Excerpts from my unpublished memoir
Excerpts from my unpublished memoir
A Standing Start
A Standing Start
Embedded Files
Updated: Mar 13, 2023
Travel through Southern West Virginia from any direction and you'll necessarily pass through the small city of Beckley. From there you can continue west, through increasingly winding mountains toward Charleston, dense rolling hills gradually giving way to the Bluegrass of Kentucky. Travel east from Beckley instead, toward the fertile valleys of eastern Virginia, and the drop from the wide plateau on which Beckley is situated will be much steeper. But if you turn due South from Beckley on the state road you'll descend into the heart of coal mining country, one of the most valuable few hundred square miles in North America.
Postcard views of the Appalachians are quickly replaced by rugged, close-set hills with houses teetering on all sides. Four lanes narrow to two as the road passes through smaller and smaller towns. You'll feel as if you're gradually shedding the modern world, and you are—first, the Internet won't be available on your phone. Soon, you'll lose cell service entirely. Road signs devolve to forgotten brands and the dogs meandering along the highway become scragglier. Bedraggled children look at strangers more suspiciously.
You'll come to a long straight stretch that ends at the base of Tams Mountain. At that point there are no more houses along the highway and the road narrows even more. Second-growth silver maple, oak and pine begin to crowd in from above. The road begins a steep climb and you'll need to slow to a few miles an hour for the many switchbacks leading the thousand feet to the top of the mountain, where a large graveyard sits off to the right.
The downslope on the other side of the mountain is not as steep but descends even further. The road is a winding, narrow shelf the mountain barely gave up, a rock wall striate with coal blooms on one side and a sheer drop-off on the other. The valley gradually reveals a black lake of dust and rock at bottom, the refuse from the millions of tons of coal surrendered by the mountain over a century. The sun only reaches the valley late morning and when it does the dust lake absorbs the light and swallows its color, reflecting a dispirited sepia back up the hillsides.
The road continues back and forth and down and earlier in time, past an abandoned coal camp, rusted skeletons of immense tipples, exhausted tarpaper shacks nearly ingested by purple loosestrife. In six more miles, at the bottom of the mountain, comes another rare straight stretch, almost a mile long, and at the end of that straight stretch, finally, is the unincorporated coal camp of Helen, where I grew up.
Pigpen Bottom
Pigpen Bottom
Another short excerpt from A Standing Start.
There were (and are) no stop signs or traffic lights in our little coal camp of Helen and the whole town wasn't much longer than a football field, except for the half-mile road leading to the town's second mine.
A single cross-street, perpendicular to Route 16, led east up past the community church and what were once general laborers' houses to the predominantly Black housing section called Berry Branch, and then up the holler to one of the two mines. The road to the west, called Upper Bottom, was much shorter and ran past the company store and the nine foremen's houses, then up a hillside past the superintendent's house to the town's second mine. By design, virtually anywhere in town could be seen from the super's enormous house, which must have had ten bedrooms, though I was never inside. At the very southern end of Helen a short unpaved spur road bent west, leading to twelve houses in the Lower Bottom.
Foremen's houses had two stories and four bedrooms and were well-built, with beautiful native cherry stairs and plastered walls. Except for Route 16, which sliced the town length-wise, the hundred feet of road in the Upper Bottom was the only paved street in town.
The houses along Route 16 and up Berry Branch were all one-story and not nearly as well-built as the foremen's houses but were sturdy and were coveted by workers with some seniority with the company.
By contrast, the houses in the Lower Bottom, the only place my father could find affordable houses for our large extended family, were the simplest-built in town—so simply built they could have been mistaken for chicken coops. They were intended for the lowest strata of general laborers and itinerants.
Train cars full of coal ran incessantly on tracks only a few feet from the Lower Bottom houses, carrying thousands of tons of coal each day from still-working mines in the region. The C&O and Virginian Railroads ran along each side of the town in Helen, parallel to Route 16, and a small stream fed by both Berry Branch and the runoff from Tams Mountain followed the tracks, each little town adding its untreated wastewater. The joined streams became the Winding Gulf watershed and eventually fed the Guyandotte River in Mullens to the south.
The railroad tracks parenthesized the narrow little town and the grime from all that coal was often visible as a gray suspension in the air, settling thickly as soon as a surface was cleaned or painted. Because of the dirt road, the rough houses, the dirty stream, and the fact that several families kept pigs, the Lower Bottom where we came to live was universally referred to as Pigpen Bottom.
Helen, at the southernmost end of Raleigh County and just a few miles from the northern tip of Wyoming County, was originally laid out in 1919 and like almost all in that area and era was designed to be a company town, with everything provided by, and controlled by, the company. Mining and timber companies in the early to mid twentieth century had difficulty hiring and retaining reliable workers; since roads were poor or nonexistent, it was in the companies' best interests to provide amenities to attract and keep workers, both families and single men. Helen and many other "model" camps of that era had a movie theater, bowling alley, post office, baseball field, clubhouse, and barbershop. It even had its own telephone exchange. There was also a small sandwich grill and, above that, tiny apartments for bachelor miners. The coal dust on a miner after a shift in the mine was deep and thick, and because many houses had no tubs or showers, every coal camp including Helen had a large communal bathhouse. The tradeoff for all this was that until the 1950s miners were paid in a private currency, called "scrip," that was good only at the particular company's store. Miners had little choice but to pay the store's inflated prices.
