Tom Conroy #7: Captain Trips .
More hitchhiking memories from Tom Conroy...

Going Down the Road

by Tom Conroy

This is back when I was a teenager living in Arizona. I was 16 and had already dropped out of high school. Actually, they politely asked me to leave. I was so far behind in my grades that I would not graduate until I was 23. This was my first real long trip on the road.

I was coming back from San Diego to Tucson. I was hitching with a cardboard box filled with about 150 old comic books all wrapped in plastic. It was night, and I was in El Centro when a car pulled over. The car jumped the curb, crossed the sidewalk, and when it came to a stop, it was sitting on the grass in a small park. Being that I was young and dumb, I actually got in the car. The driver was a drunk Mexican, and the floor was covered with booze bottles. He told me he also was going to Tucson and off we went.

It was after a couple of miles that I realized I had just made a grave mistake. We were on a four-lane highway with a guardrail down the middle. About 25 miles ahead of us was the small town of Holtville. These four lanes of traffic bottlenecked into two lanes and then crossed over a bridge just before going into town. Now this guy was swerving all over the road and would slow to five mph and then back to 40 mph. A couple times I grabbed the wheel and brought the car back on the road. I knew this guy wasn't going to get across that bridge. I had slept under the bridge with the bullfrogs on the trip into San Diego. The drop-off was at least 60 feet. I told him I wanted to visit my grandmother, so he should let me off on this side of the bridge. He stops, and I get out. I'm standing there watching him go across. I couldn't fucking believe it. The guy went in a perfect straight line with no swerving. He gets on the other side, makes a left turn and drives through town.

A few minutes later the next car to come along gives me a ride. When I get in, the guy says, "Hey, kid. What happened? You’re as pale as a ghost." While we were cruising through to town, I tell him what happened.

A couple miles on the other side of town we come up behind the drunk. He is swerving all over the road, and the guy I'm with makes an instant U-turn back into town. He tells me he is an ex-cop, and he starts doing an SOS with his car horn. Beep, beep beep. Three beeps and then a pause. He tells me if there is a cop out there, he will hear us. Beep, beep, beep, as we go shooting through town. Sure enough, on the other side of town, a cop is standing there waving us down. He pulls up and yells, "Drunk driver. Follow us." We go zooming back through town again. The cop is behind us with all his lights blazing away. It seemed like forever before we caught up with the drunk. All of a sudden we see a huge dirt cloud, and we slow down and stop. Chunks of dirt are still falling down and landing on our car. The drunk guy’s car is on its side about 60 feet off the road. The wheels are still spinning. It must have flipped at least once. All we can see is the bottom of the car and this big dust cloud.

The cop runs up to the car. He shines his flashlight into the front windshield. Then he climbs up on the car and shines the light into the two side windows. I don't know what he saw, but by the look on his face it wasn't very nice. The cop asked us questions, and we talked to him for about five minutes, both of us telling our stories. He thanked us and then said, "I'm sure glad it happened here. We got a bus full of kids coming back from a game." We drove off into the night. About half an hour later we passed the school bus on its way into town.

In the summer of 1961, when I was 18, I had talked Roger Brand into hitching back with me to New York City. We hitched from Pinole, California, down to LA to visit with Joel Beck. Joel was staying at the YMCA in Glendale and could only have one person stay in his room at night. That's where Roger stayed. I stayed in my sleeping bag under the front steps of the Y for a couple nights until somebody ratted me out. Big boss man told me I couldn't sleep there, so I searched for another place to go beddy-bye. Around the corner there is a big fancy church with a nice churchyard. In the yard are four big cement benches. They were just the right size, and at night I would crawl under one of the benches with my sleeping bag and go to sleep.

I awoke one morning with another one of those "Oh, shit" moments. The first thing I see is the back of a woman's legs. She is in stockings and high heel shoes and is about three feet from my nose. Then it hits me. It's Sunday morning, and all the people are hanging out in the churchyard after services. All I'm thinking is, "Now what do I do?" After a minute or so the woman walks away, and I decide it is time for me to get out of there. I crawl out from under the bench dragging my sleeping bag behind me. I don't even look at anybody as I walk through a crowd of at least 25 people with my head hanging down. There is this uncanny dead silence as I walk over to the sidewalk. I roll up the sleeping bag and just keep going. I don't even look back. It was the most embarrassed I had ever been.

When on the road just finding a place to sleep can be an adventure. A couple years later I was heading East on old Route 66. I was at this tourist trap in New Mexico. The place was all fixed up to look like the street of an old Western town. They had a stagecoach out in front that would give the tourists a ride. It took them around a quarter-mile circle and then brought them back to the front. Across the highway were a bunch of old buckboards and wagons. I'm there late one night and decide the best place to sleep was inside an old covered wagon. Not bad. It was nice and cozy.

I woke up in the morning when I heard people outside the wagon talking. I stuck my head out and scared the shit out of two little kids and their father. Daddy was taking photos of little Johnny and Suzy standing next to the wagon. This is when I first had long hair and a beard. I freaked the shit out of all three of them. The kids were yelling and screaming and daddy grabbed them and ran across the highway. They jumped in their car and locked the doors.

I'm heading East on Route 66 and this guy picks me up somewhere outside of LA and gives me a ride to Barstow. He was driving this big fancy new car. Maybe a Lincoln or Cadillac. A real nice car. He was about ten years older than me and talked about how he had hitched around the country when he was my age. How when he ran out of money he would get some two-bit job for a couple weeks. Then take off again when he had a few bucks saved up. He said he traveled with the wind for four or five years and had a great time. Then he got married and had kids. Now he had a good job and was making lots of money. We swapped road stories until he dropped me off. He even took me a few extra miles out of town and left me at a good place for hitching.

It was now nighttime, and the place had a lot of good lights and a place to eat. When I got out of the car he offered me some money. He took a $20 bill out of his wallet, and when I reached in through the open window he grabbed my hand. He started crying like a baby. He said, "Hey, kid. Don't let them do to you what they did to me. Keep traveling. Don't sell out. Stay free as long as you can. The only time I was really happy was when I was on the road. The one thing you can't buy is freedom." Then he drove off into the night. A weird feeling came over me. Like I had just received some kind of sacred knowledge from a holy man. I ate good all the way to New York.

