On July 14, 1958, I was startled awake at 5:00 A.M. in my room in Baghdad by the sound of gunfire. I became a little uneasy. as the noise was too close for normal army maneuvers.
I was working as an administrative assistant for an engineering firm—Tibbets, Abbott, McCarthy & Stratton. We began our day at 7:00 A.M. and worked through until 2:00 in the afternoon. I lived in a brand-new house on the bank of the Tigris River, about four blocks away from the office. Pampered as we were in those days, we always got picked up by a car each morning. However, on this particular day, it didn’t arrive, so I made the short walk up the dusty road to the office, only to be met by the point of a bayonet that was attached to a rifle that was attached to an Iraqi soldier. He motioned me to go back to my house, so I did, without having conversation of any kind with anyone. I soon learned from the local radio station that the army had taken over the palace and killed every living thing from the king and the regent, his cousin, down to the cooks and teachers. One man who escaped, the prime minister, Gen. Nuri al-Said, tried to leave Baghdad dressed as a woman. Too tall to get away with the disguise, he was seized by soldiers and shot. The crowd got hold of his corpse and dragged it through the streets behind a motorcycle.
At the same time that I was listening to my radio and trying to figure out what was happening, a truck arrived at the Baghdad Hotel and collected a dozen foreigners, who were told they were being taken to the airport. A mob killed all but three Jordanians. One lady who had been put into the truck insisted on going to get her husband, and the mob let her. Her life was spared by her wits.
As the crowd paraded with Nuri alSaid’s body through the section of town where most of us foreigners lived, a loudspeaker cautioned all non-Iraqis to stay in their houses until further notice, which turned out to be three weeks. At that time Iraq was so remote from the United States that the violence received very little press. My family didn’t know what had taken place until after the immediate danger was over. We had no phones, no mail —no communication whatsoever with the outside world. Every foreign family had a houseboy who was permitted to do the shopping and other necessary tasks.
Thus began the succession of assassinations and military coups that eventually put Saddam Hussein in power. I was devastated by the news of the death of the 23-year-old King Faisal, whom I had met only a few weeks before. He had attended a play that had been put on for some visiting dignitaries, in which I had the lead, and he asked that I meet him.
We spent half an hour together, discussing the future of Iraq and how he hoped that he would be able to bring some Westernization to his country. He had a thorough command of English, having been educated in England, and was an altogether charming young man.
When we were at last free to go, all the women and children were evacuated to Rome, with the sole exception of myself. I was allowed to stay with my company and help clean up the mountainous paperwork involved in our company’s eventually leaving the country. The new regime would not honor the contract we had made with the previous administrative board, so we were never paid. They owed us millions.
When I finally did leave, having been given 24 hours to do so (I had kept a trunk packed for almost a year), I discovered that I was the only passenger on the plane. As we flew out of Iraq, the captain came on the intercom to say, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have now crossed into Turkish airspace.” I was far more relieved than I had expected.
—Margery Cooper spent most of her life traveling the world. She now lives in Paradise, California.
The Freshman as Senior
Stalking Harold Lloyd
In July of 1969, at the age of 16, I divided my time between two very different worlds. The first was that of my generation, the colorful hippie Zeitgeist that I happily embraced. But I was also caught up in a black-and-white time gone by. In those days Seattle, where I live, offered silent movies at a handful of repertory cinemas or sometimes in private screenings through film clubs. A dedicated film buff, I saw as many silents as I could, and my favorites were always the comedies.
Seattle was host that summer to the 1969 Shrine convention, normally something the hippie side of me would have disdained. But then I read in the paper that the man being honored as Shriner of the Year was Harold Lloyd, of Beverly Hills, California.
Lloyd, of course, is considered one of the three comic geniuses of silent films, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton being the other two. Chaplin is immortal, and Keaton remains recognizable to most people, but oddly, Harold Lloyd has been largely forgotten. That’s a shame. In the 1920s he was a huge star, known for his “everyman” comic persona and distinctive horn-rimmed glasses. His pictures often featured stunts —at once both hilarious and thrilling —in which he hung perilously off the edges of tall buildings or raced wildly in mad chases through city streets. His popularity was such that exhibitor polls taken in 1927 and 1928 showed him to be one of the top box-office attractions in America.
In 1969 Buster Keaton was dead, and Chaplin was in exile in Europe, but Harold Lloyd was alive and well and visiting my town. I quickly rounded up two girlfriends for moral support and took them downtown to get Harold Lloyd’s autograph. He was staying at what was then Seattle’s poshest stopping place, the Olympic Hotel.
In our bell-bottomed jeans and tiedyed shirts, we walked boldly up to the woman at the reception desk and asked her for Harold Lloyd’s room. She wasn’t much older than we were, and I don’t think she had a clue who Harold Lloyd was. She indifferently gave us his suite number, and we took the elevator upstairs. As we stepped off, we saw two older men standing in the hallway. One said to the other, “Okay, Harold, see ya later,” and walked off down the corridor. We were left with a heavy, balding man in bifocals.
“Are you Harold Lloyd?” I managed to croak.
“Yes, I am,” he said with a friendly smile. Inwardly I thought there was some mistake. This could not possibly be the silent film star I had admired. He wasn’t thin and winsome in a straw hat and blazer; he was fat and old and wore a brown suit that made him look like an insurance salesman. (Lloyd was 76 at the time. The following year he received a cancer diagnosis; he died at the age of 77, in March of 1971.)
