NOTE January 20th 2023 - I know there are some broken links, as websites change and come and go, I'm working on that!

I don't know what it's like now, but as this old photo of Cleveland's Standard Oil refinery shows, in the early 60's there were large areas of refineries and chemical factories. Not yet old enough to understand the environmental damage being done, I used to love it when riding in the car with my parents to go shopping or visit a relative, we would pass these endless, desolate industrial landscapes: regions of dead grass and barren empty lots, rows of decaying tanks of unknown substances, corroded steel chimneys topped with thick, unnaturally coloured flames, indescribable weird odours, and I remember seeing one of the fires on the Cayahouga River, when clots of oily debris and nameless industrial effluvia floating on the severely polluted river caught fire. I thought it was amazing, like something from the science fiction films I loved!

I was a devoted fan of Ghoulardi, the host of Cleveland TV's Shock Theater which ran from 1963-1966, showing B (even Z) grade sci-fi and monster movies, but the best parts were his live, improvised interludes, brilliantly funny and shambolic. He would show and make funny comments about the things his viewers sent to him, and I sent him some drawings, and a badge he wore on his lab coat.

I gravitated towards all kinds of ghostly or weird movies, art, books, and especially loved The Outer Limits television show. Its visuals, music, and frequent suggestions of the awesome power of electricity and electrical devices made a huge impact on me, and the work I would eventually do. My mother loved spooky films and TV shows too, and I give her credit for having let me watch them from a very early age. My favourite science fiction films of the era often took place in lonely desert regions, to mention just a few: It Came From Outer Space, Brain From Planet Arous, Them!, The Monolith Monsters....and these also contributed to my fascination with deserts and geology.

With my older sister Rose I'd go on expeditions to abandoned houses in the neighborhood, explore the sewer systems, mysterious, green ravines, distant parks whose names we didn't know, we often felt as if we were on the verge of some unknown, unimagined discovery. I still feel that way!

A spring that frequently returns to my mind's eye which I last physically saw in the early 60's was at Squire's Castle, a park in a wooded area outside Cleveland. Along the path through the woods behind the castle was a small, curved stone wall built into the higher bank of earth on one side of the path. From a rustic stone spout ran a small rivulet of iron-rich water which stained the spout and the stones it fell upon a rusty orange. This little spring stirred in me such a sense of wonder and mystery I can hardly account for it. I'm hoping to find a photo. Meanwhile here are some of my own photos of springs and fountains.

The second of 9 children, no surprise: Catholic parents! Though I never believed the dogma and hated wasting Sunday mornings being dragged to church, which was a bizarre social game as far as I was concerned, what did appeal to me in a big way were the trappings and the mysterious side of it all: silence, candles, incense, statues and objects which were treated almost as living entities, hearing distant chant echoing through an empty church from some unseen chamber, and in those days they still said the mass in Latin and the priests kept their backs toward the congregation, which made it even more mysterious. It was a large, ornate cathedral there in Cleveland, with roaring pipe organ...all that was right up my street. I'm grateful for having had that Catholic upbringing because I am sure it gave me a special appreciation for certain kinds of spiritual weirdness and fantasy. I recall my old grandmother, who was practically Puritain, telling me, quite seriously, stories about people she’d known who were followed home at night by something leaping from treetop to treetop, which turned out to be the devil, or stories about demon-possessed houses where she saw holywater sizzle when splashed on the walls. She'd tell these stories again and again, I loved it...

In 1968 when I was 11 years old, the factory my father worked at in Cleveland was to be closed. The company had another factory in Watseka Illinois, a small (pop. 5000) rural community 120 miles south of Chicago, so we moved there. This small, quiet, dusty town in the cornfields suited me and my solitary nature, and I loved taking long rambling walks along the old train tracks and alleys, the lumberyard, the muddy, brown, Sugar Creek with its band of dark, mosquito-infested, poison ivy-rich woods on either side where I’d catch glimpses of raccoons, the dry, dusty old courthouse museum, where no one but me ever seemed to visit. I felt a haunting sense of time and suggestion of undefined mystery in all of it. One place I frequently explored was hidden in a patch of woods at the edge of town: the ruins of a factory which had burned down, or been otherwise partially demolished decades earler, twisted heaps of rusting machinery, the concrete floor buckled and cracked by trees and weeds. One day I followed the grassy storm drainage ditch which ran across the whole town, and when I got to the end where it simply opened out into endless fields, I felt a strange, immense sense of awe which the actual situation could not fully account for. This is still something I often feel with landscapes and gardens, even an old stone wall...

At home, I spent plenty of time in the basement, making Creepy Crawlers and playing with my chemistry sets, randomly mixing together and heating things in test tubes just to see what might happen. In those days one could still get amazingly well-equipped chemistry sets, meant for children. Mine came complete with dozens of chemicals, bunsen burner, alcohol lamp, 120 volt electric oven, test tubes and centrifuge, and one could buy every sort of chemical at the local pharmacy. I can hardly imagine it today! I remember a friend and I reading about how to make gunpowder, and decided to make some, just to see it burn and sizzle. Off to the pharmacy we went, two kids barely in our teens, asking for powdered charcoal, sulfur, iron filings and saltpeter. Smiling aimiably, the man behind the counter handed them to us, saying: "You boys gonna go make some gunpowder are ye?"

Another thing I liked about the church - I was an altar boy, and considered that as a performance, playing a character. I took it quite seriously from that angle, which made me very good at it, so I was a first choice for funeral masses, burials or weddings, which were often lengthy affairs...which meant I could be officially excused from school for the day to perform my sacred duties!

My older sister Rose had an acoustic guitar, which she played a bit (Red River Valley, Kumbaya...) and I began trying to learn how to play it too. Unlike the drums, it seemed impossible, but with a Mel Bay "Guitar Chords in Photo Diagrams" book, with pictures of where to place your fingers, I learned a few basic chords which quickly unlocked its secrets, and was soon playing along with records.

In 1971, I bought the Scholastic Books edition of The Shadow over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror by H.P. Lovecraft. That was my first taste of Lovecraft and I adored it from the first lines of the book's first story, The Colour Out of Space:

"West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight."

On the decidedly less literary side of weird fiction, I devoured just as avidly the garish horror comics of the day like Creepy and Eerie, though I often found the frequent werewolf-and-vampire fare in these a bit too "normal", and never missed an issue of the trashier, more cartoony and lurid ones like Horror and Weird. My parents however, did not approve of any of these items, and the first time I brought one home I was told to burn it! From then on I just kept them hidden in the attic, appropriately enough! I did recognise and appreciate the difference between the subtle and well-written tales of, say, M.R. James or Arthur Machen and these lurid, cheap comics, I enjoyed both.

In 1974, riffling through the LP racks at a local record shop , an album caught my attention: Unrest by Henry Cow. I'd never heard of them...a funny band name, odd cover pictures, and blurry photo of (presumably) the band inside, it all added up to “auto-buy” as they say today. I took it home and put it on - loved it from that first snare hit and piano chord. I didn’t find it "strange" or weird at all, in fact it felt very familiar, more like the definite confirmation that, yes, there ARE people who can and do make this kind of music. But how to meet them? They were so unimaginably far away from a teenager in Watseka Illinois they might as well have been on another planet!

Go to page 2