What I liked about the road was the people you would meet. A lot were guys who had hitched around during the Depression and also combat veterans from World War II and Korea. One vet picked me up in Missouri. He had hitched around after the war because he said he "couldn't go home". He was bored. This was the guy who had been at Camp Roberts when my dad had died saving a bunch of guys that were drowning during a training exercise. They were caught on barbed wire under the water. He asked, "Was that your dad who was on the baseball team?" When I said, "Yes", he said he was there that day. The first thing he did when I got in the car was he bought me a meal. Afterwards he gave me a couple bucks. He said he does that with everybody he gives a ride to because he remembers all the times he went hungry. This guy repaired vacuum cleaners for a couple of motel chains and traveled though about six or seven states.

Another veteran was a guy who traveled around inspecting and repairing billboards for a billboard company. The same story I heard so many times before. "After the war I found it hard to settle down. I bummed around for years. Now I'm getting paid to bum around."

This was another trip to see Roger Brand. I was still 18. Walking across a freight yard in New Jersey I saw a piece of steel on the ground. The voice in my head told me to take it with me. It was about an inch wide, a 1/4-inch thick and about a foot long. I was carrying a small canvas overnight bag and put it on top between the two handles.

A couple of days later I'm on Highway 40 in Indiana. It's about nine at night, and I'm by this gas station and restaurant. The place is well lit and was a perfect place for hitching. This lady come out of the cafe and brings me a slice of pie. She tells me she has a boy who is also out hitchhiking around the country. She was the night manager. She tells me if I want more pie or coffee, just come on in. No charge. "I hope somebody out there will feed my boy if he gets hungry." Wow. Another encounter with an Earth Angel.

A few minutes after eating the pie I get a ride. The guy tells me he is going to St. Louis to visit an old Army buddy. He gives me a bullshit story about him being an auto mechanic and a racecar driver in the Indy 500. I knew it was all BS because his car was too clean. I never ever knew a mechanic who drove around in a clean car. Even to this day any mechanic I know has his car filled with junk. He says, "When me and my buddy were in the Army we shared everything. You know what I mean. Even when we slept in a foxhole together, we shared everything. You know what I mean. He was the best buddy a guy could have. You know what I mean. We still share things together. You know what I mean." After about a half an hour of you know what I mean stories there was a few minutes of silence. Then out of the blue he says, "When was the last time you got your nuts off?" He reaches over and grabs my crotch. I leaned down and picked up the piece of steel. I hit him on the hand so hard I even hurt my leg. He lets out a yell and slams on the brakes. He starts screaming, "Get out of my car. Get out." I grab my bag and bedroll and bail out. He almost drove the car off the road when he made a U-turn to go back.

I am now out in the middle of nowhere. It is wet and drizzling. I hardly had any shoulder to stand on and any time a truck would go by I got hit with spray and almost blown into the ditch. What a mess. I walked for hours hoping to find a bridge to get under. Nothing. I got hungry and tried to eat some corn from a cornfield. Gag. Yuk. All I kept thinking about was that lady with the slices of pie I could be eating. Way down the road I saw a light. When I finally got there it was a gas station. It was closed. I went to sleep sitting on the toilet in the men's room. All night long a dog barked. This was a bad ride.

A few days later I'm out in Wyoming on Highway 30. I'm a little ways out of town when a cowboy and his girlfriend go by in a pick-up truck. When he passes me he honks his horn and flips me the bone. I also flip him the bone. He hits the brakes and backs up to where I'm standing. I grab my bag so it doesn't get run over. He and the girl get out of the truck, and he starts cussing me. Then he punches me so hard I fall back into the bed of the truck. The steel bar slides across the bed and stops in the corner. He starts to climb into the truck. I jump up and grab the steel bar. Ka-boom. I hit him over the head with it. He just stops. He freezes. He steps back and pushes his hat up. He says, "Get out of my truck." I grab my bag and get out. He and the girl get back in the truck and drive away. I'm standing there scratching my head, wondering what the fuck just happened.

A year or so later I was 100% into the beatnik thing. At this time I had long hair and beard. It was 1962 and the start of winter. I'm hitching from New York to Frisco with my girlfriend Donna. She was a real looker. We brought her cat with us in a cat carrier. It is nighttime, and we are in Indiana on Highway 40 and had just eaten some shitty 15-cent hamburgers. We were both wearing two old Army P coats with hoods. A car pulls over, and we get in. Our plan was for Donna to always get in the back. The guy tells us he is going to St Louis to see an old Army buddy. He also tells us he is a race car driver in the Indy 500. He starts talking about how him and his buddy would share everything. "You know what I mean."

My ears are starting to curl, and I'm thinking, "Oh, shit. Not again." At this point, Donna says something and then lets down her hood. She shakes out her long brown hair. The guy says, "Oh. She’s a girl. I thought you were two guys." There wasn't much conversation after that. On the other side of the highway, we saw a guy hitching in an Air Force uniform. At the next town he pulls over to get gas. I see a two-inch scar on his right hand as he fills the tank. I tell Donna this is where the ride ends. She says, "He's going to St Louis." I said "No way. He's turning around. I'll explain to you later." That's just what he did. I forgot the excuse he used. I know he wanted to pick up the Air Force guy so he could tell him all about his old Army buddy. You know what I mean.

Labels: joel beck, roger brand, tom conroy

  ¶ 7:18 PM 2 comments

  Tom Conroy #6: Road memories
I was still 18, and this was on one of my early trips across the country. I was on my way to California to visit Roger Brand. I'm on Highway 40 somewhere in Ohio or Indiana when a trucker picks me up. He was driving an old beat-up truck with the Mack Bulldog on the hood.

The floor of the cab on the passenger side was filled with hay. The hay was about five inches thick. He told me that's where he sleeps. "I can't afford motels, so when I get tired I just curl up on the floor. That's my bed." Now this guy was a 100% ridge-running hillbilly. He tells me, "I'm smoking a lot because I'm burning kerosene. I'm low on money, and kerosene is five cents a gallon cheaper than diesel." This was back when gas was 30 cents a gallon. So we're checking gas stations for someplace that sells kerosene. We find one, and he fills her up.

