Born in an empty Kellogg Corn Flakes Carton

Patrick D. Hazard, 1961

A SHORT HISTORY
Born in an empty Kellogg Corn Flakes Carton, Battle Creek, Michigan. 8 February 1927. Mother puzzled.

Moved to Detroit, 1930.

Boarded at Holy Rosary Academy, Bay City, Michigan. 1930-40. Sister Felicia, O.P., virtual mother.

Entered Sacred Heart Seminary, Fall 1940.

Expelled Easter Vacation, 1943, allegedly for the Rector Monsignor Donnelly catching me and Jim VanSlambrouck smoking (or trying to learn how to) after midnight in the Gothic Tower. Jim not expelled. Ambiguous justice. (I didn't inhale, either.)

Joined the U.S.Navy on my seventeenth birthday.

Entered Edwin Denby High, from which I graduated the following year, 2nd in a class of 482. Ive been looking for that over-achiever ever since, to no avail.

Boot Camp at Great Lakes, IL. Company 1818, September 18, 1944.

Xmas Vacation Liberty, traipsed around Detroit in my dress blues to no improvement in my sex life, of which there was, alas, none.

Naval Air Training Center, Gulfport, MS, January through March, 1945.

First Liberty in New Orleans, dead drunk horizontally for the first and last time. Shore Patrol picked me up and took me to the Morgue at Huey Longs Charity Hospital. Laid out on a stone slab. Never have had a drinking problem since.

Naval Air Station, Corpus Christi TX, April 1945 to September 1945. Aviation Electronics Technicians Mate 2nd Class.

First and Last and Only Posting, Pensacola Naval Air Station, October 1945 to July 12, 1946.

Entered University of Detroit Engineering School to become Electrical Engineer. Got a D in Mechanical Drawing. Decided I needed a profession in which it was an asset to be godawful sloppy. Decided to become an English Professor.

Worked Nights, Summer of 1949, Stamping Press, Chrysler, Highland Park.

Graduated University of Detroit, Philosophy major, June, 1949.

Worked Lincoln/Mercury Production Line, Dearborn, Summer 1950.

Worked Fisher Body as Rubber Cement Squirter, Cleveland, 1951.

Entered Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Fall 1949, to start a Ph.D. in American Culture.

Married Mary Elizabeth Schneider on December 29, 1950 at Guardian Angel Parish. Honeymoon at Dearborn Inn. Moved into Mrs. Goldberg's Apartment, Cleveland. First Contact with Kosher Culture.

M.A. John Fiske as Evolution Popularizer, 1952.

Moved to Michigan State to get cheap in state tuition. Bank Janitor, East Lansing Savings Bank.

Diverse Courses from Aaron Abell (Art History), Richard Dorson (U.S.Cultural History), and several English Professors who shall remain as nameless as I was in the Classrooms.

Started Teaching English/Social Studies, an experimental mishmash at East Lansing High School. Best students I've ever had, especially after I graduated to teaching 10 and 12th grade English, straight. Children of MSU professors or GM executives, with a few blues whose parents did the dirty work. First TV program, Everyman a Critic, over MSUs UHF station. Highlight: on site coverage of drag races. 1953.

First publication, Everyman in Saddle Shoes, in Scholastic Teacher magazine about using TV original dramas in the English classroom. Paddy Chayefsky's A Catered Affair was my most thrilling day in a classroom, ever. 1954.

Won Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1955 to spend a year in New York studying new ways of using TV in the classroom. Met Roy Larsen serendipitously at a White House Conference on Education where he offered me an office at Time/Life to facilitate my media contacts. Times call back phone number got me numerous interviews with the likes of Pat Weaver, NBC , and Don McGannon of Westinghouse.

Became Radio-TV editor of Scholastic Teacher, 1955-61. Shared duties with my wife, Mary.

Freshman English convention speech, Liberace and the Acts of Cultural Criticism, led to a job at Trenton State, 1956-57.

Postdoctoral Carnegie Fellowship to organize a new course on The Mass Society for the American Civilization department at the University of Pennsylvania. Research it first year, teach the second. Greatest sinecure of my career. 1957-59.

