One writing form I’d never really tried my hand at was the short story. Until now. One day recently I heard about a distinguished old couple who’d made a very difficult decision – and a story, a short one, immediately took shape for me. I know that elderly WASP couples aren’t fashionable these days among fiction editors and publishers, but I do think that life in our nation’s retirement communities and assisted-living facilities, where millions reside with their stories and fading memories, is well worth exploring.

The Washburns

The news raced through the corridors of The Hearth at Pilgrim Hill from the moment Rick and Kit Washburn announced that they were going to starve themselves to death.

By the next day, the initial shock had begun to wear off, but only a little.

“They’ve obviously thought it through,” said Gigi Sands at lunch. “They don’t want to wait for the unknown to come and sweep them away. I think we get that.”

“We also get that they want to go at the same time,” said Gene West, who just two days earlier had played gin with Rick Washburn.

“More or less the same time,” said Evie Coviello.

“Yes,” said Gigi. “It’s an inexact science.”

They spooned through their soup. Cream of broccoli. Carl Nevers, who was not a broccoli person, busied himself with a tiny packet of oyster crackers. They’re starving us already anyway, he thought but didn’t say. Their group of five—three widows and two widowers—tried to gather for lunch every day. They called themselves the Lost Spouse Club. On many days, doctor’s appointments or other obligations interfered with their having a full table, but today all were present. Each of them, either openly or not, had been shaken by the news of the Washburns.

“Is what they’re doing legal?” asked Betty Samuelson.

“To not eat?” replied Gene West, leaving the rest unsaid.

“Unless it becomes a big deal,” said Evie.

“Yes, right,” said Gene, trying to seize authority on the issue. “If it becomes a big deal, someone will step in and stop it.”

“Put a tube down their throats,” said Carl.

“I don’t think it would come to that, Carl,” said Gene. “Rick and Kit want to go peacefully, not in a struggle with the authorities.”

“They’re trusting we won’t let word get out,” added Gigi. “Even staff isn’t supposed to know, although Kit didn’t mention that specifically.”

“Staff already know,” said Carl. “You can’t keep this sort of thing quiet.”

“Especially when you issue a proclamation about it,” said Gigi.

“I wonder what they’ll do,” said Betty. “Management, I mean.”

“If they do anything,” said Evie.

“Maybe they’ll just let it ride,” said Betty. “That’s what they’re good at.”

Few would feel comfortable saying so, but death and dying were more often than not the topics du jour at the Hearth. On any given day, a new name from the population might be revealed as being ill, or on the way out, or gone. There was even a shrine of sorts out by the front desk, where photos of the recently deceased were displayed, along with brief biographies and expressions of admiration and support from other residents. Death at the Hearth could be quick: familiar faces, longtime staples of the dining room and movie theater, could disappear without warning, never to be seen again. Or it could be gradual: if someone was said to have “moved on,” it meant they’d left independent living for the obscurity of the medical wing. Betty Samuelson once called the medical wing “The Terminal,” and the name stuck.

In most cases, the end was accompanied by familiar language. “X” had waged a brave battle. “Y” had remained notably cheerful throughout. “Z” had faced excruciating pain with equanimity. Which is what was making the Washburns’ decision so remarkable. They weren’t about to go down a dark, messy path chosen for them by fate. They were choosing their own route and their own language. Theirs would be a story of their own making. Suddenly the Washburns were the only thing anyone wanted to talk about. And it wasn’t just the Lost Spouse Club doing the talking. It was all of the Hearth.

