trivia

TRIVIA

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(uh, not the person's)

In one's closet are all kinds of articles to wear. Some of my buddies saw me only in an Eisenhower jacket. Faculty and students saw me mainly in a suit. Business associates have viewed me in different kinds of sport shirts. Showbiz people might have seen me in my tux. Still others have seen me clad in all kinds of unusual duds. A few have seen me without . . .

well, to get down to some naked multi-faceted details, what follows will be
trivia , trivia, and more trivia.

(Whassamatter, your mind is already filled with too much useless trivia?
Then consider what follows a collection of tidbits.)

Although faculty and students and friends may have considered that I was a conscientious professional and intellectual at all (?) times, a teacher who got all assignments back the very next day (a reputation about which students told their other teachers, resulting in few plaudits from the faculty who took much longer; but my careful return of papers did promptly draw raves from the students), few knew about other parts of my psyche.

Not that I lived a double life, but I most certainly did compartmentalize my professional from my private affairs!

Actually, I have been adventurous like Tennessee Williams or T. E. Lawrence; have lived dangerously like Wittgenstein or Houdini; have gotten into tight spots, like Oscar Wilde or General Patton. Some day I must write my "Memoirs," in which will be tidbits about people and events such as the following:

• The Des Moines Register and Tribune gave us teenage paperboys a ride in its one-propeller autogiro, predecessor of the helicopter. Not many today can say they ever flew in a contraption that had only one overhead propeller attached to a base that could angle.

The Des Moines Register also had one of the first autogiros.

• George Yates, famed Des Moines Tribune photographer, gave me taxi fare to rush a photo I'd just taken of a Piper Cub that had crashed into telephone wires as the Iowa State Fair. Never before having ridden in a taxi, I took a slow streetcar to the newspaper's offices, pocketing the rest and somehow meeting their deadline. It was years before I ever rode in a taxi, and that was with Mae West (which I'll explain, further down this page)!

• Bob Feller played against my school's 8th grade Little Scorpions team, on which I was a guard and he was a forward. Now a Baseball Hall of Famer, Feller was signed by the Cleveland Indians when he was a senior in nearby Van Meter, Iowa. I joined him for a Radio WHO program on which he spoke, I played accordion, and then we talked about my dad (who had been on a Portland, Oregon, farm team for the Chicago Cubs) was a better baseballer than his dad. Radio WHO was where both of us got our news from sportscaster Dutch Reagan. The day our future president bought an expensive Nash, my parents were in the same showroom and bought a far less expensive Nash Lafayette, the only car then in which you could make a bed. That feature was never used, and I don't know my father's reasoning for buying a car that came with a bed.

• Earned the 39th highest score on the Iowa Every Pupil Test in algebra in 9th grade, getting to go to the University of Iowa for the Brain Derby. Also, I won the economics essay contest at Iowa State when in 10th grade, despite never having studied economics; my little Iowa high school had numbers of others who scored even better, although there were only thirteen in my high school class.

• As the Methodist Episcopal Church pianist, I had very few classical compositions I could play. So I came up with original music composed on the spot. The printed programs cited some non-existent composer and fake titles, such as "Opus 34" by A. S. Brown.

• When a teenager I wrote 30-page letters to Jong Kuet Tze in Sarawak, Borneo, who described in letters that took a month to come how stuffed human heads decorated the walls instead of pictures and how he felt devastated upon shooting a monkey in a tree and finding it was a mother whose young ones hurried vainly to her side. Having a pen-pal greatly inspired me to write even before I reached high school. Jong was killed during the Japanese occupation of Sarawak.

• During a Christmas vacation when at the University of Northern Iowa, I went home with fellow student Bill Scheldrup and became a US Postal Service employee, delivering mail to everyone at Camp Grant, near Rockford, Illinois.

• At Fort Knox, I wrote dozens of letters-to-the-editor that were published in the Louisville Courier-Journal, usually on the subject of Unitarianism or non-theism. George Gershwin buddy Oscar Levant and I slept in the same bed. Uh, we were both guests (at different times) in Louisville, Kentucky, of Mesdames Davenport and Belknap (the former was mother of Book of the Month Club's Basil Davenport, the latter was queen of the South's major silverware company).

