Three plus lives

Intro to a wastrel's wanderings

The Several Lives of Rafio the Mad  Mink Monk
Be careful what you wish for

Many times over my several lifetimes, friends and colleagues have urged me to write the story of my rather checkered existence.

I have always demurred, telling them that I was too busy living today to ponder my past.

But today it is a few weeks before Christmas 2009, and my wife Patricia has disappeared again to single-handedly bring America out of this recession, and I actually have a spare hour or three because it's also a rainy, Saturday afternoon and I can't go for a bike ride.

But beware, Freudian slips abound, and even as I typed the title of this nascent novel I initially wrote "the Mad Mink."

To whet your lit'ry appetite, here's a line about a couple of these several lives;

1. Born in a 16 room home with servants in exquisite Woodbury Connecticut where I spent my first decade and a half being spoiled r0tten as a doting mother's only child.
2. Prep schools; Taft School for boys, where I convinced my mother to let me transfer to Culver Military Academy (cadet Brooks on right at 16) so I could become an officer (if not a gentleman) and go fight the Nazis. It was the worse mistake of my entire life.
3. At age 21 both parents die within a year, got married to wife #1 and quit college to become a "newspaper man" like my father. Here's where I very nearly was killed the first time.
   
4. After 6 years left wife #1 with two cars and a ten-room house next to the Greenwich Connecticut golf course and moved to Greenwich Village to sow a few more wild oats.
5. At age 28 met Patricia when she was 17 (she actually stole my sketchpad in Ptown), and we opened Cafe Rafio, "Where the Beat Meet to Eat, and the Square Dare to Compare." Here's where I almost got killed the second time.
   
6. Sowed an un-wild oat (Pat at 19, on right, when we got pregnant) and left The Village to work for the New York Post and become a square myself... and almost got murdered the third time.

The rest you'll have to read below as I scribble my life one chapter at a crime - ooops.

Chapter 1 - The disturbing eccentricity of the amateur biographer

Three Plus Lives - Spoiled rotten in Woodbury

The sixteen room home I was raised in still looks down on Main Street and St. Teresa's across the way. That giant sycamore tree to the right was enormous sixty years ago and larger still today.

There is something disturbingly eccentric about anyone wishing to inflect his or her life story on an unsuspecting public - unless one is a Gandhi or a Christ, but people that sane seldom do so.

But I assure you I am only doing it for your own good, and I promise it will be short, if not sweet although this is mainly due to a bad memory of my youth, and the weird reasons for it.

I was the first male Brooks born off the family apple orchards in Cheshire, Connecticut, a village my forebear Henry had help found in the late-1600s. There is an area of that town named Brooksvale in his honor we assume because he fell to his death helping to build that area's first Congregational Church, an affliction which affected my family until I fled organized religion at age 18.

I was the third Brooks male forced to attend the world named Walter. My father had left Cheshire in 1917 to go fight in the first World War as a muleskinner driving a mule train to bring ammunition to the front lines for the 102 Regiment of the Yankee Division. When he was discharged he went to a business college and upon graduation got a job as a reporter for the Waterbury CT Republican and American, two daily newspapers, where he rose to be the political columnist covering the State Legislature until his death in the newsroom thirty-two years later.

The world was much smaller the year I left my mother's womb, America's population was but 123 million, it's two and a half times that today at 305 million, and a political columnist back then knew and was pandered to by most prominent citizens of central Connecticut.

I can't count the number of times my father got tickets squelched, and twice got me appointments to West Point which I turned down

Walter Sr. was a Republican, a Son of the American Revolution, and since my natal day was also election day in 1930, he received a congratulatory telegram from the Republican candidate for Governor which read,

"Congratulations on the birth of your son -STOP -
This must bode well for the party - STOP"

Needless to say the GOP lost that election and didn't get back into the Governor's mansion until I had left the state 16 years later to go to Culver Military Academy in Indiana which turned me into a pacifist and the reason I wouldn't attend West Point when offered the chance for a free, four-year college education.

That should have given my father pause, but he hoped for the best and got me instead.

The reason I remember so little of my youth in Woodbury CT is due to its absolute serenity. We recall best those great calamities of life, and since I had none, my youth is a honey-coated, happy blur until both my parents died within a year when I was twenty-one.

I assumed that all kids lived as I did - in a sixteen room house with maids and doting, supportive relatives.

My parents had lost a blue-eyed blond daughter named Muriel to pneumonia three years before I was whelped, and my subsequent existence was one pleasure after another as an only child who was spoiled rotten and given one new toy after another. There were no road bumps to remind me of growing up.

Woodbury's First Congo Church is the county's oldest, and I was the youngest ever member to join. I later become its soloist. This old photo shows the church in 1870 when is was already two hundred years old.

Woodbury Connecticut was, and probably still remains, a picture postcard, lily white enclave of well-off Yankees. With a population of 1,998 back then, it had five churches and two drugstores.

Egomaniac that I was, I managed as a boy soprano, to be vocalist in two of them - my own First Congregational Church (there were two Congo churches in this tiny town), and for one month each summer than my minister vacationed, I sang a different, Latin repertoire at Roman Catholic St. Teresa's church across the street from my mother's restaurant.

My mother, Evelyn Mae Brooks who was born in Skaneateles NY of Dutch-Irish stock, had opened a tea room before I was born to assuage her sorrow at my sister's death, and by the time I was in the local elementary school a block away, the restaurant, Mrs. Brooks' Green Acre Grill, had grown quite large and included a full sized ice cream soda shop of the era.

I never realized how my position as a "soda jerk" enhanced by popularity, and often brought a school mate to the restaurant for lunch where I ate every meal of my young life by simply sitting at a table and ordering from the menu.

My school chum and I would grab a half pint of Hood's ice cream to eat on our walk back to afternoon classes.

On our yearly visit to NYC, we stayed at The Forest Hotel, a sister hotel next to The Algonquin Hotel on  West 44th. Street.

I don't recall more than a couple meals, probably Thanksgiving or Christmas, which were served in our large dining room in the big house up the hill behind the restaurant.

Every Fall mom would take me to New York City for a week. We stayed at the Forest Hotel next to the famed Algonquin Hotel, and went to a half dozen of that season's top Broadway productions.

Between shows she would bring me the the Best & Company, a classy but long-gone, high-end department store of the era, where I was left with the toy department manager on the sixth floor for an hour to choose my Christmas presents.

I came home with armies of hand-painted little toy soldiers which would be worth a mint today if I hadn't blown them up every July Fourth.

In my early teens she decided I needed to "see" America.

She bought an open ticket on the railroad system of the day, and we spent six weeks touring across the continent ending on Vancouver Island, BC after stops in Chicago (the stock yards) and Lake Louise (the Canadian Rockies).

We swung south stopping in San Frabncisco and L.A., and one to the Grand Canyon and New Orleans and back home.

Thirty years later I followed her parental example and took six weeks off from work to make the same trip with my wife Patricia and sons Todd and Jay when they were the same age as I had been.

Opulence and pleasure were my constant companions, and as powerful a drug as any other.

COMING: To Miami's South Beach for a cure, and two terrible prep schools.

Read the Intro here.

Chapter 2 - South Beach, 1940s and Commie coffee katches

America was a different place and civility ran rampant

We spent the 1940-41 winter on Miami's South Beach during the heyday of the Art Deco hotel boom there.

A winter on Collins Avenue, return to WW2 and political polemics

This bucolic boyish existence was interrupted by the lack of antibiotics in 1940.

While penicillin had recently been discovered, it along with the other early antibiotics, was not available to the civilian population as America geared up for World War 2.

When a second winter laid me low with extremely painful earaches, our next door family doctor suggested to my mother that the only thing which might help would be to break the cycle by getting me to a warm climate for several months away from New England's wretched winter weather.

Mom drove the green Ford "Woody" while I rode shotgun reading a map and making sandwiches for several days.

My mother immediately did four things;

1.  She bought a 1940 Ford Woody Station Wagon,
2. Loaded it with a big tin container filled with salami and bologna tubes, cheese, fruit and bread,
3. Left my Uncle John in charge of her business, and
   
4. She & I drove off to Miami Beach down U.S. Route 1.

Those of you who have grown up using the Interstate Highway system's super highways like I-95 which can take a speedy driver from New England to Miami in a day or two, can not imagine what driving old U.S. Route 1 the same distance was like in 1940.

It must have taken us a week to get to Miami Beach where mom immediately went to work as a licensed dietitian in one of the hotels, and I attended the local elementary school.

This was the heyday of the South Beach Art Deco era with some of America's most attractive and exotic hotels  being built along Collins Avenue. It was here I developed my lifelong hatred for New England weather.

After we returned north in the Spring of 1941, I never had another earache.

War fever and an oasis of plenty in a rationed land

This is typical of the WW2 posters which covered walls in every town in America

But back in Woodbury CT, America was preparing for World World Two, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, our country rapidly built up the armed forces to 11 million men and women, all of whom needed to be fed and cared for by the government.

That is when everything changed on the home front.

The government rationed everything, especially the most pleasurable products like gas, tires, coffee, meat, sugar and butter. This is the era when margarine became widely accepted as a substitute, and synthetic tires were introduced because the Japanese forces had occupied the Southeast Asian areas where most the world's rubber tree plantations were located.

Everything went to our servicemen and women first, and life changed drastically for everyone I knew, except at the Brooks house.

Since dad was an editor which was a priority occupation, he had a special gas card, and since mom ran a restaurant, we never lacked for coffee, butter or steak.

For the first time women began to replace men who went off to war, but my mother had always employed strong women like herself, so the Female Liberation movement happened forty years earlier at my home.

Growing up I never experienced gender, ethnic or racial bigotry until I went to prep school in the eighth grade. There were only one Black and two Italian families in Woodbury in the 1940s, and they were among the most well-liked.

Communist, Socialist and Republican scuttlebutt

Jasper McLevy, the Socialist mayor of Bridgeport, stopped for coffee and conversation every Friday night.

Mom's restaurant was on Route 6 in Litchfield County where many of New York City's wealthy had summer places, and by late Friday evening many of them would stop for a drink and to argue politics at Mrs. Brooks' Green Acre Grill.

Stiring this pot was my Uncle John who had come to live with us during my early childhood.

John Bowen had been a vaudeville  star in theaters across America until that form of live variety was replaced by movies in the 1930s.

Uncle John was a brilliant raconteur, and he was my surrogate father since dad's newspaper hours meant he was seldom home when I was awake.

John and mother would start the ball rolling during these political powwows with these  Friday night owls.

The most memorable members of the coffee klatch were Bill Burke, a New York Communist Party secretary, and Jasper Mc Levy who for twenty-four years was the Socialist mayor of Bridgeport CT.

It's hard to believe how friendly and good-hearted these discussion were. Both the Soviet Union and communism were popular with most Americans until after the allied victory in 1945. America had entered the war with its Pacific fleet destroyed at Pearl Harbor, and the Russians were the only one facing Nazi Germany in Europe until the allies landed in Italy and France in 1944.

Bill Burke's wife was the personal assistant for Michael Lerner, of store chain fame (now New York & Co.), who was a notable big game hunter of the era. They lived in his apartment on Park Avenue, NYC, and used to have me visit this exotic penthouse where all the furniture was custom built using the skins and limbs of the African wildlife Lerner had dispatched. In  retrospect, Lerner must have been a wealthy supporter of the Communist Party, as were many other idealistic Americans before the Cold War.