Because of a recent joint birthday party, everyone knew that Rick Washburn was 95 and Kit 94. He’d seen brief service in World War II, on a ship in the Pacific, and then had come home to a degree from Bowdoin and a long, far-reaching career with the State Department. Kit was from a prominent Eastern family. She’d been a much-honored newspaper reporter and later a syndicated political columnist under the name of Andrea George. They had two children, a daughter, Harriet, who lived outside Cleveland, and a son, Jim, on the Delaware shore, now both pushing 70 themselves. Rick and Kit had zigzagged across the globe for many decades before finally settling down on the Cape, but, somehow, most likely with some very good and loyal help along the way, they’d made it all work. They’d been married 68 years. Even in very old age, they were a handsome, modest, devoted couple, and a distinguished presence. Day after day, they could be observed roaming the broad corridors of the Hearth, lately with Rick leaning heavily on a cane and then in a motorized wheelchair, and always with at least a nod and a smile to those they encountered along the way. They hosted lively discussion groups and annual carol sings, and more often than not made sure to be present for public events and celebrations. Their minds remained remarkably sharp and even probing. In their own way, and certainly without looking for it, they were considered by most to be the stars of the Hearth.

It was Kit who’d handled the announcement of their starvation plans. She’d come into the dining room at peak dinner time and moved among the tables, distributing a letter—a straightforward disclosure that affirmed her newspaper background:

Dear Friends,

After a long, productive, happy time together and with others, Rick and I have decided that we are going to end our lives. Beginning this day, November 9, 2021, we have stopped eating. We plan to take only water until such a time as our bodies give out entirely and we starve to death. This may seem an abrupt and extreme measure, but we have done the research and thought it through. And, yes, we’ve discussed it with Harriet and Jim, who are both fully on board with exceptional understanding and compassion. They’ve both promised to be with us at the end. As some of you may be aware, we have experienced a number of health reversals in recent months, none serious, but each foretelling an increasingly bleak future. Everything—seeing, hearing, walking, eating, even thinking—has become increasingly hard for us. As we approach 100 years, we’d prefer to go out more or less as we are now—in one piece, as it were. Starvation isn’t necessarily painless, but it is relatively peaceful and organic. We won’t be introducing poisons into our systems or resorting to the violence so often associated with suicide. We figure that at our ages we probably have days rather than weeks left, and after the first few days we expect to be in a weakened state and confined to our apartment, where we’ll be under professional care. We will be doing a lot of hand holding, the two of us, and thinking of past days and of course all of you. We hope we haven’t shocked you. We think it’s only fair that you be informed of our plan, but we ask that you not spread the news too far and wide. We don’t want it to become a “thing.” Again, please don’t think this a rash or reckless decision. It’s simply what’s best for us.

Avec amour,

Kit and Rick Washburn

Kit hadn’t stopped for conversation. She’d simply walked out of the dining room, leaving tumult in her wake. At some of the tables, the statement was read aloud by one voice. At others, it was passed around. After that, it quickly circulated among those who, for one reason or another, hadn’t come to dinner or were confined out in The Terminal. The expressions of shock and disbelief that night were widespread. Yea and nay judgments flowed freely and often loudly. But there was, too, an undercurrent feeling that the Washburns had knocked down a wall of sorts by giving public voice to private feelings shared by many, and, beyond that, that they were openly and even flamboyantly committing to a final act that, in one form or another—whether by starvation, overdose, suffocation, carbon monoxide or gunshot— had up until now been one of the Hearth’s most respected and tightly protected rituals.

After their lunch with the group, Evie Coviello and Betty Samuelson relocated to seats by the gas fireplace in the Hearth’s main lobby. They were old friends, going back to their days as young housewives in Swansea. It had been Evie who’d discovered the Hearth and fallen in love with its scrub pine vistas and frequent infusions of pungent sea air. She and her husband, Ray, bought in and then convinced Betty and Stu to follow. Ray and Stu played golf and card games together, but they never felt happy or at home in their new surroundings. They died within six weeks of each other—Ray of a heart attack, then Stu of natural causes in his sleep. That was eight years ago. Since then, Evie and Betty had become better friends than ever, often sharing confidences they’d never share with anyone else.

“I’ve been wondering what Greta would think of all this Washburn stuff,” said Evie. “God rest her soul.”

“Funny, I thought of her this morning, too,” said Betty.