The available coal in both of Helen's mines had been almost exhausted by the time I was born, so the miners had begun looking for work elsewhere, and the town's amenities closed down one by one. Eighty percent of the town's nearly one thousand residents moved away within a few years. Many houses were simply left to fall in, or were torn down for their lumber, if it could be reused. Arson was common in whatever was left, and almost every communal structure in Helen except the church was torn down, burned down, or abandoned by the time I was ten. There was no fire department anywhere near; if a building caught fire it would almost certainly burn completely. But as long as the abandoned buildings stood, we kids were free to roam their ghostly, echoing interiors.
Ventrilocution
Ventrilocution
Updated: Sep 14, 2023
I'd been looking for a job my whole last year of college and had gotten interviews--the local PBS station, newspapers, several regional magazines, the city communications department—but no offers. I wasn't surprised; I had basically muddled through that last year and had no answer when they asked me where I saw myself in five years.
On a bulletin board in the English department I happened to see a help-wanted ad for the local radio station, WCLG. My first apartment in Morgantown (a run-down place just above a dance school, but that's another story) had been just across the street from the station, but I already knew the name from when I was a kid and my much older brother brought home a stack of brightly colored strips of paper with the station's logo at the top, listing the week's top forty songs.
Since then, the station had added an FM signal, with 3000 watts of power, and it broadcast the university's football and basketball games.
I had always loved music and had worked in the radio station at my previous college, which came in handy when I interviewed for the job with the WCLG general manager. They needed a copywriter, someone to write commercials and do public service interviews and very occasionally cover the air in emergencies; "dead air" meant listeners tuned out, which meant lower ad revenues.
I was given a writing and producing test, creating a twenty-second commercial for an imaginary business and cutting a tape for it. I easily passed the FCC test for a radio operator license and got the job, starting work a month before graduating. The money wasn't great but at least it was a job, and I could walk to work. And, however unglamorous the subject matter, I was writing words other people would hear. It seemed like a trick, some kind of ventriloquism.
I quickly learned to write punchy ad copy and how to tell a little story with just sound, including the things not to do—since many people would be listening in their cars, you couldn't use the sound of a siren or breaking glass, for example. (Oddly, you could use sound of engines revving and tires squealing, but not screeching brakes.) You could use talking animals and funny voices and the snik of a cigarette lighter or the thipthipthip of rain on a tin roof; you couldn't mention alcohol but could refer to "your favorite legal beverage."
I wrote five or six commercials a day, sometimes meeting with the client to talk about what they wanted to highlight. I learned early on to read my pieces quietly to myself, as sometimes what seems well-written doesn't work well out loud. I chose the music "bed" for each spot of thirty or sixty seconds, whatever the ad demanded, from a huge LP library of prerecorded music styles on vinyl records (these royalty-free tracks being called "needle drops").
I would oversee the commercials' production by DJs with pseudonyms like "The Real Doctor John" and "Bobcat" Jones. Every DJ was supposed to take their turn recording commercials, which some of them hated to do. I was amazed at their ability to nail a piece of copy in one or two takes, and there was something about hearing good voices say out loud words that I'd just written.
At the time, one of the funniest and best-written shows on television, WKRP in Cincinnati, was in its second season and it portrayed fairly accurately the daily rhythms of a radio station. There's something about radio that attracts oddballs, and the WCLG disc jockeys were all characters.
Bobcat was the quickest wit I'd ever encountered, and the program director Dr. John (I never knew his given name, as everyone just called him "Doctor") was a Robert Plant lookalike and thrilled the ladies at in-person events. I was always curious about what listeners thought disc jockeys looked like; unlike the Doctor, many of those with the most seductive voices were more like out-of-shape accountants in real life.
One of the drive-time guys was in a happy long-term three-person relationship, him and another guy and a woman, and all three would come to social events. They were all nice people and although (being from deep in a West Virginia holler) it wasn't something I'd ever heard of, it helped me realize that people construct their lives in whatever way works for them.
In addition to commercials I did weekly public service interviews, going out to talk to sports people or doctors or someone in the news, editing the interviews down to the thirty-minutes per week the station was (at the time) legally required to do.
I edited my own tape, cutting and splicing by hand using razor blades, since this was long before anything was digitized. At my old college station I'd learned to cut tape at a sharp angle to make one sound overlap slightly and transition seamlessly to the next, slicing a millimeter or two at a time to get it right. I'm not sure why I took such care--the station aired the interviews very early on Sunday mornings, when listenership must have topped out in the dozens.
Occasionally someone would call in sick and I'd have to cover part of their show just to avoid dead air until a real DJ could be brought in, but I was warned to play a lot of music and keep the talk to a minimum (since I wasn't a "personality"), which I did. On the few occasions I had to speak I was "Dave Marshall."
One of the AM DJs loved spinning out patter in the lead-in bars before the vocals in some hit from the 50s or 60s, and he was very good at timing it precisely. He was also having an affair, and although he wasn't supposed to leave the studio during his shift he would go outside to talk to his girlfriend, and I was by myself. Since I wasn't supposed to talk I just played record after record until he returned. These were still the small 45 rpm ones, and songs from that era were no more than three minutes long, so I had to get a new record cued on the second turntable before the first one finished, bringing the volume up on the second as the first faded out.
I pulled commercials and public service announcements from a "cart" board, basically a rack of eight-track tapes of twenty, thirty or sixty seconds each, and every fifteen minutes or so played a "house ad," one of those jingles with a mixed vocal chorus singing the call letters of the station and its hook line ("home of the hottest hits!" or whatever).
