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.
The next installment of John D MacDonald's weekly newspaper column for the Clinton (NY) Courier back in 1947-1948. I presented this three and a half years ago on The Trap of Solid Gold.
Cinemantics:
A boy in his last year of Syracuse U. was up the other day to talk about this odd business of writing. His yen is to write for the movies.
There is a funny thing about writing for the movies. Any shooting script or plot outline sent to any major studio is returned unopened. And they have a good reason.
Suppose you send in a script, they read it and reject it, and four years later you see a movie which contains a scene startlingly reminiscent of your effort.
The odds are that it is a coincidence -- based on the very paucity of available plots. But the courts are inclined to discount coincidence, and any suit you might bring would have a high nuisance value.
So how do you arrange to write for the movies?
One -- write a novel that sells well. Despite popular superstition, the vast majority of sales to the movies are in the one to five thousand dollar range. Suppose they want to give you five thousand. You say, "No. Give me twenty-five hundred outright, and a ten week contract at two-fifty a week to work on the movie treatment."
That is your 'in'. Whether or not they pick your option at the end of the ten week period depends on whether you are able to produce for them.
Two -- make a name in the smooth paper magazines. Sooner or later a studio will see movie possibilities in one of your stories. Every story published in national magazines, both slick and pulp, is read by people in the major studios whose job is to do nothing else.
Three -- and this is the new way -- graduate from the University of Chicago out of that Hutchens 'best books' course, or go to the Graduate School of the Cinema at the University of Southern California. Maybe you will be hired on graduation as a sort of apprentice. Dore Schary of RKO is a writer-producer. He feels that the hope of the industry is to develop specific movie talent in the writer-director-producer field, rather than acquiring people from other lines of endeavor.
And those are the three ways to cut yourself a hunk of those fabulous salaries out there. The fourth way is to be a nephew of one of the studio heads.
While with the OSS during the war, we got to know a few of the Hollywood names.
Gene Markey was one of them. When his navy promotion came through, elevating him to the rank of Captain, a certain Major Willis Bird and I went to see him. Bird said, "If you're real good, maybe they'll make you a major one of these days."
Birdie is now a bone buyer in Bangkok. In addition to importing 25¢ books. Every month he has to ship so many tons of ground bones to a chemical company in the US.
Gene Markey baffled me a little. He seemed, at first glance, to be such an unimpressive guy to have been married to all that beauty. [Markey's wives, up to this point in his life, included Joan Bennett, Hedy Lamar and, at the time this column was written, Myrna Loy.] But he has that charming knack of making any acquaintance feel that he, Gene, has been languishing around for years without ever having met as unique and marvelous a person as yourself. It is a wonderful knack to have.
Melvin Douglas was in the same headquarters as we were for a time. He was a fine, hard-working, reticent guy, forever backing out of the limelight with almost obvious annoyance. He organized an entertainment outfit and took them all over the theatre, with the one provision that he would work behind the scenes, never taking a bow.
[John] Ford, the director, was around for a time. He was a vast, moody, unpredictable man, hard to meet and harder to know.
In addition to the 'regulars,' some of the other Hollywoodians made flying trips through our malarial sector. We were in hospital when [Joe E.] Brown came through. The man with the mouth. He chatted with everybody. His son had but recently been killed in a plane crash in the states. Above that wide grin of his was a pair of the saddest, warmest eyes we have ever seen. No talent ever worked harder in our theatre.
Maybe the fates sorted out a few of the best for us, but those we did meet gave us the idea that the screen colony contains a batch of very fine people.
* * *
Art Note:
If you are a mature person of not more than three feet six inches in height, there is a promising career waiting for you as a model for the artists who illustrate the automobile and appliance advertisements.
Naturally, drawing automobiles with normal sized people in the front seat would make the cars look far too small. Thus the ads contain models who can barely reach the steering wheel and peer out over the bottom sill of the window.
This is also desirable with drawings of prefabricated houses. When the tiny models, who would have difficulty in reaching the knob on the front door, are posed in front of the prefab, it looks truly enormous.
Refrigerator ads utilize tiny women not more than three feet tall. If one of the models ever opened the door to the refrigerator, standing on tiptoe, a quart of milk falling out would smash her flat.
Some cynics affirm that this use of tiny models is to make the products look so huge that the public is enticed into buying.
We have a different theory. We feel that in the beginning the models and the appliances were in scale. And the artists have merely changed the scale to keep abreast of the rise in prices.
If the trend continues, we can expect to see refrigerator ads where the female model stands beside the product, a happy smile on her face, a scaling ladder in her hand and climbing irons on her dainty feet.
* * *
See you next week.
Here's the next installment of John D MacDonald's weekly newspaper column, from the early years of his writing career.