Greta Jensen had been a close mutual friend who, three years earlier, in order to escape the frightening depths of Parkinson’s, swallowed an entire bottle of Luminal one evening right after dinner. She was discovered the next afternoon, lying on her perfectly made bed, her various letters and legal documents arrayed around her like peacock feathers.

“’Take with food,’” said Evie, which once again made both women laugh. Even for an intentional overdose, Greta had followed the prescription’s instructions.

“She wouldn’t have liked this sort of attention, though,” said Betty after a moment. “She went quietly.”

“Like a mouse,” said Evie.

“And she wasn’t the only one.”

Over the years, there’d been any number of episodes at the Hearth. Some were later confirmed as suicides while others remained mysterious. Hugh Gaffney, depressed after losing Nancy, had certainly shot himself on purpose, even taking care to first cover his head with a pillow. Darby Bly, on the way out with late-stage ovarian cancer, slit her wrist in a warm bath. No two ways about what her intention had been. But Kay Seabright remained an enigma, either confused or purposeful about her major doses of OxyContin. For that matter, always suspicious of the words “natural causes,” Evie had long wondered about Betty’s own Stu, although she never dared ask about it. Anyway, the point was that none of them, or any of the others, had announced their intentions to a full dining room, which now the Washburns had done.

Betty took two sugar cookies from her jacket pocket and gave one to Evie.

“Well, they better go through with it,” she said.

It was four days later that the Washburns’ apartment door, 207B, was shut permanently to the outside world. Except for family and caregivers, no one would be allowed to enter. The final act was now under way. The evening before, Kit made herself available in the music room for what turned out to be something like a last briefing. She was now in a wheelchair herself, having weakened considerably. She spoke slowly but precisely. Rick was confined to his bed, she said, at that very moment lying fully clothed on his back, atop the covers, with his legs crossed at the ankles and his head propped up. They’d moved their beds to the living room, where big windows allowed them a view of woods, a distant meadow and, in recent days, an evening moonrise. Soon, Rick would be permanently changed into his bedclothes, and so would she. They were listening to Mozart and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and looking at old family movies and photographs. From time to time, she said, one of the caregivers read to them from a book, but it was mostly for Rick’s benefit and she was embarrassed to admit she couldn’t recall the author’s name. Finally, she said, “When we close our door tomorrow, that will be it. We’ll be on our own.”

When she was done, she looked around briefly as if to entertain questions, but no one in the small group, which included Carl Nevers, felt like asking anything. Instead, they said their goodbyes and watched as Kit was wheeled back down the corridor. As she neared the corner, she didn’t turn around to face them—she couldn’t—but she weakly raised her right hand in a sort of final salute.

Carl relayed the details to the others the next day at lunch.

“Shutting the door like that,” said Gene. “It reminds me of when the astronauts used to climb into the capsule and close the hatch behind them.”

 “I just went by their apartment on the way down here,” said Gigi. “Their door was definitely closed. I mean, all the doors are closed, but there was a finality to theirs, with us knowing. It had almost an aura to it.”

The others nodded. They’d all walked past it at some point.

“Kit described the scene so well,” said Evie. “You could picture Rick lying there in bed.”

“The scary thing is, that could be me she was describing,” said Gene. He held up half of his BLT. “I’m not starving myself to death—far from it—but I’ll admit I do spend a lot of the day lying on my back in bed, fully clothed, just like Rick.”

“That’s too much information, Gene,” said Evie with a laugh.

“He’s right, though,” said Gigi. “How different are we from the Washburns? Just a little further back in the line.”

It was clear that by now, nearly a week after the Washburns’ announcement, the initial agitation had subsided, and a general understanding and acceptance had crept into its place. If there was one thing this group—the whole Hearth population—was good at, it was taking upsetting news or the day-to-day calamities of life and burying it under a thick blanket of happier thoughts, well wishing, prayer and forgetfulness. But even as they began to move on a bit, they could still quietly admire Kit and Rick for being trailblazers. What they were doing, and how they were doing it, would make it easier for others to contemplate doing the same if and when the time came. Not everyone would want to, of course. Most never would. But the ones who did would realize that they could chart their own course, make their goodbyes, and then just go.