As we're cruising along, he's smoking a pipe and keeps tapping it into his dashboard ashtray to empty it. We're yakking away, and he's puffing on the pipe. We're going slow through this medium-size farm town when all of a sudden poof! The hay on the floor is on fire. The flames are about six or seven inches high, and he yells at me, "Hey... kick that shit out of here." I open the door, and with my left foot I'm bailing out the burning hay into the street. He stops at a red light. There's a couple of people sitting on a bench waiting for a bus. People are strolling down the street and also walking in the crosswalk. As I'm kicking the burning inferno out into the street, he starts laughing. I'm stomping out the last bit of burning hay on the floor of the truck. He says, "Green light. Close the door." As we pull away, I look back and see a burning bonfire in the street. He's still laughing away. "Oh, man. Did you see the look on those people's faces? That was fun. Let's go back and do it again." He took me through St. Louis and dropped me somewhere in Missouri. It was a good ride.

I'm in Utah hitchhiking on a two-lane blacktop snaking its way through a canyon. I'm hoping for a ride into Ogden, so I could get down to Salt Lake City and catch highway 30 (now 1-80) which would take me into Frisco. This was a bad road for thumbing since a car only came by about every five minutes. Now this is back in 1961 when America was like driving through a giant garbage dump. Cans, bottles and trash all along the highways. I had a bunch of firecrackers with me I bought in Missouri. To pass the time I was putting them into beer bottles and throwing them off the cliff into the gully below. Bang. Pow. Boom. 

I see a car coming, and I jump across the road and stick up my thumb. The guy stops, and as soon as I got in I could smell the booze. The driver's side of the car was all smashed in, and the windows were busted. The guy tells me how a truck driver had sideswiped him the night before. "This trucker sideswiped me last night, and he told me it was my fault because I was drunk. I was not drunk. It was him that crossed over the line. It was not me... blah... blah... blah." He told me he was going to Salt Lake City, and the good thing is he wasn't driving fast. Goodbye beer bottle canyon.

About ten miles after we get out of the canyon, he sees a bar and pulls over to get another drink. We both get out on the passenger side. He goes in, and I stick up my thumb hoping for a better ride. After awhile he comes back out and gets in the car. I got my thumb up, and he stops. I was desperate to get to Salt Lake City. I get back in the car. He tells me the whole damn story again about getting sideswiped. "Blah, blah, blah."  The angels were watching over me, and I survived the drive though Ogden. We are now on a major four-lane highway headed south, and he pulls over at another bar. He goes in, and I am now hitching under a shade tree. Again he comes out of the bar, and I just go, "Oh, no, not again." He pulls over, and again I get back in the car. Talk about being desperate. The first thing he says to me is, "Hey... there sure are a lot of guys hitchhiking today. You're the third guy I gave a ride to."  So again he tells me the story about the truck driver hitting him.

I was looking out the window on my side of the car when all of a sudden he swerved to the left across two lanes of traffic. My brain instantly went into the "Oh shit" mode as I watched him smash out about ten reflector posts embedded in the median. When we came to a stop we were in the middle of four lanes of late rush-hour traffic stuck on some reflector post. The engine is still running, and we are teeter-tottering up and down. Every time the back tire on my side hit the pavement there was a screeching sound with clouds of smoke as he burned off the rubber. Then the car would pitch forward a little and then back again on the back tire with more smoke. The car does this about three or four times, and he looks over at me and says, "I think my transmission ain't working." My brain now goes from the "Oh shit" mode into the "What the fuck" mode. I can't remember if I turned off the engine, but I did get out as soon as I could. I went to the side of the highway and stuck up my thumb. The whole sky was filled with huge puffs of smoke and the smell of burned rubber. The rising clouds of smoke looked just like Indian smoke signals from a John Ford Western. Truly an amazing sight. The traffic was slowing down a little with all the people rubber-necking.

Very quickly I got another ride. It was three kids coming from work, and the main reason they gave me a ride was they wanted to know what the hell had happened. After I told them the story, they asked  me where I was going. When I told them they couldn't believe it. "California." They acted like California was on another planet. When I told them I started from New York City they really flipped. They gave me a ride to Salt Lake and put me on Highway 30. I was only 18 then, and I thought these guys were younger than me. They were all a couple years older. This was my fourth trip across country.  Knowing that I was from California they all asked me a very important question. They wanted to know if the Beach Boys song was true. Was there was really a place called Surf City, USA? And was it true there were three girls for every guy? I really didn't know if it was true or not. I lied to them. I told them it was true and that there were four girls for every guy.

It's 1965, and I am hitching with my friend Victor Clark from New York City to Bucks County, Pennsylvania. We are going there with plans of buying a car. I had long hair and beard. Victor looked like a sea pirate with a big red beard and also long hair. This was when the hippie thing had just started. We're walking and thumbing on the outside of a town in New Jersey. On one side of the highway is a miniature golf course, and on the other side is a small mom and pop burger joint. We cross the highway to get something to eat. We're sitting there scarfing down some cheeseburgers, and a bunch of ten-year-old kids swarm around us. They have a couple ballpoint pens, and they want our autographs. We are both dumbfounded. We start signing napkins and torn off pieces of hamburger bags. As we start to leave, a couple more kids run up. We sign more napkins. As we're leaving, we go by a mother sitting in a station wagon. Her window is open, and I hear her say, "They must be famous. They have long hair."

When we're back across the road Victor asked me what did I sign. I told him I signed my name. When I asked him what he signed he said, "The Hitchhikers." We started laughing. The kids are standing across the highway staring at us. I guess Dylan was right. "The times they are a-changing." If this had been a year earlier, those little buggers would have been throwing rocks at us.

It's late winter, and I'm hitching on old Route 66 going to California. It had just gotten dark, and I'm stuck out in the middle of the desert in New Mexico. There is a big moon out, and all around me are bunches of snowdrifts. On this trip I brought along a hand warmer. It was about the size of a whiskey flask, and it ran on lighter fluid. It had a hole in the middle that was for lighting cigarettes. I would stick it in my pants or under my armpits or any part of me that needed warming up.

