Okay, Okay It’s The 350^th Anniversary of Rembrandt’s (You Know The Dutch Painter With the Funny Last Name That Nobody Remembers Anyway) So Happy, Happy Birthday Brother

By Sam Lowell

By rights fellow writer here and budding amateur art critic (she insists I put that “amateur in) should be all over this short piece since she is much more involved in this aspect of human culture than I am theses days. Except Dutch painters (Flemish too or whatever they call the Netherlands painters at the art museum near you) leave her cold, do nothing for her despite their oversized place in the art world, at least in art books and generic museums.

Frankly I kind of shared her opinion about these dark color aficionados and their proper prosperous bourgeois subjects, their families, their towns and their inclinations toward showing family life from their home furnishings to their larder (those fish and fowl paintings still give me the willies). Two things changed my mind. One was that after some hiatus from museum-going I started up again and after having it up to my neck with every possible painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the death of Christ, the martyrdoms of the apostles and kindred and the whoredom of subjects like Mary Magdalene from the Middle Ages it was like a breath of fresh air to see even some hoary old bastard of bourgeois, his funky wife, and the general mayhem of urban Dutch society.

The other, strangely, was the theft many years ago of a famous Rembrandt self-portrait (among other stolen treasures taken during that heist) at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston which made me wonder why they had taken that painting. An example as shown here -a masterpiece of composition, lighting, and warts and all approach. So Happy Birthday Rembrandt and I hope they get that painting back to fill up that wall at the Gardner again.     

      

This Ain’t Your Basic Buddy Film Is It-Actors Chad Dwayne (Matt) And Charles Dewitt (Chuck) Live And In Color On Location In The Film Adaptation Of “Dawn Dates” (2014)   

By Lincoln Lavin

Catch this action, this story I heard from fellow new guy Rav Wilson as he learned to navigate the ropes here and find himself a spot around the office water cooler where more hard information is gathered than the NSA will ever uncover. We were talking about seemingly oddball combinations of friends, buddies is the term used especially the since childhood relationship between the very private, very proper Sam Lowell and the runoff at the mouth and prolific swearer Seth Garth (although you should know that both men came out of the same dust, came out of the horrible Adamsville Housing Authority projects and survived, a close thing according to both men). I would agree that it does seem an unlikely combination although the way they met and bonded in fourth grade may have eased the path.        

After hearing about Seth and Sam Rav said he had a wopper of a story about how his two friends, Matt and Chuck met to round out the various oddball ways men (women too think about Thelma and Louise) who seem far removed from each other actually learn to like each other. Matt, played by Chad Dwayne, maybe forty something nothing but a straight shooter businessman processional, a high end architect, with a pregnant wife, a home that will be paid off in a million years and a dog to keep things 1950s homey even in the new millennium was flying from Atlanta to L.A. (figures, right) to be there in time to see his newborn arrive on the planet. Chuck, played by the always bonkers Charles Dewitt, plays an actor playing an actor always a tough push in Hollywood land, is a whacko devil take the hinder post guy also looking to fly from Atlanta after his father’s funeral.

After an initial screwup of luggage which wouldn’t have fooled a rookie TSA agent Matt and Chuck meet, fatefully meet on the plane jockeying for seats with the ever holy goof Chuck blathering about terrorists and crazies, enough to draw the attention of a trigger-happy on-board agent. This scene sets up a long drawn out love affair since both men are now “no fly” boys. What the hell is our uptight ass Matt supposed to do to get back to blessed home L.A. and soon to be in labor honey wife (who turned out to be not a wife wife but one of those common law wives so in style these days). Here’s the hook though the thing that glues these brethren together. Somehow Matt has lost his wallet and with no dough or I.D. is forced to accept a ride from Chuck despite serious qualms about doing so (strangely Matt’s credit cards were maxed out so he would not have been able to use them anyway).        

         

So our unlikely boys are on their way making due with mal karma filling up the car. This Chuck is something of a low grade junkie as well as holy goof so he had to stop in Birmingham to see his fixer man. The money Chuck spent on the dope though meant they didn’t have enough dough to hit L.A. except maybe on fumes and train smoke. Matt decides to have that common law wife sent dough to Chuck but as expected the whole thing gets fucked up when Chuck uses his stage name Emmett Kelly and so no go on the dough. Things get a little worse when Matt decides that if he is to survive the journey he better go it alone, better ditch Chuck and his mal karma. Here’s the bitch though Chuck had his father’s ashes in a coffee can ready to spread them over the iconic Grand Canyon and after seeinghe did not leave the ashes with the other Chuck Mexican luggage Matt in a first sign of the fatal weakness that will have him bleeding through all pores goes back to the silly bastard.   

There of course will be several mishaps more along the way starting with Chuck doing a dead drop junkie fall while driving crashing the car and leaving them to the devises of an old friend of Matt’s in Dallas who bails them out with dough and his automobile. Forward. Or maybe southward as geographically-challenged Chuck drives them into Mexico with his fistful of dope in a plastic bag and a safe stop in some sullen bastinado. Thankfully Chuck was high as a kite when he decided to spring the detained Matt from the Federales giving him a kudo on the road to buddy-hood. Carless in Tucson they take the train as far as the Grand Canyon so Chuck can fling ashes in the fetid airs of our lady of the canyon.

From there Chuck starved to get to his L.A fixer man steals a truck to finish the ride. Finish it except for two dramatic things that seal the deal of their friendship-Matt’s honey calls saying get home quick she is in labor and Chuck seeing that the Western truck had a gun in it shoots Matt allegedly by mistake leaving him bleeding to death but intrepid to get to that hospital. No sweat in the end and the last I heard Matt, Chuck, that common law wife and that illegitimate child were living under the same roof with Matt busting out new concrete modern building designs and Chuck getting some bite player work in Hollywood.

Yeah, everybody agreed Matt and Chuck had something weirder than Sam and Seth ever could have from down in the mud or not.

The Trials And Tribulation Of “Miss Judy Garland” (AKA Timmy Riley)-With The Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon Film Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot” In Mind    

By Bart Webber

Timmy Riley, the youngest brother of the legendary high school and college football player Thunder Riley who led North Adamsville High School to the state division championship his senior year (1961), and also a fairly good football player, a tackle, in his own right a bunch of years ago told me that when he saw very masculine male star actor Tony Curtis and less masculine (maybe gay he thought at the time based more on his pretty face than any facts he knew then) star actor Jack Lemmon cross-dressing in the classic Billy Wilder film Some Like It Hot he began to feel free, discreetly free, to do the same. To go to his mother or one of three sisters’ closets and try some silky items on. As far as Marilyn Monroe who would become a darling of the cross-dresser and transvestite (now transsexual or some such term) sets (they are different) and behind number one queen Judy Garland would be the most popular character on the drag queen circuit left him cold. Nada.         

Now today that whole scene might seem archaic, seem old school and old-fashioned but let me tell you that was not the case back in the day. During the early 1960s one Timmy Riley, whatever his very secret identity, was a charter member of the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys from the Acre, read working poor, section of North Adamsville. Said corner boys I am ashamed to admit today thought nothing of “fag”- baiting each other, always testing for signs of anything less than whatever passed for the rules of manly behavior in those sullen days (and mostly poor boys long way from “home” weekend nights).

Moreover, we would fag-bait others who showed any sign of the feminine. Would and am very ashamed on this one go down to Provincetown, usually, no, always drunk looking to fag-bait, and beat up the real gays we knew populated that town. And the leader of the pack at who knows at what emotional expense, the secret cross-dresser and closet gay guy of his mother and sister’s silky goods was one Timmy Riley corner boy in good standing, Tonio’s Pizza Parlor. That would not always be the case since after high school maybe a little later, I had lost contact with him for a while when I was away at college and in the military in the late 1960s, when being openly gay was starting to be somewhat accepted he made the cardinal mistake of telling his pious Roman Catholic parents and a few others of his real sexual identity. You could not do that that then in the Acre and certainly not to pious parents. The heat got so bad, the backlash so rough he had to flee town and would eventually wind up in gay-friendly San Francisco. (His parents never were reconciled with Timmy’s decisions, especially to go to Frisco and become a leader in the drag queen community, not exactly the same as the gay community, but definitely not Roman Catholic-stamped and all parties remained estranged until his parent’s deaths.)