War Surplus:
Two years ago the tub was being thumped to call attention to all of the vast wonderful stocks of super-thermal gimmicks and double-reversing whatchits being offered to the public out of the collapsing grab-bag of our military might.
But the stuff wasn't all dragged out of the warehouses in time to meet the peak of interest -- and thus, right now, weird and wonderful items are being offered for sale without much attention being attracted. Check with your New York paper, last or next Sunday's edition.
Did you know that you can buy:
One ten-man balsa wood raft for only $12.95, a 1000 gallon portable fuel-oil tank for $24.50, one brand-new parachute for only $5.40, two used field desks, with filing cabinets for $11.00?
Or, if you have a terrific desire for one M-3 Medium Tank, with riveted hull and turret, you ought to be able to swing a deal for less than a hundred dollars. This, for a village, makes a most inexpensive and yet durable type of war memorial. Beyond chalking couplets on the outside of it, vandals are relatively powerless.
In fact, some small villages have been bright enough to run a campaign, buy a surplus tank as a visual memorial, and use the surplus to either endow a memorial scholarship for bright youngsters, or buy books for the local library.
Such goings-on are generally considered a bit more creative than an ungovernable yen for statuary.
And there is a venerable precedent. In Jackson Square in New Orleans there is a Civil War Memorial in the form of a Confederate submarine. Yes, we said submarine.
The corroded steel hull, shaped like a fat cigar, is probably twenty feet long. It was propelled by two men pedaling madly, as on a bicycle. This mutual effort turned a stern screw. The fellow in charge steered and, when they muzzled up to a warship below the water line, he manipulated levers which detached explosives fastened to the bow and transferred them to the hull of the warship.
In its day, that little tin cigar was considered a horrible weapon of war, deadly and not quite cricket.
The measure of its success is that it had to be dredged up off the bottom to be put in the park.
Now it is a pathetic and quaint little toy, seeming, like a sea shell, to echo faintly with the shrill yip of the rebel which was heard from Manassas to Gettysburg.
Beyond a doubt those tanks placed on village greens across this country will one day be looked at in the same way that we look at the Confederate submarine. As plaintive and fragile relics of a disastrous war fought in the almost forgotten past, when the technology of warfare was in its infancy.
* * *
Conspiracy:
Here is a subject that needs airing. Adequately aired, it may mean death to a large segment of American industry.
How many millions of dollars worth of lawn mowers are sold each year? And grass seed, and weed killer and strange tools for trimming borders and such?
And for what? After all the purchases are made, and all the energy is expended, the net result is a smooth green expanse of little grass blades. Somehow we have all been deluded into thinking that grass is the only thing to have around a house. Grass is a frail and stubborn organism. An incredible amount of effort is expended to get it to grow, and then to crop it off to the required shortness. Industry could certainly devise a plastic substitute. Once installed, there would be no seeding, rolling, clipping, cutting and cursing.
Evidently the manufactures of gimmicks for the lawn subsidise the magazines which show pictures of impossibly beautiful lawns. They keep the myth going. After a full season of enormous labor, all the homeowner has to show for his efforts is an expanse of snow and the prospect of starting all over again in the Spring.
The ultimate insanity is encouraging the grass to grow, and then cutting it down before it can grow tall enough to seed itself.
It's time for revolt. All that is necessary is to have brave men in the community allow their lawns to grow into the lush, untamed beauty of a vacant lot. Pleasant little flagstone paths can wander through the tall grasses.
Once the movement is started, those who follow the leaders will see the natural beauty of wild lawns, and soon the lawn mower manufactures will feel the crimp in sales and realize at last that this incredible conspiracy they have nurtured throughout the years is at an end. They can turn to the manufacture of something practical.
Like hedge clippers.
* * *
See you next week.
In the spring of 1948 British mystery author John Creasey made his first ever trip to the United States, arriving in New York on the Queen Elizabeth on April 13th. He was embarking on a multi-state speaking tour that included many chapters of the Rotary Club, of which he himself was a member. His travels took him as far as Arizona and, in early May, visited Utica, New York, where he met and spent an afternoon with rookie writer John D MacDonald.
We MacDonald fans stand in awe of the sheer quantity of JDM's output: 66 novels, 6 anthologies, 5 works of non-fiction, and nearly 400 original short stories published during his lifetime. He was a piker compared to Creasey, who, by the time he died in 1973, had written over 600 novels under 28 different pseudonyms, including crime, westerns, romance, and science fiction. He created many different series characters, the most popular of which was George Gideon of Scotland Yard, who appeared in 21 separate novels and who made it to both the big screen (John Ford’s 1958 film Gideon’s Day) and the small (the British television series Gideon’s Way).
When Creasey toured America he had written “only” 230 books, according to JDM, who took him to a minor league baseball game in Utica. He wrote about it in his weekly Clinton Courier column.
