Blame it on the Sixties (1956 – 1980)
When you tell the story of your life you can only include the parts you remember. But do you remember them because they are important, or are they important because you remember them?
I was born in New York City in 1956, the second child of Ruth & Louis, themselves children of the Great Depression. Mom was gregarious, possibly more so because dad was so taciturn. In the early part of the twentieth century their parents had fled anti- Jewish pogroms in and around Minsk (Belarus.) My maternal grandparents actually met on the ship (the “Orduna”) they sailed out of Riga, Latvia heading for Ellis Island and a better life in America.
Mom had two younger brothers: Stanley and Bernie. Stanley was a genius who wrote the operating system for an early IBM mainframe computer1; he choked to death on a steak sandwich in the cafeteria of the IBM headquarters in New York City when I was a teenager. Bernie was for me a larger-than-life character: he was big, with a booming voice, he was highly-opinionated, funny, an altogether dominating personality; he was pretty much the opposite of my own dad. When WWII had ended, Bernie left the Navy and used his GI Bill money to start a stair-making business in New York, partnering with his dad, Abraham, who was my grandfather. Eastern Stair Builders made stairs for the booming post- war home construction industry, including a lot of stairs for Fred Trump’s massive home building projects in Brooklyn and Queens. Bernie and Abraham (also known as Avram, who was a shady character on both sides of the Atlantic) moved the business to Laurel, Maryland in the early 1960’s. My family followed Bernie south, and settled in Baltimore City.
I guess I was a pretty precocious child, and because I was born in February and was not yet eligible to attend public school, my parents enrolled me in Hebrew school for first grade—which resulted in me being a year younger than my classmates after I began public school the following year. All I can remember of Hebrew school was that I was the class clown and I actually got expelled from first grade for continually disrupting the class. One parental spanking and one contrite apology later, I was allowed to return, chastened but still rebellious at heart.
My earliest memory in which I know exactly where I was at what moment in time occurred on November 22, 1963, around 2PM when I was seven years old. I was walking with my classmates down the school hallway, getting ready to begin outdoor recess when the principle’s voice came over the intercom announcing that “President Kennedy has been shot.” It’s probably symptomatic of my lifelong propensity for being a contrarian (even an unconscious one) that I mistook the word “shot” for “shocked”– I was expecting the principle to follow-up with some exhortation for us students to eliminate some shortcoming our president found so problematic!
I was raised in the Baltimore County suburban neighborhood of Woodmoor (Lochern) in a house just five doors down from the elementary school I attended, and whose baseball diamonds and basketball courts I played pickup sports on nearly every day throughout the year. There were no personal computers then, there was no Internet, and so as soon as school ended for the day, we neighborhood kids got together to play baseball, football, or basketball outside, or cards, ping-pong and pool inside each other’s houses. When I was 13 I got a bag of odd-numbered golf clubs and I spent hundreds of hours whacking golf balls with a 9 iron all around the grounds of Woodmoor Elementary School after school. I developed a pretty decent short game but I never learned how to use a driver, and I never broke 100 on a real golf course. In fact I only made par one time on one hole, and that was only because of a lucky long putt.
My best friend growing up was Curt who lived a couple blocks away; we are still friends today—more than sixty years later. We turned my house into an indoor golf course when my parents weren’t home—ricocheting golf balls against furniture legs and occasionally breaking the odd lamp! Curt and I pretended to be spies (the TV show The Man from Uncle was our favorite diversion.) We created pretend missions and used pretend guns and knives, and real magnifying glasses to make real fires; at least one fire in my backyard got out of control and had to be extinguished by an alert adult neighbor! For a short time the Baltimore Orioles star baseball player (and future Hall-Of-Famer) Frank Robinson lived about a fifteen-minute bike ride from my house, and that was definitely the place to go for Halloween candy!
Mine was not a close family. I don’t remember my parent’s showing any real affection for each other, although my mom was a loving parent to my sister and to myself. I understand that my dad’s mom had passed away when he was a child and his father’s second wife, who had kids of her own, treated the first mom’s kids as second-class citizens. My dad was essentially raised by his sisters and as a result was somewhat socially and emotionally retarded. In our family there were no real highs or lows, just a kind of resigned acceptance of an uninspiring life. My older sister Marcia and I were not close either—I have often wondered if I had been born first that we might have become friends? Is the order of birth determinative of the outcome in sibling relations?
