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The Senate Small Business Committee Pizza Parlor

2005; University of Texas Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cj.2005.0030

1527-2087

Tim Hunter,

Business Law and Ethics

The Senate Small Business Committee Pizza Parlor Tim Hunter (bio) I think many of us feel written out on the subject of growing up under the blacklist. All of us are much older now than our parents were when the blacklist hit in 1947 and again in 1952. I dare say most of us are not happy to be this old in the era of George Bush and his warmongering neo-cons; we'd hoped it would never happen, thought maybe we'd get in under the wire . . . but alas no. And if Bush should take a long time for the country to get over, will we be around to see that . . . one can only hope. As I've said in interviews on the subject, my father and all the blacklisted writers and other artists that we knew were inspiring, and I thought they were all the greatest guys in the world. So funny and so smart. My own memories of Ring Lardner Jr., Waldo Salt, Dalton Trumbo, Hugo Butler, Zero Mostel, Paul Jarrico, Gordon Kahn, John Collier, Lou Solomon, and others, based on my family's frequent contact with them, are much more idealized and less complicated than those of their own children recounted in interviews and articles over the years. All of them supported my love of film, and I admired them especially for what good friends they all were. Those friendships and loyalties that grew and endured among that group, out of and in spite of the blacklist, transfixed a young, left-wing, movie nut of a kid. I have not found these kinds of bonds in my own generation, much less tested but by necessity much more competitive. So these were my heroes growing up. In a sense it was like living in the same world as The Adventures of Robin Hood that Ian, Ring and others were writing during the '50s. They had stood up to authority and taken a most patriotic stand on principle and paid the price. Yet they banded together, robbed the rich to feed the poor, and had great times while staying true to their ideals in the forests of New York City (hmm, in this scheme, maybe Dalton Trumbo, by finally breaking the blacklist, was King Richard the Lionheart). My dad drank too much, I was overweight, and my mom was not always easy to be with, but except for a few years around the ages of seven to nine that I've pretty much forgotten or blacked out, it was an oddly idyllic and exciting childhood and there wasn't much I would have traded it in for. When we returned from our year of early exile from Hollywood (1951–52) in Mexico, Ian and my mom, Alice, and I drove from Mexico City to Tarrytown, New York, up through the Texas panhandle, New Orleans, and Louisville. When we arrived with $6 at the house of my aunt Harriet and Uncle Leo, we were complete strangers and outcasts. I remember those months in the country, never feeling at home but playing in the woods and catching frogs with a neighbor kid whose family ate Grape Nuts for dinner. My father made me a "Good Traveling Medal," pasting a small U.S. map with our route traced on a cut circle of wood with a big red ribbon nailed to the [End Page 112] back. Then we stayed with the Marzanis on West 88th Street in New York City for a few months. Left-wing writer and editor Carl Marzani and his wife, Edith, who was wheelchair-bound with multiple sclerosis, took us into their brownstone. They had met in Washington during the war. Their son Tony and I became best friends and, as was the case with many of us red diaper babies, we were very independent at an early age, going all over the city on our own. There was a bakery on Columbus Avenue nearby, with an awning and big display windows, called, I swear, "Candi-O-Plastic." Finally we settled at 20 West 69th Street in a tiny brownstone basement apartment, and worked our way up the Upper West Side, moving into successively larger apartments on...