On the eighth day, an ambulance came and took Rick Washburn’s body away. According to a couple of the Hearth’s night owls who’d noticed activity around the front entrance during the 3 a.m. hour, the stretcher had come in and then gone back out again without ceremony. An aide had walked it down to the entrance and seen it off, and on her way back upstairs told them that it had been “Mister” who’d been taken away. Now it would be only Kit behind the door at 207B. How conscious had she been of Rick’s departure? How different would it be now without him beside her? How much longer could she possibly go on nothing but water and ice chips?

These were the questions that bounced back and forth among the Lost Spouse Club early that afternoon.

“She’s a stubborn old Yankee,” said Betty. “She never ate much to begin with.”

“Broccoli raw at lunch and cooked at dinner,” said Evie.

“And gin martinis,” added Betty. “She could still have a ways to go.”

“But now her husband’s not with her anymore,” said Gigi.

“Well, it’s not like you can speed up the process when you’re already starving yourself to death,” said Carl.

“You can always stop taking the water,” offered Gene. “But it’s useless to speculate.”

“I guess we just wait until the ambulance comes again,” said Carl.

As it happened, when the next ambulance did come, it came for Carl. Later that same afternoon, in the mood to purchase a windbreaker,  he was walking up a short flight of shallow stone steps by the golf clubhouse when he somehow lost his way and pitched forward, hitting his knee and elbow against the stone, and the side of his head against a water spigot protruding from the clubhouse’s foundation. The ambulance arrived promptly and departed without delay, but Carl didn’t survive the ride to the hospital.

An accidental death such as Carl’s was a little unusual for the Hearth. There were loss-of-balance accidents all the time, of course, with so many residents being in their 80s and 90s, but a fatality had to be deemed just very unlucky. Gene took a special interest in his friend’s arrangements, knowing Carl was estranged from his only child, a son, and had no other family to speak of. He wrote up a brief obituary and sent it to the newspaper in Carl’s hometown of Troy, NY, and also to the Fairfield University alumni office. In it, he noted Carl’s service in Korea, his long career in advertising and his special interest in the UConn women’s basketball team and wading shore birds, which had drawn him to Cape Cod.

Gene also spoke briefly at the memorial gathering that took place two days later. Carl hadn’t been a religious man, so the Hearth’s well-practiced vanilla service would be all he’d require. Gigi, Betty and Evie also spoke. They mentioned Carl’s good nature and his fondness for the Hearth kitchen’s macaroons. Betty very unexpectedly sang an unaccompanied version of “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

At the reception that followed, the surviving members of the Lost Spouse Club stood in a cluster and took in a steady stream of condolences. If the words of comfort at times seemed a little pro forma, it’s because these gatherings were so commonplace at the Hearth. In a big room, with so many voices going at once, no one could hear anything anyway. The exact words didn’t matter as much as the look in the eyes.

After forty minutes or so, Gene, Evie, Gigi and Betty took their macaroons and coffee to a table and sat down. They marveled at the turnout and the affection for Carl, who had always been so unassuming. Betty called him “a dark horse.” The level of conversation swelled when Sharon Delfino sat down at the piano, as she so often did, and began playing her medley of popular show tunes. What could have been a solemn, sad event to see off one of their own had turned into a mid-afternoon celebration, not only of Carl’s life, but of each other. All would have agreed, if asked, that this was the Hearth at its very best.

It was also why no one noticed when an ambulance pulled up once again to the main entrance and a stretcher was wheeled inside. Only the staff at the front desk was on hand to witness the removal of Kit Washburn’s body from the building, and to remark on her passing.

“Isn’t she the lady who wanted everyone to know that she and her husband were starving themselves?” one asked the other. “Should we go tell them?”