“Could we please have your autograph?” I asked in a daze. I didn’t, after all, really want this fellow’s autograph. I wanted Harold Lloyd’s autograph.
“Sure,” he said. “Do you have any paper?”
We did not. So he kindly invited us into his suite while he looked for something to write on. In the meantime we chatted for a few minutes about his films. He was warm and likable and didn’t seem at all put off by our very long hair and notably unconventional appearance or the fact that we hadn’t brains enough to bring along an autograph book.
He finally found some hotel stationery and picked up a pen. As he began to write, I realized with a start that this man really was Harold Lloyd. I could tell because he held the pen in a strange way. He had to. Both the thumb and index finger of his right hand were missing.
I’d read quite a bit about Lloyd’s career, and one of the things I’d learned was that in 1919 he’d posed for some publicity photos holding a “fake” bomb. The bomb went off in his hand. He was nearly blinded, couldn’t work for months, and in all his later movies, including such masterpieces as Safety Last (1923) and The Freshman (1925), he wore a special leather glove to hide the injury. What’s even more remarkable is that Lloyd, who did most of his own sensational stunt work, did those films with only one good hand.
In his 1983 biography, Harold Lloyd: The Man on the Clock, Tom Dardis says that for the rest of his life Lloyd went out of his way to hide his injury: “Socially, he always wore gloves to conceal his deformity.” But he wore no glove the day I met him.
“Hi Jane,” he wrote on the piece of paper he had found. “Lots of luck. Harold Lloyd.” He also drew his trademark symbol of horn-rimmed glasses. Then he signed autographs for my two friends and afterward politely showed us the way back down the hall to the elevators.
I still have Harold Lloyd’s autograph and I always smile whenever I look at it. He’d probably written that phrase lots of luck to thousands of fans over the years, but I also think—after getting a load of me and my equally counterculture companions —that he figured I was the kind of girl who was going to need it.
—Jane Loiter is a writer and film buff in Seattle, Washington.
Bagging the Satchel
Leroy Paige Explains His Longevity
For reasons that are well known—he reached his prime in an era when baseball was still segregated —LeRoy (Satchel) Paige did not appear in a major-league game until he was 42 years old, well past the age of retirement for most professional players. In 1965, at 59, and 12 years after he had left the St. Louis Browns, he came back to pitch three scoreless innings for the Kansas City Athletics. I met the legendary player during a hiatus in his major-league career.
In the early spring of 1950, Paige was barnstorming with the famous Negro League team the Kansas City Monarchs, who came to play an exhibition game at the aging and quirky Borchert Field on Milwaukee’s North Side. I was studying journalism at Marquette University, and I had been lucky enough to get hired as sportswriter for the Milwaukee Journal. R. G. Lynch, the paper’s sports editor, assigned me to cover the game.
I don’t remember the Monarchs’ opponent; Paige, after all, was the show. He pitched three innings —runless, I think —before heading for a shower. I went underneath the stands to find Paige in the clubhouse and asked if I might interview him. Okay, he said, but I would have to do the questioning while he showered.
So we talked, one-on-one, as he applied soap to a long, skinny frame securely anchored to the ground by size 14 feet. I noticed his hands, leathery from decades of firing baseballs at batters on sandlots and stadiums across the world.
Awestruck and inexperienced, I must have appeared nervous at this odd, humid encounter in a run-down ballpark. But Satchel, with his great wide smile, was gracious to one more in the unending line of reporters he’d faced over the years.
Later that evening I wrote a short article for the Journal. I can’t remember if it was ever printed; I don’t have a clipping, although I’ve got an incomplete blue carbon copy in my files. What I do remember is asking Paige how he pitched so well despite his relatively advanced years.
His reply has stuck with me a half-century later: “It ain’t how old you is, it’s how old your legs is.”
—John C. DeLong, a retired journalist and college public relations director, lives in Middletown. Wisconsin.
VIP-to-Be
Prophecy at O’Hare
Part of my job in the early sixties, when I was working for United Airlines in the old terminal at O’Hare Airport, was to meet and greet any VIPs who might be traveling through Chicago.
One day I met up with Stuart Symington, the powerful Democratic senator from Missouri whom quite a few were thinking of as a future presidential candidate. He had some time on his hands between connecting flights, so I suggested we go up to the bar, run by Marshall Field’s and now long gone.
He accepted my offer, and while we were on the way, I saw coming toward us down the nearly empty corridor a tallish man with a splayed-foot walk, wearing a fedora. It was Richard Nixon. Symington and Nixon of course knew each other well and they stopped to chat. It turned out that Nixon also had a while before his flight, so Symington invited him to accompany us to the bar.
Nixon’s popularity had recently reached its nadir. He had lost the presidential election to John F. Kennedy and then lost again when he ran for governor of California. Plus, after losing in California, he had made his famous remark that the press wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore, which allowed the press to kick him around some more.
Anyway, we went up to the bar, ordered drinks, and talked for about 20 minutes. Or rather they talked; I kept my mouth shut as I figured they wouldn’t be interested in my thoughts on national affairs. Then it was time for them to go. I paid for the drinks; they both thanked me graciously, and we left together.
I tarried outside the bar and watched them walk off in different directions. I thought: There goes Symington, who may become the most powerful man in the world, and there goes Nixon, who’ll be only a footnote in history.
—Richard Harper now lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