All was fine but I had one major problem. I was out of cigarettes and had not had a smoke for a couple hours. I was a wreck. Really craving a smoke and ain't nowhere to get one. I stuck my hands in my pockets and looked up at the stars in the sky and yelled out, "God, I wish I had a cigarette." At that moment a car went zooming by me in the East bound lane. As I watched it go by I saw the driver flip a cigarette out the window. It had a nice red glow as it shot up in the air like a rocket and sparks flew off it when it landed on the side of the road. I yelled out "Holy shit" as I ran down the road to pick it up. It was a Pall Mall, and only an inch had been smoked. Oh, man, did it taste good. I took only a few puffs and held the smoke in my lungs as long possible. I then put it out. I was going to make it last as long as possible. Each time I would light it up and take a few hits and then put it out again. When I took my last hit it was so small I almost burned my fingers.

A little while after the last puff I got a ride. It was a young kid my age who was in the Air Force and going to the base in Albuquerque. As soon as we took off the first thing he said was, "Hey... you want a cigarette?" He handed me a Camel. Wow. Makes my night. The song "Traveling Man" by Ricky Nelson came on the radio. I'm sitting in a nice warm car smoking my brand of cigarettes and cruising into the night, and all I'm thinking is, "Life don't get no better than this."

On my second hitchhike trip across country, I left New York just before spring to go visit Roger Brand in California. I am on highway 40 just outside of Wheeling, West Virginia. I am about a half mile from the Ohio River just inside the Ohio border. It's night time, and it's cold. Across the road is a huge billboard that reads THE BANK OF WHEELING WELCOMES YOU TO VIRGINIA. On the billboard are two electronic number signs. One giving the time and the other giving the temperature. The river was nothing but a fog bank, and it's about nine o'clock and about 38 degrees. No luck getting rides, and the longer I'm there, the colder it gets. About midnight the temperature is about 20, and I am starting to get a little worried. A little off the road are some cabins. Not a motel. Just about five or six cabins. I go searching for shelter. I see a laundry room and go inside. In the corner is a big sink next to an old ringer washing machine. I turn the faucet handle and to my surprise hot water comes flowing out. I fill up the sink and stick my hands and face into the steam. Holy shit. I'm starting to thaw out. I put my sleeping bag under the sink and go to sleep. I'm wedged under the tub, and I feel nice and warm. I wake up later with my teeth chattering. I get up. The whole damn sink is nothing but a big block of ice.

I go back outside to the road, and the billboard tells me it is two o'clock and 12 or 13 degrees. I see a cardboard box in the ditch and flatten it out. I use it to stand on to keep my feet off the frozen ground. All I could do was jump from one foot to the other. After nearly an hour of this shit a semi-truck stops to give me a ride. I run down the road and get in. The first thing the guy says to me is, "Hi... I'm your angel that's here to stop you from freezing to death. The reason it's warm in here is because I like driving in my shirt sleeves." He tells me not to take off my coat for a while until I get adjusted to the temperature change. Five minutes later he says it's okay to take off the coat. "I can't give you a long ride, but I'll take you 40 miles down the road to the next truck stop. I'll get you a motel room for the night, and the company will be paying for it."

When we get there he leaves me in the truck and goes in and rents a room. He brings me the key and tells me don't go in the front lobby. Only use the back door over by the side. I'm standing by the side door watching him as he pulls away. There were dozens of trucks all over the place. Because of the shitty weather all those trucks were covered with crud. Sleet and slop from the highway. They were all dirty except his truck. His truck was spotless. Not one speck of dirt. It looked like it just came from the factory. I am not kidding. The whole trailer was painted bright turquoise blue and in the middle was a loaf of bread. Behind the bread was a white cloud, and behind the cloud was a sunbeam. Beneath the loaf of bread were the words Heavenly Baking Company. I stood there staring at that truck until all I could see were his tail lights fading into the night.

Tom with Milt Stoval. Tom writes, "We were trying to hitch out of Sacramento. We slept two nights under the overpass on the left side of photo. We finally bought a bus ticket to a town 30 miles away." Photos in the center of the article are atop a moving train: "We jumped the train in Gallop, New Mexico and took it all the way into Barstow, California. This was in 1981 or 1982, maybe 1983. I spent two months on the road that summer, and we both had cameras."

Labels: kerouac, roger brand, tom conroy

  ¶ 10:30 AM 2 comments

  Tom Conroy #5: Warren Tufts .
Here's the fifth installment of Tom Conroy's memoirs, illustrated with the 1949 Casey Ruggles press kit. Casey Ruggles began May 22, 1949 (seen below), followed by the daily on September 19, 1949. After the last Tufts' daily (April 3, 1954), his last Sunday Casey Ruggles was published September 5, 1954. I've done some restoration on the color proof and the other press kit pages here.

Talking to Tufts

by Tom Conroy

It was the summer of 1961, and Roger Brand and I had hitchhiked down to see Joel Beck who was staying in Glendale or Pasadena. From there I hitched down to see my mom in Arizona, and when I returned to Los Angeles, Roger told me he had found Warren Tufts listed in the phone book. We called him and he invited us over for a visit. We hitched and took a bus and got there about noon. He was living in Santa Monica. This is the best I can recall of some of the things he talked about.

He started out as a radio actor when he was a teenager, and later that was how he created Casey Ruggles. When we asked about Alex Toth he told us that he brought Toth in to help him because he was having trouble meeting his weekly deadlines. He said he had gotten into drugs to help him with the workload. I wasn't using drugs then but later realized he was talking about Benzedrine.

He was pissed at United Features because they handed his strip over to another artist when he was late on deadlines. What he didn't like was the fact the guy was a bad artist. A film studio had wanted to do Casey Ruggles as a movie or television show. The syndicate had turned them down, and Tufts was now really pissed. The money would have been great. Tufts jumped ship with the syndicate the first chance he could get. He had a really great interest in Old California history, but complained how he couldn't travel much because he was stuck in his studio. He told us how he sat at the drawing board looking out at the mountains and trees and feeling trapped: "I spent my life chained to a drawing board".

