The Literacizing of Joe Cortese, Part I

The Literacizing of Joe Cortese, Part I

As far back as I remember, I’ve always had my nose buried in a book.  My Mom took me to the library every couple of weeks—the Benjamin Franklin School branch of the Binghamton public library system—where I’d browse for an hour or so, and check out six or seven books at a time.

Even early on, I was fascinated by military and naval history.  My library choices invariably included volumes on the Civil War, World War II, and military hardware (ships, planes, tanks).  I became expert in World War II arcana.  I was the only kid in the neighborhood who knew a P-38 Lightning from a P-38 Walther, or the Higgins PT boat from the Elco.  I picked so many of these volumes that Mom developed a rule: I had to include at least one book about nature or animals in every load I borrowed.  I’m still glad she did that; I’m pretty sure nature reading has helped my three kids all study biology in college.

So my two favorite books in the world, when I was about eight or nine, were Ring of Bright Water (about an otter taken in by a well-meaning couple—sort of a riverine Born Free), and The Big E (story of the WW II aircraft carrier USS Enterprise—recreated quite well last year by the History Channel’s Battle 360).  I remember panning the film version of the former, and reading the latter five or six times—something I rarely if ever do even today.  The librarian would dutifully ask if I was ready for The Big E again, much like a good bartender asking his best customer if “the usual” was his drink order.

The other books to which I kept returning were our family set of World Book Encyclopedia.  I’d pull out “W” to reread the entries on “World War I” (I didn’t read books on The Great War for some unremembered reason) and “Warship” (Dad was a destroyer man in WW II—maybe that’s my answer on the WW I point).  I’d always end up leafing through “Wallaby” and “Wombat” as well as “West Germany” and “Wisconsin.” 

Now, as the second oldest in a family of six, in the pre-family room/den/office era of the ‘60s, there were precious few places in the house to read quietly and uninterrupted by my younger siblings.  Number four was especially nettlesome: Christopher (six years younger) took great delight in disrupting anything and everything I tried to do.  Out of desperation, I adopted the downstairs half bath as my reading room.

It was perfect: well lit and ventilated, comfortable seating, and a locking door.  The exhaust fan even provided pink noise to drown out the whining of tykes Jennifer and Stacy.  Louder noises—like Chris pulling down a lamp or banging his head on the floor (I could never get him to do it on the stone foyer floor—he preferred the dining room oak) could be muted with a press of a lever.  I did my best reading in the downstairs john.  My Mom called me “Rosie” for the ring I had to have on my backside; my older sister whispered horrible imprecations through the keyhole.  I gave new meaning to the idiom “holed up.”

[When I went back to college in the early ‘90s, I read about the Japanese people’s national fixation on their bathrooms.  It was one of the few ways I could connect with that strange Oriental—sorry, Asian—culture.]

With all this extra reading on the home front, I was honed to a razor’s edge for reading at school.  My parents were ultraconservative Catholic Republicans (Mom still has Ronnie, John Paul, the new Pope and Dubya on the fridge—I have to resist decorating them every time I visit), so I was sent to a Catholic reform—I mean elementary—school.  It was the inner-city tough-love bastion of Jesus, Mary, and nuns with metal rulers and black leather gloves. 

These women were tough.  Sister Mary Aloysius (Al-a-WISH-us), a wizened sister who spoke with what I later realized was a brogue, once chased Kevin O’Connor around the room twice.  When she finally cornered him between the blackboard and the upright piano, Kevin put up his dukes.  The good nun reciprocated—with a stance just like John L. Sullivan’s (which I had seen in the S volume of World Book).  Kevin meekly—and very wisely—dropped his and returned to his seat.

Sister Mary Matthew (I just realized why they all took male saints’ names!) carried her black kid leather gloves on the playground, like a butch Gestapo agent in her long black habit and veil.  Once, when I was trying to rescue my brother Steve (two years younger) from a bully, I got a stinging blindside whack from the dreaded gloves.  “Let him fight his own battles!” she hissed in my swollen right ear.  Like I said, tough nuns.

They did teach me good handwriting with the mimeographed sheet of 45-degree lines under whatever I was writing at the time (sloping upward, of course—lefties were REFORMED into proper right-handed penmanship to discourage devils and demons—this is where the metal rulers came in handy).

Anyway, I was the best reader in the class.  This was easy in terms of the other boys—three of the six guys in eighth grade with me went to juvie later—but two of the girls in my graduating class became librarians.  The class babe, Theresa Vitello—a busty, luscious Italian girl for whom I discovered lust —dated an older black guy, starting in ninth grade.  I last saw her in his van beside his huge Afro, smiling cheerfully for reasons I could not at the time fathom.

We had a color-coded reading series.  By seventh grade, I had finished the highest color (whose hue I don’t remember; I’m color-blind, anyway), so I got to read whatever I wanted out of the school library.  I became the class tutor that year, as our teacher (Sister Mary Francesca—strange: a feminine saint’s name?) was also the principal, and was often called out of the room on some urgent matter or another.

