The Salesman

Conrad Romo is a lifelong salesman who's hocked everything from pens to chimney cleaning services to fresh meat to computer diskettes. He's also a talented writer who crafts honest stories taken from his own life. He is a devout practitioner of Zen Buddhism who studies at the Zen Center in midtown Los Angeles.

A few years back, the Zen Center experienced a series of break-ins by a convicted sex offender.  The perpetrator (who turned out to be an ex-student of the Center) entered the premises at night and attempted to sexually assault female residents. Conrad, who had several years training in the Israeli martial art of Krav Maga, decided to get involved. He volunteered to serve as an all-night security guard. In accordance with non-violent Buddhist teachings he armed himself only with a can of mace.

The first two nights passed without incident.  Conrad caught up on his reading and wrote letters to friends. By the third night Conrad was exhausted. He found himself struggling to keep his eyes open. Sometime after midnight he fell asleep. He was awakened by a loud noise in the kitchen. He opened his eyes, disoriented and confused. He reached for the mace knocking his glasses to the floor.

A blurry figure moved through the kitchen toward the adjacent residency hall. Filled with fear and surging adrenalin, Conrad moved toward the figure. The perpetrator attempted to enter one of the dorm rooms.

"Don't move," Conrad yelled. He pointed the mace toward the man. In the darkness, the man mistook the mace for a gun.

"Don't shoot me, please."

Conrad did a quick mental calculation. The guy could be on drugs.  He could have a gun. He could have grabbed a knife from the kitchen.

Realizing the danger, Conrad aimed the mace and unleashed a heavy dose of pepper spray. Unfortunately the canister was pointed backwards and Conrad maced himself. He screamed. The suspect pushed past him and ran toward the kitchen. Conrad gave chase.

Conrad caught up with the man as he was halfway out the kitchen window (the same way he'd broken in). Conrad doused the man's face with three heavy sprays of mace. The man yelled and fell out the window. Conrad called the police then spent five minutes rinsing his own eyes.  The man escaped but he would never break in again.

A few years later, Conrad heard that the man committed suicide. The Zen Center conducted a special ceremony blessing the man. Conrad objected to the ritual. The man had terrorized the facility. He shouldn't be celebrated.

At the ceremony, the Roshi lit candles around a wicker basket which represented the "hungry ghost" or  departed one. Residents were asked to leave offerings in the basket to help the man's passage into his next incarnation. People added flower petals, pieces of fruit, little carved Buddhas. Conrad waited for everyone to leave before adding his own tribute. He placed a canister of mace in the center of the basket. He'd already scared away the man once. He wanted to make sure the man would never return.

Conrad currently hosts a once-a-month writing salon in Los Angeles called "Tongue And Groove." He is a bonafide Los Angeles iconoclast. (4" x 6", black ink print)

Dad

My father Igo Kantor is an old school film producer of the type you rarely see anymore.  He was born in 1930 and raised in Lisbon, Portugal. He learned english from comic books and American movies. His favorite films were the Republic Serials (Spy Smasher, Captain Marvel).

In 1950, Igo said goodbye to his parents in Europe and boarded a ship to New York. While at sea, he met the film director Max Nosseck (Dillinger, Rin Tin Tin). He told Mr. Nosseck he wanted to make movies and the director gave Igo a written introduction to his brother who ran a projection room in Hollywood.

Igo made it to Los Angeles and looked up Nosseck's brother. He was hired as a projectionist. Five nights a week he ran private screenings for filmmakers including actress Jean Peters who was dating Howard Hughes at the time. Hughes would sneak into the theater next to Peters while a film was playing. Hughes was quiet and aloof and though polite, he refused to shake hands with anyone.

In 1951, Igo was hired as an assistant film editor at Columbia Pictures. He worked on All the Kings Men with famed editor Al Clark (Mr Smith Goes to Washington). Clark was a lunchtime drinker and sometimes after lunch he would show up late or not at all. On those days Igo edited the film himself. (He remains proud that he edited the famous railroad speech in Kings Men.) Igo was elevated to music supervisor and he worked on Bye Bye Birdie and Under the Yum Yum Tree.

In 1962, Igo met my mother Enid through the help of a Jewish matchmaker. They were married and had three children. Igo opened a post-production house in Hollywood. He wrote the musical theme for two Tarzan features and became post-production supervisor on The Monkees. He was hired by Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson of Columbia/Screen Gems to work on Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens. He also worked post-production on Dennis Hopper's infamous film The Last Movie. After the film soared over budget, Universal pulled editing privileges from Hopper. Hopper asked Igo to participate in a clandestine plan to steal the negative from Universal. Igo refused though he and Hopper remained friends.