Visitor:
Last week-end we became most pleasantly involved with a visiting British gentleman making his first trip to the States. He is John Creasey, a writer of mystery novels that are published in England.
From the viewpoint of sheer productivity, he has left us with a feeling of awe and concern. He has published two hundred and thirty books, and has sold four million copies in Great Britain.
Mr. Creasey is a quiet and pleasant fellow, thirty-nine years old. And he is one of those rare people who have not lost the ability to be enthusiastic.
His constant companion is a small black notebook which is whipped out frequently and into which goes even bits and pieces of casual conversation.
In Utica he saw his first baseball game -- Blue Sox versus Binghamton -- and, as an ardent cricket fan, he said that he could see how it could become most exciting. We got all tangled up explaining the intricacies of the "hit and run” and the rule which says that the third foul is not called a strike.
We were explaining that a home run occurred when a fair ball was hit outside the playing area, and thereupon the batter hit a double into the left field stands, and the local ground rules made a liar out of us.
He seemed very dubious about the statement that the pitched ball actually does curve in the air, breaks sharply in front of the plate. And he failed to see the necessity of leather gloves to protect the hands. He said that the cricket ball is of the same construction, is thrown and hit equally hard, and the players merely get used to catching it barehanded. Hmmm!
* * *
Change of Heart:
During the past years the New York Central Railroad has seemed to consider the passengers as a highly objectionable sort of freight that must be taught humility as it is shunted from place to place. Deluxe service has been available on extra-fare trains.
But last week we treked down to New York, paid coach fare and got on something called the Upstate Special which is made up at Syracuse.
To our somewhat enormous astonishment we ended up in a luxurious observation car, sitting in a deep chair, listening to soft music, holding a tall cool glass and watching the Hudson Valley unroll.
The astonishing train, where you are not clipped for luxury service, leaves Utica every day at 9:25 a.m. and takes five hours and twenty minutes to get to New York. Since it is made up at Syracuse, there are seats available, and there will always be room.
Ed Stanley tried to talk us out of taking the train, saying that it is a local and that it makes six stops between Utica and Albany. Ed is right. It does. But on that train, it’s even pleasant to stop. It makes the trip last longer. Five hours and twenty minutes seemed hardly long enough. For the first time we began to feel that the NYC is beginning to cooperate with us in our perpetual ambition of getting something for nothing.
* * *
Hotel Service:
On this trip we obtained, for the first time, a "televised" room in a New York hotel. And, for the first time, we are anxious to have a coaxial cable to come into Utica so that television, in clear and distant image, can be available here.
As a practicing skeptic, we were not convinced by the ardent claims or the television boys. We had to be shown.
In baseball parks they don't sell the sort of seat that you get when you watch a game on the screen. To get the same view, you would have to sit on the shoulders of the umpire. Watching a boxing match, you begin to worry about whether a wild left hook will knock you off your chair. In the wrestling matches, they throw large gentlemen into your lap.
Maybe one day a television crew will focus the cameras on a scene of combat. And everybody sitting in their parlors watching the screen will get a slightly different slant on warfare. A slant that may help this battered old world find some better answers.
This is the 28th installment of John D MacDonald’s 1947-48 newspaper column From the Top of the Hill, published in the Clinton Courier, when the MacDonalds were living in that upstate New York town. This is perhaps the longest of his entries, a column on a single subject: a review of a jazz concert performed in Clinton. I know little of jazz, and JDM seems to go out of his way to disguise the musicians in the band, but this seems to have been a performance by one of pianist's Art Hode’s various ensembles of the era.
My copy of this column was poorly photographed and there are several words missing toward the end.
Concert Notes:
Went to the Jazz concert in the gym on the Hill last Saturday night. These concert notes may sound a shade grim, so we'll preface them by saying that we felt as though we got a fair return on the buck eighty expended for a ticket.
As a second preface, we don't claim to be an expert. We have collected jazz records for a few years and we have spent a few evenings drifting along 52nd street.
The group was a little sad. And a little phoney. We have a deep aversion to drummers who wear funny hats and scream at the people like crazy. Funny hats and screaming humor belong with the name bands for use when the crowd seems jaded with dancing.
Jazz, at its very best, should be a pretty serious operation. It is our only form of music which has not been borrowed from other nations and other eras.
The hat business might have been excusable if, during the rest of the time he had carried a solid rhythm beat on his drums. But his backing-up was shaky at best, and when the other musicians, with obvious reluctance, gave him some room for self-expression, he was more concerned with noise than rhythm. In particularly poor taste was his fading in with a cow bell in a piano number. The only reasonably acceptable thing he did was the heavy beat that went along with Parenti's clarinet solo job which was so reminiscent of the Krupa-Goodman duet in "Sing, Sing, Sing."
