Cities

I was born in a remote mountain area of the Blue Ridge of Virginia, and until my teen years, had not ventured more than 30 miles from my birthplace.

Thirty miles away was what we hillbillies referred to as THE CITY. It was Roanoke, Virginia and had perhaps 40,000 inhabitants and was the home of the Norfolk & Western Railway so to us mountain grills it was THE PLACE. It had streetcars, and one of them rolled to the top of a steep in-city mountain, a cable car. From there you could see all the way back to the hill where I was born.

Best of all, one could buy(then!) a hamburger with onions and tomatoes for 5 cents. That was the most appealing thing about Roanoke with possibly the exception of the RIALTO motion picture show…mostly cowboy movies.

But I grew up and went to Roanoke College and many other colleges and universities, and was launched into the wide wide world. But for the sake of my readers, I’ll show my cities in order of distance from the mountains.

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA,,,

 A real city, with a ton of history behind it, the capitol of the Confederacy. It was probably at the half-million population mark when I lived there, and I enjoyed its museums and restaurants and the feeling of belonging(my own family was FFV(first family of Virginia) so I was readily accepted into the social order. Work was easy to find and at that time, some years ago, the city had not become the beehive of crime and disorder that repels visitors today.

NEW YORK CITY

I arrived via Greyhound bus in NYC with six dollars in my pocket. Sitting in Penn Station where the bus dropped me, I scanned a 5 cents paper and in an hour was a cook in an uptown Broadway restaurant. The next morning I enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University and studied journalism. My restaurant was frequented by the high level of the stage and screen and by many ballet people. A famous actress for whom I fixed breakfast every morning produced my first play, DRUGSTORE and though it only ran two nights off Broadway, it gave me the push a young writer needed. I loved everything about that NYC…it restaurants, its shows , the great pulsing heart of the city itself, and the great mass (then) of eager young people like myself. I left after finishing my studies but was to return years later in the motion picture business and the publishing racket and stay twelve years. The NYC of today does not attract me.