I published my first book when I was 29, and I was proud of “Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem,” my journalistic account of a New York neighborhood. And yet, I hadn’t achieved my most important goal.

Writing a novel was not just a goal; it was my dream. In the 1950s before memoirs became popular (except for statesmen, generals and actors), the novel was like the Holy Grail. All the young writers I knew wanted to write a novel. My friends and I could all recite the lyric last lines of “The Great Gatsby” and bemoaned the tragic fate of Peyton Loftis, the heroine of William Styron’s “Lie Down in Darkness,” as if she were a real person, someone we’d met at a party in Greenwich Village.

Salinger’s “Holden Caulfield,” “Ward Stradlater” and “Old Jane Gallagher” seemed like people we had gone to school with rather than characters from “The Catcher in the Rye.” Movies were for brainless entertainment; novels were the dramas of real life.

After “Island in the City” was published – to great reviews and few sales – I wrote 50 pages of my first novel. I asked my literary agent to send it to my publisher to see if he thought it was good and ask for an advance on the novel, which would give me time to write it (it didn’t cost me much to live on in 1959).

A month or so later, he called to tell me that the publisher, Houghton Mifflin, a distinguished old Boston publisher, said they would pay for me to come from New York to have lunch with them at one of the great restaurants of Boston and discuss my proposal.? “Is this good news or bad?” I asked my agent.

“It could be either one,” said James Oliver Brown, that loyal and courtly literary agent of the old school, whose kind will never come again.

Bracing myself but hopeful, I took that magical train ride between the two great cities, immortalized in the short stories of John O’Hara. O’Hara himself, that arbiter of taste, would have approved of the restaurant my publisher chose for our momentous meeting – Locke Obers, tucked away on a cobblestone street behind Tremont, without anything so brazen as a sign to announce or identify itself. One simply knew where it was. (In the following decade, it was known to outsiders as a favorite haunt of John F. Kennedy who was known to request extra lobster in his stew.)

The editor of my first book, only an assistant in the hierarchy of Houghton Mifflin, was not even present at the grand occasion. My host and hostess were the publisher and managing editor of the venerable firm – the loftiest executives. They selected the wine to accompany our lobster thermidor, the specialty of the house. I drank and ate apprehensively, awaiting the judgment.

“We think you’re a wonderful young journalist,” I was told, “and we’d like to publish all your journalistic books.”
After such blessing, the hammer fell. “But you’re not a novelist.”

I thought the worst that could happen was that I’d be told they didn’t like the 50 pages of the novel my agent had sent cheap viagra uk paypal them. I was not expecting a judgment on my life’s dream, my chosen identity. On the train home, I lost the lobster thermidor, but I did not lose my identity, my dream. It was battered and tattered, but it was still there. I kept it hidden for a long time.

I continued writing articles to pay the rent and feed myself on spaghetti and wine. I only spoke of my novel with two people – a poet and a girlfriend. The “girlfriend,” who became a friend for life, let me use her apartment in the afternoons while she was off teaching school and I could work on the novel – or variations of the novel – away from the apartment where I spent the night and wrote for my daily bread the articles I not only needed for the modest checks they brought in, but that I worked to make as well as I could make them, and for which I was, and still am, proud.

The poet was May Swenson, who I was lucky to meet with other fine writers who also became crucial friends when we were Fellows at The Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont, the first and still the best of its kind. I believed then and still believe that May Swenson was and is one of the great American poets.

I still know and can recite lines from some of her great ones, like the opening of “Mortal Surge”: “We are eager / We pant / We whine like whips cutting the air…” And my favorite, “The Key to Everything:” “Is there anything I can do / or has everything been done / or don’t you trust me to do it or what?…” The last line is “…I could find your name for you / but I’d be gone then, I’d be far away.”? She did “find my name for me.” She believed in me. She believed in the novel I would someday write. She said so in one of her books she inscribed for me, inscribing that belief in me and in the novel.

I didn’t write it the next year after I was told I was not a novelist, or the next year, or the next, or the next, though I kept trying; I kept writing and throwing away the writing I knew was not right, and it was not until nearly a decade later that I sat down and said to myself “This is it.” I wrote one whole summer to get the first page, to get it right, and then the pages came one or two at a time. Then after almost a year of writing more and more, the pages began to flow, and it was like I was taking dictation. I finished, and Kurt Vonnegut reviewed the novel in Life magazine. My novel, “Going All The Way” became a Literary Guild selection and made it to the Time magazine Best Seller List. I sent the first copy to the publisher of Houghton Mifflin.

I learned a great life lesson: Don’t let anybody tell you who you are.

