Chapter 28
MY DAD AND I often draw cartoon pictures of each other. I have stacks of these caricatures that we did on paper plates. The ones I draw of him are usually in profile, often with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and featuring whatever nickname I am calling him at the time. “Rodman Raisin” reads one; he calls me “Young Raisin” because we both like to sit in the sun. We do these drawings after dinner at the cottage, teasing, exaggerating each other’s features more and more. I copy his signature below the ones I do of him.
During these years of the 1970s my dad is teaching Writing for Television at Ithaca College in the summer. He genuinely likes college students and thoroughly enjoys teaching. Often he holds these classes at the cottage, out on the lawn. Sometimes, though, he gets up very early to drive the forty minutes to the college to open the recording studio, recognizing that the students need a faculty member there and that recording time is at a premium.
One summer he records a voice-over for each of their individual projects. The head of the department is impressed by his generosity with his time.
e9780806536736_i0020.jpg
I would love to have had my dad as a teacher. For the most part, we have the same tastes. We like similar stories and movies and generally have the same criticisms and the same reactions. There are two occasions, though, that I remember reality falling short of our expectations of one another. He takes me to see the play Our Town, and tells me, “This is right up your alley. You are going to love it.” I like it, but I don’t love it, and I know he is a little disappointed. Today this would have been a completely different conversation; I would have agreed with him it was great, but at the time I was too young to appreciate Wilder.
The other time . . . when we go to see Paul Zindel’s movie, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, my dad laughs at the line, “My heart is full.” I am shocked and furious that he has missed the poignancy of the moment. Later, when we are discussing the movie in the car I tell him, “I can’t believe you laughed at that line. It was a critical, important, heartbreaking moment! I thought you, of all people, would ‘get’ it!”
“It was funny—out of place, over the top. A little corny. Admit it,” he says.
I sit sullenly beside him and don’t speak to him until, almost home, he says, “C’mon, who’s your best friend, Pops?” and despite myself, I have to smile and I answer, “You are.”
 
 
From a distance, on the cottage porch, I sometimes watch my dad out on the lawn surrounded by his students, laughing, writing, critiquing films, and all having a good time.
When I see the videos, now, of his lectures from classes held at the college, and I hear the questions the students ask and see the expressions on their faces when they look at him, filled with reverence, I imagine they would probably be amused if they knew his nickname was “Roddy Rabbit.”
As a teaching tool, my dad talks about his writing, what makes some scripts succeed and others fail.
One of his screenplays that he uses to represent what doesn’t work is a script called The Man, based on the novel by Irving Wallace and starring James Earl Jones. It is a story about the first African American president. My father must feel the movie doesn’t live up to its promise or the depth the characters deserve; that Jones’s character comes across as a cipher, a noble symbol rather than a flesh-and-blood human being. Mark Olshaker told me, “Your dad said, ‘That script taught me never to write about someone who doesn’t go to the bathroom.’”
In the seventies, a black president seems very much in the range of “science fiction.” The only way Wallace could “realistically” get an African American into the Oval Office was to make him interim president of the Senate and then stage a catastrophe in which all those ahead of him in line of succession are killed. How thrilled my dad would have been to see Barack Obama inaugurated as president thirty-seven years later.
My father also teaches Creativity Seminars at Ithaca College. In some of his notes he writes:

All writers are born; they’re never made . . . I take off and write, out of a sense of desperate compulsion.
I always write as if I’d gotten my X-ray back from the doctor on Monday, and I’d best check with the insurance man to see whether or not the house is free and clear.
Who was it that said “Writing is the easiest thing on earth. I simply walk into my study, I sit down, I put the paper in the typewriter, and I fix the margins, and then I turn the paper up—and I bleed.”

Often he is asked to speak at high school and college graduations. Most of his talks have a common theme. He writes a letter to the woman organizing one of his speeches at Bergenfield High School in New Jersey:

Dear Ms. Jaeger,
I usually make it a practice to send along no ostensible words of wisdom to high school or college students. This is simply because most of them are so much brighter than I am that comments of mine sound pompous and a little unrealistic. But since I’ve been invited to speak my peace, the following is a brief philosophy that I believe in, and which may be of help to someone:
If you write, fix pipes, grade papers, lay bricks or drive a taxi—do it with a sense of pride. And do it the best you know how. Be cognizant and sympathetic to the guy alongside, because he wants a place in the sun, too. And always . . . always look past his color, his creed, his religion and the shape of his ears. Look for the whole person. Judge him as the whole person.

In a commencement address on March 17, 1970, at the University of Southern California (the sentiments are relevant even today, decades later) he says:

. . . It’s simply a national acknowledgement that in any kind of priority, the needs of human beings must come first. Poverty is here and now. Hunger is here and now. Racial tension is here and now. Pollution is here and now. These are the things that scream for a response. And if we don’t listen to that scream—and if we don’t respond to it—we may well wind up sitting amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us—or the bomb that pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that destroyed the dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our own name.