“They’ll find out soon enough,” the other said. “Let them have their fun.”

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Easter Confession

by Charles Monagan

Giveaway ends September 22, 2020.

Enter this GoodReads giveaway to pick up a free ebook copy of “The Easter Confession” to read on your Kindle or other device. Nothing to lose, right? Enter today!

See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter Giveaway

I just wanted to pass along the excellent story on my new novel “The Easter Confession” that appeared in this morning’s Sunday Republican under the byline of Alan Bisbort. I’m not sure how or why the paper had on hand a 1958 photo of the Monagan family – and really not sure why they chose to use it – but it does show how nicely parents dressed up their kids back in those days. Anyway, here’s the story. You can find the book for purchase – ebook and paperback – at Amazon.com.

https://www.rep-am.com/life-arts/2020/08/15/before-the-flood-waterbury-author-uses-historic-event-as-backdrop/

MAD was the magazine most kids like me loved as they grew up. But Help! . . . let’s not forget Help!

https://pleasekillme.com/harvey-kurtzman/

Here’s something new posted today, 1/15/20, at pleasekillme.com: https://pleasekillme.com/telstar/

Everything has a story, even things so silly that they have “silly” right in their name. Such is the case with Silly Putty. In 1949, a jazz-loving cool cat from New Haven invested $147 he didn’t have to buy the rights to a weird, bouncy substance – and he ended up 25 years later with a fortune of $140 million. That’s just how things bounce sometimes.  

In 1949, when he was 18 and a freshman at the Yale School of Music, the future jazz legend Willie Ruff wandered into a house on Temple Street in New Haven, looking for his friend and fellow horn student, Bob Cecil. He later recalled the moment in his autobiography, A Call to Assembly:

There on the first floor, I saw Cecil and a busy group of undergraduates, looking like kids in nursery school. They all seemed to be wrestling large blobs of soft but very stubborn plastic material from 50-gallon drums. What was this all about? I watched, more than bemused. They were flattening the stuff out on a table, forming it into long rolls like cookie dough. Still others were cutting the rolls into little chunks and weighing them on postal scales. The chunks then went to the next man in the crude assembly line, who put them into plastic packages that looked like two halves of an egg.

“What the hell is it?” I asked Bob.

“Silly Putty.”

“Come again?”

Bob Cecil had called Ruff over that day to see if he wanted a job on the assembly line (he didn’t; he was already regularly playing his horn for pay) but also to meet Peter Hodgson, a jazz lover and one of New Haven’s coolest cats. Hodgson was 20 years older than Ruff and Cecil. He one day would be described admiringly by The New York Times as “a tall, robust man with a close-cropped, full, gray explorer’s beard.” But at the time, in 1949, after an up-and-down 15-year career in marketing and advertising, he was $12,000 in debt and badly in need of a new idea. That’s when, by chance, a glob of silicone by-product bounced into his life.

The puttylike substance was nothing new. It had been around since 1943, when James Wright, laboring in a General Electric laboratory to come up with a cheap synthetic rubber substitute, happened to drop boric acid into silicone oil, and up sprang a substance that bounced higher and stretched even further than rubber – too high and too far, perhaps, for any practical use. Although GE shared the new discovery with scientists around the world, none showed any interest in developing it. The “nutty putty,” as it was called, remained a curiosity.

When it eventually found its way into Hodgson’s hands, by way of New Haven toy-store owner Ruth Fallgatter, whose catalog he produced, he saw its potential right away. He liked the way it could bounce and stretch, ooze and puddle, break into pieces with a hammer blow, and even pick up images from newspapers and magazines. He scraped together $147 to order a batch from GE and secure the production rights. Then he got together with Fallgatter to sell some to the public at $2 a pop. By all accounts, it did well, but not well enough to keep Fallgatter interested. She dropped out of the development scheme and left it all in the hands of Hodgson. And it was here that his innate creativity and marketing chops conjured up the brilliant egg-shaped container, the crude assembly line of Yalies on Temple Street and the product’s immortal name, Silly Putty.

