DR. SEUSS GOES TO WAR

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

My day began standing butt-naked before the medicine cabinet mirror pitching my own face as I shaved. A friend of a friend of a friend had wrangled me an interview at PM Newspaper in Manhattan at 10:00 this morning. The friend of a friend of a friend scribbled the name of the guy I was to see on a piece of paper that was folded up in the pocket of my suit pants. I was going in cold. I didn’t know the guy and not enough about the newspaper. All I knew was that it’s a left-leaning, daily publication that some say is a communist rag sheet. I don’t care about that. All I care about is that it’s chock full of photos and drawings about the war. That’s what I‘m gonna do. I mean, I want to draw war cartoons. I even have an idea for a comic strip about a sailor who escaped the Jap’s bombs at Pearl Harbor two months ago.

My bad stomach got me mustered out of Navy boot camp after four weeks of training, and I need a job bad. Ma and Pop are patient as Job with me, but I know they can’t afford to keep me much longer. Three weeks and I still haven’t landed a job. Maybe mine is a pipe dream, but I gotta give it one more try. If PM doesn’t put me on today, I promised Ma I’ll take whatever I can get. I’ll even take that job washing dishes at Cholly’s Diner if I have to. It wouldn’t be too bad. Cholly’s is just up the street from our apartment building in Flushing. I can walk it, and Cholly already told me he’d give me hours so I’d have good daylight to do my drawings on the side.

Yesterday, PM featured a clever cartoon by Dr. Seuss that I cut out and taped to the top of the medicine cabinet mirror. Everyone knows him as the children’s story author, and I admit it was a little shocking to see a war cartoon under his signature. ‘Waiting for the Signal From Home…’ it’s captioned above an endless procession of Japanese Americans on the west coast of the United States who are portrayed as loyalists to Imperial Japan. The cartoon leaves nothing to the imagination in terms of Dr. Seuss’ stance that Japanese Americans are a threat, ready and willing to commit sabotage against the United States in the name of their mother country. I don’t know how I feel about the Japanese American situation, but I guess the cartoon is in line with official government policy on World War II, as well as the thinking of lots of Americans, maybe most of them. Just hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7^th of last year, the scuttlebutt is that the FBI started rounding up Japanese Americans and shipping them to ‘relocation’ facilities in Montana, New Mexico, and North Dakota. Pop says those places are called ‘Internment Camps’. And it ain’t just the Japs. Germans and Italians are running for cover, too—and like rats are ducking into any hole they can find here in the five boroughs of New York City. And I guess it’s the same scene no matter where you go in America’s forty-eight.

Americans fear for their lives and have the jitters bad. We hear that the paranoia on the west coast runs especially high where attacks by the Japs are expected.  The perimeters of buildings are stacked deep with sandbags, and blackouts and drills are common. We ain’t got it any better here. German U-boats crawl along the shore of the east coast like sneaky sharks and take out a ship now and then.

A pretty secretary pointed me to a chair in the hallway outside the office of the guy I came to PM Newspaper to pitch. Propped up on the floor against my jiggling foot is my portfolio jammed full of my drawings. I got a lot to say about this war. I just hope that guy gives me the break I need. The door opens suddenly and a noxious plume of cigar smoke snakes into my nostrils. The secretary thrusts her hand over her nose, and I watch in amazement as green nausea pulsates up her throat and into her face. Poor girl! I think to myself. I turn my head back to the door of the office and a tall, patrician-looking guy, the guy named Ingersoll, I suppose, that I came here to see, reaches out his hand to a stooped, Jewish-looking guy. Ingersoll says, “Ted, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this new batch of war cartoons. I’ll look through them after lunch and give you a call.” My heart takes off like a fighter plane and thunders in my chest. Jeez! The Jewish-looking guy is Dr. Seuss—Theodore Seuss Geisel himself, in person, not six steps away from me. It’s gotta be a sign! This job is mine! I know it as well as I know my own name.©

The above is a work of fiction by multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene. It is inspired by a true facet of the life of Theodore Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss).