Like I said I lost contact with Timmy for a while until I ran into Allan Jackson, another corner boy, at a class reunion who told me that he had been in contact with Timmy for a while. More than that really Timmy in Frisco did what he always wanted to do to express himself ever since that long ago film film exploded in his face. He would go to work in a “drag queen” circuit club in North Beach as Miss Judy Garland complete with songbook. Eventually and this is where Allan comes in big time Timmy would manage then buy with Allan’s financial help the then notorious but now merely world tourist attraction KitKat Club in North Beach. And the number two fag-baiter back in the day behind one Timmy Riley-yes- one Allan Jackson. Go figure.

I would eventually get out to Frisco and see Timmy, oops, Miss Judy Garland, and cut up old torches. That is when he told me about the Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon fantasies that drove him crazy all through high school. I cried, or maybe we cried a tear at the time for old times’ sake. Recently on another trip out to Frisco I stayed at one of Timmy’s (you know who I mean) condos and one night he came over after work and asked if I would like to see Some Like It Hot which I had either never seen or had seen only parts of. I said sure. I had to laugh along with Timmy as he gave a total critique of what was wrong with the cross-dresser pair from their dippy hats to their silly shoes. Had to laugh as Timmy gave an equally powerful critique of the basic premise of the film that cross-dressing and such was okay as long as you returned to real manhood when the coast was clear. Meaning once the bad guys who caused the need for feminine disguise were wasted and everybody could revert to homogeneity. Except guys, gay guys like Timmy, like Miss Judy Garland had to suppress their harmless desires at who knows what costs. Amen.   

In Honor Of The Fallen Vietnam War Brothers Of North Adamsville Now Eternally Etched In Stone At Town Hall And Down In Washington

By Frank Jackman  

I am probably the surprise choice to take up this assignment honoring a couple of my Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys, Rick Rizzo and Donald White, from the early 1960s who grow up in the desperately poor Acre section of North Adamsville and laid down their young heads in some now forgotten battlefield of Vietnam.  You see this is the 50^th anniversary of my own struggle as a military resister to the war and the only one from our crowd who then joined the internal Army resistance. I have, and others too, have gone through the particulars of my experience elsewhere so that need not detain us here. Besides this is about Rick and Donald (nobody ever called him anything but Donald so I will stick with that).     

Rich was a gung-ho guy, a tough little bastard who imbibed all the anti-communist red scare stuff that we were being force-fed but he was a true believer, a guy who really did want to eliminate every enemy of America. There were a few other guys who hung around Tonio’s like Rick but most of us just wanted to get laid and have some booze, stuff like that. So he signed on the dotted line right after high school I think with the idea of making the military a career (a choice of many not going to college guys looking to grab a skill while serving their country). When Rick came home from basic or maybe it was AIT he was all spit and polish and frankly we looked up to him whether we ourselves would enlist or not. Then sometime in late 1965 he got orders for Vietnam and we had a big party for him, as it turned out the last time we would see him. In August of 1966 somewhere in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam during a major confrontation Rick got blown away. The news when it came to us was a shock and each one of the corner boys probably to this day has a little sorrow in his heart for Rick’s too young fate.

Donald White was slightly different. He had gone to college for a year but just couldn’t cut it, was not his thing. That subjected him to the getting very familiar notice to report for induction from his “friends and neighbors” at the local draft board. Instead of waiting for the other shoe to drop he decided to enlist and grab a clerk’s job as his MOS. Two unfortunate things befell him. One the war in Vietnam was raging out of control with call-ups of addition manpower every few months and so despite his clerical training he was assigned to an infantry unit in-country. Two, there were really no battle-lines in that war like in Europe in World War II and so even lowly clerks had to act as infantrymen or get blown away. Got into firefights when unit positions were under attack. One night when “Charlie” came over the top Donald fell down, laid his golden blonde hair down in some muddy field.           

All of us guys still standing, still around agree that there was a very big difference between what got Rick and Donald to the war before 1968 and what TET and the endless calls for escalation, more bodies as did to the morale of the American forces and the possibilities of winning. Most of us who did our military service did so in the post-1968 and that reflected the chance in spirit even among those who had not the slightest desire to resist (by the way not one of our Tonio’s guys was a draft resister and like I said then I was the only military resister)

All this to say whatever our personal attitudes then or now we had no wish for the death of any individual soldier. Certainly not Rick and Donald. So maybe that is why I am the guy selected to give this late eulogy for our Tonio’s fallen.   

   

When Sheila Sharp Became The New Sheriff In Town -One Last Tidbit On The Fate Of Famed California Private Detective Lew Archer -Out Of Sorts With His Times  

By Seth Garth

[Over the past few years I have spent plenty of cyber-ink on the rise and fall of 1950s California private detective Lew Archer who as it turned out only recently died in 2019, a fact which surprised me and started me rethinking what I had done about him in the past. That work is pretty well documented in a few pieces published recently (as well as the earlier work).

One of the points that I made constantly, and which applies here as well is the role Sheila Sharp played in trying to get Lew back on his feet once he started crashing and thrashing around on cases letting the body counts get out of hand. At a point when it was clear to everybody in California that Lew was a has-been, had fallen down she offered him, and he accepted repo and key-hole peeping work from her agency in San Francisco. That work the lowest of the low in the profession at least kept him in coffee and cakes, kept him in touch with the profession. After a while though he screwed up royally on a repo case where he grabbed the wrong guy and the wrong car and Sheila had all she could do to fix the mess up. That and the hard fact that the key-hole peeping business which centered on getting enough adulterous dirt on somebody for the client to get a divorce dried with the increase in no-fault divorces and a lightening up of the divorce laws in most jurisdictions.

It is not clear why Sheila had a soft spot for Lew (although her Boston copper father had worked with Lew on a couple of cases the few times he headed east) but she kept him on as the office go-fer. You know take the coffee and orders, lunch stuff like that. Kept on until she found out he was hanging around with notorious junkie private eye Kenny Millar, working as his bag man. Worse starting to get a little horse habit and spiraling down even further grabbing the petty case dough meant for coffee and stuff. She gave him a fast boot then.

But enough of the Sharp-Archer connection because what I want to discuss today is how new private detective style Sheila prospered in her time when the whole profession was moving away from male hard-boiled stuff, the stuff Lew grew up with and could not shake when things changed.]  

Like a lot of private dicks Sheila started with the public coppers (as mentioned above her father was a Boston copper which smoothed the way for her*), got tired of the police bureaucracy runaround and general bullshit and decided to go private. She had a few missing person’s cases which she solved, at least the ones who did not really want to stay missing and a few ordinary trace the theft and recover cases from private parties. Par for the course starting out. What got her off the humdrum heap was hammering the Doyle case which included murder, craziness and guns not necessarily in that order. That case is also instructive not only because he set her on a path to eventually become the first female member of the P.I. Hall of Fame but about the dramatic change in style and working habits the 1970s and later brought with them.      

(*Sheila is not going to lie this although we have talked about it before on many occasions but her father Frank was such a crooked cop he needed somebody to help him put his pants on. Sheila idolized her father and either never knew or never wanted to know what Frank was really like. I knew him a little from guys I grew up with who had become lawyers in Boston who had to deal with him when they were looking for parking stickers. Those were supposed to be freely given when available for businesses and professionals who needed spaces on an on-going basis. Frank strong-armed his way to a thou per for the privilege of parking on the streets of Boston.