At that time the business model of record companies was to send out copies of their records to every radio station it could afford to, on the off chance that a song would get played and become a hit. Just as at my old college station, WCLG received hundreds more LPs every month than it could possibly play, and few that reached the station fit its top-40 rock and oldies format. The other records were to be thrown out unopened.
Everyone at the station hated disco, so those went directly to the dumpster. The rest were stacked by the back door, headed for the trash, and no one minded my having my pick of them. I took them home by the dozens and gave them at least one spin each, skipping a track by lifting the needle if a particular song didn't grab me. I found some great new favorites this way, like the Roche sisters, The Clash, and Elvis Costello. Some of the artists that I liked a lot would never have a top-40 hit but would have long careers, and it was interesting to watch them develop over the next several decades.
Since I was old enough to drive I'd haunted flea markets and secondhand stores for old record albums, the stranger the better, rarely paying more than fifty cents for one. Comedy, spoken word, instructional records, primitive rock and roll, I didn't care, and the stranger the better. (My hobby eventually paid for itself, once online auction sites came into being—someone, somewhere wanted those weird records.) The WCLG DJs appreciated my love of audio, though none shared my taste for the odder records.
One of the DJs, Larry, happened to be the son of one of the most famous ventriloquists of the 1950s, Jimmy Nelson. I have no memory of how I made the connection but Larry was stunned when I brought in a copy of the ventriloquism instructional LP his father had made in the 1950s—even he didn't have a copy. I was a little sad that he didn't.
I stayed with WCLG for a year, saving money before lighting out for the territories. I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do. As the WKRP theme song says, DJs are known for going "town to town, up and down the dial," and none of the DJs I worked with seemed particularly happy with where they were. I was no different. I enjoyed my time at the station but didn't see much future for myself in radio.
Company town
Company town
Updated: Jan 16
The tiny southern West Virginia coal camp of Helen, where I grew up, was once thriving. Its two coal mines supported a population of more than eleven hundred in the boom years of the 1940s and early 50s. But because of mechanization, depressed demand for coal, and the natural limit to how much coal can profitably be dug from a mine, the town's mines had been closed down and only about 300 people lived there by 1956. It was half an hour on bad roads to any real city.
Our large family--my father and mother and my older siblings, all of my grandparents, three of my aunts who never left home, and the young daughter of one of them--moved to Helen just before I was born and the town's population would continue to dwindle and its houses and other buildings to gradually disappear all through my childhood.
Helen has no claim to fame other than that long-serving US Senator Robert Byrd once pumped gas at its little station in the 1940s. If you go a few miles north on the only road that passes through town, then take a one-lane road west, you'll be in Slab Fork, the hometown of the singer/songwriter Bill Withers. His father was a coal miner like mine, but Withers put the town and the state in his rearview mirror as soon as he could and had no nostalgia for it.
About fifty little coal camps like Helen were scattered around the Winding Gulf coal field in the early twentieth century, built by coal companies extracting valuable timber and minerals. In such camps, the company owned all the houses and deducted miners' rent from their paychecks. The company also deducted the town doctor's fee and anything the miners bought on credit from the company store. Most miners didn't have cars and had no choice but to pay its inflated prices.
Miners weren't paid in real money anyway. Until the late 1950s, they were paid in a type of private money called scrip. It could only be used at stores owned by that particular coal company.
We only knew of it through rumors, but in the 1930s some companies used a private contract called Esau scrip. The reference is to the story in Genesis about Jacob forcing his starving brother to trade his birthright for a bowl of pottage.
The Esau wasn't physical scrip but a special type of loan contract. It was typically offered to the wives of men who were injured and out of work and could only be used for food and other necessities at the company store and it expired in thirty days. If a miner returned to work within that time, his wages were withheld to cover the debt. If he didn't return to work, the Esau converted to a loan secured by the miner's possessions.
But since miners had little of value, sometimes the repayment was demanded from the wives' bodies. The alternative was homelessness and starvation.
The rise of the United Mine Workers union and labor protections under Franklin Roosevelt put an end to this practice, and improved roads during the Eisenhower era gave miners new freedom to shop elsewhere.
Sometimes mines reopened when the inevitable bust in the coal market turned into a boom, but in many small towns there was simply no more coal to be mined. When it became clear that Helen's mines would never reopen, the company owning the town began the process of shutting the town down.
The process accelerated quickly. More and more, those left in Helen were widows or families of disabled men who couldn't afford to live elsewhere. The coal company first phased out accepting scrip and then closed the company store entirely.
Because the company owned all the houses, if a miner was killed his widow could be evicted with no notice and perhaps nowhere to go. Before the union, miners were less valuable to a company than the mules that hauled the coal to the surface. The union fought hard for death benefits for the miners but could do little about the company-owned rental houses. When a better house became vacant, miners vied for it based on their seniority with the company.
Helen's population seeped away and the company closed the bathhouse, then the movie theater, and gradually everything else. The company gave miners the option of purchasing the homes they had been renting but many couldn't afford to buy them, or chose to move elsewhere rather than commute to a new job. So, unlike in many small towns, there were houses available for purchase in Helen.
My father's family was evicted in 1956 from the large subsistence farm ten miles south of Helen it had leased from the Pocahontas Coal Company for more than fifty years, and given thirty days' notice to vacate.
My father's many siblings had relocated to Cleveland, Detroit, and California by then, and he became the family patriarch by default. Helen was the only town where he could find houses for not just his wife and two kids but both his and my mother's elderly parents and the several aunts.
