The Old Days In Gay “Closeted, Hell, Entombed ” Hollywood-With a New Book About AIDS Victim Hollywood 1950s He-Man Icon Rock Hudson-Even His Name Dripped Masculinity In Some Quarters In Mind 

By Seth Garth

Here is a link to a Terry Gross Fresh Air show on NPR about a book about the life and times of 1950s movie icon Rock Hudson by Mark Griffin All That Heaven Allows which forms the backdrop to this commentary:

https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2018/12/05/673714293/fresh-air-for-dec-5-2018-rock-hudsons-double-life

I suppose I am the one person of the old-time working poor Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville corner boys who should do this commentary on 1950s and before “gay” Hollywood through a book reviewed on NPR about the life and times of masculine icon Rock Hudson who dramatic announcement in the 1980s that he had AIDS brought new light (and more research money) on the disease because of his standing in the Hollywood firmament. I don’t usually put much stock in coincidences although they certainly exist so but I find it ironic that at nearly the same time I was listening to this Fresh Air  with Terry Gross interview that Allan Jackson was maybe three doors away from me writing his defense of himself against all kind of false accusations after he had been purged from his site manager’s job at this publication, including that he was the M.C. of a drag queen club out in San Francisco.      

As Allan subsequently detailed that false accusation, that slander and libel whether it was actionable in a court of law by some of the ”victors” in his ouster was purposefully put on as fact, really alternate fact, when he had wound up in San Francisco visiting his, our old friend and corner boy from highs school days Timmy Riley, now known far and wide in the world of “drag queens” as Miss Judy Garland and the proprietor of the so-called notorious KitKat Club which has since become a major tourist attraction in that city.  

What has come out only recently (although I and a couple of others who had put some money up knew what the situation was) is that Allan after Timmy had flee North Adamsville when he “came out” to his parents who would subsequently disown him and a few friends, a few corner boys remained in North Adamsville after high school scorned him to go to gay and drag queen friendlier San Francisco in the post-Stonewall period had loaned, had given Timmy the money to buy and refurbish the run-down KitKat Club in North Beach. (Although everybody in Frisco knows him as Miss Judy Garland we all still call him Timmy so let me stick with that name.) So, yes, Alan was staying with his old friend, and mine too, at one of Timmy’s apartments above the club which he also owned trying to jump start his life. So much for unverified “facts.”   

Allan mentioned in his introductory piece to a series on Jack Kerouac the 50^th anniversary of whose death will be commemorated in 2019 that when we were corner boys, when we were hanging around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in the early 1960s we would mercilessly gay-bait anybody who seemed the least bit, well, faggy, light on their feet, homo all the terms of approbation used at the time for gay-bashing. And here is what may startle the unwary reader Timmy Riley, football playing, rugged, pretty handsome and girl attractive was the leader of the pack. Moreover we did not, and I speak of this as both Allan and Timmy have with eternal shame, just talk the talk but would go down to Provincetown in high which we knew was “queer heaven” and not just gay-bash some poor unsuspecting guy but “lead” on to get somebody out in back of some bar and beat the shit out of the guy. And again Timmy would be in the lead. We were shocked, shocked to the core when we heard from Sonny Lewis that Timmy had “come out” had started painting his fingernails, and they had beaten him up one of the main reasons Timmy fled the town.   

What does all of this about an old gay and drag queen (they are not both the same, okay) corner boy from working class North Adamsville have to do with a famous movie star from our times like Rock Hudson. Well everything since, as the book and a documentary point out, Rock and a number of other he-man role male movie stars like Guy Madison, Rory Calhoun, and famously Tab Hunter had to stay deep, deep in the closet to maintain their livelihoods. To keep up the illusion, the movie theater illusion that every female movie-goer (and who knows now when you think about the matter some male movie-goers) that they could grab the guy for a boyfriend. Such was, and is, the Hollywood dream factory. Despite the fact that like the revelations long known in Hollywood about the “casting couch” culture which, male or female, depending on the predilections of the man in power, helped get you up the food chain the “gay community,” who was gay, who was sitting out in Malibu with a bunch of men, good looking athletic men without women.        

I am not sure how much trouble Rock got into, or avoided in having his male companionship and his affairs, before his public announcement of his AIDS condition (in those days a sentence of death) and the how and when he knew that he preferred men to women but we saw Rock, maybe not as the coolest guy around, maybe guys like Steve McQueen and Paul Newman were more our models of manliness, as a serious masculine figure especially when he was not doing that silly romantic comedy stuff that none of us could relate to. What I do know, do know from talking with both Timmy and Allan over the years that Timmy, and I assume Rock, paid a terrible psychic price for having to stay in the closet. Worse having to hide who they were, are against guys like the North Adamsville corner boys who were quick with fists and not understanding. So this does not do justice to the subject but RIP, Rock Hudson, RIP   

The Legend-Slayer Is Back- Legends Of The Old American West-The Saga Of Jake Walz’s Old Hoary Dutchman’s Gold Mine-Ida Lupino And Glenn Ford’s “Lust For Gold” (1949)-A Film Review

By Will Bradley

Lust For Gold, starring Ida Lupino, Glenn Ford, 1949  .  

You know we have today, damn throughout history really, had enough alternate fact distortions of events to fill a library, a major college or big city public library. I have been on a tear in 2017-2018 (and hopefully for the future as well as long I have site manager Greg Green’s confidence) debunking a whole raft of undeserved, overblown or just plain false legends which have been built out of whole cloth and have entered the books with devoted followers and a whole lot of people not devoted who believe based on nothing more than somebody’s conjecture, opinion. This is my answer to the increasing number of fellow staff members, including writers who have not been able to get their heads around the idea of legend-busting. This so-called ironic indifference in a publication looking for some historical truths and whose unspoken motto is – “speak the truth no matter how bitter.” Which is exactly right, exactly the right note I am trying to achieve. Take a back seat doubters, way back.  

I have elsewhere in a previous trifecta of legend-busting reviews mentioned I have had a descent amount of success, some very positive comments about how my reviews have enlightened some readers to think through their acceptance without thought of legends, of everything from belief in angels to a glowing acceptance of the Hollywood/ television view of the American Old West and the desperadoes, malcontents, drifters, con men and women, and everybody who headed west after busting out in the East. I will not go through the litany here of who I have taken down but I cannot go to busting the so-called Lost Dutchman’s Mine legend around ornery bastard Jake Walz who allegedly found the pot of gold and kept everybody else away-with hot lead- unless I mention my one significant failure, the Johnny Cielo legend. The only reason I am doing that here is that I have new proof, if anybody who is still defiantly attached to the press agent baloney around that hoary legend about one of the key elements to the Cielo legend will listen -Johnny taking 1940s film star and off-handedly beautiful Rita Hayworth to Barranca when he ran rough shot there with his airplane mail service fro big bucks .

Belief in Johnny’s case, in his publicity agent legend, has always primarily depended on the hard fact that for a period, the period Johnny claimed to have Rita sharing his bed down in Central America, she had left Hollywood under mysterious circumstances and had not surfaced for a while. The documents I have, including lustrous photographs with dates of processing the negatives attached on the back as they did in the old days, prove that Rita was secretly playing footsie, house, whatever you want to call the liaison with the Aga Klan before they were married. Was in New York and or Morocco during that crucial time. As I speculated early on in my research Johnny had hook-winked, who knows maybe she was a willing accomplice getting free airfare south and away from whatever troubles she was running away from, some young gal from Hoboken down in the Jerseys, Sarah Miles, or at least that was the name she was using, who looked very much like Rita whom he had met either walking the streets or in some whorehouse in that town. The few photos of her, revealing photos for the 1940s from some men’s magazine show that her legs were not nearly as well-formed as Rita’s and that while you can never tell about a woman’s hair even now if they don’t want you to know she was a brunette. I can hear the aficionado disclaimers now that even if my information is true maybe, maybe an important doubt word trick used forever by con artists and press agents to set up alternate facts that maybe Rita had sent the Aga Khan Sarah in her place to be able to stay with Johnny in humid, sweaty Barranca bungalows. We shall wait for the bogus blowback.

I will admit that I had some early trouble with Zane Grey readers, hell, even Larry McMurtry brethren trying to cut down the legend of Link Jones, the baddest desperado who tried to con the world that he had changed, had become an upright citizen, that he had stopped being a ruthless gunslinger and no holds barred daytime bank robber. No question they should have strung him up, hung him high and this from a guy who doesn’t believe in the damn death penalty. The clincher there was Link’s prison confession to a fellow cellmate where he went out of his way, maybe even embellished his exploits, to make him seem a tough guy to a young kid just starting out on the wrong track. That said this saga of Jake (Jacob but nobody called him that, nobody still standing after saying that) Walz should be a lot easier to dispel since at least Link had been a man of the West. Jake had been an Eastern tin-horn from Europe failure heading west to avoid some German hoodlums who wanted his head.                                
So what is the big deal with Jake, with his longstanding legend that even my grandfather who first told me the story of how Jake had held off all-comers when they tried to “steal” his bags of gold (which he had in turn had gotten by wasting the real owners and his own partner, nice guy right) and had known Jake’s grandson, Brent, who retailed the legend (and who himself had spent a lifetime, or what seemed like a lifetime looking for the rest of what his grandfather had not hidden from plain view.) According to Brent his grandfather after busting out in the East headed West with an old prospector Winer who claimed he knew where a ton of already mined gold was located outside of what is now Phoenix. Other parties including a relative of the guy, the hombre, the Mexican who after all was only going home to what before the Gadsden Purchase had been part of his own country, who sweat mined the stuff were on the trail as well. Brent claimed that his grandfather had to kill that relative, had to kill that partner too or they would have killed him, shot him dead and left him for the buzzards. Sure thing, Brent.

The weird part, the part that has always made me wonder if all these Old West legends were produced solely in New York by lazy writers who couldn’t leave the comforts of their hotels, is what followed. What Jake had to do to keep his kale once he went into Phoenix to cash in with every hungry vulture in town ready to deal him low. The weirdest story was about some dame, some ex-whore, Julia something but don’t get hung up on names since everybody was using aliases then even the respectable citizenry, who was married to some grifter who couldn’t put two quarters together who took dead aim at Jake. Minus the husband part. She had been through from hunger long enough and wanted easy street, wanted to get out of stinking Phoenix, get out of Arizona which wasn’t even a state then and head to Frisco and the gay life of spoiled lady, mistress if that was the way things turned out.

She was going to use hubby as a decoy to keep Jake wondering about her, about whether her love was true. After a minute seeing Julia and hubby in the backstreets laughing together he got the dust out of his eyes and decided he had to kill the pair, or be killed. Legend has it that the bones of Julia and hubby are still guarding the empty plot where Jake’s gold had been. Nice guy right. They say, through Brent again, Jake roamed the hills at night keeping those who still thought there was still gold aplenty from entering. The reality is after the Julia bust-up Jake now John Walsh headed to Frisco and lived a life of splendor and only killing a couple more people who threatened his way of life by exposing him as another two-bit grifter. Another hoary legend down.                             

“The Last Of The Beats”- Frank Jackman’s In Search Of Todo el Mundo-A Critical Review

Book Review by Professor V.E. Grant, Chair, Creative Writing Workshop-University of Wisconsin-Racine   

In Search Of Todo el Mundo, Frank Jackman, Black Dog Press, Boston, 2014     

In Search of Todo el Mundo (hereafter Todo) is Mr. Frank Jackman’s first longer work since he received some acclaim several years ago for his compilation, Ancient dreams, Dreamed, including from this reviewer who saw in that effort a turning away from his earlier, there is no other way to put it, self-indulgent jabs at the world in his prior short story compilations. More than that move away from self-indulgence though was a turn toward a, for a lack of a better expression, more karmic sense of the universe, a more spirited work which broke some new ground in reflecting on the condition of humankind in the last third of the 20^th century among those who had come of age in the generation before mine, what he called the generation of ’68, those who came of age in the 1950s post-World War II baby boom. A generation whose reflections we will be inundated with as that generation takes stock of itself and its follies now that it will have more time on its hands and access to more self-publishing outlets.

[The good professor has hit the nail on the head since over the past couple of years during my tenure first as day to day operations manager and now has site manager the number one kind of works, generally unsolicited, seeking publication, are from that very demographic finding time apparently to take infinite “nostalgia” trips back to those times, those 1960s when as one of the prospective writers put it quoting early Wordsworth-“to be young was very heaven.” Since any publication can only bear the weight of some many pieces of a similar kind most ate rejected, including the piece that had the Wordsworth quote. Greg Green]   

Unfortunately, Mr. Jackman has reverted back to that former incessant self-indulgence in this short tale of his addictions, mainly but not exclusively drugs, back in the 1980s when he went to Todo on the Central California coast in a failed bid to “dry out” thinly veiled and explored through his main character, Josh Breslin, in this short work.  (A work which he has called a sketch, although it reads more like a short novella and probably could have been judiciously trimmed to a longish short story). Perhaps it is the distaste that I have for the current seemingly endless wave of post-addiction cautionary tales that the reading public favors if the best-seller charts are any indication which has colored my take on the work but this one that could have been left in Mr. Jackman bottom drawer until he had some other trimmed short stories with which to surround it.

[The good professor has also, perhaps accidentally, hit upon another aspect of that nostalgia business mentioned in the bracketed comments above which is driving many, many of those still standing and coherent, of the confessional tales being submitted of late. Centrally concerning their own over the top drug experiences back when, according to Si Lannon, you couldn’t go into a room in most young adult apartments and communes without grabbing a big whiff of second-hand marijuana smoke. Later or current problems with addictions are not discussed, or hopefully have been overcome or at least suppressed. G.G.]
                
The eminent cultural critic, Stanley White, a man who has imparted  many very important insights about the writers of the so-called “beat” generation which surfaced in the 1950s and to avoid any additional generation-naming Mr. Jackman’s subsequent “generation of ’68” put the problem, put my problem with the book, in perspective when he wrote in the introduction the following:       

“It is always hard to fathom at this remove, a remove now of well over fifty years, what effect writers and poets like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, William Burroughs and the lesser lights associated with publicizing that cultural phenomenon, known collectively as the “beat” generation (Jack’s coined word meaning beaten down, beaten around, from hunger beat, from unsated wanting habits beat, from Zen-like karma angel-dream beatitude beat all meshed in one and hence all misunderstood by a rush to judgment world) had on the subsequent generations other than the obvious romance of the road that most young people associate with that term.  And hard as well to fathom the effect characters created by and lives led by the beats such as attractive-repulsive fugitive figures like William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, his various wives and mistresses, and the winos and wistfuls who populated the Route 66, or whatever route, roads and the way that mass culture was shaped for a period by such personalities. In a sense the answer to that question will determine whether this nifty little work by Frank Jackman will have a shelf-life or will be submerged by an onslaught of more pressing and expressive post-modern literary movements.”

I had asked that very question myself long ago about those who influenced my own youth, a youth influenced by those writers two generations before mine, the hard shell, no nonsense razor-like writings of Ernest Hemingway in his best novels and short stories, the flight of metaphoric language by F. Scott Fitzgerald, all bow down before Jay Gatsby, in describing the ebb and flow of the Jazz Age, the rugged cross adventures portrayed by John Steinbeck in his classic tales of American uprooted-ness The Grapes Of Wrath and down in the depths skid row Cannery Row, and, of course, Thomas Wolfe and his sagas of a nation turning in on itself and which came up short of the promised land once that damn frontier stopped at Western ocean’s edge.

I grew up not doubting in the least the influence those writers exercised on me including my exercise books filled with little pieces “cribbed” from their handsome books. But I also had an uneasy feeling then that Mr. Jackman must have had when he wanted to extend the life of the beat generation beyond its “sell by” date. I found that it was not accidental, if somewhat mystifying, that he fashioned himself in Todo (through that main and only non-stick character Josh Breslin the other characters being mere foils for his jabs) as he put it in in one of his earlier  short sketches “the last of the beats,” much as I had in my youth fancied myself as the “lasts of the modernist realist school writers” (although unlike Mr. Jackman I never made that declaration in any published work putting such words in the mouth of some character that I created in order for future doctoral students to be able to titter at and to make erudite remarks and endless footnotes about what I was referring to). Such are our vanities, and our debts.

But in the writer’s world there is a need to move on and not keep on re-packaging the same old material which in the end is what Mr. Jackman had left us with, faded beat-ery. Faded beat-ery owning a huge debt to Jack Kerouac’s lightweight alcohol addiction book, Big Sur. I often wondered about the purpose of that incessant sameness, that incessant re-packaging of some small beat ideas while reading this work and had been surprised when I read in Literary Age that Mr. Jackman had said in an interview that to be candid he thought the “beats” had become “old-fashioned” by the time he began to appreciate their virtuous writings. Join the club brother, join the club but why the continual re-hash and the failure to move on if you had enough insight to know that these days nothing but nostalgia publications and workshops lean on the major “beats” works, and less so the other lesser lights. (Although I do not intend this remark to bolster my argument very rarely these days does the writing institute I am associated with and other workshops with which I am familiar accept applicants who claim their muse is say Jack Kerouac or William Burroughs unless they have some stronger credentials, very much stronger credentials, going for them.)  

That tension between the “old-fashioned” beat epiphany and the jail break- out that their writings represented to those who came of age in the post-World War II period is more than evident in this work, this admittedly Mr. Jackman’s most ambitious work to date that pays at least fleeting homage to the beats who enchanted his youth. One can see almost from the first pages that he is satisfied with some vapid post-beat anthologizing, some pallid re-rerun of the Kerouac/Cassady/Ginsberg/Burroughs gas-fueled, pedal- floored, thumb-stuck out bologna sandwich, coffee and bennies run across cultural America in the immediate post-World War II period. Strangely satisfied to my mind for the simple reason that he was not formed by the Great Depression and the sloughing through World War II that formed the pool for their social facts, formed their generation, and the same hard fact that had precluded me from totally understanding what drove those writers two generations before me like Hemingway to prostration and Fitzgerald to the bottle in the aftermath of the glow of the gilded Jazz Age back in the 1920s.

Frankly though I have felt more alienated from the beats, mainly from their manic antics, and from their fudgy flinging of language as the be all and end all of literary life at the expense of coherent narrative, who were in the cohort a generation before mine than the Jazz Age writers since I had worked the more traditional avenues of writerliness in the 1980s being much closer to the “other” 1950s New York writers like Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Jim Jones, and Bill Styron.   

And I feel that same sensation, that same sense of off-key alienation from the direct heat of the beats in Mr. Jackman’s efforts. For one thing his sketch has more interior dialogue than anything the explosive self-publicizing beats ever tried to do. Of course addiction writing, either under a powerful opiate like that which sustained old Sam Coleridge searching for some modern Xanadu or post-addiction writing which is in favor in this confessional age complete with a happy ending and plenty of cautionary tale which actually withers into the maudlin has a long and cherished history so that Mr. Jackman has tapped into a well-versed literary genre. With this difference that he offers this short sketch from the perspective of some thirty years after the events and sensations described in the narrative so his claim to some studied spontaneity which was a hallmark of the beats runs dry. He, on the facts known to me about his life from his biographical information, was not looking for any particular Xanadu (on the contrary he was just looking for his next eight-ball), and he emphatically was not providing us with some cautionary tale. So while Mr. Jackman owes much to the “beat” rhythm, the “beat” pacing of the drama he has failed to move on past that, tellingly, as he told a reporter for the Boston Globe once in a review of his beat-etched short stories he did not believe that he was breaking new ground, was not doing an exercise in spontaneous writing (which he did not believe was either possible or a good thing since every writer likes to tinker with what he or she has written and if they did not then the damn editors and copyists would when they grabbed  hold of any manuscript).             

But enough of  searching Searching For Todo el Mundo for its niche in the literary pantheon because what is good, what is exquisite if I may use that old-fashioned word, what is essential in the sketch although it cannot save it is that shift of voice and person that floats through the eighty some pages. Use of such literary devices has not been unheard of but they are rarely used now especially in a short piece where it is hard enough to develop a character and a narrative never mind switching up voice and person. Yet the piece would disastrously fall apart if there were no such shifts. Mr. Jackman in an interview with Jerry Gomes of radio station WMEX mentioned that he had originally tried to tell this story strictly from the vantage point of the main character Josh’s experience in the 1980s when he went to Jack K.s cabin in the canyon at Todo el Mundo to dry out from his rather severe addiction to cocaine, nose candy he called it then, although there are a plethora of names out in the junkie world for it that the reader may be more familiar with. He told Mr. Gomes that he was unsuccessful in that effort since he did not have the advantage of writing the sketch under the influence of drugs and that his remembrances of the events back then needed to be fortified by the introduction of Josh’s (his) friend Sam Lowell’s recollections.

At first reading I thought that having Sam introduce the drug problem, put the problem in the distant past only to be dragged up again in later years after they had reconnected with each other would work. When I started reading though, once I got past the first pages where Sam set the story up, basically from the point where Josh in all his desperate struggles to get through from one day to the next takes over the story line there is a sense of incompleteness, a falling off of the power of the sketch to convey that sense of isolation, physical, mental, and social that was driving Josh crazy back then and which made it a very close thing that he would ever survive the experience if Sam had not set us up for what was to  follow. Although I was glad that Josh in the end grabbed that rainy day ride out of the canyon I felt empty of any emotion that he did not get the “cure” on that trip. Or that thirty years later Mr. Jackman thought he would be able to stir us about the experience. Too bad.          

Legend-Slayer Will Bradley Rides Yet Again-Pulls The Hammer Down On The Action Junkies Of The So-Called "Justice League"-Drops Batman, Flash-Aqua-man, Wonder Woman and Assorted Other Dopes Down Into The Abyss (2017)- A Film Review, Of Sorts

By Will Bradley

No question with this third straight debunking of overblown, fake or undeserved so-called legends assignments I have now found my niche in this business. (see the “reviews” of Man of the West the laying bare of the legend of stone-cold killer Link Jones and The Man In The Iron Mask the ripping asunder of the legend of one D’ Artagnan and his three drunken comrades of the Musketeer outfit that protected “sainted” Louis XIV for the other two anchors of this trifecta) Now have, since he gave me the assignments and go ahead in the first place the confidence of site manager Greg Green in case of any blowback. In case in our wicked divide age and society any diehard aficionados of the various legends that I have, documents and other proof in hand left totally deflated (with the  one sour exception of so-called aviation pioneer Johnny Cielo which has baffled me no end and which will be analyzed below since finishing this nefarious Justice League gang will be short work) decide that they have to do bodily harm of some sort to the messenger, to me and those who are starting to cohere around me in this on-going crusade against fakers from every age.

So, generally, I am feeling very well now that I will have covered the old-time legends that haunted a lot of the generation of ’68 dreams as kids, according to Si Lannon. Although for the life of me a couple of very wide generations removed from those dope-addled bastards who are crying to the high heavens for Greg to move the operation back to Boston so they can suck up all the dope in the world, or what is available now that Massachusetts has weed up the ying-yang, I don’t know why. Nor do I know why one of the older writers, Si, Sam, Seth, couldn’t move away from the bong long enough to have taken a stab at breaking down the encrusted press agent, publicity house bull built up around genuine bad guys like Sherlock Holmes and his dear friend Doc, Robert Locklear aka Robin Hood, Old West stone- cold killer Link Jones and the others I have knocked for a loop. (By the way I am not claiming I have dented, not yet anyway,  the ancient Greek and Roman bastards who had serious guys like Homer, Ovid, Virgil running their press operations but I am working on that as I write the problem, a big one, is that the documents have either blown away with the wind or are inconclusive so al we have going is to break down the Homer-Ovid-Virgil press agent noise not as easy as it sounds.) Maybe since it required no heavy lifting but merely a sharp pen some newer ones. Given their total default I am here to top off in this latest trifecta of assignments Greg threw my way a modern, very modern set to debunk the silly costume characters who call themselves, self-described is I guess the best way to put it as the Justice League made up of junkies and con artists, with a sleigh of hand artist thrown in.    

Maybe I am making too much of it, certainly some fellow reviewers have thrown a jaded eye my way, but these successes in waking people up to what in the end is basically not matter what time period some press agent, some publicity maven’s free fall fantasy about whoever those pros were being well-paid to hype. Still it is nice to be able to take credit for putting a bastard like Robin Hood down, crack Don Juan’s totally fabricated exploits with the ladies, ditto one Johnny Casavova, turned around slave-trade Captain Blood on his heels, blasted cheapjack humdrum PI Sherlock Holmes or whatever name he is using these days and his dear friend Watson, Wadkins, or whatever he finally decided his name was and took down Old West legend Link Jones without a struggle.

Still, and I have had fellow reviewer eyes gaze up when I even mention this name these days, the legend of Johnny Cielo which I fully admit I have not been able to put the slightest dent into which has me concerned not only about people’s ability to swallow alternate facts completely but since Johnny’s case is relatively new makes me wonder about how I will do against the Justice League mystique which has had a massive build-up by their handlers. Bear with me a bit as I think out loud about that bastard Cielo who has some pretty ardent if weird devotees. The latest insult to anybody’s intelligence is the Friends of Johnny Cielo fan club I guess you would call it have rounded up some campesino, some peasant from the foothills of the Sierra Madre who claims that as a young man, a boy he remembers seeing a Beechcraft plane flying low overhead going toward the higher elevations where Fidel and the hermanos (and hermanas, lo siento for failing to mention them in  a previous review). As far as any records that I know of Johnny Cielo never piloted a Beechcraft only Piper Clubs like on that last fateful trip taking those well-heeled passengers to Naples from Key West down in Florida so unless they have something more than some vague recollections of a besotted peasant who some sixty years later suddenly comes up with this cock and bull story I rest my case for now. Although not breaking this silly legend still bothers the hell out of me.         

But forward. The last person, as least in the West, Western Civilization, as far as I knew to come back from the dead was Jesus Christ. And even in his case there was, is still plenty of controversy around the event witnessed only by his mother, some whore and a few drunken Roman soldiers who by most estimates were sleeping off hangovers when this resurrection supposedly occurred. So one really has to suspend disbelief when a guy named Superman, a caped crusader he calls himself when he is not on his day job as a reporter for some high circulation sensation rag in a place called Gotham, aka Metropolis which to my mind, and that of others I have talked to looks a lot like New York City comes back from the dead to do battle with a bunch of other freaks against an old man, a guy named Steppenwolf (not to be confused with the guy in a book by Herman Hesse or a 1960s rock group who played loud rock and roll around themes like denigrating the pusher man and desperately seeking parental help against the monster, against the government’s ’t all-out war against the Vietnamese and in the end against its own young). 

Five, count them five, cretins, five so-called bad asses, not including the previously mentioned Superman, the criminally insane and probable sexual predator Batman, some nerd on speed named Flash, a guy called Cyborg who was some kind of bionic man, a woman named Wonder Woman who had some great moves and lets leave it at that and a totally worthless geek named Aqua-man get in line to beat up on this poor old man, this Steppenwolf, who is looking for what must have been the fountain of youth, something like that and got nothing but grief for his efforts. Of course as usual with guys and here for the first time I get to take down a legendary woman they all have aliases, all trying to duck the law when all is said and down so we will just use their monikers and leave it at that. The story, at least the story on the police blotter when they were rounded up for harassing an old geezer was that he, “Step” was working for some criminal syndicate and so they had to snuff him out to purify the Earthian air. Yeah, right. Old Step though should be filing an age discrimination suit any day now and if there is any justice in this wicked old world he, or his estate, should win against this vicious mob of geeks and losers. Should send this unworthy tribe back to red state Kansas (Superman), the bat cave and dear Alfred (Batman), deep dark Amazon, mother of the mother of rivers (Wonder Woman), college (Flash), some hospital for a tune-up (Cy Borg) and that flaming disaster Aqua-man to downtown Atlantis where they belong not out here in the streets where things happen, happen when you don’t expect them to.     

Legend-Slayer Will Bradley Rides Yet Again-Don’t Believe All That Alexandre Dumas Nonsense About “One For All, All For One”- Leonardo DeCaprio, Jeremy Iron, Gerard Depardieu and Gabriel Byrne’s “The Man In The Iron Mask” (1998)- A Film Review, Of Sorts

By Will Bradley

Recently I started back on my now seemingly etched in stone niche of slaying undeserved, false or overblown legends like Robin Hood, Don Juan, early aviator Johnny Cielo and what I consider my greatest achievement, taking down the stinking rank Old West’s desperado bank robber and stone-cold killer Link Jones,  although it still remains to be seen if I can break the spell that the Old West has on the American imagination. I have admitted that I while I have made significant inroads into breaking my following, breaking the general public a little too from the responses our site manager has received, from most of these fakes I have been stalled, have been bush-whacked to use a term I used in the Link Jones piece in the case of Johnny Cielo, the so-called early aviation innovator and test pilot, whose spell still lingers.

The Cielo legend still lingers over the crowd that believe that Johnny hustled guns and supplies to Fidel and his band of hermanos in the hills of Cuba when it counted in the late 1950s and refuse to believe that he was nothing but a two-bit bush pilot and tourist guide. Maybe it is because the demographic of this publication, the now hallowed (and fading) generation of ’68 as Sam Lowell calls his brethren cut its teeth on Johnny’s legend linked together with their starry-eyed admiration for Fidel and Che in the old days watching according to that same ancient Sam Lowell on black and white television those guys riding into Havana on New Year’s Day, 1959. I am far too young to have even heard of Johnny Cielo until a free-lance reporter friend of mine who having been stood up by some people on another story found some guy who knew Johnny in Key West and bought his bull hook, line and sinker. Took the Johnny exploits whole based on some rummy’s DTs story that had so many holes in it that I almost didn’t have to do research on it. For example, I was able to grab the still extant copy of Johnny’s manifest on his last flight which showed him attempting to fly well-heeled passengers from Key West to Naples in Florida before the plane, a Piper Club, fell down in the Gulf of Mexico). Case closed if not the legend.

Now I have I found addition information that part of my problem for not making any inroads in the Cielo legend is that the rummy, Billy Bradley, had been interviewed by Mike Thomas, yes, that Mike Thomas who has interviewed everybody who is anybody somehow read either my reporter friend’s fluff piece on Johnny or my slash and burn on the Cielo legend and decided to investigate (or really have his people do the legwork as far I know he hasn’t done any such work for years since his ratings went from zero to a million when he exposed the famous actor Lenny Grove as a two-bit ex-convict who hustled his ass on the street to make his coffee and cakes before he hit Hollywood ). The problem for me is that letting that rummy spout his bull on the Mike Thomas Show put things up in the air, put “may or maybe not” in play rather than what really happened with documentary proof. It would not be the first time such things have obscured the truth.   

I will keep at it although I have been asked by more than one colleague why I am so intent, other than that holding on to that niche which in this cutthroat business of “you are only as good as your last piece” is not unimportant as even they recognize, on breaking myths, legends and alternative facts. Fortunately, I have another assignment today busting up an old legend that also has refused to die, the baloney about the three musketeers and their supposed exploits and their admittedly clever slogan “one for all, all for one.” Their press agent or publicity people hit pay-dirt on that gem making it that much harder to legend-bust.  That “supposed exploits ” though should alert the reader to more revelations about this crowd of fakers although as usual with this business some people will gladly keep to their silly illusions and believe the legends until the bitter end.    

This musketeer stuff is beautiful, is tailor-made to be busted. I don’t know about the reader but in high school we were required to read this Dumas stuff, The Man In The Iron Mask stuff although it had a different name and was not so unbelievable as the actual legend that has grown since that time. All the musketeers, all four, D’ Artangan (not his real name which would have conveyed the idea that he was some kind of noble, of the sword or of blood, but Jean Rous, a farmer's son in Brittany, plus three other drunks and rowdies, Artemis, Arthos, Porthos which were apparently their real names according to the records of what then was the Ministry of Interior, the cops, were sworn to serve the King of France, and not just any king in their time but the well-known autocrat Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King, philander, despot and grinder of the peasantry whose work kept him in over the top lavish luxury.  And for a long time this quaded (sic)brethren feasted off the crumbs from the king’s larder, his wine cellar mainly. This is the king, this is the crowd in a more democratic time we are supposed to root for, supposed to pay homage to their stellar defense of king, country and wine cellar with a few tavern wenches and off-hand ladies-in-waiting thrown in. Give me a break.   

Apparently though the three underling musketeers had a falling out with Lou, had been cut off from access to the wine cellar and milady’s palace bedrooms and so began the long process of staging something like a palace revolt against the monarch under a banner of “free wine, free wenches” although they masked this in some plebeian “give alms to the people and be nice.” Usual plot, and usual trick up to create that legend. That in this case “all for one, one for all,” which became the exclusive copyright of the three underlings when D’Artagnan decided to stick with the king for his own purposes. For as it turned out filial duties but more on that in a moment.

We all know what a bastard Louis XIV was, how his policies and appetites started the long train wreck that would wind up in the glorious French Revolution later in the next century. How could you possibly defend that bum of the month. That is where the iron mask deal comes in. According to legend Louis’ mother had twins one dying in childbirth leaving only bastard, bastard in more ways than one, ugly Lou. What these musketeers, Artois mainly, figured was to get a guy who looked like Lou and do a bait and switch. As it turned out Lou did have a brother Phil who looked enough like him to pass in the dark although they were not twins. Not satisfied that Phil would play along he found a guy from Brittany who was the spitting image of Lou and so after a little off-hand swash-buckling with Lou’s loyal personal guard the switch was made.

The kingdom prospered, or rather the king and his courtesans prospered, although the new Lou was as much a son of a bitch and as nasty as old Lou. The main thing is that the three musketeers took at the credit for the coup, D’Artangan stuck with the king almost to the end then realizing what a bastard Lou was switched sides. Here is the funny part, Lou was his son as it turned out since he has been going under the sheets with the Queen Mother back in the day and took a hard thrust to the heart for his majesty, his new his majesty, Phil, the rest of the guys had full access to the wine and women under the new monster. Yeah, one for all, all for one. Bullshit.      

Legend-Slayer Will Bradley Rides Again-Don’t Believe All That Dime-Store Zane Grey Nonsense About How The West (Western United States) Was Won-Gary Cooper’s “Man Of The West” (1958)- A Film Review, Of Sorts

By Will Bradley

I must admit that when I started out back in late 2016 feuding back and forth with fellow film reviewer Seth Garth over the overblown reputation of English private investigator or whatever he called himself back then Sherlock Holmes (since exposed as a master criminal who was responsible for half the crime in greater London in his time whose real name was Larry Lawrence, no relationship to our own Lance) that I would have never believed that I could gather a following in my lonely attempts to destroy, eliminate, banish or whatever word you like some pretty bad characters. Guys, and it has been mainly guys thus far, maybe reflecting his-story not her-story on the evil side of life in the past and elsewhere who must have had pretty good press agents, publicity guys, who wrote whatever drivel the hard-pressed populations would believe just to keep their guys in the limelight. Keep their reputations all bright and shiny when the reality was quite different.

I have already given the example of the shoddy Holmes, oh, Lawrence and his dear friend Doc Watson (I don’t want to get into that “gay” Homintern business that Seth tried to run by a candid world which didn’t buy his take for a minute after my expose about Larry and Doc’s serious criminal enterprises which helped deflate those bastards’ reputations forthwith). There has also been since I began my work a noticeable decline in the reputations of others I have exposed like cheapjack slave-driver, sorry tenant farmer, peasant, serf, yeoman-driver Robin Hood, besotted Don Juan (real name Jose Rios out of Aragon who gained his “fame” via some convent beauties’ depraved fantasies while held captive those unholy dungeons, impotent, yes impotent we now have some scientific evidence for what for years was mere speculation, imposter Casanova and the wicked chattel owner Captain Blood out of Jamaica slavery markets working night and day to expand the fucking empire.

Strangely the only one who I have not been able to bring down is the so-called legendary early aviator and aeronautic innovator Johnny Cielo who claimed his whole worthless life to have invented flight despite the fact that he was born in 1910 several years after the Wright Brother joined Icarus in the legendary category down at Kitty Hawk. Maybe it is because he is a more modern example of bloated reputation which people are more inclined to believe but if anything people I run into despite the reams of documents proving he was nothing but a bush pilot, never ran guns to Fidel and the hermanos in the old days, never knew Rita Hayworth either have elevated this heel to some kind of god or something rather than bum of the month. Despite my documentation, despite the manifest on that last flight telling the whole candid world, or even the non-candid world, that he was taking high-end passengers between Key West and Naples down in Florida and had perished in the Gulf of Mexico not in the Caribbean heading toward Cuba with a shipment of guns as the legend has it.  I will have to see who his press agent was, is. He or she should get a ton of money for their commissary at whatever prison they should wind up in.                   

After all that foreplay today we are going big again, going down and dirty with what in America is something like the holy of holies-the Old West, the Wild West when men, mostly men settled things with iron and plenty of slugs-bullets and whiskey. From Jesse James to the famed and underrated Johnny Young just before World War I which is really the last time you can talk about the Old West. You didn’t have to be Professor Turner over at Harvard to know that once you got to the Pacific your chances that the frontier was vanishing were pretty strong. Yeah from Jesse and Johnny and everybody in between these bums have gotten a free ride, have been made legends out of whole cloth. Got their respective legendary starts from some guy in New York writing dime-store novels from the comfort of his room at the Brown Hotel-in New York City. That in any case is how I was able to track down the legend of a guy named Link Jones who went by a million other names in his stealing, thieving murdering time like Dock Tobin, Billie Ellis, and I think Gary Cooper, stealing the rangy homespun actor’s name even before he had it although I couldn’t definitely confirm that last one.

This one defies belief, belief that an admitted stone-cold killer and robber like Link could throw sand in our eyes and go straight after a lifetime of crime, that should have set alarms off right there. (Admitted his transgressions to Jackie Jenkins, the famous, make that infamous New York World reporter who did more than his fair share of bulling us about these “men of the west” who downplayed the bloodthirsty part to make Link readership worthy) But see old Mister Grey, Louie Le Marr, Cormac McCormick, Larry Murphy and their ilk did their jobs well, sold a million copies of the bogus book, books really detailing the bush-whackers, tramps, bums and sociopaths who really populated the West back in the day all prettified and there you have it. Like I said without leaving Manhattan. Nice work if you could get it, right. Reality check: you had to have chewed up your chances in the East, had to have been on the run or had no other recourse to pick up stakes and head West to drought, famine, desperadoes, “injuns,” now indigenous peoples or Native American depending on where you are, coyotes, avalanches, sod-busting, range wars, grifters, water wars, coal dust, cannibals, train smoke and dreams, poison wells, buffalo stampedes, social diseases, do I have to explain that, drifters, con men and women and craven insects and tumbleweed.         

With all those strikes again success old Zane and his crowd really had their work cut out for them although since they were writing for city-slickers who were not heading west, not going to the aforementioned hazards except in books naturally the guy, here one Link Jones, had to be ramrod straight in the saddle, long and tall, with that “aw shucks” manner and slow-rolling drawl. Christ they cookie-cut these guys except maybe the real deal Sam Shepard who really was long and tall and slow-draw talking (not slow at shooting though as many a man found out). Sam could have been on the cover of old Professor Turner’s opus, could have shown rum brave Link Jones a thing or two.

Of course today a million sociologists, and maybe half a million psychiatrists, will defend Link, will say it was a dysfunctional homelife, no mother, a bastard of a “father” figure in Dock Tobin, whose real name after my research was Cobb, wanted in six states-dead or alive as was Link- and his natural sons, Jack and Slim, plus a couple of stray villains in the mix, who taught him every evil known to man, woman too. Bullshit. Link, at least according to legend which we will bust quickly below, broke loose one day, repented, went straight after serving some time in some purgatory town out in the prairie somewhere, got married, had kids. Nice story right. More Grey-like malarkey.     

Here is the legend in all its glory with my refutations. Link, supposedly “reformed” was sent on a mission from his Podunk town to go to Forth Worth down in Texas to get the town a schoolteacher and had enough money to pay the required year’s salary to get her to leave everything in a big city (for the time) to teach a bunch of wooden-headed kids out on the prairie. Reel them in. Christ Link couldn’t spell teacher never mind get one. Truth: he took the dough alright but spent it all in a couple of days in Dallas on some whore named Billie, Billie something, although the only one I was able to find who spent time with Link was a whore named Julie who in the end ran off with the last of his dough when he was running low after another blood-simple kill streak. Even better, with no dough and nothing better to do he just happens to borrow some dough from some grifter with a sad story and took a train ride to Fort Worth which just happened to get robbed by Dock Tobin, remember Cobb, and his boys. Just happens to take some Judy, Julie, some woman met on the rebound, there were almost as many desperate to leave the East as men who figured to make a killing selling themselves and then maybe see what happened when the dust settled, Billie if you like to the gang’s hiding place, just happens to “play along” with Dock to the rob the El Dorado Bank of their dreams and when that flushed down the toilet wastes the whole lot of them after they had ravished Julie, his woman.       

Believe all that at your peril. Real deal, Link masterminded the robbery, had planted himself on the train in order to get to Dock and his own worn-out dreams and only wasted the gang, wasted Dock and the boys because they had wasted his time on a freaking ghost town exploit. Had it planned he would take all the dough and was pissed off when Dock hadn’t done his homework on the real situation in El Dorado. Killed one cousin just for the hell of it. By the way all that reformed married and kids’ stuff was just a cover when women “took a shine to him” like this Julie. He might have begotten kids but he wasn’t claiming them, not supporting them. The real Link would finally face the hangman in Colorado after about six more cold-blooded murders and a dozen more bank and train robberies. Julie fell by the wayside some time before Link’s end taking what was left of his and was never heard from again probably went back to whoring in Denver when they became a big cattle stockyard. Women like her always landed on their feet. I hope to high hell that Link Jones doesn’t like Johnny Cielo prove to be “Teflon man” just because half the American populations is enthralled by Old West nostalgia bits and pieces.

When You Are A Jet You Are A Jet All The Way- The Centennial Of Composer- Conductor Leonard Bernstein’s Birthday-When The Acre Corner Boys Went Down And Dirty-In Memory Of Corner Boy Sergeant John “Johnny Blade” Rizzo, (Born North Adamsville, Massachusetts, 1946, Died, Central Highlands, South Vietnam, 1967)     

By Seth Garth

Recently in a quick acknowledgement of the centennial of American composer Leonard Bernstein’s birthday I mentioned that I don't know much about the man but I did know his breakthrough West Side Story and could relate to the turf warfare in the piece from my old corner boy days when we defended our turf just as fervently as any New York City kid.  Any Jet, any Shark.

The story has been told many times in this publication by me and others about growing up, particularly that high school coming of age corner boy scene that animated our lives, gave us a certain tribal identity, in the impoverished Acre section of working-class North Adamsville south of Boston but Josh Breslin has told me that the same fierce defenses applied in the Ocean View section of Olde Saco up in Maine, Ralph Morris the Tappan Street section of Troy in New York and Sam Eaton ditto down the Bog section of Carver also south of Boston. Mostly those youthful stories have been given a positive spin, or have been sweetened up for public consumption, but there was a dark side, a very dark side to much of what went on-and how we related to our poverty and other corner boy aggregates. 

Maybe the single best way to describe this dark side is to give the event that made the late Peter Paul Markin, the Scribe, take this corner boy stuff, this from hunger stuff to heart. Before he met most of us, except I think Sam Lowell whom he had known since elementary school when they would hustle the younger kids out of their milk money, the Scribe used to hang around a spot familiar to all of us-mainly to stay away from-Harry’s Variety Store since Harry had a great pin-ball machine there and a very cool ice-filled container of all kind of soft drinks. Being a kid and if you saw Scribe then you would know he was no threat to anybody, in the physical sense, to the guys who hung around Harry’s, that corner’s corner boys and so he was something like a mascot to them. Would run errand for them, and in turn they would give him some of their free games which they inevitably won since they were wizards at the game, knew how to sway the thing just right, especially when some young girlfriend was tucked in between his arms.

The funny thing is that this group, these guys were nothing like what Scribe and others would do and put together when their corner boy time came up at Tonio’s Pizza Parlor. These Harry’s guys were hoods, hoodlums, bad-ass motorcycle guys, guys who nobody, and according to Scribe nobody messed with. Their leader was one Harold, never called that under penalty of broken bones, “Red” Riley, a guy who lived near Scribe’s grandmother, another reason why he may have been taken on as a mascot, was the baddest of them all. Nobody challenged his authority, not and be able to tell anybody about it. The corners, the corners with corner boys, in the Acre in those days sprawled out to maybe half a dozen locations, all protected by their members. That was the rules and you lived or maybe died by them. One day Scribe saw what Red could do when somebody from another corner even came near Harry’s. This guy who Scribe swore did nothing except walk across the baseball field the other side of Harry’s. Somehow Red knew though that the guy was from another corner, a different turf. Without word one Red pulled out his whipsaw chain, went up to the guy and beat his mercilessly leaving him a lump on the ground. Somebody called the cops and they called an ambulance which took the guy away a bloody stump. Get this-the guy never finked on Red, hell, the cops who actually used Harry for his real purpose at the store to make book-to gamble on the horses-never even asked what happened. Asked if there were any witnesses. Nobody, not Scribe, nobody said word one with that bloody stump in their minds. So the Sharks and the Jets had nothing on the Irish bad boys around Harry’s.

Scribe, or really Frankie Riley who was the real leader of softer and younger Irish boys, mostly in high school where Frankie’s con artist, grifter ways were quickly recognized even by Scribe who couldn’t have organized his socks despite his brilliant plans and dreams, of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys once he told him the Red Riley story, always made sure to have a tough guy or two hanging around in case some assholes  wanted to rumble, to cut our turf. Enter one Johnny Blade, Johnny Rizzo really who was one of the few Italians allowed on the corner as a favor to Tonio who was Johnny’s uncle but really by his saving grace that his mother was Irish, a Doherty who had also grown up in the Acre. Johnny Blade, nobody ever said the Johnny without the blade even a couple of industrial arts teachers at school, the track they threw Johnny on, who heard about him early on. I hope I don’t need to explain how Johnny got the blade part but for those who might not be quite sure Acre boys at some point, maybe about puberty, sixth grade somewhere around there became fascinated with knives, jackknives at first which everybody had and the more dangerous ones, the kind Johnny carried around from early on-and used.

Johnny Blade maybe could have gone a different root, that Irish-Italian mix made an Acre girl’s dream and he could have if for no other reason that by force of will had whomever he wanted, some older girls too, college girls later so he had something. The thing is Johnny Blade loved his knife (knives really but only carried one at a time by law I think). Like I said Frankie, larcenous Frankie Riley, funny to say now, maybe, since he has been a very successful lawyer in Boston for many years, knew that Johnny Blade was just what we needed to defend our turf if trouble came. Naturally when a guy gets a tough guy reputation somebody is bound as if by osmosis to challenge him, test him. Usually the excuse would be looking at some girl, some “spoken for” girl the wrong way and the boyfriend had to assert his prerogative. This time, this time I speak of which shows not only Johnny’s usefulness but Frankie’s via Scribe’s wisdom to have a “hitman” on board, it was Mother Goose, a member of Red Riley’s corner boys, an older guy like Red and most of his boys, a twenty something although nobody said that then, who took umbrage ( I am being polite) that Cecilia Duggan had caught Johnny’s eye, or more probably she had glanced his way. Bad blood, bad blood no question. (By the way nobody knows why he was called Mother Goose except maybe he never had a mother because he was one tough and fierce looking guy who I would cross the street when I saw him approaching me.       

One dark, probably weekend night I forget now, Mother came strutting, or maybe lumbering is better, into our Tonio’s space not looking for pizza but Johnny. Called Johnny out, started talking the talk that tough guys talk and guys who want to be tough guys have to respond to. I think Johnny was in having pizza or listening to the already mentioned fabulous Tonio’s jukebox (placed there as we later learned by the local Mafia who controlled all that kind of action then, maybe now too for all I know) when he heard the clarion call. He went up to Mother said something like “let’s go out back” who knows but that sounds right. That back was the alleyway between building in the commercial section of the Acre, the area where Tonio’s was located, dark, dark as the dungeon. They went out back together, alone (frankly most of us, whether we admitted it or not, would have freaked out if we had to watch this hand to hand combat in person). Several minutes later Johnny Blade came out breathing heavily, sweating from his forehead and maybe a little peaked. All he said was “maybe somebody should call an ambulance.” Somebody, I think Tonio but don’t quote me on that, did call and the cops and ambulance came. Mother had been cut up badly, a few deep gashes although mostly arm and leg wounds, nothing life threatening. Mother, eyes looking right at Johnny Blade when asked by a cop who had done this horrible deed said he had not been able to identify his assailant. Followed the time-honored, time-worn code of not finking out, ratting out to the coppers. Funny the cops never asked anybody if they knew anything, saw anybody run since they also knew they would get the time-honored, time-worn didn’t see a fucking thing. Didn’t ask sweated Johnny Blade anything.

We expected some blow-back, serious blow-back when Red Riley found out what had happened to Mother and by whom, but he may have been in shock that anybody would waste one of his corner boys and that person must have been a mean mother, meaner than Mother indeed. Or maybe it was just “collateral damage,” another term not used then in the turf wars since Mother had chosen, wisely or not, to confront a corner boy on his own turf. A few years later Red Riley, motorcycle at the ready and motorcycle mama in tow, got wasted by some redneck cops down in some freaking White Hen store in North Carolina trying to rob the place.

Johnny Blade Postscript: After high school we went our various ways as usually happens, and Johnny Blade whether he finished high school or not I am not sure I know he had been kept back at least one year, went his way. The story goes around the old neighborhood that Johnny Blade almost killed a man, by knife of course, in Riverdale out west of Boston, got caught and was given “the choice.” The choice in those days given by a judge was a nickel in the state pen or go in the Army. Johnny Blade, Sergeant John Richard Rizzo, took the latter course and laid down his head in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam in 1967. He forever has his name etched on the Adamsville town memorial wall and down in that black granite-etched wall in Washington, D.C. Every time I go down there, I go to the wall and shed a tear for him (and Frank White). Thanks for defending your corner boys. RIP, Sergeant John Richard Rizzo, “Johnny Blade” (1946-1967)