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LOOK HOMEWARD BABY          HARRINGTON

satire and humor can often make dents where sawed-off billiard sticks can't.  In 1968, when John invited me to become a part of the Daily World staff I felt that here was an opportunity to really get some licks in.  I've often gotten letters from friends asking me how I manage to keep up with what's being put down in the USA when I've lived for so long in Europe.  I can only think of that very corny reply: "You can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy."  But things do change in twenty-one years and I felt that it would do me a lot of good to see it.  I took the leap in September fortified by Czechoslovakian beer, the best in the world as far as I'm concerned.  Furthermore you can have as much as you want on Czech Airlines, which is the one I took.  Thus fortified, by the time the pilot announced that we were forty thousand feet above Newfoundland on the last leg to Kennedy, I'd managed to get on top of my conflicting emotions to such a degree that I found myself chuckling to the music going around in my head, which was "Pops'" incomparable growling of Bill Bailey Won't You Please Come Home!

Dorothy Robinson, that great soul sister, who is business manager of the Daily World came out to Kennedy to meet me accompanied by her sister.  Dorothy and I had never met and so she'd provided herself with a photograph which her sister apparently hadn't seen because when we finally "linked-up" Sis said, "Baby, I had NO IDEA you were black," and throwing both arms around my neck she said, "Welcome home, Sugar!"  That did it.  I WAS home.  I was with PEOPLE.  I was also in the midst of a different civilization from the one I'd left just a few hours ago.  I began to realize as we zipped along the highway from Kennedy to the Triboro Bridge.  This realiza-tion grew as I began counting the wrecks scattered along the center-piece which sometimes separates east from west bound traffic.  I really couldn't figure out what had been going on since I hadn't had any news of that highway having been accidentally strafed by air force jets.  Inevitably my curiosity got the upper hand and so I asked Dorothy about all that twisted metal.  Before she could answer Sis said "Labor Day weekend, Honey,"  in a tone which implied that ANY idiot should have been hip to that.  After a few miles it dawned on me that SOMEBODY was getting something out of this endless sense of disaster.  At regular intervals along the freeway there were immense billboards proclaiming the sheer impossibility of enjoying life without a Ford, Plymouth, Cadillac, well, you name it.  This was nothing less than psychodelic.  There we were whizzing past

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-26 10:42:53