Pennsylvania — the lost entries
Monday, February 22, 1971. My Nassau Cash Book was out of pages and I missed some entries. It is past midnight and mild. The ice is breaking up on the Susquehanna, jamming in spots and causing local flooding. The little creek at the foot of the Crestview Manor hill is torrentially swollen by snow melt. The pasture beyond the Reading RR was out from under white today.
I worked the Saturday night shift. We slept late and woke up and “had gookies,” as for some private reason Wanda has taken to calling it, and it was very sweet. She bathed first while I lay in bed and thought about Nassau. She put on a cassette of goombay music to help me. Soon I slept. She woke me up, all dressed and glowing that way she does after lovemaking.
We had chili and cheese and hot dogs all together on a plate. Then she read Daybreak by Joan Baez that I finished and I read back into Newspaper Days by H. L. Mencken, since it looks like my newspaper beat will take me to Baltimore sooner or later. That’s where some Roman Catholic priests, indicted by a Harrisburg federal grand jury along with the antiwar Berrigan brothers, were arrested by the FBI.
Later we drove clear to Lebanon and came back in the grey-misted-over rainy twilight. She put the ducks in the oven — two canvasbacks, one widgeon and one ruddy from Maryland — and we had a fine meal.
I was getting ready to go pick up Ron Wilson when he called and said he had work to do for the Lord — that’s what this newly born-again character said — so he could not cover the first meeting of the Harrisburg Eight Defense Committee. So I didn’t have to go. I had promised Earl Weirich, city editor, to drive Ron and look after him. Earl has taken Ron to raise since the Newspaper Guild bailed Ron out of jail on bogus marijuana sales charges, his car blew its engine, and he spent a couple weeks in the hospital following a dramatic epileptic seizure at work.
The Harrisburg cops ran a ringer into the “crash pad” for hippies Ron turned his house into with the advent of Berrigan antiwar camp followers into our city. The ringer’s affidavit led the cops straight to a pound brick of marijuana on a closet shelf. Ron — who was a pal of Dr. Timothy Leary in the town where Leary became notorious for LSD — was all outraged innocence. If he’d been dealing, he would have hidden that pound much better, see; after all, the cops executing the search warrant missed his personal stash.
Weirich gave Ron the Sunday antiwar assignment to thumb the newspaper’s nose at the cops. Ron made a splash a few months ago with a story about open heroin trafficking that implicated some Harrisburg cops. Weirich believed the bogus arrest was payback, the antiwar connection a mere coincidence to get the informant inside Ron’s house.
The only little catch in my day was Miss Lillian Shirley, the local Berrigan Defense coordinator, who called to take umbrage — she said “a bone to pick” — over my Saturday story about the Harrisburg Six (down from Eight). I referred to her Washington, D.C. address a “crash pad for young activists.” She said their house is a “collective home to seven people emotionally and financially dependent on one another.” Which would have resonated as negatively with the potential jury pool as she thinks crash pad did. The antiwar people are obsessed about the jury pool. I told Miss Shirley I apologized. I will probably quote her exactly in the future, and there she will be, umbraging again.
These peace activists are fate’s retaliation against me for bitching about the hard-news vacuum after my successful investigation of Harold Oliver, the crooked poverty-program director. As soon as Weirich tumbled to the existence of a federal grand jury, which the courthouse-beat guy missed, he pulled that guy off and shipped me to court, where I have been trapped ever since. I almost missed the forced resignation of Harold Oliver in the wake of an FBI investigation launched after my three-part series. A phone tip in the middle of the night led me from dead sleep on a high-speed run to a covert poverty-agency meeting in Shippensburg after a long day in court. I made it in time to write the dénouement to Oliver’s story.
None of which is urgent enough to keep me here writing at this hour. My fiction output has dropped to zero while I burn extra hours and weekends on news stories. And get paid overtime and expenses, that’s the rub. No questions asked, because of the front-page stories I turn in; not even 24 hours of overtime in a single week. I have become the closest thing they have to an investigator — me, the feature writer!