I had some Casey Ruggles original Sunday and daily strips that I got one day from the syndicate. About six Sundays and about three weeks of dailies. Also there were a bunch of loose panels from the first four Sundays. The panels were larger than the normal half-page originals. When I asked Tufts about them he said he had never drawn a complete drawing before. What he meant was a drawing with backgrounds and furniture, etc. So my guess is that the first few Sundays were drawn as single panels and later stuck together.

He told us how he and his dad worked together when he started the Lance full-page Sunday strip. His dad ran the business, and he did the art. But finally that became a pain in the ass. Tufts had no love for newspaper feature editors. After a while they wanted the strip as a half-page. When they started asking for Lance as a one-third page, he told them to kiss his ass. After five years Lance ended. Tufts was drawing TV Western comics for Dell and also getting a few bit parts as an actor in some of those Western TV shows that were popular at the time. He told us he was working with Warner Brothers at trying to get Lance as a TV series, but I guess it didn't work out. What he had said about being "chained to a drawing board" stayed with me a very long time. I was a pretty good cartoonist, and I am still glad I never got into drawing comics.

We spent at least a couple hours with Tufts, and then he drove us over to Dell Publishing and hooked us up with a guy who gave us some Alex Toth originals. It was a great day for Roger and me since we were really big Warren Tufts fans.

September 9, 1951

Labels: tom conroy, warren tufts

  ¶ 1:48 PM 1 comments

  Tom Conroy #4: Movie Still Archives .

This is the fourth in our series of Tom Conroy's memoirs. Here he tells the story behind his company, Movie Still Archives, which he has owned and operated since the 1960s, illustrated with jazzy artwork by Tom.

In the Stills of the Night

By Tom Conroy

The guy who turned me on to movie stills was the comic book cartoonist Doug Wildey. He drew The Outlaw Kid and other comics for Atlas/Timely back in the mid-1950s. When I was a teenager I used to go visit him at his home in Tucson, Arizona. This was in 1959 when he was drawing The Saint newspaper strip. In his studio he had movie stills stacked in the corners. He used them for swipes when he was drawing. He had bought them while living in New York City and told me about how you could buy them in old book stores.

So I went to New York in 1960 and started grabbing stills anywhere I could find them because I was also using them for swipes. Mostly war and Western stills plus any good fight scenes. When I was drawing up sample pages of comic art I always drew from photos. Movie stills were great. Stills were sold all over New York. A lot of stores in Times Square had boxes of stills for 10 to 25 cents each, and I bought up a nice little stack.

In 1965, I took over an apartment a friend after he moved out, and he left behind a stack of about 20 men’s magazines that he found in a garbage can. They were all published by Martin Goodman (Marvel). So I'm flipping through them, and I noticed that almost all the war stories were printing movie stills. They had a Korean War story with two pages of stills from Pork Chop Hill which starred Gregory Peck. I recognized them because I had a big pile of stills from that film. I also saw fight scenes that were stills.

So in the winter of 1965-66, I was hanging out in Greenwich Village doing my beatnik thing, and I met this guy Pat Williams. He did some LSD about a month earlier and had quit his job as a magazine editor and was now writing a book about the drug scene. When I asked him what magazine he said Man's World (I think), published by Magazine Management. I said, “Isn't that Martin Goodman?” and he was surprised that I knew that. When I asked him why they used movie stills he was really surprised that I knew about that also. He said that when they called for photos all these photo agencies would always send them the same 10 or 12 pictures. You can't keep using the same photos over and over, so they would stick in movie stills when they could get them. Now at this time I was selling comic books out of my apartment on East Sixth Street.

Pat hooks me up with a guy up at Martin Goodman and I call to see what kind of stills they wanted. He says, "Sex and violence, sexy babes, shoot outs, fights, hookers, strippers". I had been selling softcore sex stills to Bill Pearson for 50 cents each, and I still had a stack sitting in my place. I sent Carole up to the magazines with 200 photos, and they went nuts. She said the editors all came out of their offices and were going through the photos. They picked out 40 pix and gave Carole a check for $400, and I was now in the photo agency business. Any photos they used after that, they paid $15 each, and twice a month I would get a list of photos they wanted for each magazine. As I recall they had four monthly mags, four bi-monthly mags and a couple quarterly mags, plus sometimes they printed an annual.

My friend Mark Ricci at the Memory Shop had about 40 to 50 file cabinets of movie stills, plus boxes of stills in the basement. I was a drug addict at the time, and my drug of choice was speed. I would spend hours on end at Mark's place pulling out stills for the mags. The stuff I was taking was the crap that nobody else wanted. People that collect stills want pix of the stars, they don't want pix of fight scenes or car wrecks. Mark was getting stills from this guy in Times Square who did the displays for all the movie theaters in the area. He could take an 8 x 10 still and blow it up to three to four feet for display in front of the theaters. He did the Broadway shows, the softcore sex theaters and other places.

Every few months Mark would drive down with a cab that had the whole trunk filled with stills. All the sex pix went right up to Magazine Management. At $15 a still we were doing pretty good. We split the money 50/50. At this time Mark was selling stills in the shop for 75 cents each. The good thing was now I didn't have to try and make money drawing comic books. My checks came from the same place as a cartoonist working for Stan Lee. It was great. Being a speed freak I would spend days all wired up and do nothing but file stills. I had long hair, and it was best that I didn't show up at the office because Martin Goodman was this real straight conservative guy. Carole would take up the photos, and if she couldn't, I would send up some cute little hippie chick. One of the editors asked me if I had a harem. Later, when Martin's son Chip was running the place, it was okay for me to go up there.

When I got the want list every couple weeks it was always weird the type of pix they would ask for. Gangster and mob shootouts, massage parlors, bank robbers, lesbians, threesomes, lions eating people, sharks, alligators, Amazon women, hookers, nurses, headhunters, car chases and all those outlaw biker gang pix. I must of sold them hundreds of stills from all those bad biker movies that came out in the 1960s and 1970s. One list had a story about cheating housewives, "photos of women having sex with the milkman, mailman, plumber or any other guy while hubby was busy bringing home the bacon".