My father described how different Helen was from the farm. In the country, streams ran clean and clear, but in Helen the creek that paralleled the main road through town was unfit to even approach. Much of the sludge from the mines upstream choked out the marine life and only a few houses had septic tanks; others had "straight pipes," flushing sewage directly into the stream. Some had outhouses not far from the stream. We children were warned never to wade in or touch the water.
The closure of the local mines didn't improve the air quality. The town was only about two hundred yards wide, set down between steep hills and parenthesized by railroad tracks. The tracks ran very close to many houses on both sides of the valley, rail cars constantly rumbling by full of coal from the many other still-productive mines in the area.
A few houses in Helen had no electricity but the three my father bought on installment in 1956 did. The houses were barely habitable but were all he could afford. He worked hard on the night shift in the mines, then spent his days installing indoor plumbing, painting, and patching holes in the walls.
For several years he did nothing but work night shift, work on the houses during the day, take a sleeping pill so he could rest a few hours, and wake up and go to work again as everyone else was going to sleep.
He was always exhausted but he brought his and my mother's family to Helen, and they settled into their three strange new homes during an uncommonly mild winter, just in time for me to be born.
Thom Reese, proprietor of the Beaux Arts
Thom Reese, proprietor of the Beaux Arts
The Beaux Arts, originally a swank hotel, later a coffeehouse and cheap rooming house
The Beaux Arts, originally a swank hotel, later a coffeehouse and cheap rooming house
The Beaux Arts often had live music and showed avant-garde movies in the basement every night
The Beaux Arts often had live music and showed avant-garde movies in the basement every night
The old, weird America - The Beaux Arts Coffeehouse and Hotel
The old, weird America - The Beaux Arts Coffeehouse and Hotel
Updated: Jul 31, 2023
"The old, weird America." Music writer Greil Marcus coined that phrase for a "strange yet familiar backdrop to our common cultural history," the "playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, Illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of all stripes."
That America can't exist now, not in an age of instant and constant communication, of Google Earth and cheap flights. I came of age right as that old, weird America was dying out.
I'd been staying at the YMCA in St. Petersburg, Florida, for a couple of weeks. I had sidled into St. Pete with some small savings after a year of teaching, intending to see what the Sunshine State had to offer, maybe go back to school there. I didn't have much else going on.
A friend and his girlfriend had put me up for ten days or so but I didn't want to overstay my welcome so moved into the Y. It was cheap and I didn't mind it. The rooms were tiny but clean and the other residents ranged from doddering old guys to young transients like me, and I was never hassled by anyone. Hard drugs weren't common then, just grass and alcohol, and those who overindulged were more likely to sleep than take the trouble to steal. I didn't have anything worth stealing anyway.
I hadn't intended to stay in town very long and was thinking I'd go to grad school in Indiana instead. But after a few weeks in St Pete I found a restaurant job and met Margot, the woman I would eventually marry. I decided I needed to find a better living situation if I was going to stay there.
In a grocery store I saw a bulletin board ad for a boarding house in central St Pete, some place called the Beaux Arts, so I went to check it out. It was a huge, gothic former luxury hotel in Pinellas Park. The proprietor, Thom Reese, had inherited it from his parents and turned it into an art school, gallery, coffeehouse and by-the-week hotel. I moved in the same day, everything I owned fitting neatly into a backpack and cardboard box.
Thom was a classically trained artist and he and the increasingly ramshackle old house and its rambling garden had become cultural icons in the area since the late 50's. The rooms were very cheap and each of the four floors had a single bathroom for four tenants, and to save money Thom turned off the power to the building between 10 am and 4 pm. Palmetto bugs were everywhere, but it was a very cool place to live, with every wall covered in art by Thom or his friends.
All the people living there were interesting—artists, musicians, filmmakers. One longtime resident recalled that "there were a lot of musicians. We used to leave our doors open, and there was always guitar music. People were always smoking a joint and playing guitar. During the week, it was so placid and quiet. You’d go down into the garden and walk around. It was just an ethereal place to hang out at and live.”
Thom hosted folk and classical concerts in the garden and showed movies every night in the basement coffeehouse, a "dark, high-ceilinged room, stuffed helter-skelter with stained easy chairs and ratty sofas," as writer Bill DeYoung put it. Lots of musicians performed there or in the garden, like Fred Neil, Gamble Rogers and Jerry Jeff Walker. Thom showed movies in the basement every night and Margot and I saw some excellent ones, such as Lianna by John Sayles, and some awful ones, like Pink Flamingos. Many were foreign films or experimental ones by people who lived there or had lived there. I would go to the movies by myself if she wasn't available.
Thom had been running the Beaux Arts for a quarter century by the time I arrived and was making just enough money from his art to keep the whole thing afloat. In 1961 Marilyn Monroe and then-husband Joe DiMaggio visited the gallery and bought one of Thom's paintings, leading to many more sales.
Reese was flamboyantly and publicly gay long before it was safe to be—he had been arrested in the 1960's for "crimes against nature" and for "lewd and lascivious conduct" during the dances he hosted featuring outlandishly cross-dressed men and women. The police raided the place more than once because the European art-house movies he showed in the basement were considered obscene in that conservative city and state. “Apparently,” one partygoer recalled, “Pinellas Park blamed him for the ‘60s.” Thom laughed all of it off and just kept doing what he wanted to do.