Igo received Emmy Nominations three years in a row for editing the Bob Hope Christmas Show. He worked with renowned writer/director Dalton Trumbo (of "Hollywood Ten" fame) on Trumbo's indie film Johnny Got His Gun. Sadly, Trumbo refused to pay his hefty bill and Igo was forced to close his post-production facility.

Igo moved into producing films. For the next 20 years, he made low-budget thrillers and horror films. These include Kingdom of the Spiders with William Shatner, Hardly Working with Jerry Lewis and Act of Piracy with Gary Busey. He also produced the musical opening for the 1988 Olympics in Korea. In 1992, Igo won a Western Heritage Award for his TV documentary Legends of the West with Jack Palance.  Igo passed away in October, 2019 after a long illness. He is loved and will be missed. (5" x 7", black ink print)

Genus Equus

On the day I proposed to my wife in Central California, we saw a pack of "wild" zebras running in an open field next to Highway 1. We later learned these animals were the progeny of William Randolph Hearst's original San Simeon zoo collection. Since that day, zebras have been my favorite animal. This woodcut depicts this beautiful beast. According to African folklore, zebras were initially white until a baboon tossed a zebra into a burning fire where the resulting burn marks became their distinctive stripes. (4" x 6", black ink print)

Macguffin

Alfred Hitchcock always wanted to make a film involving a chase scene across the presidential faces of Mount Rushmore. He had no specific idea for a plot.  All he knew was he wanted the hero to hide from villains in Lincoln's nose while suffering an uncontrollable sneezing fit. In 1957, Hitchcock teamed with screenwriter Ernest Lehman (Sweet Smell Of Success) to write what would become North By Northwest.  (The working title was The Man In Lincoln's Nose.)

Hitchcock wanted the story to start with a murder at the United Nations and he wanted a plot where the protagonist is mistaken for a non-existent secret agent.  Somehow, Lehman and Hitchcock combined these elements into an original spy thriller.  The film includes several Hitchcock signatures: an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances, POV shots forcing the audience to engage in voyeurism, a hero with an unresolved mother complex, a creative chase scene and the use of a famous landmark.  Cary Grant plays Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive mistaken by Communist spies as an undercover agent named George Kaplan.  After being kidnapped, Grant escapes across country, falls in love with a beautiful blonde and desperately tries to figure out who George Kaplan is.

James Stewart wanted to play the lead role but Hitchcock preferred Cary Grant. The director waited until Stewart committed to the Otto Preminger film Anatomy Of A Murder before casting Grant.  For the female lead, Hitchcock wanted Sophia Loren but she wasn't available.  He opted for Eva Marie Saint who'd come to prominence in On The Waterfront.  Saint was from the method acting school for which Hitchcock had notorious disdain.  When a method actor once asked Hitchcock, "What's my motivation," he replied, "Your salary."  Eva Marie Saint later said that Hitchcock gave her only three pieces of direction.  "Keep your voice low, always look directly at Cary Grant and stop moving your hands so much."

North By Northwest was Cary Grant's fourth Hitchcock film, and he could be demanding.  Throughout North By Northwest, Grant is almost always on the left side of screen presenting the right side of his face to the camera.  He preferred the right side of his face because of a small mole on his left cheek.  Grant was also a known penny-pincher.  A few weeks into production, Saint was impressed by how many autographs Grant gave to star struck fans.  She later learned Grant charged fifteen-cents per signature.

Hitchcock was denied permission to film at the United Nations building. Undeterred, he hid in the rear of a cleaning supply truck while the crew secretly filmed master shots of Cary Grant walking into the UN.  Hitchcock was also denied permission to film at Mount Rushmore.  South Dakota Senator Karl Mundt felt portraying a murder at the location would "desecrate the monument."  MGM created a massive replica of Mount Rushmore in a Culver City soundstage.  The set was so large it included 100 ponderosa pine trees.

The most famous scene in the film is a crop duster chase through a barren cornfield.  The 8-minute tension-filled scene is largely silent and has no music. Cary Grant stands beside a highway in the middle of nowhere thinking he's about to meet George Kaplan.  A stranger appears and points out a crop duster plane in the distance telling Grant, "That's funny.  He's dusting crops where there ain't no crops."  The resulting scene is one of the most iconic in movie history.

