Dead Ex-tra

I made contact with Dead Ex’s sister.  No, not that way---the way everybody does it these days, via Facebook.  I’ll probably never know why it took her six months to respond to my simple query---obviously she isn’t as addicted to social media as the rest of us.  Or perhaps the simple question ‘are you Rob’s sister?’ froze her for awhile.  I doubt it, though---there’s a hunger there, starting with the present tense of her reply: “Yes, I am.  How do you know him?”

Oh, let me count the ways.  I know him by the punched in plaster on the wall into the kitchen.  I know him by forgetting he always took his aspirin dry and the resulting glass of water flung across the bathroom floor.  I know him by his suggestion that I take up with the young blond who had a crush on me.  I know him as the first man to have me totally, and you don’t forget that.  And I won’t ever forget the thin blue January morn he appeared in the passenger seat of my speeding car to apologize.

She didn’t flinch at my surreal story, she only wanted more.  What did he look like?  What else did he say?  I tried to collect up suitable situations to share, but everything seemed a bit too personal and irrelevant to her.  When he comes up behind me from the right, he takes my breath away---just like the first time.  He doesn’t wear clothes anymore, he’s naked.  Wait, he was wearing clothes the first time he appeared---and so I describe them to her: the warm gray sweater vest, the white long-sleeved pinpoint oxford shirt with the pinstripe plaid pattern.  Suddenly I can recall each article as I pulled them from the washer at the Laundromat---ironed them, hung them, folded them---twenty two years ago.

Dead Ex died in a single occupancy hotel in The City.  These were nothing new to him.  We started our first days in one, unbeknownst to the landlord---sharing a twin bed, the feeble light from the window that looked out onto a brick wall and the toilet for all down the hall.  Quite a departure for this young man raised in suburbia.   The City had been shaken down by the Loma Prieta earthquake just a couple of months before; it was quiet and slightly emptied that January.  It was easy for me to find us a nice sunny little studio at a decent price---a studio that would soon have the wall with the punched in plaster.

The news that his last days were lived in a similar place matched a death scene that had been given to me months before.  She made no report that jived with the visual dramatics I’d seen in that room, though.  The coroner wouldn’t let her view his body due to decomposition.  This gave me a lead into the details I saw, though:  There was blood on the edge of the bed and on the floor, darkened with age.  I certainly didn’t offer this information to her---I may never know the time when it’ll be appropriate to do so.

My husband was going over my responses to her latest email.  I asked him to, least the various pressures put upon me were causing me to write inappropriately.  After all, Dead Ex died from alcoholism and my husband is an alcohol/drug rehab therapist.  At one point I responded that her report of where he died matched closely to a visual I had been given.

“I’m suddenly recalling the blood you saw,” my husband said.  “I hadn’t thought of it before, but you know, it’s likely he died from a ruptured esophagus.  It’s fairly common with chronic alcoholics from vomiting so much.  He would vomit a quantity of blood as that happened.”

I stopped pacing and felt energy shoot down my legs and into the floor.  I heard Dead Ex say your old man’s right on.  He seemed pleased we got it.

“This rupture would not be visible on his body, though, would it?” I asked.

“No.”

“So the visual of his wounded chest remains symbolic.  He was only giving me an interior view of what happened.”

My husband nodded as I went back to that scene.  Not of the room where Dead Ex died, but another time, in the living room of a friend I do spiritual work with.  It was much like the first time in the car, when the setting is very ordinary and real and then the dead appear in our midst.  He was clothed in the same manner.  He walked in, turned to me and ripped open his sweater vest.  Next he tore open his shirt, buttons popping.  His broad chest look like an explosion took place.  I thought he had committed suicide with a large caliber revolver.  After all, he died three days after my friend hanged himself, and Dead Ex had once owned such a pistol.  He had hocked it by the time we came together, but he still had the bullets.

“Does this scare you?” he asked me.

“No.”  I wasn’t scared, I was in awe.

“I didn’t think it would.”  He stepped closer.  “Touch it.”

I made no move to.  It wasn’t repulsive, but it seemed very alive---raw and forbidden.

“Go ahead, touch it.”

