One of the benefits of having a grandfather who was a former mayor of Boston, John F. (“Honey Fitz”) Fitzgerald, was that he had free passes to interesting events. Just by paying the tax on a baseball ticket, I could get into a Red Sox or a Braves game. Even better was the pass he had to the RKO theaters, which allowed the bearer and up to five guests to go to the movies free.
In 1949, when I was in junior high school, The Outlaw came to the RKO Keith Memorial Theater. A sexy Western involving Billy the Kid, Sheriff Pat Garrett, and Doc Holliday, it featured a new star, Jane Russell, as the “half-breed” Rio. Howard Hughes had produced the movie with the idea of displaying Jane’s physical attributes, especially her 38-inch bust. In the many advertisements for the movie, she appeared in a low-cut peasant blouse chewing on a piece of straw, a pose that filled my adolescent mind with all sorts of thoughts, or as many as Catholic guilt would allow to sneak in.
At the time, the city of Boston had two watchdog organizations dedicated to guarding its citizens from moral harm. The Watch and Ward Society, organized in 1878, had given birth to the phrase Banned in Boston; before long, the authors of books, plays, and other entertainments actively sought the designation to draw audiences in other towns. The second group was the Legion of Decency, organized by Roman Catholics in the 1930s. People would stand up in church and pledge never to go to morally objectionable movies or to theaters that showed such films.
When The Outlaw arrived, with all its hype and promise, I couldn’t wait to see it. So one Sunday afternoon, Moosie Molloy, Bimbo Morrissey, Tootsie O’Toole, and I headed into Boston to get my grandfather’s pass.
My grandfather lived in the Bellevue Hotel, right next to the State House. He was always glad to see my friends and me, and after some small talk, we got the pass and headed for the door, full of ourselves and our good fortune. When we got on the elevator, we saw in it a tall man wearing a cowboy hat. A cowboy hat in Boston invited staring, and when I looked closely, I recognized the face under the hat. It was that of the Reverend Billy Graham. His steely blue eyes locked onto mine, and by the way he set his jaw I knew he knew what we were about to do. Guilt welled up in me. Fortunately, my grandfather lived on a low floor, and in a matter of seconds we were off the elevator, released from the reverend’s gaze.
The RKO Keith Memorial was an opulent theater with gold paint, crystal chandeliers, acres of red carpeting, and a grand staircase leading up to the balcony. When you went to the movies there, you felt you were someplace special. My friends and I decided to sit up in the balcony. We figured that by looking down at Jane, we’d have an advantage over those who were looking straight ahead.
Before long, we were treated to the scene in the stable, in which Jane takes a shot at Billy the Kid and then ends up wrestling around in the hay with him. Perhaps that stable is where she picked up the straw for her posters. Later in the film, Billy gets wounded and develops chills. Although Jane had first tried to kill Billy, her mood changes, and she realizes the only way to save him is to climb into bed with him to share her body heat.
As Jane bent over to minister to Billy, my friends and I moved to the edge of our seats. Suddenly the screen went dark, and when the picture returned, Jane was upright, dressed in more proper clothes, and in another room. Every time Jane stooped to adjust her stockings or pick up something from the floor, the screen went black. Eventually, there was an audible groan from the audience. The decency police had struck again. They were not going to let Jane Russell’s bosom corrupt the young minds of Boston, and I’ll bet Billy Graham had a hand in all this as well.
We returned the pass to my grandfather and headed back to Dorchester. As disappointing as the day seemed at the time, perhaps our ordeal was for the best; it allowed all of us to keep on imagining what we had missed. Not long ago, I rented The Outlaw. It really is a poor excuse for a movie. When I remember the agitation the film caused in the 1940s and reflect on what is available to the American public today, I have to smile. If they were still around, the Watch and Ward Society and the Legion of Decency would be busy indeed.
— Thomas A. Fitzgerald was born in Boston in 1934 and now lives in Denver. His father is Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy’s younger brother.
The Coolest Guy
…and The Sad Truth About How He Got His Car
It was the late spring of 1959, and my mother had just finished sewing nametags on all my clothes. That was great. It meant I was going to camp. Like most 13-year-old boys, I was impressionable, given to aspirational yearnings, and perhaps more trusting and less savvy than today’s kids. Then I met Gary Kaufman.
Pinelake Camp was in the Catskill Mountains, three hours north of my Brooklyn home. Bunk 16 contained ten campers and one counselor, Gary Kaufman. He was the coolest guy I had ever met. Besides being very nice, he was handsome and what people then called suave, and he had a limitless supply of girlfriends. If that wasn’t enough, he drove a brand-new red Corvette and was on the basketball team at his college. The fact that I’d never heard of that college did nothing to lessen the impact. It was in California, hence exotic and desirable. Two more exotic virtues completed the picture: Gary listened to jazz and was an excellent golfer. We campers worshiped Gary Kaufman.
One day he told us that a good friend of his was coming to visit the camp and would be spending the night in our cabin. This person had been down on his luck, Gary said, and we should treat him nicely. Then he added that our guest had played basketball in the NBA. Gary Kaufman had a friend who’d played in the NBA? And he’d be staying with us? This was beyond comprehension. Treat our guest nicely? Of course we would; only gods played in the NBA.
Sure enough, the friend came. It was late in the day. He was six feet six inches tall, unquestionably larger than life. Gary introduced him, and he shook hands with each of us before he and Gary went off. They came back long after we’d gone to sleep, but the next morning our guest ate breakfast at our table and then gave us a basketball clinic. I vividly remember practicing bounce passes with him. He left shortly afterward, and the summer progressed, with Gary continuing to lead the kind of life that only he and Hugh Hefner shared.
