Clyde Strikes Back: 1963-64

By T.R. St. George

This is the sixth in a series of nine satiric, comedic novels (The Eddie Devlin Compendium) that follow a gaggle of characters, Edward Temperance Devlin foremost among them, from the Stock Market Crash of 29 though the Great Depression, World War II, the post-war years, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, etc. to the Millennium and beyond. With illustrations by the author.

Books:

Flacks (1973)
Bringing Chesty Home (1948)
Clyde Strikes Back (1963-64)
Deadlines (1984-85)
Old Tim's Estate (1929-35)
Replevy for a Flute (1956)
The Bloody Wet (1943-44)
The Survivors (1999-2000)
Wildcat Strike (1939)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 23, 2002
• ISBN: 9781465334374

T.R. St. George

T.R. St. George spent 39 months in the Southwest Pacific in World War II, by turn a private and private first class in an Infantry reconnaissance platoon, a corporal and half the staff of a division newspaper and, eventually a sergeant, a reporter for YANK, the weekly Army magazine published around the world.

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Copyright © 2002 by T.R. ST. George.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

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FOR LISA

A tight-fisted bunch, the baby boomers and their immediate predecessors. The ten schools’ contributions are a big disappointment. Counted three times, they total a lousy $122.31 in nickels, dimes, pennies, a few quarters and two $1 bills. Not counting numerous sticky wads of chewed bubblegum, pinball slugs, pencil stubs, paperclips, rubber bands, pizza shards (some of which bear toothmarks), two dirty postcards torn in half, a dozen buttons of unknown origin, Babe Ruth and Nut Goodie candy bar wrappers, what appears to be part of somebody’s homework, several crumpled notes suggesting rendezvous addressed to Peggy, Bitsie, Gina. Etc.

This is the sixth in a series of satiric novels that follow a gaggle of characters, Edward T. Devlin foremost among them, from the Stock Market Crash of 1929 to the Millennium and beyond. The previous titles, also published by Xlibris, are: Old Tim’s Estate (1929-35), Wildcat Strike (1939), The Bloody Wet (1943-44) Bringing Chesty Home (1948), and Replevy for a Flute (1956).

1.

Clyde Otto Dobermann, all 6-2 and 240 pounds of him, some of that flab, wearing $50 brogues, dark brown $40 slacks, a yellow knit shirt with a small animal embroidered on the pocket and a $150 camel hair sportcoat, comes into the Bar & Grill off the main dining room at Manny’s on Broadway, Winatchee Falls’ premiere steakhouse, at 1:30 p.m. on the second day of his fifty-first year on earth (April 2, 1963, late in the reign of Jack the Swordsman but nobody knows that yet), halts at the sign on a stand that says Hostess Will Seat You and nods to the bartender behind the long bar to his left, a man named Hoss Hossman roughly Clyde’s size but a few years older.

Mister Dobermann, Hoss says. What’ll it be?

Branch on the rocks, Clyde, making a little joke, says. I’m on the wagon. Fell off a while last night, some my pals threw me a birthday party. But I’m back on it.

Happy birthday then, Hoss says. Many more. And thinks: Shit! Clyde is money in the bank when he’s drinking, always leaves a nice tip, buck or two, and Hoss needs the money, Nell’s goddamn abortion, illegal, but Nell knows a doctor in Fairbow who performs those and Hoss said, promised, he’d help pay for it, though. But that’s a mean thought and anyway, he promised.

Yeah, thanks, Clyde says. How come you’re working? Where’s Nell? Little Nell McNeely is the regular day bartender. She’s a pert blonde cupcake in her early thirties high on Clyde’s mental list of Possible Sexual Conquests but the story now is she’s living with Hossman.

Nell’s a little bit under the weather, Hoss, lying, says. Touch the spring flu, I guess. I’m fillin’ in for her.

Tell her get well, Clyde, surveying the Bar & Grill for a possible lunch companion, says. It’s a good-sized room with a fake Olde English ambiance: a fake stone fireplace with a gas log, not lit, heavy wooden tables and chairs and dark panelling plastered with photos of sports stars and other minor celebrities embracing Manny Hohenfeld while patients at the world famous Pretzell Chiropractic Clinic, Winatchee Falls’ chief claim to fame.

