The friends of my family, of Louisville, in the 50's and 60's

• The Bells

Dr.John and Nancy Bell and their kids, in age, Jane, John, Jr.(my age), Walter ('Flip' for his middle name of Phillip) and David and Victor. John was an ugly handsome (like Richard Boone of Have Gun) raw-boned man who reminded me of Lincoln: an immensely kind, quiet, good, perceptive man who was a superb, gifted psychiatrist.  Nancy was an outrageous gusty country woman ( a Ballantine, a family of local note) of great good cheer and decency...as I think back, she was much after the fashion of Molly Ivins. Then as now, I talked too much, and Nancy would say loudly and with love, "Stewart, be still!'.  Their kids were a galloping horde and the house was always a mess and a disaster where chaos and outrageous fun reigned. It was through the back yard and across Spring Drive from my house. Oh my, the Bell kids were so involved and socially on top of things as I, odd duck, was not.  Alas, the family had their share of grief: John Jr. was at Williams when I was at Amherst...and ran off the road into a bridge abutment. John, Sr. was gone in '08, Nancy in '16.

• The Furnishs

Both Bill and Mary were M.D.s but neither ever practiced that I knew of.  Bill was the Dean of the University of Louisville Medical School (an institution of some justifiable pride and reputation as the first such west of the Appalachians), Mary kept house and reigned over the chaos (with rather more order than the Bells) of another mob of some four or more chilren (I remember Mike and Mark) and a three story house with a 6'x10' handbuilt slot car track in the basement and an attic completely taken over with an eeeeeenormous HO-gauge model train setup.  I was always welcome.  Mary offered ice-cream to everyone. Oh my, did I wish to be a Furnish.  They had a Chevy Suburban (the predecessor of all SUVs, a sort of truck station wagon) in the '50's, and the whole family would pack up for long trips out west or up to Canada.  At one stop, they even left one of their many kids behind and no one noticed for 15 minutes. I remember Mike furbishing up a fire-engine red Austin Healey bug-eyed Sprite....adding a Judson supercharger and giving it a walnut dash...while doing it, he had the steering wheel off and drove it around with a pair of Vise-Grips pliers clamped onto the splines of the shaft.  I was terribly impressed and envious...though my father had gotten the Bugattis. 

Bill could play foolish dimwit but had a dry, dry, slow but utterly devastating wit. The stories of it were legend and legion.  One winter he was teaching a med school class on the top floor of an old building at UofL that had long iciciles hanging down from the roof.  On the chemistry bench at the front of the class he had an enormous test tube along with a big honking bunsen burner and a huge Ehrlenmeyer flask.  Every so often during the class, he would stop, slide down one of double hung windows, lean out and snap off an icicle and put it in the test tube over the roaring Bunsen burner.  When the icicle had melted, he'd stop, pour the melt water into the flask, go to the window and snap off another icicle.  After some 45 minutes of this, a student could resist no longer and burst out with the question, "Dr. Furnish, whatever are you doing?".  Bill fastened his gaze on the questioner, blinked owlishly and then drawled, "Why, I'm uh...uh...making testicles!"
But anyone whoever took Bill for a fool got his ass handed to him, as did the mayor of Louisville when he tried to make fun of Bill's model train setup.

• Milton and Miriam Metz
  

  
  ...here goofing with another of Dad's hat collection.  Milton Metz ran a call-in talk show at the local  radio station (party of the wonderful, legendary and Pulitzer Prize winning Louisville Bingham publishing empire) back in the innocent days before the sort of raw-meat and lies of Fox and the like.  Nonetheless, Louisville being in Kentucky and somewhat Southern, he would get iggnorat, bigoted pin-headed redneck callers that would leave a reek of nastiness....whereupon Milt would call Dad. Dad would call up and assume a creaky soprano voice and the character of Gwendolyn, a dotty, sweet old maid who just couldn't understand why people couldn't get along and be nice to each other..."Why Mister Metz, I heard that unhappy fellow who just called.  It was sad! Why I know the people he was talking about and they're just as nice as could be....I don't what he could be thinking or why it he would say..Ooooops, I hear the teakettle whistling, gotta go <click>.
  Milton was with Dad the co-owner of a genuwine Met Opera Viking helmet (seen here with my uncle mugging in it).
  
