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| "Excuse me," he said to my father, who had answered the door; "I noticed -- it might be your little son . . . |
| "Buzz, yes, he's five years old. Has he been bothering you?" |
| "Well, I noticed Buzz playing in the vacant lot next to our house this morning, and then I noticed that a couple of my little lead tanks--a Sherman and a Panzer, I think -- were missing from their formation on our big boulder. I'm Clayton Coots. |
| "Come here, Buzz!" my father intoned in that grave, lawyerly voice of his. I came out of the kitchen and into the hall, where the two men were waiting. "Did you take anything from Clayton Coots's yard this morning? |
I removed the two lead tanks from my pants pocket. "They were just sitting there on the boulder. I thought I could take them." Sensing these last words had struck a false note, I handed the heavy little toys over to Clayton and waited to be dismissed..
| But the last words were Clayton's. "You can come over whenever you want," he said, "and watch them, but please don't handle them, Buzz. They're delicate." | In the following days, I took him at his word and watched whole divisions of troops scattered on the boulder and nearby weeds. There were tanks American and German, reconnaisance cars, armed trucks, soldiers with flame throwers, armed trucks |
Clayton, I heard, had a little sister Gloria, who was somewhat younger than he but a lot older than we. One summer morning, after we kids had congregated at "the lot," she came out of her house and introduced herself to the neighborhood kids as "Mousey." I thought I hadn't heard correctly.
| "Yeah, Mousey. Why?" | She had dirty blond hair and a deep tan. She wore denim short jeans (remember, this was 1945) and a soiled white t-shirt and dirty sneakers. She wasn't, I thought, a homely girl, but she wasn't doing much to enhance her looks. Her language was another story. The empty lot sloped upward toward center field. The huge boulder from which I'd swiped Clayton's lead tanks marked the right field boundary. The left field line was a house whose outdoor porch had been closed in to make another room She marked out home plate by scrawling a square in the dry dirt of the lot and yelling to the rest of us, "Get out in the outfield, you guys, and field the balls I hit to you." She'd noticed the bat and softball I'd brought and grabbed them without a word to me. She stood at the plate and blazed some grounders out to us kids, who stood at the three outfield spots and shortstop. They were far too hot for us five- and six-year-olds. We winced and watched the balls roll or sail into the yard beyond the dirt field, then started on our way home, in disgust. | |
| Where ya goin', ya little babies? You're a bunch a *&^T&^%Y!" | From the Coots's outdoor porch above us came a sudden, incensed stentorian female voice. "Gloria!" | Mousey lowered her voice and departed from the field. |
We decided the field was worth staying for.
I didn't see much of Clayton, who was a young adult in the early postwar years.
Later, I heard he had become stage manager for one of the Broadway theaters. Outside of Artie Wilson (Clayton's age., who blazed loudly up Normandy Lane on his Indian motorcycle with a sidecar, and thereby earned a reputation as the Lane's juvenile delinquent -- words tossed around loosely in the early 1950's), Clayton Coots was pointed out to us by our parents as a model young adult.
Learning about the kids and adults who lived in the little circle of seven houses surrounding ours, I was particularly interested in Clayton and his family. It was a great big stone and stucco place which faced Mountain Avenue and had its back facing our circle of houses.
| At the very back of their property was a very large and open wood deck supported by wood poles some fifteen feet from the ground. Evenings in spring and summer, there were large parties which, in retrospect, reminded me of Jay Gatsby's Long Island bashes in their gaiety: there was food and evidently plenty of liquor, liquor that accounted for raised voices as the night rolled on; and piano music, not classical, like my father played on our own Steinway, but jazzier music, tunes that were new to me and lifted my spirits. | The fathers of all my friends were either lawyers or some other dull profession that was practiced in a New York City office. It came to be known, however, that Clayton and Gloria's father J. Fred Coots was a songwriter who had written, among other tunes,"Santa Claus is Coming to Town," which had originally been recorded by Gene Autry, the cowboy singing star. |
Royalties from this one song, my mother told me, must have had afforded the Coots family enough money to buy the house on the Normandy Lane hill. And each Christmas time, whenever we heard it on the radio or television, we mockingly called out, "Ka-ching! There's another nickel in the Coots coffers!"
| But there'd been other popular songs, one of which,"Love Letters in the Sand," had originally been recorded by a singer in the 1930's, then, more recently by Pat Boone. That must have meant plenty more sheckels in the Coots coffers, enough, maybe, to buy the Cadillac in their garage. |
One day, when I was old enough to walk by myself from my house down to the village of Larchmont and browse in the local record store, I noticed in one of the bins, where records for sale were kept in those days, a collection of songs by J. Fred Coots. I didn't recognize any of them (I was only 12 years old), but the notes on the back of the record cover said Coots had married a former Ziegfeld girl.
| That explained a lot. Mrs. Coots (I never learned her first name) was a tall, statuesque beauty, somewhat younger than her husband, who at least once a day emerged from their house and, with impeccable posture, descended a flight of stone stairs, as if they were a flight on the stage of the Ziegfeld Follies, to their driveway, got into her car and drove off. |
| One morning in the late 1950's, happening to be tuned to the NBC Today Show, with Dave Garroway, I noticed the show featured a live chimp known as J. Fred Muggs, who seemed to be better known than my neighbor. |
In retrospect, I think J. Fred Coots, when I knew him, was in the autumn of his song- writing career. He was no longer the dashing song-smith he had been in the 1930's. But he hadn't been a one-trick pony; he'd written other fine songs beside "Santa Claus is Coming to Town."
| In fact, not so long ago, I discovered he had written that elegant standard, "You Go to My Head" ("and you linger like a haunting refrain") That alone had put him in the company of Gershwin and Porter. |
Shortly before getting married and leaving Normandy Lane, I heard that J. Fred and his wife had moved from their large house to a retirement village in Wykagyl, a small town a few miles from Larchmont.
While I rested content to believe Clayton had remained stage manager of a Broadway theater, I never learned whatever became of his tomboy sister Mousey.
