Dispatch #305: Robin Hood Was a Commie

 

    Right-wing book bans are all the rage in 2023, but such authoritarian tactics are nothing new. Back in the 1950s—during the height of the McCarthy Era—conservatives actually tried to get the legendary hero Robin Hood removed from schools as they were convinced his steal-from-the-rich-give-to-the-poor philosophy was nothing less than straight up communism.

     Just a few years earlier, Republicans had prodded the F.B.I. to investigate Frank Capra's 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life, outraged that George Bailey was—gasp!—some kind of socialist (well, duh!)

     As a native Hoosier, I wasn't surprised to discover this Robin Hood ban originated in Indiana—a state long known for its embarrassingly backward politics—but I was pleased to learn how a group of Indiana University students organized a campaign of resistance against it. 

    Known as The Green Feather Movement—because supporters wore a single chicken feather dyed green to show their antipathy toward censorship—the movement eventually spread to other U.S. college campuses: Purdue, Harvard, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and U.C.L.A. 

   

     While the Green Feather Movement may have been short-lived, the idea behind it is as important today—when right-wing groups such as Moms for Liberty are attempting to cleanse school libraries of books they don't agree with—as it was during the McCarthy Era.

  You can read more about the Green Feather Movement here and here. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to order my Green Feather button from Etsy, which I plan to wear during the next school board meeting.

    There's more to come in the next dispatch.

    ©2023 SummitCityScribe

#304: Ghosts of Junkyards Past

 

When I was a kid, there was a huge scrapyard on Clinton Street just across from Fort Wayne's Lawton Park. Despite a corrugated metal fence along the property—originally known as Superior Iron and Metal—stacks of junk cars and scrap metal eventually grew so tall they were easily visible to passing motorists.

That junkyard eyesore is long gone, but recent announcements about new developments slated for the property (which you can read about here and here) made me wonder how many people remember what used to be on that land—and what may still be there.

Back in the year 2000, a soil study of the former junkyard revealed unsafe levels of argon, cadmium, lead, mercury, and PCBs—all pretty bad stuff—and spills of diesel fuel, gasoline, and cleaning solvents were reported on the site. At this point I'm sure you're thinking: but that report was over 20 years ago, so surely everything's all good now, right? 😟🤞

Normally, I think any news about the continued development of downtown Fort Wayne is good news, but in this case, I intend to steer well clear of any future developments on the old OmniSource site. I mean, who wants an ice-cold PBR with a PCB chaser?

    There's more to come in the next dispatch.

    ©2023 SummitCityScribe

Dispatch #298: Tom Henry for Mayor

     

    Tom Henry is the most transformative Fort Wayne mayor in my lifetime (or at least since the days of Ivan Lebamoff). The Summit City's emanating more energy and optimism than it has in decades, and that needs to continue. 

    People vote for change when they don't like the direction things are headed in, and I don't know anyone who thinks there's been too much growth and revitalization around town since 2007. Well, I can think of one person: Tom Didier.

   Mr. Didier—Mayor's Henry's vanilla Republican opponent—settled on a head-scratching campaign slogan of Fort Wayne First. To paraphrase the Journal Gazette's observation: as opposed to what, exactly? 

     Personally, I think a more appropriate slogan would be something like "Had Enough Progress? Vote Didier!" The guy was so stiff as a candidate that he employed Russ Jehl as pit-bull during his press conferences.

     Didier is about join a list that includes Matt Kelty, Paula Hughes, Mitch Harper, and Tim Smith among Henry's vanquished Republican foes—frustrating local GOP hack Steve Shine in his scheme for total control of the Summit City yet again.

   By the way, there's a great slate of smart, accomplished Democratic women running this year, too—Porsche Williams, Patti Hays, Jennifer Matthias, Melissa Rinehart, Sharon Tucker, Michelle Chambers, Stephanie Crandall, and Audrey Davis. Fort Wayne city government would be transformed if they'd win behind a Henry victory—and afterward, Steve Shine would need to start buying Maalox in bulk.

     Update—8 November 2023: I'm happy to report that Tom Henry will continue as Fort Wayne's mayor for a historic fifth term. 

     Despite losing the mayoral race for the seventh straight time (including two terms by Graham Richards), local GOP hack (and Emperor Palpatine clone) Steve Shine still claimed that "Fort Wayne is a Republican city." 