  
  

• The Eskinds

  
  Dr Harold and Rosalie and their sons, Andy (one year older) and Robert (one younger) and daughter Jean (much younger, whom I never knew well).  Jews in the South were then utterly unlike those I encountered in the Northeast/New York area.  Much quieter, much more in the background.  Harold was one of the sweetest, gentlest, surpassingly good men I've ever met.  Rosalie was much more forward (her line: Growing old is not for the faint of heart) as were her sons. Dear me.  In 1968, when the Yellow Submarine came out, my older and gay brother Bill (AIDS and Valley Fever took him in '84), Robert and I all went to see it, quite stoned. You should understand that it was a unique time in that the older you were, the less experience you were likely to have had.  Bill had just begun to try grass, I had done it for two years lightly and was just beginning to try the hallucingens, but Bob, youngest of all, was quite expereienced in it all.  So, we dropped off Bob at his parents...and the next day there was Hell to pay.  Bob had come bouncing in to the kitchen, humming the music and joyously higher than a kite. Rosalie, in a dread flash of mother's intuition, saw it all and said with a horrified gasp, "Bob, you haven't been.....smoking.....GRASS??".  Bob looked at her with an beaming grin and said, "Well.....Well...YEAH!". My brother and I were blamed because we were older and must have drawn Bob into reefer madness...when the opposite was pretty much the case.
  
  

• Molly Clowes and J. Willy Walsh

  
  Molly Clowes was the unprepossessing but incandescently bright Brit ex-pat woman editorial page editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal...and perhaps the first woman at that level at an major metro daily. Molly was this dumpy little woman with frizzy hair and that flawless porcelain English complexion.  Easily overlooked and seeming harmless, she had mind like a steel trap...that closed on many in ground breaking exposes.  She cut her teeth in reporting by doing such on corruption in the Eastern Kentucky coal fields; no one there had taken her seriously, but she got the goods on them and blew the roof off. She was married to....
  Willy Walsh, a quiet, tall, thin scarred French aristocrat with a whispery voice. In this picture, he's alas back to the camera, but had the winning hand of a royal flush.  Willy grew up in substantial wealth in Frances of the early 1900s; one of his friends was given a Bleriot (the first production monoplane) for his birthday....the bunch of kids would take turns taxiing it around the pasture while awaiting the day that the aviator instructor was to come....but before that day, Willy got going too fast and found himself in the air...and having to figure out how to fly all by hisself.  He flew in the French air force in WWI, had been shot down in flames and bailed out without a parachute.....it was deep winter and he felling through a pine tree into a snow bank and walked away (after a fashion).
  Willy taught French and history at U of L.
  



• Miss Faust

  IIRC, She was the head librarian at the Main Louisville Free Public Library and would, once a week, have a stack of four to 15 books, serious literature, fiction, non-fiction, biography for pickup that my mother would plow through in a week. May God bless her: she made my mother's life tolerable with the escape into the world of literature, mind and spirit.  My mother couldn't do much, but Lordy, did she read....and then would go on the local TV station (another Bingham arm) and do book review once every 3-4 months...and I got to tag along at age 12 and see the workings of a TV station studio.

• Sam Haldeman

Sam (and wife Becky, IIRC) was a craggy, booming, immensely stong Swiss who had settled in Kentucky as an agent for a Swiss tobacco firm.  He was made out of granite and indeed, built his house in the country out of stone with his own hands. He would go back to Switzerland occasionally and return with uncut, pure alcohol (190 proof...he would cut it with water once back here, thus doubling what he could bring through customs) liquors like Pear Willums eau de vie and Ancien, an incredibly vile health liquor perhaps made of golden seal and other herbs.  Sam smoked, smoked El Lupos, a Whelling stogie-like twig of a cigar that must of been 50% tar and nicotine.  Once in a visit, I (about 10-12) asked if I might try one.  Sam glinted at my father, who said, "Sure, kid".  I managed to get down about a quarter of it and turned green and nauseous.  That was my one and only experience with tobacco.  Alas, the cigars killed him, and being a rock of a man, he did not go easy. A titan.

• The Wagners

  
  
  Martin and Nell Wagner and their daughter Martha (here waltzing with Dad). Brilliant lovely people.  Martin knew Dad from a ways back, never knew that story.  But occasionally they would visit from Urbana Illinois, where Martin would buy wine by the case, load his car down and split the haul with Dad and his wine cellart that took up the far wall of the tool room.  It was Martin from his work in labor relations and negotiation who gave me this dictum: "If you can't explain something, you don't understand it".  I wa 13...Martha stunned me.
  
