AS SEPTEMBER BROUGHT IN A NEW SCHOOL YEAR, DEAN MOVED into Fay Bitting’s home again for his last few months. Although he was officially part of the class of 1967, he had taken summer courses so that he could finish his classes before Christmas in 1966. He and Gerda had set a date in October to get married, just before his final exams. This semester would be spent on job interviews.
As short story editor again on The Reflector, he contributed more material than ever. This time he published nine of his poems and two short stories. One was about the ways in which various people interpret the fall of a statue of the Virgin Mary in Agna Scalientes in Mexico. The other was science fiction. Its theme was population control and destinies decided by androids. Several of the poems expressed antiwar sentiments and anger at religious hypocrisy.
The last issue of The Reflector in which he was published was in the spring of 1967, after he was already gone. It was a poem called “Where No One Fell,” depicting a paradise made of the most delectable foods imaginable, such as cherries and chocolate.
Feel the wind of Cherry Mountain
Taste the sugar of Chocolate Sea
Hear the music of Harmony Forest
See the girl - so pretty is she…
…Hold her close and hold her well
Enjoy a land where no one fell.
As Dean and Gerda planned their wedding, Dean ran into a family conflict. He had known it was building, but he had not foreseen how nasty it might get.
Sometime earlier, Aunt Kate had asked him to come over because she needed to tell him something important. To his surprise, she insisted that his mother did not really like Gerda and that if they planned to get married, Florence would put a stop to it.
Dean knew it was not true, but when he related this odd event to his mother, she dismissed it with, “Well, you know your Aunt Kate.”
After that, every once in a while, Kate took him aside to tell him that Florence was saying negative things about Gerda. When Dean ignored her, she became surly.
As the wedding date approached, Dean and Gerda prepared the announcements. They sent one to Aunt Kate and Uncle Ray.
“I got summoned over to their house,” Dean recalls, “and Aunt Kate said that she had told us before anyone else about [her son] Jim getting married, and she was unhappy that we didn’t have the courtesy to tell her about my wedding, that she just received an invitation like everybody else. Of course, she’d known for years that Gerda and I were going to get married. I’m sure she knew the time and date, but still she said she would not come to the wedding. She turned it into this big feud and my Uncle Ray got caught in the middle.”
Dean was unhappy that Uncle Ray would not be there to witness this joyous event, but he had seen how long these feuds could last. There was nothing he could do.
For the past two years, Gerda had begrudgingly lived at home to save money and had worked at the First National Bank in Bedford. The plan was that after they were married, Dean would move into her small bedroom in her parents’ home for a month or two so they could save money. Gerda had been reluctant to do this because she wanted to leave home, but eventually she gave in. At least they would be together.
Then, shortly before their wedding, Dean came home from Shippensburg for a weekend. He spoke with his mother about his plans, that he and Gerda would have a short honeymoon before he took his final exams. At the end of the weekend, as he was about to leave, his mother came out to the car. Dean kissed her good-bye and was about to get in when Florence asked, “What would you think of me if I divorced your father? Would you think I’m a terrible person?”
Dean was stunned. He stared at her a moment and then managed to say, “No, I wouldn’t. The only thing I have to say is why in the hell didn’t you divorce him twenty years ago?”
Florence was shocked by his response.
“Are you going to do it?” he pressed.
But now she was reticent. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t believe what you just said.”
“I just asked you why you didn’t do it twenty years ago.”
Florence turned away and would not say another word. Dean asked her again if she intended to divorce his father, but she refused to address it. “Later,” was all she would say. “Maybe later.” Dean had to return to school with his question unanswered.
“And she never raised the issue again,” he says. “I couldn’t get her to talk about it. All I ever could figure out from that conversation was that on some level, my mother thought that I had been oblivious to certain things. How she could think that, when I had been there through it all, is a mystery to me.”
It may have been that, faced with her son’s imminent departure and the idea of being alone with Ray for the rest of her life, she finally had confronted the terrible truth about her future.
The wedding day approached. Relatives arrived and friends gathered, although Dean’s longtime friend Larry was out of town. There was little money, but Gerda had bought, rather than made, her wedding gown. Her stepmother Angie helped her prepare.