So no bitch with the newspaper; I’m the problem. The thump of the big Hoe presses and rattle of wire-service machines picking up my stories has mesmerized me. I was featuring along pretty good until a feature story down the Susquehanna turned into hard news, closely followed by a recreational-land scandal near Gettysburg, which has grown into a statewide story and is far from over. I was assigned the suspicious reorganization of the Penn Central companies, which led me from county courthouse records to the federal courthouse in Philadelphia.
Then Oliver, the corrupt director of the local Great Society anti-poverty agency, driving around in his big Cadillac with a white car phone — first one I ever saw — who was so crooked and the stories so much fun to do he was like an early Christmas present for me. That left things boring until the New Year, when the government chose Harrisburg to open its three-ring Berrigan-boys-and-the-ransom-of-Kissinger circus. The Great Washington Sabotage the Steam Ducts Conspiracy and Traveling Minstrel Show. With luck, court action might get me to next hunting season; without luck, right into it.
But today I am depressed over nothing in particular after a sweet day at home. I want to be writing fiction again. Little, Brown has had “After August” for over a month. The Meredith Agency refused to try to place it. The local income tax specialist doubts my right to a writer’s deduction because only “Snowing A Little In Paris” and four freelance photos sold for the tax year; to hell with him. If I hit in 1971 like I did in 1964, they’ll be around for their share quick enough. They gouged me on Sleeping Planet and I haven’t forgotten. I’ve already got $60 from the National Catholic Reporter from the Harrisburg Six business, with more on the way, and Sleeping Planet went into its second paperback printing. Walter B. Wylie (back in the Army, for god’s sake) wrote to me that he read “Snowing A Little in Paris” aloud to some broad who was so impressed that she screwed him, thanks for the assist. A writer must get on with these efforts, if only for Wylie’s sake.
I have been so busy I have not acquired a new hunting ledger. So I did not write about a late-season bow hunt in the snow with Doug and his game protector buddy, joined later by a passel of other guys for a deer drive. How I pushed into a snowy clearing — and more than fifty pheasants, mostly bright cocks, poured out, wings loud in the stillness over the winter-dormant trees. How the three of us trudged through snow flurries and a chillingly cold wind past a snow-laden abandoned farmhouse, and flushed deer but saw only bounding flags in the snow. We saw more deer — the game warden led us up a slope so steep it almost killed me; several jumped from where they were taking the intermittent sun. The warden drove his department Ford LTD with considerably élan down snow-choked roads that should have bogged a Jeep. We staged several drives. I was surprised how noisy they were — I would have thought it more effective to move slowly and quietly and let the deer ease out in front of them. Doug offered me a shot of his homemade wine from a flask — first time I’ve touched alcohol on a hunt — and it lit my insides nicely. I recall it all with perfect clarity: the happy camaraderie of the hunters between drives; the guy who fell and broke the arrow nocked on his bow, staring ruefully at the nub.
I also neglected New Year’s Day in Maryland. Earl and Beth came for a visit in their new blue VW Bug and experienced a real Pennsylvania blizzard. We had fun playing in the snow and going to a holiday party hosted by Stu Ditzen in his row house.
Then I led them to Maryland where the snow was only a couple inches deep but temperatures frigid. Earl’s plan was for me to rent a room and Beth and he would sneak in, to save money. Naturally the desk guy caught on. I got all offended and said my brother and his wife came to watch the Bowl games. But Earl (grudgingly) and Beth stayed elsewhere. We burned our bayberry candles in Maryland.
On New Year’s Day I took Earl to Deal Island. Unwilling to buy out-of-state licenses, he forged his signature on Wanda’s; no one checked us anyway. We broke skim ice all the way to the blind and it reformed around the decoys as soon as we put them over. It was bitterly cold and the ducks stayed gone, except for one stray mallard we missed. Earl unhappily compared sitting in a metal boat atop skim ice to camping inside a refrigerator. They headed for warmer climates; Wanda and I went home. It was pretty clear Earl had lost any passion he might have had for duck hunting, making Mama a prophet all those years ago when she said he only went hunting to humor me.
