Hank Miller hadn’t always done casual work down the street at the Lancaster County Farmer’s Market, nor had he always painted houses in the neighborhood. Hank had held a couple of real jobs since getting out of the Navy at the end of the war. But they all ended in a pattern. The people who employed Hank just didn’t seem to understand how things should be done, no matter how many times Hank tried to tell them. For a while he had been a washing machine repairman. His route could have been plotted by tracking the customer complaints that so often followed a visit by Hank. It wasn’t the work. Hank could do the work well enough. He was mechanically gifted, a natural tinkerer. It was more a combination of an attitude and of Hank always having a lot to say. Usually things that people really didn’t want to hear.
My mother dismissed Hank as an “odd duck,” a “strange bird,” but harmless. Even though Hank had fifteen years on me, he tended to be out on the street hanging out with the kids. Despite a contrary disposition, Hank received the deference accorded to someone in a position to bestow goodies. Hank had a car. If you could manage not to annoy Hank, you might be included in the group that would be invited to ride up to Melrose Country Club to sled on the hills. Or you might be among those taken on a run to Bauer’s Ice Cream Parlor up on Rising Sun Avenue in Lawndale. Hank’s car was in keeping with its owner, a 1939 Plymouth coupe, festooned with reflectors and little yellow lights. The lights ran along both running boards, down the seams of the hood and trunk, and outlined the car’s roofline.
Over the course of the summer of 1946, Hank found Jesus. His mother attributed the intensity of Hank’s sudden evangelical zeal to staying up too late at night listening to the radio and smoking cigarettes, neither of which met her approval. In a time and place where churchgoing was more a matter of group identification than of strongly held convictions, Hank’s new enthusiasms taxed the forbearance of his neighbors. Mr. Farr, the Jewish debit insurance man, who came door-to-door collecting the thirty-five to fifty cents a week industrial insurance premiums, learned to plan in advance his escapes when stopping at the Miller house. Hank would be waiting for him armed and ready to win another soul for Christ. Hank of course remained Hank, and soon after joining the Bible Baptist Chapel that met in a storefront on Rising Sun Avenue, he felt it his duty to straighten out the pastor and the elders on what he felt were their incorrect interpretations of the scriptures. Following the schism, the only remaining evidence of Hank’s days as a soldier of the cross was a sticker on the rear window of the ‘39 Plymouth announcing that “Jesus Is Coming – Perhaps Today.”
Trumping the car’s colored lights and the Jesus sticker were the set of horn effects Hank had installed and loved to use. They included a wolf whistle and an “oogah” klaxon. Even at eleven or twelve years old, I found it embarrassing. But the alternative was being left behind.
My relationship with Hank took a serious cultivating turn when he bought a used Whizzer motorbike. I wanted to ride that motorbike more than I ever wanted to do anything up that point in my life. Sex was still lying unknown over the horizon. I began going out of my way to engage Hank in conversation, to listen attentively to what he had told them down at the shop, to how he had set some woman straight when she tried to tell him where the washing machine hoses should go. Like a Shakespearian villain, I plotted to maneuver Hank into allowing me to take out the Whizzer. I think I was twelve at the time and according to the law you had to be a licensed driver to operate a motorbike. It took some doing and some time, but one weekday afternoon, with Hank home between jobs, I finally got the go-ahead. His caveat was “don’t get caught.”
This was five years before “The Wild One” and eighteen years before “Easy Rider.” But my image of myself on that putt-putt motorbike anticipated both Brando and Peter Fonda. Unfortunately, the old motorbike conked out on Second Street up near the reservoir. I was at least twenty-five blocks from home and had no idea of how to restart the bike. The walk home pushing the now non-whizzing Whizzer was long and a lot of it was uphill. Hank was pissed that I was gone so long. My tale of bad fortune fell upon deaf ears, and I never again tried to get the use of the motorbike. Two years later when Hank bought an old prewar Harley, I didn’t even ask.