     Sorry to rain on your parade, dude, but it's pretty obvious that a fairly large number of Republicans have voted for a Democratic mayor to represent the city over the last two decades.

   There's more to come in the next dispatch.

   ©2023 SummitCityScribe

Dispatch #292: The Time(s) My Mother Took Me to a Slasher Film

John Carpenter's Halloween turns 45 this month, and lately I've been thinking about the first time I saw that classic fright flick up on the big screen.

As I wrote in a much earlier Dispatch, my mother loved movies, and among her favorite kinds were thrillers and murder mysteries.

One of my earliest childhood movie memories is watching Stanley Kubrick's Killer's Kiss on the living room couch with my mom—eventually pulling a blanket over my head when the picture's creepy climax in a warehouse full of mannequins became too much for me.

On that same living room couch we also watched Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number, Dorothy McGuire in The Spiral Staircase, Ross Martin and Stephanie Powers in Experiment in Terror, and a very scary Bette Davis as The Nanny.

As I got older, mom and I would often spend Saturday afternoons at one of our local cinemas. We saw all kinds of films during those weekends in the 1970s, but in particular a lot of thrillers—both good and bad: Jaws, William Castle's Bug, Grizzly, The Eagle Has Landed, The Cassandra Crossing, Twilight's Last Gleaming, The Boys from Brazil, Capricorn One, and Phil Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

In late October 1978, mom saw a commercial for a new flick she thought looked pretty scary and chose it for our weekly movie outing. 

 As it turns out, she was right, but I don't think either of us were prepared for the intensity of John Carpenter's Halloween. This wasn't a murder mystery like Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians—it was a full-on slasher film, and it scared us silly that Saturday afternoon. 

As I hadn't seen any of his earlier films (Assault on Precinct 13, Dark Star), I remember thinking beforehand it was pretty bold the film was advertised as John Carpenter's Halloween, a privilege usually only afforded to established directors such as Alfred Hitchcock. 

Afterward, I realized it was pretty clever, assuring that everyone knew the name of the man behind the stylish, low-budget thriller—who would later go on to give us The Fog, Escape From New York, The Thing, and They Live, among other iconic films.

That screening of John Carpenter's Halloween wasn't the only time my mother and I saw a rather intense film together, either. Thanks to our weekly movie ritual, we also saw Midnight Express, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Ridley Scott's Alien, too. 

As these features were all R-rated, I was usually the only kid in my class to see them, but even for those of my intrepid peers who did manage to sneak into a Halloween screening back in October of '78, I think it's safe to say that none of them saw the spooky slasher film as I did—with a movie-loving mother by their side. 

Several months later, in the summer of 1980, mom took me to see another thriller with a high body-count: Friday the 13th. Yes, that's right: I actually saw two iconic slasher films with my mother. 

Unfortunately, director Sean Cunnigham was no John Carpenter, leaving us both disappointed. "I can't believe Betsy Palmer was in such a lousy picture," mom grumbled as we walked out of the theater. 

Obviously, we had no idea at that moment how Jason Voorhees would continue to haunt movie screens for decades to come—we just agreed that Friday the 13th couldn't hold a candle to those old black & white thrillers we used to watch together on the living room couch.

There's more to come in the next dispatch.

©2023 SummitCityScribe

Dispatch #291: It's a Bloggy Anniversary!

      Believe it or not, today marks three years to the day since I began this blog back in October 2020. Back then, I saw it as a place to publicize my Young Adult fantasy series, The Samantha Stanton Adventures (and post background material about it, too).

     Eventually, circumstances necessitated moving all of that content to a brand-new online home, and Dispatches from Aldeburgh morphed into a place for me to write about other stuff—whatever's on my mind, really. Sometimes it's a bit of nostalgia, other times it's my take on current/local events.

     As long as it remains fun and not a chore, I'll continue to post random stuff here—to the delight of a select few and the continued chagrin of everyone else. 

     There's more to come in the next dispatch.

     ©2023 SummitCityScribe

Dispatch #289: Fort Wayne's Horror Hosts

 

WPTA's Shock Theater in the 1950s (left), the 1970s (center), and WFFT's Nightmare Theater (right) in the 1980s

I've covered some of this material previously at this blog, but it's just a little over a week until Halloween, so what the heck...