The stories were also in a class by themselves. “I Watched an Alligator Eat Out My Buddy's Guts”, and they used a pix of Tarzan fighting with a rubber alligator. They painted sunglasses and sideburns on Johnny Weissmuller. Some of the stories had titles like “Cheating Housewives and Their Private Sex Club”... “The Biker Gang from Hell That Stalked America”... “Call Girl Confessions”... “Vice Raid on Hooker Alley”... “Cops Raid Suburb Sex Orgy”... “Treasure Hunt for Nazi Gold”... “My Night of Terror with a Killer Grizzly”... “Nude Beach Nymphos of Pleasure Island”... “Turning Women on to Forbidden Sex”... “Yacht Club Wife Swappers”... “Pleasure Girls Who Roam Our Highways”... “Hell Raid of the Two Wheel Biker Brutes”... “Nevada's Two Girl Hooker Teams”.... “College Girls Who Prefer Blue Collar Lovers”... “Top Cop and His War with the Mafia”, and of course, the best story of all time, “I Pick Up Men In Bowling Alleys”.

So now I started to get out of the comic book business because the people I was selling to were a bunch of shitheads. I would do the comic and Star Trek conventions, but while selling I was also hustling up stills. I traded a lot of comics for stills. I came across an article in an old magazine that was about the guy who started Culver Pictures. That was when I started building up files of the big name stars and directors. I knew this thing with Magazine Management was not going to last forever. When the men's magazines went down, they went down hard. When I took up some pix in 1977-78, the whole damn hallway going into the offices was stacked with bundles of magazines as high as your armpits. They were all wrapped up and stacked. When I asked what was going on they told me these magazines just came back from Canada. They had been censored because they had nude girls on the covers. To sell in Canada the covers had to be folded over, and the magazine had to be wrapped in plastic. They sent them to the New York offices because that was the address printed on the inside front cover. What killed the men's mags was they were started to print full-color beaver pix. They lost all the supermarkets in California and other places. While mommy was shopping for Kool-Aid and cookies, little Johnny and Jimmy were looking at pictures of young girls with their legs spread apart. They lost the PX at Navy and Army posts. The subscriptions stopped coming in because each issue had at least three photo spreads of beaver shots. It all ended in 1978 or 1979. They became a girlie magazine rather than an adventure magazine, and now it was all over.

They called me one day to come and pick up all the photos me and Mark had sent up over the years. When they started using the pix I was sending them they had stopped using eight other photo agencies. That was how much they liked the stuff I was sending. When I went to California in 1966, Mark filled in for me while I was gone. So later both of us were sending them pix. I spent about three years debating about whether I should be a cartoonist or a businessman. I said fuck it and laid down the pen. I made the right choice.

I started Movie Still Archives in 1979. I spent two weeks on the phone calling every magazine in New York. I knew the "powers that be" were going to put Ronald Reagan and his goofball wife in office, so when Carole and her brother went to LA for a movie poster convention, I had her buy up every still of Reagan she could find in the all the stores that sold stills. She dug up about 100. My first big sale was to People. They printed four pages with a still from all 54 movies he made, and 20 stills came from me. They paid $75 each. For years I was sending out pix of good old Ronnie and his charming wife Nancy to all the magazines in New York. I made lots of money off those two dimwits. After two years I made my first sale to Life. The last pix I sold to Life they were paying $400 for 1/4 page. I sold stills to the biggest and best magazines out there. My best clients were Time Life Books, The New York Times, Penthouse, Omni and Readers Digest. But all that started to turn to shit. AOL bought out the whole Time Warner Turner group. Now six companies own everything. They fired the oldtimers working for them and hired all these stupid shits who knew nothing about running a photo department.

About half the photos Magazine Management used they would retouch the faces by painting on sunglasses or put a black square over the eyes or darken in the face. This was so nobody would notice that the person was a movie actor. On one of my visits when they were shutting down I asked if any readers ever recognized they were using movie stills and they said, "No, never". They did a story about sex in automobiles, and they handed me a letter a guy wrote to them wanting to know if the girl getting screwed in the back seat of a car was his girlfriend. The letter was addressed to Tom Conroy % Stag magazine since the photo credits in the back of the magazine gave me as the photographer. I guess the guy never thought that while his girl was getting slammed, she let someone take photos. The photos they asked for were really weird, so I had all these pix filed under all these different categories. You name it, and I had a folder for it. I had one folder titled Kitty Litter, Face Pushed In which the National Lampoon printed in the early 1980s. I had a photo of a guy screwing a chicken which the Lampoon also printed.
One time they wanted pix of all the softcore porn theaters in Times Square, so I sent Carole up to 42nd Street with a camera. She gave them the film, and they sent it to a photo lab and ended up using about a dozen pix in a two-page spread. Carole said that when she was taking the photos the guys coming out of the theaters would cover their faces. They were businessmen in suits. One time I got a call for a girl getting screwed on a merry-go-round. I had a file, and they paid my cab fare to deliver it to them.

After I moved over to Cooper Square two hot-looking chicks from the romance magazines came walking in. They were looking for a photo for a story titled, "My Sister Was Raped in Her Coffin". They were a little upset that I didn't have a picture. The secret to my success was that I had a good eye for photos and never filed a photo that looked posed. For the first couple years, all their want lists asked for pix of women in mini-skirts, so when I wasn't filling photos I was out on the street with my camera stalking women in mini-skirts, and they printed a lot of them (of course, with the black box over the faces).

The whole time this was going on I was high on speed. One of the editors that came on board was a guy who used to do Confidential magazine, and the magazines he edited had that type of look. Mario Puzo, who wrote The Godfather, was an editor and writer for Magazine Management. When each mag went to press I would get a billing notice which had a brief description of the photo used: Guy with Gun, Girl in Bra, Plane on Fire, German Tank, Sex Orgy, Cops Busting Hookers, Nazi with Girl, Nude Girls on Beach. I would send them a "bill for photo used", and every two weeks the checks were in my mailbox. For the last five years, Mark at the Memory Shop would send in the invoices because I had made a few trips to Frisco and would be out of New York for short periods of time. A couple times when I was gone, Paul Kirchner sent the photos up, but we both forgot the details of that. This whole venture was weird, but I was not into anything normal. I had fun doing it, the money was good. I could buy drugs and pay my rent, and I didn't have to go out and get a job. What a long weird trip it's been.