On October 15 at Saint Thomas Catholic Church in Bedford, Dean and Gerda were married. This church was renowned for its elaborately carved wooden altar, which was enhanced that day by white gladiola and red carnations. White carnations also adorned the side altar.
“My mother had a little trouble with it being a Catholic ceremony at first,” says Dean, “but it was not a serious issue with her.”
Gerda wore an Alfred Angelo original of white satin with long, pointed sleeves and a butterfly train. The bodice was embroidered with swirls of seed pearls. Three satin roses anchored a veil, and Gerda carried a cascade of white fugi mums and red roses.
“Gerda was very tiny in her lacy dress,” recalls Mary Jeanne Wilt, a bridesmaid. “She was beautiful.”
Gerda’s younger sister Donna was maid of honor, wearing an empire-waisted gown of red velvet. She carried white fugi mums with bronze centers. The bridesmaids were Gerda’s friends, Barbara Webber and Mary Jeanne. Their empirewaisted gowns were bronze velvet and they carried bouquets of bronze fugi mums. All three attendants wore headpieces made of a velvet rose. Both mothers wore green suits.
Dean had rented a tuxedo. Paul Perencevic from school was his best man. Ushers were also college friends, Andy Wickstrom and Robert Wilson. His first roommate, Harry Recard, was in attendance, along with about sixty other people.
Father Edward F. McConnell officiated. He did not really know Dean, and during rehearsal had repeatedly called him “Dan.” Dean and Gerda had thought he was trying to make it very clear that Dean did not belong to his church. Gerda corrected him quite sternly on several occasions, and during the actual ceremony, he got it right.
Dean’s mother had felt sure that Aunt Kate was still determined that she and Uncle Ray would not come, but they showed up after all. Dean greeted them afterward.
“I hugged them,” he says, “and my Uncle Ray was crying, of course, but Aunt Kate was in one of her glowering states. I said that I was so happy they had come and hoped to see them at the reception. Kate said, ‘I’ve come to the wedding but by God if I’ll go to the reception.’ And she stormed off.”
The reception took place at the American Legion Hall. Gerda’s Italian family loved weddings and made it a fun time. Dean’s father got thoroughly drunk.
“Gerda did not toss her bouquet,” says Mary Jeanne. “After the reception, they went back to their house to change and she put her bouquet on her mother’s grave.”
They had bought a used blue Ford Galaxy together while Dean was still in college, and they packed it up for a weekend away.
“We drove down to Williamsburg, Virginia, and stayed overnight,” says Dean. “We just had a few nights before I had to take finals.” Both of them thoroughly enjoyed this restored colonial town, although they were novices at taking a vacation. “We didn’t even know how to check in to a hotel,” Gerda remembers. “We had to learn.” Even so, it was fun just to be alone together.
Afterward, Dean finished his courses and went immediately to his first teaching job.
In 1967, seven hundred thousand people marched in New York to support the war in Vietnam, while fifty thousand demonstrated against it in Washington. Martin Luther King, freed from prison, led an antiwar march in New York. Hippies in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury responded to Timothy Leary’s invitation to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” They proclaimed the Summer of Love, while blacks rioted in Detroit, Newark, and Cleveland. China exploded its first A-bomb, Rosemary’s Baby was the year’s sensational film, and Twiggy made an impact on the fashion world, with her skinny legs and doll-like eyes. Stanford biochemists produced synthetic DNA.
It was during this time that Dean took a teaching job in the former coal-mining town of Saxton, Pennsylvania, tutoring students in English in the Tussey Mountain School District. The mines were played out and the town relied on one of the early nuclear research plants for employment. Dean had gone on job interviews over to Chambersburg and as far north as Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, but had ended up taking over a position in Title III of the Appalachian Poverty Program for a teacher who was in the hospital. It was administered by local school districts, and Dean was assigned to Saxton, which was not far from Bedford.
The job affirmed his idealistic bent. College students everywhere were devoting themselves to the environment, the Peace Corps, and the civil rights movement. Middle-class students identified with the oppressed and wanted to reject the self-centered materialism of their parents. They believed that the world would only improve with their involvement, and even as they protested the thirty billion dollars per year that the government was spending to send young men to war, they spread doctrines of peace and cooperation. Over two hundred antiwar demonstrations disrupted college campuses, and young people insisted on freedom and respect to be who they wanted, love whomever they desired, and do whatever they pleased. A job working with a poverty program was one in which to take some pride, although it could be more challenging than a regular teaching position.