Sheila is really not going to like this but beyond the traditional graft and pay-offs from gangsters and others Frank had a little “collection” racket going. In the 1980s, the time of troubles in Ireland, many bars and other establishments in Irish neighborhoods like Southie and Dorchester would have a bowl or a box located in some prominent location but with no designation on it. Guys would stop by and throw a few dollars or whatever they had in and that was that. The cause was to aid the boyos in the North, the IRA guys, in their struggles against the bloody British. Frank would come on say late Friday afternoon and “skim” his share from the pile. Of course the owners weren’t going to squawk since he was “protecting” their various operations. If they had known though I bet more than a few longshoremen and other hefty types would have had their noses bent out of joint and done something about it. The late Frank Sharp was certainly not one of nature’s noblemen.)

Sheila when she told me the Doyle case mentioned that she had been having an affair with one of the Doyle sons, Richard. This is important because what happened was that he was target number one in what turned out to be an old-fashioned powerplay ethnic rivalry between the Irish and Italian bad guys who ran the various illegal operations in southern New England. The way she got involved was that this Richard was supposed to be out of the line of fire, was supposed to be kept clear of his family’s “businesses. Somebody broke what was essentially an armed truce by taking on Richard, a couple of his uncles Fritz and Freddie , a few of Desmond’s (his father) employees and assorted flak-catchers.

Nobody could figure out why until somebody told Sheila to look for the money trail, look to what the Doyles were spending their hard cash on to make even more cash. Naturally it turned up to be illegal, illegally gathering up every available stock of guns on the East Coast. For starters though guns were supposed to be under Italian control according to Richie Rizzo, the kingpin of that crowd (not Mafia but close). Still blowing away a bunch of Irish guys when some arrangement could be made didn’t stack up. Sheila sensed something more was at play-something that was superheating the ethnic rivalry thing. Of course this had to about women, about sex but in an odd way.      

Nobody can blame an Irish guy for not chasing the Irish colleens with their stiff white shirts, their rosary beads in hand and their Bible between their knees. What the tow bad ass Doyle brothers, Desmond and Freddie did though was fall, fall hard for a beautiful Italian dish and do something about it, at least one of them. That doing something about it meant having sex and having a child with that woman. An unknown child of sorts in that nobody knew that the kid had grown up to be a gangster with a serious grievance on his shoulders about being abandoned by his fucking Irish dad.  

Put guns and grievances together and you get a possible war without end-except here is where Sheila really did learn a few lessons at the police academy. If you want to roll up a hard ass gangster with a serious piece of weaponry in his hands then hire a hitman, hire Vinnie Morris if you can get him, can afford the gaff. He wasted the sullen kid without working up a sweat. Saved the day for Sheila and Richard too. Then it was up to Desmond and Rickie Rizzo to figure out the gun monopoly and go back to that armed truce that had held so long  

     

Down The Street Of Dreams-To Be Young Was Very Heaven-Except When You Were Down In The Dregs Of Society Gasping For Air     

By Rav Davis

This hot off the press from one Johnny Allan a high school friend of the legendary high school cross-country runner (and track star but the former is where he excelled) from the 1960s Boomer Cadger out of august North Quincy High School. Earlier this year Bart Webber a guy who ran against Boomer and got nothing but dust and ridicule, no, scorn, from girl classmates, irate motorists, the sex police and your average elderly citizen brushed by these perverts, had written a series of articles about the exploits of this fabled runner. Mostly about how against all odds, meaning new running shoes and old socks which gave him massive blisters he still finished fifth in the World Junior Cross-Country Championships held at Van Cortlandt Park in New York City. About the grit it took to not give up even though Johnny (who had travelled with him) could see in his darkened eyes that he was hurt beyond compare.        

That was the high-side Boomer, the Boomer who was probably born about a decade too soon to have been washed clean by the running revolution that jumped out at everyone come the early 1970s when girls, high school girls too, were no longer ridiculing or scorning runners but having some salacious dreams about them (to the extent that they were not runners themselves a wave that was to accelerate later). Motorists were more than willing to cross the white lines of the highway to give them room to run-“sharing the road with a runner” even. Except for the most rabid holy roller sex police their running in scanty clothing was a sign of liberation and the old folks would stand and marvel at the strides they no longer could do (except a last-minute rush by a few elders much later). What Johnny had to say, why he wanted me to stop the presses was that there was much more to Boomer’s rage to run (rage the right word here ask Bart about when Boomer cranked the hammer down.)

I do believe that Bart mentioned that Boomer’s father was the last of big-time working man’s bar aficionados, including the obligatory periodic “theft” of his pay- check by him to go on a five-day bender. Also that his mother was some kind of backwater junkie living off morphine (first given when there were complications in the birth of Boomer’s oldest sister) paying the freight doing tricks for her fixer man and his allies. Nice right. One would think that under such conditions that he (and siblings) would be the “beneficiaries” of all kinds of madness but no the parents actually directed their angers at the world against each other. The kids were a sideshow. This statutory neglect is what kicked Boomer’s ass, got him out to running around the world.

Boomer was maybe thirteen years old, without sneakers to his name except those bogus tennis shoes you wore in gym to keep the floors from getting scuffed when one desperate August night (Johnny’s word) Boomer couldn’t stand staying in the house. Headed to the “circle” in front of North Quincy High School and ran who knows how many laps. That so-called circle really a triangle was off the roads and in those days “safe” from those murderous motorists and mocking girls. For the rest of the short summer every night he would run in those sullen tennis shoes until they were ragged. That is how some legends were born.      

Once school started Boomer signed up for the junior varsity cross-country team where. as a benefit of membership, he got a pair of what were considered then state of the art running shoes (laughable today). That first year Boomer kind of hung out and hung out and I remember in reading Bart’s article he made mention of the fact that he had actually badly beaten Boomer in the regional meet. That would be the last time, the very last time no matter what Bart did he always seemed to be blowing off dust from the front runner.

A lot of that we know but that “circle” at North Quincy High had much more meaning for the elastic Boomer than a field of dreams. Starting the summer before sophomore year, the year of his break-out locally and state-wide Boomer and Johnny would meet on the steps of the high school and speak of dreams, of little dreams mostly but big ones too. Johnny talked about college or getting his ass out of the Muds, the lowest of the low section of the town, maybe pursuing the law stuff like that. Boomer of course talked endlessly of the world championships (not the Olympics), talked endlessly about getting out of the fucking junkie whore wino haven that was his home. Talked about meeting some young thing and doing everything very different from his woe begotten parents. Small dreams or big the jury went both ways on both men. Funny Johnny told me all three years they spent their summers sitting on the stoop nobody else ever came by, came to speak of their dreams such as they were.            

Not All Harvard Professors Were, Are Crazy And In Some Academic Bubble-Using Modern Digital Technology To Bring Back The Lions Of The Pre-Be-Bop Poetry Like Moore, Eliot, Pound And Frost

A link to an NPR Morning Edition segment on the poetic voice restoration project at Harvard

https://www.wbur.org/news/2014/11/28/irene-audio-preservation-technology

By Rav Davis

Okay, okay I suffered through long drawn on readings of highbrowed T.S. Eliot, pastural Robert Frost, neo-fascist Ezra Pound and a million other guys and gals who made up the poetry pantheon back in the day, back in high school. Not as far back in the day as when some very savvy professor decided to use the technology of his day to get those high-end poets on vinyl, or wax on anything that would preserve them for posterity. And then it all fell down the materials were left in some sullen corner to decay and die.       

Enter digital technology and bang-bang like magic many of those seemingly lost forever recitals are now back in the racks, now ready for poetic listening. A monument to culture and to hard work. But still I would rather listen to one be-bop long gone daddy like Allen Ginsberg holding forth on a moonless Howl. Just like I am doing now via YouTube as I write this little tribute to some hard-thinking Harvard folk.

