MAYBE THOMAS WOLFE WAS RIGHT…MAYBE YOU CAN’T – Part Four

 

Continued from Part Three…
https://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com/2022/01/maybe-thomas-wolfe-was-rightmaybe-you_15.html

“He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations.”

—Thomas Wolfe – You Can’t Go Home Again—

For a couple of weeks, Virginia and I just relaxed at Whitie and Reba Mae’s condo and did some touristy things with my parents or alone in our new car. We had been through a lot over the past year or so and this was a sort of R&R for us. It was also a chance to reconnect with my mother and father after years of contact that was always fleeting and always thinking that I’d be leaving soon to return to Argentina. This felt, to both them and me, as if, the Prodigal Son, I was finally “back home” after nearly twenty years.

Still, I wouldn’t feel I was really home until I reached Ohio. I wasn’t one of those snow-bird Ohioans always dreaming of living in warmer climes. To me, Florida always felt almost like a foreign country, some tropical republic unto itself. In fact, years later, when I started visiting Miami regularly on business, I would come to realize that that city was indeed a foreign country, or rather, a rich composite of foreign cultures, where I mostly spoke Spanish from the time I arrived until I left.

Reba Mae and Whitie were enjoying this time too. Whitie seemed at his best in Florida. Granted, north-central Florida, since, as a very white, very blond, very meticulous person, he found the beach, with its heat, sun and gritty sand, disagreeable. This part of Florida was, to him, sort of like Ohio with a much-improved climate, and, it was right on I-75. No directions needed, no way to get lost. You drove onto the South 75 ramp at the Wapakoneta city limits and drove south on the same road until you got to the sign that said OCALA SILVER SPRINGS NEXT EXIT, some thirteen and a half hours later.

During his fifteen years as a trucker/route salesman, he had come to detest winter, which had always been a hard time of year for him anyway, because his bipolarity seemed to be even more pronounced and his periods of depression deeper at the time of year when daylight waned. If he hated being out roasting in the sun, he feared and hated the short days and unending nights of winter in the northern climes even more.

Now he was playing host, introducing us to “his” Florida. He and Reba Mae took us to some of their favorite Ocala haunts, including a diner called Wulffy’s, where they loved to have breakfast, and a restaurant called The Oaks, where, Whitie assured us, “If you get there for supper before four-thirty, the salad bar’s only five bucks.”

They also took us on rides through the lovely countryside surrounding Ocala, best known for its wood-fenced horse farms, and gently rolling land. Reba Mae had been around horses as a little girl growing up on German-community tenant farms in west-central Ohio, and she would bring a few sugar cubes, or a couple of carrots, or a sliced apple in her purse and have Whitie stop along the road so she could coax a horse or two over to the fence by the road and pet their muzzles. I followed suit, remembering when I was a little boy, how she had taught me to keep the palm of my hand flat when offering a horse a slice of apple, a lump of sugar or a piece of carrot so it couldn’t grab my fingers, and how to pet its forehead and muzzle gently so as not to spook it.

Whitie, like a town kid at the county fair, touching
a horse for the first time.

Coaxed by my mother and Virginia, Whitie too would join us at the fence and tentatively run his hand over the animals’ muzzles, like a town kid at the county fair, touching a horse for the first time. Even though they clashed stridently from time to time, Virginia and Whitie had a connection. She and my mother never seemed to find a common ground on which they were comfortable together, but she “got” Whitie. She got what we all refused to see, because he was husband and father to us, which made us ask ourselves all the time, “What the hell’s wrong with this guy, and how can we fix him?” She got that, at some level, he was almost autistic—self-obsessed, inward-focused, obsessive-compulsive in the extreme, locked into minutely repetitive behaviors, haunted by largely unwarranted fears for the future, highly structured, yet manic-depressive and wildly bi-polar. She got that he was psychologically broken and needed understanding, not criticism.

Virginia enjoying a coffee in the "Florida Room"
of Reba Mae and Whitie's condo

She also understood that, through his own experiences, he got her. She always said that when we had gone back to Ohio in the early seventies, after I was discharged from the Army, and she had fallen into a period of deep depression from which she couldn’t seem to extricate herself until I took her home to Buenos Aires and her mother, “Your dad was the only one who understood what was happening to me, the only one who talked to me and tried to help,” instead of treating her like it was just a stage she was going through or a bit of home-sickness, and with time she’d be fine. He understood that she wouldn’t be fine. That she was lost and couldn’t find the path back until her situation fundamentally changed.

If we could have kept this in context or paid attention to what was going on, it would have made perfect sense to us. It had invariably been the case that whenever Whitie was hospitalized for his mental illness, he suddenly gained confidence and became a kind of guiding light in the psych ward—as long as he wasn’t forced to leave and go back home. Home, work, responsibilities, those seemed to be his depression triggers. He appeared to thrive in that controlled hospital environment, because he was with people who comprehended what he was going through, and psychologists always marveled at how he would gravitate to the other patients who were most lost, especially the younger ones, and try to help them see their problems more clearly. One psychiatrist at a place near Dayton where Whitie was in the hospital for an extended period, talked about how he had adapted to group therapy and had been a constant help to other patients. The doctor said that it was so remarkable that he actually thought Whitie had missed his calling and should have been a mental health care worker.

