The pursuit of girls took an awful lot of time and energy during my last two years of high school. Never did I have a steady girl friend. No high school sweetheart. Nothing more or less complicated than playing artful games, when I could afford it\u2014dancing to the big bands at Jantzen Beach or McElroy’s or the Uptown\u2014swimming and picnicking at Blue Lake Park\u2014 taking a date to the movies\u2014-hanging around Coon Chicken Inn afterward\u2014necking in a parked car up on Rocky Butte.<\/p>\n
I think it was the irascible Groucho Marx who once said, \u201cWhoever called it necking was a poor judge of anatomy.\u201d<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
John Moore and I have enjoyed a close, 60-year friendship of unusual intimacy.<\/p>\n
At the start, John and I were only casual friends. He was one year behind me at Washington High. But we became involved together in various campus projects and eventually became close friends and skiing buddies. I visited his home near Mt. Tabor several times. In later years, as bachelors, we also shared an apartment just off the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
John\u2019s parents were warm and welcoming people. Colonel Henry H. Moore, John\u2019s father, had retired from the US Army after spending some 25 years in the service. As a young officer, he had served with the famed Philippine Scouts at Arayat, Pampanga and Batangas in the early part of the century. He told spirited stories of fighting against the pulajanes in Samar. Later, he served at Corregidor Island. The Colonel was a devout family man, an officer and a gentleman. John was devoted to his father\u2014and to his mother, a charming, twinkle-eyed lady who had known the life of a military wife in the Philippines before the outbreak of the First World War.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Most radio sets in both America and Europe were tuned in the night of the second Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight in 1938. It had taken on political overtones far beyond a world heavyweight championship bout. It was \u201cUSA versus Nazi Germany.\u201d The buildup was intense.<\/p>\n
Max Schmeling, the ex-champ, had surprised the boxing world in 1936 by beating a fast-rising, undefeated Joe Louis, His unexpected win made Schmeling the sporting hero of Nazi Germany. Decorated by Adolph Hitler, married to a German film star, entertained by the likes of Hermann Goering and other Nazi bigwigs, Schmeling became as big\u00a0an icon in swinging, prewar Berlin as Marlene Dietrich.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In 1938 came the rematch. The previous year, Joe Louis had defeated James J. Braddock for the title and now, \u201cThe Brown Bomber\u201d was ready.<\/p>\n
A crowd of 80,000 crammed into Yankee Stadium for the event. But the wise guys and their blonde girlfriends at ringside had barely settled in their seats when Louis unleashed a vicious attack\u00a0that sent Schmeling sprawling to the canvas five times. The last time, a powerful right hand punch, put the German down for good\u2014scarcely two minutes into the first round. The first round!<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n I was staying with my grandparents the night of that fight. I remember that I had just stretched out on the floor in front of the radio, getting comfortable with a pillow under my head, when it was all over. My grandmother and I stood up and cheered.<\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/p>\n One reason \u201cdouble dating\u201d was popular in my youth was simply because so many of the fellows needed rides. Only a handful of high school \u201cboomers\u201d owned cars. Few families owned more than one car. Many families owned none at all. So borrowing the family car in order to take a girl out on a date was a familial struggle every weekend all around town. Many of the kids simply doubled up- two or three couples in one borrowed car.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n I think it was shortly after my sixteenth birthday, maybe later, that my mother finally let me borrow the Hudson-Terraplane<\/em>. A double date was not what I had in mind. I had lined up a date with a curvy, tousle-haired tease named Patricia Karasik. Better known as Patty.<\/p>\n My adolescent dream of a torrid Friday night turned into a fiasco. After cuddling our way through a meaningless movie, we drove out to a secluded, dead end lane I knew about, under the trees near Eastmoreland. It was an idyllic setting, frequented by young lovers.<\/p>\n The night was still young. A soft, steady rain was falling. Inside the Hudson-Terraplane<\/strong><\/em>, it was steamy and mellow. I draped my arm around Patty as I wheeled in under the trees. Then, I made the wrong move. A couple in a pickup truck had parked in my favored spot, so I swerved sharply into an obscure opening on the left\u2014into what turned out to be a sea of mud. I made a futile attempt to\u00a0pull out of the muck, stepping down hard on the gas pedal. The wheels began spinning, digging deeper into the mud. Soon, we were stuck up to the hubcaps and going nowhere.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Outside, the rain dripped on.<\/p>\n \u201cWhadda we do now?\u201d Patty whined.<\/p>\n Clutching the steering wheel tightly with both hands, I glumly thought to myself, \u2018I’ll be damned if I know.