I slowly reached out.  I was aware of my friend watching me reaching out into thin air, but my fingertips touched flesh, wet and warm.  I shivered.  It was as sensual as any other spiritual meeting with him.

“You can do anything,” he said.

Dead Ex

Life’s finger has been on the rewind button as of late.  I can press pause, but if I press again the scenery just continues in reverse.  At first the views are fleeting.  Words, significant or otherwise, blurt out midst the blur.  But as the days progress the past develops nuance, and I start recalling myself in that room---or on that roadside, standing so close to him that our foreheads almost touch.  It’s my silent plea for comfort, and he growls: “Don’t you know where we’re at?!”

No, not exactly.  Twenty-two years later I still don’t know where we’re at.  I only know you’re dead now, because that’s the only way you could slip into my car at sixty miles an hour.  It’s the only way you could tell me you’re sorry because pride, shame and physical distance came between us.  Some of the best times of your life, you said.  I’ll have to accept that as a gift, because I’ve come to believe the only way I can grow is to believe in what others can’t see.

It took me a month to look up your name, because knowing more is sometimes less.  You can only go so far on this planet, and then there are fees to pay or issues of privacy that block the way.  There you are---on some obscure interface called My Life.  But I’ll never know about Your Life after we parted, because a pop up insisted I become a member first.  Still, for a brief moment, I saw your face.  You looked back at me, older yet still the same---the same confidant gaze, like a movie star.  Your hair was now white---and not the expensive white we processed into your drab, graying brown.  You looked pink and healthy---and very much your Scottish ancestry. The only difference was your brows, which had gone brushy, like my husband’s.  Oh, the irony. 

And yes, you are dead.  Here’s the little en memoriam type remembrance printed in the San Francisco Chronicle---the paper you used to walk to the corner store to buy on Sunday morning, along with another pack of Marlboros.   The date surprises me.  You died years ago---well, two years ago, last October.  Your dropping in on me wasn’t exactly a courtesy call while on your way out like some people experience.  It takes me awhile to figure a startling correlation: you died within a few weeks of my friend’s suicide.

I start reading---and grow slightly incredulous, because this is not the man I lived with:

We mourn the loss of our dear friend, Rob Radabaugh. Rob was known and loved by colleagues and friends over several decades at UCSF, Genentech, Neurex, Elan, Medarex, and Avigen. Those of us who loved him were the recipients of his tremendous kindness and unstinting loyalty that extended over the years to many of us. Rob was warm and funny. He was smart and charming. He could be goofy and laugh at himself too. He was quick to spot pretense or hypocrisy, and was adept at lampooning it. He lived out the words of that old verse, "Life is mostly froth and bubble, but two things stand like stone: kindness in another's trouble; courage in your own." Rest in peace, dear friend.

I wonder who wrote this.  A woman friend, I suspect---not a man you laid with.  She could see all this in you, and send you home when it faltered.  Because as I read it again, I can recall you being warm and funny---and certainly charming.  You charmed my whole family.  And then you turned it off when things stopped going your way.  That horrible Thanksgiving when I said I couldn’t go on, you wouldn’t even speak to my mother as you got behind the wheel to take us away.  I cried for a hundred miles, and you showed no kindness for another’s trouble.  You had already seen in me the PTSD you saw back in ‘Nam, but you never spoke of it.  You never said: ‘Dan, let’s get you some help.’  We were both so afraid of our pasts.

I rest on that written phrase courage in your own trouble.  Did you stop drinking?  Did you face the memory of your abusive, alcoholic father head on?  Did you find a way from rage to a state of grace over that doctor that botched the operation that killed your mother?  Your career tangent suggests you did, and yet that’s a lot of companies in less than twenty years.  It’s a leap between wanting to be a drama professor to being a patent holding medical research librarian, but I am not surprised you took a scion from your past to grow a new future.  I hope it was a clean start, and that your friend was writing from truth as well as from her grief.

I’m thinking of your sister now, even though I can’t recall her name.  We met only once, you know.  I was nervous and she was kind.  I wonder if I found her that she’d speak to me---that I could learn how you died, and thus learn why my body aches so.

And I wonder if she found among your possessions that Polaroid of the time your cat decided to park on my naked lap.  I hope so.  I hope of all the things I left you and the money you took, it was the one thing you kept.