Silver Springs - "They ain't boilin'."

Whitie and Reba Mae also took us to the sites of their own adventures. We visited Silver Springs State Park, where, among other things, we took a ride in a glass-bottomed boat. The guide was a surly woman in her late-fifties or so, who dragged us reluctantly from our ignorance by explaining certain scientific facts to us.

“That there hangin’ from the trees,” she said with a wave of her hand, “is what they call Spanish moss. Only thing is, it ain’t moss and it ain’t Spanish.” Then later, as we gazed through the bottom of the boat at that crystal clear salt-spring water, “See them bubbles a-comin’ up down on the bottom? Around here, them’s called ‘boils’. But they ain’t boilin’. Fact is, that spring water’s downright cool. They just underground springs a-bubblin’ up.”

Another day, Whitie and Reba Mae drove us to St. Augustine, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States, and the capital of Spain’s American possessions for more than two centuries. We were just four more tourists enjoying a bright blue day and a sea breeze on the ramparts of Fort San Marcos.

Ocala National Forest

Later on, they introduced us to the Ocala National Forest, where we walked a couple of easy interpretive trails set up by the Parks Service for tenderfeet and the older folks to do in their JoyWalkers. From some of the helpful information posted along the way, I learned, for instance that sand pines were a species uniquely adapted to frequent wildfires, since their serotinous cones only open to release their seeds when heated. Virginia and I would go back later in our new—to us—van, to explore the backroads and to trek the hiking trails that wended their way through those strange woodlands, with their oddly disconcerting mix of tropical species, sand pines and scrub forest. It was an area known to harbor both typical gators and manatees and bizarrely out of place black bears, as well as deer, panthers, bobcats and red wolves.

St. Augustine

Later, also on our own in our van, Virginia and I enjoyed a daytrip that took us on picturesque Florida State Route 24, along the lower Suwannee River and the bayous of its estuary to Cedar Key. Had I known then what I know now, all of that would have been just as beautiful, but I wouldn’t have been able to separate it in my mind from the ugliness of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period in which places along that scenic route like Rosewood, Sumner and Cedar Key were the sites of white supremacist atrocities in the African American community.

It was in these very bayous of the Suwannee Estuary that terrorized and persecuted black folks hid for days on end in 1923, when random armed bands of marauding whites attacked their prosperous community in Rosewood and chased them as far as Sumner and the key, grabbing a few along the way and torturing them to get information about a fugitive falsely accused of beating a white woman. By the end of the mayhem, some one hundred fifty innocent African American residents of Rosewood had been murdered and many of their homes and businesses were burned to the ground.

Cedar Key - Ignorance was bliss.

On this day, however, ignorance was bliss. We simply marveled at the beauty of nature and enjoyed a lazy day in the little town of Cedar Key.

After a couple of weeks of this life, which would have been easy to get used to, Virginia and I headed north to Ohio. My parents’ home—the place that had seen me grow from a pre-teen to a young man—would be our base while I was searching for work. I’d made some inquiries already in Florida, and things were not looking particularly good. My timing for our move had, typically, sucked. The US was in the midst of one of its several post-war recessions. Although this one was mild by comparison to some of the others and was nearing an end, employment recovery had remained definitively sluggish. While still in Florida, I approached several news organizations, including the Miami Herald, where I had some contacts.

Virginia and a friend sun themselves at Cedar Key

My contact at the Herald was the first to explain to me that it was a really bad time to be seeking work in a US newspaper. The recession and the incipient growth of electronic journalism were kicking the profession’s proverbial ass. Although a guy like me—an experienced newsman, fluently bilingual, who had intimate knowledge of South America—was just the sort of person they normally would be looking to hire, the newspaper had only recently laid off forty journalists. Maybe in a few months when things got better. Keep in touch.

I had also approached The Charleston Evening Post Publishing Company, which was the majority shareholder of my alma mater, the Buenos Aires Herald, to see if they, perhaps, had a position for me. Like the fellow at the Miami Herald my closest contact there said that it wasn’t a good time. Had I, however, thought about a career in electronic journalism? Specifically, what did I think about considering a job with an affiliate TV station, of which the Post was majority shareholder, in El Paso, Texas, where my fluent Spanish would be a real asset.

I said I couldn’t really afford to be choosey, but I was a newspaper and magazine journalist, a writer, an editor. What sort of job was I being offered in TV? They said it was right up my alley. They wanted me to consider taking over the news department there.

So Virginia and I flew to El Paso via Albuquerque. We checked into a motel room in the desert on the outskirts of town that had been reserved for us. A car was later sent for us, and that evening we had dinner at a well-known local steakhouse with the former owner and now Evening Post partner at the local TV station. The man was an urbane, white-haired Texan in a sky-blue, Western-cut suit, who was accompanied by a young woman who, because of the obvious bond between them, I might have guessed—were I being presumptuous—was perhaps his daughter or granddaughter by an Hispanic wife or daughter. It was a lucky thing that I reserved judgment, awaiting a formal introduction, because it turned out that she was the wife.

