Tony Hey:
CLASS OF 1962
Arlington High SchoolClass of 1962
Arlington heights, IL
california state university,FullertonClass of 1967
Fullerton, CA
Prospect High SchoolClass of 1959
Mt. prospect, IL
South Junior High SchoolClass of 1958
Arlington heights, IL
South Middle SchoolClass of 1955
Arlington heights, IL
Tony's Story
Rather than just being "remembered" I'd rather do the work it takes to actually be "known".
People think posting pictures of themselves is a main thing in life, but not me. Snapshots and small screens, to me, are nothing
"Oh oh, the grandfathers of twins...", Nico and Luca. Until I learned to tell them apart, I told them both, "Hey man you're one of my favorites.""
Humanity divides into 2 groups, ones who accelerate at yellow lights and ones who slow down, one or the other.
In 1994 my AHS friend Wayne Meyer described my teen self as "like a jumping bean bouncing all over the place". Not long after, new friend Bonnie Ray described my then self as "both genuine and odd", 2 fair sum ups in my opinion.
I hate bucket lists though I'm as aware of "the bucket" as anyone.. We're all going to die though probably not today, so we must get busy acting convincingly not dead now. Ah,but how...?
Elderliness is not so much how you look as how you make left turns.
The classmates.com concept of "remembering" is useless, a website's list of simplifications resembling attempts to get Alzheimer's patients to speak after they no longer can.
I arrived in LA in Aug. of 64 driving my $68 uninsured 51 Nash, the same month The Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl, the same month Gracie Allen died.
Self esteem is impossible until you put the family puzzle pieces together. Until then all you ask of other people is that they like you more than you like yourself. Oops!
I was always afraid of psychotherapy because I thought if I ever went, in 5 minutes they'd carry me off rolled up in a carpet. Years later I actually went to shrinks and quickly discovered life should be lived like a therapy group.
If I ever moved back to Arlington, I'd volunteer at the Historical Society. Who but me remembers the picture that hung outside the old South School gym dedicated to Ray Hickman, a kid hit by a C&NW train in 1947?
I ran religiously for 40 years then tore my meniscus in 2006 and that ended that. Dr. Klapper said, "Find another sport.", but of course none exists. My kids , raised playing in the sand pits at high school tracks, would see me gliding around the track and say, "I bet in another lap he'll be talking to that guy." My message to the world was (and remains), "Hey man, how far you going?"
My 41 year old daughter Julie's dog Nadine has died and Julie's taking it badly, though for years the most often made comment to Nadine had been, "Shut up doggy." as she tirelessly guarded the house from passersby who hadn't the slightest interest in the house. Just like when she was 2, I wish I could shield Julie from such hurts but that's the one thing you can't ever do. It is what it is. What's next I ask myself, playing dumb...?
My relatives don't E-mail, they do phone calls at times of calamity. I call it "so glad to hear you're still not dead" calls. Aside from that, their curiosity about who and what I actually am remains remarkably limited. As time passes, I remember more of our past and they less
At the 87 reunion, Katy Witt said, "We always thought you were one of the cutest of the guys who didn't date". Well she had me there.
In August of 63, I was working in the Fields' towel dept at the downtown store. When the Chicago contingent from the ML King rally arrived back from DC, they did an impromptu march down State St. I told my boss, "I'm taking my break.", and joined them for a mile. Ulmer Turner was out there with his hand mike, getting jostled and looking confused. 4 months later when Fields offered me a promotion, seeing my future smirking at me, I quit instead and hitchhiked back to Kansas, giving my parents 10 minutes notice before Jimmy Mahler drove me out to the highway. The 60's had begun.
The only exercise I get, other than walking is tearing AARP solicitations in half, knees slightly bent.
Why do people prefer tweets to E-mail? Because the thought of being deeply understood distresses them. Isn't being figured out by others the whole point of life? Let the people visiting my deathbed at least know what it is they're losing, not scratching their heads saying "Who the hell was he?"
When Julie and Kevin had their daughter Alex in 2010 I, as always seeking clues about my uncertain future, saw within days my destiny carved definitively in stone telling me - "You, sir, were born to babysit".
Power walkers have taken a natural thing and made it into something grotesque and unnatural. God only knows how they contort other things in life. When I walk I saunter, like Thoreau.
