From the Top of the Hill # 32: May 27, 1948

This is the last installment of From the Top of the Hill, John D MacDonald’s 1947-48 Clinton (NY) Courier newspaper column. Unfortunately I am missing the full text of the final few paragraphs, but you’ll get an idea of what he is talking about from the initial sentences.

It had been a difficult 1948 in the MacDonald home. Earlier that winter Dorothy’s mother Rita, who had been diagnosed with cancer a year earlier, suffered a relapse and was forced to leave her home in Poland (NY) and move in with the family. The MacDonalds set up a hospital bed in their living room and Dorothy tended to her care, administering shots every four hours, day and night. A month after this column was published, on June 24, she passed away. (Not in April, as is claimed by Hugh Merrill in The Red Hot Typewriter, an error I regret not correcting for the Stark House reprint.)

With Dorothy in need of a change of scene, and with JDM’s writing income just keeping them afloat financially, and with no savings needed to begin construction on their Piesco lakefront property, the couple decided to move to Mexico. Enticed by Malcom Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano, the couple reasoned that they could live more cheaply there and could also benefit by renting out their Clinton home. So, on October 30, the family began driving south, destination Cuernavaca and the American artist colony there.

Thus ends John D MacDonald’s first career as a newspaper columnists. His second (and last) wouldn’t occur until 1959 when he began writing for a Sarasota monthly titled The Lookout under the pseudonym T Carrington Burns.

Good Piano:

In New York last weekend we dropped in to see a good friend and a very fine gentleman, Gene Rodgers, who, at the moment has his remarkable piano-playing featured in what the New Yorker calls "a triphammer show" at Cafe Society Downtown -- appearing on the bill with the Edmund Hall band and Kay Starr.

Gene advised us that he is opening in New Hartford on the night of the seventh of June. If editorial policy doesn't delete the name of the spot -- you can find him at the New Hartford Grill.

We rashly promised him that we would wave a flag for him, so, on the night of the seventh, if we look around and fail to see you and you and you -- we will request an explanation when we meet again.

Gene is not one of those stylists who zoom to the top, cling there for a year or two, and then fade away. Gene's jazz piano has more depth than the piano of the stylists; he is a musician who has been around for a long time, and will be around for many more years. He will fade if, as, and when public taste for a little subtlety in jazz piano fades. But it is only fair to add that when he switches from Debussy to boogie, some of the numbers are as subtle as a clenched fist. We like variety in our piano. Gene has it.

* * *

Highway Neurotics:

This time we drove to New York. The Parkway from Poughkeepsie down was cleverly designed to bring out the worst aspects of human nature. With dense traffic in one direction restricted to two lanes, and with passing on right or left permitted, the drivers expend every ounce of trickery to keep anyone from passing them. The game is played by using the slower vehicles as blocking backs. Your are in the left lane, going fifty, and someone whom you instinctively hate is slowly passing you on the right. Ahead you see, in your land, a car going about forty. Never, never wait until the guy on your right passes you. Give your crate a burst of speed and cut into the right land ahead of him. Then you can cut your speed to forty-five, thus blocking both lanes and bottling the one who was passing you.

Standard procedure while performing this maneuver is to draw your lips back from your teeth into a fiendish grin which is part snarl. But you do not rest on your laurels. No, you look ahead to see if there is some other opportunity of bottling up the enemy.

Of course the purpose of all this is to so infuriate the man you have bottled up that he will either swing onto the wrong side of the drive or go too fast. Then you can look in your rear vision mirror and watch him trying to talk his way out of a ticket.

* * *

Adios, Amigos:

This is the thirty-second and last edition of From the Top of the Hill.

You have been a fine and understanding audience. Without that chorus, in a minor key, of cheers and jeers, writing this thing would have been very dull indeed.

By now you must have us pretty well pegged.

Yes, we think Clinton is just about the finest spot we have ever seen in which to live and bring up kids. There are a few little things we’d like to see changed, but even the most important of them is minor compared to what we have here.

We also think that Clinton exists as a tiny segment of a world which, even with the utmost charity, must be considered psychoneurotic. On a national scale we are being continually captured by political pygmies, nauseated by radio rhetoric, embittered by B movies, battered by advertising based on fear, mentally impoverished by production-line methods in "higher" education, and possibly condemned through television to what Philip Wylie has called a long future of "swooning in the gloom". Medical science, having gained the upper hand over infectious diseases, is faced with a demoralizing increase in functional disorders.

Our disease of gadgetitis is symptomatic of Veblen's conspicuous consumption. We are racing madly to keep up with the Jones without ever stopping to wonder where the Jones are going. We insist on two strips of chrome where before there was one. Yet the modern industrial plastics empire will never devise a plastic human -- the ideal type of organism if our world is to be a .... [missing three or four paragraphs]...

This is the first time we have been entirely serious in the column and we do it now only because it is the last column.

It's been fun for these thirty-two weeks. Thank you and fare thee well.