Image: Dr. Seuss’ cartoon: Waiting for the Signal From Home…

Paperbacks and eBooks by Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase through Amazon. An overview of her latest novel, A CHANCE AT THE MOON is below:

Amid the seductions of Las Vegas, Nevada and an idyllic coffee plantation on Hawai’i’s Big Island, a sextet of opposites converge within a shared fate: a glamorous movie-star courting distractions from her troubled past; her shell-shocked bodyguards clutching handholds out of their hardscrabble lives; a dropout Hawaiian nuclear physicist gambling his way back home; a Navajo rancher seeking cleansing for harming Mother Earth; and from its lofty perch, the Hawaiian’s guardian spirit conjured as his pet raven, conducting this symphony of soul odysseys.

Was it chance or destiny’s hand behind the movie-star and gambler’s curious encounter at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas? The cards fold, their hearts open, and a match strikes, flames that sizzle their hearts and souls. Can they have the moon and the stars, too? Or is she too dangerous? Is he? Can their love withstand betrayal? Can it endure murder?

While the cards at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas fail to distract them from their troubled pasts, on the side, the actress and the gambler play a game of ‘will they won’t they’ romance. Meanwhile, an otherworldly hand also has a big stake in the game. Unexpected secrets unfold brimming with dangerous consequences, and finally, a strange brand of salvation.

Amazon Buy Links:

https://www.amazon.com/CHANCE-AT-MOON-Betrayal-Murder-ebook/dp/B07Z44YN9X/  - EBOOK



https://www.amazon.com/CHANCE-AT-MOON-Betrayal-Murder/dp/169984402X/ - PAPERBACK

              

A New Yorker at Green Gables Drive-in Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio©

By Linda Lee Greene

When in the early 1960s I met my former husband Bobby, his driver’s license gave an address of Cambria Heights, Queens, New York City, a relatively placid neighborhood a mere stone’s throw from the Nassau County, Long Island line. It was his parent’s address, a place to which they had moved soon after Bobby’s senior year in high school. Born in Manhattan, and as a toddler had moved with his parents and older brother to the Bronx, New York City’s northernmost borough, they remained there until Bobby’s pre-adolescence. The family relocated at that time to Flushing, Queens. It was there that Bobby received most of his schooling, and is the place he considers home.    

It wasn’t that the little family was unstable…they were upwardly mobile. Bobby’s beautiful Spanish/Puerto Rican mother Paquita, and his movie-star handsome father Eusebio (Americanized as Frank) were always on the hunt for a better life for their little family. Both of them had immigrated to Harlem originally, Paquita from Ponce, Puerto Rico, and Eusebio from Barcelona, Spain. A seamstress in a “boiler room,” as she called it, Paquita commuted every weekday by train and subway to the garment district in New York City, a musty room in a highrise in Manhattan located between 5^th and 9^th Avenues to 34^th and 42^nd Streets. Frank was also a daily train/subway commuter to his job as a kitchen worker at the Chase Building in midtown Manhattan. I knew that I was an accepted member of the family the day that Frank carted home to me a special disk-like pan from that famous kitchen, a pan with the name of Chase Manhattan engraved on its bottom, a piece of equipment that I use to this day, and each time I do, I recall with great affection my long-deceased father-in-law.

At the time that Bobby and I met, he was the saxophonist, clarinetist, and comedian with a five-piece combo that traveled cross-country on one-night to eight-week-long gigs at every type of venue imaginable; I was a dance instructor at an Arthur Murray’s Dance Studio in Columbus, Ohio. Fate brought us together at a nightclub, the infamous Club Rubu, in Columbus where his group was appearing and where my dance-instructor buddies and I often headed after the studio closed in the evenings. Subsequent to some stops and starts in our relationship, I went on the road with him, and absent the benefit of having met each other’s families, we married in Palo Alto, California in the spring following the year we met.