When All The World Was Young-In The Pre-Lapsarian Days Before The Boot Out From Eden-When The Late Famed California Private Detective Lew Archer Was “Walking With The King”-The Broadmore Case    

By Seth Garth

[About a year ago, maybe more I did an earlier series of articles on the rise and fall of famed 1950s California private detective Lew Archer who after a really good start to his career wound up on cheap street, wound up working for wages at Sheila Sharp’s detective agency on Post Street in San Francisco doing at first the dregs  repo work and key-hold peeping and then when he fell down on that basically the office go-fer since Sheila had a soft spot for him, or something. Once he started taking dough out of the coffee and crullers till, the petty cash she had to reluctantly let him go. He would wind up working like a dog for the notorious junkie private eye agency run by Kenny Millar and who knows who else before he laid down his head. (I did not know of the Millar connection then but only learned it from Sheila recently).  

I did that series based on the assumption that Lew had passed away many years ago so I was shocked to learn that he had only passed away a few months ago at the age of 104. He was found in a Bunker Hill (L.A.) skid row rooming house head down in a toilet after overdosing on heroin (That description may seem indelicate, but a surprising number of famous and not so famous junkies have been found in that condition.) That renewed my interest in the fate of one Lew Archer who in the immediate post-World War II period after serving in Military Intelligence in the war and forsaking his pre-war public copper job set up his own agency and was ready to give guys like Sam, Marlowe, Phil Larkin and Benny Gold a run for their money.    

In the interest of the current craze for transparency I should mention that I interviewed Lew in person in the early 1970s for the East Bay Other where the editor Ruth Ryan knew Sheila Sharp who had helped set up the interview. Ruth’s idea, mine too, was to focus on what happened to bring Lew low, why was he then reduced to doing repo work and key-hole peeping. I spent considerable time with Lew, and with others like his ex-wife Martha who had an idea of how the big fall down happened. I even found myself drafted onto a couple of committees urging the P.I Hall of Fame nominating committee to put Lew on the ballot in those days for basically life-time achievement and subsequently for changes in the way the profession moved on from just hard-boiled macho types with twists hanging off every arm while a P.I. worked his case against the bad guys. They laughed in our faces on both counts since Lew had less than a decade of first-rate work and the repo stuff was beneath contempt and that to avoid an anachronism Lew had to stand up to the doll-swirling P.I. model of his time.      

Bringing things forward to the almost present as part of that series last year I joined a group which once again was attempting to get Lew in the Hall this time through an end around on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) seeing his sexual disfunction as a qualifying medical condition which would be factored in. The nominating committee this time, given the subject, did not laugh in our faces but could find no reason like sexual dysfunction to bring a guy in when they had one-armed Bart Devine and wheel-chair-bound Chris Lord waiting for induction. Real disabilities is what they really meant. The junkie head in the toilet will preclude any further efforts, no question.]   

Ah, to be young was very heaven as old greybeard poet Wordsworth had it. To be young when hard-boiled private detectives, male mostly, the parlor pink stuff was left for amateurs like Dame May Whitty, took on the bad guys with dolls swinging from every arm and unlike the public coppers closed down the case without shipping it off to the dead water cold case bin. Yeah, in the days when a guy like Sam, Sam Spade, went right about against evil, female evil and sent over his paramour without blinking an eye after the bodies started to rise to block out the sun. Grabbed some other frail the next day and never missed a beat. Take Phil, Philly Dog Marlowe who lammed into a beautiful money pit complete with a couple of wild child doll sisters who couldn’t keep their clothes on for long. And all the Dog had to worry about was a couple of whacks to the head and a couple of off-hand slugs before he did the big kiss off. Starting to round out things how about Phil Larkin who specialized in co-eds and young tail but who cleaned up Dodge when the deal went down. I could go on but one more, Danny Moore, the handsome ex-film star turned P.I. couldn’t show up on Sunset Boulevard without a fistful of lovelies and some serious iron.          

That my friends is the culture, the ethos, if unwritten that the once famous California private dick Lew Archer who I have written about extensively about over the past couple of years, partially in a final last ditch effort to get him into the P.I. Hall of Fame, partially to show how easy it was for a guy to essentially lose his nerve and in the end wind up as a bag man for the notorious junkie fixer man gumshoe Kenny Millar and partially as a cautionary tale for any guys and dolls coming into the shamus grift these days, days when it is not seen as a virtue to have a ton of frail or muscle hanging off your arms. Of late I have spent most of my time, once I found Lew had only this year passed away as a dead weight junkie on skid row, bringing up his failed cases, cases which he fell down on leading to his being  reduced to repo man, key-hole peeper and eventually office go-fer for real private detectives in Sheila Sharp’s Frisco agency and then bag man for the evil Millar and his sleaze ball operations out of darkest Oakland. But today, thanks to some fancy footwork and some archival work by Sarah LeMoyne I have the details of Lew’s last successful caper, the Broadmore case when he was in his prime, when he was ready to take on the whole known shamus world.       

Yeah, the Broadmore case, was classic Lew. Lew, coming like a bat out of hell after Military Intelligence duty in the Army in the Pacific during World War II. Racked up a few classic cases like Galton, Harlan, Hardmore, the last piece of the Sternwood case which brought in dough, glory plenty of referrals from people who could pay the freight or get their hands on plenty of dough from somewhere. The Damask case is what got Lew in the front door of the Broadmore case, his known    
discretion, his getting kidnap victims back alive and when women are involved a little romp in the hay along with that one hundred large and expenses, tax exempt.    

Laura Broadmore, against his husband’s wishes, sent for Lew once it was clear their son had been taken, probably kidnapped, by a couple of lame longhair types (beatniks really but strictly from Corona not the Frisco hardcore), boy and girl who had some kind of agenda which Lew was supposed to solve. All teary-eyed when talking about that son, Ronny, Lew consoled her the best way he knew how (after that quick romp she would admit that relations, sexual relations with hubby, some blowhard named Stanley, were on the ropes. Amazing how many such stories Lew heard, and acted on when he was himself in good sexual health, providing something like a public health service he told one colleague at the time.)        

Lew went through his paces (paces plus in this one) getting on the trail of these bastards, a trail that led to some mountain retreat that belonged to this Stanley’s mother who was the source of the dough from her father who was one of the rancid oilmen who blew the West Coast to smoke and traffic jams. There he found Stanley killed by some force of nature it seemed which left his mother distraught with Lew there to console her. Meanwhile the girl beatnik, Sandy something, was reported missing by her parents and since they knew this Laura he went to interview them and see what was what. As it turned out this Ellen, Sandy something’s mother, was another one of those frustrated 1950s housewives, sexually frustrated, a situation Lew helped tamp down. He eventually worked his way into grabbing that share of the case too (although by rights he should have farmed it out to his ex-partner Willie Brown). To grab the trifecta the male beatnik, some hulky punk named Jerry, was connected to the other two families by some earlier financial dealings and his parents didn’t have a clue as to what to do with this bum of the month. After Martha, Jerry’s father’s second wife, got rid of that pesky husband she and Lew settled down to drinks and silky sheets Lew grabbing all three parts of the deal, great stuff.            

You have to follow the bouncing ball on this one because unlike say the Sternwood case where Lew picking up the remnants, grabbing young Carmen Sternwood for a saucy weekend in the bargain, was not dealing with old-time Los Angles gangsters who were not ready to give in to the new boys like Bugsy and Lucky from the East and who played rough, including the usual spray of orchid-like slugs to keep things interesting this was not about hardened criminals but misunderstood youth who got blended in with plenty of unsavory behavior by their parents and/or friends’ parents. Not worse but different because the bang-bang factor didn’t get much play and Lew got cold-cocked only once. Some experts I have run into think beyond his later sexual dysfunction when his ex-wife gave him the big boot out of the household door that he had gotten a little soft, had begun to look for cases where he didn’t have to run into hard guys, did need to bleed as much as when he was younger. That his career life’s blood was heading south.     

