I received two job offers. Stanley Aronowitz offered me a teaching job at Staten Island Community College. He ran an urban clinic operation out of the College where working class kids put theory and practice together. He wanted someone on his team that combined academic credentials and organizing experience. I liked Stanley, a working class intellectual with anarchist tendencies in terms of movement organizing. I wanted to finish my dissertation and Stanley said he’d help. I just didn’t know if I wanted to stay in New York. I had learned a lot in the last six years, but the city was getting on my nerves.
I told Stanley I wanted to think about it and I went up to Ithaca, New York, to look over the HAP job and meet with Ted Reed. Ted Reed taught at Cornell University and acted as part-time Director of the HAP program. As an Associate Professor, Ted and his wife, Pam, lived in a particular section of Cayuga Heights. Assistant Professors lived in another section and Full Professors in yet another section. Residential feudalism to match your rank.
Ted and Pam lived in a large Victorian house, well furnished and set on a good size yard. Pam worked as a doctor. She got her degree from a Quaker College which was the first College to grant medical degrees to women. No kids. No dogs. A quiet place. I sat there in their living room a bit uncomfortable in what for me was a luxurious setting and tried to make small talk. Ted suddenly got up and went out the front door. “Hey, Pam, where did Ted go?” I asked. “Don’t mind Ted,” she said, “there’s a tree stump out on the front lawn and Ted likes to stand on it and take a leak. It’s his way of pissing on Cornell.” I began to relax.
Ted turned out to be a former leader of the SDS, a Port Huron type of SDS, one who opposed the Vietnam war and believed in community organizing, a left liberal we said at the time. I’m not sure why Ted served as part time director of HAP, maybe he pissed on Cornell this way too. The HAP program and its staff full of anti-poverty, anti-war, hippie, anarchist, radicals always got in trouble and Ted loved to rationalize their actions in academieze, much to the consternation of Cornell’s stogy faculty.
The HAP staff consisted of Mike Wright, Ben Erlick, Bernice Bunny Cramer, Becky Fowler, Frankie Whitman, Sam Salkin, Nancy Bereano and Jinx Dowd. They put me through a series of tests to see how working class I was. Some of the staff lived in a collective house that had no doors on the bathrooms to eliminate bourgeois sensibilities about privacy. I got confused. I’m working class; my parents and very large extended family are working class and all our homes have doors on the bathrooms. Anyhow, I didn’t pass that test.
They took me to a place called Tweedmans, a roadhouse on a highway outside of Ithaca. Tweedmans catered to big old boys who drank beer, hustled gals and danced to country music. Lots of booths, bottles and boasts. I don’t think any of the HAP staff frequented this place, but they took me there just the same. They gave me the impression that this was a risky place to go. I went in the front door and almost immediately relaxed. There was lots of room, multiple exits and I liked the people I saw.
Jinx Dowd liked being at Tweedmans too and I hung out with her for the evening. Jinx worked as the Secretary for the HAP program and seemed to be the mother hen for the staff. Jinx grew up in Wynnewood, Oklahoma and lived in Paul’s Valley where she married and had five children, Jackie, Jeanne, Johnnie, Jennifer and Jyl. She put her two youngest kids in the car one day, drove to Memphis where her eldest daughter Jackie was going to school and got a job at the college. Later she drove up to Ithaca where Jeanne was going to school and got a job at the new HAP program around 1969.
Jinx lived with her two teenage daughters, Jennifer and Jyl, on the second floor of a rental house in downtown Ithaca. She drove an old Plymouth sedan that was so rusted out that when you sat in the passenger seat you put your feet on the inside car frame to keep the fire wall from dropping on the highway. Jinx also smoked like a chimney and always kept her pack of cigarettes in one of the two front pockets of her denim cowboy shirt. She never remembered which pocket the pack was in. She had the habit of slapping both pockets when looking for a smoke. I got so I’d ask her for a smoke just to watch her grab both of her tits in search of that pack.