I got one thing from my dad and I passed it down to my daughter: the love of good bread. The only quote I can remember him saying was that if you had a twelve course meal, everything from soup to nuts but there was no bread it wasn’t a real meal. On the other hand if you had a piece of good bread and maybe a little butter or cheese, that was a meal. I am not quite so insistent as dad was, but, on the other hand, I don’t think they make a bread I don’t like.
Most of my happiest childhood memories involve my Uncle Bernie. Every Sunday he would preside over a long table reserved for his brunch crowd at the Suburban House restaurant in Pikesville. A dozen or so friends and relatives would enjoy bagels and lox, latkes, etc. and be regaled by Bernie’s amusing take on the topics of the day. As Bernie had only daughters, I was sometimes the lucky beneficiary of his largess. One year, unbeknownst only to me, Bernie spent months building a train set for me at his home, which he dissembled and reassembled in our basement just in time for Chanukah. The train set filled the entirety of a four foot by eight foot sheet of plywood and was elaborately comprised of mountains, valleys, villages, people, cars, trains and tracks.
When I expressed an interest in drafting, Bernie bought and assembled a drafting table for me, replete with all the necessary drafting supplies. Bernie occasionally took me with him on his semi-annual “food run” to New York City where he bought all the food (Nathan’s hot dogs, corned beef and pastrami, “coddies”, coleslaw, knishes, gefilte fish, etc. he missed living in Baltimore. Bernie brought me to his shop in Laurel a few times and showed me the massive steaming machine they used to bend huge wooden boards for spiral staircases.
My parents were proudly Jewish and all of their friends (that is, friends my mom made) were Jewish. We kept quasi-kosher in the house: separate plates and dishes for meat and dairy, etc. but non-kosher food (KFC, etc.) was allowed in the house as long as we ate it on paper plates and with plastic cutlery that went immediately into the trashcans outside the house after dinner. My parents belonged to Beth Israel congregation, of which Uncle Bernie was a founding member and the shofar (ram’s horn) blower for high holiday services. Even though they both spoke some Yiddish in the house, my parents weren’t especially religious; my mom and dad never prayed or told us to pray, and I’m not even sure that they really believed in god. They were what I guess you could call “cultural Jews” and I guess I am one too.
My parents made me (but not my sister) go to Hebrew school and get bar mitzvah’d. So after school every Tuesday and Thursday, when all my non-Jewish friends took the school bus back home, I took another school bus to the Hebrew school and stared into space for two hours, studiously ignoring whatever the teachers were trying to impart. This went on for six years, and the only thing that made this bearable was that my mom gave me a dollar each time which I spent on a red, sweet, fizzy cola drink called Almond Smash and a Baby Ruth candy bar. I was again, characteristically, the class clown and again was periodically kicked out of school for disrupting the class. I never learned to read or write Hebrew and I believe our class was last class to graduate Beth Israel through “social promotion”—that is in all the subsequent years, students had to actually learn something in order to progress to the next level.
What my mom believed in—and passed this belief down to me, was the idea of being a mensch. Literally the Yiddish word mensch means “man” but what it actually connotes is being a “good man.” In other words my mom taught me that the highest praise a person (man or woman) could receive was to be called a mensch. Being a mensch is to act out of love, kindness, sincerity and a sense of morality and justice, even, or especially, at the risk to one’s own life. The Danes were a race of mensches for saving their Jews in World War II. The young men and women Freedom Riders who risked their lives and were maimed and killed registering black voters in the south were mensches. The Catholic men and women of the Catonsville Nine who “hit and stayed” and spent years in jail for burning draft cards were mensches. A mensch does the right thing even when it is difficult and dangerous, even when they know they will get no attention, let alone credit for doing it.
Mostly because they were children of the Depression, and, perhaps, because of the Nazi holocaust, not to mention the dawning of the Atomic Age and the Cold War, my parents were fearful about the future. Consequently, they spent their modest incomes (dad was a furniture salesman and mom was a bookkeeper) very frugally. We did take occasional vacations to the Catskills2 or to New York City to stay with relatives, but we never went anywhere exotic or expensive or adventurous. Two items they did splurge for the sixties, after my sister and I were both in school and mom went back to work, were wall-to-wall carpeting (burnt orange) and a console stereo.