Cousin Marianne informs me Eileen Young has died of heart disease. She was my mom's glamorous younger friend (10 years younger), and in my teens I'd babysit for her and Ralph's toddler Elizabeth and baby son Philip. After they were asleep, I'd have a Fresca and play Ralph's Harry James albums and read his prewar Nazi era propaganda magazines touting the new Germany with no mention of death camps or Blitzkreig, just profiles like, "Meet Air Reichsmarshall Goering, who loves art." I'd read Eileen's Maryknoll magazines (she stopped when Vatican II came in). I visited her with my Aunt Elaine last August, and found her wheelchair bound, living in the most cigarette smoke-saturated house in Cook County. She said she'd given away all of Ralph's stuff when he died. Hadn't she heard of storage units? Well I have. When Howard Carter first looked into King Tut's tomb, his assistant asked, "Do you see anything?", and he said, "Yes, wonderful things.", when he could have just as easily said, "I think there's a dead guy in here.", but he didn't.
In 1994, I crashed my daughter's Honda into the Cadillac of one of the last surviving cast members of "It's A Wonderful Life", Argentina Brunetti (Mrs. Martini in the film) as her car slowly turned left into my path, imitating with no injuries the details of James Dean's death crash, and totaling the Honda while doing negligible damage to the Caddy's bumper which nevertheless cost more to fix than Julie paid for her whole car.
One time in New York, near the Natural History Museum, I saw David and Helen Gurley Brown getting on a bus for downtown. No cabs for them.
In 1987, my sister Barb and I followed Louise Lasser for 8 blocks on the Upper East Side as she trudged along looking like a bag lady.
The only time I was in the Cafe Carlyle (to see George Shearing), Robert De Niro's ex-wife Diahnne Abbott (the band singer in "New York, New York") was at a table out front talking loudly like everything was fine, a sure sign everything wasn't.
My last quarter at Cal State, I took a class from Milton Orowitz who was said to be the brother of Michael Landon, who Wikipedia confirms was born Eugene Orowitz though I've never been able to confirm their actual kinship Dr. Orowitz was intense and intimidating and not one to suffer fools, a group that apparently included his students. I was both terrified and dazzled by him. He brought the British novels we read in class to life, then he tore them apart like a fox does chickens. On my midterm, he lambasted my wordy prose in a way that both chilled my blood and snapped me to attention as he wrote - "A generally valid argument, though scarcely weighty enough to support the souped-up style in which it is written. You have an impressive command of language but use it in what, unfortunately, strikes the reader as a self-congratulatory way. And your rather sloppy habit of throwing around parentheses and dashes (sometimes improperly used) coupled with your misuse of the semi-colon that results in "fragments" weakens the effect you seek. A little self restraint in expression might produce real and honest expressiveness: you have the talent: treasure it." These words were like a stake into a vampire's heart, and being no fool (just young) I wrote my endterm final with them in mind, apparently successfully because I got an A in the class, but I was too scared of him to go to his office to pick up my test paper, so I don't know what he wrote on that one, a cowardice I've regretted for 50 years. Two years later, I heard Orowitz had killed himself and I felt bad about it, and wished I'd have gone in and told him how much he'd taught me about books and life, but side B of many a blabbermouth is a shy person who's often unable to speak up when it really counts. 5 years later in Charles Thiras's office waiting to get my taxes done, I saw June Preisser, that gorgeous, acrobatic blonde from all those Mickey & Judy MGM musicals. I knew exactly who she was, but I didn't speak to her, either.
The main defect of classmates.com is that it's not free. It wants to be Facebook, that garish bazaar of fansites to self, but wants you to pay for it. People dip into classmates.com, then return to Facebook's free lunch, Once you've written to all the people you knew or remember, it's up to them whether they want to answer or even if they want to read the things. You're not in control. God it's just like high school.
My friend Scott took a comedy class from Robin Menken, the ex-wife of Country Joe McDonald (the Country Joe album "Together" shows their wedding). One day he needed a ride to class, so I drove him and met Robin, and we discovered we both had the same favorite movie, "Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000". I liked her. Later, Scott told me that Robin had mentioned that an old boyfriend of hers had committed suicide, and she'd remarked, "Hey I would have married him.", as if that might have saved him from himself. Hearing that, I kind of loved her, and when I saw her at Scott's house that Thanksgiving, I wondered what it would be like to be married to her myself though of course I barely knew her. See how my mind works? Well it doesn't seem like work to me.
