trip, an identity it took me a bit to adjust to. Alas, I sat down with a troop of Egyptian soldiers, one of whom thought it was a great joke if he could arrange a liaison between me and an old shrew that sat nearby. She became as pissed as I, eventually. He knew just enough English to be a pain in the ear. Finally, his captain told him to knock it off. Which led to an even more puzzling experience. The captain was learning English by reading American comics.

Have you ever tried to explain the subtleties of Snoopy to a foreigner. It’s no snap. There was an extra buzz to the experience because Charles Schulz had been the de facto Duke of Santa Rosa. As the visiting media maven, I had organized a Peanuts TV Film Festival and called him to see if he would grace the opening with his presence. To my amazement, he was apoplectic. Had I gotten permission to use those videos in a public showing. I was uncharacteristically speechless! Bigby explained it to me later: when he was just breaking into the comics game, a syndicate really screwed him financially. And although he was by now a multimillionaire, he still was hypersensitive to the slightest possibility that he was once again being cheated.

We kissed and made up later that year at the opening of a successor to “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown!”, namely “Snoopy”. I invited one of my best friends from Philly who had played Patty in a college production and we were thrilled to mingle with the cast at the post opening party at the Brown Derby. That train ride almost ended calamitously. As the train neared Suez, I noticed riders getting lined up next to the windows. As the train was almost stopped, they started popping out the windows! Geesh. When in Suez, do as the Suezzies do. I hopped out just as it slowed to a stop. Total Darkness. The station still a good walk ahead. I started towards it—when I tripped over a piece of steel left from some rail repair job. My head took a real rap and bled like crazy. I staunched the bleeding and started cautiously looking for a hotel. Whew. I know it was April 14 because the next morning I had to phone my daughter Catherine for her 23rd birthday.

The most memorable trip I had was on Easter Sunday. I had fallen in with a biologist from Munich and we agreed to meet at Paleohorus, where she had booked an old farm house for an overnight. Alas, I had to get up very, very early the next morning (Easter Sunday)-- to catch a bus from Ghania to Heraklion, where I was booked that evening on the ferry to Alexandria. Everything was fine until the driver announced an hour layover in Rhytmion, about halfway to Heraklion.

I decided to use the hour reconnoitreing the town. I headed for the old Venetian Port after securing my luggage on the bus. Suddenly I saw a man in a finely tailored suit sweeping away the detritus from the Saturday night debauch. I told him he was the fanciest sweeper I had run into since starting my 50th birthday odyssey. He explained that he was a lawyer from Athens and that he had purchased this bar/restaurant rather than go to a psychiatrist! He called it Barbarossa because there was a huge fissure right over the bar which he attributed to a Crusade battle.

I asked if he minded if I snooped around. The first thing that added to my amazement was a book collection so up to date that it featured a brand new edition of the Greek poet George Cavafy—from the Princeton University Press no less. And ceramic glasses and jugs of international standard. Alas, I had only a handful of drachmas and my passport jammed in my jeans pocket. But I asked him how much two tan mugs with striking dark brown bands were selling for. Needless to say they were way above what I had in my pocket. But he congratulated me for my good taste. These were his best works. From the oldest ceramics atelier in Greece. Maroussi. “You mean the Henry Miller Maroussi.” “Absolutely,” was his proud reply.

Suddenly, he took both off the shelf and started to wrap them. “But I’m broke,” I explained. “Ah, but you have excellent taste—for an American,” he added with a twinkle in his eye.”I’m going to give them to you, young man. HAPPY BIRTHDAY.”: Mamma mia, I thought, for my good luck. I was beginning to get nervous about what was left of the hour layover. I thanked him profusely for his generosity and hurried back to the bus station.

Just short of it I heard great Easter choir music coming out of the local church. A Zorba clone was eyeing me from a café table next to the Church. “Christos anysti.” (Christ is risen) I aimed at his eye. “Oh, is that the way the CIA is worming its way into Greece these days.” In perfect American. “Me, CIA. You’ve got to be kidding, or really goofy.” “Heh, sit down and have an Easter drink.” “I would, Zorba, but my bus is about to leave for Heraklion. Give me a rain check. And where did you learn such colloquial English?” “Detroit. I worked making Chevvies for years.” “Heh, Detroit’s my home town. On my next trip, the drinks are on me.”

Little did I know what a nasty surprise was awaiting me at the bus station. I looked in vain for my bus. For any bus. There weren’t any. And no one spoke English. All I could do was repeat the word “Heraklion”. He mimed a departing bus. I pointed to the telephone. He called the station where the manager assured me that my luggage would be on the bus that arrived back at 3 p.m. I had two hours to go back and smooze Zorba and have a cheap fish lunch. Whew! I hugged my mugs and got ready to bug Barbarossa some more. Some troubles can be serendipitous.