Walter Annenberg gave Penn two million dollars to found a graduate school of communication. I recommended that Gilbert Seldes, who wrote the first serious book on American popular culture, The Seven Lively Arts (1924), become its first Dean. I was his gofer, crisscrossing the nation telling other Us and many media how good we were going to be. Created a weekly TV program for University of the Air on WFIL-TV, Walters station. Manmade Landscapes dealt with the built environment. High point was Louie Kahn's electric enthusiasm over the Salk Center in La Jolla, CA.

Taught History of Communication (from Cave Painting to Comic Strip) for Annenberg and The Mass Society for Am Civ. Started writing for scholarly publications. Regular book reviews for Penn's magazine. Articles in Television Quarterly and Journalism Quarterly.

David Riesman recommends me for the first director of the Institute of American Studies at the East West Center. Heaven. Pacific Profile on KAIM-FM, the QXR of the Pacific, was my weekly radio interview with VIPs (very intelligent persons) passing through Honolulu. Did a TV talk show with my wife on Honolulu Star Bulletin's TV station, called Coffee Break to characterize its casualness. Highpoint Alfred Frankenstein (art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle) on his new book about folk art in churches on the Big Island.

Wife hated Paradise. (We had just bought an AIA award winning house in Philly, and the dinky poo house of a friend on sabbatical that our English Department provisional IAS director dumped on us was tacky), and after promising a $13,000 salary, the UH President pleaded poverty and reduced it to $11,000 in high priced Hawaii, and so we returned to Philly where I was appointed chairman of the English Department at Beaver College. Twenty years later I took early retirement to become a free lancer, with only modest but satisfying publication in the Nation, the New Republic, the Christian Science Monitor, the Inquirer, Daily News, Connoisseur, Civilization, American Heritage, the Indianapolis Star, San Francisco Chronicle, the Oakland Museum Magazine, Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Independent. Two jobs were semi-permanent and really stimulating: Herb Larsen of the San Francisco Business Journal was amazingly ecumenical in the way he allowed me to cover culture in the Bay. It was a chain based in Dallas and he wrote all the other editors to encourage them to run my stuff when not too SF parochial. I remember him as the best boss I ever worked for.

The second best, and very very good, was Derek S.B. Davis, the arts editor of The Welcomat, a superb weekly with a goofy name. The chief editor was Dan Rottenberg, one of the brightest journalists I have ever watched close up. Derek gave me free reign for my weekly Hazard at Large column. So did Doris Brandes, editor of Art Matters, for several years. I loved the hit and sometimes miss character of journalism compared with grade book rigidity of teaching. I also had a great short run at the Philadelphia Daily News when Gil Spencer was editor and Rich Aregood did the editorial page. His assistant moved on to New York, but before she did she taught me how to take professor out of Op Eds for a funky tabloid. Ive forgotten her name but not her beauty and her moxie. That was the People Paper with Nels Nelson on jazz and Pete Dexter on everything else. It's still very good, probably even better, but editor Zack Stahlberg did a Beruf Verbot on me and that was that. His manners are still pretty plebey, but he runs a good paper. Can't have everything.

I was unlucky enough to have my father abandon us when I was three: he opted for bigamy with his secretary. I was lucky enough to inherit 150,000 dollars from him and his almost wife, which I have wasted creatively on poetry projects and other non-essential necessities.

I have been traveling the world since I took early retirement at 55. I'm 77 now. I've studied Mandarin in Shanghai, interviewed in Tokyo Toshinobu Takagawa, the lead descendant of the last shogun , written for the Japanese Times and other Asian dailies, I've covered the first World Negro Arts Festival in Dakar, and the Commonwealth Education Ministers Congress in Lagos. Reviewed jazz festivals everywhere. Fallen in love with Scandinavia. My life would be perfect if my wife were Finnish.

Now I live in Weimar, Germany with a German wife, finishing a book on the Bauhaus, writing an autobiography, Dumb Irish Luck: A Serendipitous Memoir, and writing a coming of old age novel mocking Goethe's The Sorrows of the Young Werther, with the working title, Sorrows of An Old American Geezer, about a 27 year old Jewish girl who foolishly falls in love with a 77 year old goyim geezer. (They both love architecture more than themselves!) Mrs. Goldberg would never approve.