Author's note:

This was written a while ago, and Dead Ex's name was changed to protect the innocent.

In the interiem there has been several adventures with Dead Ex that I'll be exploring in the future. 

It Runs In The Family, Part Deux

At 6:00 PM on Sunday, May 21st 1939 my great grandfather Wilson K. Felton made his way into the radio studios of KFWB in Hollywood.  For now the name of the program is lost, but the content is not, for I have the radio script he was given to study beforehand.

Note the stations of the California Radio Service in the left margin

Wilson was no actor.  Apparently the show concerned missing persons, and he was there to recount the tale of one of his sons who disappeared sixteen years before.  The cover letter to the script is signed by Robert Dillon, who likely was the host and producer of the little program---perhaps only 15 minutes long.

Robert Dillon had a long history as a screenwriter in Hollywood, mostly in the silent era but continuing again in the mid-1930s for serials, Westerns and exploitation films for Poverty Row studios.  The only title most likely to be recognized today by film historians is the tasteless blackface silent Ham and Eggs at the Front (1927)---which co-featured Myrna Loy in one of her early and most thankless 'exotic roles'.  Produced by Warner Brothers, it may have been the allowance for him getting a program slot at KFWB (Keep Filming Warner Brothers) in the late 1930s.  At the time of this broadcast, Dillon had sold his last scenario two years before, but he was certainly qualified for spinning personal tragedies into radio entertainment.

1935

My family's version of the story of missing son Wilson Otis Felton had always been brief: As a teenager, he checked into the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco but never checked out.  Great grandfather Wilson hired a private detective, but a lead was never found.  Due to strikes at the docks at the time, the detective gave the one plausible exit he could think of: Otis had been shanghaied.

Of course the first question might be: What is a teenager doing checking into the St. Francis Hotel?  Without going too deep into a back story worthy of a miniseries, Otis had been left under the supervision of his older brother, Jim, after their mother died and their father ran off to Mexico in 1917 to escape creditors.  Since Jim was only about 16, it was hardly an ideal arrangement.

 Wilson K. Felton's Mexican passport photo, 1917.  Age: 50.

The discovery of this radio script does fill in a lot of voids.  Apparently Jim's supervision went quite well for a couple of years, as he and Otis lived together in Las Vegas and Otis worked as a clerk at the Union Pacific depot.  Then the script strays, either due to their father's hazy memory or lack of involvement, as it claims that Otis was transferred to the Union Pacific depot in Los Angeles.

Simultaneous to the discovery of the script was the one letter that survives from Otis to his bother Jim (or anyone else).  It's postmarked Dec 22 1919 and speaks of loosing a job on a dredger---presumably in San Pedro Harbor.  He then tried to get a job in the Los Angeles railroad yards, but had to settle for being a junior clerk again.  Why he left Las Vegas and the Union Pacific in the interim will be forever unknown.

However, the letter gives an oblique view of unpleasantness:

I don't know what the trouble was, but I was "canned".

Stout went to [illegible] on the seventeenth.  That night there was a poker game on the dredge.  (I wasn't in on it, however.)  I was sitting about two or three feet from S[illegible]tley, whistling lightly.  It's always been a habit of his to cuss me out when he didn't like the way things were going, so he cussed me out there and told me I could get my time [the] next day.

Next day I phoned Russell.  He only said he didn't want me on the dredge.  He didn't say why.

So I came up to  L.A. to go in[to] the R.R. shops.  "No could do" so I got in[to] the office.

Now that's the truth, so help me God.

Jim obviously had some acquaintance or at least knowledge of these men since Otis refers to them by name, but why this letter was saved and others were not suggests that Jim may have known more about "the truth" than the letter admits to.  Gambling is alluded to, but the reaction doesn't seem to be connected to it.  It's more like S---tley is annoyed by Otis hovering nearby.  Otis was making him nervous, as if he felt guilty by association.

The script continues with the fact that my great grandfather didn't know that Otis was in San Francisco until he received a letter from the St. Francis Hotel.  How they knew to contact him was another mystery, since the script claims he registered under the name of M. Couer.