About the time the discussion slowed down, my Republican father would get back from his newspaper which went to press about 10PM. He joined what became a decade long political salon where voices were never raised, and genuine friendship was obvious despite strong differences in opinions.

It was a heady experience for a young teenager.

After America declared war on Germany, the Soviet Union became our ally, and no one under fifty can believe how civil the discourses were then between the far left and the far right.

It took Joseph McCarthy and the Religious Right to destroy this civil discourse between Americans who held different opinions.

We are the lesser for it.

Chapter 3 - I never met a school I couldn't hate

Off to the hell of prep schools

I hated school. I hated kindergarten and elementary school, but I didn't develop a fulsome loathing for school until I entered Taft School followed and exacerbated by Culver Military Academy.

Taft is an ivy-covered Yale preparatory school in Watertown CT where mother enrolled me when the school added an eighth grade to the curriculum because she was not satisfied with the level of learning in the small Woodbury elementary school.

I'm sure she also strongly sensed my resistance to schooling in general.

At Taft I chaffed at the regimen and rules. I was used to getting everything I wanted, and now had to obey the dons. In addition, in this era these private schools were not co:ed and my raging hormones were deeply offended.

After a year I started nagging my mother to let me transfer to Culver, which I succeeded in doing for the Class of 1949 when transferred to Culver in September of 1944. World War 2 was at its height and the only thing anyone thought or cared about, and I wanted to fight the enemy as an officer when I was old enough in few years.

A popular movie of my youth was "Tom Brown of Culver" directed by William Wyler. The New York Times review made many a boy want to toddle off to Indiana.

Sitting at attention for my Plebe year was not my idea of fine dining. This photo is from a LIFE magazine feature on this great school where I was a lousy student.

Culver was and still is gorgeous, on Indiana's second largest lake, but I managed to arrive for the final year of hazing, and the school didn't even have a Spring vacation then - we studied from New Year's until June.

Worse yet, the war ended towards the end of my freshman year, and with it, my reason for coming to the wilds of the Hoosier State in the first place, a benighted province I have managed to avoid ever since.

Being there at the same time as George Steinbrenner didn't help matters either, and later Bill Koch, Arianna Huffington's ex and the Crown Prince of Yugoslavia attended. At least George gave the school an indoor Olympic pool and Huffington built a new library.

The discipline gave me ulcers by my third year, but crammed a good education down my throat whether I wanted one of not.

I was the only four-year student to graduate as a buck private.

A great number of my classmates were the sons of Latin American dictators of the era. Their daddies felt that sending their sons off to a military school to be trained in military arts might help them keep the masses in their lowly places when they graduated.

I was completely out of place. I regularly was punished by having to "march post" for one infraction or another. That meant countless hours marching alone around the school quadrangle toting my 9-½ pound M1 rifle instead of enjoying the scant time allowed for personal fun each day.

My deportment was so lacking in the academy's approval they did not allow me to be a member of senior class until a few months before graduation.

And most of my classmates were bellicose lads, while I was a pacifist, like "a rose among thorns."

When I returned for my 50th class reunion, I was complaining to fellow grads about how they were great successes at Culver and had all risen to officer or non-com rank by graduation while I was a failure.

But they replied, "Walter, we all admired you. You were the only one they couldn't 'break'".

These critical thoughts rose up like an unwanted pustule as I read my Alumni bulletin from Culver Military Academy above on the  right which extols the virtues and achievements of my fellow alumni.

One such who graduated a year ahead of me was George "Damned Yankee" Steinbrenner. And yes, George on the top on right, was as a big a snob and lout as a teenager as he became in adult life. Even worse, he was in The Black Horse Troop while I was a mere infantryman.

Another infamous alum was Bill "Damn the Wind Farm" Koch, in the middle on right, who won the America's Cup on his way to funding an organization dedicated to stopping America's first offshore wind farm.

Be careful what you wish for

You see, I hated that school with a passion, but believe that Culver made me the man I became. I have been rebelling its discipline and regimen ever since, and it surely explains why I became a  Beat Poet and a voluptuary shortly after graduating.

The (rather good) wages of sin 

Luckily these same characteristics helped me become a successful newspaperman, and I have always been secretly proud of the fact that I survived four years at Culver until the latest alumni bulletin arrived this week.

It contained an article in the magazine Elite calling the school a meritocracy but also extolling its most famous alumni.

I was not on that short list.

But Osterville's Bill Koch was.

What an ironic juxtaposition that Bill Koch, America's Cup winner, and our Nantucket Sound wind farm's greatest financial detractor, should have shared the same education as myself, the wind farm's most clamorous promoter, and both ended up with homes on Cape Cod. 

Of course I have just the one while Bill has a half dozen other homes scattered around the globe.

But what an unholy trio of "Culver men" we represent - Steinbrenner, Koch and Brooks.   It does make one remember the adage, "Coincidences are God's puns."
------------------------------THE SHORT LIST------------------------------

Chapter 4 - Better to have loved & lost, than never to have lost at all

Confessions of a known fornicator

I think it only fair that my dear readers be advised concerning what a complete cad and libertine I was during my misspent youth. On the other hand, misspent may be the only profitable way to fritter away this only unchained time in one's life.

The claim that men think about sex every 7 seconds has been soundly refuted in the medical and physiologic journals, but they never asked me.

I know there have been days when the thought hasn't interrupted my thinking for an hour or so. I just can't seem to recall many of them.

Remember, I grew up decades before the sexual revolution, and little boys and girls of my era had to discover most of the facts of life for themselves, a very poor method with no Masters & Johnson to help.

We played "doctor" a lot, until our mothers caught us, but these amateur examinations did little to answer our curiosity.

I think the biggest two disappointments of my early life were when I discovered;

1. The frosting on cakes was made of lard, and
   
2. Parents "did it" too.

Up until then we assumed that while the rest of humanity might indulge in these interesting but sweaty acts of love, our parents would never deign to do so.

My eureka moment came under a bridge next to our local swimming hole while I changed cloths on a hot summer day. There, at the age of eleven or twelve, manual manipulation finally resulted in the discovery of the pleasure which resulted in the act and why everyone was so excited about it.

That's why the suggestion about those seven seconds seemed conservative, and why shortly after I came to really "know" my Aunt Julia, in the Biblical sense that is.

Julia wasn't a real aunt, although I had called her that all my young life.

She was a friend of my mother's whose husband had died in the First World War, which made her somewhere between 45 and 55 years old, but at twelve and a half, anyone over twenty seems ancient.

She came to visit us several times a year for as long as I could remember, and on a bright summer day when I was twelve and a half, she came again, and I was asked to carry her suitcase to her bedroom for her.

One thing led to another, and I eagerly lost my innocence to an old family friend.

Today, I suppose, her actions would be thought criminal, but since I was the aggressor , I only think of "Aunt Julia" as one of the most amazing , comfortable and convenien occurrences of my entire life.

Think about it for a moment.

Most teenage males even today suffer the pangs of unrequited lust for most of their formative years. They face rejection after rejection until most are in their twenties, or worse yet, married.

I, on the other hand, could play at the usual game of love with my peers knowing that if all else failed (and it usually did) there was always kind, understanding and available Aunt Julia.

As the Buddha said, "Of all the worldly passions, lust is the most intense. All other worldly passions seem to follow in its train."

Chapter 5 - The best roommate a boy ever had

Raised by an retired vaudeville comic, Uncle John

People who meet me sometimes remark on my garrulous nature and my story-telling ability.

These are all gifts from my surrogate father, John Bowen.

A few typical vaudeville acts like Robinson's Elephants and Fink's Mules. Joh's act was Marston & Manley.

Uncle John was my mother's step-uncle, the brother of her step-mother whom I never meet, so he wasn't even a real relation, but he was an amazing substitute.

I don't have a photo of him, but he looked like those classic picture of Santa Claus without the beard.

John was bald except for a fringe of hair above his ears, and he would allow me as a budding artist to paint his bald head so he looked like a bearded man from above.

John was born in New Haven CT and spent his adult life as a vaudeville actor on the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Circuit traveling back and forth across America performing his various skits on theater stages between movies.

John, Irish and lapsed Catholic, was long divorced from his Jewish wife who he had met during the famous San Franciso earthquake of 1906.

Vaudeville was a huge attraction from the late 19th century until it was literally destroyed by Joseph Kennedy in the 1930s  when he was an owner of a movie studio and theater booking company and wanted to focus the public on his studio's more profitable films rather than the vaudeville acts.

When vaudeville finally collapsed, John came to live with us, and for all my childhood helped run our restaurants and literally raised me because my father worked for a morning newspaper and was seldom home when I was awake.

One of Uncle John's tales

He said he once took a job as cook on a railroad where he rode in the caboose at the end of a long freught train. He had to cook for the crew and also bring the train's engineer his hot lunch in the engine twenty cars ahead.
   There was a very steep hill which John waited for because the train could never  make it in the first attempt.
   As the train came to a stop near the top of the hill, Uncle John would step off the caboose and wait for the engine to pass on its way back down the hill to try again.
   He simply handed the engineer his lunch as the steam engine went by him.
   Then as the train started up on its second try he would step back on the caboose as it slowly passed.

For many formative years I shared a room with Uncle John who told me a new bedtime story every night.

And every night the story was different, and they all came from his vivid imagination drawn from his thirty years on the stage.

He was the kind of man who always had a pair of socks hanging next to the stove to warm for me when I returned with wet and frozen feet from ice skating.

He was simply the warmest and most charming of men.

He was also an alcoholic.

He was what's called a "bender drinker."

John would not touch a drop for three months or longer, and then disappear for a week until he ran out of money.

Help like Alcoholics Anonymous didn't exist until 1937, and wasn't wide spread until years later, so his ability to stop "cold turkey" for months at a times was all he had.

Needless to say, he returned as the wonderful, warm and clever man he had always been, never seemingly the worse for wear.

I can't even blame my own drinking problems on him since he wasn't a relative and I was a more pedestrian working drunk during my mid-life until AA saved my butt thirty years ago.

But that is a tale for a later chapter.

Chapter 6 - Après Julia, le déluge - Life 1 ends and life 2 begins

A well wasted youth comes to a frightful end

What a charmed life I led until now. After this baptism of eros I frittered away the rest of my teen years when home from prep school.

When I came back home after graduating from Culver, my parent had divorced, and mom's business could not afford to pay for a private college, so I worked my way through the University of Connecticut by driving a milk truck among other menial jobs.

But Culver had spoiled me by jamming so much knowledge into my reluctant brain that my courses at UConn didn't reach the levels I had in my final years at Culver until my third year when all hell broke loose.

In less than one year both my parents died.

My relationship with my father was solid and above par for the era, but I was truly a "mother's boy" with a deep and kindred relationship with her.

We were so much alike, and not just our personalities.

If you want to know what my mother loved like, imagine my face with a woman's hair style of 1950 but without my mustache.

I was (some say still am) a snotty-nose little egoist who thought the world was his oyster, and no one else deserved a clam knife.

As I ended my teens and began my twenties, the normal "leaving the nest" syndrome began, and our friendship was testy at times.

