It was Spring Break of Freshman year, 1968. I don’t have to remind you how 1968 began and ended. The news from the outside world relentlessly bore down on everyone. This past year, 2020, may have surpassed it in weight, but that depends on how you tally. They are the two years in my life that are most of a piece. By the time March ’68 rolled around, protest was everywhere, news came in torrents from McCarthy to Tet, much of it dispiriting and unrelenting. It would only get worse. And there was the unforgiving demands of coursework that I wasn’t interested in and wasn’t doing. I hadn’t found whatever I would do. I was ready for a road trip.
So was Kamarck, with whom the nucleus of a tribe began forming. His yellow ’65 or ’66 Dodge Dart, had a black interior. He called it Capt. America. Truth to tell, I always thought naming a Dodge Dart Captain America was overstating things a bit. Better than Rocinante, however, Don Quixote’s horse already taken by Steinbeck for a road trip with his dog. We decided to get in and head South. As we were within inches of leaving, I ran into SiQ (Student in Question) outside Roberts. He asked what I was doing for Spring Break. I don’t have a very developed radar for course changing vectors coming straight at me, but then I had none. I replied that Kamarck and I were moments from getting into yon Capt. America and heading South. To which he replied, “Can I come?” At 70+, I have been schooled by my betters in the notion of Boundaries. I might have sufficient practice in Boundaries now to apologize and find some way of expressing regret married to a boilerplate reason why that wasn’t going to be possible. At 19, forget it. I was blindsided. I was a Haverford Man, after all, and fumfered, said I had to check with Kamarck. He had no better social defenses than I, maybe worse. Twelve minutes later we were on the road in Capt. America, with SiQ bright eyed in the back seat, and all looking straight ahead into the abyss wondering in silence what was going to come of this.
What happened next is a blur. Except for the following incident.
We were just beyond the Washington beltway heading south. Why I said let’s go see Don Denton, he lives in Virginia Beach, I have no idea. Sounded okay to the revolutionary drug brothers. Had either of them said, Nah, let’s go see Elvis, we’d have angled right and headed to Memphis. Instead, we angled left and headed toward Don. Who had no idea that we were on our way. We certainly didn’t call. I don’t recall how we knew where he lived. We must have used the College directory. In short, the sequence of hows and whys are lost to me. And I have no true recall how much any of this is true, but only that it is what I have been telling myself for half a century.
I do remember that we found the house, a two-story white colonial on a pretty street full of same. The three of us parked Capt. America in front, went up to the door, and I stepped forward and rang the bell.
After a wait, the door opened. A young kid within shooting range of our age stood there and stared at us. He was white and scrubbed and neat and clean, maybe blond, but boy, was he clean. And he just looked at us. This was a year before Charlie Manson and his band of crazies murdered Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring et alia in LA, but we looked like we could’ve been the East Coast Chapter. We were in high Haverford hippie regalia: jeans with well-earned holes (no prefab artful slashes like today’s Old Navy phonies), and boots and long, crazy hair and beards and billowy pirate shirts, or maybe just plain old blue jean shirts. I don’t remember necklaces since I never wore jewelry, but couldda been necklaces, it wouldn’t have been out of the question for SiQ to have had one, along with a leather riverboat gambler hat which he did. In short, judging by the look on this boy’s face, we looked like the wild animals he’d seen on Wild Kingdom and on the cover of TIME.
It is true that Bob OldCountryLastNameShortenedToAFirstName, a year ahead of us who had already found the future Mrs. Bob at BMC and who was navigating his way toward being a lawyer, once described just the two of us, sans-SiQ, as Animals. This was pretty much because he could tell that when we grew up we were unlikely candidates for officers of the Shul. Maybe say Kaddish for a parent after some coaching. But members of the Temple Brotherhood, not. Nevertheless being called an Animal still rankles after all these 50 years, as I like to think of myself as a rather refined and empathic aesthete who did his part when called upon by history to push the class of 1971 score to record-breaking highs on the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Inventory Test that the college had us all take, which came to the conclusion that we were all women. Mega-empathic. (Sample series of questions: I like summer. True or False? I think about killing my mother. True or False? I like the smell of fresh mown grass. True or False? I think about killing my mother. True or False? Etc.) Kill her? We wanted to be our mothers. Every time someone accuses me of being an old white guy, I want to scream, Wait, don’t you know Who I Am? I Blew the Doors Down on the Femininity Scale of the MMPI in 1967 and kept on going.