                                                                                               -- © 2012 Tom Conroy 
                                                                                                     Movie Still Archives

Labels: doug wildey, mario puzo, roger brand, tom conroy

  ¶ 4:03 PM 1 comments

 
Tom Conroy returns to talk about Doug Wildey (1922-1994).

A Walk on the Wildey Side

by Tom Conroy

This is Quincannon of Company C, samples for a full-page Sunday comic strip Doug Wildey tried to sell to the syndicates. Quincannon was his version of Warren Tufts' Lance strip. The syndicates were not interested. I knew Wildey when I was a teenager in Tucson, and he gave them to me in 1958 or 1959.

These three strips are 7 1/2 x 10 1/4 inch photostats that I had glued in a scrapbook nearly 50 years ago. When I first met Wildey he was drawing The Saint newspaper strip and was no longer doing The Outlaw Kid for Stan Lee, so I guess this was 1958/59. He showed me some of the Steve Canyon daily strips he had worked on for Milton Caniff. He drew the strip for about three months. His studio was filled with stacks of movie stills that he used for swipes. He bought them all while living in New York.

He gave me a couple original pages of art that I still have somewhere in this warehouse I live in. One is a drawing of Richard Boone from Have Gun Will Travel television show, which he also tried to sell as a comic strip. Another is a drawing of football players. He had done some artwork for a guy that printed programs for sporting events.

I visited him about a half a dozen times. and he always made me feel at home. He and his wife were really nice people. Wildey was a jazz fan and would drive to Phoenix when Art Farmer and others were in town. He always told me he was buddies with L.B. Cole, and when I went to New York to be a cartoonist I heard that Cole was an editor at Dell. On one of my hitchhike trips back to Tucson I called Wildey and told him where Cole was working. Wildey contacted him and got a job drawing one of those television comics. As I recall, it was The Detectives with Robert Taylor.

Doug Wildey was another one of those guys that got better with age. The older he got, the better he got. I think his Rio comics were some of the best Westerns ever done.

                                                                                                    © Tom Conroy

Labels: rio, tom conroy, wildey

  ¶ 4:37 AM 3 comments

  Tom Conroy #2: Portfolio .
A selection of artwork by Tom Conroy, who recalls,"I turned 18 in 1960, so most of this stuff is when I was around 20 to 23, a lot of it when I was staying in Berkeley with Roger and Joel. I lost a lot of my old art work over the years."

Labels: joel beck, roger brand, tom conroy

  ¶ 6:24 PM 0 comments

 

The cartoonist Joel Beck (1943-1999) was one of the founders of underground comics, having created Lenny of Laredo in 1965, followed by Marching Marvin and The Profit. In 1962, he was in New York, staying in Larry Ivie’s apartment, but Larry was out of town one week. In the Lower East Side, the Charles Theater on Avenue B was a neighborhood movie theater dating back to 1926. It became a focal point for underground films in the early 1960s because it ran Filmmaker’s Night once a week. I had been contacting filmmakers such as Ed Emshwiller and suggesting they bring in their 16mm films. I knew that Larry Ivie had been running around Central Park in a Superman costume for a short movie starring himself as Superman.

I spoke to Joel on the phone and told him to bring Larry’s film to the Charles. Joel was very reluctant to do this and said, “The splices are all Scotch tape.” Finally I talked him into it, and he turned up that evening with the film. When Walter Langsford, who owned the Charles, saw the Scotch tape splices, he was fearful of running it through the projector and did not put it on the program. However, later that night, after the audience had left, Langsford took the film up to the projection booth. I sat with Joel, Tom and a few others as we watched Larry’s film on the giant theater screen. The special effects involved a plastic Superman toy sliding down a wire attached to a tree. I can’t remember if Joel ever told Larry about the clandestine screening, but I somehow doubt it.

Tom Conroy picks up the story:



I was the one who bought that plastic airplane in a toy store and rigged it all up with the pulleys so it would fly. I hooked it up with a string and it flew over one of the small coves of the Central Park Lake with rocks in the background while Larry filmed it. It was a seaplane with pontoons, and it had a cardboard cut out of Superman taped on one of the wings. It worked great and we only did one shot. I think it looked as good as anything Sam Katzman did. I remember jumping around on the rocks to set it all up, and Larry asked me if I would dress up in tights so I could star in his John Carter of Mars film. Bhob, Joel and I stood out there on Avenue B and laughed about it for at least an hour.

A little bit about Joel Beck when he came to NYC in 1962. This was my first year of doing my “beatnik thing”, so we would hang out all night long in Greenwich Village. Joel really liked the beat scene. and we both did a lot of artwork for some of the coffee houses. I still have a menu that he drew for the Cafe Wha on MacDougal Street. So one day I’m at Larry Ivie’s pad, and Joel was getting dressed so he could take his art portfolio around to the magazines hoping to get work. He had a suit jacket, vest, white shirt and a necktie, and he had them all pinned together with safety pins. These four items were now one solid piece all pinned together. He laid them on the bed with the necktie facing down, and then he crawled into them like a snake slithering into a rabbit hole. His arms went into the sleeves first, and then his head popped out at the top. He flipped over and sat up, buttoned the collar and tucked in the shirt tails, and he was now dressed. It was an amazing thing to see. “Well… I’m ready to go into the big city”. Joel considered Madison Avenue the “big city”. God made only one Joel Beck, and after that he threw away the mold.

Joel got kicked out of school when he was about 10 or 11 years old. Being a artist he was using the walls of the boys’ bathroom as his canvas. He was doing drawings of Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Daisy fucking. They let him back into school when he promised to not do any more artwork on school property.

When Roger Brand (1943-1985) and Joel were in high school they were “teenage drunks”. Joel had a car, and they did a lot of driving and drinking. I can’t even remember some of the stories he told me. Where did they get the booze? Was it from their dad? It seems even as a kid the booze was always a part of his life.