“This is the one I wanted to do,” Dean states. “It had the most appeal to me and sounded the most interesting and exciting. I was idealistic and thought I would have more impact on the kids.”
The program was introduced as part of President Johnson’s Great Society agenda. Teachers in the school district were to identify the most gifted children from poverty-stricken families — those kids who would benefit from one-on-one attention not readily available in larger classes. However, when asked to select students to leave their classrooms, some teachers were inclined simply to get rid of those that caused the most trouble.
When Dean first met some of the other teachers, one man said, “I think it really takes guts to do what you’re doing.” Others made similar comments. Unsure what to make of that, he dismissed it. Then he found out what they were talking about.
Dean thought he was walking into a situation where he could do something important, but what he found was a room full of kids who had little going for them. It did not take long to discover that the man he had replaced in this program had in fact been run off the road by these same students and beaten so badly that he had been hospitalized. Dean was not at all sure what might be in store for him.
“When I taught that group of troubled kids, none of them had any discipline. I assumed I was going to get the crap beat out of me just like the guy before me, but I set requirements for behavior. I was fair. I was not arbitrary. There were standards and you met them. There was never a problem — which told me that these ‘worst case’ kids really wanted to be shown a way to behave. They would test your limits, but they wouldn’t go too far.
“I realized early that many of these kids had been in trouble at one time or another — some more seriously than others — and all of them were discipline problems, which is why their teachers had pushed them onto me. Those teachers didn’t choose the kids who might have been able to benefit from extra tutoring, and with a number of these kids, there wasn’t a lot going on upstairs. That didn’t make them bad kids. Some were definitely bad, but a few were just fine once you were willing to address them one-on-one. When they knew you actually cared about them, they opened up.”
One boy in particular became Dean’s protector. His name was Glenn and he was seventeen, tall, and strong, but he was only in eighth grade. His parents would not allow him to leave school because they wanted the welfare check they received for him as long as he was there. “Glenn was smart,” Dean says. “I had real rapport with him, but he just didn’t think that learning was worthwhile. The future to him just meant get out of high school, get some menial job, or go on the dole. He had no aspirations, and it seemed almost impossible to get him to see his potential.” Some of the other kids, however, seemed to show potential, though few would go on to benefit from higher education.
Dean commuted an hour back and forth between Saxton and Bedford. He lived in the Cerra’s home while Gerda continued to work at the bank, but after living there for two weeks, they reconsidered. All they had was a used Ford, a couple of hundred dollars, and their clothes, but they decided to see if there were any houses in Saxton for rent. They wanted to be on their own.
“We desperately wanted out,” says Dean. “We looked at six or seven places and only one had an indoor bathroom. That settled it; it didn’t matter that we couldn’t afford it. I’d spent six years of childhood without indoor plumbing and I wasn’t going back to that. So we rented this seven-room house. I think it was fifty or sixty dollars a month — a week’s take-home pay — and we really had to scrape to pull that together. We had a budget of a hundred and fifty dollars to furnish the place.”
It was a modest two-story frame house on a corner not far from the fire station, but it was home.
Along with many of the other women in Saxton, Gerda found a job in a shoe factory near Altoona. Since it was located on the other side of a mountain, a factory-owned bus picked them all up at five each morning. Other women on the bus did not socialize with Gerda, so she made few friends, which made the ride over the mountain rather cold and lonely. Then she sat for eight hours every day on a hard wooden chair, working as a bartack which meant cutting out and forming squares to sew into shoes where the strap going over the instep met the body of the shoe. All day long, after a difficult bus ride, she sewed the same pattern over and over. Then she went home to cook dinner on a simple hotplate.
This was in the Pennsylvania mountains in the dead of winter. She would walk through snow and cold to the bus to face hard stares and earn scant wages at a tedious job to pay rent on a tiny house, while Dean taught for pay that was just as bad.
Yet they were happy. “We were on our own,” says Gerda. “We could do whatever we wanted.”