Drum should have. been Baby Dodds, or better yet, Big Sid Catlett.
Parenti is technically, a very accomplished musician. A.shade too accomplished for jazz at its best. In other words, he seems to become so infatuated with very involved variations on his theme that he unfortunately misses the greater impact that less elusive variations would have.
Der Max is, of course, a fine, raw, earthy horn, but there seemed to a shade of condensation
in his selection of the maximum number of large, raw blasts at the expense of some of the softer and more controlled numbers he has successfully waxed.
The trombone -- despite a definite uncertainty of tone, came the closest to hitting the spirit of the thing, though the slow portions of his long solo were painful.
Old James P. made us feel bad. Age slows up everybody. The obvious result of it with James P. is a blurring and running together of the notes, particularly noticeable in his rendition of “Snowy Morning Blues.” Our record of that, cut some twelve years ago, has a crystal clarity sadly lacking in his performance the other night. Hodes displayed remarkably strange taste in playing the same number in his own fashion.
As to Arthur Hodes, he seems to have technical ability without creative ability. Particularly unpleasant was his "showmanship" in jouncing up and down and trying to beat a hole in the platform with his foot. His "Yancey Special" was almost a note for note duplicate of the Meade Lux rendition of the same one—but Meade Lux does it better.
Errol Gardner, Meade Lux, Albert Amnions and Johnny Guarnieri all have more of that indefinable creative ability.
The selection of group numbers was good, but inventiveness seemed to be oddly inhibited.
We looked around in the audience and saw many people who, we are sure, came more out of curiosity than out of any knowledge or appreciation of jazz.
We wish to inform those people that what they heard was a pale and artificial imitation of jazz. Individually, not more than two of the men who performed could be fitted into a top rank jazz combo. That could be raised to a possible three if James P. were younger.
A lot of guff is being written these days about jazz. We don't want to add to the torrent but we would like to make clear the major distinction between jazz and classical music. In classical music the notes are already scored, and the quality of the musicians must show in his rendition and phrasing of those scored notes. Classical music is, on the whole, variations on one or more themes. In jazz, the theme is there, and the listener has the only opportunity that exists in the musical arts to hear actual composition of music at the moment of composition. Under the right circumstances and in the proper mood, it can become not only pretty stuff, but intellectually stimulating.
The mood wasn't right the other night. Good jazz is something you catch when it happens to be there. It can't be planned. Six men on a platform in a gym can't make jazz. Not good jazz. And good jazz, inventive jazz, is no longer played these days in Dixieland style. It happens with numbers like "Sunny Side of the Street" or "Summertime" or "A Good Man is Hard to Find."
Maybe tonight, somewhere in the country, maybe in some small Chicago spot where the lights are dim and the tables are scarred, the waiters are sullen, there is a small group playing a [...] tune, passing the melody back and forth.
Maybe one of those musicians, under the stress of his own personal problems, will take a break and put into music what he can't put into words. If he's unhappy, it will be blues If he's happy, his variations will [...] and inventive and bubbling with life.
At any rate, his sincerity will [...] the rest of the group, and if he tires, they will pick up the song and do things with it that can't be repeated.
The people in that small spot will hear jazz, and its excellence will be limited only by the technical ability of the participants. I have seen musicians, sitting [...] laugh until they wept over some gay and inspited improvisation of a soloist.
Jazz isn't a man with a funny hat.
Jazz isn't the result of [...]
Jazz is a man with a horn saying something about himself and about the world he lives in. [...] the wandering minstrel of [...]
Another entry from John D MacDonald's 1947-1948 newspaper column From the Top of the Hill, published in the Clinton Courier when the family was still living in Upstate New York.
The Future of Housing:
The new Lustron House, made of enameled steel, will be changed each year to provide a new model -- just like automobiles.
Scene -- the steel breakfast booth of an enameled steel house of the future. Harry, a rather haggard-looking businessman, is attempting to read the morning news as it emerges from the radiopress on the table. His wife, Beth, has an alert, intent look.
BETH: And it has an eight inch band of chrome under the picture window.
HARRY: Huh? What?
BETH: The Robinson's new house. It was delivered yesterday afternoon. It's beautiful. Three extra built-in bookshelves in the living room, a more efficient photo-electric eye on the garage doors. This house is definitely shabby, dear.
HARRY: Shabby? We've had it just two years now!
BETH: But it looks so outmoded. The chrome trim is so narrow, and people sneer when they see that we have to open the front door by hand. It's the oldest house on this street.
HARRY: I like it. I'm use to it. Besides, you know the Robinsons. Every time they have a party, they trade their house in the next day.
BETH: I've got the catalogs of the new ones, dear.
HARRY: This house runs all right and the paint job isn't too bad yet.
