MEMORIES OF OSCAR AMERINGER

...Saving democracy was such a fatiguing job that when Number Two got home o'nights he just sat down and took off his shoes and curled up with a good detective story or read over the volumes of the Dies Committee reports—"which, as examples of fiction — written in its most imaginative flight, can't be beat," as Oscar remarked in conclusion...

...When he spoke at the next forum some of the crowd stood on the stairs to hear him, so jammed was the assembly hall...

...I have never known a man as essentially lovable and good—all the way through good in the true sense of that much abused word—as my comrade and friend, and yours, Oscar Ameringer...

...Number Two fumbled around at this point, and said he was sorry but he didn't have a list of names with him...

...We had at the time, and I hear he's still infecting those parts, a flannel-mouthed Congressman who was Number Two on the Dies Committee...

...IN THE FALL of 1939 Oscar Ameringer came to visit us in the little town of Radburn, N. J., toting with him the bulk of his manuscript for his autobiography, if You Don't Weaken...

...Oscar then asked Number Two for a list of the Reds who were holding down "key positions" in the government...

...Oscar mentioned Marx, Veblen, Beard, Parrington, etc...

...I would study this word from all angles, hold the paper sideways and upside down as one used to study a Cubist painting, and finally, completely baffled, take it in to Oscar's room where, stripped to his undershirt, pants, and shoes, he would sit, muttering and groaning at the writing table...

...Great," I would say hurriedly and truthfully, "but, boss, what in blazes is this word...

...Oscar's Bucolic Bewilderment Act Whereupon Oscar rose, puffing at his pipe and looking the very picture of bucolic bewilderment, to tell the speaker that he (Oscar) was a simple soul from Oklahoma who, thinking that free speech was a pretty good American institution, had sent a few dollars to the American Civil Liberties Union...

...Oscar's writing was emphatically sui generis...

...Number Two, not knowing that his audience was a keen group who knew very well the exact time of day, gave one of his infant-class, Red-baiting speeches, winding up by announcing that "hundreds of Com-moonists" were in "key positions" in the government...

...Why don't you look it up in the dictionary...

...He assured Oscar that one of the functions of the Dies Committee was to •protect just such innocents as Oscar from the machinations and conspira-tional shenanigans of the Reds...

...I have known many people of fame and prominence and front page status in my time...

...To the accompaniment of suppressed snickers from the audience, Number Two walked open-mouthed into the trap...

...Why don't you go and look in that big book over there and not bother a poor, ignorant proletarian like me who never had no education nohow—" "Gosh darn, Oscar, how can I look up the word if you don't know what it begins with...

...Bulk is right...

...Technically, this would be a job in a publishing house for those specialists who go over an author's work in manuscript form to get it ready for the printer...

...You fix up the spelling and sort of smooth out the rough spots and I will go on writing until up to now...

...It looks like 'p-e-n' something...

...He would then proceed to read aloud, with wide flourishings of the hands and much puckering of the brow...

...Although Freda, his wife, had typed the first part of it, he had with him page after yellow page of penciled copy written in German script with long "esses" and funny little "r's" and words that went off into utterly illegible curleycues...

...Soon he was playing the flute in a quartet of music-lovers who went around to the homes of a few non-commuting souls making sweet sounds...

...And yet so disarming was the man's natural charm, so contagious his outgoing gift of a great love for anything human, that Oscar hadn't been with us for a fortnight before he had captured the town, brief cases, steel-rimmed glasses, baby carriages, and all...

...what he had written that morning...

...He Captured The Town And so on into the late afternoon, when we would saunter out into the little town to watch the commuters coming off the 5:45 from New York, the drab company of brief case carriers, regimented "junior executives," bond salesmen, bank clerks, walking alike, briskly and importantly, talking alike, thinking alike — a small cross-section of commuting middle-class America as far from Oscar's rank and file, grass roots, raw-boned America as could be imagined...

...We Will Miss That Sweetness' All hands then adjourned to our house to hear Oscar's magnificent yarns of pioneering days all across his many Americas...

...How we will miss that sweetness, in the bitter days ahead...

...Then the young people had him for an evening and wouldn't let him go for hours...

...Now, dearie," beamed Oscar, "we are going to finish the darned thing by Christmas...

...But—what does it begin with, Oscar...

...You are a college man...

...Then Oscar went to the kill by asking Flannel-mouth what he knew about some books that Oscar had been reading on his presumably remote farm in the wild Southwest...

...And he sent back home for his oil paints, planning to do a portrait, in the thoroughly workmanlike style which he had from his days as a Munich art student, of my little daughter, Ann, who together with my youngster Mickey adored the ground he walked on, as what children did not...

...And as for spelling . . . Oscar And Coleman At Work We would come to some utterly fantastic looking combination of syllables in the middle of a paragraph...

...How widely and how deeply the interests, the warm, human interests, of that great man ranged...

...I mean so far as the actual handwriting went...

...You went to the great and glorious institution of learning presided over by that great and glorious scholar and gentleman of parts, Nicholas Ridiculous Butler...

...Number Two, at any rate, was scheduled to speak one Sunday night at the forum of the church in Radburn, an intellectual and spiritual oasis in the surrounding reactionary desert that is North Jersey...

...Set him down anywhere on the face of God's earth and he would bring out of his environment, no matter how alien it might seem, the essence of all that was wise and good and beautiful in it...

...Outside of a Cherokee Indian, who was for years foreman of the composing room of Oscar's paper, Carl Leathwood, long Oscar's chief editorial assistant, Freda, and myself, no one could decipher, save with the closest and most painful scrutiny, the strange compound of English, German, and Oklahoman which Oscar sweated out of his creative soul...

...Ten days later he sent a list headed by the name of Maxwell Bodenheim, the professional Greenwich Village Villon, who has written some good poetry and a novel with the unforgettable title, Naked on Rollerskates, but who knows as much about politics as a canary bird knows about technocracy...

...But, of course, in Oscar's case it was by no means as easy as all that...

...He would sigh deeply, shake his head and then, looking like a guilty little boy, murmur apologetically: "I haven't got the faintest idea what this here word is...

...Now the speaker had just said that the Union was no more than a front for "Commoonists" bent on overthrowing the government, and Oscar wondered if he had been giving aid and comfort to subversive movements...

...At my entrance, he would stop, wheel around in his chair, pull his gold-rimmed glasses down on his nose, and say: "How's this, dearie...

...No, Number Two wasn't much of a reader...

...Finally he promised to send Oscar a list of 10 card-carrying members of the C. P. in "key positions...