Bobby’s biographical background is an important element to my story, especially as it relates to the geographical and cultural aspects of it, for it points out differences between us that were always sources of humorous situations, as this one demonstrates. Before I proceed, I will list just a few of our dissimilarities: to Bobby, white castles are repeaters; pop is soda; lunch meat is cold cuts; mayonnaise is Hellmann’s; gingerale is Vernors; and Houston Street is pronounced like “house” with “ton” tagged to its tail-end. As multi-dimensional as was his upbringing within the borders of the five boroughs of New York City, as well as his cross-country travels, at the same time, he remained oddly unsophisticated in many ways. It was an innocence that theretofore I wouldn’t have associated with what one would expect to be a stereotypically “jaded” New Yorker. It allowed him a refreshing capacity to be captivated by new experiences. For instance, never in his life had he seen, or had knowledge of, drive-in restaurants, an enormously popular American phenomenon from sea to shining sea in the 1950s and 1960s—other than those spots that had been Bobby’s turf, apparently.

St. Louis was the home-base of the other four boys in the band, and when our work in California dried up, we headed east with them, camping out in the home of the parents of the leader of the group for a week or so, a week or so until some work materialized and we would be on the road again. But homesickness bit all of us fatally instead, which was the death knell of the band. The only choice available to Bobby and me was packing up our electric skillet, our ironing board, our iron, and our clothes (our only worldly possessions at the time, other than his horns) and to head to Columbus in our old Chevrolet. It was time for Bobby to meet my family and friends for the first time.

The introductions went swimmingly—everybody loved Bobby and Bobby loved everybody in return. I called my friend Carol Richardson, who was Carol Treadway by then, and she and her husband Dick, and Bobby and I, planned an evening together. Dick picked us up in whatever boat-of-a-car he owned at the time (Dick always owns a boat-of-a-car), and Bobby and I climbed in the roomy back seat. The early part of our evening is a blur to me, but we ended up at Green Gables Drive-in Restaurant, the favorite haunt of all of the teenagers and twenty-somethings of our area of Columbus when we were growing up, and judging by the steady flow of traffic in and out of the place that evening, it was still going strong.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the drill of such places, you would park your car, roll down your windows, and a carhop would walk, or in some cases, skate up to the driver’s side window, and take your order. Presently, she would return with your food balanced delicately on a tray that she would attach to the driver’s side door and window, and then she would fade away until it was time for her to return to fetch the tray at meal’s end. Well, that was the purpose of such places for the older folks, but not for the younger crowds that frequented them. The real function for them was for the young motor heads to show off their automobiles, their 1950s concept cars, classic cars of today, and for the girls to hang out of the windows of the cars and wave and shout to all of their friends. Around and around like an endless carousel the cars would circle, passing up open parking spaces with abandon.

My husband was fascinated! While the other three of us in our car chatted away, Bobby was so caught up in, and befuddled by, the parade that was unfolding before his eyes that he failed to contribute a word to our discourse. You must take into account that this is a person from New York City, where a parking space is golden, and never remains empty for more than a second or two. Street fights and turf wars break out over parking spaces in New York City. At Green Gables that evening, there happened to be an empty spot right next to our car, the side where Bobby sat, a spot that had been passed up by the same cars time and time and time again. 

Finally, Bobby just couldn’t take it any longer. Thrusting his entire torso out of his open window, and his free arm jerking wildly like a frustrated traffic cop’s, in his New York accent, Bobby shouted to the driver of a particular car on which he had kept his eye, “Hey Buddy, what’s the mattuh with you? There’s a pahkin’ spot right heuh? RIGHT HEUH!!!”

Original posting on September 17, 2012 – Updated on January 8, 2019

http://booksbylindaleegreene.gallery-llgreene.com/

To date, Linda Lee Greene has authored five novels: “Jesus Gandhi Oma Mae Adams” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG); “Guardians and Other Angels” (http://goo.gl/imUwKO); “Rooster Tale” (http://goo.gl/vNq32g); and “Cradle of the Serpent” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG), which was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. Scheduled for release in early 2019, her latest novel titled “A Chance at the Moon” will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com. 

"Possessed by Intense Life"

“…possessed by intense life:”  It is an immortal line by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his novel, The Great Gatsby, and while it describes the enchanted universe of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, it just as easily could have been written about the artistic vision of Lucila Linik.  When this kind of vitality in a writer is moored by “innate genius augmented by control, technique, craft,”[1] as was said of Fitzgerald, you get “the great American novel.”  The same qualities given rise in an artist such as Lucila Linik bring into being a body of work worthy of any superlative in any lexicon.