Clyde finds no lunch companion: the lunch crowd is thinning out. There is room at a table with Pinkie Stern, the local promoter, and Eddie Devlin, the sports editor at the Bugle Call, Winatchee Falls’ daily-except-Sunday newspaper, but they’re dawdling over coffee and will soon be leaving.

There also is room at a table for four with J.P. (Whip) Rahilly and Lennie Schultz. But Clyde won’t break bread with those two! Rahilly, who used to be the local Teamsters Union business agent, is the Trades & Labor Council B.A. these days. That’s an umbrella for the building trades: carpenters, plumbers, electricians, cement-finishers, etc. He also advises other local unions, including the Hotel & Restaurant Employees, which just elected Schultz, a Dobermann Hotel Coffee Shop fry cook, president. Schultz and Rahilly: no doubt they are plotting another assault on Capitalism. They may even be plotting another assault on the Dobermann Hotel, the old man’s pride and joy and the Dobermann Enterprises flagship.

There is no room at a table for two occupied by two women Clyde laid once or twice in the distant past, Marlys Something and Elsa Something Else, both married now, Elsa’s put on weight, and both those brief affairs are long dead and buried.

Table for one, Mister Dobermann? the hostess who will seat him, a thin blonde distantly related to Manny, says. Clyde nods and she leads him to a table beside the fake fireplace.

Passing Pinkie Stern, Clyde halts and says, How’s our boy doing?

Great! Pinkie says. He’s a short fat harried man in his mid-fifties with thin red hair who runs his promotion business out of his hat: his real name is Milton but hardly anybody knows that: he’s been Pinkie for fifty years. He saw the doc yesterday. Hand is one-hunnert percent. He’ll be back in the gym, start training again next week. Be ready and fight, six weeks. I’m looking at a card the end of May, early June. Outdoor card at the ballpark maybe. Step him up a little.

This boy is actually a young man, Pat Cassidy, a tough specimen from Hayfield, a nearby dot on the Minnesota prairie, just turned twenty though the State Boxing Commission believes him to be twenty-one. He lied about his age, adding a year, the first year he fought in the Winatchee Falls Golden Gloves, cosponsored by the Bugle Call and the city’s construction unions. That was six years ago, when he was a 110-pound flyweight. Now he’s a middleweight, 5-10,168 pounds when not training, a natural middleweight, Pinkie says, with a 50-5-2 amateur record. He went to the Golden Gloves Nationals a year ago, losing a decision in the quarter-finals, then at Pinkie’s urging turned pro and became, professionally, The Irish Shillelagh. Pinkie’s been bringing Cassidy along since then, carefully, against carefully selected imported opponents. His professional record is 11 and 0 with eight of those victories, the way Eddie Devlin puts it in the Bugle Call, coming by way of knockouts. The Irish Shillelagh’s boxing skills are limited but he can hit, no question about that. Got a punch like a jackkass’ kick, Pinkie says.

Clyde Dobermann’s interest in all this is 6.25 percent. Cassidy by trade is a construction laborer but work, he and Pinkie feel, interfers with his training. So he doesn’t work much. Clyde and three more Winatchee Falls boxing fans, consequently, are sponsoring The Irish Shillelagh. Investing in him is the way Pinkie Stern put it when trolling for sponsors, him and his golden future in the ring. The sponsors will get their investments back ten times over, Pinkie says, when Cassidy starts fighting for some real money, more than $500 per fight, and the sponsors share 25 percent of his purses. The other sponsors are Manny, Webster

R. (Web) Allen, a lawyer, and Nick (Shepka’s Off-Sale Liquors) Shepka, who also owns some crummy apartments and The Fish Houses supper club overlooking Lake Winatchee. The Shillelagh then will also get 25 percent and Pinkie will get 50 percent less all the expenses. As of now, Pinkie and Cassidy are splitting the purses but they have not amounted to much. To date, his 6.25 percent interest in The Irish Shillelagh has cost Clyde close to $500 for unspecified equipment and training expenses and a few bucks for the kid, this Pinkie’s accounting. The kid still lives at home when he’s not shacked up in Winatchee Falls, his dad’s the service manager at the Hayfield Chevy dealership, but he needs walking around money.