Today's Dispatch spotlights Fort Wayne's horror hosts—that trio of spooky gentlemen who fronted broadcasts of horror movies on local TV over the years.

The first was WPTA's Dr. Meridian, who hosted their weekly airings of classic Universal Horror movies from their Shock Theater syndication package in the late 1950s. As the good doctor was before my time, I have no idea what he looked like or if his hosting style was campy or sinister.

Actor Jeff Gibson's Asmodius was the frontman for WPTA's Shock Theater airings in the 1970s that I watched religiously as a kid. Gibson's tone changed gradually during his tenure, going from mostly serious to fairly campy. Years later, I got to meet my childhood horror host when we worked together briefly at a Fort Wayne bookstore.

Finally, Summit City residents in the 1980s thrilled to weekly visits from The Shroud, a black-clad figure portrayed by Don Paris on WFFT's Nightmare Theater. In sepulchral tones, the deadly serious Shroud dispensed fascinating bits of trivia about the classic monster flicks he showed each week.  

In the early 1980s, I got to meet Paris in his Shroud persona when he did an autograph signing at Dick Stoner's legendary magic/gag shop in downtown Fort Wayne.

Sadly, the era of Fort Wayne horror hosts came to an end when Nightmare Theater ended its run on WFFT. These days, Summit City residents have to get their Saturday night fright-flick fix with out-of-town horror hosts such as Svengoolie or Lord Blood-Rah.

My childhood experiences watching Jeff Gibson's Asmodius led me to create the fictional horror-host Count Mortius, frontman for the Shock Theater broadcasts beloved by 12-year-old Samantha "Lizzie" Stanton in my e-book, Samantha Stanton and the Mysterious Library.

There's more to come in the next dispatch.

 ©2023 SummitCityScribe

Dispatch #279: Night Monsters

      

Me and Mark on a Halloween night in the 1980s.

   Like millions of American kids, I loved dressing up on Halloween and going door-to-door begging for candy from my neighbors, usually in a cheap dime store costume from Ben Cooper or Collegeville—a plastic half-mask fitted tightly to my sweaty face with a thin elastic strap.

     I did so for the last time when I was nine years old, and although I continued to enjoy all the trappings and atmosphere of the spooky season in the years that followed, I didn't dress up again in horrific regalia for almost ten years.

     In the picture at the top of today's Dispatch, that's a teenage me on the left wearing the black coat and hat and sporting a chalky white skull mask. My friend Mark Ward (who painted both our masks) is the wolfman on the right. 

     The two of us went out looking like this out on a Halloween night in the early 1980s. We didn't go door-to-door, however—instead we merely tooled around Fort Wayne aimlessly after dark, occasionally popping into public places like Southtown Mall to gauge people's reactions to our frightful get-ups.

     Since this is the time of year when everyone from kids to grownups like to dress up in costumes both fanciful and fearful, here's an interesting article examining the history behind such traditions.

Photograph ©1964 Diane Arbus

    These days, my October traditions no longer involve wearing spooky garb, but I still have fond childhood memories of walking down the sidewalks in my northside Fort Wayne neighborhood after dark on Halloween—tucked into one of those Collegeville/Ben Cooper costumes from Kresge's or Mr. Wiggs—with a plastic jack-o-lantern bucket swinging from one hand that I hoped by the end of the night would be filled with sugary treats.

     There's more to come in the next dispatch.

     ©2023 SummitCityScribe

Dispatch #278: Cannibalism at the Disco

 

     I've been endeavoring to focus my posts this month on all things spooky, eerie, and macabre, and since today's Dispatch deals with cannibalism, I think it fits the bill quite nicely.

     In early 1971, I heard the song Timothy by The Buoys on local radio for the very first time. A disturbing tale of miners trapped underground in a cave-in—and the gruesome things they do to survive—it was nothing like the cheery pop tunes I usually heard on WLYV. 

     Even though I was just a kid, I understood immediately what the song was about and got a juvenile kick out of hearing something that I probably shouldn't have been listening to at that age.

     Of course, I was already heavily into monsters and horror movies at the time, so hearing a creepy rock tune about two trapped miners eating a third didn't give me any nightmares. 

     Songwriter Rupert Holmes went on to have a successful music career. You can read about the history behind his song Timothy here.