• I tailed a suspected Nazi, Kurt Hoffman, while in the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) at Fort Knox. I broke into his footlocker and found German merchant marine papers;

• A soldier with a complimentary ticket, I saw Mae West at the Shubert in "Catherine Was Great," the most memorable line of which was her asking her hairdresser what he wanted for Christmas. He replied, "One of your discarded lovers." As she exited the Shubert and seeing I wanted her autograph, she invited me into her taxi ("Come up and see me"), asked me where I was from and where I thought I was headed, must have cast me as an Iowa hick, and signed the Playbill for me by the time we reached Eighth Avenue. My dad was particularly impressed.

• As an acting first sergeant, I took my company up the hill at Omaha Beach, first having to jump from the little PT boat into the water, then camping nearby at a replacement depot. We lost one enlisted man when he failed to follow directions about avoiding land mines - he chose to take a crap in a hedgerow so no one could see, and he was immediately blown up. He had gone AWOL just before we left the States, saying he had three kids and didn't want to die, to which I had retorted I had no kids and I didn't want to die.

• Was chief clerk of the Adjutant General's Office's postal division, a Hq. Oise unit stationed first on Rue Voltaire in Reims, then in the Little Red Schoolhouse where the Armistice was signed;

I returned to Omaha Beach 50 years afterwards. The battleships in the background and the murky weather were similar to what they were in 1944. That's President Bill Clinton and Hillary (in the yellow coat) at the ceremony where we veterans of the biggest battle EVER were honored.

Hillary follows Bill up the Hill at Omaha Beach

I "stole" a jeep on several occasions (signed the AG's name, which I did as a part of my job, signing dozens of documents daily) and took Sgt. Joe Sczesny with me on separate occasions to Paris, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Aachen, Germany. Joe is my inspiration for the pseudonym Jun Sczesncoczkawasm, because I used to call him Suz- noz-ka-pop.
I found my father Harry C. Smith's name in the Livre d'Or in Verdun, for he had been in the World War I battle there. On the return jeep ride to Reims I got shot at. My father, who had been wounded twice and received the Purple Heart, was amazed when I wrote him all the details. We were not allowed to say where we were when we wrote home--my parents knew where whenever I would write a "poem" (and they'd read the first letter of each line):

    Rarely have I
    Ever before been so
    Inspired by the
    Motivation of the
    Soldiers in my unit!

Was one of the first GIs allowed into Switzerland during WW II. The sergeant who was my roommate in the Swiss hotel got VD from the gal I'd met while playing piano there and who'd wanted to go with me rather than him.
Was sent to Belgium by Adjutant General Floyd W. Brown (whose name I signed on so many official memos that his own signature was once questioned as to its authenticity) to pick up his English girlfriend and, because it was illegal, took a several-day vacation there, driving around in his Packard, knowing he could not easily punish me (and, as a matter of fact, he promoted me to T-Sgt. because I brought her back safely); he had once been sent back to the States because of the allegation that he had thrown his girlfriend through a skimpy, temporary wall in England; everyone feared him but me. One of my jobs was to supply his desk with colonels', captains', and lieutenants' insignia; after a lieutenant colonel would have his "ass eaten out," for example, the AG would reach into his top desk drawer, pick an insignia, and tell a colonel, "That's all, Captain!"
Once faked being a Frenchman rather than a GI when stopped by MPs after curfew in France and while returning from my nightly visits to Jean-Marie Picard and his parents. On every trip to Paris, I faked the AG's signature in order to scout the city and receive lodging and food;
With Myron Messerschmidt, another pianist, I won the Tutor Ticklers contest as a college student at the University of Northern Iowa; I also had my own dance band, which evaporated when a union official appeared as we were setting up for a gig and he made us non-union guys get lost fast; my band featured Duke Ellington's "Take the A Train"; little could I have suspected that one day I would take that particular train almost daily;
In 1946, on a visit to the University of Wisconsin, I got in touch with some Unitarian youths (for I had written an article about my interest in Unitarianism) and worked with them to carry several stones with which Frank Lloyd Wright would construct their revolutionary new church structure, which I never saw once it was completed.