He didn't allow drinking in the Beaux Arts and from the 50s on a lot of teenagers were drawn there by the freedom it represented. "Thom gave us a safe place to gather, where we could escape the rules of our parents' generation and feel comfortable expressing our own opinions," one recalled. "I felt really comfortable with the people. I didn’t realize how weird I was until I discovered people who were weirder than I was.”
The coffeehouse gave poets and stand-up comedians a venue with open-mic nights. Allen Ginsberg visited at least once, and Jack Kerouac hung out there often near the end of his life, calling it "a little bit of San Francisco, right there in St. Petersburg." Thom would throw Kerouac out when he got too drunk. A fledgling and often-plastered Jim Morrison would recite his poetry there. Thom was eccentric and mercurial and "would explode on people” and "that's what Morrison was copying on the dramatic parts of his Doors records, where he would go from singing to screaming. Thom infused him with a lot of theatrical stuff," one of Reese's friends recalled.
I liked the Beaux Arts' eccentrics and the constant stimulation of bright abstracts on every wall, and the constant thrum of music and movies and poetry readings; but I didn't like having what little air conditioning the old house offered turned off during the hottest part of a Florida summer day, and moved out after a few months.
The Beaux Arts, a St Pete mainstay for decades, was destroyed by fire a few years later. These days St Pete has a thriving arts community, with the Dali Museum and much more, but few remember that Thom started it all. The fire that took the Beaux Arts took with it one more piece of the old, weird America.
Free Ride
Free Ride
Updated: Sep 13, 2023
It wasn't long after Thomas Edison perfected the electric light that the more imaginative predicted a world with no dark corners—streets made safe, the night conquered, glittering marquees shilling movie stars ten times larger than life.
Horse-drawn carriages were replaced by electric cable cars and, when radio became the first popular mass entertainment medium, broadcast towers sprang up in cities across America. Soon the hum of electric wires became the background noise of everyday life.
Electricity changed everything, and from the start there was a critical need to train young men—they were almost all men at the time—to understand and build and repair all those machines.
B.W. Cooke, a Chicago engineer, saw this demand coming. In 1899 he founded Coyne Electrical School, and it would thrive for more than a hundred years, half of that with him at the helm.
Coyne grew with the American Century, fresh interest in its training growing during wartime and the Space Age of the 1950s and 60s. Just after the war, ten thousand telephones a day were being installed in the US, and factories that had turned out bombs were retooled to make washing machines and vacuum cleaners and cabinet radios and televisions. All these industries demanded well-trained and up-to-date electricians, and soon the average American home had countless appliances and entertainment devices that depended on repairmen to keep them running.
Coyne became so successful that for more than fifty years it could afford to advertise widely, with a unique hook: the school would pay a student's transportation to and from Chicago by rail for anyone enrolling. The ads appeared in newspapers, movie magazines, on billboards. Thousands signed on and became skilled in anything having to do with electricity.
In 1956, a year before I was born, my father saw one of Coyne's ads on the back of a comic book my brother brought home. My father aspired to a college education but it was never to be; he was working as a general laborer in the coal mines, the only job available in West Virginia, and caring for his own growing family, an ill wife, and his elderly parents, all while dealing with PTSD from his time in the war.
My father quit his job and took advantage of Coyne's offer of free railroad fare, moving to Chicago for a condensed course in electricity. When he came back he passed the exam to become a mine electrician and got a new job at higher pay and with safer working conditions. It was never easy but it was easier than shoveling coal, and he was able to lift our family into the lower rungs of the middle class.
My father loved his short time in Chicago. It was the first big city he'd spent any time in, as was true for many other young men who enrolled in Coyne. They all took their experiences back to the small towns they'd come from and kept all those machines running. In a way they were the unsung heroes of America's prosperous, can-domid-century.
In the 1960s Coyne Electrical merged with the American Institute of Engineering and Technology to become Coyne American Institute and expanded its courses to provide much of what any small college would, and their focus shifted to accommodate the then-new microprocessor revolution.
But time caught up with the school in 2022, and it closed its doors, partly because of the pandemic, but also because many consumer items are designed to be thrown away once they break down, and more complex machines now require a depth of specialization that no small school can offer.
But a run of 120 years isn't bad.
Ashes and garbage
Ashes and garbage
Updated: Mar 14
I wandered into Portland just after the explosion of Mount Saint Helens on May 18, 1980, about fifty miles northeast of that city. The explosion, the equivalent of a 5.1 magnitude earthquake, threw half a billion tons of ash into the sky, plunging hundreds of square miles into darkness. Ash rained down on the entire region for days.
I got my first gig in Portland washing cars and shoveling the ash from driveways. The first day of sweeping and shoveling I had no mask, just a damp handkerchief tied around my nose and mouth, but my aching lungs made sure I got a mask before the next day.
The cleanup was accomplished in a week or so and I went to a day-labor office and picked up whatever one-off work I could. For the next few weeks I did a little light construction, hauled furniture, went door to door soliciting donations for Greenpeace.
I soon found a full-time job at a small restaurant and coffeehouse, The Wheel of Fortune in Northwest Portland, near where I was staying. I started out washing dishes and mopping floors but soon moved up to prepping fruits and vegetables.
The restaurant's goal was to serve good, cheap vegetarian food, mostly soup, bread, and salads, and I got to take home lots of leftovers (the main reason I always gravitated to restaurant work for short-term money).
The Wheel was founded by a New Age religious movement called The Holy Order of MANS (sic), a mystical Christian sect, which had started on Haight Street in San Francisco in the 1960s. By coincidence, I had stayed in a youth hostel in Seattle owned by the Order.