Two years later, in 1961, all hell broke loose in college basketball. Thirty-seven players from 22 schools were implicated in fixing games or shaving points. The center of the activity was our amiable guest, Jack Molinas. He had befriended good ballplayers in schoolyards and playgrounds, cultivated their trust, and eventually bribed them.
I pored over the articles. After all, I knew Jack; we had bounced passes together. I learned that he had been banned from the NBA for betting on the games he was playing in. No wonder he was “down on his luck.” Then I came upon an article that mentioned Gary Kaufman. I was stunned. I’d never thought about how Gary got to be cool. He just was. He had a sports car because he was cool. It never occurred to me to wonder about how someone who must have been from a working-class Brooklyn family would acquire a car simply through suavity. But now I wondered if all those girlfriends were also payments.
Gary Kaufman testified against Jack Molinas in what was almost certainly a deal with the prosecution. To protect himself, he turned against the friend who had been “down on his luck” and whom we should “treat nicely.”
Jack Molinas served five years in Attica and died in 1975, shot in the back of the head in a likely mob hit.
Historians sometimes talk about the assassination of JFK as the end of innocence for my generation. For me, it came two years earlier when the person I longed to become turned out to be a criminal.
—David Leveton is an advertising executive living in Brooklyn, New York.
The Loudmouth
When a 17-year-old Almost Learned the Century’s Biggest Secret
I was 17 years old in the early 1940s, a graduate of Theodore Roosevelt High School in Chicago, when the University of Chicago accepted my application. Roosevelt, on the north side of the city, was highly structured with definite rules and regulations, but Chicago—wow!
The university was then operating under President Robert M. Hutchins’s Plan, which postulated that a student could absorb enough information in two years to graduate with a meaningless degree (at least, it was recognized by no other school) whose letters were PHB. We girls changed them in our minds to read MRS, because that was about all it would help us get.
Students were not required to attend classes as long as they passed the comprehensive examinations. These were part of the Plan. At the end of each year, there was one six-hour examination of study, both essay and multiple-choice questions in four subjects. There were no weekly exams, no midterms. One chance a year was all you had. Sink or swim.
One day the chemistry building was closed to all classes and became a restricted area; no one was allowed in without a special pass. A lot of our young physics and chemistry instructors disappeared into that building and never again taught our freshman classes (the full professors did). We sometimes saw them walking to and from the building, but students were never allowed to get close enough to say hello. After a time they moved to a squash court under the Amos Alonzo Stagg Field stands, which was off limits too.
I had made two good friends, a pretty blonde girl named June and Ev, a lingerie model. We had discovered the various taverns that ringed the area. June, Ev, I, and another friend—a voluptuous brunette named Doris—used to frequent them of an evening when our studying had gotten us “up to here.” We never drank very much. Money was tight and, anyway, we really went to relax and get away from the grind with good conversation and our peers.
Our favorite tavern was the University Tap at 55th and University. It was only a couple of blocks away, and if you felt like eating something, both the prices and the food were good. In deer-hunting season the owners would bring home their quota and the tavern cook would fix up a venison blue-plate special that cost 50 cents.
Then one evening the four of us decided to visit a different bar in the same area. This one was classier than UT; it had booths, plus tables. We sat down at a table directly across from four guys in a booth. They began to flirt and asked if they could buy us a drink. Three of them had been our lab instructors. We accepted their offer.
We sat and talked for about an hour. The fourth guy was drinking two to everyone else’s one. He finally got visibly drunk and began to babble. What he said was mostly unintelligible, and the words that did get through sounded highly technical. Suddenly two of his friends grabbed him under each arm, stood him on his feet, and, the third following behind, gave him the bum’s rush out of the room before he could say another thing. We never saw any of them again.
Of course we talked about the evening’s event as we walked back to the dorm. We were so naive, it never occurred to us to connect it with anything that was happening on campus. Our lives went on and we never speculated about it again.
It wasn’t until V-J Day when the news came out about where the atomic bomb had been been manufactured that we realized that was the reason the chem building and the Stagg Field stands had been closed, and the reason the guys had dragged their drunken friend out into the night.
—Bernice Crown Teifeld still lives in the Chicago area.
Approaching Lakehurst
Little-known Information about the Final Moments of the Hindenburg
In 1937 I was a nine-year-old living on the fifth floor of a six-story walkup in the Bronx. One warm day I went to open the kitchen window and I heard a great deal of noise from the street below. When I looked down, I saw a crowd of people staring up at the sky and pointing.
As I turned my gaze upward, I jumped back in horror, bumping my head on the window frame. Just above the rooftops of La Fontaine Avenue sailed the most gigantic behemoth I had ever seen, the dirigible Hindenburg.
It was so enormous and flying so low I felt I could reach up and touch it as it glided by. I called out to my mother to come to the kitchen, and we stood side by side at the window.
My Russian Jewish peasant mother was well aware of how Jews were being treated in Nazi Germany, and when she saw the swastikas on the zeppelin’s tail fins, she said in Yiddish, “Du zolst ontsindn vi a likht [May you burst into flame like a candle].”
Later in the day, we heard on the radio that the Hindenburg had indeed burst into flame as it came in to moor at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. My mother had often told me stories about her childhood in a tiny village in czarist Russia, a place where people believed in werewolves and the evil eye. As the broadcast ended, I turned to her and said, “Mama, what did you do?”
—Geraldine Vigoda is a lifelong history buff who lives in Jackson Heights, New York.
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