My Longest, Sweetest, Saddest Weekend (Yet!)

The recent publication of the first biography ever of John Beecher, the most neglected poet in the history of American Lit, reminded me of the longest, sweetest, saddest weekend in my life (so far!). It began early Friday 7 December 1975 when John Bigby, my favorite Annenberg student, now head of the Media Department, Santa Rosa Community College, drove me out to the tiny local airport to hop a puddle jumper to San Francisco International.

There I nervously awaited a former Philly pal, Alice Mazurie, who had beguiled me as Lucy in the Charles Schultz romp, “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown!” Recently divorced, I invited the graduated senior to join me blissfully at my Louie Kahn manor in Greenbelt Knoll in Northeast Philadelphia. Eventually my old-fashioned mores grew restless as she sat around the house, sizing up Villanova as the place to start her stage career, anomalous as that was for a sociology major! She soon split, acerbically!

Meanwhile Bigby had talked me into spending the Philly Bicentennial Year as an Andreini Fellow, a plum, honoring a recently retired professor.

The idea of sharing my chosen city (I was a migrant from Detroit) with goofy colonial wannabees motivated me to move. What a lively decision! Before you could say “Ezra Pound” I had a weekly radio hour dubbed “Muse Room West” and dedicated to Pound’s injunction that “Literature is News that stays News!”

It would lead to such serendipities as an evening with my homebody date, Mary Mueller, at Dizzy Gillepsie’s table while he performed at the Great American Musical Hall, and reminisced between takes with Kermit Scott, a fine tenor who had gotten Diz his first date at Minton’s 52nd St, thus beginning his jazz career. Kermit had retired to the dependable retirement as an Oakland port worker. (Oddly Diz got this date because some gal in the San Francisco Unified School District who wanted to leave administering for performing got Diz a federally financed gig to motivate Lowell High School seniors to jazz induced better mathematics scores.)

Lowell, the Harvard of high schools, needed motivation as badly as Nobel Laureates need more coffee breaks. Thus the arcane underworld of earmarks! Kermit still had his chops and Diz was a superb interviewee! But Dolly had better stick to education. “MuseRoom” was my ticket to Valhalla. If it wasn’t the jazz duo Jackie and Roy, it was the imminent Charles Schultz world premiere of “Snoopy”, his followup to “Charlie Brown”.

My first encounter with Schultz had not been salubrious. I had decided to inaugurate my new “Media” class with Bigby’s tapes of Schultz TV, and phoned Charles to invite him to bless the opening. He went berserk right on the phone. “Who gave you permission to play my copyrights?” What I didn’t know was that Snoopy’s master was paranoid about being ripped off as he had been by his first cartoon syndicator! I apologized profusely and pleaded total ignorance—and asked for an interview over “Snoopy” on opening night. He conceded.

So there I was at United waiting for Alice in Wanderland’s flight from Philly! She arrived in all her blonde glory, clad in a black cashmere sweater set off by the boldly colored abstract wraparound skirt I had sent her as an early xmas bribe to fly by! No longer believing in Heaven with a capital “H”, I scrambled unsuccessfully for a metaphor. We bussed to the premiere.

Hooray! Later at the staff AFTER Party at the Barbary Coast we schmoozed with the great cartoonist, who grandly inscribed a new book to her. (Googling nostalgically recently I sadly discovered that she is selling that inscribed book for $3,000—it was personalized, so the tot declaimed, with unusual power and the truths of our relationship was covered by a false story with me as her professor (she was never my student, but she did teach me a lot, looking back!) Add to that price, the $900 plus I popped for her flight to and back and stay at the Mark Twain Hotel.

After the Barbary Coast I took her to my favorite place of all in the Bay, Top of the Mark! Timothy Pfleuger, that self taught German immigrant became the greatest architect in the region after the First World War. A tour of his masterpieces I had saved for Saturday—The Oakland Paramount, Pacific Tel And Tel, TransBay Terminal, George Washington High, and the Top of the Mark, which saved that hotel from bankruptcy by its magic.

Alas, all my sad salesmanship led to her disconsolate plea: “I wanna go home!” We retired glumly to the carefully chosen Mark Twain never the word “chased” morph so swiftly and completely to “chaste”. United didn’t help my malaise by a sudden strike, so I scrambled to find an early Sunday morning flight back East. The saddest part was over.

She would never know the sweetest second chapter planned for eleven a.m. Sunday at the First Unitarian Church: the return of John Beecher to his job at San Francisco State. The liturgy was strictly William Blake and Walt Whitman. At the height of the McCarthy scare, John refused to, as he said “give in to a loyalty oath passed by a used car salesman in Sacramento”.

His whole professional life had been a testament of loyalty to American values and he wasn’t going to suck up to such a slob. So the theme of John’s sermon that morning was Trust the Constitution, but get another job! For two decades he crisscrossed the country rather than succumb to unpatriotic blather. He ended his life teaching at SF State, dragging an oxygen tank on his back to keep alive.

When his inspiring sermon on how the California Supreme Court rejected the oath was over, I introduced myself, a Philly pal of Jake McGoldrick who knew his third wife Barbara. I told him tomorrow was Emily Dickinson’s 145th birthday and I was throwing a Birthday Party Readout up North in Santa Rose. Would he join us? “For Emily, I’d drive a thousand miles,” he smiled. He came. And did he ever conquer that rock n roll mob. A few of his own and a few favorites from ED! He’s great with strangers. As I would later confirm, when I visited him at his home in Burnsville, N.C.

Heh, if it took 70 years to publish ED’S collected works (from her death in 1886 to Thomas Johnson’s Harvard edition in 1955) then maybe Beecher will get the readers he deserves in due time. It’s up to US! Before Alice sells “our” book?