While she’s home, let’s look back at some of the statistics of 1952…what
was going on in the world while Linda was getting used to her new boarding
school experience

Some
Events in 1952

• Albert Einstein refuses Presidency of Israel
• Big Bang Theory of the creation of the
  Universe first propounded
• Elizabeth II becomes Queen upon the death of
  her father George VI.
• De Havilland 110 fighter aircraft breaks up over
  spectators at Farnborough Air Show killing 30
• Three Trains crash at Harrow in North London
• The Mau Mau Rebellion starts in Kenya
• South African Police Arrest Nelson Mandella
  
• India holds it's first general
  elections
• Thick smog on December 4th in
  London,
  England causes 4,000 fatalities
• Britain announces it has Atomic Bomb
• Live Atomic bomb Test from testing site in Yucca
  Flats, Nevada shown on Television
• California has it's second largest earthquake
  rocking 100,000 sq miles
• Charlie Chaplin refused entry back to the US after
  living in Hollywood for 20 years.
• Rocky Marciano becomes world heavyweight champion after
  knocking out Jersey Joe Walcott
• Vice Presidential Candidate Richard M. Nixon defends
  himself on Television over allegations of secret cash fund
• 3300 die of polio in U.S.; 57,000 children are
  paralyzed
• The Last London Trams Decommissioned
• Mother Teresa opens the home for dying and
  destitute in Calcutta
• The Summer Olympics are held in July
  in Helsinki, Finland
• Puerto Rico becomes a Self Governing
  Commonwealth Of the United States
• Steel Plants Placed Under Presidential Control after
  Steel Unions Threaten to Strike
• Military coup d'etat in Egypt headed
  by Nasser
• The Winter Olympic Games are held in
  Oslo, Norway
• The Today Show premieres on NBC
• The first commercial jet plane, the BOAC’s Comet is put into
  service.
• A tropical storm forms north of Cuba and moves
  northeast making landfall in Florida.  It is the earliest reported formation of a tropical
  storm on
  record in the Atlantic basin.
• The film The African Queen opens at the Capitol Theatre
  in New York City.
• Churchill’s government in the UK abolishes Identity
  Cards to “set
  people free.”
• Fulgencio Batista leads a successful coup in Cuba.
• Alan Freed presents the Moondog Coronation Ball, the
  first rock and roll concert, in Cleveland, Ohio.
• Sun Records begins operation.
• In a radio
  address to the nation from the White House, President Harry S. Truman
  calls for the seizure of all steel mills in the United States in order to prevent a
  nationwide strike.
• Secretaries
  Day (now Administrative
  Professionals' Day) is first celebrated.
• Occupied
  Japan: The United States occupation of Japan ends.
• U.S.
  lieutenant colonels Joseph O. Fletcher and William P. Benedict land a
  plane at the geographic North Pole.
• The
  concept for the integrated circuit, the basis for all modern computers, is first published by
  Geoffrey W.A. Dummer.
• Dwight
  D. Eisenhower retires from
  active service in the United States Army.
• Catalina
  affair, a Swedish Douglas DC-3 was shot down by a Soviet MiG-15 fighter.
• The
  keel is laid for the nuclear submarine USS Nautilus.
• Puerto
  Rico's Constitution is approved
  by the Congress of the United States.
• The
  15th Olympic Games begin in
  Helsinki, Finland.
• Puerto
  Rico becomes a self-governing
  commonwealth of the United States.
• Hussein
  proclaimed king of Jordan
• The
  Arab League goes into effect.
• Reparation
  negotiations between West Germany and Israel end in Luxembourg; West Germany to pay 3 billion
  Deutschmarks.
• Premiere
  of John Cage's 4'33" in Woodstock, New York.
• United
  Nations gives Eritrea to Ethiopia.
• The
  US bars Charlie Chaplin from reentering
  the country after a trip to England
• United
  Kingdom successfully tests a nuclear weapon.
• The
  United States successfully detonates the first hydrogen bomb, codenamed "Mike" , at Eniwetok island
  in the Bikini atoll located in the Pacific Ocean.
• U.S.
  presidential election:
  Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower defeats Democrat Adlai Stevenson.
• Agatha
  Christie's murder-mystery play The Mousetrap opens at the Ambassadors Theatre in London,
  still the longest continuously running play in history).
• Korean
  War: US president-elect Dwight
  D. Eisenhower fulfills a campaign promise by traveling to Korea to find
  out what can be done to end the conflict.
• The
  New York Daily News reports the first successful sexual reassignment
  operation.
• A
  "killer fog" descends on London ("Smog" for
  "smoke" and "fog" becomes a word).
• The
  Abbott and Costello Show
  starring comedians Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, debuts.

TEACHING ARTISTS:  Classes are guided by professional artists.

WHERE:  All classes are held at Chuck Jones Archive, 131
West Chapman Avenue, Orange, CA

REGISTRATION:  Registration
and payment in advance are required.

