Indian Summer of Innocence

The Thirties: A Time to Remember, edited by Don Congdon. Simon and Schuster, $7.95 The thirties were, for me, a Crucial Decade. They began, in Heart’s Ease, Mississippi, with my learning, at three, to read Orphan Annie for myself, galvanizing my father to observe “that boy is smart as a steel trap.” And they ended, in Algiers, Louisiana, on a more non-comformist note: I announced to a startled freshman class at Martin Behrman High School, and to a shocked teacher we called Egyptian Ella, that I favored Wendell Willkie.

In our town the thirties brought, to be sure, WPA gangs, bank failures, Blue Eagles, Share the Wealth stickers, batture squatters, surly cane cutters, arrogant CIO organizers, and good men on the street. But, looking back, I tend to remember—and I believe others do too—the decade in different terms. There were Old Maestro Ben Bernie’s “Yowsah, yowsah” and Amos’ “Ow-wow, ow-wow” and Andy’s “I’se regusted”; Fred Allen laughing at his own jokes about Jack Benny’s anemia; baseball pictures with “Lou Gehrig Sez” at the bottom; sneaking in by the fire escape of the Air-Cooled Foto’s Folly Theater (left open by Fred Webert, who later went off to become a priest) to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing on the mirrored ceilings of improbable staterooms, and, if we were in luck, Westbrook Van Voorhies’ jeremiads on The March of Time; an illicit expedition with one Walter Ray Watson, when we took the ferry S.S. Thomas Pickles “over the river” to New Orleans, gawked up Canal Street, passed the Crescent Billiard Hall (the owner, Oakley Harris, had recently been gunned down on the premises by his lady friend), the forbidding Boston Club and the glamorous Roosevelt Hotel, and arrived at our destination: the Joy Strand, where for a nickel we watched a Pete Smith special, Buck Jones and Silver, and Don Ameche and Tyrone Power—a pair of tough New York City reporters, playing checkers with shots of rye and schooners of beer on a speakeasy floor. On the way back we stopped at Martin’s, where, for fifteen cents each, we had a Po’ Boy sandwich and a bottle of Jumbo sarsaparilla. Total cost for day, including ferry tickets, two bits each. All this seems to mark me as hopelessly non-political, but I did carry flares in Old Regular parades and I did hear Huey Long rally the faithful on Opelousas Avenue.

NP

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Noel E. Parmentel Jr.

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The Thirties: A Time to Remember, edited by Don Congdon. Simon and Schuster, $7.95 The thirties were, for me, a Crucial Decade. They began, in Heart’s Ease, Mississippi, with my learning, at three, to read Orphan Annie for myself, galvanizing my father to observe “that boy is smart as a steel trap.” And they ended, in Algiers, Louisiana, on a more non-comformist note: I announced to a startled freshman class at Martin Behrman High School, and to a shocked teacher we called Egyptian Ella, that I favored Wendell Willkie.

In our town the thirties brought, to be sure, WPA gangs, bank failures, Blue Eagles, Share the Wealth stickers, batture squatters, surly cane cutters, arrogant CIO organizers, and good men on the street. But, looking back, I tend to remember—and I believe others do too—the decade in different terms. There were Old Maestro Ben Bernie’s “Yowsah, yowsah” and Amos’ “Ow-wow, ow-wow” and Andy’s “I’se regusted”; Fred Allen laughing at his own jokes about Jack Benny’s anemia; baseball pictures with “Lou Gehrig Sez” at the bottom; sneaking in by the fire escape of the Air-Cooled Foto’s Folly Theater (left open by Fred Webert, who later went off to become a priest) to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing on the mirrored ceilings of improbable staterooms, and, if we were in luck, Westbrook Van Voorhies’ jeremiads on The March of Time; an illicit expedition with one Walter Ray Watson, when we took the ferry S.S. Thomas Pickles “over the river” to New Orleans, gawked up Canal Street, passed the Crescent Billiard Hall (the owner, Oakley Harris, had recently been gunned down on the premises by his lady friend), the forbidding Boston Club and the glamorous Roosevelt Hotel, and arrived at our destination: the Joy Strand, where for a nickel we watched a Pete Smith special, Buck Jones and Silver, and Don Ameche and Tyrone Power—a pair of tough New York City reporters, playing checkers with shots of rye and schooners of beer on a speakeasy floor. On the way back we stopped at Martin’s, where, for fifteen cents each, we had a Po’ Boy sandwich and a bottle of Jumbo sarsaparilla. Total cost for day, including ferry tickets, two bits each. All this seems to mark me as hopelessly non-political, but I did carry flares in Old Regular parades and I did hear Huey Long rally the faithful on Opelousas Avenue.