Long Time A-Brewing

The Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting was a great place to work back in the early seventies. The station had started in downtown Baltimore in the late sixties and by 1972 when I joined the firm, they were newly established in their headquarters building outside the beltway.  Sharon and I bought a house nearby and she went off to teach each morning and I went to work nearby.

Having never conquered the ability to just work one job a time, I found myself slowly becoming more and more engaged in learning the craft of writing. That subtle obsession slowly morphed into novel-writing each evening after work and finally the creation of two western novels over a two-year period of time.

As par for the course, Sharon encouraged me to try to get them published and I demurred and put them into a filing cabinet instead. They never came to gestation until about ten years ago. When my first novel morphed into a trilogy called ‘Apache Death Wind’ and the second novel was reborn as ‘Apache Blue Eyes.’

Now going back even further in time, 50 years to be almost exact, I wrote a parcel of poems and song lyrics during the mid-to-late 60s. Those faded gray pages sat in the same filing cabinet until this last fall when coincidence and circumstance brought them back to life. Such is the writing style of someone who never discards anything written even in jest.

A while back I wrote a blog entitled: Ode to a Broken Down Palace. It was about the first apartment building I lived in near the University of Minnesota. The building was designed and constructed around the turn of the century for a prominent Minneapolis industrialist.  By the time I moved in, almost sixty-five years later, it was a rundown boarding house chopped into several apartments.

That period in my life encompassed what I now whimsically call my lost years; roughly from 1961 to 1971. It began with my high school graduation on May 31st, 1961 and culminated in my marriage on July 31st, 1971. Ten years of wandering and wondering about my life as it unfolded in twists and turns; some expected and others not so much.

It was during that latter period, in an old tired musty apartment, that my creative juices really started to flow. From roughly the fall-winter of 1967 through the spring of 1970, I found myself going through a furious writing phase.  Poems, song lyrics, outlines for novels and mind-stories poured forth, all captured with my ancient L.C. Smith typewriter.

My new job at KTCA television entailed some script writing and other journalistic endeavors. But more importantly it meant I was interacting with a plethora of wildly crazy, creative, free-thinking folks. It was the mid-sixties when almost anything was up for grabs and challenges. I was living the life and not focused too far beyond the next day.

People were coming in and out of my life. Some were fleeting moments whose names are still etched in my brain while others have long since been forgotten. The Triangle Bar became my refuge from reality; a place to toke in the shadows along with the stoners, drink cheap schooners of beer and leer lustfully at the University Coeds all lined up neatly at the bar.

Thoughts and scenes, feelings and emotions were coursing through my veins and piling up in my memory bank. I found a wonderful outlet for expressing those sundry images and imaginative scenarios on paper.

Writing poetry was incredibly liberating along with the song lyrics for which I had absolutely no skill whatsoever. Almost every night, I’d be hunched over my L.C. Smith, pounding away at words and verses, sentences and paragraphs that kept rushing forth.

It was like a euphoric rush of emotions spilling out of my consciousness. Most nights, I became incredibly high on endorphins surging through my brain matter. Good, bad, terrible and some not so bad material was captured on’ now’ old gray sheets of paper. That episodic flash of creativity ultimately lasted for only a short period of time. The resulting pile of papers were assembled, bound together and filed away. Then life took a turn for the wonderful and they were forgotten for almost sixty years.

A new relationship had gained traction, this one for good, and I was on a new path toward the future. Fortunately, those old stapled pages of poetry followed me around the country before finally settling into a filing cabinet in the basement along with other forgotten dreams and storylines.

The idea of creating a book of my poetry evolved out of a play I had written during the pandemic. ‘PTV’ is a semi-autobiographical play about my own early television experiences. There were some wonderful personalities and characters that lived in my world at that time. It was the mid-sixties and the vortex of the social, sexual and political upheavals of the time. I thought it would be neat if I could write some songs reflective of that period and the events taking place in and around the station.

I decided the first step in that process of song-writing would be to peruse those song lyrics and poetry I had stashed away for all those years. I began to study the material for anything I could use for ‘PTV.’ But the more I perused those ancients’ words, I realized they really captured a ‘time in my life’ and weren’t appropriate for the songs I wanted to write today. But, I thought, they could stand on their own as a testament to the times and my life back then.

Hence was born the idea of a new book of poetry. I wanted this book to be different from so many others that encompass black words on white paper and the author’s feelings hopefully found somewhere within. To that end, I selected thirty photographs from that period in my life. Vida has stylized them as watercolor, pop, watercolor/ink versions of the original images.

The idea here is to present an image, representative of that period, but mixed with enounces that leave much to the imagination. I hope those images, along with the words of my poetry, will stimulate the reader’s mind to wander and self-examine.

After more than fifty years of dormancy, it will be interesting to see those words carved from another life and time back in print again.