[During one of these absences—just before our music class time (which the other guys abhorred as much as they craved the sacramental wine jug in the sacristy—I think that’s why several were altar boys), they decided on a preemptive strike on the upright.  (Symbolic, or what?)  I was ordered to act as lookout, which I did reluctantly but intelligently.  They performed “piano tuning” that reminded me of the wartime Bugs Bunny cartoon about gremlins and Army Air Force bombers.  Chalk, pencils, chewing gum, paper clips, a discarded lunch sack orange—if it fit into the wires or under the hammers, they put it in.  When the poor harried principal came in for music class, very strange noises emanated from the ex-piano.  She started sobbing and ran back out the door.  Sister Mary Francesca left the school—and her religious order—shortly thereafter.  Music literacy would have to wait.]

I started writing creatively in eighth grade.  It was the first year the nuns were allowed to liberalize their habits if they so desired.  They suddenly looked like…women!  They had legs!  Hair!  Hair on their legs!  (Actually, they were required to wear opaque stockings, and we didn’t look that closely; they were nuns, after all…)  It’s amazing what a two-inch lock of hair on a forehead can do to a face once framed in starched white and dense black.

My eighth grade teacher, Sister St. Peter, became a babe then.  She was young, pretty, very sweet, and very smart.  She got me interested in writing as a way to impress her.  It never seemed that I was quite able to do that, though.  She was too good a teacher to let my ego (or my as-yet-unidentified horniness) get in the way of learning.  I wrote some pretty snappy short stories; “The Blood Beast of Black Lake” was my favorite, in which the nerdy protagonist rescued the beautiful virgin (even though I didn’t understand what that meant) from the voracious creature.  Ahh, Sister St. Peter…

One of my favorite times of the St. Mary’s school day was silent reading time.  The nuns liked it, too, because in that era we all did read when they told us to (remember the rulers).  This was the day of amazing leaps in technology: we brought transistor radios with earphones to listen surreptitiously to the World Series—day games were great—and Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon—in miraculous, grainy black and white—during seventh grade.  But books were still books in 1970, and we actually read ‘em.

One afternoon, we were reading away, and my gut started rumbling.  Oh no.  A monstrous gas bubble worked its way to my south side.  The nun was out of the room, indulging in convent gossip for all we knew (who was faking novenas and so forth), so I couldn’t ask permission to go to the lavatory.  God, it was strong and insistent; it was determined to exit, stage down.  I quickly developed a plan: I lifted myself gently, slowly out of my desk, relaxing my sphincter ever so slightly…

BRRRAAPPPPHOOOMPH!!!  Ooops!  A titanic fart shattered the library-like silence.  Utterly surprised, I stood straight up with the force of the expulsion.  Without missing a beat, Richard Puglisi announced “And we have LIFTOFF!”

It was some time before we were able to settle down to reading again that day.

At about this time (after splashdown, of course), I discovered Twain, Saki, O.Henry, Thurber, and Wodehouse.  I started reading their stories voraciously, loving the twisted little worlds they constructed, and the sophisticated, gimped people with whom they populated them.  Jeeves, Bertie, Red Chief, and Thurber’s sardonic crabbiness shaped my sense of humor and observation of irony and foible. I also loved Jean Shepherd’s column in Car and Driver, rushing to that page in the new issue each month.  His gentle, teasing tone kept me reading and chuckling decades before A Christmas Story ever hit VHS. 

One of the more eccentric reading passions I had throughout these years was the Sears, Roebuck Christmas Wish Book.  I’d start watching for it in late September, checking the mail as soon as I got home from school every day.  When it came, it was mine.  I pored over the pages of boys’ toys intently, analyzing, memorizing, fantasizing about my Christmas morning; I spent hours prioritizing my desires for GI Joe (the original, historically accurate figures) and HO trains.  I’d scour the toy aisles of Grant’s, Woolworth, Stars and Grand Way stores for tangible versions of what I saw on the catalog’s pages.  When I found an especially rare GI Joe piece, I’d ramp up the plea bargaining with Mom.  It worked once in awhile—I’d have to fold laundry or vacuum more than usual, but it was usually worth it.

I discovered one angle to earn money—Mom would take me grocery shopping (a family with six kids needed two carts’ full anyway) and I could keep the money we got back from the coupons I clipped and used (in those days, the stores gave cash back for coupons redeemed).  My Wish Book browsing had prepared me well for the need to search every newspaper and magazine for the juiciest manufacturers’ promotions.  (Literacy takes many shapes.)  All was well until the day I topped twenty dollars in rebates; I think Mom may still have some of the bizarre products I tucked into my cart so I could cash in on them. 

Fast forward for a moment: In the late ‘80s, I started to take my daughter toy shopping.  I’d always cruise through the boys’ toys aisles out of self-interest and the need to see colors other than purple and pink.  It struck me that there were no warplanes, warships, or military weapon toys at all; I never saw olive drab or battleship grey, and I missed them.  On one shopping excursion, though, after Desert Storm had begun, we turned the corner into the aisle where we usually saw construction vehicles and toy power tools.  Every toy was sand tan.  I felt I had come home; there were F-14, -15, -16, and -18 toys in several scales (as well as the stealth bomber), M-1 Abrams tanks, and bags of plastic soldiers.  M-16s and army helmets abounded.  (Typically, there wasn’t an AK-47 to be seen; we always wanted our kids to emulate our soldiers and airmen). 