St. Francis Hotel, circa 1925

I don't know why he used that name, but he was romantic sort of boy, and maybe it seemed adventurous to him.  He was only 19 years old.

So the date of his disappearance is 1923--- almost three years after the above letter.

Q:  How long did he remain at the hotel?

A: That's the strange thing about the whole matter.  He registered at the hotel, moved in his trunk and a couple of  bags, and never was seen again.  They say he had good luggage, and several good suits.  After several days went by, and no sign of him, the management entered his room to investigate.  They found that he never occupied the room.

Strangely, the script never gives a description of Otis but spends almost a page on his habits and scars.  Either a description was told beforehand or Dillon thought Otis's habits and scars were enough.

A:  [As a child] he swallowed a tube of ochre paint.  His mother was an artist, and he got hold of some of her paints.  It gave him lead poisoning.  As a result of that poison, he acquired a habit that will help identify him.  The lead poisoning left his joints rather painful, and he would close his hands into fists and bring them to-gether across his chest.  Then he would press the knuckles to-gether, real hard, and he said it relieved some of the pain when he did that.

Q:  That's a good point, Mr. Felton.  Now, does your son carry any scars?

A:  Yes. When he was in school, he went through a ring-worm epidemic.  Somehow or other, it got into his hair, and was awful hard to clear up.  It left several bare patches on his scalp, and he combs his hair so that they will be covered up...

 Wilson Otis Felton, circa 1914

The one surviving photo of him shows this.  Midst a motley crew of Imperial Valley grammar school students, his hair appears to be sporting a primitive layered look.  He is also darkly and heavily freckled, and for some reason I recall being told he was a dark redhead.  His mother was strawberry blonde, so it could be possible.  My grandmother---his sister---had dark brown hair and was lightly freckled at most.

Otis excelled in school, particularly in composition.  He won a prize for a poem he wrote at around the age of twelve.  It's hard to say what he could have accomplished if he didn't have to leave school at the age of thirteen or fourteen.

Which brings us back to Otis at nineteen years of age and checking into the St. Francis Hotel:  How does a railroad clerk afford good luggage and several good suits---let alone a grand hotel?  Obviously he had bettered himself since the last time we heard from him, but how remains yet another mystery.

A:  If the news isn't good news I want to hear it anyway.

Good suits can come from selling good bootleg liquor or having a good hand at cards. That's also a good way to end up on the bottom of San Francisco Bay.  There are also certain good gentlemen who will give a young man such things in spite of his peculiar hairstyle.  It could all be a clever ruse to get lost.  After all, he may have just been following his poorly spelled French m. coeur---'my heart'.

Channelized for Your Viewing Pleasure

After I made the posting of 'Stationized' radio dials last week, this Hoffman television came up on eBay.  Hoffman was a postwar California radio and television manufacturer. 

Having never seen this model before, I studied it and the description---not noticing any particularly interesting about it until I saw a word in the accompanying ad copy: "Channelized".

Looking closer at the channel selector, I then noticed it had but two numbers out of 12, and those two numbers were accompanied by call letters.

I've never heard of let alone seen this before, but it's not all that surprising since Hoffman was derived from the prewar Mission Bell radio company, and they did at times 'Stationize' their dials.  I have one from circa 1938.

Both Channelized stations are in San Francisco. This television was located in Pleasanton, CA---an interior East Bay city---so it never went far in its lifetime. That there are only two stations instead of three tells us that this set was actually sold in the fall of 1949 because Channel 4 KRON-TV is not represented.  It didn't start broadcasting until Novemeber 15, 1949.  KGO-TV started broadcasting on May 5th, 1949, while KPIX was the first commercial television station in the Bay Area, having started broadcasts on December 22, 1948.

I'm curious about this dial plate.  Was it meant to be embossed with new channels as they came on?  Did the factory supply the local dealer with pre-embossed rings or did the factory supply some sort of stamping machine so they could to it themselves?  That this one was never stamped with KRON suggests they were stamped at the factory---or this set never went back to the dealer for servicing. 

Hoffman's main gimmick was their EasyVision screen filter---which offered a jaundiced view of the world.  Rather unpleasant color aside, it did increase the contrast of the image in an era where television was more in shades of gray than black and white.