• Many years later, in New Canaan, I tutored a rich girl who lived in a Wright house and was absolutely fascinated with the place (the rich gal never paid me for the college-level tutoring). My other favorite architect, Philip Johnson, lived in New Canaan, and I once took Fernando, his mother, and his sister on a public tour of the "Glass House," marveling at the landscaping, pool, and love temple. Later, I took some writing classes into his underground art chambers (Warhol's "Campbell Soup Can" was there, along with other avant-garde works). "When," I asked Johnson one day while visiting, "are you going to build a place that a high school teacher can afford?" He laughed at my rhetorical question. In over three decades of teaching in town, I never heard about nor saw his companion, David Whitney.• I liked to collect autographs, obtaining them from Mae West, Veronica Lake, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, violinist Nathan Milstein, tenor Lauritz Melchior, the Don Cossack Chorus's leader S. Jaroff, singer Celia Cruz, and others. At the old Latin Quarter, I pulled a feather from one half-naked dancer's garment as she prepared to fly out over the audience, her back strapped to overhead wires - I was guest of band leader Sammy Fields whenever I chose to attend, and it was great fun to mount the spiral stairs with the showgals and other entertainers.

• When Fernando sent me on an errand to deliver an acetate disk to Betty Stasny, once a Ziegfield Follies gal, he warned me that she would probably pinch me. What I hesitatingly found, however, was a very old (in her 80s?) serious businesswoman who headed Betty Stasny Music Corporation and who used elastic bands to support her facial lifts; nevertheless, I could discern a past beauty that still shone through decades of aging.
• When I asked Jerry Bock how to file the original music he had just recorded, he said the Broadway play had not yet been named. "So file it under 'Tevye,' " he suggested. That later became "Fiddler on the Roof."
• Found an abandoned gold mine that Wyoming people in the Teton Valley area had been looking for for decades, ironically while working at a dude ranch in Montana, the year after being a counselor on John D. Rockefeller's B-K Ranch at the foot of the Grand Teton. When a person looking for our director, Bob Turner, introduced himself as "Rockefeller's my name, John D.," I sophomorically responded, "Smith's my name, Warren A."

• Once had lunch with Al Capone's successor (Tony Accardo) in River Forest, Illinois. His 12-year-old Tony Jr. was in my Montana dude ranch's cabin and invited me home after the camp was over. Soon afterwards, Accardo made the front page of Life because Senator Kefauver's crime committee caught up with him. Young Tony did not know about his father's business, telling me was in trucking.

• At the dude ranch in Wyoming, I would spend time gambling in Jackson. On several occasions I lost money (but got free shots of whisky) with Wallace Beery and J. Carroll Naish. The former, a favorite of my parents, was disliked in town, to my surprise. He loved to click-clack the pile of silver dollars he would pass from hand to hand.

• Almost got married twice: first, to Mary Womboldt, who, instead, then put her football-playing husband through dental school, after which he left her; and, second, to ectomorphic Judy Repplier, who married a Belgian noble and now deservedly lives in a castle; both were true beauties!

Judy

• got expelled by Phi Mu Alpha after accusing the honorary music frat of discriminating against Jews; but after my graduation I was eventually reinstated with apologies from the national organization; the trouble resulted in my switching out of my chosen major of music (to avoid one anti-Semitic prof who suggested not accepting a Jewish pledge from New York -- I asked, ingenuously, "Y'mean, Jews can't play trombones?") and over to English, which appears now to have been a good switch; however, I still have dozens of original tunes in my head that I've never gotten down (except on the LP which I made for my parents and a few friends, including one boogie woogie number, "Cross-Eyed Georgie");
• inspired by James T. Farrell (whom I later commissioned to write a story for The Humanist ), I faked being a homeless person in Chicago and joined a Salvation Army soup line; I got my soup and bread, but not until they forced me to pray for it; next to me was a guy who tried to sell me some ice, so in 1946 ice (heroin) was not unknown around the Loop or in soup lines. When Farrell lived in Manhattan and I asked him to write something for The Humanist, he could have hand-delivered the material, walking from 85th to 103rd Street, but he sent it special delivery . . . and postage due!