\u201d<\/p>\n Across the way, the lovers in the pickup were getting ready to pull out. They offered to give us a ride in the back end of their truck to the nearest phone\u2014a wet, disagreeable idea, but I grabbed at the offer.<\/p>\n Getting through the mud to firmer ground was another matter. I tried to carry the petulant Patty in my arms, but she squirmed and I slipped and she howled as she landed on her behind\u2014splat<\/strong><\/em>\u2014in the middle of the wet mud.<\/p>\n I jerked her up on her feet.<\/p>\n She was a mess, of course. A, muddy mess\u2014and spitting mad.<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t you touch me, goddammit,\u201d she yowled. And she went on and on like that, as we sloshed through the muck\u2014over to the waiting pickup.<\/p>\n The rain dripped on.<\/p>\n I called home from a nearby, all-night gas station. Frank Simmons showed up a short time later in his own heavy-duty pickup, with a sturdy, tow chain, a couple of blankets, a tarp and maybe the hint of a grin on his face. Maybe not. I don\u2019t remember. Back at the scene of the fiasco, he pulled the Hudson out of the mud in minutes.<\/p>\n Without another word between us, I took the bedraggled Patty Karasak home. Then I drove the Hudson back to our flat.<\/p>\n An entire month passed, at least, before I was allowed even to touch my mother\u2019s car a second time.- And Patty Karasak? She refused to go out with me ever again.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n A Yugoslavian family named Borich lived in our neighborhood. I never learned for certain whether they were Serbian or Croatian. They proudly let it be known they were Yugoslavs\u2014and the questions stopped there.<\/p>\n The youngest son, Dan Borich, was a classmate and sometimes buddy of mine in high school. His older brother, Nick, was a dockworker, avowed Marxist and incessant arguer. However, I remember Nick for a more prosaic reason. He played the accordion, badly.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Support for the Loyalist side during the Spanish Civil War turned into a passionate, leftist cause on college campuses across America in the late \u201830s. On occasion, that emotion seeped down to the high school level, too.<\/p>\n The fascist army of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, backed by right wing Spanish extremists and beefed up with massive military aid from Hitler and Mussolini, set out in 1936 to smash Spain\u2019s first ever, legally elected government.<\/p>\n The anti-fascist forces, made up of Loyalist troops alongside Spanish peasants and workers, fought back stubbornly against the specter of a military dictatorship. Ensuing events led to a bloody, three-year civil war that turned into a Nazi staging ground for World War II.<\/p>\n As Franco\u2019s forces slowly burned and blasted\u00a0their way across the Iberian Peninsula, aided by German planes, tanks and troops, an urgent call went out-around the world for workers to defend Spain\u2019s fledgling republic. \u201cNo Pasaran!\u201d \u201cThey shall not pass!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Response was the formation of the International Brigades, a hurried volunteer army of men and women from 53 different countries who traveled to Spain to fight for the Loyalist cause.<\/p>\n The American unit was called The Abraham Lincoln Brigade<\/em>, a gutsy band of workers, adventurers, artists, college dropouts, radical intellectuals, technicians and youthful idealists that numbered eventually about 3,000, along with some 1,500 Canadians.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n In the outcry following the horrific destruction of Guernica by the Luftwaffe in Spain\u2019s northern Basque country, Nick Borich persuaded Dan and me to go with him to a nighttime meeting of “The Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee\u201d at Reed College in Southeast Portland. The speaker that night was a stocky, pockmarked veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. named Robert Sharral. He exuded the fervor of an evangelist. Recently returned from the bitter Pyrenees campaign,\u00a0Sharral was back in the US to raise money for the cause and to sign up volunteers for the Brigade.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t sign up that night to fight the fascists in Spain, although the pervasive power of the man was hypnotic. What I did do was corner Sharral after the meeting and interview him for our weekly high school newspaper, the Washingtonian<\/em>. I had learned that I could interview people and do a relatively good job turning that interview into a story.<\/p>\n I felt good about the Sharral interview and the follow up story. Somewhere in my files, I still have a faded yellow dipping.<\/p>\n While it didn\u2019t make a helluva lot of difference one way or the other, after my story was published I found out that the American Communist Party had sponsored that Reed College meeting.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n As a result of my interview with Robert Sharral, I continued throughout my senior year to follow closely the troubling news from out of Spain.