When "Hanging Around" Amounted to Something...

Once upon a time, I thought I would be an artist.
I lived in Greenwich Village after the Army and spent most of my time doing cartoons and illustrations. It was a tough road to hoe and if I didn't have friends, I would have been out on the street. But in those days, you could get by on very little. Thirty five cents would buy you a bowl of stew and all of the peanuts you could jam into your jeans if you ordered a tap brew. It was how a lot of us got through those days. Still, within a short time, I found that the life of an artist did not guarantee survival. This was the time that the Village was the place to be. The Folk movement was beginning to come to life; the Realist was popular; WBAI was sounding anti-war themes. People of all types of background, faith and different countries would come together and we would simply hang out and talk about things. A couple of my best friends had traveled from Paris across the trans-Siberian railroad and down to China when there was probably no more than a handful who had done it. It seemed like such a great thing to do.
Meanwhile, whether we realized it or not, we were starting to change the world.
This was long before Kent State or Woodstock or the riots or Haight Asbury.
Ted Jonas was one of the first to come to light earning some heavy duty coverage in the news weeklies for what? He started the movement of Rent a Beatnik and then he was reading poetry to jazz at Cafe Wha!.... Ted had some great informal parties where everyone would go and chip in a few coins. I also ran into my old buddy, Dave Van Ronk down in the Village, and he was over at Gerde's Folk City along with Dylan who nobody as yet knew. Eventually, Dave would take Bob around to all of the haunts and put him up. He would go on to have his own career, start the Guitar Study Center, and become the Mayor of Greenwich Village.
In those days, after my experience overseas as an Adviser, I was living in the West Village near Chumley's the old haunt of avante garde authors and over the Blue Mill, a watering hole for lots of old Village insiders. Later, I moved to West 10th across from the Ninth Circle into the house that was the model for the Movie Rear Window. My window was the one Jimmy Stewart looked out at. Dave hung out at the deli across from the cigar store on 7th Avenue and Sheridan and Streisand was working the pubs across the street. Much later, I ran into a friend of Dave's in Northern Ontario, name of Sylvia (Ian and Sylvia) and she told me that she used to introduce Barbra's act across the street. I did my cartooning but I didn't seem to be moving my career along fast enough and decided that I would go back to graduate school and go straight. Later, we learned who Bob Dylan really was and became addicted to his music. Things started getting tougher after the government started playing hardball with the protestors. I missed those days of staying up all night and painting and then going to another apartment where everyone was doing precisely the same thing and we would sit up all night and chat over Turkish coffee that would bend your spoon. And then I met the girl I would marry at a Noble Laureate dinner I attended as a guest, moved to Brooklyn and started a new phase of my life. This picture was made of my fantastic building on Tompkins Place in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn where it would take you literally a half and hour to walk the small block because everybody stopped you to have a cup of coffee with them. I had died and gone from one form of Heaven to another paradise. Such was the life in those days before things really heated up...and I put my drawing on the back burner and got serious about school...