attended a Manhattan party at Maya Deren's, meeting the avant-garde movie producer's Japanese boyfriend with the one earring (an oddity in the 1950s);
after a movie on 42nd Street at the Harris, I would walk on the south street of The Deuce past the Fascination parlor, perhaps eat at the big Horn & Hardart Automat (where characters abounded and where beatnik Herbert Huncke hung out), then go downstairs to look at freaks (now I call them "exceptional people") in Hubert's Dime Museum and Flea Circus. Years later, I asked Tiny Tim if it is true he had performed there, and he said yes, then surprised me by being able to recall individual songs he had sung while on tour in Iowa and elsewhere.
In common with Diane Arbus, who was known to go to Hubert's, I enjoyed being entertained by the cross-dressers at Club 82 over on the East Side.
In the 1950s I founded the Hvmanist Book Clvb at XXVII Millport Ave., New Canaan, Connecticut, in order to help sell off the book reviewers' copies I was getting as book review editor of The Humanist. The pseudonymous Jun Sczesnoczkawasm (the company's seneschal) could legally sign checks for the club, as could Lvcretivs (the president) and Jesus Vargas (the sexton, in charge of having relations with the public). The idea of the club amused many of the university publishers and rated an article in Saturday Review of Literature.
sold Edmund Wilson's then controversial Memoirs of Hecate County by placing an ad for my Hvmanist Book Clvb in the New Canaan, Connecticut, Advertiser;
arranged the smuggling of one copy in Russian of Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago into the Soviet Union when such was illegal;
Guillermo? There have been two handsome Guillermos in my life. One, son of the NCHS Spanish teacher from Uruguay, Reyna Piola, was, with his beautiful sister Monica, like family during his and her highschool years. The other (in the cast of Buñel's "Los Olvidados," the classic movie about downtrodden youth) was unsuccessful in talking me into leaving Manhattan and Connecticut for a new life in Mexico City, where I would have shared his hacienda with a monkey and a parrot (and would have had to learn Spanish, a feat I felt I could never accomplish).

Guillermo

taught Shigeko Sasamori, one of the Hiroshima Maidens brought here for plastic surgery by Norman Cousins, but her true teachers were the Cousins daughters:

• upon hearing someone in Studio A that I envisioned was an aging Italian opera singer, I entered and found a young smiling baritone, Gilbert Price, who was Langston Hughes 's protégé at that time.

- Gilbert wanted to learn how to play my Wurlitzer church organ. So as he sat at the organ, I got behind him and, while he placed his hands on the keys, I put my arms around to guide them on the keyboard. He turned his head around knowingly, and we saw eye-to-eye for the next 25 years of his life. When he asked if I could get a drama yearbook for Langston, one that contained the "Jim Crow" photo, I did and met the eminent poet on several occasions. In fact, because Gil was performing in Vancouver and could not return, I attended Hughes's funeral and signed his name in the visitors' book. Gil was invited by Fidel Castro (Gil brought me a little rock from Castro's front yard as a souvenir, and it's still in my aquarium) to be the first American to sing in a Cuban prison. In a really dangerous move, Gil sneaked a note from an inmate to give to a brother in Connecticut. Later, we drove to Hartford to find the brother but were unsuccessful because Cubans there suspected us of being government agents. When he got the role as star of "Timbuktu," I advanced the money to get him to Morocco so at least he could see some camels and sand. When a sports show paid his way to be filmed with pygmies ("When I was showering outdoors one morning, to my surprise they watched!") in Central Africa, I helped write his story. When Granny explained she'd been born in St. Kitts, I was the first to explain that that island was not in Africa but, in fact, was one which was publishing my syndicated column. I actually sang along with him in his Catholic choir on 106th Street, we cruised the Village together (once having our billfolds stolen from where we'd hid them in my car), we spent many Christmases and Thanksgivings at his Harlem home, and I became one of the few of his friends whom his mother even half-liked. I was Gil's buddy from the time he starred in Hughes's "Jericho-Jim Crow" (taking Fantuzzi with me) through an acting career which netted him four Tony nominations. I was his bookkeeper, big brother, advisor, pianist (Anthony Newley might not have accepted him had he not been able to rehearse "Feeling Good," a key number, with me, for the audition was upstairs at Variety Arts and because I accompanied him on the piano and he got the song memorized, he was able to return in a short time), drama coach, public relations person, roommate, chauffeur, butler, tax man, confidante,

and more . . . .

