More Books by Douglas Welch Sideline Impressions - a look at the San Francisco United Nations meeting. The Squirrel Cage - the first collection of columns Neighbors and Other People - the second collection Mr. Digby - thinly disguised recollections about Welch's neighbors and co-workers

July 4, 2003

The other day, Agent Borussky and I were chatting about this and that and Douglas Welch's writings came up.  If you don't know about Douglas Welch, you are about to find out.  The upshot of the conversation was that yesterday Neighbors and Other People showed up on my back porch.  Agent Borussky could just deliver things in person like most people, but he prefers to add an air of mystery by using the area near the recycling as a "dead drop."  I sometimes get coded messages telling me that a delivery is ready for pickup.  You probably have friends like this, too.

If it wasn't for Douglas Welch, I would probably be an illiterate, which I am sure there are a considerable number of people -- some of whom aren't in jail yet -- probably think would be a good thing.  So a lot of what I get blamed for is really Doug Welch's fault.

This is because Doug Welch had a weekly column in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and when I was old enough to start stealing the paper from my father at breakfast, Welch's column was the only thing I found worth reading on a regular basis, at least in a newspaper.  This is understandable because the P-I has always been the most dreadful rag of a Hearst scandal sheet and there really wasn't anything else in the paper worth reading, at least not on a regular basis.  We weren't allowed to have the Seattle Times -- which is a very sordid story involving my father's feud with the Blethans that I won't go into here other than to say that they shot first -- but the result was that I read Douglas Welch faithfully from the time my arms were long enough to reach across the table when my father wasn't looking.

Welch's fascination for me was that the goings-on in his neighborhood were a continuously unfolding historical document.  There were the McMurty's.  Mr. McMurty was a retired banker who devoted most of his time to activities that involved pitchers of martinis.  Even though he was retired, he still liked to go down to the bank and roll around in the money.  Occasionally, they would let him foreclose a mortgage or two.  The reason Mr. McMurty kept going to the bank even though he was retired was Mrs. McMurty who was 40-40-40 straight up and down and suspected the communists were everywhere.  In other words, it was just like our neighborhood, only classier because Doug Welch and his wife Green Eyes lived farther up the hill.

Except for his neighbor the Widow.  She would cause traffic snarl ups whenever she was weeding the front yard dressed in a halter top and shorts.  We didn't have anybody like that.  Most of the women in our neighborhood were more like Mrs. McMurty, especially in regard to the creeping communist menace.

So my view of society was very strongly shaped by the weekly reports that filtered out of the Welch's neighborhood and by occasional pieces that appeared in Ann Landers' column.  When Doug Welch (I never thought of him as Mr. Welch because the heading on his column said "Doug Welch" and not "Mr. Welch") reported on his neighbor who had a cannon and belonged to a cannon club that seemed to fit right in with our neighborhood. 

Even though we lived farther down the hill and most of the men were Boeing engineers instead of the bankers, professors and doctors who peopled Welch's column, I still felt an affinity because one of our neighbors had a radar dish in his backyard.  I never found out exactly what it was all about, but he had built this big contraption out of 2x4's and chicken wire.  So reading about the man with the cannon seemed right in place with the sort of society where people had radar dishes in their backyard.

I suppose the other reason I felt such an affinity for Doug Welch was that my father also wrote humorous articles, though these didn't show up weekly in the paper and instead popped up at random intervals in Seattle magazine.  This was the real Seattle magazine that went under in the early 1970's -- not that snotty rag that shows up next to the National Enquirer at the grocery checkout line these days. 

In 1963 or so, when everyone who read books was reading Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, my father had the bad judgment to write a short article titled "The Feminine Mistake."  This was nearly half a century ago but I still remember some of the phrases about kitchen stoves with control panels more complicated than a Boeing 707 and the housewives who went to the grocery store dressed like longshoremen.  But the real zinger was when he coined "League of Women Vipers" for the League of Women Voters.  My mother was tight-lipped for a month.  And I still run into her friends from the League (which is really a great organization, by the way) who remember both my parents -- though with differing degrees of fondness.

It makes me wonder what Doug Welch's relations with the neighbors were really like.  At the time, being an impressionable young child, I took every word as gospel truth.  And the only thing I was really jealous of was that Welch had the Widow for a neighbor and we didn't have anyone like that.