My dad bought comedy albums to play on the new stereo: Bill Cosby (I started out as a Child), Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (The 2000 Year Old Man), Myron Cohen (Everybody Gotta be Someplace) and the Bob Booker / George Foster albums (You Don’t Have to be Jewish and When you’re in Love the Whole World is Jewish.) I can remember laying on the carpet in front of the console stereo for years, listened to these albums a hundred times each, and memorizing most of the sketches verbatim. I can even remember a few of the punchlines to this day. Mom, who had a classically-trained voice (and who had sung in the chorus at the New York Met) bought operas and show tune records and sang along with Beverly Sills and Barbara Streisand, etc. which I hated.
But the stereo console in our living room was mostly used by me. This was my (pre-Internet) portal to the counter-culture. My first album was The Beatles’ Rubber Soul. I would lay on the carpet on my back and belt out all the words from all the songs ( “Norwegian Wood”, “Nowhere Man”, “Michelle”, “In My Life”, “Run for Your Life“, etc.) and I was sure there was never before, nor could there ever again be a better collection of tunes. I joined the Record Club of America and got to choose one pretty lame (and suspiciously thin) record a month until I let the subscription expire after the initial year. About that time I made friends at school with Randy and Rick (brothers) who turned me on to Cream (Badge), and later The Allman Brothers Band (Sweet Melissa) and Chicago (everything!)
I was a class clown and a mediocre school student who mostly daydreamed in class and who usually did my homework on the bus ride to school in the morning. Every year pretty much every teacher would write pretty much the same report: “David is smart but doesn’t try.” And every report card would be filled with C’s, the occasional B and the occasional D. I wasn’t interested in what I was being taught, and, being a contrarian by nature, I reveled in rebelling against all authority. Looking back, I wonder how much of my rebelliousness was due to normal childhood/teenage angst, how much was due to my fairly unhappy family life (dad’s taciturnity + mom’s gregariousness = my truculence?) and how much was due to the spirit of times.
I grew up in the 1960’s thinking that pretty much all public utterances were lies: whether they were told by spokespeople in advertisements, politicians, newsreaders on TV, the rabbi and teachers in the synagogue I was forced to attend, or the teachers in the public school classes I studiously ignored, etc. I thought that LBJ’s war in Vietnam was a lie and worse, it was a crime against humanity done in my name. I always took the side of the underdog; I was a mensch in training.
I was twelve years old in the spring of 1968, as I watched (on our black and white TV set) footage of Baltimore and other U.S. cities burning in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. I sympathized with the black rioters. I thought it likely that JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. were both assassinated by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. A month later the Catonsville Nine burned draft cards in a building only ten miles from my home, but I characteristically remained completely ignorant of the event until many years later. But in the summer of 1968 I was radicalized by the TV footage from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where police beat up young people who looked like I wanted to look, for protesting against the things I also thought were unjust (war and racism, etc.)
I thought that Republicans were fascists and Richard Nixon3 was the anti-Christ. I can remember feeling proud to be an American only twice growing up: in the fall of 1968 at the Mexico City Olympics when the athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised the black power salute, and in the summer of 1969 when Americans landed on the moon. My political/social outlook has not really evolved very much in the ensuing decades…
I was bar mitzvah’d in 1969 during a weekend snowstorm in early March. I was uncharacteristically excited about being the center of attention of relatives from around the country who came to Baltimore for my ceremonial “crossing into manhood” ritual. But the ceremony itself, on stage in the synagogue, where I sang in Hebrew before the congregation some meaningless section of the Torah, reconfirmed in me (already an established atheist) the fraudulence of religious observance. After I sang my number (quite well by all accounts) I sat in my chair on the stage and fixated on the facts that from behind I could see that the rabbi wore a toupee, and the cantor (singer) sitting next to me had a paperback copy of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead tucked inside his prayer book, and was evidently reading it and nodding sagely during the rabbi’s sermon!