The Order's street ministry focused on feeding the hungry and otherwise assisting those in need, and The Wheel in Portland was its first "satellite" restaurant outside the Bay Area.
The two dozen other workers at the Wheel were all around my age, in their twenties, and, the city being very cosmopolitan, were from all over the region and Canada and even Europe. I got along fine with all of them and they were exotic to me and I was fascinated to hear them talk about their lives.
Two of my co-workers were only sixteen but were emancipated minors, escapees from the cult their parents had raised both in. The West Coast was fertile ground for cults in general. A few of the other workers were refugees from yet another cult, the Brethren, which was casually referred to as "the garbage eaters," for their common practice of retrieving still-edible food from dumpsters.
The cult (which still exists) was started by an end-times evangelist from Paducah, Kentucky, and required members to cut off contact with their families; food and money and everything else was shared and everyone was expected to prepare for the end of the world. Members lived as vagrants and shunned many of the trappings of modern life, and because Armageddon was a serious matter they were forbidden to laugh or dance.
I became friends with several of my coworkers and always got the impression that those who had been in the Brethren or some other nominally spiritual group had left it not because they no longer believed in its ideals but because there was no joy in it. But they still wanted to live a humble life, still wanted some belief system that would actually walk the walk of the Christian roots of the cults.
At the Wheel I worked under a guy named Mark, who reported to the manager, Brother John. Mark wasn't a member of the Order but Brother John was. Not once did they or anyone else try to recruit me into the Order.
I don't think I would have gone for it in any event, but I could see that my new friends were happy—they had a job to go to every day, a roof over their heads, people their own age to talk to, and simple food to eat and share. The Wheel was a good place for them.
Statistics show that about a third of food produced in America is wasted, thrown out once it's just past its sell-by date or when leftovers aren't appealing. The Wheel tried to reduce that waste by keeping the fare to a few ingredients and donating any leftovers to the homeless, and making sure the staff ate well.
Every cult starts with the germ of a noble idea, before some charismatic leader processes it and rebrands it, until it's as different as stale oleo is from fresh butter. "Garbage eaters" is an ugly term masking a noble idea.
For some cults, the explosion of Mount Saint Helens was just a warmup for the Main Event, the great convulsion promised in the Bible that will cover the whole world in ash. I don't know anyone at the Wheel who thought that, but I'm sure there were some who were just where they wanted to find themselves if it should turn out to be true: living simply, getting along with others, and feeding those who couldn't feed themselves.
The Grey Rabbit
The Grey Rabbit
Updated: Mar 14, 2023
It was 1980, near the end of the era when strangers would pick up a hitchhiker, and I had no problem getting rides. I was on the road, hitching back and forth across the country and to Florida, and was now out west, visiting uncles in California and an aunt in Las Vegas, picking up day labor here and there. I was twenty-three and a year out of college, with no ambition greater than to go where no one knew me; I'd hardly been anywhere in my life, so that left a lot of options.
It was also the dawn of the Reagan era, though we didn't know it yet, as he campaigned hard against America's moral decline, against hippies and long-hairs and liberals. People like me. He would capture the White House that fall. None of us could name it but it felt like the end of something, and a turn toward a generally darker America, no matter how optimistic the lines that actor recited.
I happened to be visiting a friend in LA when I saw an ad for a cheap bus that ran from San Francisco to Alaska, a hippie-run outfit called The Grey Tortoise. I'd never been to the Pacific Northwest so that sounded like fun so I took a local bus to San Francisco and then boarded the Tortoise. The old Greyhound sported a technicolored paint job and all the seats had been removed and plywood platforms with foam mats set up at various levels all through it. You stuffed your backpack under a platform and found a spot anywhere. It was a leisurely two-day drive with plenty of stops to get out and walk around or throw a frisbee, even a few hours at the Pacific Ocean. Near the end of the ride, a guy walked around handing out leaflets promising good-paying jobs working on fishing boats in Alaska, but that sounded like hard work so I got off in Seattle, where I planned to stay in youth hostels for a few days and just look around.
It was a beautiful city, Paris compared to my grimy little coal camp hometown. I loved everything about it except it already had a large homeless population—of which I was perilously close to becoming a member. I didn't care, I was learning more about life and the world and myself from having to talk to so many different kinds of people than I could have ever learned in school. I'm sure I looked like just another unkempt long-haired kid but I'd never been happier.
I soon made my way down to Portland, intending to stay just a short while, but I liked it so much that I was there for seven months. I got my first gig washing cars and shoveling the ash that had settled all over town from the recent explosion of Mount Saint Helens, then went door to door collecting donations for Greenpeace before I found a full-time job at a small restaurant and coffeehouse near where I was staying. I could walk just a block and gaze up at snow-covered Mount Hood in the distance, and it was an easy walk to Powell's Books, the best used bookstore I'd ever seen.
As the year wound down and Christmas approached I knew I needed to get back to West Virginia for at least a visit, as my mother wasn't well. I had only a few hundred dollars to my name and wasn't looking forward to cobbling together more rides back east and it was too cold to hitchhike. I was tired of that anyway, and it didn't feel safe anymore. Two hitchhikers had been murdered in the Monongahela National Forest, near where I'd gone to college and where I'd been hiking several times. Those murders remain unsolved these many years later, and during my time on the road I'd crossed paths with a lot of people who seemed to have no one who would try to find them if they simply disappeared.