Whatever the truth of that assertion and I don’t necessarily buy the story this was a “soft” case beyond the bewildering number of nubile young to middle-aged housewives who were ready to run him in their racks as part of the play. Okay, okay I will tell you right now Ronnie, sweet little Ronnie got back to his mother safe and sound via the cleverness of one Lew Archer. Here is where things get weird and maybe started the weirdness trend very much associated with California even today. The two beatnik felons despite what looked like a snatch for cash were playing out some weird drama revolving around things their parents had done say fifteen years before. They thought in their demented drug-soaked minds filled with all the 1950s-1960s alienation and angsts which some prosperity created in essentially overindulged and under emotionally cared for post-war youth they were saving the little guy from the tyranny of the past. And Lew, for good or evil bought the argument and let these juvenile delinquents off easy. But that was later, much later.   

Here is the play old man Broadmore was nothing but a ladies’ man and a guy with no dough except through his wife, the one who grabbed it from her oilman father. All this some fifteen years before the snatching of baby Ronnie. If it wore a skirt he grabbed, willingly or not, and on occasion had a couple of these bored housewives doing tricks in one of his buddy Lester’s motels along the Pacific Coast for travelling salesmen. Once the heat was on though thoughts of stir, thought of a world without access to women made him close up shop, got out of the country especially when one friendly copper, public copper asked him if he wanted to play ball with the law to get out from under. Knowing Eddie Mars was the subject of that snitch he decided to blow town fast before Eddie had Mister Brown Suit hang him out to dry. So he took off with this Ellen and that was to be the end of the troubles.  

As it turned out that Ellen was a woman not his wife and that triggered a whole bunch of stuff not so much by her as by her old-time evangelical housekeeper, a woman named Sister Snow who even Lew passed on not because she wasn’t desirable but because he couldn’t take the gaff with her Book of Revelation fire in the lake bullshit. What happened was this Broadmore brought this Ellen to a mountain cabin owned by his wife and that flipped the wife out and Sister too. Wifey killed hubby and put him about sixteen feet under with the help of Sister’s oddball son. Nothing happens for a long time except a wildfire brings out some craziness, brought out the link between Ronnie’s snatching and old man Broadmore’s murder via Ronnie’s father, that dwebb Stanley, who was looking for the father he never knew. To keep the thing tamped down Sister Snow wasted that Stanley when he was up at that very same mountain cabin and anybody else who got in the way, meaning anybody else who was looking for answers about the whereabouts of the old man or Ronnie, or both. Lew finally caught up with the snatchers left them in the care of their parents and blew back to L.A. and some well-deserved rest  

Like I said follow the bouncing ball but know this our Lew didn’t travel back to L.A. alone he had that Laura and little Ronnie riding sidesaddle on the golden calf. Shacked up with her for a while. That would be either the last straw or pretty close to the last straw for his wife Martha. The rest you know. Still, to be young at that time was very heaven.    

      

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-Déjà vu All Over Again-The Rise And Fall Of Singer Billy Bradley  

By Sam Lowell  
           
I have said it before but it bears repeating-as desperately poor and woe begotten the Carter corner boys were and that was pretty desperate in the projects in the days before the extension of certain social welfare benefits left those down in the dig pretty barren that these guys, us, had skills, had some talents. I have already mentioned a while back the case of Ronnie Mooney, early leader of the Carter corner boys and the one who started on our doo wop summer nights. That work a prep for his attempts to break out of the projects ethos when talent searches were in bloom. In his case, and as we shall see in Billy’s demise failure early on, failure compounded by “the fix” being in led him to make the Pretty James Preston-inspired armed robbery life look like a romantic alternative, or at least a place to grab some big dough if you had the guts to go after it with guns in every arm. As already mentioned Ronnie fell down hard after a shoot-out in Ohio with a bunch of Lima coppers.    

(By the way thinking about how desperate my own family situation was at the time, car-less most of the time when a car was needed to break out of the isolated projects located in the middle of nowhere, mother always short on the weekly envelopes to hold off the bill-collectors and the like we lived in fear of even a worse fate. The county farm, the place where you went when you knew all hope was abandoned. Needless to say, that good Irish Catholic mother hard-pressed on the weekly white envelopes used the idea of us winding up there as a whipping tool to keep us in line. In my own family’s case it never got much better even when we moved across town to the Bottoms section of the Acre, read-lowest of the low.)       

Maybe Billy’s case on top of Ronnie’s (remember these two were the leaders, were tough guys whatever else who I would when they turned pro not have wanted to meet up with in a dark alley, hell, maybe at noon on the Boston Common either) speaks to something grimy in life down at the bottom of the heap. Maybe full of hubris and hot air project boys, corner boys were less accepting on getting kicked to the ground, and yet getting up and dusting off your knees. Maybe that social gene was never strong even for guys like me, Seth, and for a while the Scribe to not feel “the fix was in” for somebody else and the cards were seriously stacked against us.

I have already mentioned in the last published piece that Billy was hot to trot to win a local talent search sponsored by radio station WMEX in Boston and the famous Darius Records. By his lights, by mine as well, he did an excellent job but lost, and I believe now rightfully so, to the doo wop-influenced Painter Sisters who are still holding forth in Vegas and the lounge at the Newark  Airport. We all know because it came out later that the fix had really been in when Ronnie Mooney made his leaf for fame but Billy couldn’t take that some silly “girl” act would beat him and so he had the same reaction as Ronnie-the deal was fixed.           

   

That realization would not immediately lead to his turn to the bright lights of armed robbery. Billy would through a little more pluck than Ronnie, a lot more skill and better voice than him in any case would cut a record on his own Me and My Rock and Roll Baby-Sitter promote it endlessly, get radio stations to play it and have it turn into one of those minor one-hit Johnnie classics. He expected pay dirt, pay day and easy street when that thrilled the girls one summer. Expected some record company would beg him to come to their stable. Nada, no go, forget it. That is when he made the turn, started talking big about how he would avenge Pretty James Preston’s death at the hands of some dumb coppers. (I was not around then, having moved over to the Bottoms but got this at the time from Go-Go Flynn).     
Billy Bradley was tough, was smart too, smarter and tougher than Ronnie so when he made the turn, when he became the ghost-avenger of Pretty James Preston (which hit us all hard at the time of his death since we worshipped him something like a living god) he lasted far longer than Ronnie. According to Go-Go spent some time in the county and state pens as well. Held together for something like twenty years doing “the trade.” But armed robbery is a tough trade, eats up its denizens and is filled with bad end stories. Bad end stories because you have to be fast in the trade or be swallowed up. That happened to Billy after he got out of Shawshank the last time. Headed south to new territory-with old ways-decided who knows why- to rob a fucking White Hen store in North Carolina for walking around money I guess. Didn’t figure that those wet highways that high robbery night would cause any trouble for him but they did. The coppers nailed him, nailed him good since he like any other good Carter’s corner boy swore he would not be taken alive, and in the end he was not.  

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-The Night Billy Bradley Got His Talented Ass Handed To Him On A Platter-A Cautionary Tale, Maybe   

By Sam Lowell

Make no mistake even desperately poor “the projects” corner boys have skills beyond those larcenous hearts that of necessity drive their existences in a world where “not enough” is the operative term. I have already noted that even among the young upstart corner boys around Carter’s Variety Store there were those like the Scribe who would go on to some success, however short term in his case, in the journalism field. And myself as a fairly successful film and music critic for a whole career. The classic case is that of later Tonio’s Pizza Parlor leader Frankie Riley who parlayed a law degree into a nice partnership with a big Boston law firm where he is now “of counsel” (meaning plenty of dough and no heavy lifting which is left to some luckless young younger lawyer)       

But getting back to the Carter corner boys I have already mentioned that Ronnie Mooney had he decided to stick with it a bit could have had a fair career maybe a lounge lizard Vegs-type career in rock and roll if he had not as a result of a “the fix is in” talent search show where he wowed the crowds but got crossed-up in internal record company/radio station politics and wound up with no record contract when he clearly deserved one. That was decisive in many ways not the least to give him a permanent “sneer” about the real world and drove him headlong into the arms of some older tougher guys who taught his some very different skills along the lines of the art of armed robbery which became his specialty, and would lead to his bloody downfall once night in a police shoot-out in Ohio from what Go-Go Larkin told me.

