Wichita Made Me Do It by Galen Green

Galen Green
8606 Chestnut Circle, Apt. 3
Kansas City, Missouri 64131
816.807.4957 or 523.1813

Tuesday
January 01. 2008
New Year’s Day


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Wichita Made Me Do It

or

The Birth of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Multicameral Microcosm


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Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

-- Dylan Thomas, from “Fern Hill”


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Dear Shannon (& Company),


We move from world to world. An apt image of our movement might be that of a ghost swimming through thin air, from room to room (from camera to camera). Now that we are pushing 60, our "world" no longer resembles a "microcosm," but, rather, is exactly the same as the vast cosmos itself. That is to say that our world has opened and opened to encompass the entire cosmos. But things were quite other, when we were 6 -- or even 16.

When we are very young, we inhabit a multicameral microcosm, a relatively little "world," made up of many rooms, many camera. I like to amuse myself at times by envisioning a very young person as being a very tiny person, trapped like a pixy in one of those multicameral soap bubbles, one of those bubbles which is actually a series of interconnecting bubbles, with each individual bubble representing in my imagination a chamber, a camera, a separate spherical room -- like a three-dimensional Venn diagram. This pixy whom I imagine as being trapped in this interconnected series of spherical chambers represents, for me, the child or young person, trapped within his or her multicameral microcosm, yet somewhat free to swim like a ghost from room to room.

So it seems to me, in retrospect, was I, in my formative years in Wichita, Kansas -- hardly a ghost and hardly a pixy, but merely a diminutive young person, free to move about within the confines of my multicameral microcosm. What then shall we call those chambers in and out of which I moved, way back then, from one to the other to the other? Home, of course, was one, as were school and church and my hither and yon around the old neighborhood and in and out of the lives and living rooms of our closest neighbors. As I say, these interconnecting spherical chambers, in and out of which a young person is allowed to move in relative safety, might reasonably be said to constitute a three-dimensional Venn diagram, often overlapping one "set" circle (i.e. sphere) with another and yet another, etc.

I know that you know that I know, of course, that soap bubbles in the real (molecular) world, no matter how "interconnected" or interlocking they may appear to be, gleaming there in the kitchen sink or in one's child's foamy bubble bath, are, in reality as hermetically sealed off from one another as is this world from the next. It is only in this metaphor which my imagination is trying to download to your imagination that a young person is able to move from chamber to chamber like a pixy trapped in his or her multicameral microcosm of interconnected bubbles.


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Here's The Riddle of the Latter-Day Sphinx: "What goes upon 2 legs, then upon 4 wheels, then upon 4 legs, then upon 4 wheels, then upon 4 different wheels, then upon 2 wheels, then upon 6 wheels, then upon 2 legs again -- all before lunch time in his little life's journey?" The answer, of course, is: Galen Green, throughout his childhood in Wichita. Here's how it figures itself:

-- 2 legs of the person carrying him as an infant --
-- 4 wheels of the pram in which he's pushed about --
-- 4 "legs" of his own, upon which he crawls --
-- 4 wheels of his family's car --
-- 2 legs upon which he eventually walks upright --
-- 4 wheels of his little red wagon or blue peddle car --
-- 2 wheels of his bicycle --
-- 6 wheels of the city bus, as it conveys him downtown --
-- 2 legs of his own, which walk him all over downtown Wichita, where his five senses learn and learn and learn.

As part of the process of prewriting this piece, I was straining my brain earlier today in an attempt to recall the first time my parents let me take the city bus downtown by myself. I'm going to make an educated guess that it was probably sometime around 1962, when I'd have been perhaps 13 years old; and that it was most likely for the sole purpose of getting me to an after-school Youth Choir practice at First Methodist Church (q.v.), a sprawling compound which (as of this writing) nowadays takes up most of the city block bordered by Broadway & Topeka & 2nd & 3rd Streets -- just north of the center of downtown. Anyway, of all the interconnecting spherical chambers which made up my personal multicameral microcosm, when I was growing up in Wichita, it seems to me, in retrospect at least, that that spherical chamber we called "downtown" was probably the most exotic.

(Incidentally, the contemporary American writer, Bill Bryson [of A Walk in the Woods fame] has done a better job than I can ever hope to do, in portraying the exotic nature of "downtown" in the 1950's and '60's, through the eyes of a boy who'd have been very nearly our age back then; although the downtown he's reminiscing about in his recent humorous memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, is that of Des Moines, Iowa, rather than of Wichita, Kansas. That technicality not withstanding, as I read Bryson's wonderful book, it delivered me into a flood of vivid rememberings of downtown Wichita throughout my earliest years.