Which makes a nice segue into me reading books and doing other things that I wasn’t supposed to be doing. In high school I read only what I wanted to (Shakespeare and Steinbeck mostly) instead of what the teacher assigned (e.g. The Red Badge of Courage.) In fact, I nearly failed high school because, in those days, you had to have a passing grade in English in order to graduate. I can remember, at the end of my senior school year, I had to ask the English teacher, who I liked and who liked both me and my choice of reading, to give me a “C.” She was kind and allowed me to write an essay on Hamlet4, and gave me a passing grade so I could graduate high school.
I cut a lot of my classes in high school, mostly to go to the drafting classroom where the teacher inexplicably allowed me to stay for hours at a time drawing elaborate mansions with rotating rooms and hidden passages. (I thought I wanted to be an architect.) I also cut classes to sneak into the otherwise- empty auditorium to sit next to my first girlfriend Marjorie, the younger sister of my friend Mike. We were both very thoughtful, me because I could chronicle the injustices of the world, and she because her mother had died very young and very suddenly a few years previously. Those precious hours each week that we stole together in the dark auditorium were the most cherished moments of my teenage years: I was finally with someone who I could be honest with and who cared about and clearly understood what was important to me.
When I was a senior at Milford Mill High School something determinative of my entire future occurred: we students were allowed to pick a single “elective” class for the first (and last) time in my public school career. I chose Philosophy which was taught by Mr. (later Doctor) Watson5. We had to buy a book for the class, Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, edited by Walter Kaufmann (see below.) Well, that was all she wrote! I read the book like a dying man drinks water in the desert. I actually said out loud: “Where have you guys been all my life!”
Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Kafka were kindred spirits; they became my closest comrades for the next few years. I read pretty much everything they had written. My mom later joked about my “Dostoyevsky phase” when I locked myself in my bedroom for days at a time reading Crime and Punishment and the other great novels of the Russian master. I guess I sort of became Raskolnikov, dirty and disheveled, a “humanist and a nihilist; kind and terrible.” Or at least confused, bitter, and, in my thoughts if not my actions, to use Nietzsche classic phrase, moving “beyond good and evil.” Existentialism fused my antipathy towards authority and my inherent atheism through the credo “First you exist, then you become” and gave me a system to help organize my inchoate beliefs and a home for my rebellious spirit to breath freely in. I wrote a line from Nietzsche on a slip of paper and kept it in my wallet for years like an intellectual ID card: “Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.”
I had thought that going to college would be unbearable—just four more years of not doing what my teachers told me. But my experience with picking my own class (Dr. Watson’s Existentialism Philosophy) in my senior year of high school made me realize that college might not be so bad after all. I enrolled at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and took history, philosophy, English, and other humanity classes and found most of them to be challenging and thought-provoking. Dr. Wexler’s class on the history of the Enlightenment was seminal in my understanding of the arch of Western history and my role as a citizen. My multi-year interactions with my advisor Dr. Jeffries taught me that if I wanted to be a polemicist I could shade the truth, but the job of an historian is to be rigorously honest, even to the detriment of the case he was trying to make.
I surprised myself and delighted my parents by getting excellent grades, making the Dean’s list every semester—not too bad for a kid who nearly failed high school! I graduated with a BA in History in 1976 at the age of twenty. As a reward, my parents gave me a few hundred dollars that allowed me to go (with my friend Curt) to the Soviet Union (I had been studying Russian history and US/ Cold War history) for a vacation in January of 1976.6
It was at UMBC that I met my future friend and first landlord Bill. We got into a friendly argument in a German literature class that spilled out into the hallway after class and eventually wound up at his big, old Victorian house in Irvington, a modest Baltimore neighborhood only a few miles from campus. Bill was pretty much the opposite of myself: cocksure and capable of swaggering, and a real “ladies-man.” Bill had been in the Air Force, had lived abroad (in Turkey,) was married (soon to be divorced,) and he owned a house– a really, really big house. It was in Bill’s living room that I first experienced the joy of listening to a great, loud stereo system (linear tracking turntable, three-way stereo speakers, separate pre-amp and amp, etc.,) got to hear amazing music from his huge collection of hundreds of records (mostly rock and jazz) and smoked pot for the first time. It was also in Bill’s house that I lost my virginity.