“I don’t think either one of us really felt like we were suffering,” Dean agrees, “or that this was a hardship. We were so happy to be on our own and with each other that it was an endless adventure.”
While he was teaching and grading papers, Dean continued to write and send out stories. When he received personal notes from a rejecting editor who offered advice, he felt encouraged. He sent a story, “Soft Come the Dragons,” to one of these kind editors, along with a note explaining that he had a Druid friend who was going to cast a spell on the entire staff of the magazine to make them buy his work. Not long afterward, he received a note from Ed Ferman, editor of The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, that said, “I had thought Druid spells were long ago impotent, but…” and with it was a check for one hundred twenty dollars for the story. Dean was elated. In the same year that Twiggy, Rosemary, and Vietnam dominated the news, Dean had made his first sale in science fiction.
Ed Ferman was an important contact. He had taken over the editorship of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1966 and it prospered under his guidance. He also edited anthologies, so Dean’s acceptance gave him a shot at being invited into some.
“My life has never been the same,” Dean claims. That same year, Ferman also bought “To Behold the Sun.”
“Soft Come the Dragons” tackled the theme of how myth and science are each bereft without the other; myth fails to advance us beyond superstition, but enriches us spiritually, whereas science alone makes us somewhat sterile as human beings. A secondary theme in this story is racial insecurity and the way that most human beings react to strangers. It may take contact with truly alien life-forms, Dean asserts, to free us of our tendency to hate others unlike ourselves. Interestingly, one character asks another why he writes. His response: “To detail Truth.”
In the second story, “To Behold the Sun,” a man prepares to fly with a crew toward the sun to study its energy for use in space travel. It is a gruesome tale about the paralysis that results from an intense desire for the very thing that one most fears. When Dean first submitted this story, Ferman returned it with a note that indicated it needed more scientific grounding. He included two paragraphs that he had requested from Isaac Asimov, who offered them for Dean’s use. Dean was astonished, but he went to work. He managed to slip in Asimov’s rationalizations without disruption, and sold the revised story forthwith. Two years later, when Dean met Asimov at a fan convention in Philadelphia, he jokingly offered him a share of the proceeds — about a quarter — for his contribution. Asimov smiled and said, “If you don’t mind, I’d rather kiss your wife,” whereupon he took Gerda in his arms and kissed her.
Both stories were reprinted in a collection three years later called Soft Come the Dragons, and the first story was included in other anthologies, such as The Liberated Future and Dragon Tales. From his first publication, Dean elected to use his middle initial, R., for his authorship.
He also tried his hand at short novels. “The first few novels I wrote didn’t sell, so I put them aside,” he admits. “I didn’t keep revising them. I went on to something else.”
In their limited free time, Dean and Gerda set about furnishing their little house. Gerda sold her wedding dress for sixty dollars so she could buy a sewing machine. (Some people she knew were upset by this and warned her of dire consequences.) They needed curtains and she was practical. She knew she would never again need the wedding dress.
“Everywhere we lived, we’ve made it our home,” says Dean, “so we repainted this place and haunted garage sales and auctions. We bought an old sofa for five dollars in one of these country auctions. To fix it up, I learned how to use an upholstery gun and Gerda sewed slipcovers. We also bought a used sleeper sofa to use as a bed, and when we folded this thing out, it was the size of a king-size bed, but it was very low to the floor.”
In the attic, they found some old doors in storage. They asked the landlord if they could have one. He liked the fact that they were painting his house, so he told them they could. They brought one downstairs and transformed it into a dining room table. “It was paneled,” says Dean, “so we covered it with a sheet of masonite and put a latticework trim around the edge. We painted it black and brown and put short legs on it to make a Japanese dining table. We had everyone in the family saving plastic breadbags for which Gerda sewed pillow covers. We shredded the plastic bags and stuffed the pillow covers and made pillows to sit on the floor and eat Japanese-style.”
They also put up bamboo blinds and Gerda sewed curtains to hang along the sides of the windows. They kept the blinds closed most of the time. They had two used kitchen chairs to sit on and Dean built some bookcases — “the worst constructed bookcases in the history of the Western world” — for their small collection.