                Argentina-born, Manhattan-reared, Lucila won her first award in an art competition at the age of thirteen when she took the top prize for a piece she executed for New York’s Metropolitan Opera.  Educated at New York’s High School of Music and Art, a school for gifted children, she went on to receive her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at Temple University and her Masters Degree in Education at Penn.  It was back to Buenos Aires following college, however, and there she met her physician husband, and there she remained for forty years.  As head of the art department of a prestigious, English school there, Lucila was provided the opportunity to be what she calls a “world traveler.”  Upon the death of her husband seven years ago, Lucila relocated to Central Ohio to be near her son.  A member of the Grove City (Ohio) Arts Council, it is in that capacity that I am acquainted with her.

                Lucila’s resumé is extensive, among the highlights are artworks shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art.  Since residing in Central Ohio where Columbus is the anchor, Lucila’s work is highly sought in exhibitions at galleries, festivals, and other art-related venues.  A diversified artist, Lucila describes herself as an “expressionist working from observation, and recording not only what I see, but also what I feel about a subject.”

                Dreaming Tree Galleries at 3968 Broadway, Grove City, Ohio is proud to host “All That Jazz - Twigs, strings, birds and things,” a wide-ranging show of artwork by Lucila Linik, to be on display from November 5 to December 1, 2012.  The general public is invited to the opening reception scheduled for Saturday, November 10, 2012 from 5 – 8 pm.  There you will see Lucila’s oil and watercolor paintings; sculptures; collages; tapestries; embroideries on canvas and other grounds—indeed it is a magical world of mixed-media upon which to feast your eyes and to feed your soul.   

www.dreamingtreegalleries.com

 

Linda Lee Greene’s latest novel, GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS is available at http://www.amazon.com/Guardians-Other-Angels-Linda-Greene/dp/1897512562/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338336762&sr=8-1

---

[1] The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner Paperback Edition, Published by Simon & Schuster, original date: 1920, p. xvi (Preface) by Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1996.

A New Yorker at Green Gables Drive-in Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio

When in the early 1960s I met my former husband, Bobby, his driver’s license gave an address of Cambria Heights, Queens, New York City, a relatively placid neighborhood a mere stone’s throw from the Nassau County, Long Island line.  It was his parent’s address, a place to which they had moved soon after Bobby’s senior year in high school.  Born in Manhattan, and as a toddler had moved with his parents and older brother to the Bronx, New York City’s northernmost borough where they remained until his pre-adolescence, again the family moved, that time to Flushing, Queens.  It was there that Bobby did most of his schooling.  It is the place he considers home.    

It wasn’t that the little family was unstable…they were upwardly mobile.  They were always looking for a better life than had been available to them in Harlem, and before that in Ponce, Puerto Rico, the place from which Bobby’s beautiful Spanish/Puerto Rican mother, Paquita had immigrated, and Barcelona, Spain, the homeland of his movie-star-handsome father, Eusebio (Americanized as Frank).  A seamstress in a “boiler room,” as she called it, Paquita commuted every weekday by train to the garment district between 5^th and 9^th Avenues to 34^th and 42^nd Streets in Manhattan, as did Frank, to his job as a kitchen worker at the Chase Building in midtown Manhattan.  I knew that I was really a part of the family the day that Frank carted home to me a special disk-like pan from that famous kitchen, a pan with the name of Chase Manhattan engraved on its bottom, a piece of equipment that I use to this day, and each time I do, I recall my long-deceased father-in-law with affection.

At the time that Bobby and I met, he was the saxophonist, clarinetist and comedian for a five-piece combo that traveled cross-country on one-night to eight-week-long gigs at every type of venue imaginable, and I was a dance instructor at an Arthur Murray’s Dance Studio in Columbus, Ohio.  Fate brought us together at a nightclub, the infamous Club Rubu, in Columbus where his group was appearing and where my dance-instructor buddies and I often headed after the studio closed in the evenings.  Subsequent to some stops and starts in our relationship, I finally went on the road with him, and absent the benefit of having met each other’s families, we married in Palo Alto, California in the spring following the year we met.

