Open Writing

The year-plus of living in downtown Washington and, later, out in Parkfairfax, Virginia (1943 -1945), was to provide a couple of completely naive boys with a virtual blast of the rarified air of political, military, and Hollywood society. The facts were these: The U.S. government, due to a near-complete lack of available living space in the D. C. area at the time, was putting us up, so to speak, in a two-room suite at the then-glamorous Wardman Park Hotel in downtown Washington, D. C. Though we accepted it as completely normal at the time, I can't begin to relate the number of admirals, generals, senators, and other famous persons with whom we rubbed elbows on a daily basis for month after month. We would even be admitted attendees (by virtue of living at the Wardman Park) at the President's Birthday Ball, held on each of his birthdays during Mr. Roosevelt's tenure, and an annual magnet for dozens of Hollywood celebrities (and, for every celebrity wannabe who could manage to scratch together train fare).

Keep in mind that we were at a cute age, especially me — crosseyed, with my tiny "Skippy" glasses, two teeth missing in front, and a smile for anyone who happened along! Who would not love this child? Mom, as mentioned in the first chapter, was beautiful by any standard (resembling, many said, actress Maureen O'Hara at the time), and invariably attracted her own gaggle of admirers, not to mention would-be lotharios. In the company of little cross-eyed Ronnie and darling, pudgy Gordon (whose resemblance to Spanky McFarland of "Our Gang" fame was truly amazing), Mom had the complete run of the entire old Hotel. Everyone there knew us by name and warmly accepted us as "family." Our Dad, to his credit, worked day and night, and would be, in the end, rewarded with several impressive, high-level commendations.

I recall only one time when we created even a minor disturbance. It involved the telephone in our hotel room and the natural desire of two young kids to pull off a harmless practical joke. Unfortunately, it would backfire. Fortunately, Dad, working late as usual at the testing lab, never learned about it.

Wouldn't it be a scream, I suggested to Gordie, if we made an anonymous call to room service and, rather than saying anything, squirted water into the phone instead! The guy at the other end would get soaked! And if we didn't say anything at all, no one would ever know where the water — or the call ~ came from! Wow! (Fantastic ideas like this one, let me tell you, didn't come along every evening to a pair of bored kids alone in a hotel room! Not on your leaking catamaran, bubba!).

And so, we did it. We dialed ... and the moment we heard a voice at the other end, we poured an entire glassful of water into the phone speaker-part, held daintily upside-down for the evening's frivolity. Much (all?) of the water spilled on the hotel carpet, of course, but we were absolutely certain that plenty of it got through to what we imagined would be a gasping, choking fellow at the other end! A guy answered, but instead of gasping and choking, we heard a voice say, "Hello ... hello." Then he simply hung-up. That was it! We waited. Nothing! Our best-laid plans — two pint-sized delinquents in search of momentary escape from a deplorable case of hotel suite suffocation ~ had emphatically gone awry!
(It wasn't until much later in life that I became aware of the odd way hotel trunk lines were wired at the time. Apparently, because of inertial forces brought to the primary wiring by both the room circuits and the. tension flanges into which the magnetic fields are captured and reversed, and because this then leads to exterior transformers boosting the secondary current through both matching grids, around the relay cord nodules, and finally back on itself, water during those early years simply could notbe transmitted through hotel phone circuitry. What I would have given to have known that at the time!).

As she did every night, Mom called the room later that evening to say she'd be up from dinner in about ten minutes. We heard her fine; but she seemed strangely unable to hear us, no matter how loudly we spoke. We weren't sure what was going on; nor did we know why she kept shouting things like, "Can you hear me? Can you HEAR me? Hello. Hello."

Being the wonderful mother she was, the suggestion of even a small problem was enough to bring her back upstairs at a spirited gallop, curiously a'titter, to the two-room digs we called home at the time. And the very first thing she did on entering was to check the phone. When she could find nothing wrong, she casually announced her intention to go next-door and call maintenance. Her exact words were, "I'm going to go next-door to call maintenance."

My awareness of the grim possibilities this sort of call might engender loomed larger by the second. I decided to come clean and tell her about the funny idea Gordie had introduced earlier! Fortunately for the two of us - but mostly for me - she thought the whole matter hilarious. Even cute! But she cautioned us, "don't you dare tell your dad about this!" I told her she didn't have to worry about that. Her secret would remain safe with us.

The President's Birthday Ball was a gas — every second of the ten minutes or so Gordie and I were allowed to stay. The first clue that the evening was going to be an odd one occurred on the way down in the elevator. A nice looking older man turned to Mom and said, "May I please have your autograph?" Mom seemed uneasy at what seemed to me a fairly simple request, and informed the man that she was "nobody" (which I for one thought an odd response indeed!).

Mom graciously explained that we were merely residents there at the hotel. The man smiled and thanked her, then said, "Well, you certainly are a beautiful woman." Mom, of course, thanked him. Even though we were only allowed in the crowded lobby for those few fleeting minutes, I saw three others ask Mom the same dumb thing. One was another man. The other two were a cute young couple. With that, we were ushered off with instructions to go straight to our suite with nary a stop, as Mom made it ultimately clear, for anything less than a fiery bus crash on a treacherous hallway curve.

Mom was home by nine; and we, you might well imagine, were still very much "up." She entered bearing gifts, among them a neat autograph (on her actual postcard-sized ticket to the soiree) from comedian Joe E. Brown, and a second featuring the signatures of both Alan Ladd, and of his agent-wife, Sue Carol Ladd. Mom informed us that she'd even been able to tell Mr. Ladd personally that he looked a lot like her brothers, and that he'd seemed pleased to learn of it. The evening ended quietly

Oh...and we had a new phone the first thing the following morning.