She even set up a completely separate apartment for me in our sixteen room home to give more more freedom than any of my peers, but I was (some say still am) a snotty-nose little egoist who thought the world was his oyster, and no one else deserved a clam knife.

A day came in the Fall of 1952 when we had a pretty bad argument after which I stomped off to bed and mom went out for a walk to cool off.

Very early the next morning I was awakened by a delivery man pounding of our front door.

He had come upon my mother lying at the corner of our house in the rain in a coma.

She never regained consciousness, and I was never able to make amends.

It haunts me to this day over a half century later.

I have almost no memory of the months which followed. It was such a traumatic experience that it literally drove the thought and image of her out of my head for over a year. I walked trough the wake and the funeral in a daze.

Her estate was in shambles, and our home was sold to pay her debts, probably for my prep school education, and I left Woodbury a few months later penniless and without a single personal possession except my clothes.

I kept not even a single photo of my family, nothing.

Dating with dad

During the next few months I lived in a studio apartment in Waterbury while I attended college sporatically.

Dad and I even double dated a few times, and we must have resembled two lost souls.

Then one day the second knock came on my door.

My father had died at his desk at the Waterbury Republican & American where he had worked since leaving college.

He lingered a day or so in hospital, and then joined my mother in the family plot in Woodbury, less than one year after her death.

They had both died of coronary thrombosis, a stroke.

In retrospect, given the era and their diet and high blood pressure, I assume their arteries hardened and were clogged with cholesterol. Theirs was the first generation to sit at a desk rather than work on the family farm, but they continued to eat like their forebears with tragic results.

It would be another generation before American began to alter their diet for the times.

Chapter 7 - Picking up the pieces

Veronica and Evie

I make no excuses, I was hurting and lonely, and a wonderfully, warm and gentle girl offered me her love.

I didn't hesitate for an instant to accept her gift.

Veronica Dorn was a customer on my milk route, a job I had while working my way through the University of Connecticut after my parents both died within a year of each other.

Veronica, or as our daughter calls her now, Ronnie, lived in Prospect CT with her father Joe,  older sister Margaret and younger brother Bobby, but at sixteen Vera ran everything and acted years older.

She ran her father's house, and I don't recall anyone successfully challenging her authority. Her mother Mary had run off with a long-time boyfriend, and she reminded me much of her daughter.

Vera was tall, voluptuous and eager for love. She looked very much like Leonardo DiVinci's portrait of the Mona Lisa, and she probably saved my sanity during this period.

We married in the rectory of a Catholic Church where I agreed to raise our daughter in that religion. We named her Evelyn after my mother.

Sometime around our first year together I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night with vivid memories of my mother's death and memories of her life flooding my mind.

I had not thought about my mother in well over a year or longer.

I suppose some sort of self-defense took over at her my mother's death, and my subconscious mind knew I could not handle the grief at the time  even if my consciousness didn't realize it.

I cried in Vera's arms for a long time that night, and have been able to think of my mother rationally ever since.

Right after my father's death I had quit college and looked for a job at an area newspaper. I had never thought of being a journalist or a newspaperman before his death.

At twenty I got my first newspaper job in 1951 at the Naugatuck CT Daily News as Classified Advertising Manager at $35 a week and all the newsprint I could eat.

Unfortunately Naugatuck was then the home of US Rubber's reclamation plant and the two smelled like a municipal-sized fart.

Vera and I used to double date with Don Anderson, the Sports Editor who took our wedding photo above on right, and Justine Kirkwood, the Society Editor who ended up living a miles away from me on Cape Cod a lifetime later.

Justine became the conservative chairman of the Orleans Republican party and I became a liberal Democrat - ah, youth.

On to Greenwich

Vera and I had an apartment in that town for almost two years until I moved up to the Greenwich CT Time in that swanky , seaside town.

Vera was a lovely woman, as this photo from our marriage shows,

Here we are walking newborn Evie in Prospect, CT.

Vera sitting on our bed in Naugatuck, CT.

At the defunct Naugatuck Daily News I drove a '49 red Ford Convertible with a white top and white wall tires.

At the Greenwich Times I segued into a 1953 MG-TD, two of the spiffiest cars ever built.

As last man hired in Greenwich they assigned me the worse economic territory they had, the down-market, factory town across the state border, Port Chester, NY.

There were only three good things about Port Chester in those days;

1. The town smelled like Life Savers because the factory was there,
2. The hot dogs at the Texas Hot Wiener stand was still the best I've ever eaten, and
3. A guy named Carl Bennett had a warehouse-like store at the end of town where he sold electronics, house goods and toys at what was just starting to be called "discount prices."

None of the Greenwich newspapers other ad salesmen deigned to call on such a lowly sort, but I was fascinated.

Carl didn't get co:op advertising matching funds from manufacturers because he wasn't selling at their "suggested retail price."

The newspaper had bought me a new Polaroid "Land Camera" which had just come out, and I suggested to Carl we take photos of his stuff and run full pages across the border in Connecticut featuring item and price, item and price, ad infinitum.

Carl became the newspaper's biggest advertiser, and he hired me to moonlight as his advertising director at age 23.

I would spend an evening each week in his apartment in Stamford CT with Carl and his wife Dorothy as we planned campaigns.

He named his fledgling discount store after him and his wife, and called it CALDOR.

The rest is history, and Carl and Doris sold out at the height of the market.

Around this time Vera and I split up after six years.My departures was utterly selfish, but I assuaged my guilt by leaving her with everything I owned at the time, and took off in my corvette to work on the road for the H.T. Dickinson Ad Agency where I created TV magazines for newspapers from Pennsylvania to Maine.

Vera went on to marry a couple more times, moving to Phoenix AZ with Evie. We lost touch completely for three decades - she wanted no part of me, and who could blame her?

By the time she allowed me back in her life she was owner of a junk yard and wrecker service on the Alcan Highway in Valdez, Alaska.

I may be the only ex-husband who has such an interesting ex-wife as the remarkable Veronica.

My daughter Evelyn (now called Lynn) lives in Arizona with her two beautiful daughters, Carah and Robyn, and now their children, so I am even a great grandfather to boot. Two years ago Vera died from breast cancer like so many women today.

She was a wonderful wife and a wonderful woman.

I was a rotten husband and father.

I did well at H. T. Dickinson, and seldom spent more than two months at any newspaper.

This was in the mid-1950s, and America was sleeping through the quietest years of the last century during Dwight Eisenhower's placid administration where everything was cool, women, blacks and immigrants still were second-class citizens, and of course some people protested the peace and quiet.

They were known as Beatniks.

They wrote angry poetry about America's ills, and I, sitting alone in hotel rooms from Houlton ME to Greensburg PA, begin scribbling his own protest poetry as I sold advertising and created television magazine or sections for newspapers.

If that's not a little schizophrenic I don't know what is.

Guess which side won.

Chapter 8 - If you remember the '60s you didn't experience them

 Dropping out - Life #3 begins

Beat quotes:

"I got treated very badly in Texas. They don't treat beatniks too good in Texas. Port Arthur people thought I was a beatnik, though they'd never seen one and neither had I."
- Janis Joplin

"I was a beatnik in the '50s before the hippies came along." - Charles Manson

"It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on." - Jack Kerouac

I dropped out in 1958. After two years on the road creating television sections and magazines for newspapers I had run my '56 Corvette into the ground and was driving a company car.

I called my boss at the H.T. Dickinson Co. and told him where the keys were, and I headed for Greenwich Village and the start of life #3.

No life could have been more different after a sheltered preppy youth, a big house next to the Greenwich Country Club and roaring through one newspaper experience after another living high off the hog as the company's top account executive.

I had one "significant other" in Houlton ME, a woman named Billy and another in Greensburg PA whose name is lost in the fog of my ill-spent youth. I was true to them both in my fashion following the line from the song in Finian's Rainbow "When I'm Not Near the Girl I Love, I Love the Girl I'm Near."

I was mad about them both. Billy and I would drive from Houlton to Greenwich Village and back on weekends to visit the jazz joints like the Blue Note, Birdland and the Village Vanguard, and she never allowed my excessive speeding to interfere with our love-making. It was a 1,130 round trip.

Once during that period, when I was working at the Holyoke MA Transcript, I left the newspaper office at 5pm on a Friday and drove to Palm Beach FL to see Molly Bain, a petite blue eyed blond with whom I was smitten at the time. That was a 2,760 mile round trip.

I was stopped by the Georgia State Police going 125 mph in my Corvette on a 2,760 mile weekend round trip to visit a girfriend in Florida.

In my cherry red Corvette convertible I was stopped driving 125 mph in Georgia and still managed to have a night of bliss and a return to Holyoke in time for work Monday at 9am.

But when I left the road in '58, I moved in with a girl I knew named Pat Beardsley who had been a friend of my ex-wife back in Greenwich. She had a tiny one-room flat on West 10th Street in NYC, and we shared a bathroom with a couple others waifs.

It was the height of what newspapers were calling The Beat Generation.

Jack Kerouac had just died, but Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and other influential Beats were still in The Village spending some of their most productive and destructive years in New York shuttling between mad parties and bebop joints while drinking and drugging their way to literary fame.

Among the striving artists we hung with was a gag writer for the Ed Sullivan television hour named Woody Allen and a big throated nightclub singer named Barbara Streisand.

The center of The Village in those days was south and east of Washington Square Park with the coffeehouses along Bleeker, Third and MacDougal Streets being the most popular. They had names like Bizarre, Gaslight, Figaro and Cafe Wha, but I wasn't ready to read my poetry yet.

Art to the rescue

The popular coffeehouses included the Figaro which is still at the corner of Bleeker and MacDougal today.

My mother had sent me to art school for a couple years when I was around ten, and until I could get a gig reading my poetry in a coffeehouse, I figured I'd support my bad habits by sketching portraits of tourists.

In the 1950's the street artists set up on the east side of Sixth Avenue at Waverly Place a block from the Washington Square Park.

I set up my easel at the end of the lines of about eight artists, and soon the others started giving me tips on how to improve my style, one man in particular.

He was named Primo Afríca with the accent on the second syllable.

Primo had what was called "the perfect style."

He could literally set his charcoal at any point on the sketchpad and begin drawing a perfect likeness from any point on the subject's face.

He might start in the middle, or either side, top or bottom, with no outlines or preliminary moves.

I was never half as good as Primo, but with a lot of help from him and others I managed to support myself and do so with only a few hours work a day.

Life was a permanent party. Time didn't exist, and I never had any idea or thought about what day or month or year it was.

I was beautific, which in those halcyon daze meant I smoked grass, ate a lot of munchies, stopped using alcohol and lived what was undoubtedly the most peaceful existence known to man, or at least to this man.

Drugs, Sex and Jazz

1958 was before the sexual revolution and Rock 'n Roll, and the rest of America was getting high on double martinis. The Beats simply turned their backs on the imagined, Eisenhower idealism which hide a nation where blacks couldn't vote and women were second-class citizens. "Leave It to Beaver" pretty much summed up what the media told their audience we were like.

It was bullshit, but ignorance IS bliss

Meanwhile in a couple places like Greenwich Village and Haight Ashbury during these years a nickel bag was really a nickel bag with enough grass for several good highs for five dollars.