I wound up moving into Bill’s house in Irvington, a long-term member of an ever-changing, semi-communal, community of tenants. Bill’s was my first home away from my parents, where I escaped to immediately after I graduated college, when I was twenty. Bill and his brother and another friend had a “music night” every Friday where each of them brought a few new records (and beer, and pot and cigarettes) to audition—I learned most of what I know about music (especially “Prog Rock”) from those joyous evenings that occasionally stretched into dawn. It was Bill who took me to the best concert I ever experienced: the obscure progressive rock band Gentle Giant playing in a club in Catonsville. I decorated my first and only Christmas tree (with a star that scrapped up against the ten foot ceiling) at Bill’s house.
During those first years living in Bill’s house, armed with my copy of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, a backpack and a sleeping bag, I hitchhiked down to Tennessee for a few summers to stay with my friend Mike (Marjorie’s brother) who lived with his girlfriend in a cabin on top of a hill in a holler near Smithville.
Mike and Kathy-Lynn lived without electricity and running water in a wooden house with a fireplace and a cast iron wood-burning stove. When I stayed with them I slept in the huge barn behind the house on the floor in my sleeping bag, and sometimes I drifted off to sleep under hands of tobacco, swaying above me like an upside-down field. I milked a cow for the first time and drank the still-warm milk from a mason jar. If living with Bill taught this suburban boy about urban life, staying with Mike opened my eyes to the possibility of a rural life, a post-hippie, laid-back, low-cost, off-the-grid way of living. Mike did some farming and some carpentry and he taught me a little about each.
Interstate (and later cross-country and international) hitchhiking was transformational for me– it was my own personal right of passage. Some people joined the military or the Peace Corps to “become a man”; I had hitchhiking. Being bar mitzvah’d was only symbolic; long-distance hitchhiking was actual maturity, through my demonstration of proven competency and independence. When I discovered that I could do what was necessary to survive, like come to a strange town and find a day job, or walk for miles in the rain, or make a shelter in the dark in the woods, or meet new people every day and share honest interactions with strangers, my estimation of my own capabilities grew. It was liberating to speak with people who didn’t know me and who I would never see again. The acknowledgement that I did all these things with a level of grace and good humor was elevating. (In the intervening decades, something has been lost, I suspect, because I’m not sure it is possible to hitchhike across the country anymore in America– we have become too dangerous a people and too afraid of each other.)
Back in Baltimore, I lived in Bill’s house for a year or so, and then moved into the old carriage house behind the main house. It was my intention to use some of my new-found carpentry skills to fix up the carriage house and turn it into a proper home with electricity and plumbing. In this endeavor I was only partially successful—the carpentry and electrical were greatly improved but none of the plumbing was installed. To earn money, I worked for a while as a high-rise window washer for the improbably-named Pyramid Cleaning and Maintenance Company. I liked the work, standing on an aluminum frame scaffold, suspended from the side of some of the tallest buildings in Baltimore. I have to admit I sometimes took on a bit of Bill’s swagger as I strode into elevators full of dour businessmen and women in suits and dresses while I, dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, wearing a leather climbing harness, my face sunburned and my hair long and unkept, made me act like the only free person in a prison.
While I lived with Bill in Irvington I got my first (and best) dog and made a great friend. Two of Bill’s dogs (an old male Irish setter and a very young female white German Sheppard) had a litter of some dozen or more pups, out of which eight survived. I decided I would take the last pup, the one that needed the most help. Murphy7 was a great dog, a real companion who I even hitchhiked across the country with (note: not a good idea in rainy weather.) He introduced me to a lot of people—in Irvington all the neighborhood kids called me “Murph’s dad“! Like all dogs, I guess, Murphy had his foibles: he was deathly afraid of loud noises and July fourth was the worse day of the year for him. He would cower, shivering, under the bed and growl and bare his fangs if you tried to force him out. But he was born to fetch—everything from tree branches too long and heavy for him to lift, down to the smallest pebble. If I could throw it, he would sniff it out, find it and bring it back to me, but he stubbornly refused to drop it. I almost always had to feign disinterest or distract him in order to get the stick back.