BETH: But the lines, darling! The lines!
HARRY: Hah! We should have kept the one we had before this one. I passed it on the street full of used houses the other day. It still looks fine.
BETH: (with a mind sneer) Now you're joking, Harry. My goodness, we couldn't be seen in an old model like that!
HARRY: (with a shrug) Some people still live in handmade houses built of wood.
BETH: And some people still drive around with horses.
HARRY: (sighing as he gets to his feet) Okay. Long as you have your heart set on it. Call up the Grinning Armenian and trade it in, but I don't want to come home tonight and have to wait around for all the bolts to be tightened on the foundation. And don't leave any of my pipes or anything in this one.
BETH: (throwing her arms around him) My generous darling!
The Unarmed Forces:
The latest act in the perpetual Gilbert and Sullivan operetta playing to SRO houses in our nation's capital is a bit more ludicrous than usual.
After much flexing of biceps regarding the unification of the armed forces and the need for preparedness, we find that the Congress, despairing of getting a firm and resolute answer on the needs of the armed forces from the armed forces themselves, is going ahead and deciding how many air groups are necessary.
That is much like the Board of Directors of the Twentieth Century Boxing Association telling Joe Lewis exactly how many left hooks he will require in this year's title bout -- Joe being unable to make up his mind.
One would suspect that with all the high priced talent in the War Department, all the planners and all the fillers-out of myriad forms, they would be able to make some firm statement of needs, rather than delegate the determination of requirements to a group who can never be on more than an amateur status.
At any rate, certain spice is being added to the Washington drama by the new head of the Marshall Plan. That gentleman, in an unprecedented moment of sanity, has raised a question about the merits of sending one billion dollars worth of cigarettes to Europe during the next four years. He seems dubious also about the merits of sending mechanized farm equipment into places were there is no distribution of gasoline.
It is fervently hoped that this gentleman has such a high resistance factor that he will not become infected by the type of Alice in Wonderland thinking which was originally responsible for the inclusion of mechanized equipment for the European peasants which would be as readily understood and operated as would be an equivalent number of cyclotrons.
As long as we are trying to buy international peace, it is well to have a sane and steady hand on the purse strings.
The Marshall Plan as yet includes no coal for Newcastle. Probably an oversight.
Here's the next installment of John D MacDonald's 1947-1948 newspaper column, From the Top of the Hill, published in the Clinton Courier, when the MacDonalds were living in that university town in upstate New York. Some interesting tidbits of JDM's personal life at the time, including his failing eyesight, the life of a pulp writer, and being a concerned parent.
MYOPIA:
By the time this column is printed, we will have come back from Utica wearing glasses that do a more effective job of correcting our crummy vision than the old ones did.
So, in a sense, this is an apology for the innumerable times we have stalked right by friends and acquaintances without the suggestion of a nod.
Actually, you have all been pretty well fogged over for some months now.
Human nature being a stubborn and ridiculous thing, we began to worry a great deal when, about a year ago, the horizon began to creep toward us. We worried so hard that we didn't go to a doctor, fearing that it would be something serious and he would say, "You've got to stop using your eyes."
And we can't afford a stenographer to take down this deathless prose, even if we were able to dictate it.
But discomfort overcame fear, and we found that slightly thicker lenses would do the job. (The man said slightly thicker. Maybe he means like those at the ends of flashlights.)
Also, he made no mention of any bad effects that might result from our furtive occupation of sitting here at an electric typewriter, inflicting all sorts of horror on the newsstands of America.
Of course, it may be a pretty reckless thing for us to promise to recognize people and speak to them. We can't seem to remember names or faces well. A book said that the idea is to pick out some distinguishing feature on the person to be remembered and connect it up with his name. Thus, if a man is named Smith and has silver-colored hair, when you meet him, you mumble, "Silversmith" a half a dozen times, and you're set.
Note: This system will not work in Clinton where the last name happens to be Burns.
Anyway, while trying to apply the system, we once met a man with a small bit of lint on his cheek. It was at a party. From then on, at that party, we got his name right every time. But we've never been able to remember him since. If he'd had any sense, he'd have made things easier by leaving that lint right there from then on.
* * *
Professional Note:
This is the week we will remember mostly because of a letter that came from an editor in New York. He wanted us to write a story for him. But with certain conditions. It had already been made up. And it had to fit the enclosed photostat of a cover of the magazine, showing a gruesome action picture. And it had to be 15,000 words.
The things we do for the sake of "art"!
The story has been mailed. Haven't heard from him yet.
* * *
Fair Warning:
Spring is in the air and that certain sub-human species, the Daring Cowboy of the Highways, is with us again.
He has lately been much in evidence zooming over the crest of College Hill and heading out into the wild blue yonder.