In my last piece in this series I went into the early musical career of Billy Bradley who actually got farther up the record company /radio station food chain that sustained early rock and roll. His minor classic Me and the Rock and Roll Baby-sitter could have, should have sent him on his way even though he had to self-promote the record from jump street before it caught on. But it did not and a lot of what happened to Billy later, what happened similarly to Ronnie Mooney colored his turn a away from rock and roll to those armed robberies which made him a very different kind of star.* Billy’s case, like Ronnie’s is why I have dubbed part of the headline to this piece a cautionary tale.

[*It is no accident that most of the corner boys, Carter’s, later at Doc’s Drugstore and at Tonio’s Pizza Parlor who carried too big of chips on their shoulders and succumbed to adversity turned to the surprising lucrative, then, crime of armed robberies. Seth Garth and others have written about the legendary Pretty James Preston, a loner wild west cowboy type who pulled bank robberies solo, and who do his work on a very fast English motorbike, the Black Lightening. Although Pretty James in his turn would fall down when some asshole bank guard thought the dough he was guarding was his and bang-banged Pretty James enough to slow him down for the real coppers to shoot him down into some mud all through my time as corner boy we revered Pretty James as a living god, as a hero. Even today we speak his name in hushed tones as a sign of respect, as brethren.]          

I have already mentioned but its bears repeating here that in the mid to late 1950s when there were a million mostly small record companies who were marginally connected to an array of local rock and roll stations there was a crazed search by those organizations to find the new Elvis, Chuck, Buddy, Jerry Lee, maybe Wanda Jackson, the Shirelles to set them on their ways. Moreover the teen nation demanded it, demanded that some new sounds come out of the now deadass transistor radios and records. Linked to that thought was a corollary-teen nation had a million kids who wanted to be the next Elvis, Chuck, Buddy, Jerry Lee, Wanda, or Shirelles. That is where Billy Bradley’s next logic step came in.         

    

In the winter of 1959 when the deep ass snow was on the ground and we were all freezing our butts off the hot rock and roll radio station WMEX along with Darius Records (yes, if you know your record company label history, the label which produced Lanky Devoe, The Chiffettes, Danny Mack and the Pack, soulful Lamar Le Bert and many others before being bought out by Columbia Records) was sponsoring yet another one of those ubiquitous talent search events. The local version to be held in the auditorium at Adamsville High on a Friday night in early February. The way this talent search gag worked was that there would be maybe a dozen local events where each winner would get to go to Boston, to the Park Plaza Hotel ballroom, to vie for a one record deal with Darius Records and see what happened from there. A pretty cheap way for WMEX and Darius to get down in the mud, get a hear of the talent down below. Of course Carter corner boys, our own Ronnie Mooney, had already been burned once when he entered the contest a year or so before and got nothing but air for his troubles. Nothing but air since the “fix was in” for Mona Levitt (yes the Mona Levitt of the now classic Blue Sunday Blue).

Billy Bradley knew the ropes on that one but two things had changed. Supposedly the judges were neutral and not affiliated with either outfit as before and Billy never one to not be full of himself though he had ten times more talent that the hapless Ronnie (he exaggerated as usual probably only five times as much talent as Ronnie). We tried to keep his feet on the ground, feet that when it came to the clip we or busting change machines at places like laundromats he was all business, or else. But he went wild grabbing a new white shirt from Filene’s (gratis, Billy, Carter corner boy gratis), ditto a sports jacket from Robert Hall (a shade too big but for free what the hell), uncuffed chino’s from Raymond’s and maybe a belt too. The tie and shoes were actually his).              

I will say Billy looked great in that 1950s music scene great where guys wore jackets and ties as par to of their acts. He would not tell us what he selected for his song wanting to surprise us when he went on stage. He was maybe eighth or ninth that night so you could see some jitters while he waited. There were several good acts before his, especially the Painter Sisters (yes, those sisters who had the hit Baby, Baby, Baby and are still bouncing away in venues like Vegas and the Newark Airport Lounge). Then Billy came on and did a Buddy Holly tune, a classic now, Peggy Sue. He gave it his all and left nothing on the stage.

Here is the problem, the Carter corner boy problem in a nutshell for those who could not scratch and claw their ways out of the mud settled down at the base of society. The Painter Sisters won that night and rightfully so (they would win the whole Boston region competition in Boston) as mightily as I wished Billy had won. You probably know the follow-up though. Billy never got over the idea that once again the “fix was in” based on no more than that he did not win. More to the point like with Ronnie something inside burned out that night or shortly thereafter and while he plugged away to some small successes he knew that music would not be his road to easy street.    

    

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-When Billy Bradley Held Forth In The Whole Rock And Roll World

By Sam Lowell

One reader recently told me to cut the bullshit and get on with the story, or stories, about the legendary Billy Bradley who unlike some two-bit junior varsity thug who was doomed to fall down, fall down hard either in Q or out on the cop-infested highways like Ronnie Mooney or some stumblebum has-been journalist for publications now since vanished along with the so-call prizes like the Scribe hy had actually heard of, had heard on the radio, probably WNCB out of Providence, or from records back in the late 1950s with his moderate smash hit Me And The Rock And Roll Baby Sitter. Maybe a one hit johnnie but at least he was a recognized name then. That reader further accused me of apparently getting paid by the word which for a modern day journalist, a guild guy, a guy who has spent many years in the vineyards is a serious slap in the face since only free-lancers and people who work on spec get paid that way today and so bulk up the volume to see what falls out, how many dimes they can squeeze out of an assignment. (Every editor knows the gag and will automatically cut one thousand words on “principle” to keep under budget.)       

Okay so on with it although I think that straight as a gate reader must have been asleep during the 1950s since while Billy did record a moderate smash 45 RPM single it was not played on radio (too salacious) and had  passed muster in 1950s teen angst world via the old-fashioned way of having promoters (who could be the performers themselves) going around to the various record stores, hose that had listening cubicles and hustling their proteges material that way. If the song hit pay dirt everybody grabbed copies and word, the eternal teenage be-bop grapevine world would do the rest. Be that as it may I did not meet Billy that first day of school at the old Snug Harbor Elementary when I did meet the Scribe down across from the Adamsville Housing Authority projects where we all grew up and became Carter’s Variety Store corner boys for the simple fact that he had skipped school that day since it a yawner half day and he went to Adamsville Center to perfect his skills on “the clip” which was our poor boy financial lifeline when our parents said no dough for nothing every time we bothered to ask.   

Moreover and that sleepy-headed reader will probably take a fit when I mention this Billy, whatever authority he had later as corner boy leader and as a rock and roll singer, was not the leader then nor the guy who led the rock and roll doings around our way. That “junior varsity thug” Ronnie Mooney did. It was Ronnie who was so recklessly tough that he thought nothing of kicking a guy in the groin as some kind of initiation into corner boy life and who led the criminal enterprises like the classic “clip” devised by the Scribe without anybody questioning his authority to lead. For our purposes as well he was the king hell king of the doo wop night in the summer between fifth and sixth grade when his voice was pure magic and would draw the curious girls around him, us. It was only later after Ronnie decided hanging with serious tough guys, getting deep into that life was what he wanted, craved that Billy who was probably even tougher than Ronnie became the king hill king of the rock and roll night and leader of the corner boy crew.    

I think, and if I remember right the Scribe agreed with me at the time, that Billy also had a better voice than Ronnie when he finally came around to those summer doo wop sessions and would eventually share lead with Ronnie on say This Magic Moment. Everybody thought

Ronnie knew a ton of stuff about music but Billy through his older sisters knew more. In any case that doo wop attraction pit is what got Billy all hopped up about a singing career, about being the next Elvis or Buddy or Jerry Lee (it was different models at different times). That would sustain Billy through a couple of good years once Ronnie left and nobody challenged either his larcenous heart or that be-bop beat in his head.