When I was a kid growing up at 6129 Winthrop and going to School #80, a favorite pastime was to go out to the airport and “watch the planes come in.” We would sit for hours, entranced at the sight of the big passenger planes landing. Somehow, taking off didn’t seem quite as dramatic since it was assumed they knew how to get up into the air, but setting down such a huge piece of flying machinery on a narrow strip of land seemed more of a challenge.

There was always the tense moment as they drew lower and closer, perhaps tilting a little in the wind, then settling the front wheels on the runway and the tail touching down, which we greeted with a sigh of relief and sometimes applause. It never occurred to us – either kids or adults – that someday we would take off and land in one of those planes ourselves, rising above Broad Ripple and all of Indianapolis, onto some exotic far off land within our own country, like, say, Pittsburgh or even New York.

It’s hard to remember now how new this whole thing was – the first revolution of passenger planes took off in 1936 with the Douglas DC 3, pioneered by American Airlines. Three years later, when I was in the first grade, my “rich Uncle Crawford” and his Southern belle wife Aunt Susie flew (“took an airplane” as we said back then) to Mexico!

Uncle Crawford, one of the owners of the four Harbison Drugstores in Indianapolis at the time (my father was pharmacist at their store at 16th and Central), was a strange combination of the past and the future – he was the only man I knew who still wore high button shoes, which had gone out of style circa WWI, but this same old-fashioned man took Aunt Susie on that flight to Mexico in 1939.

What tales they returned with! My favorite was Aunt Susie in a Mexican café with a mariachi band as she stood up and sang – in her molasses’ slow South Carolina accent – a hit tune of the time, “South of the Border, down Mexico way…“

Just being related to such people made me feel like royalty, but Uncle Crawford topped it the following year (1940). He gave tickets to my father, my mother and me to fly to New York to see The World’s Fair! The most exciting thing wasn’t that we were going to The World’s Fair but that we were flying to New York!

All the neighbors came to the airport to see us off. This was the event of the year for our block – or maybe of all the 12 years I lived there. To make things more awesome, the plane we would be boarding was “an American Airlines Flagship.” (I didn’t know until I did some research on the subject that all American Airlines planes were called “flagships” back then. The marketing department knew what they were doing! You weren’t just flying on any old run-of-the-mill airplane; you were going on a flagship. It brought to mind the great ocean liners of the time that were the standard means of trans-Atlantic transportation.)

My parents and I were dressed for the big event as if we were going to a wedding. My mother was wearing a new dress, high heels and a wide-brimmed hat. Miss Leah Justice, a “practical nurse” who lived across the street, asked my mother what seemed at the time a “practical” question:? “Miz Wakefield, you’re not going to wear that hat when you get on that airplane, are you?”

My mother hadn’t really thought about it but said she supposed that she would.? “But Miz Wakefield,” Miss Justice exclaimed, “it’ll blow right off up there!” ? A few neighbors giggled, but a few looked concerned. My mother bravely kept the hat on as we boarded, just as if she were going to church.

Our flight landed in Washington, D.C., and then proceeded to LaGuardia. The stewardess (as they were then called) gave us gum to help relieve our ears popping when we landed. She was an attractive young blonde woman, and my father was so entranced by her, his eyes instead of his ears were popping. My mother never tired of reminding him about the stewardess for years afterward.

When he could focus his attention elsewhere, my father took photos of the sky (blue with white clouds) out the window of the plane with his new home movie camera (another first on our block!). He also took pictures of the stewardess.

When we got to The World’s Fair, we saw the famous “trylon and perisphere” that were symbols of the fair – a large needle-like thing and a huge ball-shaped thing beside it. (I still don’t “get it.”) More dramatic was the synchronized diving and swimming of the beautiful young women in “Billy Rose’s Acquacade.”

My father took movies of the “Acquacade,” starring Johnny Weismuller (the buy ambien online pharmacy first “Tarzan” of the movies), and Eleanor Holm, who finished fifth in the 1932 Olympics but was thrown off the 1936 Olympics team when the team doctor found her in a coma induced by alcohol after partying on the ship going to Europe. Impresario Billy Rose made her the star of his “Acquacade,” married and divorced her; she got a handsome settlement and a movie role as “Jane” in the movie “Tarzan’s Revenge.” (Maybe it should have been called “Jane’s Revenge.”)

For me, the big moment of The World’s Fair was going to see “Elsie, The Borden Cow.” She was famous in Borden’s ads throughout my childhood, and as far as I was concerned, she was a far bigger star than Eleanor Holm. (My father did not agree, though even Eleanor Holm played second fiddle to the stewardess.)

One brief piece of that home movie survives, thanks to Betsy Blankenbaker, who managed to take from it a shot of my mother and I waving goodbye as we left the house en route to the airport, and included it in her documentary film of my memoir, “New York in the Fifties.” If I can find that home movie again, I will send it to The Smithsonian, or better still, my “archive” at The Lilly Library at Indiana University. It is surely historic for the fact that my mother is wearing her wide-brimmed hat, which despite Miss Justice’s fears, did not “blow off up there.”