Fueled mostly by desperation, Hodgson had to move very fast, and he did. Less than a year later, in August 1950, a reporter for the “Talk of the Town” section in The New Yorker would write, “We went into the Doubleday bookshop at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street the other day, intending, in our innocence, to buy a book, and found all the clerks busy selling Silly Putty, a gooey, pinkish, repellent-looking commodity that comes in plastic containers the size and shape of eggs.” A Doubleday official noted that the company’s several shops had sold 10,000 eggs in the preceding month at $1 each. And here was Hodgson himself, extolling the virtues of his product, which in the beginning he had aimed at adults.

“It means five minutes of escape from neurosis,” he told The New Yorker. “It means not having to worry about Korea or family difficulties. And it appeals to people of superior intellect; the inherent ridiculousness of the material acts as an emotional release to hard-pressed adults.” To which the huckster in him could not help adding, “We’ll sell a million eggs by Christmas.”

It’s not known whether he reached that lofty goal that year or not, but it’s certain that Silly Putty took off as the years went by. It soon found its rightful niche as a kids’ toy, ran some ads on the “Howdy Doody Show” and became a mid-1950s staple right alongside baseball cards and Davey Crockett coonskin caps.

As for Hodgson, he enjoyed the hell out of his unexpected new fortune. One thing that happened was that when he finally met Willie Ruff, the two became great friends, as Ruff later remembered:

Pete often drove me into New York in his new elegant maroon Hudson convertible to listen to Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and other jazz greats. We went to expensive dining spots on the Silly Putty expense account, places I’d never have been able to afford. Although I wasn’t on the Silly Putty payroll, Pete made me the firm’s unofficial music director and put me in charge of purchasing new jazz and classical recordings that I felt he and his kids should be listening to. Silly Putty was a boon to my already hot and broad exposure to good music, and thanks to Pete and that expense account, I learned my way around New York’s music emporiums while at Yale.

As his fortune grew, Hodgson moved his family out to an 80-acre estate in Madison, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound, known simply as “The Hill.” Here, all were welcome, most notably the family of his longtime vice president for production, William Henry Haynes, a young African-American who’d joined Hodgson at the very beginning through a connection with Ruth Fallgatter’s toy store and stayed until his death, at age 49, in 1976. In her blog, Haynes’ daughter, Carol, recalls the days of going out to The Hill:

We spent a great deal of our childhood on The Hill. When Pete and [wife] Margaret were out of the country we would sometimes spend up to a week there. It was an idyllic, peaceful and storybook setting.

Pete and Margaret never locked their doors. They figured that if anyone really wanted anything they owned they would find a way to get in. Even when they left for long trip in Europe they would leave the doors open and the keys in their cars. When we would arrive at the house we would just walk through the poolside doors and settle in.

The property had a tennis court, a pool, a side of the house where you had breakfast and another side where you had lunch and dinner. My favorite room, the living room, was alike a small cathedral. It had French-style glass panes all around and it was two to three stories high. It seemed as big as a basketball court. Pete was a music buff and there were what seemed like a million albums lined all around the perimeter of the room. When we were there we heard mostly classical and jazz. But music was always bouncing off the walls.

Such was the life that Silly Putty afforded and that Pete Hodgson readily shared. When he died in 1976 at the age of 64, he left a fortune of $140 million – not a bad return on his initial $147 investment. By then, Silly Putty had become a hit in the Soviet Union and traveled around the moon with the Apollo 8 astronauts. In 25 years, it would be inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame. All this from what once was an unwanted lump of goop.

Willie Ruff conducted the music for Hodgson’s memorial service, held at Yale Divinity School. Margaret Hodgson said it had been her husband’s wish that there be no speaking, no preaching, no religious references – only music. Ruff gathered the musicians and selected the music. Let’s just hope that one of the selections was something with a little bounce to it.