If I've retained a handful (a bouquet?) of the fondest of the fond images of the downtown dimension of my childhood that have been kind enough to stay with me this long, the two most vivid of those have to do with food -- 'though it's really not the food itself that I remember so much as it is those two most favorite of my favorite haunts, which would have to be Innes's Tea Room and that long and winding lunch counter at the Woolworth's on Douglas. To use that currently overused term of restaurant reviewers, it was primarily the ambience which won my heart. Or was it? How can my heart separate in memory the winning ambience of those two venues from the winning woman who was always with me, back during those introductory visits? I mean, of course, my adoptive mother, the retired schoolmarm, Margaret. Yet it isn’t so much Margaret que Margaret which lingers so fondly as it is the fact that we were alone, just the two of us. No Kevin. No Harry. No Lois. Just my mom and me, goofing off on a summer's day in downtown Wichita, Kansas. And perhaps most significantly of all, conversing, just like a couple of grownups -- or so it seemed to me at the time.



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When I entitled this installment "Wichita Made Me Do It," the visual imagery which burned from the back of my mind, down through these fingers with which I'm relating it to you now, was and is the indelible memory of my many consciousness-raising visits to Rector's Bookstore, at its original location in the 100 block of north Broadway, just a few doors south of the Miller Theater.

When the human creature is very young, as he or she moves from world to world to world, consciousness is born as a direct result of the breakdown (the expanding and melting away) of his or her multicameral microcosm. (. . . is born, is nurtured, is liberated, is empowered . . . .) I wish that I could paint for you a beautiful word picture of how the original Rector's Bookstore in downtown Wichita during the 5 or 6 years immediately preceding and following President Kennedy's assassination facilitated this birthing (etc.) process in my psychosocial development. I wish that I could, but I can't -- at least not today; maybe some other day.

Just this morning, I was trying to recall exactly when it was that I first set foot inside Rector's. It must have been sometime in 1962, during the Kennedy years, when you and I were students at Brooks Junior High School. Back then, Rector's Bookstore was second only to the campus bookstore in the Campus Activities Center at Wichita University (now WSU) -- in diversity, perversity, depth, breadth, range, flavor and scope. When I last visited Wichita in 2002, however, I discovered that both of these bookstores had been tragically diminished, had become but pale shadows of their former selves.

These days, America is pretty much stuck with Border's and Barnes & Noble, neither of which can hold a candle to the magnificent enlightenment to have been had at any number of independent and university bookstores across the country, back before the advent of the indoor shopping mall. And as I traveled around America throughout my early adulthood, these truly exciting bookstores proved a constant source of inspiration to me as a budding young writer on his way to becoming The Happy Peasant Heretic.

But the point I guess I'm trying to make here is this: When I think back now on all the chambers comprising the multicameral microcosm of my adolescence, and then focus in on the one I call "downtown Wichita in the mid-1960's," and then zoom in even closer on the single glowing magical sphere within that chamber’s sphere which "made me do it" (i.e. which nurtured, liberated and empowered me to become me), then the name of the object of that tight-zoom close-up would have to be Rector’s Bookstore.


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I could rhapsodize for hours about the seductive charms of Rector’s. But then, I could rhapsodize with equal vigor upon the allure of at least a score of other, albeit lesser, “sub-chambers” contained within the chamber of the downtown of our adolescence. A few of these which spring immediately to mind include: Jenkins’ Music Store, Head’s Shoe Store, Russell Stover’s Candy Store, Henry’s Clothier, the Orpheum and Miller theaters, and, of course, the downtown branch of the Wichita Public Library (that elegant old native stone Carnegie library with its deformed lions out front, across the street from the newer downtown branch). I guess I’ve already mentioned Innes’s (Wichita’s Macy’s) and Woolworth’s (every child’s nirvana). As I say, these are only a few of the many.


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Head's Shoe Store, if my memory serves me well, was located on the south side of Douglas, a few doors west of Woolworth's, and was, back then, a major outlet for Florsheim and Buster Brown brand shoes. As nearly as I, as a small child, could make out, my parents had been regular customs of a salesman there known to my little brother Kevin and me only as "Mr. Quick." (I believe that that was his actual surname.), since before I entered upon the scene in 1949. He was an uncommonly pleasant man, about their age and of their cultural background, who reminded me a little of that mysterious (but impeccably groomed) gentleman who used to ring strangers' doorbells and hand out those cashier's checks for $1, 000, 000 on that popular 1950's TV series entitled The Millionaire. Mr. Quick was very good with children and always seemed happy to see us dropping in on him at Easter time and at back-to-school time every year, when he could be assured of a tidy sale of Buster Browns or Keds for Kevin and me, appropriate to the season.

