Victims of Suburbia

A
young man named Steve asks if I can dig up a live hermit he can
interview during Easter vacation for his B-11 American literature class
at Hamilton High. I regret to report failure. An honest-to-goodness
hermit is hard to find. I checked a few places and came up with
nothing.

There are, of course, countless men and women who
live alone and dislike it, and imagine they are hermits. But they don’t
qualify. They go to the grocery store and see people. The dictionary
defines a hermit as "a person who retires from society and lives in
solitude."

I am sure there are a few so-called hermits living
in isolated canyons and hillsides, away from it all, but I doubt
they’re authentic, either. Incidentally, this kind of life is becoming
more difficult all the time with the freeways reaching into nooks,
crannies andbosky dells. 

IN FACT, it appears the hermit business is shot. Come to think of it a hermit would probably be subpoenaed by the Un-American Activities Committee for renouncing the blessings of civilization.

So
you see, Steve, you’ve got too much going against you. And it would be
useless to ask any self-respecting hermit who might read this to come
forward. Part of the hermit game is not to read anything and to want no
part of intruders, especially interviewers.

Ever think of interviewing an Easter Bunny, Steve?

IT’S LATER
than you think. Les and Lucy Wagner phoned their daughter Georgia in
Los Altos Sunday and her husband said she wasn’t there, she was out
Christmas shopping.

"Christmas shopping? Sunday?" Les exclaimed.

"Why not? It’s March, isn’t it?"

SMALL CONSOLATION
If the bombs get cleaner and cleaner
And testing continues its course
If the Russians get meaner and meaner
I’ll be an immaculate corpse.
— PEARL ROWE

IN A LETTER,
Doris Hellman’s sister, now on a slow tour of Europe, writes that she
went to a fancy reception and ball in Hamburg, Germany; attended by
many important political leaders and nobility, and overheard a dowager
in this conversational tidbit: "So I told him — don’t go to war!"

UP AT Stanford, Cameron Shipp
relates, they’re telling about a scientist who went to Cape Canaveral
to launch a rocket. It fizzed momentarily, then died without getting
off the pad, and the scientist returned toPalo Alto disconsolate. 

"Don’t worry, it could have been worse," president Wallace Sterling soothed.

"Worse? How could it have been worse? It not only didn’t go into orbit, it didn’t even rise?"

"Suppose it had risen five feet," Sterling said softly, "and then gone into orbit?"

Man, would that have created consternation on the Santa Ana Freeway at 5 p.m.

PUBLIC AT LARGE — Frank Barron has a solution for the West Berlin crisis. Make it the 51st state. We need one on that side . . . Harry Cimring
knows a man who is having engraved on his St. Christopher’s medal, "Not
good over 65 m.p.h." . . . Of Boris Pasternak’s ejection from the
Soviet writers’ union AlHine remarked to Caskie Stinnett: "They bartered their birthright for a pot of message." 

AT RANDOM —
The magic word among actors these days is residuals — checks they
receive for repeat runs of old pictures on TV, usually without knowing
about them. "It’s like stealing," one says . . . That wasn’t Khrushchev
at 2nd and Spring, it was John Grover. Friends said he’d look like
Nikita if he got a close haircut. He did and he does . . . Oops, Mischa
Elman is 68, not in his 80s, as stated here . . . The same issue of a La Mirada paper had a bank worker’s death notice and an ad for a replacement.