Two of them roar by often enough at speeds well over fifty so that we have begun to know the cars. One of them drives a green crate four or five years old, and one of them drives a jalop.
Since this area is liberally bespattered with children, and the crown of the hill limits visibility, we consider those two citizens to be potential criminals.
So, here is a warning to those two spiritual refugees from California. We are going to try to clock them and catch the license numbers. From the license numbers we are going to find addresses. Then we are going to visit them, ask a few questions and print the answers in this column.
One of the questions is going to be -- "What in the world do you do that makes you so eager to either get to it -- or get away from it?"
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See you next week.
Here’s the next installment of John D MacDonald’s 1947-1947 newspaper column for the Clinton (NY) Courier, "From the Top of the Hill". An article in Life magazine brought back memories of his days in the CBI theater in World War II. I’ll have a postscript after the column.
A few weeks back, Life magazine took a long look at some boys who, four years ago this spring, had a rough time with the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional). That outfit was more popularly known as Merrill's Marauders.
We met Frank Merrill before he received that assignment. We saw him a few times while the assignment was in process.
The Life article made us remember. And we began to think of what North Burma must be like this spring.
Four years ago, it was a busy little place. Engineer outfits, QM truck companies and ordnance groups were grubbing away at the Ledo Road, later to be renamed the Stilwell Road. The Marauders were hammering down through the madly scrambled terrain toward Myitkyina. The Chinese divisions, trained in India, were cluttering up the place. Kachin guerillas, organized and equipped by OSS, faded in and out of the shrubbery. Combat Cargo was airdropping supplies. And, far overhead, the ATC and CNAC ships were shuttling on the hump run to Kunming. And, of course, there were the Japanese.
It must be quiet there, now. Deathly still.
No guns, no planes. The Nagas and the Kachins have it all to themselves.
The road must be pretty well washed out after this past monsoon season. And the leeches will be hungry. Billions of them. Little grey worms, they cling with their back legs to twigs and leaves, waving their front portion in the air. When anything passes underneath, they drop.
Those weird and wonderful names for the little villages in the jungle lived for a short time in history four years ago. They will probably never be heard of again.
Strange names. Tagap Ga. Shingbwiyang. Nsopzup and Sumprabum. Kamjaw Ga and Shaduzup. Tumbuzut and Okkyi.
No decent history of that operation will ever be written. The Marauders restricted their files for the sake of mobility while operating behind Jap lines. A Jap artillery shell scored a direct hit on the mule which carried the few records that were maintained.
On the third mission, the heavy rains and humidity turned all the paper records into pulp. The unit's intelligence officer was killed at Myltkyina and his records were all washed away before they could be located.
But a few things will be remembered. Like Lieutenant Woomer, leader of a weapons platoon who worked himself up within twenty-five yards of a Jap machine gun emplacement, and then, when our mortar fire was a little over, phoned back for them to bring it in about 25 yards, saying, "If you don't hear from me, you'll know you came this way too far. Then shift it back a little and you'll be right on it."
Or Tec. 4 Matsumoto, creeping close enough to his countrymen to overhear the attack orders, and scuttling back in time to warn the battalion.
Yes, it must be quiet in Burma now, up near the Chin hills. The lush, wet, green thickets, once scorched by the flame throwers, raddled by the mortar fragments, have mended their wounds.
The streams are probably still depopulated. The Chinese fished them dry with hand grenades.
But at dusk tonight a thousand billion mosquitoes will be singing shrilly along the Salween. We didn't even make a dent in their multitudes.
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We're all tangled up these days with a pretty strange enemy. In 1940 there was no organized, cellular Fascist Party or Nazi Party in this country. But the phone books of this country list various Communist Party offices.
Naturally, they must have checking accounts and charge accounts, and must prepare tax forms and Social Security forms.
Maybe we're getting too emotional about this thing, but it seems darn strange.
Wonder how many Democratic Party and Republican Party offices there are in Russia. Anybody want to take a quick trip over there and open one up?
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See you next week.
In a letter quoted by Hugh Merrill in his biography The Red Hot Typewriter, MacDonald went into great detail about his dislike of General Joe Stilwell, citing his administrative deficiencies and his total lack of mercy. He mentioned Merrill's Marauders and was much more open about the difficulties they faced.
I read in the papers that someone has asked for a Congressional Investigation of the use this theater made of the long range penetration unit called Galahad, or Merrill's Marauders. They had better hurry and have the investigation because there aren’t so many of those boys left. They were thrown in again and again and again long after any sane field commander [referring to Stilwell] would have removed them for a rest. They were decimated by the Japanese and by disease. They performed unbelievable feats of marching and fighting long after they were thoroughly “browned off” by a commander that apparently had no regard whatsoever for their welfare… The true story of the blood, sweat, tears, madness, dysentery and cruelty of [those troops] will never be written. They were abandoned in the face of the enemy and left to fight over their destiny. There are damn few of them left.