Over Texas beef and fine wine, the man told me that he was looking to make changes in how his news department was being run, and Charleston had told him I might well be the man for the job. He wanted more hands-on news management, somebody who lived the news and was constantly looking for leads and follow-ups. He wanted more dynamic newswriting and a lot more on-the-scene reporting. He wanted greater engagement with the Hispanic community, and he wanted the networks to come to El Paso for the TV news, not the other way around.

El Paso, Texas

It sounded challenging. Just the sort of thing I was looking for to jumpstart my career out of its mid-life crisis, even though neither Virginia nor I was very excited about the prospect of living in El Paso. After dinner, our host drove us back to our hotel. The TV executive was obviously prosperous, driving a late-model Lincoln Mark VII that pretty much matched the color of his suit, while his affable and welcoming wife wore a heavy gold chain around her neck bearing several large, coin-like pendants that found a convenient resting place in the broad cleavage of her ample bosom, as well as a veritable treasure trove on her fingers and earlobes.

He didn’t look like a man who would be averse to discussing money, so while his wife was seeking to entertain mine on the drive back to the hotel, I boldly asked what he figured this job might be paying if I decided to accept it. He said why didn’t I have a look around, meet the folks at the station, and all, the next day, and then we’d discuss details. He’d have “his man” pick me up the next morning and show me around.

“His man” introduced himself as the news director at the station. He arrived with his wife to pick us up late in the morning. They were both amiable, genuine, soft-spoken people and, as we talked, I realized that this guy was not only an experienced newsman, but a fellow with a sound career in, and understanding of local TV. We chatted about the idiosyncrasies of the community, and he took me downtown to the station for a look around. He had a keen insight into how being a border town affected the life, culture and society of places like El Paso. He, like myself, seemed like a shy guy who’d had to overcome his own retiring nature in order to become an effective newsman. I got him and he got me, and the four of us spent a not unpleasant day together touring El Paso and the surrounding area, despite the fact that my host seemed somewhat antsy and preoccupied throughout the day. At the end of the tour, that evening, he and his wife invited us for cocktails at a place that seemed to be frequented by movers, shakers and wannabes. After a couple of margaritas, the news director finally cut the crap and said, “So Dan, what exactly is the job that the boss is offering you?”

I said, “Well, I’m not exactly sure, but it sounds like he wants me to head the news team.”

He blanched, slowly nodded while looking frankly at me, and said, “So, essentially, my job.”

I was caught on my hind foot and faltered for a second before saying, “Uh, well, I hardly think so. I mean, you’re obviously an experienced TV guy with a lot of flying time under your belt. No, I think more like a news editor, news-writer, and assignment editor.”

With a wry grin, he said, “Right, so, my job.”

“Geez,” I said, “I don’t think so. I mean, if that were his plan, why the hell would he have you, of all people, showing me around?”

“You clearly don’t know the boss,” he said. “He can be one twisted sonuvabitch.”

Back in my town, Wapakoneta, Ohio

The next morning, when I put this theory to the station executive before we were due to catch our flight back east, he confirmed that replacing the current news director was the plan, but that he would want us to work together for a time, until I could get acclimatized, before he gave the other guy the boot. In the meantime, the current guy would be told that I was being brought in to assist him. Although I’d worked hard at becoming hardboiled and ruthless in two decades of journalism, my heart suddenly wasn’t in it. Especially since it spoke more clearly about the trustworthiness (or not) of the station executive than it did that of the fellow I was supposed to replace.

If this hadn’t been sufficient to end the negotiations, the annual salary he finally quoted to me was. It was less than half what I had been making as managing editor of the paper in Buenos Aires. Clearly, he was aware of the abysmal employment climate in journalism and figured good editors were a dime a dozen. That kind of disdain made him someone I really didn’t want to work for.

We shook hands and parted…forever.

Ohio greeted us with the kind of Artic winter
I'd known as a kid.

Now, back in Ohio—that welcomed me with the kind of Arctic winter I’d known as a kid—we made ourselves at home in my childhood residence, to which Whitie and Reba Mae wouldn’t return for another month or so, and I continued my job search. I talked to one of the news editors and to the Washington correspondent for USA Today, with whom I had worked in Buenos Aires, when the publisher was on a South American tour and took a news team with him to write color stories. I was their local guide and was also added to the reporting team. Later on, I would contribute reporting to the paper as a stringer, once they all left and went back to the States.

But here too, it was the same story. If I’d been in Buenos Aires, they might have been able to find some story assignments for me. But one thing nobody needed right now in the US was another out-of-work journalist. I tried ABC Radio News in New York, an organization I had, during several years, reported for in South America in the nineteen-seventies. But by this time both Charlie Arnot and Mark Richards, the two fabled veteran assignment editors I had worked for back then, had both retired, and the new guys, who didn’t know me from Adam, “weren’t looking for anybody right now, thanks.”

So, I eventually decided I would be biding my time for a while in Ohio, and, for the moment, I needed to relax and find something to do there. Meanwhile, I thought, maybe I could just enjoy not being an expatriate for a bit. That would prove a lot harder than I imagined.

To be continued…