<\/p>\n During those final days of the republic, remnants of The Abraham Lincoln Brigade<\/em> played a key role in a stubborn, guerrilla defense that held the fascists at bay in Barcelona and the craggy mountains of Catalonia. But it was a losing struggle, In January 1939, Franco and his henchmen took over the country. Spain fell under the fist of a repressive military dictatorship that was to last for more than forty years.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n I\u2019ve answered readily to three different nicknames in my lifetime. When I was a small youngster, my family called me \u201cBilly.\u201d In high school and beyond, my classmates\u00a0called me \u201cBy \u201d Even in college, \u201cHi, By!.\u201d became a ubiquitous greeting.<\/p>\n A third nickname, \u201cPacky,\u201d came a few years later in the islands of the South Pacific.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n My mother delighted in wearing Coty\u2019s Emeraude, a heady, cloying perfume, which -I never liked. Still, on her birthday or at Christmas, I would usually buy her a bottle. That particular gift always made a colossal hit.<\/p>\n One spring, I dated a girl, Priscilla Fisher, who dabbed herself from head to toe with Coty\u2019s Emeraude. Every time I kissed her, it was like kissing my mother.<\/p>\n After the second or third date\u2014that was enough. I couldn\u2019t get myself to tell her why, but I never took her out again.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n In the late\u00a0thirties, The Lucky Strike Hit Parade<\/em>, featuring the top ten song hits of the week, was a wildly popular network radio program among teenagers. No surprise\u2014Lucky Strike also became the popular brand among the gang of smokers around Washington High. Smoking was the cool thing to do. Sound familiar?<\/p>\n I tried it, did it, dropped it. Didn\u2019t like the taste and didn\u2019t like the smoke.<\/p>\n A few years later in the South Pacific, it was a different story. I became hooked on the habit and I smoked heavily for the next 20 years.<\/p>\n One late night in the sixties, after a poker game where I stupidly drank too much and smoked too much and lost too much, I threw away my crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes. And I haven\u2019t smoked a cigarette since.<\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/p>\n Unlike cigarettes, drugs were something we seldom even thought about in high school. There must have been some involvement with drugs among youth on the margins at that time. There must have been. We were simply not aware of it. Now and then we heard rumors about opium dens in Chinatown. But among the guys I knew, the closest we ever came to drugs was sneaking away one afternoon to see the lurid film, Reefer Madness<\/em>.<\/p>\n In no way did we face the astonishingly pervasive presence of drugs that exists in American society today.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Pete Zanetos was one hard-working Greek.<\/p>\n Pete had The Oregonian<\/em> route next to mine. He never stopped hustling. His day started before dawn with the paper route. After school and some evenings, too, he worked in the steamy kitchen of his family\u2019s Greek restaurant on Southeast Grand Avenue. With any spare time, he practiced on his horn. And maybe did a little homework. Then, Friday and Saturday nights, he came alive, He played first trumpet in the “Babe\u201d Binford band, the hottest swing band going around Portland in the late thirties.<\/p>\n Pete\u2019s\u00a0old-world father wanted him to be the first in the family to attend college.<\/p>\n Pete\u2019s own personal goal, lie often told me, was to land a job with, one of the big time dance bands. He never quite achieved his goal, although he did get a chance to sit in with the Benny Carter band during a three-night engagement at the Jantzen Beach ballroom. A few of us turned out with dates to\u00a0see Pete up on the stand that weekend, blowing his horn. It was said he could make the angels sing.<\/p>\n When World War II broke out, Pete joined the army. After the war, he returned home and took over management of the family\u2019s thriving Greek restaurant. That\u2019s when Pete Zanetos packed away his horn for good. No regrets? I wonder.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n After a night out dancing, we usually made a beeline for some lovers\u2019 lane, or we took our dates to a late night eatery. Or, sometimes both. \u201cHey, let\u2019s go get a hamburger and a Coke!\u201d<\/p>\n One of the liveliest and most popular joints for teenagers on the eastside of town was the Coon Chicken Inn. Coon Chicken Inn<\/em>\u2014a descriptive, full-flavored name from a time when attitudes and stereotypes that would set off alarm bells today, once passed unnoticed.<\/p>\n Equally offensive by today\u2019s criteria would be the bizarre entrance to the place. A giant, round, cartoonish head of a laughing Negro jutted out from the center of the low-slung building, like the entrance to some grotesque, boardwalk fun house. You walked through the wide-open mouth of this caricature to get to the front door.<\/p>\n The pop-eyed Negro in the chicken coop was a clich\u00e9, of course, right out of black face-, vaudeville. Subtlety had nothing to do with it. Up until World War II, ethnic humor, sexual jokes and the free use of racial and sexual stereotypes were staples of popular humor\u2014from sophisticated covers of magazines like The New Yorker<\/em> all the way down to weekly zingers by an array of famous comedians on national radio. It was another era.