Lastly, it should be noted that the evening news regularly carried stories about the entire social order being upended by people who looked like us, though again with the benefit of 50 years we plainly looked preposterous. But to this fine, young fellow at the door, I concede, we may have looked like the Animals reportedly circling towns like Virginia Beach and that Bob OldCountryLastNameShortenedToAFirstName had labeled us.
Someone had to go first. I asked if this was the Denton residence. The boy took that in. “Wait a minute, please,” he said and closed the door. When it reopened, a handsome, refined woman who could’ve been played by Barbara Billingsley, scanned the menagerie and said “Yes?” Trying not to sound like Eddie Haskell, I said “Mrs. Denton?” She nodded. “We’re friends of Don’s from Haverford. We’re on Spring break heading south, and we thought we’d stop by and say hi to Don.”
She took that in. She then said something that has always stayed with me, given the tableau. “He’s not here. But do come in,” she said. “Any friend of Don’s is welcome here.” And in we went. Turned to the right following her into a clean, light-filled living room and sat down on pristine couches and chairs. She explained something about why Don wasn’t there, and as I remember it, wasn’t even in town. Then she asked about school, how it was going for us. At this point, I asked if I might use a bathroom. She directed me up the center hall staircase to the first door on the left.
On the staircase wall was a series of framed letters starting at about the third step and ascending all the way to the top. I stopped at the first one and read it. Then the second. Then the third. And the fourth, if there was a fourth. They were all chronologically dated, personal notes from The Office of the President to Mrs. Kathryn Denton and her family that I loosely paraphrase now:
Dear Mrs. Denton,
Please know that I am doing all in my power to secure the safe return from captivity of your husband, Jeremiah (Capt. Jeremiah Denton). Rest assured that as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, I will spare no effort toward this end. I hope to deliver the news that we all pray for about Jeremiah to you in the near future.
Yours,
Lyndon.
Lyndon Baines Johnson
President of the United States.
It all clicked into place at that moment about Don in a way it never had from the outside at Haverford: Virginia Beach. Navy Town. Navy Family. Missing Dad in Vietnam. Don was at Haverford College, founded by Quakers, where the likes of us were on the CBS Evening News chanting, “Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today!” And now here we were in the home of a man held by the North Vietnamese. Navy pilot. Prisoner of War. Husband. Dad. I realized in a flash Uh oh, SiQ was down there. He might be dropping paragraphs about the horrors of the War like payloads of napalm on a military wife and family who had shown themselves to be the most trusting of hosts. The whole script inside my head flipped in an instant not on this terrible war, that to this day has defined our generation and created a continental divide that has lasted a lifetime, but how I saw people on the other side of it. I knew this much in a heartbeat: whatever would end this war would happen outside this family’s nerve center where we had been welcomed. And I confess I didn’t trust SiQ not to find the nerve and hit it.
I never made it to the bathroom. I turned on my heels at the last letter from LBJ, jetted downstairs and executed a sharp left into the living room. I don’t remember whether the discussion had turned to the war or not, truth to tell. For all these years I’ve employed artistic license and told the story that SiQ had indeed started in about the war, but they might have been talking about grits. I’d grasped at the top of the stairs, however, that if SiQ was doing guerilla war on Mrs. Denton, I needed to interrupt it. If he wasn’t, he might get there faster than I could. All I remember is skidding to a stop in the living room. I gave the pilot of Capt. America in the highback chair a “door” look. Then I thanked Mrs. Denton for welcoming us. I asked her to please give our regards to Don, whom we’d see back at school.
Exeunt omnes.
Harlan Jacobson
Film Critic
WBGO 88.3 FM
jazz and npr news & reviews
harlan@talkcinema.com
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