A story Roger told me about him and Joel when they were still in high school: Joel is going to pick up his girlfriend Carol Verlinden for a date. It is night time, and Roger hides in the back seat of the car. He lies down on the floor so that he can’t be seen. Joel picks up Carol, and they are cruising along, and Joel reaches his right arm around and puts it on Carol’s right shoulder. He squeezes her shoulder for a little bit and then drops his hand behind the seat and taps Roger. Roger then lifts his hand up and puts it on Carol’s shoulder. Joel then brings his hand back around and puts it on the steering wheel. He is now driving with both hands on the wheel, and Roger is squeezing Carol’s shoulder. After a block or two, it dawns on Carol that Joel now has three hands, and she flips out. This is why I liked these two guys. Their brains operated at a different frequency than most people.

This is another story Roger told me. It is the early 1960s, and he and Joel are at a beer bash in Berkeley. It gets loud so someone calls the cops. The police give Roger and Joel a quick pat down and put them in the back of a police car. At this time Joel had this huge Jerry Lee Lewis pompadour hairdo. They had some Dexadrine pills on them and didn’t know what to do with them. Joel takes the pills and starts sticking them in his hair. When the cops get them and the other partygoers to the police station they strip search everybody and throw them all into this big jail cell. Joel sits down and starts shaking out his hair. The pills all land on the floor. They pass out the pills to their friends, and everyone sits there all night stoned on speed. The cops let them go the next day.

This is the early years… 1963-64. Through some strange chain of events, Roger and Joel ended up living in a garage. You know, like where you keep your car in the suburbs. Of course, there was no toilet. They had this huge vase that they used as a urinal. It was about four or five feet tall. Thin at the top and round at the bottom like a turnip. When they needed to take a leak they would climb up on a footstool and pee into the vase.

Knowing how much drinking they were doing, they probably were doing a lot of pissing. Somebody ratted them out, so after a while the city served them with an eviction notice. Be out by so and so day. So they call some friends to help them move. On moving day, a cop car is there, and their friends show up with a pick-up truck and another car. The street is lined with all the neighbors watching the event. You know, these are all straight clean-cut citizen types. One of their buddies who is this big strong joke football-type guy picks up the piss vase and carries it out to the street. Roger and Joel start saying to the guy “Easy. Easy. Careful. Watch out. Take it easy”. The guy sets it down on the street. and the bottom breaks out. Now this is on an incline, and the piss starts flowing down the street. All the citizens start gagging and wretching… end of story.

In 1983, I was 40 years old. Carole came to NY to run the photo agency. I hitched out to New Mexico to team up with my friend Milt, who I knew from my old beatnik days. Milt was the guy that Janis Joplin shared an apartment with the first month she was in San Francisco. They were not lovers. Milt and I jumped a freight train that took us into Barstow, California. From there we hitched up to see Roger and also an old friend of Milt’s.
A friend of Carole’s loaned us a car, and we headed over to Point Richmond to find Roger. We went from bar to bar until we found Joel. He made a couple of phone calls, and about ten minutes later Roger showed up. He looked a little worse for wear, but it was really good to see him.

When Joel saw that we had some wheels it was decided that we all would go on a mission. That mission was a trip to Rip Off Press so Joel could deliver some pages of artwork. At this time, Milt and I both had cameras, so I took some photos.

I remember so well the drive across the Bay Bridge and us just doing nothing but laughing and laughing. Roger was funny, but Joel was even funnier. It was a great trip. When Joel was outside of Point Richmond he was like a fish out of water, so we headed back. We dropped him off and came back into town with Roger and stayed at Carole’s pad with her brother. The next day we’re driving around, and a cop pulled Milt over for an “illegal lane change”. He searches the car and checks our ID and finds out that Roger has an arrest warrant for “failure to appear”. It was for some two-bit thing like jaywalking, open container or farting in an elevator. Roger gets handcuffed and hauled off to jail.

This was one of the few times I was on the road and had a lot of money on me. This was the weekend, and it took a day or two of running around to get Roger bailed out. The fine was $100, which we paid, and they cut him loose. I have never seen Roger more happy than that day when he came walking out of the slammer. We hung out in Point Richmond for a few more days, then headed up to the Russian River to see Milt’s friend. We hung there for awhile and then came back to Point Richmond. Milt really liked being with Roger and Joel. Milt was also a drinker.

Roger knew this old couple that we visited with. They were old beatniks from the 1950s and had great stories to tell about Frisco in the days before me and Milt made the scene. They had a Robert Crumb drawing that was framed and hanging on the wall. They liked underground comics, and Roger was like a guest of honor whenever he stopped in. One of the local bars still had an old faded poster of the nude Daisy Duck painting that Joel had done. He pointed at it and said, “Do you remember that one?” Then he chuckled, “The money I made off that paid my rent for three years”.

About a year earlier, Joel had gotten mugged one night and had his head split open with a lead pipe. He stumbled around town for a few hours before somebody took him to a hospital. Because of the injury, a lot of his memories were a little scrambled. He would talk about stuff we had done when he came to New York in 1962, and he had a lot of stuff mixed up. Also his memories of the time in LA with him and Roger were jumbled. I know it was head injury, not the booze.

I’m not sure who Roger was staying with, but he was homeless. Some chick said she would rent him a room at her place for $40.00 a month, so before we left I gave her the bucks for two months. I sent her money for a couple months after I got back to New York, but I think it was Joel or Paul that called and said she threw him out, so I stopped sending money. Even the sad shape Roger was in, he had not changed. His essence, his inner being was still the same as when he was young. Any time I spent with Roger was a good time, and Joel being there made it even better. Those guys were two of the best people I have ever known. I did the “Live fast and die young” thing for 20 years. I failed at it. Roger succeeded.

                                                                  --Article and photos © 2011 Tom Conroy



Above is a page from the Phil Howe/Joel Beck children's book Spouts, created 20 years ago but finally published last year. For much more about Joel and his artwork, go here. The San Francisco Chronicle ran this Kevin Fagan article about the search for Joel Beck's daughter.


Since the 1960s, Tom Conroy has run a picture rental agency, Movie Still Archives.

Labels: charles theatre, joel beck, roger brand, tom conroy

  ¶ 10:10 AM 1 comments