"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it." - Antonin Artaud, The Tarahumars (1947)

We also routinely popped bennies, and if a most exotic experience was called for, we'd walk a few blocks south to Canal Street where they sold Peyote bulbs on a pushcart. The divine cactus fruit gave you a 24 hour hallucinogenic high. The downside was that you got nauseous for the first hour after chewing it raw, and you needed someone to be with you because it was really powerful.

By 1960 a new national drug law added peyote to the proscribed list, but by then it had been synthesized into mescalin and later L.S.D. when another local named Timothy Leary illuminated us on its pleasures.

Seasons, what seasons?

Summer turned to winter (I have this on good authority although I don't recall any seasonal changes myself) and spring turned into summer, and one by one the other artists disappeared from along Sixth Avenue.

When I asked where they had gone I was told that since tourism dropped off in July and August, my fellow artists had all gone to Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod.

Since my parents and I had spent all our family vacations there at the old Colonial Inn in the East End of that town, I loved the place, and started looking for a free ride to Cape Cod.

I found one on the back of a one-person motor scooter.

The portrait artists hung out on Sixth Avenue at Waverly Place in NYC and Commercial St. in Ptown.

Picture it - The driver and me with our duffel bags and my easel, chugging along the Interstate through Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts for over 300 miles.

It took us two days.

We only got to North Greenwich CT the first night, and pulled off the Round Hill Road exit (a four acre zoned district of that affluent town) and pitched our pup tent a couple miles north of where I had lived in splendor two years before.

Provincetown

When we arrived in Ptown the next afternoon, we drove to the end of Bradford Street and hiked north into the sand dunes opposite the old Moors Restaurant where we set up camp overlooking Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth in the distance.

There wasn't a house within miles, and I headed to Commercial Street to set up my easel, and my life took another seismic eruption.

Chapter 9 - Provincetown, August 22, 1959

Some women steal your heart. This woman stole my sketchpad
And I fell in love forever the instant I saw her

On left, 1959, the bearded Rafio when he was a beat poet and street artist with his girlfriend Patsy Twite in the middle and her friend Barbara Chase on the left. The middle photo is Patricia in the late 1960s and 70s when she was a model in Puritan's weekly full-page ad in The Cape Codder where the author, now Walter Brooks again, starting in 1965 was Advertising Manager and photographer.

What a difference a half century makes

There was a new best seller published in 2009 named "1959: The Year Everything Changed", and it could have been written with me in mind.

From the book 1959:
The Year Everything Changed

It was the year when the microchip was introduced, the Food and Drug Administration held hearings on the birth-control pill, IBM marketed the first business computer, a passenger jetliner took the first nonstop trans-Atlantic flight, and America joined the Russians in the "space race." It saw the rise of free jazz, "sick comics," the New Journalism, and indie films; the birth of Motown, Happenings, and the Generation Gap; the Lady Chatterley trial that overthrew the nation's obscenity laws; the U.S. Civil Rights Commission's first report, which sparked the overhaul of segregation laws-all this bursting against fears of a "missile gap," the fallout-shelter craze, and the first U.S. casualties in the war in Vietnam.

During this summer in 1959 I was known as Rafio, and my home was a pup tent in the sand dunes at Land's End in Provincetown.

I would spend a couple hours each day sketching portraits of tourists on Commercial Street, and when I had earned enough for a New York Times, a nickle bag of noxious weed and lunch, I'd quit for the day.

This was 1959 and the only coke around came in a six-ounce glass bottle. It was an innocent but bigoted era.

I didn't drink alcohol and rolled my own cigarettes, so all I did all day was lay in the sun, flirt with women, and wait for the long-gone "Wreck Club" to serve their free food each evening after the fishing boats unloaded.

One day's repast might be a simple pasta and another night it might be squid stew, but it was fun and it was free for the price of a drink at this great old watering hole.

I was beatific and had reached nirvana.

Then I met Patricia

 I was almost 29 back then and one day when I was coming back from my daily swim in the harbor on August 22, 1959, I spotted a shimmeringly beautiful 17-year-old girl in front of Adam's Pharmacy walking off with the sketch pad I had left on my easel at the Crown & Anchor.

I asked her why she'd glommed it, and she said. "the drawings were so lovely, I couldn't resist them."

Guess what - I didn't say another word, and one thing led to another until she moved into my pup tent with me that same night.

We had a rapturous week together at Ballston Beach behind her family's camp on Old King's Highway in Truro, and even made poet Harry Kemp's last beach party. He was called "the poet of the dunes" and would be dead within a year.

We had one week together, sleeping in my pup tent in  the sand dunes or her father's camp.

I sketched long enough to get the money to take her to Ciro & Sal's for our first dinner together, but mostly we dines al fresco on the beach or at the Wreck Club's free "whatever".

But our wild week of passion came to a screeching halt when her parents came down on Labor Day, took one look at me, and dragged her back home.

Ruth Hogan painted this oil of the spot Pat and I met, Adam's Pharmacy in Ptown for our 40th anniversary.

Pat gave them a month back home in Southbridge MA to see the light, and then she ran off to look for me in Greenwich Village.

Miracle on  4th Street

She didn't have an address for me because I didn't have one myself. I crashed at various friends' pads in The Village. The only thing she knew was that I hung out at the Rienzi and the San Remo on McDougal Street.

She took a bus to the New York Port Authority terminal on West 42nd Street, ignored the pimps and other chicken hawks, and took a cab downtown to 6th Avenue and 4th Street.

She left her duffel bag in a deli, and went looking for me among New York's eight million people.

I leave to find her

A hour before Pat arrived in NYC I had lunch with a friend who was a mystic of sorts named Ivor.

I told him I couldn't wait any longer, and that I was going to go to the subway station on 6th Avenue and 4th Street and ride it north into the Bronx to the end of the line and then hitchhike to Southbridge to get Patricia.

I say so long to Ivor, and I walked up MacDougal and turned left on 4th. Street.

Patricia had at the very same time started walking east on 4th Street, and we met each other on that one short block.

Neither of us at the time thought anything about how impossible meeting this way really was. Today it still gives me shivers.

MacDougal Street between Bleeker and 3rd. Streets.

This was the Beat Era, and The Village was jumping with art, music, poetry - it was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and sexual freedom and Civil Rights were about to bloom, and America would never be the same again.

I was crashing with a friend, and after celebrating our miraculous reunion for a day or two, we realized that her parents would come looking for her, even contact the police to find their daughter.

One buddy named Jackson had a mint condition MG-TC, the original model, unwieldy with those 19-inch wire wheels.

He offered to drive us to the Florida Keys for a couple weeks to hide out.

Pat gets stoned in The Keys

We packed our duffel bags, put our pet white mouse in a large brandy snifter, and headed south.

The mouse fell out somewhere in Georgia, but we got to Marathon Key where we moved into a boathouse, and Pat had her first and last mescaline tab.

Pat wass 5' 9", 118 pounds soaking wet, with the tolerance of a flea. The mesc had her hearing the conversations in the telephone lines overhead as we walked along the Keys Highway that night. She can get high on an aspirin - the cheapest date I ever had.

The next night I was stopped by an INS immigration officer on the look out for Castro spies coming in from Cuba fifty miles offshore.

That island's revolution had occurred a few months before, and the U.S. Government was afraid Castro's minions might sneak into the country, and the Keys are the closest part of America to that new Communist country.

I guess I looked more like a Castro sympathizer than a New England preppie I was (see photo above), and I laughed in the INS guy's face, which was apparently the correct response because he let me go.

Pat dyed her light light auburn hair black to disguise herself, and we came back to The Village where Jackson gave us a very cool, rent-controlled apartment he owned on East 6th. Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue.

There were a lot of "Jacksons" hanging around The Village in the Beatnik era. The park filled up with them on weekends as they sought to emulate our "in your face" attitudes in what was a very peaceful, Eisenhower America.

I called the weekend wannabees 'Bronx bagel babes' and 'Brooklyn bongo bums', but they paid to hear us spout our rantings in the Village's coffehouses.

For the next two years we lived and thrived in  Greenwich Village. The area had been the mecca of what passed for strip joints in NYC, although tame by Vegas standards, they were mob controlled, and trouble started as coffeehouses with beat poetry reading began to take some and then most of their visitors away.

We were in the thick of the upheaval which led to the mob funding our own coffeehouse the next year, but that's the next chapter

August 22, 2009 marked Pat and my fiftieth year together, so 1959 really did change everything for us, thankfully, and below is the happy couple with the Fresh Air Fund visitor Gina Peterson at Long Pond in Brewster around 1972.

10 - "Where the Beat meet to eat & the square dare to compare."

1959-1961: Me, the Mob and Cáfe Rafio

Those of you who know Patricia are aware that she is a very beautiful woman who only gets more lovely every day.

This is Pat in 1974when she was 32 and apearing in full pages ads for Puritan Clothing in The Cape Codder.
A short video of the scene in 1960 by Jean Shepard.

My banner dominated the scene on Bleeker Street next to the Circle in the Square and and The Village Gate.

The Cáfe Bizarre when I was reading there. Click here for another friend Ted Joans regaling the "squares."

The menu from Cáfe Rafio which featured charcoal broiled burgers, steck, corn on the cob along with the usual Beat beverages, see below. Yeah, that's me.

The 1961 prices were expensive then by New York City standards, imagine, $1,25 for a steak sandwich.The menu's back was a form to mail it to "squares."

In 1959 at seventeen she was the most stunning creature in Greenwich Village, and the two of us were inseparable. We soon attracted a large following. It was a small community in those years before the "Flower Children" and the "Hippies", perhaps a hundred or so poets, artists, writers many of whom considered themselves Beats as we did.

Love poems flowed from my heart like the torrent shooting over Viagra Falls, and I was taken on as a poet reading my own work at the Cáfe Bizarre on 3rd Street on my first attempt.

Pat in leotards and little else passed the hat after each session, and I did so well I gave away my easel and never sketched another portrait.

A couple Beat buddies named Ted Joans, Ringo Angel and Jamaica Jonny Cayonne and I cut a record, which I am embarrassed to say is still available here, and you can hear us all reading our Beat Poetry here.

God we sound dated, like some passe "period pieces", but at the time we were as serious as sin.

On the album's back cover (below) I am described thus:

The Mad Monk, Rafio
The High Priest of the Beat Generation, known also as the most far out prophet going by those who know. The final word in Beat circles on matters moral, spiritual and erotic. According to the Gospel of Rafio, as the initiated call it, Bedroom Theology, all is one and love is all! Therefore enjoy it!

Talk about purple hyperbole - at least I'm not guilty of having written that blurb, but I assure you we all believed this stuff in the 1960s.

By this time the mob's strip joints in The Village were really being hurt by the Beat phenomenon.  The New York Times interviewed me as the poets protested a crack-down on coffeehouses by the police instigated by the mob, and the story called me "a beatnik spokesman", as if an unruly mob like us could have such.

The Bizarre and all the other coffeehouses were turning away customers several nights a week, and I'm sure this and my newspaper notoriety led to my being approached by a Jewish mobster who lived in this Italian neighborhood.

A guy named Sol Joseph introduced himself to me one night when Pat and I were having an after work drink in a bar around the corner.

An offer I couldn't refuse

Sol exclaimed over my poetry, but seemed even more impressed with my promotional skills and the NY Times story.

After a couple meetings, one at Sol's apartment where Pat had her first champagne, he "made me an offer I couldn't refuse", and this was long before The Godfather.