Here’s the next installment of John D MacDonald’s 1947-1948 newspaper column in the Clinton Courier.
Students of MacDonald’s short fiction will immediately recognize the setting of the first few paragraphs. Twenty-three years later the author used it in his short story “Woodchuck,” which appeared in the 1971 anthology S*E*V*E*N.
A myth is exploded:
Way back when each week consisted of seven Saturdays, and there was always sunshine, we went out with the grandfather we once had near a fabulous village named Orangeville while he shot woodchucks with great efficiency and dispatch.
The excitement of the gun and the hunt and the sharp crack of the shot was all very fine, but in a sense we felt we were betraying something by being a party to the slaughter of a superb animal.
It wasn't manly to mourn the stricken 'chucks, but we did. Secretly. The books of childhood had pictures of him on many pages -- sitting erect and wise, looking for his shadow, predicting the weather.
We suspect that our grandpop was killing off our furry friends.
Last week when the kids left for school one morning, they paused to report some sort of a beast down in the concrete hole by one of the cellar windows. We hurried through coffee and went out and took a look.
At first we thought it was a 'chuck. He wasn't very big, and he looked pretty calm and quiet. The cellar hole isn't deep, so, for his convenience a flat board was obtained. As soon as the board was within six inches of him, he pulled his underjaw out of the way and, using some large upper-story teeth, he hit the board like a striking snake, knocking off one large splinter and nearly knocking the board out of our hands.
He continued to hack at it while we put it in place. And then, even when he was left alone, the darn thing wouldn't climb out.
As a bit of further assistance, we dropped a small cardboard carton in there with him. He hacked at the carton like a crazy goldminer attacking a mountain with a pickaxe.
With a ski pole we attempted to urge him up the improvised ramp. He grabbed at the ski pole in his front paws and made four or five determined chompings at the metal part of it, removing some enamel from his teeth.
It was then and there that we decided that he wasn't a 'chuck. First, he had a foul disposition. Second, he was stupid. Everybody knows that 'chucks are amiable and intelligent.
After a time, Charlie Locke appeared, bearing the usual stack of disappointments from our editor friends. We asked him to take a look.
"Woodchuck," he said without hesitation.
Herewith we furnish readers of the Courier with a method for removing 'chucks from cellar holes. (A) Place carton on side near 'chuck. (B) Slap 'chuck into carton with board plank. (C) Tip carton over onto its bottom before 'chuck can scramble back out. (D) Make threatening motions with plank so he won't climb out while other party gets something flat to cover the top of the carton. (E) Lift out covered carton, and do not permit the 'chuck to take a hack at your hand or he will remove fingers at random.
It is only fair to add that Mr. Locke performed the more risky portions of this procedure.
Liberated, the 'chuck waddled off across the Saunders' Strip without a backward look.
This buildup that has been given the character of the woodchuck over the years is completely fallacious. The 'chuck is an evil little animal with a filthy disposition. If he ever climbed out of his hole and saw his shadow, he'd bite a hole out of it. He is so stupid that he couldn't get himself out of a cardboard box if the directions were printed on the bottom. Also, once you do him a favor, he ungraciously ignores you.
A week ago last Tuesday, hoping to arouse professional interest, we told Dr. Francis about the 'chuck leaving tooth enamel on the ski pole.
"Bring him in,” said Dr. Francis without hesitation.
* * *
Things we learned on Easter Sunday:
We learned the following from a CBS program, largely wire-recorded, called "Our Northern Exposure" and dealing with Alaska.
There are less people in the Territory of Alaska than in Utica. There is no rail connection with Canada or the States. There are no surfaced roads. Military officials on the spot consider our defenses inadequate. Siberia is minutes away. Forced labor in Siberia has been constructing airfields and military installations. Alaska is the ideal base for the bombing of our industrial centers.
Alaska is the frontier we have in common with our enemy in the Cold War.
A common frontier is the logical jumping-off spot in case of conflict. Not only are we unprepared to do any jumping-off, we are unprepared to hold what we have.
It is silly to think of the Atlantic as being between us and Russia.
In Alaska we sit in each other's laps.
Ant they, on the roof of the world, hold aces -- back to back.
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See you next week.
Here’s the next installment of John D MacDonald’s 1947-1948 newspaper column, “From the Top of the Hill.” I posted the majority of this entry back in 2010 with the following introduction:
“John D MacDonald's first effort in the world of science fiction is generally dated to February 1948 with the publication of his short story ‘Cosmetics’ in Astounding Science Fiction. And although this 4,000-word tale had been preceded by two other stories that contained aspects of unreality -- they were more fantasy than s-f -- ‘Cosmetics’ was his first such entry in a science fiction pulp magazine. It marked the beginning of a relatively brief torrent of such works that produced ten stories in 1948, sixteen in 1949 and fourteen in 1950 before dwindling off to a mere handful. He then penned two early s-f novels before giving up on the genre almost entirely.