I found a ride south from Portland to LA and then took a regional bus to San Francisco before boarding the hippie bus again, the cross-country version being called the Grey Rabbit. The fare from San Francisco to New York was just $75, and I planned to take it as far as Charleston, West Virginia, which is only an hour from my parents' home.
As with the Tortoise, there were no seats on the bus, only the plywood platforms, and again you found a space to lay your sleeping bag out wherever you could. I had a guitar with me, one of half a dozen on board. It would be a long trip, as the bus would take I-40 into Oklahoma before turning north to the Great Lakes and then heading back south through Cincinnati. The summer version of the cross-country Rabbit would meander its way through Yellowstone and Montana and through Chicago, with frequent stops for outdoor activities; but this was the dead of winter, with nothing much to see across the bleak southern route. We settled in.
There was no alcohol on the bus, not because there was a rule against it but because we couldn't stop that often to pee. There was a constant aroma of marijuana, offset only by the scent of thirty young people crowded into a bus with no air conditioning. We bundled up and always left a few windows open even though it was freezing out. I wondered why no cops ever stopped our strange-looking bus and searched it for dope, but one of the other passengers, a seasoned Grey Rabbit rider, explained that the bus always stuck to the Interstates, never sped, and the drivers never smoked or had weed on them. Also, it must have given any cop pause to think they'd have to search every nook and cranny in the crammed-to-the-gills bus.
When I wasn't reading or journaling or playing music, I talked to the other passengers, all of whom were interesting and weird, in a good way. There were clowns, singers, jugglers, and writers. There were even a couple of mimes, though I never saw them in whiteface. Several riders played guitars or flutes with varying degrees of skill and others sang, for better or worse. One young woman was an excellent seamstress and not only mended old clothes but worked on intricate needlepoints, ignoring the rocking of the bus.
One young woman was traveling with her daughter, who was about five. Both her and her daughter's hair was cut very short, as if growing out from being shaved. Out of her earshot another passenger told me they were on the run from a cult, Synanon. The woman looked exhausted and fearful and the kid had free run of the bus. I have no idea what she thought about all the funny smoke.
I talked to a lot of the passengers as we rode along. Many were old-time, authentic hippies who had been living in communal housing of some kind or just on the streets. Some were perfectly at peace living outside the normal American rhythms and expectations of life, unburdened by politics or middle-class concerns. Some were older than me but many were younger and already burned out, limping their damaged souls home to families back east, to squares whom they had cut out of their lives, to fathers and mothers who would have no choice but to take them in. Some were refugees from the free love and drug experiments of Haight-Ashbury or its LA equivalent. The dawn of the Reagan era and the emergence of much harsher street drugs made all that freedom seem naïve and dangerous, and free love had run into the reality of human nature and antibiotic-resistant disease. AIDS wasn't a word yet but was on the horizon.
The Rabbit would stop every few hours at a rest area and at one the woman on the run from Synanon just disappeared, along with her child, and no one knew where they went. We searched the rest area but couldn't find them and after an hour we drove off.
Our bus made it as far as tiny Shamrock, Texas, about an hour east of Amarillo, where it broke down. The locals were not happy to have such a motley crew inside their establishments so we huddled out in the cold or stayed on the broken bus under our sleeping bags. None of us had much money for restaurants anyway. We passed the time talking and singing and I asked one of the jugglers to show me a few things while we milled around outside.
After our bus was repaired we rumbled on through the night and all the following day and it got us as far as Milwaukee, where it broke down again, this time for good. Christmas was only a few days away and the snow was deep. I had just enough money left to get a real Greyhound bus to Charleston.
Soon the Grey Rabbit fleet (two buses) and the names were bought out by Greyhound. The operation closed entirely a few years later when Reagan-era airline deregulation made airfares much cheaper.
Stopping by "New Paradise"
Stopping by "New Paradise"
Updated: Aug 29, 2023
It was the early 1980s and I was on the West Coast for no reason in particular, in the middle of several years of bumming the country around after college, waiting for my adult life to begin. I had no idea what I wanted to do, and as long as I stayed in motion I didn't have to think about it. It was nothing to me to hop into a car with friends and drive pretty much anywhere we had enough gas to get to.
On a lark, a friend and I drove from Portland, Oregon, where I was briefly living, to the eastern part of that state, which is rugged and barren and arid, completely unlike the verdant western side.
By chance we stopped for lunch in a small town then called Antelope. It was soon to be renamed Rajneeshpuram, as it was gradually taken over by the followers of a cult leader, the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The cult had already built housing, tourist shops, and work buildings, and cult members had registered to vote and would soon take over the governing body of the small town.
The cult was just beginning its ambitious plans when my friend and I happened by. On the day before we got there Rajneesh had ordered everyone to cease wearing orange robes and to wear red robes. He didn't give a reason, nor did he need to; everyone immediately dyed their clothes or bought new ones. The old orange ones were thrown in massive piles to be burned. (Later he would reverse his order, and it was back to orange.)
Everything stopped mid-day as his followers lined up along the roadside to have him bless them as he drove by in his Rolls Royce. He smiled beatifically, his index and middle fingers held together in a lazy wave.
Being a follower of Rajneesh meant doing his bidding, not just dyeing your robes but, it was later learned, sexual coercion and violence. The local community and the state fought the cult's expansion and the cult pushed back hard. Members of the cult spread salmonella poisoning at local restaurants, sickening over seven hundred people, and in a few years cult members would be indicted on charges of attempted murder, wiretapping, arson, and voter fraud. A few years after that, Rajneesh would be arrested for immigration fraud and deported to his native India.