Sol owned a building at 165 Bleeker Street, and he proposed we become 50-50 partners in a new coffeehouse named after my nom de plume, Rafio.

As Oscar Wilde said, "I can resist anything except temptation", and I heartily agreed.

I was also a 29 year old jaded newspaperman by then, and I was well aware that the Italian mob ran The Village which was then a homogeneous Italian neighborhood.

Sure, the Beat coffeehouses were visible on the main drags, but the powers-that-be sipped their espresso in the small local neighborhood coffeehouses which outsiders like us never tried to enter because we knew we weren't welcome.

Mob boss Tony Bender ran that precinct until he disappeared in 1962 presumably in the cement foundation of a New Jersey sports complex. Bender was believed to have set up over 50 gangland murder victims. Besides his lust for violence, Bender oversaw rackets in Greenwich Village, Manhattan and oversaw the New Jersey docks, so since I had every reason to believe Sol was "connected", Bender's representative wasn't someone I wished or dared to refuse.

And until we had a problem a year or so later, Sol was a peach, the ideal partner in that he allowed me to make every decision about my new coffeehouse.

Since I was tired of reading poetry by then, I made a 180 degree switch and wouldn't allow a poet in the door except to have a free meal.

I redid the front wall at the new Cáfe Rafio with a large picture window for the musicians and stand-up comedians to perform in so the passing throng might be lured inside at a cover charge.

I had a huge banner made to hang over the awning at the entrance and created sandwich boards to hang from that outlining each night's acts.

This was one of the first comedy clubs in the city, but I alternated the comics with jazz groups like the Billy Taylor Trio and others.

Feeling the weight of the law and the mob

Since Sol was my silent partner, I had no trouble with the local hoods, at least those who knew the score.

But one huge local thug named Gazoot, who had always been friendly to me when I was a starving artist, came in one afternoon and dumped a couple boxes of candles in glass jars wrapped in webbing on the table and said, "I think you should buy these for your table tops."

I thanked him politely, but declined his offer.

He then put his very large and muscular arm around my neck, dragged me to the pay-phone on a nearby wall, and proceeded to beat me over the head with the receiver saying, "Rafio, you really should buy these candles."

I gargled as best I could saying, "sure, Gazoot, just let me call my partner and ask him for the money for you."

I got Sol on the phone, and whatever he told Gazoot worked, because he turned pale, picked up his candles, and quickly left.

I only saw Gazoot once more when Sol "dissolved" our partnership the "the hard way."

The only cash pay-offs we had to make was to the cop on the beat, the local NYPD precinct, the NYPD division and the boss at the local NY Fire Station. Otherwise they would close us down for failing to have a license for entertainment like the strip joints had.

Some of this ended with the Knapp Commission investigation a few years later which inspired the movie "Serpico".

But these police pay-offs were a total waste because the day Gazoot accosted me, Pat ran screaming to the cop on the beat for help, but he high-tailed it in the opposite direction.

Success - immediate and bad for your health

From the first weekend Cáfe Rafio opened we were an immediate success. There were lines waiting to get in on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and the rest of the week when we busy as well.

Pat and I moved into a nice apartment off Orchard Street, took limos out to Fire Island, and flew to Southbridge to visit her family. Business boomed, the village was the place to be, and life was one, continuous party.

A car, a boat and a hurricane

Our tiny Vespa car, and below the Captain's gig we were converting to a sailing ketch.

We bought our first car, a tiny Vespa automobile, into which we crammed three friends along with Pat and myself to visit Point Judith RI every  week for a couple days to work on your boat.

The boat was a 40-foot US Navy launch which we were rebuilding as a ketch so we could set sail around the world and educate our kids on board.

Luckily for us a hurricane came one weekend while we were all back in The Village, and it tore of unfinished yacht from it's mooring where upon it wrecked havoc as the hunk smashed one pleasure craft after another in the harbor.

I say lucky, because we probably wouldn't have survived that sail anyway.

Things went great for a year or more.

Then Sol decided we needed more space for the business we were turning away. Since he owned the building, he suggested that we check out the building superintendent's apartment which separated the restaurant from an large open area in back which could serve dozens more during the busier summer months as an outdoor addition to the business.

As we toured his apartment, the very old building super figured out what was happening, and begged us not to dispose him. He told us his ancient wife had lived there since getting off the boat from Italy decades earlier, she'd recently had a heart attack, and he was sure the move would kill her.

It was the first (and last) serious dispute between Sol and myself.

I told him I wouldn't do it, that money wasn't everything, and we'd find another way to increase profits.

You can figure out how that played in his Machiavellian mind, and the result of my refusal will make interesting reading in the next chapter, especially since it led to Rafio's murder.

        Below is the back cover of the record we made featuring our Beat Poetry at Cáfe Bizarre. If you want to hear what it sounded like back then, click here.

Chapter 11 - Rafio's murder

The reports of my death were premature - Life #3 ends
A good deed pays off with another half century of life

Although no one ever really knows another person's motivation, I think it's safe to assume that my refusal to evict the old super to make room for more customers led to my partner and I splitting. That was made painfully clear about a week or so after our examination of the super's apartment behind our coffeehouse when that same local thug named Gazoot who tried to sell me those candles when we were opening came into Café Rafio saying Sol had sent him.

Gazoot proceeded to beat the crap out of me, and literally threw me out of my own café.

A bearded hanger-on Von Ehmsen, whom I hate to admit bears a strong resemblance to me at age 29, was hired by Sol Joseph, my ex-partner to imitate me. That's me around the same time below.

My wife Pat ran out into Bleeker Street screaming for the local policeman who had disappeared as if on cue the moment Gazoot showed up.

In that neigborhood, the mob was the only real law back then.

A widow before she was a mother?

Patricia was eight months pregnant at the time with our first son, and I figured it was probably as good a time as any to move on so she wouldn't become a widow before she became a mother. One thing was sure - I wasn't about to try to fight the mob by myself.

The Village was a little like high school - a couple years of it is enough, and it was time for Pat and me to graduate

We packed up our kit and caboodle and moved to a small, basement appartment in  the Flatbush section of Brooklyn where within a few weeks I was rushing Pat to the French Hospital in Lower Manhattan to whelp our first born son Todd.

As it turns out, I really did save my life by the move because my replacement was murdered within a year.

By then I had shaved off my beard and mustache and got a job at the New York Post which in 1962 was the most liberal newspaper of the eight daily newspapers still published daily in New York City.

With me out of the picture, my ex-partner, Sol, needed someone who at least looked something like me to masquerade as Rafio after my swift departure from the scene.

Every artistic environment has its groupies, and the small Beat movement was no different. In addition to the real poets, artists and writers, we harbored many jackals who hung around the herd looking for leftovers when the countless young adorning females descended upon the village every weekend.

Rafio dies at 12:20 am, or did he?

One such jackal was a tall, bearded hanger-on named Von Ehmsen whom I hate to admit bears a strong resemblance to me at age 29. Nobody ever saw anything Von wrote, but he was a colorful bearded wannabe who was a Beatnik from Central Casting.

Sol, a dapper, black-suited wiseguy, needed a "Rafio" to front for him, so he hired Von Ehmsen to play me, and soon the two of them made a second tour of super Simone Pepe's small apartment behind the café.

Apparently my impersonator Ehmsen had less heart than I, and the second time around he and Sol served the super with an eviction notice.

Today the former site of Cafe Rafio at 165 Bleecker Street is a Chinese restauarnt. That's Pat and our two grandchildren standing in front this past summer.

But unbeknown to them the old man had a plan of his own.

Since he had little else, Von Ehmsen had a Doberman Pincer which he took for a do-do run after closing the coffeehouse each night after 1am. A few nights after the eviction notice was served, the 73 year-old super Pepe accosted Von Ehmsen and his dog, and again begged to be left alone.

Neither history nor the police reports recorded the ersatz Rafio's reply, but knowing the man well, I always assumed it was something along the lines of "get the hell away from me old man."

Whereupon the super Simone Pepe pulled out a very old .32 caliber revolver and shot Rafio dead.

I read about his death during a coffee break while working at the New York Post when I was doing the NY Times crossword puzzle.

I guess it pays to be a half decent human being... the real Rafio is alive and well and living on Cape Cod.

But that didn't prevent me from almost being murdered a second time - that's in Chapter 12.

Here's the actual story in The Village Voice, April 4, 1963, Vol. VIII, No. 24

Elderly Evictee Shoots Bleecker St. Cafe Owner

By J. R. Goddard

The life of Ronald Van Ehmsen, a bearded, flowing-haired 31-year-old Villager locally famous for his resemblance to Christ, ended last Saturday in a manner worth of the most violent passages in the Bible. He was shot by an elderly man facing eviction to make way for the enlargement of Von Ehmsen's beat-ambiance coffee house.

Pepe then pulled out a .32 caliber revolver and shot the coffeehouse owner three times.

Simone Pepe, 73, the occupant of the premises behind Von Ehmsen's Cafe Rafio, 165 Bleecker Street, was arrested for the crime on Saturday evening. Taken to the Charles Street (Village) precinct house, he readily confessed.

The shooting occurred at 12:20 Saturday afternoon. Von Ehmsen was walking his dog near his cafe when Pepe approached him. According to witnesses, Pepe showed him an eviction notice which had been sent preparatory to enlarging the Rafio. The two men apparently argued, and Von Ehmsen finally turned away. Pepe, it was reported, then pulled out a .32 caliber revolver and shot the coffee-house owner three times. Von Ehmsen stumbled down Bleecker Street where he collapsed and died in front of a liquor store. Pepe quietly left the scene to take a train to his daughter's home in Long Island.

Von Ehmsen often displayed a picture of himself in the Rafio window looking like the common pictorial representation of Christ.

Ironically, only moments after the shooting of the Biblical Von Ehmsen, a man on a motor scooter drove by carrying a giant cross. About the same time local police cordoned off the area and found Pepe's eviction notice lying on the sidewalk. Detectives promptly traced Pepe to his daughter's home and arrested him. The elderly and allegedly ailing Pepe is scheduled to appear in court on April 15.

Since taking over the Rafio a few years ago, Von Ehmsen had become something of a legend in the Village. He often displayed a picture of himself in the Rafio window looking like the common pictorial representation of Christ. A later picture, however, contradicted this Messianic image. It showed Von Ehmsen, or "Von" as he was often called, driving down Bleecker Street in a bed on wheels ogling a sexy girl. Von Ehmsen's success with women was another part of the legend, which also included ownership of a weird variety of sports cars, old limousines, motor scooters, and the like. No matter what MacDougal Street thought about the exhibitionistic Von Ehmsen, most had to admit he had a weirdly amusing sense of style.

"What can you expect when you've got the worst creeps in New York hanging out here now?"

Because of his reputation, many among the huge springtime crowd surging onto Bleecker and MacDougal Streets on Saturday night knew of his death. Clumps of curious people peered into the closed Rafio, and many made wisecracks about the "beatnik killing." Some locals were also overheard singing a hastily written and ribald ballad, sung to the tune of "Mack the Knife," which recounted the violent demise.