  
  
  

• The Wolfs

• Claire Grey and her children

Oh my God, Claire (here vamping wildly with Jack Radow)! 
Who passed at age 100 in the early days of April 2014.
A gamine pixie....
Who was the sparkling life of the party everywhere she went, because it was a party if she was there. Bubbling with life and a rolling laugh always but a few words away. 
Who had a "difficult" husband,  Judd, a soul of darkness and passive aggression,
But Claire!
Who had danced exhibition English Country Dance at a (San Diego?) World's Fair in '32.
Who came from an free-spirit and communal family (in the 20's & 30's, part of it in Fairhope, Alabama, which was a Single Tax “Colony” based on Henry George’s economics.).
Who had 4 talented, gorgeous kids, Chris & Parker & Nancy & Ben.  Parker and I went exploring through rural Kentucky in the family's oh-so-bizarre Citroen DS; we would take an overall compass bearing and then slant off discovering the world, taking the 'roads diverged' by lookinhg at the compass. Later, in college summers and after, I was made family in the wonderful Yelping Hill summer colony (originally an intentional Yale/Vassar/Harvard faculty summer colony) and introduced to the world of West Cornwall, CT.  So much effervescent life, including the wonderful community soccer games with everyone from 5 to 80, from hot Europeans with real soccer chops, to gutsy little kids, to Earl Brecker a humorist writer (who would dribble the ball up to you then start a funny patter that have you laughing so hard that he'd go right by you) to William Sloan Coffin. Which gave entre that led to staff photography for the Lakeville Journal and a winter spent in a log cabin on the edge of Yelping Hill, a mile from the Appalachian Trail.  Claire had shadows in her soul, but the true courage to bring sunshine and laughter to everyone around her.  I feel incredibly privileged to have known her and have been blessed with her attention, care, wisdom, laughter and love. There are some people who don't "do" much in life, no Pulitzer Prize, no public office, or whatever, but the very mention of their name makes people light up.  People who are treasures; Claire was one.  It doesn't seem like she could ever be gone from the world.

• Jack and Jean Radow

  
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• Here Jean is vamping with Jack and Dad. Whew, was she hot...and a flaming red head.  Our help referred to here as Miss Radar..  The Radows left for the Northwest when I was 12 or 13; I felt a spark had gone and always asked after them, they had personified joie de vivre.
  
  
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• Alan Caperton. 
  

  
  
  
  
  I never did see much of him, but he had a full race Gran Prix Bugatti (like this) and the all-up Type 50 shown at left; he got Dad interested in Bugattis which led to the cars I grew up with.  He also had a gun collection that included an Honest-To-Pete antique fully functional Gatling Gun
  
  
  
  
  
  

• John Ed Pearce

  John Ed was the quintessential soft-spoken Kentucky gentleman and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. I believe he was involved in getting us to Sanibel in the early '60's long before it was discovered.  He was a man who appreciated women but perhaps had trouble living with them.  At one point, he llived a while in our guest room during a divorce.  A quote: “Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to” and "I'm not a good husband, but I'm a pretty good Saturday night date."  As memorialized by the University of Kentucky College of Communications and Information:
  
  Columnist and writer, the Courier–Journal Magazine. Graduate, University of Kentucky; graduate work at Columbia University and Harvard University, where he was a Nieman Fellow in 1958. Started journalism career as reporter for Time-Life and United Press, later edited the Somerset Journal. Joined the Courier-Journal as associate editor and editorial writer. Shared in the Pulitzer Prize won in 1967 by the Courier-Journal for its successful fight for stronger strip-mining controls. Awarded the Governor’s Medallion for public service in conservation; won the National Headliner Award, the Meeman Award, three awards from National Bar Association, Freedom Foundation Award. Named Outstanding Kentucky Journalist in 1985 by Society of Professional Journalists/Sigma Delta Chi. Published numerous articles and short stories for national magazines, a novel, a volume of history and several television plays. Adviser and speechwriter for four Kentucky governors; chairman, State Oral History Commission. Navy veteran, World War II, retired commander.
  
  

• Louis Lusky

  Not so much a close friend, but part of the circle of political and artistic intelligentsia of Louisville.  Lusky had clerked at SCOTUS for Harlan Fiske Stone and when the police harassment of a black man who did occasional handyman work for the family became altogether outrageous, Dad got in touch with Louis and the KCLU, which took his case to the Supreme Court (I was 13, but my brother, four years older, got to go to DC to watch the case heard).  The local DA had to defend, but had no case, was handed his ass...and the police thereafter left Sam alone.
  

• Fred Wehle

Fred Wehle moved into the neighborhood when my father was a boy shooting marbles.  He became something of the neighborhood's gentle godfather. Once a year, he would write, illustrate and bind a story book out of grocery bags and, with great ceremony, much anticipated by the neighborhood children, would read it to them. He was still alive in my youth, a bridge between my father's youth and mine.  On left,  he's sitting in a seat dismounted from the Type 49 Bugatti and talking with my mother. Turns out he was a nephew of the great Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis.