No matter. Clyde, technically a Dobermann Enterprises vice-president without portfolio, on the Enterprises payroll at $150 a week with his old man’s blessing, plus a room and meals at the Dobermann Hotel so long as he does not mess with any of the Enterprises, can afford a few bucks for a piece of a fighter. And there are perks: a ringside seat at all The Shillelagh’s fights, entre to his dressing room, an inside look at professional boxing. Clyde’s

6.25 percent interest is like a hobby and Pinkie frequently assures the sponsors, There’s big money coming. Cassidy, Pinkie says, is just about ready for a name opponent on a card I guarantee you it’ll be SRO at the Armory. Or the ballpark, it’s an outdoor card.

Pinkie first said this a couple of months ago but those plans were delayed when Cassidy in his last fight in mid-February, whacking a colored opponent’s head before, in Eddie’s Devlin’s words, putting him down for the county at 2:05 of the fourth round, tore a ligament or something in his big right hand. He’s not worked or trained since then. But he’ll be back training next week, Clyde has Pinkie’s word for that, and one thing you can say for The Irish Shillelagh, he’s keen on training. Not the running, he hates running, but he bangs the heavy bag for minutes on end in the Fire Hall basement, much admired by the younger lads with Golden Gloves aspirations who also train there. And he likes to spar with those lads, beat the bejesus out of them.

Sounds good, Clyde says. See you around, Pink.

Mary Margaret be with you in a minute, the hostess, planting Clyde at a table for two beside the fake fireplace, says. Clyde studies the menu he knows by heart. He lunches at Manny’s three or four times a week, Manny’s cuisine better than the Dobermann Hotel’s, whatever the old man says.

Mary Margaret, another pert cupcake in her early twenties, arrives wearing a white blouse with a black bowtie and a short black skirt. Something from the bar, Mister Dobermann?

No. I’m on the wagon. This Mary Margaret is a new waitress. Clyde appraises her: friendly smile, dark hair, firm 32-Bs, good legs. But married. Wears a ring anyway. That by no means puts her out-of-bounds but Clyde over the years has come to the conclusion married women seldom are worth the effort and all the concomitant fear somebody, meaning the hubby, will find out. He places his usual order: bacon cheeseburger rare and, surprise, glass of milk.

Be right up, Mary Margaret says and departs, swishing her cute little butt. Which Clyde observes but does not, another surprise, imagine naked. Well, his goddamn stomach is a little queasy and he also has a headache. Too much Jack Daniels at his birthday party at Sammy White’s cabin overlooking Lake Winatchee, still another surprise concocted by Sammy and half a dozen other respectable Winatchee Falls business and professional men Clyde’s known for years, most of them married, a couple divorced, all former Junior Chamber of Commerce members. The entertainment, even Clyde thought, was a little bit raunchy: a colored stripper with a thin rawboned body who said her name was Jade, imported by Sammy from Minneapolis (At great expense, Sammy said), who amused all present by playing with herself then offered to blow everybody at $10 a blow. But only Sammy and Van Lester took her up on that, one at a time in the privacy of the cabin’s primitive bathroom. Her skinny naked body did not arouse Clyde.

Christ, Clyde thinks, upset stomach, headache, libido on the fritz. Guess I’m slowing down. Getting old. Hell, I am old. Or getting there. Fifty going on fifty-one.

More than half his life, Clyde ruefully calculates, is over. Or more likely a larger fraction. His mother after all, the former Valkyrie Gutknecht, died at fifty-six in 1941, some kind of cancer. The year The War started and he was divorced, the first time. The old man is still going strong of course, coming up on ninety, still spry as a squirrel, works fourteen hours a day maintaining a close watch on his numerous enterprises, piling up the money. But the old man, Henrich (Dollar) Dobermann, Dobermann Enterprises president and CEO, stands five-four in his shoes with the lifts, weighs maybe 120 pounds, a natural featherweight. The late Mrs. Dobermann was a big woman, 5-8, 175, a natural light-heavy. Clyde got her genes, probably including (he fears) the early death gene and he tries, not for the first time and with limited success, to imagine his parents conceiving him. The picture he gets is that of a tiny cowboy risking his life aboard a hippopotamus.

Mary Margaret arrives with his cheeseburger and milk. Enjoy, she says, treats Clyde to a friendly smile and departs.