My best-selling collection of Connecticut treasures is back on bookstore shelves with Globe Pequot’s brand new edition of “Connecticut Icons.”

For this fourth printing, I’ve added eight new icons, updated the other 50, and fancied it up with a nice new cover.

“Connecticut Icons” proved to be a popular gift choice when it was first published in 2006. Lots of people bought it for their family and friends, and also those who are no longer in Connecticut but recall it fondly. The icons range from hot lobster rolls to Yale Bowl, from stone walls to steamed cheeseburgers, and from Sleeping Giant to Top-Sider deck shoes. Each gets its own write-up and colorful photo. The book is filled with lots of surprising, revealing info about Connecticut places and things you thought you already knew about.

It makes a very good corporate gift, premium or giveaway, too – or even a nice little holiday gift for your employees. Let me know at charlesmonagan@sbcglobal.net if you’re interested in a bulk purchase.

Meanwhile, thanks for your time and attention. You can find “Connecticut Icons” through me, at most Connecticut bookstores, or even here at Amazon.

 

If we’ve been fortunate in life, we’ve gotten to witness some of the cultural bomb-throwing moments that have shown us the path from one way of seeing and living – and even being – into another. In my lifetime, some of the most famous of these, as far as music is concerned, have been Elvis Presley shaking up the Ed Sullivan Show, Jimi Hendrix powering through the “The Star Spangled Banner,” and Marvin Gaye doing his revolutionary version of that same anthem at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game.

But if you’re really lucky, you’ll have a watershed moment happen right in front of you – a burying of the old and blasting through of the new – right before your very own disbelieving eyes. Which is what happened to me on the night of Oct. 11, 1967 – 50 years ago this month – when the Doors played a most unlikely concert at Danbury High School in Connecticut.

The Doors had been booked the previous spring to open up Fall Weekend at Western Connecticut State College (now University) in Danbury. By the time October rolled around, 1967 had already been a sensational year for the band. Its stunning first album, “The Doors,” arguably one of the greatest debuts ever, had been released in January, and it had done well. But it was the runaway success of the summer’s big hit single, “Light My Fire,” that pushed Jim Morrison’s scorching vocal through every AM radio speaker in America. The song went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts and carried the album all the way to No. 2, where it understandably stalled out behind “Sgt. Pepper.” In short, by October everyone knew who the Doors were.

The band’s sudden success had turned the Danbury booking into a major coup for the WestConn organizers. But a huge problem arose: The college auditorium was undergoing weeks of renovations and was no longer available for use. In a last-minute switch, the concert was moved to nearby Danbury High School, where the auditorium was large enough to accommodate the crowd, which would turn out to be about 2,000 strong.

As for myself in October 1967, I was a 17-year-old high school senior attending a boarding school in the neighboring town of New Milford, CT. Boarding schools in those days were not known for welcoming cultural change with open arms. We were all male. We wore jackets and ties to class and suits to dinner. We learned Latin, hosted tea dances with likeminded girls’ schools and attended chapel nearly every day. We were confined to campus except for wholesome special occasions, like a movie theater showing of “Becket” or a milkshake at a local dairy bar.

But we were far from unaware of the changes afoot in American culture that year; in fact, our prisonlike circumstances made us even more keenly aware of them. We had just witnessed, and maybe even participated in, what was widely referred to as the Summer of Love. Movies such as “The Graduate,” “Blow Up” and “The Trip” were throwing out a counter-culture vibe. And now drugs – in the form of a few stray joints, an illicit bottle of Nembutal, a tube of airplane model glue – began to find their way into our dorm rooms, and we were eager to give them a try.