“We had taken an Oriental theme throughout the house,” Dean explains, “and it worked. We were just in heaven.”
The house had no oven or stove, so Gerda cooked on a hotplate. “It was really amazing what she could do,” Dean relates. “She’d put a Corningware dish on it and cook everything in that. She’d make stuffed pork chops, cakes, everything but pies on that hotplate, and we ate very well.”
When they were ready to have guests, they invited Dean’s parents for Sunday dinner. “When my mother came for the first time, she cried all the way through the meal,” Dean laughs. “‘You’re eating on the floor,’ she’d say. ‘This is terrible.’”
He wanted to show them how they had fixed up the bedroom, so he invited them to tour the house. “I guess they hadn’t stopped to think how we were sleeping, but we couldn’t afford to go out and buy a bed. When my mother saw the old sofabed, she started crying even more because we were sleeping on the floor.”
He could not make her understand that they wanted to live that way.
As Dean went to school each day, he discovered that the position involved more than just teaching. “I was expected to know the background on these kids and do counseling.”
Some of what Dean saw around him for those few months would inspire one of his most popular stories, Twilight Eyes. One of the protagonists, Rya, comes from a town similar to Saxton. “That was sort of based on what I saw with some of these kids,” he acknowledges. “There was one girl who was fourteen and had a reputation around school that she was ‘beyond easy’ I heard other teachers joking about her. There were eleven kids in her family and her parents had children to get welfare payments. The father hired out some of the girls for prostitution. There was some truck traffic up through those mountains, so this man would set up an air mattress at a restarea picnic table and offer his daughters on that. I found out that everybody knew and nobody cared; I think it was at that point that I knew I had to get out of this job.”
Dean became disillusioned with these social welfare programs. What sounded good on paper became corrupted in the hands of greedy politicians and bureaucrats.
“The system didn’t really care about these kids. Most of the money that was supposed to be targeted toward books and educational materials was funneled into building a gymnasium. To get a few dollars for books, I had to fight for weeks. If you cared or believed you could make a change, you were seen as an odd duck. I was convinced that someone somewhere was pocketing the money.”
He perceived how government programs fed attitudes of entitlement among these people. They seemed to think that the government owed them something because they were poor, and getting funds for such things as child welfare took away initiative and inspired some people to find ways to cheat the system. “By the end of the year,” says Dean, “I realized these kids would never be helped by this system.”
Dean discovered that his protector, Glenn, came from a large family. He lived in abominable conditions. “I saw where his family lived,” Dean recalls. “It was a shack that could comfortably accommodate three people, but there were all these kids. I remember asking Glenn where he slept and he told me, ‘On the porch’ — even during the winter. You start looking at that and you think: As long as they’re in the orbit of parents who have this incredibly screwed-up worldview and no ambition, they won’t make it. These kids would have one hell of an upward pull to get out of the overwhelming gravity of that life.”
Rya Raines in Twilight Eyes describes it: “Poor, uneducated, unwilling to be educated, ignorant. Secretive, withdrawn, suspicious. Set in their ways, stubborn, close-minded.”1 So much for the ideal of the noble savage, the human being away from the trappings of civilization.
Although Dean knew what had happened to his predecessor and had heard about the various weapons these kids liked to devise, he thought he had things under control. “We had a couple of kids come to the house who were angry with me. They’d pound on the door and demand that I come outside. I’d open the door and say, ‘Yes, what is it?’ And that was usually the end of it. There was constant testing among the boys, but I think the reason I had no real trouble was that I had a good sense of humor and I was interested in them. Then, of course, I had Glenn threatening to beat people up.”
For Dean, teaching was a constant performance. He had loved teachers who made learning into an experience; he tried to do the same.
“We’d make up games,” he recalls. “I brought in a rubber ball. As we discussed the lesson, I would fire the ball at anyone in the room at any time. Whoever caught the ball could hold it and fire it at will at anyone else — including me. Depending on whether it hit the target completely unawares or whether he caught it, the pitcher scored points. You also had to be able to answer any question at any time and be part of the discussion. I found that keeping that ball firing around used up their energy and excited them, but in a strange way it also focused them; they would pay attention instead of just zoning out. I tried to find things like that to do, but I was never as good at it as I would have liked.”