Bobby’s biographical background is germane to my story, especially as it relates to the geographical and cultural aspects of it for it points out differences between us that were always sources of humorous situations, as this one demonstrates.  Before I proceed, I will list just a few of our dissimilarities:  To Bobby, white castles are repeaters; pop is soda; lunch meat is cold cuts; mayonnaise is Hellmann’s; gingerale is Vernors; and Houston Street in Manhattan is pronounced like “house” with “ton” tagged to its tail-end.  As multi-dimensional as was his upbringing within the borders of the five boroughs of New York City, as well as his cross-country travels, at the same time, he remained oddly unsophisticated in many ways.  It was an innocence that theretofore I wouldn’t have associated with a “jaded” New Yorker, and it allowed him a refreshing capacity to be captivated by new experiences.  For instance, never in his life had he seen, or much less experienced, a drive-in restaurant, an enormously popular and visible American phenomenon from sea to shining sea in the 1950s and 1960s, other than those spots that had been Bobby’s turf, apparently.

St. Louis was the home-base of the other four boys in the band, and when our work in California dried up, we headed east with them, camping out in the home of the parents of the leader of the group for a week or so, a week or so until some work materialized and we would be on the road again.  But nostalgia for home bit all of us fatally instead, which was the death knell of the organization.  The only choice available to Bobby and me was packing up our electric skillet, our ironing board, our iron, and our clothes (our only worldly possessions at the time, other than his horns) and to head to Columbus in our old Chevrolet.  It was time for Bobby to meet my family and friends for the first time.

The introductions went swimmingly…everybody loved Bobby and Bobby loved everybody in return.  I called my friend, Carol Richardson, who was Carol Treadway by then, and she and her husband, Dick, and Bobby and I planned an evening together.  Dick picked us up in whatever boat-of-a-car he owned at the time (Dick always owns a boat-of-a-car), and Bobby and I climbed in the roomy back seat.  The early part of our evening is a blur to me, but we ended up at Green Gables Drive-in Restaurant, the favorite haunt of all of the teenagers and twenty-somethings of our area of Columbus when we were growing up, and judging by the steady flow of traffic in and out of the place that evening, it was still going strong.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the drill of such places, you would park your car, roll down your windows, and a carhop would walk, or in some cases, skate up to the driver’s side window and take your order.  Presently she would return with your food delicately balanced on a tray that she would attach to the driver’s side door and window, and she would fade away until it was time for her to return to fetch the tray at meal’s end.  Well, that was the purpose of such places for the older folks, but not for the younger crowds that frequented them.  The real function for them was for the young motor heads to show off their automobiles, their 1950s concept cars, classic cars of today, and for the girls to hang out of the windows of the cars and wave and shout to all of their friends.  Around and around like a carousel the cars would circle in the place, passing up open parking spaces with abandon.

My husband was fascinated!  While the other three of us in our car chatted away, Bobby was so caught up in, and befuddled by, the parade that was unfolding before his eyes that he failed to contribute a word to our discourse.  You must take into account that this is a person from New York City where a parking space is golden, and never remains empty for more than a second or two.  Street fights, turf wars break out over parking spaces in New York.  There happened to be an empty spot right next to our car, the side where Bobby sat, actually, a spot that had been passed up by the same cars several times. 

Finally, Bobby just couldn’t take it any longer.  Pushing his entire torso out of his window, and his free arm gesturing like a traffic cop’s, he shouted to the driver of a particular car on which he had kept his eye, “Hey Buddy, right heuh?  There’s a pahkin’ spot RIGHT HEUH!” 

 

Many thanks to my fellow Franklin Heights High School alumnus Don McCarty for permission to use the drawing of Green Gables in this posting.

Linda Lee Greene's latest book GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS is available at

http://www.amazon.com/Guardians-Other-Angels-Linda-Greene/dp/1897512562/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338336762&sr=8-1

To view Linda's online art gallery log onto www.gallery-llgreene.com