Along with the interviews, dinners, bars and tests, I got to see my friends Cary and Beverly Hershey and their young daughter, Jessica. When Marge and I lived in Brooklyn and attended NYU graduate school, Cary and Beverly became our first married friends. They were sophisticated and charming and Cary enthusiastic with a wry sense of humor. Now, they lived in a nice home, down a country road outside of Ithaca. Beverly was the stay at home mom and Cary had a job as Assistant Professor in the Urban and Regional Planning Department at Cornell. He drove a new BMW two door sedan, encouraged me to take the job and told me to stay at his home until I found a place of my own.
Ted Reed ran the “you can be a part of history” number on me and I began to fall for the Cornell job. It did not appear to me, however, that the HAP staff really wanted a Director, besides they seemed committed to a “serving the poor” style of organizing while I wanted to “march through the ruling institutions.” Plus, after working for the Quakers for three years at $300/month, I wondered about selling out working at an elite university like Cornell and earning a whopping $14,000/year.
I headed for the Ithaca airport to fly back to the City still undecided. The plane was one of those small, twin prop planes with a tube-like inside that made you bend over as you search for your seat, two on each side of the plane. I sat down next to this young woman. As the plane warmed up its engines before takeoff, the plane rattled with vibrations. I noticed this young woman’s left hand gripped the front of her arm rest like the world dependent on it, her eyes closed in fear of her life. I spoke to her, told her not to worry, the plane vibrations are normal and these planes are safer than jets. I put my hand on top of hers and we talked the whole way to LaGuardia. It turned out she was a white witch, someone who practices Wicca by herself rather than in a coven.
I knew about Wicca. On assignment for the Park Slope News, I wrote a story about a storefront in Brooklyn Heights that advertised itself as the largest, east coast outlet for the artifacts of Wicca. It unnerved me to do the interview, as a good Irish-Catholic boy. I waited for some time outside that storefront checking things out before I went in for my meeting with the Warlock. I found out about the power of positive thinking, that healing people in covens was “a lot of hard work and not as easy as tweaking one’s nose” and that my article made the newsletter of the New England Coven of Traditional Witches, as well as the Park Slope News.
I didn’t end up sleeping with the white witch, but we did go to my apartment in Brooklyn and talked about my two job choices. As she left my apartment and headed down the stairs, she left me with a little rhyming diddy that ended with “you’ll get that job at fourteen.” She must have known it. I did get that job and agreed to come to Ithaca in the summer of 1973.
Leaving Brooklyn took some doing though. I missed the street life, the Irish bars, the kids playing stickball, the political action, my communist and socialist comrades, my matter-of-fact and very old friends, Annie Boylon, and Katie Harrigan.
I wanted Katie Harrigan to come with me to Ithaca. I can still see her plodding up those stairs to my Brooklyn apartment turning her lunch break into an intense love making session. Blond, long-legged, big breasted and calling me Danny. I kept hoping if I made love to her longer, if I went deeper, if I thought up new ways to please her sexually, she would fall in love with me, give up her Irish family, her separated husband and move to Ithaca with me. For several weeks before I left Brooklyn, I even had a red rose delivered anonymously to her hospital office. It didn’t work.
The last time I saw her she told me we were just working out our sexual frustrations after several years in marriages that weren’t working. Probably true, but I wanted more. I kept calling her from Ithaca, but she didn’t answer. I then called her sister which provoked a response from Katie who told me it was over. Don’t call anymore. I kept her smiling face in my wallet until, several years later, Annie Boylon said Katie was back with her husband and pregnant. Even then it hurt.
June 1973. I’m thirty years old and starting a new life in Ithaca, New York. I moved into a downtown two story rental house after living with Cary and Beverly for a few months. I threw a mattress in one of the two upstairs bedrooms, got an old chair from somewhere and used the box from a newly purchased stereo set for a living room table. Beverly took me to the mall and guided me through to purchase all of my kitchen ware, all except a kitchen table which was already there. I bought a desk for another of the rooms downstairs. That’s about it. I didn’t add another furniture item to that house for the next four years. I had so much space I rarely stayed there, except for Wednesday nights when I sponsored a guys-only poker game.
Julio’s was two blocks away located on a corner off the main drag that came into Ithaca from the east. I started going to this bar since it was closest to my home and I needed to “have a bar,” a Brooklyn practice that stuck with me for most of my life. Julio’s was the downstairs of a two story building. I never went upstairs which, according to rumor, was an after-hours gambling den, off limits to white boys like me.