The Prince of Timbuktu (above), who is singing a Rimski-Korsakov tune, is wearing a gown by Geoffrey Holder.
At the Automat on Broaday between 46th and 47th, Fantuzzi and I got to talk just after their first Ed Sullivan appearance with Stiller and Meara; they were most interested in what we had thought of their act, and Fantuzzi left them laughing and with no doubts; later I was to record the Stiller son, Ben, along with the grandson of Washington Roebling (builder of the Brooklyn Bridge) in a positively gross musical work called "Road Kill," about running over small animals with your vehicle;
Fantuzzi, my neighbor in the building on 103rd Street, I had taken when he was a pre-teen to have acting lessons from Ernestine McClendon, an eminent actress who had appeared with Ethel Waters in the Broadway production of "His Eye is On the Sparrow." Ernestine had shown Fantuzzi how to empathize, then gave him a study in which he was supposed to come home from school and find his mother dead. She played the part of the mother, and when Fantuzzi opened the door and tried to awaken his "mother" (Ernestine was a very, very large lady) she was just too fat to move and he started to giggle. Whereupon Ernestine came back from the dead and slapped him! This is not a game, she sternly ejaculated! Never go out of role! Later Fantuzzi and his buddy Gabriel "Lito" de Silva got a bit part in a telecast with George C. Scott - a fun scene in a schoolroom, during which they had to throw objects at other students and rile the teacher. As "stage father" for the two kids, I got all the 8x10 photos, did the resumés, demanded cattle calls, etc.
At the Automat across from the old Palace Theatre, I often ate with various vaudeville retirees, including some of the 120 munchkins (midgets) hired for "The Wizard of Oz" that starred Judy Garland (whom I saw once at the Palace and once at Madison Square Garden as well as once following a play, at which time I found she really was not even five feet tall). Seeing and talking with the midgets, and reading that at one time geniuses were considered freaks and were killed, I became interested in teratology [Frederick Drimmer, Very Special People, 1973, became like a textbook]. The circus giant who appeared in Jolly Green Giant commercials for vegetables once buzzed to come in to a recording session, and I responded, "Ho, ho, ho!" He told me that were it not for ankles, giants would have few problems, but such a big body could not be supported by such small ankles.
Jack Lawrence phoned Fernando and me to come for dinner one night, but what Lawrence really wanted was for Fernando to fix his hi-fi. It was a great dinner, Lawrence prepared it himself, Fernando fixed the hi-fi, and it was only some time later that I realized we'd been entertained by the composer of "If I Didn't Care" and "All Or Nothing At All." Sinatra's singing of the latter number was one of Fernando's favorites, for it was by listening to Sinatra's enunciation and phrasing that Fernando really learned to speak English so well. I always took total credit, naturally, mostly because I insisted that he not only look like but also should sound like Desi Arnaz. Years later a Broadway theatre was named The Jack Lawrence.
Once Fernando told me that Steve Allen had come for a session and waited patiently for the previous group to finish. So many musicians are temperamental, but Allen was patient and just sat in the waiting room while reading a book. Years later when I donated Anita Weschler's "The Humanist" to a humanist group, Allen was present. To my surprise, he didn't at all remember Fernando's having made acetates for him. After I took the following picture, I had everyone laughing by placing a hat on the statue's head.

A truly memorable showbiz character, one for whom Fernando cut master acetates, was the performer Ray Bourbon. Although his act was as good as anything seen at Jimmy Daniels's Bon Soir boite (and one night I saw Senator Richard Nixon there and on another Marlon Brando - he was there to see his intimate friend Wally (Mr. Peepers) Cox, Bourbon had a rough time succeeding with his fey act. His bitchy repartee was considered as shocking as anything else during that period, and his garb was delightfully outlandish. When accused of murder and jailed, he got a letter from Fernando and me to the effect that prison can never jail a person's imagination We encouraged him to continue working on his act. He sent a thank-you but died soon afterwards.
Lima Charles-Pierre, a member of dictator Baby Doc Duvalier's Presidential Guard, became one of my unusual acquaintances. I invited him to my hotel for drinks, but he said he couldn't go, that he lived in the Palace. To my surprise, that night he and four fellow guards knocked on the door of the hotel (scaring the owner, who thought they were here to imprison him for running a questionable residential place for foreigners). I ordered drinks on the house, and what a party we had, particularly when a Belgian "Bette Davis" with a very large straw hat swished down the stairs, making a grand entrance. Lima (on the left in the photo below) stayed with me. The sergeant (on the right, below) would not let the others go alone to the Belgian's room:

Captain of Haiti's national volleyball team, Lima visited several times in New York, where I took him up the Empire State Building and elsewhere; he sent me a T-shirt with "Haiti" on the front, one I have worn when protesting with various groups about conditions in that colorful island.