    Many years later, while living in NYC, I attended a Morrissey concert at what was then known as The Uptown Ritz (to differentiate it from the Ritz down in Greenwich Village)—located at 254 W. 54th Street in Manhattan. 

254 W. 54th Street in 1992.

     I knew at that time the venue had started life as a legitimate theater before becoming a CBS Radio/TV studio—and then the legendary 1970s disco Studio 54. What I hadn't known then was that in-between CBS and the disco era, the office building had also been the home of Scepter Records.

    Scepter was famous as the label of iconic 1960s girl-groups such as The Shirelles and the Chiffons, both of whom recorded at the label's original home at 1674 Broadway. 

     In 1965, however, Scepter moved to their new digs at 254 W. 54th Street, where acts as varied as The Velvet Underground, B.J. Thomas—and yes, The Buoys—cut studio tracks. I knew none of that history when I visited the Ritz on November 27th, 1992, however.

     I had a great time at the Morrissey show that night. Moz—on tour for his excellent Your Arsenal album—was in fine voice and hadn't yet veered off into the uncomfortable political statements he's infamous for these days. During the set from his opening act, Jet Black Machine, I remember glancing around the venue and thinking about the glory days of disco at Studio 54. 

     I had absolutely no idea back then that just a few floors above my head, Timothy—the song about cannibalism that gave me the shivers as a kid—had been recorded in a Scepters Records studio. Thinking about it now brings a mischievous grin to my face—just like the one I wore as a kid while listening to that macabre little song on WLYV back in 1971.

     Postscript: After the uptown Ritz closed in the mid-1990s, the space was vacant until the end of the decade, when The Roundabout Theatre Company found its home there—where it remains to this day.

     There's more to come in the next dispatch.

     ©2023 SummitCityScribe 

Dispatch #271: David McCallum

     Hot on the heels of yesterday's obit for author Allan Asherman comes word of another passing: actor David McCallum has died at age 90.

    Among Baby Boomers, McCallum is best remembered for his portrayal of secret agent Illya Kuryakin on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in the 1960s, while modern TV audiences knew him as Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard (a character he played for 20 years) on NCIS.

     Whenever I think of McCallum, it's usually for his science-fiction & horror roles on TV, such as the two stellar Outer Limits episodes he starred in: The Sixth Finger and The Forms of Things Unknown, an atmospheric Night Gallery entitled The Phantom Farmhouse, a short-lived 1975 NBC series, The Invisible Man, and—years after its original run ended on British TV—I enjoyed MaCallum's pairing with Joanna Lumley in their proto X-Files show, Sapphire and Steel.

     In the YouTube video embedded above, you can listen to Henry Mancini's classy theme to NBC's The Invisible Man, which starred McCallum, Melinda Fee, and Craig Stevens.

     David McCallum (1933-2023) R.I.P.

     "Closing Channel D..."

     There's more to come in the next dispatch.

     ©2023 SummitCityScribe

Dispatch #270: Allan Asherman

 

The Star Trek Compendium (first edition, 1981)

     Some sad news in today's dispatch: according to a post over at Mark Evanier's blog, writer Allan Asherman has died. Mike Glyer posted a reminiscence about Asherman here. 

     Over the years, Asherman wrote for Castle of Frankenstein, The Monster Times, and DC Comics, but it was his work on the Star Trek Compendium that I remember him for most fondly.

     Long before the internet enabled anyone to instantly summon production credits on any film or TV show, that information wasn't easily available to those outside the entertainment business.

     That's why I cheered the arrival of Mr. Asherman's Star Trek Compendium in bookstores back in 1981. It not only offered detailed credits for all three seasons of the original Star Trek series and The Motion Picture but also lots of fascinating behind-the-scenes production trivia. 

     Asherman's Compendium was reprinted and expanded by Simon & Schuster's Pocket Books multiple times, but I can still remember my excitement at picking up the first edition at the Waldenbooks inside Fort Wayne's Southtown Mall back in 1981. 

    Along with Bjo Trimble's Star Trek Concordance, Mr. Asherman's Star Trek Compendium was an invaluable resource for Trek fans in the pre-internet era. 

     Allan Asherman (1947—2023) R.I.P.

There's more to come in the next dispatch.

©2023 SummitCityScribe