Years later, I found myself engaged in an amiable discussion with my (then) close friend John Garvey, trying to decide if my (adoptive) family of origin could more accurately be categorized as lower-middle class or upper-lower class (based upon some 9-tier socioeconomic model that was in vogue at the time -- Remember?). John asserted that Harry & Margaret belonged in the latter pigeonhole. And he, of course, would know -- being (literally!) a billionaire and all. I mention this to you here to contextualize the fact that my parents were both firm adherents to the (scientifically defensible) theory that, no matter how humble might be a peasant family's circumstances, their children absolutely unequivocally deserved to be shod as well as was feasible. I suspect that you and Steve and Chris can all recall some of the clownishly embarrassing hand-me-downs from my older cousin Bill I showed up wearing to grade school, when we were 5 and 6 and 7 years old.
(I certainly can.) But be assured: little Kevin and I could always be found – much to our parents' credit -- shod in the sturdiest and most tasteful Buster Browns our folks could afford.

By the way, Shannon, did you ever watch The Buster Brown Show on Saturday mornings? (Was it Saturdays? I forget.) Extremely primitive early television: just Andy Devine (aka Jingles Jones, Wild Bill Hickok’s confabulated sidekick on the TV series by the same name . . . brought to you by the makers of Kellogg's Sugar Smacks . . .) -- on a cramped sound stage, along with Andy's nemesis, Froggy the Gremlin -- subtly referential to the (then) Cold War with the Russians -- the "Gremlins from the Kremlin." Remember that bizarre little springing sound of Froggy's "Magic Twanger?" Of course, nearly all of early televised comedy had its roots in vaudeville, which, in turn, had its roots in Yiddish (and similar "ethnic" immigrant) theater. The Buster Brown Show was pretty much a complete bafflement to me as a child. I always suspected that there must surely be hidden meanings and coded messages which were aimed at "the big kids" out there in TV Land. Either that or else Andy & Froggy were, like Pinky Lee, mere masters of insipidity.

One last thing before we move on. If either Kevin or I end up dying of cancer, it will most likely be the fault of Head's Shoe Store. I'm sure that you remember fluoroscopes. They were parodied as props in numerous World War II era Warner Brothers cartoons. A hundred years from now, when we've all gone the way of all flesh, your great-great-grandchildren will still be able to watch animated representations of Daffy Duck's and Bugs Bunny's skeletal structures right through their cartoon skin and clothing, thanks to various cartoon parodies of fluoroscopes.

Beginning with my earliest visits to Head's Shoe Store, I can recall Mr. Quick having me stand up on a little platform with my feet (in whatever pair of new Buster Browns I was trying on that day) tucked under the slotted opening at the bottom of what resembled the tall wooden cabinet of a 1940's upright console-style radio/phonograph, much like the one in our living room at home. Mr. Quick would then flip on the power, so that this cabinetted fluoroscope would send near-lethal doses of x-rays up through my feet and shoes -- and then on up through my eyes and face and brain, as I peered down through the viewing window at the top of the cabinet. These types of in-store fluoroscope units were probably to be found by the tens of thousands throughout the industrialized world, back in that Age of Innocence (read: Age of Mass Delusion) when, as Bill Bryson points out in his own brilliant memoir of that period (q.v.), practically everything was considered to be good for us: cigarettes, sugar, fat, radiation.


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However, most of the worlds I frequented within the multicameral microcosm of my youth, especially those worlds within the world of downtown Wichita in the 1950's and '60's, were neither so welcoming nor so carcinogenic as was Head's Shoe Store, with its genial Mr. Quick, with his Buster Brown shoes and his handsome cabinet of deadly radiation. It probably turns out that I'm the last member of our high school class of 1967 to figure out just how fortunate we all were to have grown up in Wichita during that era, with its delicate balance between the fascinating and the boring, the stimulating and the dull. Safe, but not too safe. Seductive, but not overly seductive. Dangerous, but nothing like Detroit or Casablanca.

In one sense, it provided us with a kind of laboratory for learning about the world without undue risk to our, as yet, untoughened hides. This isn't to imply that downtown wasn't crawling with a thousand hazards and pitfalls back then. It was. Everything from pederasts and rapists to TB and hepatitis to careless drivers who'd run you down in a crosswalk to your standard-issue thieves and thugs who -- like all predators -- will always follow the food supply . . . lurked, just waiting to teach us harsh lessons from which we would never fully recover.