In October 1997, I learned from Lima's brother in Brooklyn that Lima had almost been assassinated at the time Aristide dismissed his entire Army, so I have helped provide him with funds to keep his family of two children alive (Junior, only 3 and knowing nothing about racial color, has called me Dady Smith. Although Lima had served for 20 years in the Army and in the President's Palace, Lima has had problems collecting any pension or even an entire three years' pay. In 2004, learning that Lima had been assassinated (37 bullets) by Aristide goons, I got in touch with Emelyne, the wife with whom he had separated, and have been "uncle" to his 12-year-old son, Ligardy.
• When the voodoo lady bit into the chicken's neck, I got blood on my pants during a voodoo service in a small Haitian town where no other tourists were present and where, that night, I first experienced having my toes erotically licked; the next day, riding in Haiti on a colorful motorbike with a colorful friend, I held on tight to his colorful stirrup. Haiti has been one of my favorite places to visit.
• Once I crawled over a fence onto private property with a friend in Jamaica and made love on the moonlit beach, the palm trees swaying, the waves crashing onto the beach and getting us but-who-cares-wet. Will the individual now please return the gold DeMolay ring I gave as a souvenir?

• Moved in 1962 to Hell's Kitchen from 103rd St. (the street where George Gershwin built the home for his parents and the street where Henry Wallace lived when running for Vice President) during the week after the Cape Man, Salvador Agron, stabbed to death two teenage boys in the adjacent playground; Agron was leader of a Puerto Rican street gang called The Vampires; no wonder the apartment at 425 West 45th Street had become vacant, and these were the days when sailors were warned they had to go two-by-two through the area as they walked to and from their ships. Paul Simon, who may have talked to Fernando about the killing when as Jerry Landis he cut his acetate records for eight or so years, told the Daily News in 1997 that he vividly remembered the screaming headlines that chronicled the Cape Man's crimes, that he was sufficiently fascinated by Agron's rehabilitation to write the $11+ million Broadway musical; the last time Paul came to the 46th Street studio, incidentally, he and I talked about Hayakawa and semantics.
• From my Hell's Kitchen apartment, I dallied in the Times Square movie houses for years, particularly in the upper balconies where no one was watching the film. At the one place which featured Western and cowboy movies, I became an expert at observing the pickpockets, one time putting a quarter in my left pocket, deliberately sitting one seat in from the aisle and feigning sleep, sensing someone had sat down, feeling the hand go into my pocket, and hearing the rush of air as the dip hastily left. I saw pairs of them using razor blades to cut pocketbooks from pants while people drowsed. I read about cutpurses in Shakespeare, juvenile pickers in Dickens, funeral and cathedral dips that frequented places where large crowds assembled, and references to pickpocketry in the works of various major authors. Once, when Tim Madigan and I were riding the "A" train, a subway dip (a dangerous looking African-type who had a partner) patted me to feel where my money was. I stopped him by yelling so everyone could hear, "Hey!" and "I don't want you in this car!" As Tim and others looked on, and just as the doors were closing, the perp and his partner got out. Stanley Walker, famed gaffer (city editor) of The Daily News, shared my odd interest and at my request once wrote a book review for The Humanist on the subject.

• When Barbados joined the United Nations, I covered the story not only for that island but also for one paper in each of all the other English-speaking West Indian countries plus Belize and Guyana and Bermuda. I was a member of the International Press Institute and had my own typewriter space at the UN, which was quite a thrill inasmuch as I could eat in the cafeteria and go anywhere throughout the entire UN

• Helped found in 1965 what has become Mensa's oldest special interest group: its investment club. I've been its newsletter editor, its stock selection committee chairman, its Management Board director, and I'm still chairman of the Management Committee; at one time in mankind's history, exceptionally brilliant people were said to be abnormal - a study of abnormalities is teratology, which explains my adding that subject as an avocation in my Who's Who entry.
• Once started a mutual fund (Taursa, my coinage of Taurus combined with Ursa) with two Mensa guys, one an English prof in Austin, Texas, the other a motorcycle insurance salesman in Philadelphia. I spent one entire summer running the portfolio, even shorting in order to try to make the fund succeed; it died, however, during a market downturn soon afterwards, much to my disappointment and that of a few friends whom I'd talked into investing;
• Had poetry published in Vice, which Puritans would call a pornographic journal;
• Became Tanden Peyton's accountant after rescuing him in a dark area of the Metropolitan Theatre on 14th Street where his pocket was picked. When he died of AIDS years later, I helped with the memorial and found his true name was Jesse Smith and that he was the brother of famed footballer Bubba Smith:

Was alone with Langston Hughes (at the Benta Funeral Chapel, 630 St. Nicholas Avenue, in Harlem); I signed the guest book for Gilbert Price, who was in Vancouver and unable to attend;
Was alone with Tennessee Williams (at the Frank Campbell Funeral Home); his young friend who was sitting when I arrived left the room for a time, and I was then the sole person in the room; I inspected the icon Maria St. Just had placed on TW's breast and was surprised his beard had been shaved, which led to correspondence with his brother Dakin Williams on that subject [TW had shaved the beard off some time prior to choking on a bottle cap. Dakin was not the one who first suggested burying TW "in the orthodox Jewish casket" nor next to their mother, which TW had definitely not wanted; he wanted to be buried at sea near where Hart Crane had drowned; the arrangements had been made, however, by St. Just and attorney John Eastman). Incidentally, Paul Cadmus showed me, and I have a copy, of TW lying entirely nude on his stomach.

House-sat during the week the Fire Island place built by The New Yorker editor Harold Ross and rented by Fernando's Audiosonic Recording Studio for $2,000/season; on weekends, however, the studio gang came out and I went back to the city. An eminent drama critic (George Friedley) was an admiring neighbor. At that time there was no electricity in Cherry Grove, and refrigeration was possible only by using a gasoline engine in the basement.
Was not alone in Marrakech when teenage Omar, his friend, and I shared a sleeping bag at some little town in the Atlas Mountains, where I paid a kid to sleep in the rented car to insure that no one would steal the hubcaps; at a camel auction, Omar and I exchanged clothes and I walked around incognito in his djellaba; he was so exhausted translating French into Arabic and Arabic into French for me (he spoke no English) that we had to stop at a pharmacy to get medicine for his throat;
Critiqued movies for my West Indian syndicated newspaper column, "Manhattan Scene," often accompanying Orde Coombs, the intellectual from the island of St. Vincent who once made the cover of New York (and who died of a mysterious ailment around the time GRID was first mentioned in the earily 1980s);
Was a regular at the Variety Theater on the East Side. Montgomery Clift often attended Variety Photoplays, once sitting next to me in the darkness of the back row.
My other hangouts were The Victory, and New David's from the 1940s to the 1990s, three sites which would have inspired Fellini.
Was sued (unsuccessfully, in a counter-suit by the person to whom I had sold the recording studio and who tried to get out of paying) for over $1,000,000.
Told Gore Vidal that he and I are in love with the same man (after a pause, adding: Lucretius); this resulted in his willingness to be listed as a member of the International Academy of Humanism although he once had refused to accept membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, saying he already had Diner's Club!
At one of the annual ceremonials of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, I spoke to H. D. about how she liked the recent poetry publications put out by her publisher, New Directions; showed Aaron Copland, who had just received the Academy's Gold Medal and thought it contained no writing, that his name was engraved on the rim rather than on the sides; talked briefly with any number of Academy members, including over the years John Steinbeck, Philip Johnson, Jack Levine, I. M. Pei, Paul Rudolph, George Segal, Andrew Wyeth, John Ashbery, Harold Bloom, Leon Edel, Allen Ginsberg, Emily Hahn, Edward Hoagland, Alfred Kazin, Arthur Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, Derek Walcott, Ralph Ellison, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Mona Van Duyn (a co-editor with me of our college writing magazine, Purple Pen, when she was a senior and I was but a junior), Kurt Vonnegut, Emily Hahn, David Diamond, Lou Harrison, Ned Rorem, Stephen Sondheim; and foreign honorary members such as Lucien Freud, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, Ravi Shankar, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko (who gave me his personal address to forward to Royston Ellis).
Interviewed writer-actor Sir Peter Ustinov, New Yorker writer Emily Hahn, painter Paul Cadmus, ex-Muslim Taslima Nasrin, and other notables for various publications;
Was listed in The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You to Read (1993) as a freethinker (along with an exaggerated listing: Ethan Allen, Bela Bartok, Clara Barton, Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Beckett, Marlon Brando, Luther Burbank, Samuel Butler, Lord Byron, Camus, Darrow, Darwin, Dickens, Edison, Emerson, Epicurus, Epictetus, Franklin, Freud, Galileo Galilei, Gagarin, Katharine Hepburn, Hume, Huxley, Jefferson, Mencken, Michener, Nietzsche, Florence Nightingale, Paine, Picasso, Protagoras, Rousseau, Russell, Sagan, Sakharov, Santayana, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Shaw, Shelley, Mark Twain, Vidal, Voltaire, Whitman, Wilde, and Mary Wollstonecraft ).
Joined Robert Delford Brown's dadaistic First International Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. - actually, it was just the title of his art studio.
Arnold Rampersad, while teaching at Columbia University, and John Szwed, while teaching at Yale University, interviewed me to obtain biographical information about, respectively, Gilbert Price 's relationship with Langston Hughes; and Fernando's and my relationship with the eccentric jazz great, Sun Ra. I had the verve to ask Rampersad to give Gil $100 for his time, which he did and which Gil needed badly to pay some of his debts; the interview was held in my recording studio office. John and I had several meetings together, once at SOBs after Sonny's death and The Arkestra played a kind of memorial. "Sonny broke many hearts," I told him, supplying important material which he used, and for which he graciously credited me [and which is found in the present homepage under "Costa Rican Connections"].
Wrote "If an American Secularist Were to Move to India" for the Chirala, India, Rationalist Essays and later befriended Babu Gogineni, Innaiah Narisetti, and other rationalist VIPs from India;
Entertained two noted ex-Muslims: Taslima Nasrin of Bangladesh; and Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not a Muslim; took Taslima to see where Madonna had found some of her dancers; took Ibn, which isn't his real name for he fears being assassinated, to the Broadway production of "Titanic," where we drowned in the bromides;
Was entertained for a week in Sweden by Taslima Nasrin, who showed me the various places the Swedish authorities had hidden her from Bangladeshi religious fundamentalists; in a remarkably short time we developed a brother-sister relationship;
Became surrogate uncle for Taslima's 15-year-old nephew, Alimul Kamal, who spent the summer of 1997 at my apartment; I coached him in the humanities and supervised his being in a city-wide tennis program where he aimed at becoming a ball-boy at the US Tennis Opens. I am entirely certain that he never before was so challenged despite the 60-year difference in our ages; by our frequent e-mails, for I continue to be his tutor, he is able to check his homework and receive my advice.
Became editor of The Janestreeter, the newsletter of the 5-block Jane Street Association, but after 5 issues I resigned over the issue of editorial freedom.
Dennis Middlebrooks and I, both past presidents of the Council for Secular Humanism chapters in New York, founded an independent group of freethinking activist non-believing New Yorkers (FANNY) and, most recently, Brights NY. Below we're shown at "Marie's Crisis," celebrating an anti-superstition event during which we broke mirrors and converted everyone present to skepticism.

