1959

I am not precisely sure what triggered it — a bout of melancholy perhaps or a sense of general unease as my fifty-second birthday has just passed by in a whoosh — but I felt compelled to look up certain cultural milestones for the year of my birth, 1959, in San Francisco, California (I share the same birthday, March 12, with Jack Kerouac, which has always thrilled me to no end).

In the year of my birth, 1959, to an unwed San Francisco mother of blue collar stock originally from Indiana, one significant literary work was  published that would become important in later years to my own development as a reader and writer: “Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs, which I first explored in 1993 while separated from my pregnant wife and living at the Los Feliz Motel in Atwater Village. 

Another writer I have greatly admired, Raymond Chandler, passed away a few days past my date of birth, on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California, a seaside community north of San Diego where I would spend a lot of time with my grandparents (both now deceased) in the 1970s.

On October 2, 1959, seven months into my diaper soiling years, Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” debuted on the CBS television network — I’m fairly certain that thanks to reruns in syndication, I have viewed every episode of that classic series at least thrice, to the point that I can no longer stomach seeing a single episode even for the sake of nostalgia.

One month after the debut of Serling’s television classic, on November 18, 1959, MGM’s widescreen, multi-million dollar Technicolor production of Lew Wallace’s novel “Ben-Hur” debuted and would go on to win 11 Academy Awards — and I still by far prefer the original 1925 silent version starring Ramon Novarro, which pops up on Turner Classic Movies from time to time.

Novarro, the son of a prosperous Mexican dentist, moved to Los Angeles with his family as refugees from the Mexican Revolution of 1916. As a young actor in the early years of cinema, he was groomed as “The New Valentino”, but his career faded fast after 1930.

On October 30th, 1968, Ramon Novarro, a forgotten star of yesteryear, was savagely beaten in his North Hollywood home by two young gay hustlers. They had heard, erroneously, that he had thousands of dollars locked away somewhere in his home. They never found any money, and Ramon was discovered dead the next day by his servant. Novarro’s murder served as the influence for Charles Bukowski’s short story The Murder of Ramon Vasquez, perhaps the most disturbingly brilliant work of short fiction that I have ever read.

And that’s 1959 … how ill this taper burns, as the Bard of Avon put it so succinctly.

Phil Harris in Ensenada

Left to right: Jean Wilhite, Phil Harris, Bergen "Willy" Wilhite. Click to enlarge

“If it hadn’t been for radio, I would still be a traveling orchestra leader. For 17 years I played one-night stands, sleeping on buses. I never even voted, because I didn’t have any residence.” ~~ Phil Harris

In my early childhood and teen years in the 1960s and 1970s I spent as much time dwelling under the roof of my maternal grandmother, Jean Wilhite, as I did with my own mother; in fact, from 1961, when I was two years old, until late 1967, I lived with my grandparents exclusively — they were my legal guardians after my mother was arrested and convicted of fraud in Bakersfield in ’61.

After my mother was released from state prison, my grandmother refused to let my mother regain custody of me (two of her daughters were put up for adoption while she was serving her sentence) until she proved that she could “straighten up and fly right” — which, in my mom’s book, meant getting married and divorced three times until my grandmother was satisfied that her eldest daughter had “met the right man” (the owner of a small construction firm in Parkersburg, West Virginia) and was capable of caring for her only son.

In the late summer of 1967, the year that large demonstrations against the U.S. war in Vietnam were staged in New York and San Francisco, my mother flew out from West Virginia to my grandparent’s middle class home in the sleepy suburbs of Hayward, California, and fetched her son to come live with her and her new husband, Donald Barr.

My best and brightest memories of that year in West Virginia was going to the Jungle Drive-In Theater, so named for the dense patch of  woodland on Old St. Mary’s Pike that the classic Ozone theater (opened in 1952 and still operating to this day) was situated in.

The movie we saw that night in October of 1967, one that I was anticipating eagerly and anxiously, was Walt Disney’s animated adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. I loved every minute of the movie and over the course of the next year my mom bought me every Jungle Book-related novelty that I asked for (she was making up for a lot of lost time, after all): 45 RPM records of Phil Harris’s showstopper tune The Bare Necessities and Harris and Louis Prima’s duet, I Wanna Be Like You; Baloo the Bear plush toys; ceramic figures of all the characters from the movie (a promotional tie-in with Jell-O and Disney Studios); and plenty of books, from cheap Disney illustrated books that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the original work, coloring books, sticker books, and an abridged edition of Kipling’s work for children. 

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Over the ensuing years, until I was 16 years old, I bounced back and forth between the homes of my mother and her husband-of-the-moment and my grandparents, who always had a bedroom available for me. I called my grandmother, Jean Wilhite, “Other Mother” for most of my adolescence because that was how I was instructed to refer to her when I was very young … she was, simply, my other mother.

In the late 1970s my grandparents had retired to Otay Mesa, California, a San Diego suburb straddling the Mexico border. They had a vacation “home” at the legendary American Trailer Park in Ensenada Baja, the coastal fishing community known locally as La Cenicienta del Pacifico (The Cinderella of the Pacific). I often accompanied my grandparents on weeks-long summer vacations at the trailer park, populated by American retirees with a love for deepwater ocean fishing and booze, not necessarily in that order.

The next-door neighbor of my grandparents, occupying a large double-wide on a huge slab of concrete, was Phil Harris, the famed Big Band leader of the 1940s and a radio, film, and TV personality. I knew Phil, of course, for one thing … he was the voice of Baloo the Bear in The Jungle Book. My grandmother and Phil hit it off right from their first meeting since they both hailed from Greene County, Indiana, and Phil was a frequent dinner and drinks guest whenever we stayed at the park.

The photo above was taken in 1976 one hot summer afternoon. Note the glass of bourbon in Phil’s hand, de rigueur for the adults in the park. I’ve had this Polaroid shot in my possession for decades (with Phil’s signature on the reverse border in black ink); when I scanned it over the weekend I was startled by the freshness of the color and the composition when enlarged. It was like seeing my grandparents and old Phil in the flesh one more time and it filled me with a certain nostalgia and melancholy that has lingered all weekend.