Von Ehmsen's death was the second homicide in the controversial and highly commercialized coffee house district last week. On Thursday evening Thomas McNear was stabbed to death by Eugene "Teeno" Smith on Sixth Avenue near Minetta Lane. And on Friday evening police answering another fight call in the area cooled a near rumble at Bleecker and MacDougal Streets. One Villager living nearby shrugged his shoulders when it was all over and laughed. "Well, it's warm weather fight time again." Then he added with much less humor, "What can you expect when you've got the worst creeps in New York hanging out here now?"

Chapter 12 - Life #4 and preparing for Cape Cod

It was déjà vu all over again as I started the climb back in the newspaper racket

By 1964 I was Advertising Manager of The Thompsonville Press owned by Bill and Barbara Breisky who both followed me to Cape Cod, he as Editor of the Cape Cod Times and she as a hot shot real estate broker. Here I'm mc-ing a Sidewalk Sale for the local Chamber of Commerce.

But this time it was Patricia who was very nearly murdered

Being a "square" wasn't nearly as dull as I had suggested in my poetry. Flatbush was "country" in the 1960s and a short bus ride to the Far Rockaway beaches or Coney Island.

Our landlords, Jesse and Ethel Greenburg, were like grandparents to our new son Todd. Jesse even gave him the first silver dollar he received in America when he arrived many decades earlier.

East 36th Street near Utica Avenue was a Jewish neighborhood with the requisite Chinese restaurant.

According to the Jewish calendar it was 5721 back in 1961, and, according to the Chinese calendar, the year was 5675.

5721 minus 5675 equals 46 years, and Pat and I always wondered what did the Jews eat for those forty-odd years before their Asian chiefs were created.

That Jewish people have an love for Chinese food is no secret - the Jews know it, the Chinese know it, even some goys like us know it, and Flatbush was no exception.

Like our Levantine neighbors we ate out exclusively at the local Chinese joint, and even had one of our biggest family fights over who ate more of one night's Sweet & Sour Chicken, a dish no self-respecting Asian ever poked a chop stick at.

Until the dispersal of middle-class Jews to the New York suburbs was complete in the 1970s and 1980s, Chinese take-out shops opened on every corner of the city. It was said that you could tell how Jewish a neighborhood was by the number of Chinese restaurants.

The New York Post before Murdoch

I commuted to my job at the New York Post by subway, and after establishing myself and joining the Newspaper Guild, I started looking for job offerings in Massachusetts, one which would impress the owner of The Cape Codder weekly newspaper because Pat and I had decided to raise our new family in that peaceful backwater which in 1960 had a population of 80,000, one-third of today's total.

I knew about that weekly because Pat's father Harry Twite subscribed to it off cape. The better local newspaper of that era was The Oracle run by Ed and Mary Smith and his family, but since it was mailed free to locals I didn't know of it's existence until I got my ass handed to me by adveristers when I had to compete against it later.

We vacationed at Pat's parent's camp in Truro where her father had acquired 50 acres which ran from Route 6 to the Atlantic by paying the back taxes on some land his family owned. It was a timber strip about a couple hundred feet wide, and her father Harry was a subscriber to that weekly.

I was determined to get to Cape Cod fast, and The Cape Codder was the only newspaper published here then which was owned by someone who had spent time learning the inky trade off Cape.

Publisher Malcolm Hobbs had always vacationed on The Cape with his first wife Peggy, but he had worked for a small wire service in Washington and Mexico and had bought the paper 15 years before.

Snob that I was, his was the only fish-wrapper good enough for the likes of moi, and I read the trade publication Editor & Publisher searching for a position which another snob like Mal Hobbs would appreciate.

I found one after 18 months. It was as Advertising Manager of the Amherst MA Journal Record owned then by Michael  (Mike) de Sherbinin and his wife Polly.

I got that job, and Pat and I moved to Easthampton MA where Mike had asked me to launch and manage a new weekly for him in that town which we named the Easthampton Record.

We rented an apartment from a nice Polish family whose daughters were built-in baby-sitters and we discovered the joys of linguisa, pirogi and gołąbki.

It was a low-budget operation, and Mike found an editor for me to manage who was currently a patient at a vet's hospital in Northampton suffering for post-traumatic stress from World War II.

The man was in his forties and looked like a lost soul. Mike asked Pat and I to "look after him" since he was still an outpatient from the psychiatric ward at the vet's hospital.

The man's father had been a famous author, and my new editor was an experienced, journeyman reporter who the doctors assured us would benefit from having a reporter's job as he had before his break-down.

He was good at his craft and dependable, and soon we had a decent new weekly up and running with ads which could be sold in combination with Mike's Amherst Record.

Every Wednesday evening after our little newspaper went to press, Pat and I had the editor over to our apartment for dinner.

A quiet man, he was delighted to be a part of a young family's life and often played with our son Todd who was soon joined by a brother we named Jay.

Pat was sweet on Syrian Olympic Basketball player Ayham Omary who we sponsored in a "People to People" exchange in 1964 while in Thompsonville CT.

After a year or so I ran into a young couple named Bill and Barbara Breisky who had just bought a struggling weekly newspaper in the town just over the Connecticut border to the south called The Thompsonville CT Press.

Bill had been cartoon editor at the then famous Saturday Evening Post, and I realized that Bill and Barbara were really go-getters who only lacked my promotional skills to grow fast.

Having already added Amherst and Easthampton to my new resume, I jumped ship and went to work for Bill and Barbara whose newspaper at the time consisted of a linotype machine, a rented office and a half dozen employees.

One of my tasks was to bring the pages to the Springfield Shopping News to be printed at dawn each Thursday.

When I left 18 moths later the newspaper owned it's own building, had a printing press, and I had started two free newspapers for them in the neighboring towns of Suffield and Somers Connecticut.

Another chilling newspaper story of a murder-almost-mine

When I left the new weekly I'd started for the de Sherbinins in Easthampton, I broke in my successor who also had a pretty young wife and new child.

They continued Patricia and my habit of "looking after" the editor by having him over once a week for dinner.

One day I was listening to the radio news on WTIC when I heard the grim story of my successor's wife being murdered by my old editor.

Apparently the editor had come to my successor's apartment a little early that week before he was home, and while the man's wife was making dinner he grabbed a kitchen knife and killed her instantly.

That's the second time someone was murdered in our stead, and there is still (at least) one more coming in a later chapter.

Chapter 13 - Cape Cod at last and forever

The Low Wages and "Psychic Income" of working for a Cape Cod weekly

Moving to Cape Cod meant sailing to a private nook on the Outer Beach on weekends with my family and Pat's brother and sister-in-law Jim and Sandra Twite who followed us here a year later, or climbing out on the boom of my Marshal catboat the "Pat Cat" or cutting free wood to heat our house on the power lines during the oil embargo in 1978.

Confessions of an advertising man

I

timed my visit to meet Malcolm Hobbs (on right), owner of The Cape Codder weekly newspaper on the Lower Cape, for late morning on a Thursday in September of 1964 while I was vacationing at Pat's family's shack in Truro knowing it was the slowest time for any weekly newspaper.

The redoubtable Madeline Curry was the receptionist, bookkeeper who (wo)manned the front counter in the summer of 1964, and when I asked if Mr. Hobbs was available, she cocked a wary eye and asked, "are you a newspaperman?"

Amazed and amused at her prescience, I admitted to being guilty of the crime.

She then asked, "what do you DO?"

I told her I was at present an advertising manager at a Connecticut weekly, and she said, "Good. Our ad manager just walked out."

As we drove to meet a broker we passed this 3/4 Cape with an el and a garage complete with rose-covered split-rail fence at Meetinghouse Village on Route 39 in East Harwich. We bought it for $17,600.

I drove a 1971 Land Rover to work and

Pat drove a 1962 Morris Woodie Wagon.

You can imagine my consternation.

I had planned for this day for three years, and if I had arrived any earlier or later, I would have probably failed since Hobbs had to fill the job fast.

But I managed to arrive an hour after the position I coveted was vacated. It reminded me of the miracle of passing Patricia on that Greenwich Village street when she came searching for me in New York in 1959.

I asked the now friendlier Madeline why the gentleman had quit such a good newspaper.

She said the man's sister was one of the founders of the local John Birch Society, and Hobbs had written an editorial this week endorsing Jack Kennedy over Barry Goldwater in the upcoming Presidential election. The ad guy had quit in a huff over what he felt was a dastardly move by Hobbs.

Need I say more? A right wing zealot gave this knee-jerk Liberal his job on this sandy paradise.

Hobbs and I talked that date, and we corresponded when I returned to The Thompsonville Press, but he soon offered me the job at what I was getting in Connecticut, and Patricia and I arrived with sons Todd and Jay on February 15, 1965.

I gave the Breisky's a long enough notice to find and train my replacement who turned out to be Patricia's best friend's husband, Dick Kiusalas. Dick later followed me to the Cape as ad manager of The Register which was printed at The Cape Codder printery before starting his own business, the West Barnstable Table Company.

The final irony to my departure from Connecticut came when I was approached by the owners of the 100,000 circulation Springfield Shopping News during this time between jobs and offered two-and a half times what Hobbs was going to pay me.

I thought about their offer for all of twelve seconds, and told them "thanks, but no thanks", and headed to Cape Cod and the rest of my destiny.

Once ensconced on Cape Cod we made frequent trip to Martha's Vineyard where Pat's redoubtable Aunt Fran was a great fisherwoman shown here with Pat on Chappaquiddick. Pardon my pride, but Pat's an incredably beautiful woman.

Working for less and enjoying it more

I began at The Cape Codder in February of 1965.  Mal's Managing Editor John Ullman had told me my salary included "psychic benefits" like already being here in our sandy paradise after work each day and on weekends rather than for two weeks each summer .

Mal Hobbs was a flawed and cold man, but he taught me three important lessons:

1. "A man is known better by his enemies rather than by his friends,"
2. "They all believe what they're shouting," and
3. "You must rub hide with the herd, or they will turn on you"

The last line was offered when I resisted attending any more Orleans Board of Trade meetings after a of couple years. The group, which later morphed into the Orleans Chamber of Commerce, was then comprised mostly of motel owners and old guys with no business but who had nothing better to do but sit around the Legion Hall in East Orleans getting slopped and chewing the fat. None had the remotest possibility of becoming advertisers, but I guess Hobbs didn't want to attend himself so he made me "rub hide with that herd."

At least the obligation had one sweet result.

I'd been away from Greenwich Village now for four long, pot-less years, and I hadn't visited Provicetown yet where I eventually connected with several old Beat buddies, and so I hadn't smoked a joint in that long.

Then in the mid-1960s the state narcotics folks felt it important to warn motel owners here how to detect the smell of that noxious weed should any of their summer help be potheads.

At the next Board of Trade meeting the narcs made a presentation to the assembled motel owners and others, and laid on the table samples of the popular drugs of the era.

The heroin and cocaine were kept in sealed containers, but the narcs wanted the attendees to recognize the smell of marijuana, so they opened one of several one ounce packages of pot, dumped the contents in a dish, and got the grass smoldering.

They invited each of us assumed innocents to pass over the smoking pot dish and get a whiff.

I made sure that I was at the end of the line, and when I returned to my seat there was one less pot package on the table.

I don't know if the narcs noticed its absence, but I knew that if they did, they wouldn't say a word.

After all, what policeman wants to let people who he was robbed?