For details, registration forms, and the class schedule,
please contact:  

Pamela Marsden, 949.660.7793, or via the Center for Creativity's website.

Post #32

Wednesday, November
26

Dearest Linda;

Boy, have I been a
lousy correspondent—so now I’m a despondent correspondent—on account of I’m
sorry I haven’t written more often. 
As I told you I’ve been banging madly away on this outside picture, so I
have a legitimate excuse, but who wants excuses?  I feel particularly bad for letting you down when you were
sick abed.  There’s nothing so foul
and sick-making as a cold.  It is a
humiliating disease and a wretched ailment all the way around.  You can’t dignify the little bastard by
calling it serious and yet it is impossible to ignore it, for it can serve as a
jackknife to something more formidable. 
(I was thinking of “spring-board” in the previous sentence, just why it
came out “jack-knife” I cannot say.)

I don’t imagine you
will get this before you return from Florence, so please write us all about
it.  You know, I think we must be the
most indulgent parents alive: if it sounds like fun, we’re all for it, to Hell
with anything else.  It was quite
different in my day.  The fact that
a teenager suggested a thing was usually sufficient to generate an automatic “NO!”  It was supposed that a youngster was
always up to mischief, that it would only lead to trouble to give him what was
known as “his head”.  Phooey!  People were very, very jerky in that
age.  It is indeed amazing that we managed
to attain adulthood with any degree at all of common sense.  The amazing thing, too, is that we are
able to be different than they were.

I am never able to
understand from your letters just what kind of a student you are.  Between reports you seem to sink to the
most astonishing depths only to rise to fairly respectable levels when we
receive your grades.  I know that
this situation may alter, that your grades may agree with your letters or worse
yet that your letters may glow with optimism and your grades shine with the
faint light of decay.  All things being
equal perhaps your present course is the best, but tell me, Linda, is there any
hope for you?

Hm?

The Lutzes will be
here at 9:00 o’clock tomorrow by Union Pacific R.R.  We shall whisk them to the house, wash their little paddy
paws, back into the car, pick up Russell Baldwin (an old friend of our school
days) then over the freeways to Jack and Joyce and a thirty-five pound turkey,
courtesy of bl. Joneses.  Whole
tribe will be present, including Bob and Bob and new bobbie, I mean baby.  Should be a hectic, but fun type
day.  I will report on it to you.

Hell, no more
paper.  I love you.

Post #31

[Because there is discussion in this letter about the exorbitant
price of tickets for a college football game and related items, here are some
statistics to put the amounts in perspective:

Cost
of Living 1952
Average wages per year $3,850.00
Cost of a gallon of Gas 20 cents
Average Cost of a new car $1,700.00
Average Cost of Rent $80.00 per month
LB of Hamburger Meat 53 cents
Average House Price 2,028]

November 19, 1952

Dear Linda;

Listen you foul
little beast, how’s about a letter? 
Hm?  Postcard?  Bit of a message scribbled in blood on
an old petticoat and smuggled out in a loaf of pumpernickel?  Or don’t you export pumpernickel from
old Quarter Circle V Bar?  No
letter Monday, no letter Tuesday, what’s the deal? 

Your voice Satirday
sounded healthy, but a little frustrated. 
Hope it gets de-frustrated soon. 
Any break?  How do you like
the word ‘Satirday’?  How about
‘Satireday’, the day we satirize things? 
Brilliant wit, eh?  Yes,
indeed.

The big game for Los
Angles this weekend to end all big games. 
UCLA and USC meeting for the first time with both teams undefeated,
untied, winner to go to the Rose Bowl with a fair chance to be judged national
champs.  Thank goodness they’re
going to televise it, otherwise there would be rioting at the gates of the Coliseum.  Even at five bucks per seat, plus two
or three bucks for parking (can you imagine that?) thirty-five cents for hot
dogs and twenty cents for cokes, seventy-five cents for programs and God knows
what else.  Scalpers, of course,
are running rife.  I imagine by
game time a brace of tickets between the goal posts, that is on the flat side,
will sell for sixty to a hundred dollars. 
If that sounds impossible, well, last weekend at the Michigan/Notre Dame
game two seats brought seventy-five dollars.  Just what prompts people to want to see a game that badly I
do not know, but they do.  I can’t
remember a game ever meaning that much to me, even though I used to get almost
sick with excitement when a really big game came along.

Heigh-ho or rather
ho-hum.  I’m a little sleepy.  Been slamming through another Coyote
and Roadrunner, as I may have mentioned. 
These are sort of money-in-the-bank type pictures.  We don’t have to worry about
establishing a premise or continuity or character development much or trick
backgrounds.  Everything’s pretty
open.  Just sit down and start
drawing and when all the gags are roughed out, arrange them according to pace,
so’s the picture will build in tempo, find myself a strong gag to end on and
I’m in business.  Timing is a snap
because no dialogue and there’s no worry about making it too long, because I
can time the gags as I go along and use just as many as I need.  All in all, life could be very simple
and maybe a little bit dull if all I had to do was direct coyote and r.r.s.