My friend and I knew nothing about all that at the time. We had a vegetarian lunch in the cafeteria and browsed the devotional books and unlikely cult-themed t-shirts and tchotchkes in the gift shop. Everyone was overwhelmingly kind and helpful and joyous. They offered us a tour of the property and to stay for dinner, even a place to sleep for the night.
We were broke and considered the offer but somehow understood how easy it would be to lose ourselves in such a warm light of positivity and love, and how, for many cult members, a night's stay convinced them to never leave.
Husbandry, hope, and equicide
Husbandry, hope, and equicide
Updated: Mar 22, 2023
The late 1980s saw a frenzy of financial deregulation and the loosening of bank and insurance company investment rules; for the first time since the Depression era they were free to put clients' money into ever-riskier bets. Horse farms, despite having the old-money reputation of conservative management, weren't immune to the lure of easy stock market gains, and banks were eager to lend to them.
Collateral for horse farm loans is a blend of husbandry and hope. Horse breeding operations sell interests in breeding rights for champion horses, either a stud fee for a well-bred stallion to impregnate a mare, or a fee when a live foal is produced by the union. A talented stud could breed many times a year, so retired racehorses continued to bring in money. However, in the 1980s the practice expanded into a bewildering array of fractional investing, such as buying an option on the future earnings of a horse's offspring, the stake's value tied to its performance on the track as well as its relative success in eventually breeding champions. The whole enterprise began to resemble a tulip mania or stock market bubble.
All this speculation came to a head when one of the oldest and most respected farms in Lexington, Spendthrift, a local institution for half a century, decided it was time to take the then-shocking step of going public and selling shares in the farm—that is, shares in the future performance of its brood mares and studs. It looked like a great idea at the time—in 1978 Spendthrift had syndicated interests in its horses, meaning it sold breeding rights to two back-to-back Triple Crown winners, Seattle Slew and Affirmed.
In 1983 the son of the farm's founder sold millions of dollars worth of stock in the farm. Things looked great for a while, with Queen Elizabeth visiting the farm in 1984 to consider having her own thoroughbreds mated there. But the farm quickly became overextended financially and the lawsuits began the following year, with unhappy investors claiming that the farm had overvalued its assets and was spending money on personal expenses. It only took a small market downturn for the whole thing to go sour.
Spendthrift wasn't the only farm this happened to, but the firm I worked for represented one of its largest creditors, which meant I had the dubious distinction of going to the farm and going through mountains of paper as it anticipated filing bankruptcy. My document review process took several weeks and I drove out to the beautiful farm every morning, past cantering foals and lush green fields surrounded by whitewashed fences. I was ready but not eager to sit down all day and sort through mountains of paper.
That such a thing could happen to such a historic place was demoralizing to everyone. The few people still working at the farm, mostly young and mostly from the bluest of Lexington blueblood families, were already grieving the loss of such a historic place as we requested file after file, each another nail in the farm's coffin. Spending habits and iffy valuations that had worked for generations when the farm was run on a handshake as a family business now ran up against its auditors, its investors, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. New tax laws less favorable to breeders and a sharp downturn in the oil market exacerbated the problem.
Controlling interest in the farm changed hands repeatedly and its stock value continued to plummet until it finally filed for bankruptcy reorganization in 1988. Most of its breeding stock and much of the farmland were sold off in a corporate reorganization to service the debt. Still, many lenders were left holding the bag. The sinking of the giant Spendthrift ship promised to take many smaller businesses down in its wake. The farm's affairs were so complex and their banking relationships so convoluted that it seemed as though every attorney in town had a piece of the action. Managing it all was Judge Joe Lee, who was fair and patient but ran a no-nonsense courtroom. Other historic farms had also gone public and gone bust in the same era, so he had multiple similarly complex horse farm cases going on at the same time. One of the biggest involved another historic farm, Calumet, which had been a successful breeding operation since 1924.
On the death of the farm's matriarch in 1982, control of the farm passed to Duane Lundy, the husband of the family's only heir, and he borrowed heavily against the farm's assets. There seemed to be plenty of money at first, as the farm bred many successful racehorses and boasted the leading sire of his day, Alydar. But Lundy over-leveraged the farm and was deeply in debt at the time of Alydar's mysterious death; the horse was insured for $36 million. The legal wrangling eventually sent Calumet into bankruptcy and a cloud of suspicion settled over Lundy and the farm's attorney, who was also its chief financial officer. Investigations into Alydar's death were stymied for years, hampered by destruction of physical evidence at the scene and the disappearance of veterinary X-rays.
In 2000 Lundy and the CFO were convicted of fraud and bribery and sentenced to prison. (For an excellent book about the decline and fall of Calumet, see Wild Ride by Ann Hagedorn Auerbach.)
Alydar's death has never been proven to be intentional and the federal judge overseeing Lundy's criminal trial said the preponderance of the evidence didn't show that Lundy was responsible. A reporter asked Lundy, "You didn't have anything to do with that horse's death?" It was the first time he spoke about his alleged involvement and he said, "Hell, no. I loved that horse. Loved him."
A wealthy investor stepped in to prevent Calumet's liquidation and eventually the farm found its way back into the winner's circle, with one of its horses winning the 2013 Preakness. Over the years Spendthrift's assets were repeatedly bought and sold and its breeding stock handled more soberly, and it too has gradually approached its old glory; as of 2020, it was again one of the top money-makers for horse breeding in the US.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse