Our Great White Winter

Brother Sam and I were footloose through the last years of the 60s, except we were becoming settled, in Kansas City, in 1969. We rented a home in a boarding house and got jobs and an auto. He drove a delivery car. I worked at a plant that provided caustics for soaps and the like. As it settled into winter, we had lots of ice and some snow. I recall one day watching a thermometer go to minus eight. More than once, my feet skied out from under me and my butt slammed into the sidewalk.

After work, we two introverts would go home, and play records, into the evening. As one unhappy resident put it, walking past our door, "Clang, clang, clang." We had just discovered Leonard Cohen and we had Beatles, Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Donovan and the Band, and The Fugs. Sam discovered James Taylor. He loved Sweet Baby James. I never liked Taylor's delivery and ignored him, except later, when he sang Fire and Rain.

I had recently been in New York City and DC, to participate in civil rights and antiwar protests. I avidly bought the LA Free Press and other anti-establishment publications and collected R Crumb comics. R Cobb had some fantastic editorial cartoons in the LA Free Press.

Lately I had been staring at blank spiral notebook pages, yearning to write. Finally, Sam said to me, "Write a story about Wild Wormwood." Inspired, I began to turn out daily stories, all instigated by Sam. "Write about Nathan Warlock." And so on. Then we began to collaborate on a magazine, which never materialized.

This period I have called Our Great White Winter, because, in the ice and snow of Kansas City, we were inside, warm, and the artistic ferment seemed wrapped in a pure, white, secure, blanket. And the seeds were planted for the future.