North By Northwest was the first spy film filled with deadpan humor.  The film served as a creative template for the James Bond movies that came out a few years later.  Cary Grant's drink of choice is a Gibson--gin & dry vermouth--similar to Bond's "shaken, not stirred" martini.  The crop duster scene is blatantly copied as a helicopter chase in From Russia With Love.  And the pre-Bondian dialogue includes lines like, "I never make love on an empty stomach."

Renowned graphic designer Saul Bass created the film's opening credits. Hitchcock's signature cameo appears just after the credits.  He arrives late at a bus stop and misses the bus.  The modernist home owned by the villain at the peak of Mount Rushmore was based on a Frank Lloyd Wright design.  The house didn't actually exist.  It was recreated in an MGM studio.

North By Northwest was nominated for 5 Academy Awards.  The American Film Institute lists it as one of the top ten movies ever made.  The film's title is taken from Hamlet and the meaning is a class MacGuffin (unexplained plot point) since north by northwest is not a true aviation direction.  (5" x 7", black ink print)

Milhous

This woodcut is an amalgam of Nixon campaign posters. The slogan was actually used in his 1972 re-election campaign while the image is from 1960. I wanted to make Nixon look happy but as his battle with JFK was falling apart, he must have been miserable. Eisenhower helped sink Nixon when he was asked to name one positive thing Nixon accomplished as Vice President. Eisenhower's response: "If you give me a week , I might think of one." Ouch! (5" x 7", black ink print)

The Bootlegger's Son

It was August 1960, three months before the presidential election, and the polls gave Richard Nixon a slim lead over John F. Kennedy.  Nixon had the advantage of being the reigning Vice President under Eisenhower and Republican strategists were labeling Kennedy as "too young and inexperienced." There was also suspicion of Kennedy's Roman Catholic religious affiliation.  Some Protestants feared Kennedy would take his orders directly from the Pope in Rome.

In a speech before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Kennedy addressed the issue directly.  "I am not the Catholic candidate for President.  I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president who also happens to be a Catholic.  I do not speak for my Church on public matters and the Church does not speak for me."

Nixon's campaign was plagued by bad luck.  In a televised interview, a reporter asked President Eisenhower to cite an example of a major idea Nixon contributed during Ike's presidency.  Eisenhower responded, "If you give me a week I might think of one."  This undercut Nixon's claim of having greater experience than Kennedy.  Democrats turned the comment into a TV commercial.

Nixon suffered a serious knee infection which caused him to lose two important weeks of campaigning. Nixon had pledged to campaign in all 50 States.  He ended up wasting valuable time visiting states where he had no chance to win or states that had few electoral votes.  (He spent the final weekend before the election visiting Alaska that had only 3 electoral votes while Kennedy spent the final weekend in Ohio, New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania.)

The candidates' choices of running mates were crucial.  In a move later deemed a "stroke of genius," Kennedy chose Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson.  Kennedy and brother Robert despised LBJ for his attacks on the Kennedy family, but Kennedy recognized he needed the support of traditional Southern Democrats most of whom had backed Johnson as the Democratic nominee.

Nixon chose former Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. as his running mate.  Lodge made numerous campaign mistakes including a pledge--not approved by Nixon--that as president Nixon would appoint a black person to his cabinet.  The remark was viewed as pandering by African Americans and it also offended southern whites that still supported segregation.

1960 was the first year the presidential debates were televised.  The first debate would be the turning point of the campaign.  Nixon had not fully recovered from his knee infection and he looked pale, sickly and tired.  He also refused makeup causing his bearded stubble to show prominently on the black and white television sets of the era.  (After the first debate, Nixon's mom called him to ask if he was sick.)

Kennedy took time off before the first debate.  He relaxed at home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts and acquired a generous tan.  As the debates began, Kennedy looked calm and confident while Nixon appeared irritable and ill at ease. Subsequent studies claimed that tv viewers overwhelmingly believed Kennedy won the first debate while a much smaller radio audience believed Nixon won. The post-debate polls seemed to validate this theory as Kennedy moved from a small deficit into a small lead.

On October 19, Martin Luther King was arrested in Atlanta while leading a civil rights march.  Nixon refused to become involved.  Kennedy placed calls to political authorities to get King released from jail.  After the incident, King's father endorsed Kennedy leading to favorable publicity in the black community. Kennedy would win the black vote by a huge margin helping to secure victories in New Jersey, South Carolina, Illinois and Missouri.