<\/p>\n I first met Vic Collin at Coon Chicken Inn. We were both feeding the flashy, \u201cnickel in the slot\u201d jukebox. Vic was a football star at Grant High School, where they called him \u201cRipper.\u201d Years later, Vic and I worked together in both Portland and Los Angeles.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Nobody expected the Reno wedding of Agnes Peterson and Eddie \u201cDouble Thumb\u201d Daniels to last. Agnes and Eddie were a couple of tough, independent people.<\/p>\n \u201cI give them six months, maybe less,\u201d Emma Lindquist had predicted.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe a year,\u201d my mother countered at the time.<\/p>\n Yet five years had passed since Agnes and Eddie returned from their boisterous Reno weekend. In their uptown Portland flat, they hosted a small party to celebrate\u00a0their fifth\u00a0anniversary. Throughout most of the evening, they clung together on the couch like a couple of newlyweds\u2014still very much in love.<\/p>\n Do you suppose the fact that Eddie spent more than six months each year at sea had something to do with it?<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Fast-talking Walter Winchell was at the peak of his popularity and power during my high school years, with his widely syndicated Broadway column and his 15- minute nightly radio show on the NBC Blue network.<\/p>\n When he made the cover of Time Magazine July 11, 1938, the editors called him a \u201cnational institution.\u201d<\/p>\n Later on, Winchell’s vicious paranoia and the fadeout of \u201cCafe Society\u201d led to the erosion of his fame and power. But in the late thirties, he was still at the top of his game. One afternoon, as we were putting the Washingtonian<\/em> to bed for the week, Editor Fred Lang came up with the idea of my doing a weekly Winchellesque column for the paper.<\/p>\n I took on the challenge.<\/p>\n Fred Lang named the column By\u2019s Bylines<\/em>. For the next nine months I banged out a weekly, uninhibited column loaded with gossip, opinions, predictions, doggerel poetry and even the latest knock knock jokes. These nutty, word-play diversions were the rage at that time.<\/p>\n \u201cKnock. Knock.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWho\u2019s there?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEuripides \u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEuripides who?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEuripides pants, I breaka your face!\u201d<\/p>\n It was a sloppy column. As I look back on it, I am not proud of my attempt at three-dot journalism.<\/p>\n The column was popular with some of my compatriots, detested by others. Either way, it added a touch of spice to my senior year at Washington High.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n In that final year, I was one of six Portland high school journalists invited to The Oregonian<\/em> for an afternoon visit to the newspaper\u2019s editorial department. We were able to meet and talk with reporters and editors and view the newsroom in full operation. It was truly a memorable experience for me. I stood around bug-eyed as an associate editor took us from point to point, explaining what was going on.<\/p>\n No computers. The big, noisy room echoed the organized bedlam of loud, fast-talking reporters, clickety- click typewriters, scores of teletype machines seemingly all going at once, cluttered floors, the smell of ink, yells from the copy desk and people\u00a0running around\u2014straight out of The Front Page<\/em>. Playwrights Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur apparently knew what they were writing about.<\/p>\n We also visited with the publisher, Palmer Hoyt, in his lofty, top floor office which had walls paneled in a beautiful matching veneer of rare Oregon Myrtlewood. (The use of the threatened Myrtlewood species for such paneling today is illegal.)<\/p>\n At the close of our\u00a0meeting, with nothing to lose, I came out and asked Palmer Hoyt for a job in his newsroom. Sitting casually on the edge of his desk, he was somewhat taken aback. Then he asked me my name.<\/p>\n \u201cByron Mayo, sir.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, Byron, I\u2019ll tell you. If you go on to the School of Journalism at the University of Oregon and graduate with a good GPA and come back and see me, I promise I\u2019ll give you a job.\u201d<\/p>\n For a long time, I remembered that promise. But seven years were to pass before I was graduated from the University of Oregon Journalism School. By that time, Palmer Hoyt had moved on to become the celebrated publisher of The Denver Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Sometime late in ’38, Emma Lindquist gave up on Portland. Reeling from the breakup of her latest love affair, the statuesque Emma decided she would move to San Francisco and begin life anew. She had a place to stay\u2014sharing an apartment with a dancer friend who was living in San Francisco\u2019s North Beach. And she had a good chance of getting a job, she said, with the city\u2019s nearby Arthur Murray Studios. Meanwhile, she was staying in Portland with Agnes until the end of the year. Eddie was back out to sea.<\/p>\n During the Christmas holidays, Emma and I agreed on a goodbye \u201cdate\u201d at the movies. \u201cFor old times sake,\u201d she said, as we laughingly recalled those nights over the years in which she had taken me out to the movies.