Here in a poem of mine, Mr. Wehle takes a bow:

In my youth, there was a neighborhood godfather of the besst sort

He had been young when my father was a youth. By the time I came along, he was white-haired but still dapper, still gracious an elf with sparkling eye, Mr. Wehle, who would play a mandolin and sing old songs in a high clear voice.

When I was in college, cancer took him. My father told me and sent me off to visit him in the hospital, towards the end. Still gracious, still wanting to know if I would like a snack, how wonderful to see me and how was I?

Nothing of himself, his pain, his doom. A true gentleman. Grace under pressure: the true courage.

• David Maurer

  
  A quintessential man's man.  Ex Marine, man of iron, sportsman. Author of any number of books on the criminal underworld: gambling, con men, pickpockets, moonshining.  The plot for the movie, The Sting, was plagarized from his book, the Big Con; he sued and won. Doctor of criminology (as was his wife Barbara). Interviewed all sorts in the pen, the stir, the Big House. Brought us a crow from one of them who'd had a fledging drop into his cell...raised it, then passed it to Bill when it outgrew the cell.  We named the crow Sam.  I was too young to remember much, but family legend had it that it would get its jollies putting its beak in electrical outlets.  Yowza!
  
• David lived out in the country with the yahoos and some bumptious idiots would drive along with a a pipe sticking out the window and clear off mailboxes.  After a few repeats of this fun and frolic, David rebuild his box with an I beam sunk in concrete and hidden with wood cladding and extending all the way up into the mailbox.  The next time, the mailbox may have dented, but It Did Not Move...and the clowns in the car were on the wrond end of the lever.  it might have killed them, but apparently God and his angels kept that from happening though the car was a mess.
  Alas, David had a miserable end.  He was returning from a day of fishing with a boat trailering behind his truck when a yahoo passed on the brow of a hill and hit him head on, leaving him paralyzed.  He used his gun collection to check out.
  
  
  

• Richard Hutchins, Mouse and the hot rod gang...my high school friends
  

Oh my, I wonder how they are. I had no social skill as a kid, no coordination, too smart, talked too much, had no pretensions...thus I didn't fit in with my economic peers, who were high school fraternity and cheer leaders and atheletes.  I ended up drifting into the periphery of the blue-collar lower middle class kids who accepted me as this weird kid.  And as I had messed with cars and machinery, I first struck up friendship with Richard Hutchins, a wry, easy-going fellow that didn't take himself seriously.  He gave me entre into the Chevy hot rod gang.  Its leader was Mouse, a laconic, wicked-witted guy, maybe 120 pounds, 5'1"...and the guy who knew how to build the hottest engines around.  His driveway always had some project going or someone had dropped by for advice....Mouse would perch in a squat on top of the fender and point out where and what had to be done. The gang had one of those Harley Davidson tricycle motorcycles with the big trunk...which they had insulated, would pack with ice and keg for their picnics.
Richard's famous motorcycle progression started with a little putt-putt Sears-Roebuck moped.  Eastern Parkway was 4 lane highway built long ago with a 40' treed grass sward in the middle, wide concrete gutters and lined with big trees.  One day he was zipping along the gutter with his moped and the proverbial little old lady holding a bag of groceries stepped out from behind one of those trees...then seeing Richard zipping towards her, she screamed, dropped the groceries, froze and covered her eyes.  Richard, with cars to his left, managed to pull the Moped up over the curb and ran into the tree to avoid the LOL.  The Moped was totalled, and Richard had the most impressive set of bruises, though nothing was broken.
Fast forward to Christmas.  One of the rich kids at my high school had a Triumph 650, then a monster machine, that he had disassembled to cleanup and soup up.  His parents had an attack of sanity and enough money that they bought him a brand-new Corvette, likely to save his life....and the rich kid sold Richard the 650 for a song all apart: the frame and some bushel baskets of parts. Sometime in a bright sunny late winter day, Richard had it all back together and the hot rod crowd gather for the startup.  Now when you start a rebuild for the first time, the timing is off, the spark's off, the carb isn't right and you're lucky if the silly thing fires at all (a big help since then you know you're more or less in the ball park on all the settings).  So Richard kicked the starter, and hot damn, it fired! Or back fired through the carbuerettor, which given that it had be primed liberally with gas, caught fire.  In the crowd was Moose, a varsity linebacker of marginal wit, who thought quickly and, taadah!, pulled the gas line off the carb to starve the carb fire!  Of course, the contents of the fuel tank then ran out the hose onto the ground and made a merry fire that pretty much torched the bike.  The carb ended up as a sad little pancake of melted pot metal.  It was another 2-3 months before Richard finally got it on the road.