On election night, November 8, 1960, Nixon watched the returns from his suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles (where Robert Kennedy would be killed in 1968).  JFK watched with his family from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. The early returns from northeastern states and midwestern cities gave Kennedy a large lead.  Later returns from rural areas in the Midwest helped Nixon close the gap.  Before midnight, the New York Times went to press with the headline "Kennedy Elected President." Times managing editor Turner Catledge soon realized the election was too close to call.  (He feared another "Dewey Beats Truman" debacle.)  Not until the next afternoon was Kennedy finally conceded the election.

Kennedy won the popular vote by less than two-tenths of a percentage point (112,000 votes).  In the electoral college, the vote was 303 to 219, the closest election since 1916.  Thanks to Johnson, Kennedy carried most of the South including North Carolina, Georgia and Texas.

Some Republicans believed Kennedy benefitted from voter fraud in Illinois and Texas.  Kennedy won Illinois by just 9,000 votes (out of 4.75 million votes).  He was helped by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's political machine that gave him a 450,000 vote advantage in the windy city.  In Texas, where Lyndon Johnson was a standing senator, Kennedy won by 46,000 votes.  Some Republicans argued that Johnson's political machinations in the state's lower Rio Grande Valley produced forged votes for Kennedy.  But the state Board of Elections, whose members were all Democrat, certified Kennedy as the winner in Texas.

Had he won Texas and Illinois, Nixon would have earned 270 electoral votes, one more than the 269 votes needed to become president.  Nixon's supporters urged him to pursue recounts and challenge Kennedy's victory. But three days after the election, Nixon gave a speech stating he would not contest the election. Kennedy was president and the Camelot era was about to begin. (5" x 7", black ink print)

The Jewish Superhero

His name is synonymous with magic, but Harry Houdini (born Erich Weiss) rose to fame as an escape artist and stunt performer. Long before David Blaine, Houdini perfected the art of death-defying public spectacle. He hung from skyscrapers while tied in a straightjacket and he immersed himself in freezing rivers while trapped in a barrel.

The son of a rabbi, Houdini became a strong moral figure in the magic community often resolving disputes between competing magicians. In 1906 he started the magazine Conjurer's Monthly which helped unite magicians who had no union at the time.

Legend has it that Houdini was killed by a punch to the stomach.  Though parts of the story are accurate, it's not the whole truth.  Here are the details.

It was October 18, 1926.  Houdini was scheduled to perform at the Princess Theater in Montreal.  On the day of the performance, Houdini gave a lecture at McGill University about exposing fraudulent spiritualists and mediums.  After the speech, three students visited Houdini backstage.

As the students entered his dressing room, Houdini was lying on a couch reading mail.  One of the students, Joselyn Gordon Whitehead, brought up the question of Houdini's strength and his ability to take a punch to the stomach.  Houdini stated that his stomach could resist much, but he did not offer to test the statement.  He remained reclined on the couch having broken his ankle a few days earlier while performing his famous Water-Torture Cell Escape.

Suddenly, Whitehead struck several fierce blows into Houdini's gut.  Houdini winced in pain and gestured for the student to stop.  Houdini stated he'd not been given time to prepare.  Had he known the punches were coming, he would have stood up.

By mid-afternoon, Houdini was suffering from severe stomach pain.  He made it through that evening's performance as well as two more shows the next day.  On a train to Detroit for a week of new shows, his stomach pain had become insufferable.  His wife Bess wired ahead for a doctor whom met them in the Detroit theater dressing room.  Houdini had a 104-degree temperature.

The doctor urged that Houdini go straight to the hospital.  Houdini proclaimed, "I'll do this show if it's my last."  By the show's third act, Houdini could not go on.  His assistants finished his act and Houdini finally agreed to go to the hospital.

The surgeon determined that Houdini had a ruptured appendix and he was suffering from peritonitis.  These were the days before antibiotics and Houdini's condition was serious.  Houdini hung on for four days before undergoing a second operation.  Though he seemed to be recovering, Houdini died a few days later on Halloween.

Newspaper reporters wrote that the blows to Houdini's stomach had killed him. Today, medical experts agree that appendicitis caused by blunt trauma is not possible.  Houdini was likely already suffering from appendicitis when Whitehead punched him.  (His wife Bess confirmed Houdini was in discomfort for weeks.) Houdini possibly wrote off his pain as a residual effect from the blows thus delaying the medical treatment that might have saved his life.  At the time of his death, Houdini was just 52 years old.  (5" x 7", black ink print with watercolor)