We continued to “dress up” in our finest new clothes (bought for the occasion) the whole time we were in New York. Courtesy of Uncle Crawford, we stayed at The New Yorker Hotel. Every day when we came out to go to The Fair or to see other sights in New York, we were immediately surrounded by people offering us “Tour of Chinatown,” “Boat Trip Around Manhattan,” “Tour of Rockefeller Center” and every other tourist attraction in the city.

“How do they know we’re from out of town?” my father wondered, and so did my mother and I. We blithely walked on, resplendent in our white summer outfits, the latest finery from Blocks, Ayres, Wassons and L. Strauss and Company. All the New Yorkers seemed to be wearing black or other dark clothes. Were they all going to funerals? (It was early May and chilly.)

My only other memories of that trip to New York include going out to dinner at a restaurant that looked from the outside as if it were within our price range. After being seated and given our menus, my father whispered that we must all order the ham with potato and vegetable. It was the only thing we could afford, and even at that, from the strained look on my father’s face, I think we just barely got out of there without having to wash dishes. I distinctly remember the bare look of that thin slice of ham with the lonely boiled potato beside it.

My father had looked forward to hearing Cab Calloway at The Cotton Club (he loved Cab’s “Hi De Hi De Hi De Ho’s.”). My father and my mother had decided that I would be safe enough in the hotel room for a few hours (a bold move), but perhaps out of my fear of the big city, I got a terrible stomachache, and they had to cancel their great adventure. What a wimp I was! Still, the whole trip was a great success, and we had the home movie to show to our friends and neighbors for years to come. We each had our golden memory: my mother’s hat did not blow off, my father had film of the “flagship” stewardess and I had met Elsie, the Borden Cow.

Afterward, I have a distinct memory of lying around on the floor of my Greenwich Village apartment reading The New York Times one Sunday 17 years after my trip to The World’s Fair. I came across an article with a prediction that seemed so impossible, I read it aloud to my roommate. “Can you believe this? The Times says that someday, more people will go to Europe by plane than take the boat!” We both laughed. It was another 15 years before I flew to London.

On a magazine assignment in 1995, I again flew to London but this time on The Concorde. It seemed rather plain inside, but the lunch was elaborate: first a salad, then wine, then an entrée, then dessert, followed by an aperitif, then coffee. As I finished my coffee, we were descending into Heathrow Airport. The flight had taken three and a half hours. Sadly, the Concorde was sidelined due to the cost of the gas it took to fly faster than the sound barrier. Now it takes a little more than twice that long to fly to London. It still beats the five days it takes to cross The Atlantic on The Queen Mary, the fastest of the great ocean liners.

When I was a sophomore at Shortridge I went to a High School Journalism Conference in French Lick, Indiana, and shared a room with my classmate and fellow sports columnist on The Daily Echo, Dick Lugar. When we turned out the lights at night we spoke of our hopes and dreams, and Lugar asked me “What would you be, if you could be anything at all in high school?” I answered without hesitation: “High point man on the basketball team.”

“Oh Dan,” Lugar said “You’re so frivolous!”

Lugar’s high school dreams were more appropriate for a future United States Senator: President of the class, valedictorian, student body president. Neither of us achieved our high school dreams, but Lugar came a lot closer than I did.  I didn’t even make the basketball team, much less become the player who scored the most points. In defense of my dream, though, I would argue that I wasn’t being “frivolous” – I was just “basketball crazy,” an Indiana affliction.

I pleaded with my parents for a backboard and basket in our backyard when I was ten years old, and my father hired the Broad Ripple Lumberyard people to do the job (the basket was always supplied with a real net so you could hear the satisfying swish of a score.) This not only sated my lust for the game but also insured my popularity with every kid in the neighborhood.

We played in fall and winter, summer and spring, on ice and in snow, in heat and rain, sleet and slush, in the earliest mornings till the shadows of winter drew us home for supper with the passing of the Monon train to Chicago at the very back of our yard, beyond the Victory Garden, at five-fifteen every evening. Playing in all seasons, I became a good shot, but my flat feet denied me the ability to run at even a normal pace. (I bought a stopwatch to time myself and learned that I couldn’t break the seven-minute mile – roughly a minute slower than the average kid my age.)

My only basketball glory was reflected in two of the graduates of my backyard basketball court – Gene Neudigate and Dicky Richardson, the legendary “Itchy,’ a slender, slithering master of the court and nonstop shooter from any angle. Itchy and Gene were both backyard regulars, and both went on to star for Broad Ripple. Though I’m a true blue Shortridge Blue Devil, my earlier loyalty to School #80 and my backyard backboard allowed me to root for both those guys even though they were Rockets. Not only were they great players they were also a lot of fun. We sometimes tried to spook whoever was about to take a shot by shouting incantation-like curses the moment the ball was about to leave his fingertips: “Oogum-Sloogum!” “Puget Sound!” (Don’t ask me to explain why these sappy syllables sent us doubling over with happy hysterics that caused noses to run and stomachs to ache. You had to be there, in my backyard, in 1944.)