Not that I want to
be a slobby old father, but ‘twould be nice to hear from you, if you haven’t written
already.  If so, write again.

Love LOVE LOVE loooooooooooooooooove…….XXXX

s/Daddy

Post #30

November 13, 1952

Dear Linda;

Your letter on the
round up I found vivid and exciting, quite a deal all the way around.  How is your Technicolored hand?  If you think those calves were a
problem think how they would have been if they had known what was in store for
them.  I’ve often thought that one
of the saving graces about being a so-called dumb animal is that you can’t
anticipate your problems and you don’t worry about them afterwards.  Being castrated, to paraphrase P.G.
Wodehouse, can never be an unmixedly pleasant experience, but it is undoubtedly
easier if you don’t know it is going to happen, or care particularly
afterwards.  The treatment you guys
gave these beasts was rough enough, god knows, but seeing them after on the
range one would never suppose that they had enjoyed (?) an experience that to a
human being might be slightly frustrating.

Remember the square
dance at the opening of the service station?  Not so.  ‘Twasn’t
a service station at all, but the opening of a new city hall and civic center
at the small township of Bell, a town about opposite Westchester, but about
eight miles inland.  It was quite
an experience.  We were slated to
dance on a parking lot (one square of us [from Rip ‘n’ Snort] and one of the Levis and Laces, Ralph [Maxheimer] to call), which had been
covered with some kind of goop to make it danceable.  The teeming multitudes were to watch us dance, be impressed,
take up square dancing themselves and so live happily ever afterward. 

There were several
slight hitches.  The impresario who
had arranged the deal had gotten gutter-drunk early in the day and swarmed home
in a stage of black forgetfulness. 
Those officials who remained were not at home, but they were certainly
gorgeously looped. 

If we had gone up
and told them we were the trained dog act, they would have accepted us with
bland faith, but they wouldn’t have known what to do about it.  They didn’t know what to do with a
bunch of trained square dancers either, so they stared at us in glassy
contemplation then turned without another word, climbed upon a ribbon-bedecked
grandstand on the other side of the City Hall and started talking to a small
group of Solid Citizens arrayed before them.  Most of these were in a happy state of rigidity too so
things proceeded in an orderly and steamily vacuous way: drunks applauding
drunks, a sweet civic picture for the multitude of frisky moppets who seemed to
be everywhere under foot. 

We walked pensively
back to our parking lot where six or eight hangover cases were scattered around
on benches provided for just such emergencies.  A band now appeared. 
Square dance band? 
Nope.  Twelve pieces in
dress suits who climbed into another bandstand and began tootling away in
stringy harmony like a poor man’s Guy Lombardo.  They had never heard of us and once we had heard of them, we
had no desire to repeat the experience. 

Another interesting
factor was the sound system provided for the girl vocalist, mm-hm, they even
had one of those.  This sound
system had the interesting faculty of either being off altogether or on
altogether.  No delicate shading or
foolishness like that.  Part of the
time this poor little dame in her flamboyant vestments was trebling away in a
thin little voice that barely reached out of the bandstand and the next second
she was drowned in a torrent of sound so overwhelming in its violence that she
could not hear the orchestra, for this sound system not only blasted eight
million decibels, but lowered the key to a thunderous base that set the
electric wires vibrating clear to El Segundo.  I am told that this awe-inspiring auditory spectacle had no
visible effect on the drunken City Fathers who continued with untroubled
eloquence their paternal maunderings. 

It must have been a
touching spectacle to have watched these public servants mouthing their
platitudes into this great vortex of sound and to see the audience respond with
soundless clapping as the thunder and storming broke around their liqueous
shoulders all unbeknownst.  Such is
the peace of true biliousness. 

Eventually Ralph got
impatient and pushed his way to the turn-table, made some rapid adjustments
with a nail-file, ushered the bewildered orchestra into the Men’s Room, locked
the door and carried on the exhibition for one of the smallest audiences in one
of the biggest arenas in square dance history.  After which, we released the orchestra, most of whom had
fallen asleep on toilet seats, whispered our good-byes to the one sober
policeman and the firemen, who were all sober, but introspective, and pushed
our way to the street through platoons of children and windrows of drunks. 

An electrifying
evening, all in all.

Last night we
appeared on a square dance program over KECA television, sort of a barn dance
deal.  Very corny show, but the
dancing was fun and the experience was, too.  I am told by those who saw it that we looked quite good,
considering what we start with, physiologically speaking.

If Dottie hasn’t
sent you permission to go to Shirley’s, I shall, of course, do so, by special
courier if necessary.  I think it
will be great fun.

Goom bye..my best
and highest regards to all.

Holy Christ, my poor
old typing is degenerating into shambles of the first order.

I love you…

Daddy