Looking back, Dean does not feel that he really inspired them. “I was young. It was my first experience. It was like coming into a war zone. You’re scrambling every day to figure out how you’re going to keep these kids interested, how you’re going to keep them in their seats, and how you’re going to reach them and make some difference. I do think that if I had any impact, it would have been in the sense that these kids were given no reason at home to have any self-esteem. Maybe I helped with that.” He also helped some of them begin to love books; when they told him how the novels they read helped them forget their situations, it further inspired him to want to write stories that could serve that purpose.
In part, he felt, some of the other teachers made things worse. “Basically the place was adversarial. They would come to me and tell me about these kids — how rotten this one was, or that so-and-so was arrested or had a reform school record. They were very down on the kids.”
The school district allowed corporal punishment and some teachers had paddles with holes drilled into them to create a stronger sting. One fellow teacher, who seemed to enjoy punishing his students, even made a paddle for Dean.
“You’re going to need this,” he said.
Dean refused it. “I don’t want it,” he insisted. “I don’t think I’m going to need it.”
The other man laughed. “You’re going to come to me and say, ‘Give me that paddle after all. “
“No,” said Dean, “If any of them need it, I’ll send them down the hall to you.”
Dean wanted to treat them fairly, but had little hope that it would matter.
Dean and Gerda liked their privacy, but they were somewhat surprised by how difficult it was in Saxton to evoke a friendly response. A man next door, who taught in the same school system, usually responded to their greetings with a hurried nod before he disappeared into his house.
One day, this man had to deliver a message to Dean about an early morning meeting.
There was a knock at the door and when Dean opened it, he saw his neighbor standing about twelve feet back from the door. Surprised, Dean invited him in.
He said, “No, no, I can’t come in. I have this notice.”
He held up a piece of paper and continued to stand right where he was, forcing Dean to go out to retrieve it. Dean thought this behavior strange until he discovered one day what the townspeople thought of him and Gerda.
One of Dean’s close friends from college, Jeff Steele, was from Saxton. Whenever Jeff came home from the Pittsburgh Institute of Art to visit his parents, he went to see Dean and Gerda. “He would tell us stories that were being circulated about us in the town,” Dean relates. “It was so weird. We liked moodily lit rooms and we had put up bamboo blinds that we kept closed. It never occurred to us that this would become a major point of concern — people wondering what we were doing that we didn’t want anyone to see.”
“I understand you’re Buddhists,” Jeff told him. “Everyone in town thinks you’re Buddhists. They don’t know what Buddhists are, but they don’t want anything to do with a Buddhist.”
“How did they get the idea I was a Buddhist?” Dean asked him. Then he remembered. He had once had a conversation with a defrocked Methodist minister who had taught at the high school part of the year. They had discussed which religions were the least hypocritical, and both had thought that Buddhists most closely follow what they preach. “It was just a casual conversation — yet everyone in town took it to mean we were Buddhists.”
In fact, Dean and Gerda were still practicing Catholics, although they were having doubts. A single priest went from one small town to another in those mountains, and the Koontzes could attend whichever service coincided with the time they rose from bed. However, the priest had a habit of making people feel guilty for coming in late. “He was so full of himself,” Dean remembers. “He’d stop right in the middle of the Mass, turn to the people who had come in, and stare for twenty seconds, half a minute, until they were completely humbled.” Yet when the priest himself was late, he never apologized.
Coupled with this overt hypocrisy were unsettling changes from Vatican II. “Somehow it just seemed like it wasn’t timeless anymore,” Dean complains. “It makes no sense to say the ritual is symbolic unless it symbolizes timeless things. I happen to think that the Latin Mass is a beautiful service. It’s the most refined theater in the history of human culture, and to just come in, willy-nilly, and start hacking it up struck me as a lack of true belief. I can understand the motivation behind it. The wisdom in the early sixties was that change was necessary to prevent the Church from losing people. What’s happened instead is that, subsequent to these changes, the Church has lost people.”
Many of Dean’s stories from that period reflect his growing antagonism toward religion. He would soon stop attending services and, for a while, move away from a belief in God.
1Dean R. Koontz, Twilight Eyes (New York: Berkley, 1987), p. 175.