Gene Neudigate now sports a neatly-trimmed white beard; he’s a retired, respectable businessman, but he still lights up like a kid when he tells me how he averaged fifteen points a game and was seventh in the city in scoring his senior year.

“We beat Tech in the Sectionals when I was a Junior,” he says. “They were the favorites, but then we got beat ourselves the next day.”

Those were the days when the tournament was played in the “any team can win” era that was dramatized in the movie “Hoosiers,” before the schools were divided up according to enrollment numbers into “athletically correct” divisions so more kids could be called “winners,” but the sacred spirit was lost.) Butler Fieldhouse was filled to the rafters for every game from Sectionals to Finals, rocking in a frenzy of unforgettable March madness that will never be matched. Those were the days when fourteen thousand people came to The Fieldhouse to see Crispus Attucks play in a regular season game when Oscar was there; everyone waited for “The Crazy Song” that meant The Tigers had the game sewed up, and you clapped in rhythm no matter what school you were from as they sang: “You can beat everybody – – but you can’t beat us.”

Gene and I were so basketball crazy we not only went across the Monon tracks at night to the Broad Ripple gym to see the high school games and the grade school “curtain raiser” that came before the freshman game that came before the varsity game; we even went to games of “old guys” who played for company teams after work.

“We used to laugh at those ‘old men’ who were probably in their twenties and thirties,” Gene reminds me. “We even made up a cheer for the team of guys who worked for Seven Up. We knew the head man of the company was Tom Joyce, so our cheer was ‘Seven Up’s our choice/ Rah Rah Tom Joyce!’”

Gene said sometimes he even went by himself just to watch the Broad Ripple team practice. (I can hear the often-quoted words of the NBA star Alan Iverson complaining that he was rumored to be traded because of missing a practice: “We talkin’ about practice – not a game, not a game – we talkin’ about practice. We talkin’ about practice, man. We talkin’ about practice. . .” )

Gene Neudigate is talkin’ about walking over the Monon tracks after school to go watch the Broad Ripple high school team practice – not even to see them play in a game, man, but just to watch them practice. His devotion – addiction – is more understandable when you know he was watching the Broad Ripple team that went to the state finals in 1946 (and was beat by Bosse of Evansville 35-33.)

“Do you remember that the guys from that Broad Ripple team used to stop by sometimes after school at Gene Purcell’s Pure Oil station and get peanuts out of the penny machine?” I ask Gene.

“That team was my inspiration,” Gene says, and we both, in unison recite the starting lineup: “Allen and Chafee at guards, Chapman at center, Baker and Steinhart at forward. . .”

The coach was Frank Baird. So just imagine how Gene felt one day when he was shooting around by himself at the outdoor basket by School #80, and a car stopped and the driver sat there a while and watched Gene shoot the ball. After a while, the man in the car asked Gene “Are you going to go to high school at Broad Ripple?” Gene said he was, and the man said “Well, I hope you do, and I hope you play for me.”

The man was Frank Baird.

That was the neighborhood equivalent of Knute Rockne watching a boy named George Gipp kicking a football and asking him if he’d like to play for Notre Dame.

“Frank Baird was a real gentleman,” Gene said. “He never once used a cuss word. But he could make you feel small. Once when we were losing a game and playing badly he told us at halftime “I’m going to deflate this ball and you can use it for a sewing kit – you might as well use it for something, since you don’t know how to use it to play the game out there.”

Even the low points of basketball memory are high points now.
“Remember who made the shot that beat Ripple in the Finals?”
“Brock Jerrell!”
How could we ever forget?

I remember playing for The Coagulators, an intramural team at Shortridge that won at least half their games (as I remember.) I remember being in the starting lineup with Jerry Burton, Don “Moto” Morris, Bailey Hughes, and Johnny “Big Red” Peterson, backed up by the all-star bench of  Pete Estabrook and Dick “Ferdie” Falendar. I remember joining Ted Steeg of Shortridge and Jere Jones of Broad Ripple in a pick-up game at an outdoor court in Greenwich Village against three high school guys from Harlem in 1957. I remember being so beat and exhausted after the game that my team-mates and I couldn’t speak until we flopped down on the grass in Washington Square Park and Jere Jones summed up our experience: “The Parable of the Three Fools,” he called it. We were basketball crazy.

*     *     *     *     *
Dan Wakefield is author of Under The Apple Tree: A World War II Home Front Novel.