Cancer did me a world of good. After I had my surgery in April 2001, after 4 days I read a discarded New York Times one of the ICU nurses found for me. ...Expand for more
In it, I saw the obituary of film director Michael Ritchie, who'd just died of what I'd been operated on for. He, the director of "Downhill Racer", "The Candidate", and "Smile", had died and there I was reading about it. It made no sense and took my attitudes about life and sent them flying like a boomerang that's tossed then for some reason just keeps on going. I'd always thought it was having children that made a human being out of me, but it was illness. Now, no matter what happens to me, It never occurs to me to say, "Why me?" since "Why not me?" makes as much sense. Cancer did me a world of good. It made me fearless.
I remember everything. Both my ex-wives agree that I remember more about their lives and histories than they do. Hey, I thought paying attention was what the marriages were for.
I remember the mean old lady at the Ben Franklin's on Campbell, who was polite to adult customers but mean to kids. As you got older, she got nicer. By the time I left town, her sour irritation had been replaced by sickly civility, though meanness returned when kids entered the store. The Christmas of 1952 when my purchases for my entire family amounted to $1.10, much of it in pennies, she nearly leaped over the counter at me. Everyone that year got Unguentine which cost 15 cents a tube.
I remember kids in line for lunch at Miss Ellen's cafeteria at Baker University. She'd sit at the end of the line like a benign troll guarding a foot bridge, greeting us all by name. At night, they'd pipe in tunes like "Green Onions" and "Do You Love Me?". When "The Dave Clark 5" did their cover of it 2 years later, I was in Fullerton, CA watching "Shindig" with my pals at The Hillcrest Apartments, whose shrewish owner Mrs. Whiteman hated students but was forced by necessity to rent to them, since it was walking distance from the JC and the rents, with 4 kids stuffed refugee-like into each apartment, were affordable to all .
My first real job in California was at Disneyland but before that I briefly delivered telegrams on a bike at the Anaheim Western Union office, which was less fun than it had seemed in "the Human Comedy".. The customers would open the door as if unsure whether to fight or flee. One went to a place on a block of Loara St. I learned years later Tim Buckley lived on at the time, Sept. of 64, but he wasm't out on his porch noodling, unlike when my sister Barb's friend Edie, hiking in the hills above Boulder in the 70's, saw Stephen Stills playing for free on his cabin porch. When I went in to resign, the lady told me that most of the people who quit just called in and had their final checks mailed to them.
Later, at D-land I, worked at "The Yacht Bar" food stand in Adventureland near the submarine ride, within sight of the grander food stand, "The Space Bar" in Tomorrowland, where the unsigned, unrecorded teen band "Gary Lewis And The Playboys" played a zomblielike set every half hour like musical Mr. Lincolns. One night, John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands walked by pushing their kid in a stroller. Later, I saw Bob Denver and his then wife, the one he later dumped when he traded up..
I got unhelpful draft counseling from Mike Klonsky, the head of LA SDS, not that I needed counseling, since I already knew there was no way I'd go, though Gertrude Kiley at the Des Plaines draft office certainly tried to get me to. I went for a pre-induction physical in 65 in downtown LA in a bus full of Orange County kids feeling like new arriving cons in a prison movie. From the window, I saw the "Dave Beck Trucking Company" truck lot (he was the president of The Teamsters before Jimmy Hoffa, and, like him, went to jail). I passed the physical but avoided the draft by keeping a full course load, classes that started as A's then became D's as I worked to support myself and neither slept nor studied. I still have my last draft card, a 1-0 card Mrs. Kiley sent me when I was classed a CO and was allowed to do 2 years of alternate service at the Welfare Dept, and ended up staying 5 due to a lack of vocational direction shared by my colleagues, liberal arts majors who spent more time talking out on the quad than planning for careers. I didn't go to Vietnam but the kid sitting in front of me in my nursery school picture, Bobby Bardach, did and got killed (my mother sent me his obituary out of "The Herald"), and in the picture 4 year old Bobby has a forlorn, desolate look of someone who knew even then he wouldn't be making it to San Francisco with flowers in his hair.