In 1997 went solo, first class, on a 4-day "cruise to nowhere" on the Queen Elizabeth II, introducing myself only as Allen Windsor.

I have many more tales to tell at some later date, but note the photo above which was taken at the Art Students Ball in the early 1950s. I arrived with shaved chest as a Mary Renault-like Persian boy. Needless to say, people noticed and pince nez dropped when I walked into the Waldorf Astoria's lobby on my way to the ball. That's me on the right. That's my date, who kindly shaved my chest just beforehand, on the extreme left (and whom I met 30 minutes before the ball). How I met the girl and how I got invited remains a little unclear (maybe I was invited by one of the guys with a hat?), but the judges picked me as one of the almost-winners.

OK, the nude statue at the top is not of me.

It's by Anita Weschler, is entitled "Prologue," and it's of José Limon. I never met Mr. Limon, but at one of Anita's parties in the Village I was nudged by The New Yorker author sitting next to me on a sofa who pointed out Mrs. Limon. "There, between his testicles," he said, and the two of us peered between the statue's legs into the next room, where Mrs.Limon was probably conversing about her late husband.

Anita the Greenwich Village Sculptor

Anita did not like to be called the wife of Herb Solomon, and I irked her upon many occasions, at least until we'd both had several wines. Herb, a Wall Street stock analyst, knew how to save money, their Waverly Place apartment in Greenwich Village (on a different floor from that of Joseph Campbell) was rented and he had a device to charge old batteries instead of buying new ones. They owned a beautiful Bucks County farm in Pennsylvania, where Anita's kiln baked the statue of hers that I bought, "The Humanist." For the various little tasks I did for her, she gave me an expensive electric picture, "Sweet Blues," but I also own two of her hexes and another electric picture (one with lights behind the baked plexiglass).

Herb and Anita at a street fair in Greenwich Village across from their apartment
She sculpted "José Limon," the statue at the top of this page.