So what’s he got left of life? Ten years if he’s lucky? And what’s he got to show for the first fifty? Not a hell of a lot, Clyde concedes, his mouth full of cheeseburger. Except he laid a lot of women, various ages, shapes, sizes, ethnic backgrounds, he should count them someday, beginning with Lucy the maid when he was fifteen and the old man, the Dobermann Hotel open a year, reluctantly took four days off and took Mother to the annual Hospitality Industry Convention in Chicago. What ever happened to Lucy, Clyde wonders, after Mother caught her swiping the old man’s Cuban cigars and fired her? Who knows? Who cares? He won’t dwell on Lucy. And he was married, twice, and divorced, twice, the old man providing suitable settlements, keep things out of court, then laying down the law: screw them, okay, but you ever marry another one, Sonny, I’ll cut you off without a dime!

An idle threat, Clyde surmises. The old man probably will outlive him, have to leave all his money and his Enterprises to a church or something. Or, though this seems unlikely, the prediction he’s heard local residents voice from time to time may be the case: Dollar Dobermann can’t take it with him, he won’t go.

But Clyde does not dwell on this. What else has he done, leave his mark on the world, in his first fifty years? Well, he did his best to keep the liquor industry solvent, beginning at fifteen when Lucy the maid showed him how to pick the lock on the old man’s liquor cabinet, through the final Prohibition years and ever since, less a few months here and there when he was on the wagon. Like now. But this time is different.

You know, Clyde, old Doc Dempsey said at their consultation two weeks ago following the thorough physical he’d recommended in view of Clyde’s age, the first in twenty years and a real pain in the ass, literally, in Clyde’s view. Your liver is not indestructible. You keep on drinking the way you do, I give it about two years, it packs up.

Following which, vaguely frightened, Clyde climbed on the wagon again, though the seating there based on his previous experience is precarious. But this time is different. The liquor industry henceforth will have to take care of itself and he doubts the liquor industry will erect a statue or anything in his memory, deserving though he may be.

So he laid a lot of women and drank a lot of booze and wrecked a couple of cars, escaping with bruises both times. And ran up a local record for DWIs. But most of those, all but two, in view of the old man’s clout, were eventually dismissed or reduced to Careless Driving. He may be remembered for one of them, the first Winatchee County DWI on a snowmobile. But that’s not the sort of thing you’d want as an epitaph.

What else? Not much. Hard to count the three months seven years ago he was the president of Dobermann Enterprises’ Everlasting Rest Gardens, the ecumenical cemetery the old man launched on sloping land he owned south of town when the Protestant Cemetery ran out of space. But then there was that little mix-up, Margie Bremer’s worthless old man laid to rest high on the slope beside old August Schott’s wife Elaine, had to be disinterred, replaced by old August, buried again on (or in) the flat ground at the foot of the slope. All he was trying to do was do Margie, a hell of a lay, a little favor. But the old man was livid, removed him from his presidency, barred him from any further participation in the Enterprises’ enterprises. That hurt some, a little, hurt Clyde’s pride, but he’d die before telling anybody that. And Everlasting Rest is doing well, a third full, and the old man is dickering for some adjoining land in order to enlarge it. My final resting place, Clyde assumes. Not the old man’s though. The old man has half a plot beside Mother paid for in the Protestant Cemetery and that’s where’ll he go. If he goes. The old man won’t waste that investment.

Missed The War too, the Big One, Clyde thinks, munching his cheeseburger, recollecting his misspent life. A 4F, he was, draft proof in view of the knee he banged up playing football in his senior year at Shattuck, a private school for wayward youth. One lateral cruciate ligament badly damaged. Did his part though, two years on the assembly line at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach, California. His right knee still aches in damp weather. Sometimes. That’s an affliction he shares with the bartender, Hoss Hossman, also a Douglas alumnus. They now and then exchange War Stories about Douglas and the Rosie the Riviters they riveted there. But you seldom hear a War Story any more. The War is pretty much forgotten. It’s ancient history. The Korean War too or whatever it was. But few in Clyde’s experience paid much attention to that conflict.

Clyde finishes his ‘burger and milk and considers dessert. Whip Rahilly and Lennie Schultz have departed. So has Pinkie Stern and Eddie Devlin is at the bar with a woman Clyde doesn’t know. And Dr. Jerome Kennnedy, the chief of staff now at the Pretzell Chiropractic Clinic, and three guys in suits, other chiropractors or they might be medical equipment salesmen, are rising from their table.