In the spring of 67, "Ten Years After" played a show at La Habra High where the tickets were $2, but I couldn't go because I had to work my job as night manager at the Americana Motel on Beach Blvd. near Knott's Berry Farm. The motel had a coffee shop next to it where the guy playing the piano bar was Scatman Crothers, who was famous enough to be mentioned on a Lenny Bruce album, but hadn't made many movies yet. On the nights he was too tired to drive home to Van Nuys, he'd stay at the motel and sign in only using his first name, since we all knew Scatman. The rooms cost $8.32 and if you wanted to use the phone in the room, I was the one who'd hook up the connection for a "time and charges" call using a phone switchboard like in those 1930's movies, with snake-like connection cables you had to plug in, me wearing headphones like Josephine.
One time in the 60's, I saw the guy who played Peggy Ann Garner's brother in "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn" clerking at Pickwick Books. Later, while working at the Welfare Dept, I saw Muhammad Ali outside the 103rd St.office and got his autograph. I went with my friend Mike Levine to a question and answer session with Henry Miller done as a fundraiser for a theater company. Mike introduced me to his single mother poet friend Kay.. During the Q+A, she asked Henry Miller if he had any recommendations of local bars to go to as if 80+ year old Henry was still hanging out in them.
Once, in the 80's, I ran into Christopher Cross on the running track at Lincoln Jr. High in West LA, He talked about his girl problems. The miles just floated by.
I came to LA from Kansas because the idea of New York scared me, then I finally got to New York and realized I should have been born there.
I decided to come to LA in the summer of 63 when I saw an Arlington girl, Sharon Slater, cavorting with her UCLA pals on the sidewalk outside "The Steve Allen Show" (in that bit where he'd point a camera outside to see what was happening on Vine St.) and I reasoned, "If she can get there, I can get there." I always expected to run into Sharon Slater in LA, but I never did, but I once saw Inger Stevens driving out of a bank parking lot on Beverly Blvd, and looking sad.
15 years before that, my sister Nancy was in a swimming class at Rec Park with Andy Prentiss, whose dad Ed Prentiss played "The Green Hornet" on the radio
Larson & Blix houses were made of brick and were square like a wiffle ball box. Ours cost $16,000 in 1947, and when we built our addition in 1954, it looked like a wiffle ball box with an addition. I knew rich kids Suzi Larson and Rusty Blix all through school.
I arrived late at the Monterey Pop Festival and missed the Friday night show, so I still have my intact Friday night ticket saved between pages of a book. I'm not in the movie but my Welfare Dept. colleague Mary Flotho is, sitting and giggling in a cloud of pot smoke while her adorable, blonde friend chatters in the first scene in the movie.
I loused up my interview for a stockboy job at Haggenbring's when Mr. H asked me if I liked sports, and, to appear hireably manly, I said I liked them all so I wasn't hired because he assumed I'd soon be quitting to go join the varsity. In fact, I was never on a school team in my life, though I was a natural runner and loved running laps in gym class and with coaching and training could have given Jim Hendricks a run for it when he ran his 4:30 mile, (then I'd be in the yearbook too). Had a coach recruited me, I'd have been on the track team instead of in Murphy's plays. I expressed regret about this to my friend at Disneyland, Nancy Jo, and she said, "But then you'd have just been another jock." I should have married her. She was studying to be a teacher, like her uncle in Anaheim, who lived in one of those California craftsman style houses. Nancy Jo was perfect for me, therefore out of my league, I reasoned. Reluctant to shoot myself in the head, I settled for my foot.
All I ask of people is that they have a prose style, an authorial voice. Is that asking too much? As a matter of fact, probably
I always tell people not to waste their expensive wine on me since it never seems that much better than the cheap stuff. It's part of my philosophy of life. Expensive wine is wasted on me, along with expensive everything else.
Though a smart ass in class, I was the teacher's pet more times than anyone in the history of the Illinois school system, in 3rd, 5th, and 8th grades, and even more in high school where there were even more teachers to glom onto. In Sociology Class senior year, Betsy Sherman said she'd seen our freshman Algebra teacher, Miss Van Diggelin, dressed in black and smoking a cigarette outside a jazz club on Rush St. Miss Van D had been a favorite of mine, nice to me despite my D's. I spent lots of time after school talking to her and making her laugh. Teachers either loved me or saw me as their natural enemy and hated my guts. Did I shine a harsh light on their choices in life, or was I just another obnoxious 17 year old jerk, untested by life and not too eager to take the test?
The only things I regret in life are the things I was talked into selling at yard sales. I did it because there was going to be a revolution in 5 years and funds were needed. Well the Revolution didn't come in 5 years. The divorce didn't even come in 5 years.
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