Doug is the friend I met through Bill. Bill had entered a medical study, an opportunity to make money testing drugs, and when he came home he said, “I met this crazy guy—you’re gonna love him!” Doug came over and I was immediately hooked! Doug was a revelation to me—I had never met anyone like him. His personality was a disarming combination of narcissism and selflessness: he loved being the center of attention but he loved getting everyone around him involved in the activity even more. Most of all, Doug loved to metaphorically open your skull, stick his hand inside, swirl your gray matter and close it back up. Doug was a graduate of MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art,) and was an artist with a Puckish nature, a character in the tradition of the Merry Pranksters from a decade earlier.
Doug’s boundless energy was fueled by drinking liters of Coke and by a mind continuously seeking playful engagement with the world. Doug staged a sleep deprivation performance where he lay in a public setting inside a box with a viewing window for days. When the Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurred, Doug and some friends raced up to PA in his funky VW camper and staged a stunt with Doug, dressed in a Mylar shroud (sort of a shiny KKK outfit) and holding burning flares, waved drivers past the entrance to the nuke plant, intoning “Don’t worry, everything’s under control!” Photos of Doug glowing near the site of the accident were reproduced in newspapers around the globe.
Doug achieved some local notoriety by having a framed photograph of his reclining girlfriend in the nude, which was currently hanging in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s (BMA) photography contest gallery, removed after it was discovered that a shadow of his own erect penis was visible against her thigh. There were far too many such “performance art” events for me to remember, but I would be amiss if I neglected to mention the annual Balto Media Event and Fashion Show (an avant- garde alternative to Baltimore’s Artscape Festival) in Wyman Park Dell across from the BMA that Doug helped to found and organize. I had a lot of fun working the festival and even created my own pieces for some of those shows which drew hundreds, if not thousands of visitors each year.8
When I look back now it seems to me that my greatest influences were the times I grew up in, my isolating, dysfunctional family, my fascination for existentialism, literature and history, my relationships with Marjorie, Bill and Doug, and my annual hitchhiking trips I made to visit Mike and absorb the rhythms and honest simplicity of his bucolic life in rural Tennessee. All these ingredients set the stage for the next phase of my life.
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1 The Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program (SOAP) is an assembler for the IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data-Processing Machine, an early computer first used in 1954. It was developed by Stanley Poley at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.
2 I was at Woodstock, sort of. I was 13 years old and riding in the back seat of my dad’s car heading south on the highway out of the Catskills when we encountered a miles-long caravan of freaks stalled in traffic on the northbound highway. They were sprawled in the median strip and sitting on the roofs of their cars, all young and colorfully attired. It wasn’t until years later that I made the connection that what we had seen were hippies heading to the Woodstock festival!
3 Coincidentally, Nixon’s Vice President was Spiro Agnew who had been Superintendent of the Baltimore County Public School system when I was a kid. I already hated Agnew before he became VP because he was so stingy about when he would close school because of snow.
4 Only decades later, after the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK in 1991, did I begin to wonder to what extent my fascination for Hamlet was a subconscious reaction to the truth that, “We have all become Hamlets in our country, children of a slain father-leader…”
5 In what was the most poetic moment in my life, I was, years after the fact, able to express to now- Dr. Watson how much he and his class had meant to me. At the time I was a graduate student in History at UMBC and was substitute- teaching an exam prep class on the French Revolution when I noticed that my former high school mentor, who did not recognize me, was in the class. After my lecture was over and the class was dismissed, Dr. Watson came up to me and thanked me for delivering one of the most cogent and succinct explanations of the political and cultural landscape of revolutionary France he had ever read or heard. I thanked him, and went on to introduce myself as his former student, and I explained to him that I would never have even gone to college were it not for him and his Existentialism class in my senior year at Milford Mill High School!
6 I plan to write about our USSR adventure elsewhere. Stay tuned, as they say.
7 Named after the character in Samuel Beckett’s novel of the same name.
8 Doug went on to own a special effects (mostly weather effects) company supporting films, tv, commercials and commercial photography in the mid- Atlantic area. He worked on Deep Impact (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), Major League II (1994) and more. I worked for him on a film set on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, an “afterschool special” called Jacob Have I Loved (1989) which starred a very young Bridget Fonda. My job was to pull on ropes to make house shutters swing wildly during a storm scene.