And what better way to try them out than with music? The year had already been a great one for fresh sounds, with hit singles that included “Ruby Tuesday,” “Penny Lane,” “Groovin’,” “Sunshine of Your Love” and “Incense and Peppermints.” But there was also another sound to hear as well, music that carried a darker, more disturbing, more rebellious note. “A Day in the Life” on Sgt. Pepper was certainly one of them, Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” was an obvious, urgent call to ingest drugs, but it was “Hungry Freaks” on the Mothers of Invention’s “Freak Out!” album that astonished us with its lyrics that acknowledged Dylan and the others but then blasted past them into pure freakdom:

“Mr. America, try to hide

The emptiness that’s you inside;

But once you find that the way you lied.

And all the corny tricks you tried

Will not forestall the rising tide

Of hungry freaks, daddy!”

All of this put us in the right mood for a Doors concert. With its big hit single and lyrical touches, but also with its hard rocking and potentially menacing stage presence, the band seemed to have all the bases covered.

Exactly how a group of overprotected preppies convinced school authorities to allow a field trip to a Doors concert is unfortunately pretty much lost in the mists of time. One recollection has it that it was a classmate, an excellent drummer and ardent music fan, who found out about the concert and pushed hard for the road trip. Another classmate remembers that about 20 of us went in a school bus and paid $2 for a ticket. We were of course dressed in jackets and ties and properly chaperoned, perhaps by a couple of younger, hipper faculty members. Thus we were perfectly positioned to witness, and take part in, an epic clash of cultures.

 

This “clash” came about because immediately preceding the Doors concert there was a beauty pageant. I don’t mean that the two events happened on the same day; I mean that they were part of the same bill. Here again, no one seems to recall exactly who was being crowned. It easily could have been “Miss Fall Weekend” or “Miss Homecoming.” It could even have been “Miss WestConn,” but I don’t think it quite rose to that level. During the pageant, the house lights were all turned up so everyone could see the contestants parade back and forth on the stage. WestConn being in large part a local commuter school, there were no doubt a number of proud parents in attendance. And maybe some little brothers and sisters ready to have their formative little brains fried by what was to come. In any case, the pageant ended with big smiles and polite applause, and then the principal, who sounded very much like Firesign Theater’s Principal Poop, said a few words about not having too much fun: “Sit in your seats and do not leave them,” he said in a reedy, high-pitched voice. “If you get out of your seat we will escort you to the door. And no smoking.” These words were greeted with derisive shouts and boos.

And then the Doors were standing before us – Robbie Krieger, John Densmore, Ray Manzarek and, front and center, Jim Morrison himself in his signature tight leather pants, leather jacket (which he soon tossed off) and frilly white shirt. Following a very low-key intro from an anonymous deep voice (“The Doors, okay?”), they went into the jaunty first notes of “Moonlight Drive” from their new album “Strange Days,” released just three weeks before. I am quite sure they played the opener with the house lights still up (as shown in the photo at the top of this page) and that Morrison shouted for concert lighting, which was provided. And then it was off and running to “Break on Through” and “Backdoor Man,” “People Are Strange,” “Crystal Ship” and, following a wild piece of Morrison’s avant garde poetry called “Wake Up!,” they did a masterly version of “Light My Fire.” And then finally, inevitably, as sort of a required encore, came the extravaganza of “The End,” with its dark theatrics, role playing, and intimations of violence and incest. Here Morrison went into full Morrison mode, leaping from the stage and writhing down in front of the front row, before returning to the stage, at the very end of “The End,” to repeatedly smash his mic stand onto the floor.

In other words, it was perfect. Here was our watershed cultural moment – a sunny, small-town beauty pageant morphing into a loud, rhythmic, lizard-infested teachable moment. We’d never seen anything remotely like it, although we certainly would again in the months and years ahead. The promise of the West Coast had been fully delivered to us in prim and proper Connecticut. And whether we all fully enjoyed it or not, or got what it was all about, it signaled for us, personally, that change was in the air and that we might truly enjoy being on the side of change. On that night 50 years ago the world all of a sudden opened up right before us. It would remain one of the finest, most enduring things we ever could hope to experience in a high school auditorium.