Times change, Clyde thinks. The Chiro (as it’s locally known) has an employee cafeteria and a dining room for its medical staff, both dry as Death Valley. When the Pretzell Brothers (Drs. Wayne, Ward and Waverly) were running The Chiro everybody ate lunch on the premises. But Ward, the middle brother, died in January: he’s in Everlasting Rest. Waverly, the youngest, retired years ago and moved to Florida. Wayne, the oldest, he’s got to be eighty-something, who always called the shots and ran a tight ship, still keeps an eye on The Chiro, more or less, but he suffered a stroke a month ago and is pretty much out of it now. Jerry Kennedy, Clyde surmises, they were classmates at Winatchee Falls High before the old man shipped Clyde off to Shattuck and Jerry’s aunt, Mabel Murphy, a legal secretary, put Jerry through the Pretzell Chiropratic College, runs a looser ship, likes a martini with his lunch.

The Chiro and its associated Chiropractic College loom large in Winatchee Falls, a prairie city with (the Chamber of Commerce likes to think) close to 32,000 inhabitants. Hell, The Chiro put Winatchee Falls on the map. Founded by Dr. Wayne Pretzell in his spare bedroom in 1900, the year he got out of chiropratic school in Philadelphia (Ward and Waverly arrived later), The Chiro now is a complex of red brick buildings, the main one a whopping four stories, a block off Broadway on West College Street. It treats bad backs, sprained sacroiliacs etc. from all over the Corn Belt, two Canadian provinces and elsewhere. These patients, those with dough, keep the Dobermann Hotel at 80 percent of capacity through much of the year. Those without much dough keep the Winatchee Hotel, some similar dumps, two dozen motels and Guest Houses and half the restaurants and gift shops in town in the black. Winatchee Falls owes the Pretzell Brothers plenty and somebody, it occurs to Clyde, ought to do something about that, honor them someway, before they’re all dead and buried.

Somebody?

Why not Clyde O. Dobermann! Who has nothing better to do and it’s high time, what with his life dwindling down, he made his mark in the world. Show a great many people including first and foremost the old man there by god is something he can do! Reflected glory maybe but what the hell. Many local residents, Clyde knows, consider him a wastrel, a drunk lucky in his choice of parents, old Dollar Dobermann’s worthless son. Well, he’ll show them! He’ll. What?

What else? The idea hammers Clyde like a bolt of lightening. Get busy and get erected a statue depicting and honoring the Pretzell Brothers! A big statue in some suitable location. Downtown maybe at the entrance to The Chiro. Or up in Bluff Park, the high ground at the far end of West College Street. Where Dr. Wayne can see it from his big stone house adjacent thereto. Warm the cockles of his aging heart. Clyde pictures three gigantic figures made of iron or whatever it is they make statues with. Gazing down upon Winatchee Falls, the city they put on the map. And forever after, or for quite a while anyway, all who view this work including the old man will know it was Clyde O. Dobermann had the idea and saw it through to fruition. Raised the money.

But just how, Clyde wonders, the lightening bolt wearing off, will he go about this? A committee comes quickly to mind. That’s it, form a committee. A Pretzell Brothers Memorial Committee, Clyde Dobermann, chairman. Then launch a Memorial Fund Drive. Clyde over the years has been a member of numerous committees, named to same he knows full well to enlist the Dobermann name, extract from him a contribution and, perhaps, another contribution from the old man, who will reluctantly contribute Dobermann Enterprises cash to deserving local causes once assured this generosity is tax deductible. Clyde was on the Committee to Save Baseball, the Winatchee Falls semi-pro Whackers, when they almost went under financially (and did a year later) and the Lights-Up Committee that raised funds for lights at the ballpark now devoted to softball and the Flag Pole Committee that raised funds for a tall steel flag-pole in front of City Hall, much favored by dogs now. He found all these committees extremely boring but he knows the drill.

So who then will he name to the Pretzell Brothers Memorial Committee? Well, Dr. Jerome Kennedy for one. Web Allen, perhaps, the lawyer who also has a 6.25 percent interest in The Irish Shillelagh. Every committee needs a lawyer or two. His old friend Sammy White, the CEO at White’s Furniture & Appliances, est. 1922, an avid civic do-gooder. G. Dale Gitlin, who owns KWIN and KWIN-TV (with studios in the Dobermann Hotel), likes to lend his name to local causes: he’ll be good for some free publicity. Somebody at the newspaper for more free publicity. Cadence Snorkel II, the Bugle