<\/p>\n \u201cOnly this time, I\u2019m buying the tickets,\u201d I told her emphatically. She went along with the game.<\/p>\n Myrna Loy was still Emma\u2019s favorite film star. And my favorite movies at the time seemed to be daredevil aviation films. So we put our heads together and easily agreed on going downtown to the Broadway theater, where they were showing Test Pilot<\/em>, a fast-moving new film that heralded three winners, Clark Gable, Myrna Loy and Spencer Tracy.<\/p>\n Myrna Loy\u2019s work with William Powell in the highly successful Thin<\/em>Man<\/em> films made her a star. But I always thought that Test Pilot<\/em> was the best thing she ever did. In later years, I found out that she agreed with me.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n After the movie, Emma and I walked out of the theater into a cold, unexpected, December downpour. With no umbrellas, we scurried around, the corner and ran down the block, where we found refuge in a warm and fragrant Yamhill Street coffeehouse with cramped, spindly chairs and sticky coffeecake. We were soaked. Emma unpinned and shook out her wet, ash-blonde hair, letting it hang wild and loose. Then, at a small, back-of-the-room table for two, we dried out and nurtured mugs of hot coffee. As I recall it, the coffee went in the first ten minutes and the rest was a happy after-taste of reminiscence.<\/p>\n Test Pilot<\/em> had grabbed the both of us. We enjoyed it. And it started us talking about the world of flying. She reminded me that she had been in the co-pilot\u2019s seat the first time either one of us had ever flown\u2014in the old Ford Trimotor with Dick Rankin at the controls. We went on from there. As I now try to piece together the fragments, I think we talked about the first movie we had seen together, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde<\/em>. Later, I know she teased me about the weeks, or was it months, that she had devoted to the task of teaching me to dance, we laughed about my boot camp misadventures at Vancouver Barracks, and we analyzed her former boyfriend, stiffly pressed, ramrod-straight, Master Sergeant Henry Karle.<\/p>\n At some point, the talk turned serious, too, as she described to me her troubled life in Spokane as a teenager, That\u2019s when I heard for the first time the full story behind the thin, pale scar that slanted down into her left eyebrow\u2014the story of a brutal husband, the jagged edge of a broken bottle and a teenage marriage gone wrong.<\/p>\n I saw the sadness in her laugh, too, when she talked of that desperate, lonely year on her own with no job and no family. And the degrading pressures of the marathon dance contest.<\/p>\n As I listened to this wistful, enigmatic woman who had come in and out of my life so many times over the years, I admitted to myself something that I already knew: I had been infatuated with Emma Nielsen probably from the time I was ten years old.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n The rain had dissipated to\u00a0drizzle by the time we left the coffeehouse that night. When we arrived back at Agnes and Eddie\u2019s flat, we said our good-byes in the front hallway. I took her in my arms and I kissed her as if I\u2019d been planning it for months\u2014or years. Momentarily, she kissed back, hard. And I held her close, feeling the full length of her body.<\/p>\n Then she pulled back. She put her hands on both of my shoulders, looked me directly in the eyes and half- whispered, \u201cByron, do you realize what you\u2019re doing?\u201d<\/p>\n I sort of gulped, grinned bravely and said, \u201cYes!\u201d<\/p>\n She smiled, kissed me lightly on the end of my nose and quietly led me by the hand down the hallway to her bedroom at the back of the flat.<\/p>\n Seared into my memory is the picture of Emma by lamplight, as she wriggled out of her loosened dress, letting it fall softly to the floor.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Sometime later in the sweet aftermath, we were lying on her bed, locked in a barelegged embrace, when we heard the muted sound of the doorknob being turned. The door opened and there was Agnes, mouth agape, looking almost as shocked as we were, in our flagrante delicto. Agnes paused, suppressed a smile, and then backed out of the room, closing the door softly behind her without saying a word.<\/p>\n The next day, however, she did say a word. She told my mother, who exploded in disbelief. My mother was furious. She railed at Emma and at me and I think even at herself.<\/p>\n Eventually, dear Agnes, forever the personification of the positive, stepped back in and smoothed things over. My mother calmed down, although . I think her relationship with Emma remained strained from that point on. The following day, she sat me down and gave me a stern lecture on venereal diseases and other such matters, all of which I knew already.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Was the time that Emma and I spent together in her bedroom that night amoral? Perhaps. She was twenty- nine years old at the time, maybe thirty. I was three weeks away from my seventeenth birthday.<\/p>\n Yet this I know and I know \u2022it well\u2014I have always felt fortunate to have received such an open and loving introduction to the joy of sex.<\/p>\n