The icing on the cake, the thing that drove Billy’s early career forward, was his big prize win at the all city rock and roll talent show held in the summer of 1958. In order to qualify you had to have won a talent show and been sponsored by some organization in the town (that meant either Adamsville proper or North Adamsville since both were part of the same city). As it turned out Billy would represent Our Lady Of The Flowers Catholic Church, the projects parish where he had won the annual teenage singing contest. The whole gag with the church was to keep the budding sexual stirrings of the young in check by providing a weekly outlet and keep a sharp eye out with a Friday night dance to keep things in check. During intermission at those dances there would be a short talent show with the winner getting a fifty-dollar U.S. Savings Bond as a prize (Ronnie would be the first to win that bond and quickly turned it into cash, some thirty some dollars which he could never figure except somebody was cheating him ping since you had to wait a million years for the bond to mature and get the whole fifty). One night Billy blew the lid off the place with his version of Sweet Little Rock and Roller with a classic Chuck duckwalk included. The girls went wild and Billy was headed for the stars (and I got at that point Billy’s stick girl rejects, no, got second choice after the Scribe in those days the guy who Billy thought was his best friend, at least the Scribe thought so).    

Still trying to keep the thing in check the head priest, mean old Father Lally, at Our Lady decided that the church would sponsor Billy at the all-city talent show (later they would be called talent searches but that is when the radio stations and record companies were desperate for new sounds). So with some front money Billy got some new clothes and was ready to make the all city talent show “jump” (his term). The expectation was that he would again do the Chuck Berry classic and that was that. What the crowded audience at the Adamsville High School auditorium got however was Billy’s own creation, Me and My Rock and Roll Baby-sitter. This song as already mentioned pretty salacious about a guy who is pissed off because his girlfriend has to babysit a bunch of brats one Friday night and who sneaks into the house the babysitter is at and after she blows the kids off to bed gets down and dirty with her rock and roll man with Jerry Lee in the background. Not much left to the imagination either. Needless to say despite winning the talent show hands down (based on audience applause not judges approval) Billy was persona non grata around Father Lally, around Our Lady in general.

That night though would start Billy on his short sweet ride to his fifteen minutes of fate.

    

The Case That Turned A Once Famous California P.I Lew Archer Into A Has-Been-The Road Down To Skid Road Aint That Far-The Spinner Case   

By Seth Garth

Hold the presses! Or maybe that is what I should have done when I learned that there was a smaller previous case by the once famous California P.I. Lew Archer who died at 104 recently found head down in a toilet seat in a Bunker Hill (L.A.) skid row rooming house of a drug overdose, heroin. I spent considerable cyber-ink laying out the facts of what I have called the Jameson case, the late 1950s case that set Lew on his ass, got him rolling downhill. Of course all of this including the verifiable facts left remaining after fifty-plus years was subject to some serious holes although on the basics that case can still provide argument for the definitive slide. But with this new information gathered from the archives of his last boss, the sleaze ball junkie P.I. Kenny Millar who got Lew hooked on junk for good it appears we now have the Spinner case that shows in light detail where Lew was heading and why. Moreover the case has the central virtue of having been worked on very shortly after Lew’s ex-wife Martha heaved him out of the house and took everything he had including his vaunted sexual prowess which is what led to the toss in the first place.

I don’t want to beat a dead horse but that sexual prowess/impotency angle really does play a major role in the big fall down here so it bears a short analysis of its own. (The other major points you can gather in from the Jameson case if interested.) Every serious male private eye from about Sherlock Holmes, no, bad example, since we have discovered via Will Bradley of this publication that he and Doc Watson were, well lovers, unofficial husband and husband in today’s terms, let’s try Philo Vance. Every serious male private dick since Philo Vance has had the mandatory frail or seven hanging off his every arm as a sign that not only will he solve the case before him no matter how high the bodies stack up but is manly enough for the tasks at hands, including in bed. So Lew in a way really was a victim of his times, or the far edge of his times when he had to compete with reputations like Sam’s who thought nothing of sending some dishy dame over when it looked like she had him set for the fall guy, like Phil who specialized in sisters and multiples, Phil Larkin for the young ones, Lance Larson for the wealthy not too old widow set and so on.

Lew had married Martha his high school sweetheart before he went into Military Intelligence in World War II and things were fine until after the war when he decided to set up a private investigation operation on his own. Naturally after winning a few high-profile cases that were the beginnings of his bigtime reputation he needed to have his share of twists hanging off of him, serious or just one night, hell, maybe one afternoon, stands and be done with it. Just as naturally that did not set well with his ever -loving Martha who was no stranger to beauty herself. According to her when I interviewed her for a piece in the early 1970s for the whys of the fall of Lew Archer the last straw was when he would start hanging around with what looked like underaged girls. Started taking only cases when some young fluff was on display. That led to the toss (the final toss there were a couple of earlier bumps around that same issue). Out on his ear Lew realized as much as he loved having dames hanging on him his rock was Martha and without that rock he was in trouble. That would not stop him from pursuing young fluff-inspired cases but we now know what happened to Lew when any woman, young, old or indifferent put the moves on him. Nada. The newly found Spinner case can serve as a primer of the way down for formerly promising Lew Archer, a cinch to make the P.I. Hall of Fame on his first try.         

A first glance of the archives at U/Cal-Irvine’s School of Criminology where all the serious cold cases and hot wind up to provide teachable moments my impression was that there were too many moving parts to the case itself, that maybe Lew should have, given his emotional frailty at the time passed on this one. The old now seriously yellowed newspaper articles from the period list a bewildering number of interconnections between a small group of people none of whom I would not turn my back on for one minute. The tapes, all old-fashioned six of them digitally remastered for the archives, tell an even more horrendous tale of evil and treachery almost on a   daily basic for a number of years. Of course, the nexus was the money, the knee-deep oil money which once Lew was in kept the bodies started piling up, that Lew let the case get away from him.      

         

This is where the aging Lew’s sexual appetites for younger and sometimes underage women got the best of him, at least that is where he thought the deal was heading. Seems that some lower level hedge fund manager’s high school daughter had flown the coop with, Danny, Danny Spinner, some bad ass doper, con artist, psycho who will really be the link to all the craziness in the case but that is the side fluff since Lew had a photograph of the young damsel and was ready to get the lances out on that inspection. Here is what is weird though right from the get-go when Lew went to that hedge fund manager’s house he was greeted at the door by his wife, a knockout who went straight at Lew with her come hither look-all to cut the tariff, to cut Lew’s fee with a little human barter. No go, Lew said he had hot flashes or something that day.      

It only gets weirder from there as Lew puts the clues in hand together which led to the place this bad ass Danny was employed, an apartment building run by some red-headed older woman who was looking for a little loose company when Lew crossed her path. No go, probably the residue from those hot flashes. I guess this bad ass kid was a social worker’s dream, you know the misunderstood youth noise because the next big lead was some high school do-gooder who saw this Danny as an alienated youth who had some good qualities not apparent to the general public who faced assaults, robberies, con games and mayhem from this stumblebum kid. The important thing is that this do-gooder had left his wife high and dry while he went around trying to save this motherfucker. Knocking on said do-gooder’s door a few times could have gotten Lew whatever he wanted from the lonely J.D-chasing widow. Lew touched, no brushed against her dress as she came forward which in the old days would have had him in the sack before lunch but now he was “all business” (no wonder this case was buried  deep in the Irvine files since even honest criminologists have an interest in keeping the legend of P.I. sexual prowess on the front burner).   

After this things start to get ridiculous because this bad ass Danny and that wayward daughter Ginny have decided for their own reasons to kidnap her dad’s boss, the ill-begotten son of some super-rich oilman who migrated in California after the Texas oil boom went bust. Get this double-header. It seems that this oilman, Steve, in his travels picked up a German wife, some frail from Dresden who hated being held in splendid Malibu isolation and was ready to break out, break out with Lew when he showed up to see what anybody knew about where the misunderstood kids would take Papa. All she got for her troubles was the now familiar Lew raincheck. But wait there is more, there is a doting Steve mom who will pay big bucks and throw in a little something extra for Lew’s troubles. She got the let’s get your apparently kidnaped son out of harm’s way first. What would become a frequent dodge.