But I wanted to make Julio’s my bar for two reasons. One, I needed a bar to keep my feet on the ground, a reality check due to my new position as Executive Director of Cornell University’s Human Affairs Program. And, two, I needed a place where Cornell University did not enter.
When I asked a Cornell professor about Julio’s he said, “Boy, Dan, it’s a rough place, I wouldn’t go in there without a couple of people with you.” His comment cinched it. I made Julio’s my bar. Well, almost. Julio’s was a small bar with only the front door available for exit, an unnerving barrier in a crowded bar. When you entered, the bar on your right held enough room for ten people to belly-up. A wall on your left made it crowded to get past those standing at the bar. Facing the bar, a small, black and white T.V. hung in the left hand corner. A jukebox stood at the end of the bar just off to the left and in the adjacent room people played pool on a small table. Julio’s did not serve food, only liquor.
Only the Black community went to Julio’s, the non-middle class Black community. Respectable Black people only came to Julio’s on a weekend night out when they “put their jeans on.” Most people called Julio’s a loser bar. I never saw another white person in that place while I lived in Ithaca. I brought one or two in over the years and it was always a mistake.
I knew I had to be careful so at first I only went in during the day. I met the owner this way. Hank was a six foot six albino Black man who worked as a union bricklayer. With Hank behind the bar, I drank my Black velvet beer- back most weekday evenings after dinner. The old timers taught me to shoot pool. The younger folks periodically played a song for me on the jukebox, “There’s a white boy in a soul band and he’s getting down.” I knew all the regulars.
It got so I could stay later on week day nights and even close the place down with a few stragglers. They invited me to the Black Elks Club after we closed Julio’s one evening. I asked the elderly man if it was okay for me to go. He said, “Son, it was you who excluded us; we didn’t exclude you.” I ate great chicken dinners at the Black Elks Club in the early morning hours and felt honored as the white boy in the Club.
I watched the George Foreman versus Muhammad Ali world championship boxing match on Julio’s black and white T.V. People packed the bar. Most people had bets on Foreman. I quietly rooted for Ali along with a short, elderly Black man seated at the end of the bar. The bar yelled for Foreman to take him out as Ali lay on the ropes for the early rounds. Ali came off those ropes in the later rounds and kicked the shit out of Foreman with the now famous “Rope a dope” tactic. Me and that small Black man were jumping up and down yelling “Ali, Ali” as the money people grew silent and ordered more rounds to drown their sorrows.
Joe’s Italian restaurant was two blocks down the street from Julio’s. I ate dinner at Joe’s most nights. They let you eat at the bar so I didn’t eat my dinner alone. I started off most evenings with a couple of straight up gin gibsons, two glasses of red wine with a heavy Italian dinner, New York cheesecake and a couple of shots of amaretto for dessert, then I walked to Julio’s to start drinking. For my four years at Cornell I ate and drank like this in the evenings and worked hard all day. Your body can absorb a lot of poison when you’re young. I do remember, though, prior to leaving Ithaca, I had come to a conclusion about how the “system” encouraged the working class to drink itself to death.
Seven months after arriving in Ithaca, I fell in love with Jinx Dowd. Jinx was fifty-three years old and I was thirty. We made love for the first time on New Year’s Eve, January 1974. I still remember walking through downtown with Jinx at my side after we had made love and deciding for the first time to reach down and hold this older woman’s hand. Jinx said I opened up her “fibers” and I spent a lot of time with Jinx Dowd. We worked together, ate and drank together, watched the “late, late, late” movies together, and worried over her two daughters.
Jyl at fourteen lived in the room next door with her wolf dog and her young man lover. Jennifer was madly in love with her girlfriend Robin and stayed up with us watching movies all night. She had coke bottle size reading glasses and inevitably read her novels with her face right next to the TV screen. Jennifer brought a jar to the table one night. “This is the homestead fund,” she said. Years later the coins collected in that jar became the fund that put a down payment on a piece of land near Wilseyville, New York where Jennifer now lives with her husband Mike, her daughter Jade and Mike’s son, Ryan.
Jyl stayed in Ithaca too, always holding down multiple jobs and always with a man in tow. Jyl who never fails to send me a birthday card or keep me up to date on the growing up adventures of her daughter, Emily.