This experience led me toward my master’s thesis project: analyzing war toys and girls’ toys in the Sears Christmas catalog from its inception in 1933 until the 1968 edition—the year of the Tet offensive in Vietnam.  I found an astounding correlation between world events and the toys Sears chose to offer.  For example, the Depression-era books would typically have two or three war toys—a World War I tank, a brightly colored Army Air Corps biplane (a trainer, of course), and (in 1939) a coastal defense fort play set.  For girls, the big toy was the baby doll that cried when it was hungry (and only you could soothe it with a bottle and a hug!).

As war clouds gathered on our horizon, so did the war toys; 1940’s Wish Book offered a torpedo-firing submarine (not a U-boat!), and in ’43 and ’44, you couldn’t find any boys’ toys unrelated to the war.  The 1945 book had no war toys (one red civilian Jeep was the closest to one), and several (for the first time ever) bride and bridesmaid dolls.  As one would probably expect, the next few years faithfully mirrored the Baby Boom with a wide variety of infant dolls; the early Fifties even had “baby brother” dolls that could wear the hand-me-downs from dolls brought home earlier!

The most amazing change came in the 1968 book.  The only military toys were frogman GI Joe, astronaut GI Joe, and his Mercury space capsule.  It was patently obvious that Vietnam had turned the nation away from glamorizing warfare.  Like all successful merchandisers—and network news shows—Sears didn’t blaze trails or ride the cutting edge of consumer desires, they followed the majority.  With this project, my current passion for commercial and economic literacy came into full bloom.

My love of humor and comedy (I think they’re different, but I haven’t bothered yet to figure out exactly how) also led me to Woody Allen, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers.  The combination of wordplay, timing, and slapstick in their movies mesmerized me, and still does today.  I imitated Groucho’s and W.C.’s puns and putdowns, gaped at Allen’s blasphemies in Bananas (the cigarette commercial at the communion rail), and learned to ignore the musical numbers in A Night at the Opera and Cocoanuts.  The joke was what I lived for.  I learned to channel Groucho’s schtick; I’d play him at Halloween for years.  I could get away with saying damn near anything to damn near anybody clad in a greasepaint moustache, eyebrows, and a tux.  Because of those great evenings in character, I now understand Method acting very, very well; I was Groucho Marx. 

This discourse has led me to understand another form of literacy: comedic literacy.  I’ve often read (and remembered firsthand) that comedy is the hardest filmmaking to pull off successfully; the jokes have to be paced briskly and they have to work.  Humor in writing of any medium (gee—maybe I’m beginning to understand the difference…) is a matter of demographics as well as pace and what I’ll call “customer accessibility.”  The reader/listener/viewer has to not only understand the jokes, she has to want to understand them, and feel at ease with the persona of the comic.

An example: as a restaurant manager (in my first career), I had to mingle with my patrons at the bar and the tables.  Most were regulars, and some were very proper, so I could exercise a good deal of familiarity with most of them as long as I was careful.  I also had no desire for any kind of dalliances with our female patrons, so I was sure to maintain a professional distance in that regard. 

When I curled my hair, applied moustache and eyebrows, and donned my Groucho tux, though, I could say anything—insulting, lewd, ridiculous, provocative, outrageous—to virtually any of them.  Even the staid, wealthy funeral home magnate and his wife (a perfect Margaret Dumont to my character, if much closer to the crypt) would laugh at my insults and barbs.  My customers knew what they were going to get from Joe (warmth, good cheer, gentle humor, camaraderie) and Groucho, even if both were the same man.  When they saw Groucho, they expected to be insulted, tweaked, and flirted with in outrageous ways.  And they were.  I got a lot of aggressions out in a very healthy way on Halloween nights at the restaurant.

As a high school teacher, I experience this same dynamic every day.  As one may have gathered, humor is pretty central to who I am and what I do.  [If the reader has not picked this up from the previous pages, please read something else…now.]  If my students are in a light or relaxed mood, they’re far more prone to laugh at my banter than if they’re surly, tense, or nervous.  When they’re in the latter frame, I have to bring them along gently; if the former, I can go over the top rapidly and they’re right with me.  I have to gauge whether to play the warm-up act or the headliner very quickly.  And some days, I’m playing Dubuque no matter what I do.

Okay, back to my teenage years. 
The Literacizing of Joe Cortese, Part II
SVWP
Literacy Autobiography

My first day at Binghamton Catholic Central High School was a completely traumatic experience.  One may ask why, as I had spent the prior nine school years in a parochial school.  Well, Saint Mary’s had about 120 kids in eight grades.  Catholic Central had about 210 in each of four.  I didn’t know that many children lived in the entire city of Binghamton, let alone attend one school.  And the only kids from my school who had gone on to the “city on the hill” were two girls who, I’m sure, became either nuns or spinsters.

So I was alone amidst a thousand other teens.  I had no choice but to become more literate in as many ways as I could find.