“MacDonald was living in Clinton, New York when he wrote ‘Cosmetics,’ and during that same period he authored a weekly newspaper column in the local newspaper. The following ... comes from the March 25, 1948 edition of The Courier, a month after ‘Cosmetics’ appeared and two months before his second s-f story -- ‘The Mechanical Answer’ -- was published. Reading between the lines, one can detect JDM's interest in a new market for his work, now that he had actually been published in an s-f magazine, and now that the field was -- as he termed it -- turning away from the ‘world of wooden men and steel space ships’ and toward more ‘believable’ stories with ‘oddly prophetic situations.’”
Fantasy, Unlimited:
Frequently these days we come face to face with the staggering platitude that this is indeed an odd world and an odd time to be in it.
While little men in laboratories are concerning themselves with the chore of exploding our planet with all the thoroughness of a dynamite stick jammed through a decayed apple, certain segments of our population are avidly collecting science fiction which makes such a catastrophe as impressive as the blast from a cap pistol on the Fourth of July.
The intense interest in science fiction has grown as quickly and as impressively as a certain odd-looking cloud over Hiroshima. (Accent on the second syllable, please.)
For many years science fiction was published without attracting much attention. Wells, A. Huxley and Verne fathered the breed. In the pulp magazines, the science fiction story became nothing but a Western with space ships instead of horses, heat pistols instead of 44's and far galaxies instead of the red-rocked mesa.
This world of wooden men and steel space ships rightly deserved the obscurity it achieved.
But now and again a story would be published in which the writer managed to make his characters human. The more gifted writers, gifted both scientifically and artistically began to put believable people into oddly prophetic situations.
In fact, one imaginative character during the peak secrecy of the Manhattan Project published a story wherein somebody fiddled around with uranium and made a bomb. If he had gotten two cents a word for every word he said to the FBI after that story was published, he would be a wealthy man.
A city went up in smoke, with a flash as bright as the sun. Science fiction suddenly became yesterday's news flash. A few hundred thousand fans were acquired.
The Saturday Review of Literature for February 28th, this year, carries a long editorial by Harrison Smith on this current phenomena in the publishing world.
The new fans of science fiction have dug through the files of old copies of various pulp magazines, and have found therein stories for their collections.
The Saturday Evening Post has published five science fiction stories within the past year by Robert Heinlein and Gerald Kersh.
Good publishing houses have come out with anthologies of merit. We strongly recommend, for the curious, one called Adventures in Time and Space published last year by Random House, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas.
In addition five new publishing houses have recently been born, with the object of handling only science fiction and fantasy: Arkham House, Fantasy Press, Prime Press, Hadley Publishing Company and Fantasy Publishing Company.
And they all sell every copy of every book!
Circulation of pulp magazines in the science fiction field has grown. Sam Merwin, Jr. edits two pulps for Standard Magazines, Inc. and John W. Campbell, Jr., edits one for Street and Smith. (For the citizen who picks his magazines off the news stand arid cares what thinkle peep, the titles are the kiss of death: Astounding, Thrilling Wonder, Startling.) There are others in the field, but these three are the toppers.
But In addition to this crescendo of Interest, there is one very special manifestation which could only exist in the science fiction field.
The readers, the fans themselves, have banded together in groups and they publish their own magazines—called fanzines. They are usually mimeographed and they contain criticism, offers to buy and sell science fiction and some fiction. There are nearly forty of these 'fanzines' being published. There are additional ones in England. Letters to the editors of the pulp magazines come from all over the world.
No other aspect of American letters Is expanding as rapidly as science fiction.
So, we say, this is a strange, strange world. We are in the atomic age. If we get sharp enough with the atom, we may arrange to make this planet uninhabitable. Maybe that fear is deep in the hearts of all of us.
Maybe science fiction is like the comforting words of a wise parent:
"Don't worry, little man. When you bust up this planet, I'll buy you a new one. A nice new green one. Two hundred light years away."
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What Do You Call Robins?
Every March all the newspapers in the land dig down in their closets and bring out a word that is only used in March. It would be absolutely pointless to use it during any other month of the year.
Thand word is HARBINGER.
Robins are HARBINGERS of Spring. So are spring training trips for baseball players. So are income tax forms.
This year, all aspects have been HARBINGING as usual.
Nothing ever HARBINGS winter or fall or summer.
After March is over and everything has HARBUNGED, the word goes back in the closet, tied with cotton string, until once more March comes around and it can be dusted off again.
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See you next week.