Chapter 14 - Confessions of a Cape Cod advertising man

A Newspaperman in the boondocks - 1965-1988
Surviving The Cape Codder and MPG Communications

When I started at The Cape Codder it had generated $65,000 in advertising for the entire previous year. For the math challenged, that's $1,250 per weekly edition.

When Mal Hobbs fired me twelve and a half years later in 1978 we generated a million a year, averaged 24 full-pages of real estate ads alone each edition. The neewspaper's paid circulation had gone from 4,000 to 16,000 and was audited by the A.B.C. through my wife Patricia's skill at selling subscriptions on the phone while manning the Harwich office.

Mal and I had coffee together every morning for all those years, him reading the news and me doing the crossword puzzle in the New York Times. Perhaps familiarity did bred contempt in his case, but I idolized the man as a surrogate father.

Our falling out was over the paper's coverage of a new school for Brewster in 1978.

That town's leaders and school committee were proposing a second school a decade before one was eventually built, and the newspaper supported the move enthusiastically.

I was by the nature of my job more peripatetic than Mal and his editorial minions, and I was getting a lot of feed-back from people in Brewster complaining that they were unable to get their objections to building the new school published in The Cape Codder, and that the problem was a three year school population bubble like a pig passing through a belly of a python and not a permanent school enrollment increase.

"If you give the readers the right information, they'll make the right decision."
          - Malcolm Hobbs, 1978.

I said one morning over coffee that I thought giving readers all the information so they could make a well informed decision was the way to go, and asked him why these people weren't getting their letters or Op Eds printed. He answered by saying that wasn't how you did it.

He said "If you give the readers the right information, they'll make the right decision."

I was astonished as his statement, and asked how that was different than the Communist Soviet Union's attitude that the ends justify the means?

His face paled, he turned on his heels, and a week later I was out the door. He even tried to deny my unemployment check from  the state labor department when I applied.

I had simply gotten too big apparently for Mal's britches, but it was a devastating blow to my ego and pocketbook. I had just built a new home overlooking Pleasant Bay and had two sons in Harwich High School about to enter college.

Ironically the Brewster voters turned down that second school that time only to vote for one decades later to solve what also turned out to be another temporary problem because the town is trying to dumpthat second school today.

"With circulation of more than 17 million, Best Read Guides have become one of the largest visitor guide companies in the country."

Onward and upward, I mean REALLY upward

I guess some higher power was  taking care of me, because I would have been there still through several new owners in the last thirty years.

Instead within three weeks I had three publishers coming to my house so I could interview them, finally choosing MPG Communications in Plymouth. I soon was earning over ten times what Hobbs had been paying me, at least until I got fired at MPG ten years later.

When I started with MPG in 1978 it consisted of three weeklies and Cape Cod Guide. When I left it owned 23 newspapers, I had created a network of eight vacation guides. It  was a powerhouse south of Boston.

I only had to drive to Plymouth three days a week, and worked at a Cape office on other days, but even that became a pain after a few years. At one point the company told me to buy any car I wished to encourage my continued commute.

They bought me a Mercedes Benz 500 S.E.L. to keep me commuting to Plymouth.

I bought a Mercedes Benz 500 S.E.L.

But MPG in its heyday was a very kewl and enterprising outfit, spoiled eventually by its leader's hubris.

At the beginning MPG's President Roger Miles - who was married to BOTH the heiresses of the company but not similateously, "knew what he didn't know" and hired the best and the brightest he could find, and listened to them.

Among them was Neil Jorgenson running the printing division and Sheila Smith, a very hot C.F.O. who went on to be Publisher of the The Daily News of Newburyport. A handsome woman with the best legs in journalism at the time.

But power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Miles stopped listening to his people and, using his own engineer's skills made decisions which cost the company it's momentum.

My contretemps with the boss Roger Miles came over my endless nagging him to allow me to franchise the vacation magazine concept I had developed after creating a network of eight vacations guides printed at MPG which included relationships and editions with newspapers like the Newport Daily News and The Vineyard Gazette.

MPG said it was too litigious, even though I reminded them that was what insurance was for, and they could get sued every time a circulation truck left their parking lot.

Instead of getting fired this time however, they "negotiated my withdrawal from the company" by offering me half of my six-figure salary including benefits for two years if I would sign a two-year non-compete. They gave me three months sitting home doing nothing to ponder the decision.

Best Read Guide became the countires largest network of vacation magazines, and it all started here.

I waited until the last check arrived with the notice "This is your final payment", and I started planning the creation of Best Read Guide.

The last check arrived before Memorial Day, 1988.

The first edition of Best Read Guide CAPE COD was launched July 1, 1988, a month later.

During that month I had to persuade Pat and Steve Sullivan to quit MPG and join me, hire a paste-up staff, editorial help, buy PCs, find a printer who would be able to get the product back to Cape Cod for distribution by July 1st., and find office space.

Ironically help came from a most unexpected source.

Ed Smith and his son Jeff, against whom I had competed for twelve years while at The Cape Codder, called and offered their help.

Without it I never would have made that first deadline.

After the first four monthly issues on Cape Cod that first year, Patricia and I with our friend, fellow salesman and now partner Steve Sullivan, hopped on a plane to Orlando FL where we set up shop and launched the second edition, Beast Read Guide ORLANDO, on January 1, 1989.

In 1990 our bookkeeper stole a half a million from our fledgling company, and I rushed back to Cape Cod to keep the ship afloat until the cash flow started in the Spring.

I felt duty bound to inform the other newspaper publishers who had switched from MPG to follow the Beat Read Guide format, and when I called Albert "Buck" Sherman, the publisher of the Newport RI Daily News, I got another surprise.

After I told him that we were in effect insolvent, he said he had been miffed when I hadn't asked him to invest in my idea two years prior, and he wanted to know how much we needed to stay alive until Spring.

I told him I'd need $50,000.

Buck  said simply, "Can I put it in the mail, or do you want me to drive down with it today."

How do you ever say thank you enough to a man like Buck Sherman?

I gave him 5% of our worthless stock for his gift.

After fine-tuning the formats, we launched BRG Franchise Corp. a year later and by 1996 had twenty franchises from Maine to California, when a media giant "made me another offer I couldn't refuse."

Steve Sullivan had worked for me at MPG, and when I started Best Read Guide he jumped ship and followed. 23 years later he's still plugging away, and one of the most decent human beings I've ever known.

This time I was in the boardroom of Morris Communications in Augusta GA in 1998 trying to sell Billy Morris franchises in three of the many cities where he owned daily newspapers.

Half way through my pitch he asked to buy the franchise company instead.

I told him I thought that a great idea.

I had seen the internet coming as few of my newspaper peers had, and I wanted to marshal all my efforts on the web here on Cape Cod by starting a new company eCape.com which is today run by my daughter-in-law Julie Brooks.

Patricia and I had already started our own brochure and magazine distribution company called BRG Distribution Company which my son Jay runs as well as managing the financial of all three of our companies.

Billy Morris suggested he fly up to Cape Cod after his financial people checked our numbers, and we'd talk.

Billy at 70+ was a pilot licensed to fly passengers in a multi-engine jet.

He flew one of his two jets here while his son and staff flew in a second one. We picked them up in Hyannis, and drove to my home in East Harwich.

Very shortly into the conversation Billy asked me how much I wanted for BRG Franchise Corp.

I named a seven figure number.

He countered by offering me a slightly smaller seven figure number.

I said, "I'll split the difference."

Billy replied, "Done", and we shook hands.

The lawyers didn't get us the paperwork for a month, but nothing changed, and I signed up to help start new editions for Morris for one year while retaining the Cape Cod edition for myself.

Buck Sherman got more than his $50,000 investment back when I sold the franchise corporation, and he still owns 5% of Best Read Guide CAPE COD and eCape.com.

As Billy Morris' website states, "With circulation of more than 17 million, Best Read Guides have become one of the largest visitor guide companies in the country."

Chapter 15 - We both had a machine gun stuck at us for hours

 The Haitian airport guard didn't have a ticket or a passport but he did have an Uzi

  This is page 3 of the Boston Herald on February 13, 1984, after our hijacking from Haiti.

Bad news: we almost died. Good news: I gave up smoking

Pat and I had been to Haiti once before during Papa Doc Duvalier's reign, and we loved this gorgeous island with its wonderfully warm people.

It was the government which we all feared, especially the Tonton Macoutes.

Pat and Callie Fowles who succeeded me as Advertising Manager at The Cape Codder in front of the Iron Market in Port Au Prince on a previous Haiti trip.

We were invited back by the government of Baby Doc Duvalier in 1984, and asked our friend Tom Cronin of Orleans to join us because he'd been there a dozen times and knew the lay of the land.

We covered the island from Cap-Haitien to Jacmel with stops at every town in between, but after two weeks, with a by-election looming, we began to hear drums in the jungle, and decided to leave a day early in case trouble erupted which it did a few months later.

When we arrived at the Port Au Prince airport a day early, Tom noticed a woman at the ticket counter who he recognized from a prior trip, and said he bet he could talk us into First Class.

His mission failed, but Patricia loves a challenge, especially from men, so she returned to the counter, and said, "What are all those people doing waiting outside?"

The clerk said they were waiting as stand-by in case any seats became available.

Pat then asked if there were any seat available in First Class.

The woman said yes, but these local people couldn't afford the much costlier tickets.

Holding out our three Economy Class tickets, Pat said, "If you bump us all to First Class, I'll give you our three economy tickets which you can then sell to them."

The clerk thought that a great idea, and we were escorted to the waiting American Airline 727 by a uniformed Haitian Army man in helmet, carrying grenades and an Uzi machine gun, pro forma for Haiti and other Third World countries in those years.

When we got on board the guard turned his Uzi at the captain and demanded to go with us. The door was closed, the hijacker sat facing the rear in the steward's jump seat outside the pilot's cabin while the negotiations went on for hours between the plane and the control tower.

So because of Pat's skills, we got to be sitting in the front row of First Class across from the guy with his Uzi stuck in our bellies for five hours as the government decided whether to let him accompany us to New York or try to take over the plane.

After an hour of staring at the muzzle of that Uzi, the three of us said we had to use the lavatory in the rear of the plane, but actually we planned to open the rear door and jump to the ground and escape.

The stewardess in the back, however, called the captain who told us that the plane was now surrounded by Haitian troops, and anyone jumping out would probably be shot by a nervous soldier.

So Pat and I slowly trudged back forward staring into that muzzle the whole time. I went through a pack of cigarettes in that time, and vowed that if I got out of this alive I'd take better care of whatever parts of me were left which meant I'd stop smoking.

To start at the beginning of
"Three Plus Lives" click here.

Tom elected to hide in the lavatory until it occurred to him that if the plane was blown up he'd be projectiled out and land covered with that blue stuff they use in the toilet bowl.

The story on the February 12, 1984, New York Times read:

GUNMAN IN FATIGUES HIJACKS AN AIRLINER IN HAITI TO KENNEDY

A man with a submachine gun hijacked an American Airlines flight carrying 152 people from Haiti to New York last night, but surrendered his gun in midflight and asked that he be given political asylum, officials and a passenger on the plane said.

The passenger, Walter Brooks of East Harwich, Mass., said the gunman boarded the plane just before its scheduled takeoff at 7:30.