I guess that that's why God invented parents. Right? I imagine that yours, like mine, issued stern warnings with a long list of do's and don'ts, before ever letting you out of their sight -- certainly before ever letting you venture into the dangerous world of downtown on your own. In the case of Harry & Margaret, their edicts tended to take the form of gentle reminders of what they’d already told me in earlier times. I can recall that there was considerable emphasis on dirt, filth, contamination and the sorts of things I'd best not touch. And, for the most part, I took these admonitions to heart, and so, managed not to catch anything fatal. (Unless you want to count the radiation poisoning from Mr. Quick's Fluoroscopic Cabinet of Death.)



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Over the course of the past 40 years, I've occasionally been asked by several of our East High classmates where I was on that historic May 1967 afternoon when the so-called "Sandy's Race Riot" was taking place across the street from our alma mater. The short answer is: "downtown at Jenkins' Music Store." Diana Freeman and I had driven there immediately after school that day to look around for some sheet music -- and perhaps to pick up a new set or two of nylon guitar strings -- and perhaps the latest album by Judy Collins or Buffy Saint-Marie. (Joni Mitchell was too recent an arrival on the scene for either of us to have even heard of her at that point.)

Technically speaking, however, 1967 is outside the time-frame I was intending to place around today's thumbnail sketch of downtown Wichita as I first interfaced and interacted with it as one of the several "worlds" within the multicameral microcosm of my youth. By May of 1967, we were only minutes away from graduating from high school and then bursting into the bright blue open waters of university life.

(And, in my particular case, I was only inches away from cashing in some of that sense of overconfidence which all those downtown solo adventures had kindled within my soul, by setting out on the first of my lengthy hitchhiking excursions, which I later dubbed "Alone With America," in homage to an excellent book of literary criticism by the poet Richard Howard. This maiden voyage of my lonely thumb and backpack happened to take me into the Deeeeep South, including that part of Mississippi where those three young civil rights workers had been brutally murdered by the local Nazis, a mere three years prior to my visit there. More about all of this later.)

Shifting our focus back into the multicameral microcosm in question: I'm sure I was quite young when I first set foot inside Jenkins' Music Store, because it would have been with my mother, who played (accompaniment) piano for the adult Sunday School class (called "Triad," for some strange reason) to which she and my father had been active members since 1941, as well as for the various children's Sunday School classes which she and he team-taught throughout most of my childhood. (I was listening to Joni Mitchell's piano style, the other day, as she accompanied herself so deftly on "Blue Boy" and "Rainy Night House" on her 1970 Ladies of the Canyon album, and was struck by how much her style put me in mind of my mother's.)

My earliest visits to Jenkins' which I can actually remember with a reasonable degree of lucidity must have occurred sometime in 1961, around the time I embarked upon my 3-year program of private voice lessons with my parents' friend Carol Bean. You may remember Mrs. Bean's daughter, Donna, who was our age and who attended Brooks JHS with us all 3 years -- which just happened to coincide with the 3 years I studied voice with Donna's mother. (Carol Bean also gave piano lessons; and one of her pupils just happened to be Norman Mills, whom I'm guess you'll remember as one of the science teachers at Brooks. It seems to me that I can recall Mr. Mills explaining to me that he was "taking from" Mrs. Bean as a ploy to embolden his young daughter to do likewise.

But of course, my career as an enthusiastic customer of Jenkins' didn't end the day I took my last voice lesson from Mrs. Bean. In fact, quite the opposite turned out to be the case. Not only did I experience tremendous momentum as a result of the 3-year push from her voice lessons, but I found myself becoming, by the half-way point in my high school career, a veritable song junkie, spending what some folks considered an inordinate percentage of my meager allowance and, later, my equally meager salary as a “sacker/carry-out boy” at Mr. D’s IGA Store in the Ken-Mar Shopping Center, on more and more sheet music, songbooks, guitar strings, harmonicas, and vinyl folk albums from which to steal, borrow and/or adapt more and more intricate lyric arrangements and instrumental styles. For the sake of the historical record: it’s worth pointing out that the only sources for the rarer folk music releases on vinyl between Denver and Kansas City back then were Jenkins’ and (believe it or not) the David’s retail outlet on East Kellogg.