It only gets worse from there, but I will shorten it up because you know what the results are already. Some ex-cop, a county guy was working his magic with modern technology to either blackmail or get some woman who turned out to be Danny’s mom. He got his head blown off for his own troubles but when Lew went to his house he ran into this ex-cop’s drunken wife who was not afraid to let her kimono slip for Lew’ eyes. He took an offered drink or five to while away the time with her in the kitchen. They blew out the door. I won’t even bore you with the few female cabbies and waitresses cluttered along the trail since a guy needs to get places and to eat since we now have a well-worn path.  Nothing doing.

Lew, who never even mentioned this case when I interviewed him in the early 1970s after he had been reduced to repo work and key-hole peeping through the generosity of Sheila Sharp’s detective agency, wound up letting the body count rise without getting to the bottom of the case. The bottom of the case, which cost him plenty of dough for not finding Steve alive, was that the whole play was an elaborate set-up so Steve’s mom, actually Jasper’s mom, her illegitimate son who had many years before killed Steve and had taken his place and his dough, could run through a Texas oil fortune. As for Danny he got blown away by that do-gooder high school guy when he showed his real colors. And that Ginny who was more than willing once she met Lew to play house with him got the big step-off and nothing else from him.          

       

     

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can--The “Skinny” On The Demise Of One Award-Winning Journalist Peter Paul Markin, The Scribe

By Sam Lowell

Recently at the office water cooler I was comparing notes with Seth Garth old fellow corner boy from the Acre in North Adamsville where we grew up back in the 1960s about responses to our respective series of pieces, his on the old-time California private detective Lew Archer who just passed away at 104 out in some skid row dive in L.A. of an overdose and me on my earlier corner boy experiences at Carter’s Variety Store. But really about how I met and got involved in Peter Paul Markin’s world, always called the Scribe from about eight grade on and I will use that moniker here. About how as well, and I am not alone in this, we still shed a tear for that long-gone daddy.

The common theme we noted about reader responses is the spike in comments and notes concerning the demise, how both men fell down, went from kings of the hills to dust or something like that. Beyond the common theme of some off-the-wall Greek tragedy noise neither man fell the same way. For Lew it was sex, or rather taking the toss from his wife from their abode which whatever philandering by Lew had led to that decision by her caused sexual impotency in Lew and he just flat out lost his edge thereafter. Dropped from a serious challenger to the P.I. elite to repo man and key-hole peeper to go-fer. Had won, I think, Rookie of the Year for the Galton case fresh out of World War II, then P.I. of the Year a couple of times for respectively the Harlan case and the Billings case. Grabbed a few honorable mentions too then the wife Martha toss and all fall down. Worse winding up doing who knows what skullduggery with junkie P.I. Kenny Millar (who in turn turned Lew into a junkie right to the fucking end when he was found head down in some skid row rooming house in the Bunker Hill section of L.A). But enough of Lew’s story you can read about his rise and fall via Seth’s pieces. What I am interested in today since readers have been pounding about it is the demise of the Scribe, how he fell down hard to what I have called his “wanting habits.”

I kind of sensed in my last piece on the Scribe where I put the very real positive spin of what the Scribe was about in good weathers, when the tide of the 1960s was rising that would not be enough to satisfy those who wanted to know how a guy who could have been practically anything wound up face down in some dirty ditch in some back alley in Sonora down in Mexico when some “strike it rich” easy street drug deal went south on him. I mentioned and this is a distinct part of his fall, the part where nothing bad could touch him, that he was the original Teflon man that he made a fateful, hey, let’s call it fatal, decision to drop out of Boston University in the spring of 1967 just as we were getting the first waves eastward of the new dispensation, what he endlessly called the new breeze in the land he would bore us with on lonely Friday nights.            

As already mentioned the Scribe was the pioneer heading west in the Summer of Love and all that meant to his prospects and dreams and after feeling the situation he came back East to drag us out there for varying lengths of time. He decided as did the some of the rest of us to stay out for a while, not go back to school, calling that Frisco experience all he needed for schooling. Except dropping out of school in 1967 during the height of the bloody massacres in Vietnam was not the smartest idea in the world since that meant the loss of the critical student deferment setting himself up for being drafted by his friends and neighbors at the local draft board as they liked to say then. That is where his hubris got him in a bind since by January of 1969 he received a draft notice to report for induction. Not having any reason, any principled reason despite his anti-war views and with no support or sympathy on the home front he “allowed” himself to be drafted. (I with less hubris then, once I got my draft notice in mid-1969 hustled my ass back to Tufts although that only deferred me until 1970 when the grim reaper called with my low draft number after that has changed the system). Other guys like Seth, Bart Webber, Allan Jackson, Frank Jackman also were inducted. Everybody except the heroic military resister Frank did their time and survived some of it rocky for guys like me who had a very hard time coming back to the “real world” from Vietnam times.               

       

Nobody had a harder time than the Scribe though who somehow though he was going to wind up a clerk somewhere writing bullshit on a stick for some officers. The reality: although he never talked about it much, a problem maybe, at least to us he saw some very hard fighting in the Central Highlands before he was done. What the hell did he expect after the huge attrition rates of KIAs and wounded at a time when the Army only wanted cannon fodder to replace the thinned ranks. Like I said he never talked about it much but if you had to put an ebb tide time for the Scribe’s 1960s that 1969 date would serve.

Those back in the “real world” day  were the days when he, we actually, were living out in Oakland with Josh Breslin a guy we met out in Frisco in 1967 from Maine and doing mostly dope, mostly some free-lance writing for the ton of alternative newspapers and journals that were feeding the counterculture toward the end and mostly trying to figure out what was what. Those were the days when the Scribe was heading out for days and weeks from Oakland to be with “brothers,” a particular kind of brother who like him could not deal with the realities of coming home and so set up alternative communities I guess you would call them today along the railroad tracks, under bridges, near arroyos with kindred. He wrote a series of articles for one of the alternative newspapers in the Bay area that either won or was nominated for a big prize since he concentrated on having each man tell his own story. That year or two was probably the high point of the Scribe’s post-military time.

I guess Josh Breslin was the first to notice it and then I picked up on it when we were living out in Oakland when the Scribe started talking more and more about material things, things he wanted that he never was able to have as a kid. What we called, or have called since then, the wanting habits. Josh and I were no strangers to that feeling, that nagging feeling since he up in the Atlantic section of Maine and I in the utterly lowest part of the Acre, the Bottoms, had shared that experience. That was the glue that held all the corner boys together from my utter poverty to Frankie Riley’s genteel poor as church mice circumstances. The Scribe fell somewhere in between probably closer to my end than Frankie’s. Even today when we talk about it there is always a slight nudge about the effect those wanting habits had on all of us.

Like I said it hit the Scribe hardest and maybe with less reason since he was a guy who had plenty of great prospects, at least before the Vietnam War bogie haunted his dreams. Sometime in 1974 though he started doing cousin, started doing cocaine which was then just becoming a drug of the month choice among those who were seriously into drugs but who had previously sustained themselves mainly on marijuana or mescaline, maybe speed. It was also the time of that south of the United States border drug cartels were gearing up the cousin market. Those two factors would bring the Scribe low. He started getting seriously into the rather expensive drug and selling small amounts around town to keep his habit up. That could only last so long before he really was a cousin junkie. Then he started “muling” for some Frisco drug dealers meaning he would go to Mexico, get the product and bring it over the border. Not so hard then unlike now when you were a straight looking gabacho gringo.

We don’t know all the details, we were basically warned away, but sometime in 1976 the Scribe fell down. He either snatched some big shipment he was muling for his own profit or he was trying to work some crazy independent deal and cross-up the wrong cartel people. In any case he wound up face down in a dusty back street in Sonora with two slugs in his head and was buried in some potter’s field grave down there. Like I said we were warned off by the Federales to forget about what happened to the Scribe. That has not meant that we still do not shed some tears over that fallen brother.