Mr. Brooks said the man, wearing military fatigues, a helmet and a belt ringed with grenades, pointed the submachine gun at the captain.

''We all thought he was from the airport's military police,'' Mr. Brooks said. ''We thought someone hadn't cleared customs.''

The gunman then ordered the pilot to take off immediately for New York, Mr. Brooks said.

The man was identified as Jean Phillippe Windsor, 33 years old, a corporal in the Haitian army and a security guard at the airport, according to James F. Murphy, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Maximum Passenger Load

The hijacked plane, American Airlines Flight 658 from Port-au-Prince to Kennedy International Airport, was a 727 ''stretch'' that was carrying its maximum load of 144 passengers and 5 flight attendants, according to a spokesman for American Airlines, Al Becker.

After nearly an hour of negotiating between the gunman and the pilot, the airplane took off, with the hijacker standing in the cabin doorway facing the passengers, Mr. Brooks said. At one point, he asked sharply for a drink but a stewardess quickly responded, ''I'm sorry, this is not a drinking flight,'' Mr. Brooks said

Throughout the flight, a stewardess Mr. Brooks identified as Marie Hayes acted as an interpreter between the pilot and the gunman, who spoke only Creole, the native Haitian language.

At 9:42 P.M., he surrendered his gun to the pilot and asked for political asylum, according to Fred Farrar, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration. The rest of the flight was without incident and the plane landed at Kennedy Airport at 12:06 A.M., according to Mr. Murphy, of the F.B.I.

Mr. Murphy said that Corporal Windsor was being held by Federal agents and would be charged with air piracy. He will be arraigned Monday by U.S. attorneys in Eastern District Court in Brooklyn, Mr. Murphy said.

Chapter 16. Patricia

Patricia Brooks - The most beautiful woman I've ever seen

Like a fine, full-bodied wine Patricia simply gets better with age. Clockwise from top left, as a young teen with her horse Bollo which she always rode bareback, at 60 holding up the Taj Mahal in Accra, India on one of her hundreds of trips visiting over 100 countries, at 40 looking bemused on her deck in East Harwich and in Oak Bluffs in Martha's Vineyard with Aunt Fran and her younger son Jay when she was 40.

Patricia has an ethereal beauty.

Pat was lovely at nine with cousin Kenny

and even when annoyed by her brother Jim.

At age 40 she was still blooming.

On a travel story assignment to a BVI cooking clas in 1999 she met Paulette Cooper, her doppelgänger, and her husband Paul Noble who have become close friends.

Pat even managed to give your hair to grandson Will.

Patricia should of course write her own autobiography, but she's asked me to include bits of her life in the telling of mine.

It would be impossible not to do so because I have not a single doubt that I am alive today because of her love and "creative nagging" over the past half century.

Rakes like me only grow old if they love a woman enough to stay in love with her as she keeps after them until they give up all their bad habits.

Patricia and I were destined to meet and fall in love. After all, we met because she stole my sketchpad, and even when her parents separated us she ran off to New York City searching for me and bumped into me on the street as I was leaving to go get her.

Since we both have extremely proud, passionate and volcanic personalities, it's a small miracle we have not killed each other countless times.

Pat says tongue-in-cheek that we're still together because we haven't finished fighting yet.

But I'm not the only person she occasionally riles.

A Cape Cod woman

Pat hated school even more than I did. She spent huge hunks of her school days in detention or forced to sit next to the teacher's desk.

Even her agnosticism started early, and her mother once told me that when they passed the collection plate in church, little Patsy Twite would try to help herself.

The stories of her rebellious nature are infamous in the family, and it's that feisty, "take-no-prisoners" attitude that is one good reason for her success as an adult.

Patricia, whom I call Pat and a few call Patsy, was born in Falmouth on George Washington's birthday in 1942.

On her father Harry Twite's side her grandmother was a Bangs, which was one of the first eight families to settle on Cape Cod in the mid-1600s.

Her mother Margaret Teresa Geraughty came to America at 16 from County Galway, Ireland, and within two years was a maid and nanny for little Gloria Vanderbilt at her Newport RI mansion.

Pat was at least as adventurous as her mom by running away from home at 17 to find her Beatnik lover.

Obviously she didn't hang around home long enough to finish high school, and yet within a few years she was probably the highest-paid advertising rep on Cape Cod.

But that came after she had her last child when she was 21 and quickly became an advertising model for Puritan Clothing featured in countless full-page ads for over a decade.

At the same time she worked first from home and later from The Cape Codder office selling ads and subscriptions over the telephone.

She was incredibly good at both.

After I was fired at The Cape Codder in 1978 and quickly hired by MPG Communications, Pat stayed on selling for that weekly until after six months the Business manager, Paul Donham, called her into his office and told her she was being fired "because you are sleeping with a competitor."

Imagine getting away with that crap today!

But it was a lucky break for her as it was for me, for she would have loyally stayed there forever, but when she started selling for MPG where I worked she zoomed past every salesperson and within a year was earning over $100.000 a year, and the year was 1979. That's the equivalent of over a quarter million a year today.

Pretty and witty

Pat was crucial to our success at Best Read Guide. It was not unusual, when we had four salespeople on staff, for her to be responsible for half the group's total.  She was just as important for the launch of our internet company eCape.com in 1996 when she sold contracts for banners even before the first site was online.

As this is written she is in her 67th year and out selling this year's ads for Best Read Guide.

Here's an example of her quick wit.

We were visiting our son and his wife in Salem fifteen years ago, and Pat noticed a copy of "American Atheist" on their coffee table.

Pat asked our son what it was, and he told her that they subscribed to it to support the separation of church and state, to wit Pat parried;

"I raised my kids to be agnostics and they turned atheists."

This is Pat's family on a Pleasant Bay beach in front of her home in 2002: from left, Patricia, Jay holding Marina, Julie holding Will, Walter. Son Todd was out of town the day this was taken.

Chapter 17. Know my car, know me

Cars I have loved or loved in

Left column: 1936 Cadillac Limousine, MG-TD, 1956 and a 1978 Jeep J10.
Right column: 1949 Ford, 1956 Corvette, 1963 Oldsmobile, my present 2006 Land Rover LR3.

"But the thing about bad guys is that they have the biggest bosomed blonds, they have great clothes and great cars, and get great death scenes." - Eric Roberts

The Rig Veda, Book 10,
Hyman CLVI, Indra.
For life I set thee free by this oblation from the unknown decline & from Consumption;
Or, if the grasping demon have possessed him, free him from her..

I've never owned a dull car. It started at age 16 when at the legal age to drive in the late 1940s I had a low budget but a high taste and decided to start with a limousine.

Luckily for me the local Woodbury CT funeral parlor had just bought a new limo and offered their twelve-year old one for a very small price.

It was a mint Cadillac with about 20,000 miles on the odometer and an enormous rear seating area with two jump seats facing the very substantial and cushioned back seat.

No teenager suffering from a surfeit of testosterone could have found a better launching pad for his over active hormones.

While my peers drove old, beat-up wrecks, I squired young women around in elegant style with the expected results.

That 1936 Cadillac Limo got about ten miles to the gallon, but we weren't going any further than the nearest trysting spot.

On to the Naugatuck Daily News and my first newspaper job

Two years later, even before I got my first newspaper job, I traded up to a 1949 Ford convertible, bright red with white leather interior.

I had the MG-TD I drove in 1955 repainted and added a small windscreen to the driver's side.

I had it about a month when my first wife's young brother jumped on the hood with sandy shoes and survived to tell the story.

In that sweet little convertible we used to go double-dating at the drive-in movies with the Sports Editor of the Naugatuck Daily News, Don Anderson, who was going out at that time with the Woman's Page Editor named Justine who ended up living a couple miles from me on Pleasant Bay years later.

Don and I each brought along a six-pack of beer, and Don finished his before the previews were over.

I discovered that when I felt a warm,wet sensation on the back of my neck as he projectile vomited his six-pack at my back.

Poor Justine. I never tire of telling the tale in front of her conservative Republican friends.

My next car was an MG-TD, the second in the MG series. The windscreen on this model could be rotated foreward on the bonnet, and I had a smaller driver-side only windscreen attached for solo racing.

At age 25 I inherited my father's estate which he had wisely kept away from me since he died when I was 21.

Dad should have held it in abeyance longer because it took me very little time to go through the entire amount.

On the day I got access to my inheritance I walked a block from the Greenwich Time newspaper office where I was working to the Chevrolet dealer who had a bright red 1956 Corvette in the showroom window.

I paid cash and drove it out.

I was getting divorced at the time and sped off to work for various newspapers (Chapter 7) all over the east coast, and that Chevy was dead at the side of an Aroostook County Maine road 18 months later.

It was worn out.

Who needs four wheels anyway?

We used our little Vespa to drive to Point Judith RI weekends (with a couple more Beatniks in the back) to work on a 40-foot boat we were re-building to sail around the world. Luckily a hurricane destroyed it before we left.  We drove it the way the video shows.

The next few years were spent in Greenwich Village where a car was not needed, although Patricia and I did buy a tiny Vespa car to get out of town once in a while.

The little thing was so light we could pick it up and slide it into tight parking places sideways.

It too died after a year of auto abuse. The video on the right shows why. There is another photo of the little devil below.

When Pat and I got to the Thompsonville Press in 1964, we bought an almost new, white Oldsmobile 88 convertible which was a real beauty, but huge.

When we moved to Cape Cod in 1965 we discovered it was literally too big for the Lower Cape roads, and drove a VW Beetle and a Toyota Corolla until I bought my first Land Rover.

Pat drove the cutest little Morris Woody you ever saw, also shown below.

During the O.P.E.C. oil embargo of the 1970s I switched to a red Jeep J10 pick-up with an extended back.

We spent weekends driving down old dirt roads and power lines gathering deadwood to feed our wood-burning stove.

Later, when I worked at MPG Communications in Plymouth, I switched to a Mercedes 500 SEL for the 45 mile commute.

In 1988  I started Best Read Guide and went back to Land Rovers, first a red Range Rover, then a white Discovery and today the LR3 shown above.

Below are a few I've mentioned in previous chapters: top row, 1940 Ford Woody, 1970 Land Rover a and a 1960 Vespa. Bottom row, 1958 Morris Woody and a 1984 Mercedes Benz 500 SEL.

Chapter 18 - The newspaper of the future

Cape Cod TODAY, Plymouth Daily News and CommunityDailyNews.com

After selling the BRG Franchise Corp. in 1998, I turned all my attention to the internet which I knew even back then would replace untold print publications, especially regional newspapers.

Our latest venture is Plymouth Daily News.

Best Read Guide was the first print media on Cape Cod to offer an online version in 1996, and my daughter-in-law Julie Brooks who heads up eCape.com and I launched Cape Cod TODAY which was quickly followed by a half dozen niche portals to appeal to parents & child, pets & their owners, vacations, etc.

CC Today grew expontenitally at between 20 and 30% yearly until in 2010 we launched our first additional newssite, Plymouth Daily News, to cover the South Shore of Massachusetts as well.

In doing so Julie and I joined forces with a longtime newspaper friend, Louise "Lou" Phelps, to created similar newssites in Georgia, and the three of us founded a new franchise company to offer the Cape Cod Today and Plymouth Daily News format to anyone who wanted to start their own newssites anywhere else.

The new company is called CommunityDailyNews.com.