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The birth of consciousness in the breakdown of the multicameral microcosm is, of course, only one way of looking at the thing -- of looking at how it was that I, as a young and unformed person, growing up in Wichita, Kansas in the age of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, was impacted, shaped, impelled, nurtured, liberated and empowered by what I brushed up against. What I’ve shared here has shamelessly left out more than it’s included. But it’s all that I had time for today. I’m truly sorry that I was able to do a better job of it. But I try to console myself with the thought that what I’ve just blurted out here is better than nothing. I live in the faith that it really is.


Nevertheless, I regret having had to leave so much out. Would that I'd have had time to rhapsodize about all the great -- as well as the not-so-great -- movies I sat through at those grand old movie palaces, the Miller and the Orpheum. And as you'll undoubtedly recall, it wasn't only what we were watching there in the dark, up on the big silver screen, bordered by plush velvet curtains, but also the lush landscapes and skyscapes painted on the theater walls and ceiling. Yes, yes; I know: 20th century America contained literally thousands of such ornate temples to the Goddess of Cinema. But the Miller and Orpheum -- along with a handful of others that were still around during our younger years -- were uniquely ours. They belonged to the people of mid-century Wichita and were emblematic of our being a part of something so vast and magnificent as to be unnamable, a part of the zeitgeist -- thereby anointing us as players in the oceanic tragicomedy of contemporary human history.

And would that I'd have had time to rhapsodize about what my parents insisted on calling "Skid Row" back in those days -- probably mostly for lack of a better name -- that area of a few blocks of two and three story 19th century buildings lining both sides of Douglas, between the much maligned Easton Hotel and the relatively modern editorial headquarters of the Wichita Eagle. I gather that this formerly blighted stretch has been gentrified in recent years. Back when we were growing up, however, it provided an irresistible magnet for junior bohemians, future philosophers, wannabe urban anthropologists, Bob Dylan imitators, nostalgia addicts and bargain hunters such as I was at the ages of 16 and 17. I'm not claiming to have been the very first junior bohemian to have discovered the Skid Row junk stores and pawnshops back then, but all available evidence indicates that I was certainly among the first. Moreover, right next door to the Salvation Army thrift shop stood the Skid Row Beanery. When I took Pam Batchelor there, on one of our first dates, to see the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, one evening in the winter of 1966, word seems to have spread through old East High like wildfire, so that I was finding myself, in less than a week's time, congratulated for my creativity in dating.

Of course downtown Wichita, neither then nor now, is or was (or ever will be) a spherical chamber, a soap bubble interconnected within a network of soap bubbles; nor is it, was it, or ever will it be a room (camera) within any actual (molecular) multicameral microcosm. It merely remembered itself to me that way today, as I started out to scratch the surface of this mountain of reminiscences which I've carried around here inside me for more than half a century. Again: for the purpose of historical accuracy: downtown Wichita in the age of our youth, yours and mine, bore the appearance of the most average of average Midwestern cities in the middle of the 20th century: lots of buildings – some of them tall, some not so tall – streets and sidewalks and parking meters and cars and trucks and buses and streetlights and the tameless prairie wind blowing trash around and the sky above and people walking around, going about their business, breathing in and out.


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That’s about all I have time for today, Shannon, except for this song lyric that I composed way back in 1980. It started out as a cute little children’s song, but seems to have “gotten away from me,” as Harry the Toolmaker might have said about a difficult piece of machinery. Hope that it brings a wry smile. And that the New Year brings you everything your heart desires.



Until Next Time, Stay Well,

Galen



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CHAIN AND DIE



I love to listen to the evening rain, as it gallops from the sky.
It always helps to ease the pain, when I listen to it cry.
I’ll dangle from my golden chain, until the day I die.
I love to smell the evening die, in a city full of rain,
To watch it dangle from its chain, then vanish into the sky.
It always makes me want to cry to hear it scream in pain.

Chorus:
When the radios rain from the sky and Love’s pain makes the city cry,
The shoppers form a chain and die...shoppers form a chain and die.

I love to taste the bitter pain, when Love begins to die,
And the radios begin to cry as they walk out in the rain.
They disappear into the sky, but leave their golden chain.
I love to dangle from that chain and writhe in clouds of pain
That jam the city’s evening sky as Love begins to die.
The radios begin to rain and make me want to cry.
(repeat chorus)

I love to watch the shoppers cry as they form an endless chain
And wander out into the rain to try to escape the pain
Of knowing that their brains will die before they reach the sky.
I love to touch the evening sky. It makes me want to cry.
I love to watch the radios die and leave their golden chain.
And I love to taste the bitter pain when Love dies in the rain.
(repeat chorus)



Words and Music by Galen Green c 1980


/gg