Living next door to where Hank lived with his widowed mother and their arthritic dog was the Myers family. Mr. Myers was a little guy with a belligerent manner. The “Missus” had about four inches and at least seventy-five pounds on him. Their two daughters were also a study in contrasts. The older girl, Elly, was bright and good-natured, but she was plain and nearly as wide as she was tall. Her younger sister, Norma, was a different story. She was, considering the standards of our time and place, a knockout. My mother was less than amused if, when Norma went by, my father so much as raised an eyebrow.
Norma was tall and she was voluptuous. She was blonde and had the look of a Betty Grable knock-off. She was all soft curves and bulges and giggled whenever a grown man spoke to her. Hank Miller had a thing for Norma. He might as well have wished for the moon. I picked up on what was going on one day out on the street when one of the older kids, Matty Mac, made lewd note of Norma’s charms in Hank’s presence. Hank’s face twisted and changed colors. Oblivious, Matty was moving to the next level when Hank broke in and said, “you ever say anything like that again, and I’ll go right over to your house and tell your mother.” This from a twenty-three year old to a thirteen year old. Matty Mac never got another invitation to go anywhere in the 39’ Plymouth with the funny horns and yellow lights.
Things got very bad for Hank when Elly’s sailor boyfriend, Willie, brought home a Navy Yard buddy for Norma. Earl was everything Hank was not, and Norma went for him. He was tall, thin and slinky looking in his dress blue bell-bottoms. He had a sly, shifty look to him, a look that wasn’t helped in any way by the thin pencil mustache he affected. Together, he and Norma looked like characters from a low budget movie. Hank was devastated.
Probably out of desperation, Hank befriended Earl as he had earlier fallen in with Willie, Elly’s suitor. For a while, they were a fivesome, going to the movies as a group or going for rides, all jammed into Hank’s little coupe. The arrangement seemed to work until Norma announced that she wanted to learn how to drive. Since Hank was the only one with a car, since he wasn’t working, and had nothing else to do, he was the obvious choice for the job. What we didn’t realize then was that Hank would have done anything to remain in the proximity of Norma. With a transparent reluctance, he agreed that maybe, just maybe he might find his way clear to spending long periods of time alone with Norma in his car.
To Hank’s dismay, Norma was a quick study. After just a few sessions, she believed she was ready to go out to the Belmont Barracks and take her driving test. Hank wouldn’t hear of it. He began raising questionable, nit-picking criticisms of her performance behind the wheel. His instructions got more and more demanding. Norma came back from one of her driving lesson in tears. In his hopeless quest to keep Norma near, Hank tried to impose standards of driving perfection upon her beyond those required to qualify for the Indy Five Hundred. On a Saturday afternoon, at the corner of Fifth and Chew Streets, shoppers got an unexpected treat. A spectacular, but enraged blonde exited the driver’s side of a prewar Plymouth coupe to an accompaniment of horn and siren effects and shouted “you can take your driving lessons and your crappy car, and you can stick them up your ass.”
Earl either wasn’t aware or didn’t care, but on the day that he and Norma were married at Lindley Methodist, Hank came down with the flu that caused him to miss the ceremony and the reception. With a G. I. Mortgage, the newlyweds bought an unfinished house up in Bucks County, a place we’d only just begun to hear of, Levittown. One cold, dreary Sunday afternoon, I was a part of the group that rode up to Lower Bucks County in Hank’s car to inspect the progress of the construction. We walked on boards strung out over snow filled ditches to get to the house. Inside the unheated house, a beaming Earl and Norma with Elly and Willie at their side began pointing out all the modern features of the place. I was impressed by the idea that someone I knew was actually going to live in a single house. Hank didn’t have much to say, but all the way home down the Boulevard he went on about all the things that were wrong with those kinds of houses.
Tags: 1939 plymouth coupe, 1945-1955, bauer's ice cream parlor, belmont barracks, brando, bucks county, easy rider, gi mortgage, lancaster county framer's market, levittown, lindley methodist, memoir, olney, peter fonda, philadelphia, rising sun avenue, the wild one, whizzer motorbike
