Stalking Old Ladies for Fun and Profit

Searching for Oscar Part III

As the subtitle suggests, this is the third installment of a story that starts here.

Before I found my niche, collecting tangibles didn’t hold any interest. Collection stories are a different animal altogether. Whenever people asked, I’d say I collect hobbies. There’s nothing more appealing than people passionate about a subject most others find meaningless because they can describe the magic of attraction.

Decades of interviewing experts turned me into something of a know-it-all, a disposition I fight at every turn. I’m conversant in enough topics to sound naïve (or maybe even pathetic) to an expert and reasonably informed to anyone else. As a professional dilettante, I try to strike a balance between my desire to share information and my need to learn more. It’s hard to help myself, though, because I love to talk and fear nothing more than being a boor. I hedge by turning whatever proclamation I feel coming on into a question. Questions encourage elaboration, expounding on what you already know kills it. True stories are infinite and intertwined, slices of when multiple lives interact, so finding an ending is arbitrary. But “arbitrary” isn’t “meaningless.” The right ending is the debt you owe the reader for their attention. The story started with a clear ending that collapsed under the weight of my overconfidence. It turned out having the company address wasn’t sufficient to solve the mystery.

Having committed to writing an Oscar Pens origin story and driven by embarrassment at my arrogance, I forced a premise: Someone who lived at that address in the 1960s must know about these pens. How could they not?

A Stalker is Born

After chasing down a couple of dead ends, reading about garage sales and spaces to let on Roman Street, I found a person who fit the businessman description in my mind: Herman Elliott occupied the Roman Street address up until the late 1960s at least. A Stanley Kessler whose obituary put his death in 1993 also lived at the Roman Street address. There were few mentions of him in the local paper, though. I had no such trouble with Herman, which meant he must be my guy.

Herman had two daughters back in the 1960s,when running big, splashy newspaper wedding announcements was in vogue; it may still be, I haven’t checked in decades. His eldest, Sandy, married Eddie Haynes, eventually. The couple postponed the ceremony after Eddie and his parents were in a car accident.

The trouble with pre-internet stalking is, not everyone put everything online. It makes for some tantalizing reading. In a newspaper archive rife with car crashes, I could never find Eddie’s name. I know nothing about the crash except that it happened. In fact, I’d never learn much more about him than this: Haynes and his parents were from Laguna Beach, California, and he was studying to be an electrician. I can’t imagine how he bumped into Sandy in New Orleans 40 years before online dating. Maybe a church conference? A Seventh Day Adventist peacher married them, and they’re a camp meeting group.

Sandy’s younger sister, Annie, was married a few years later. Then they had their lives, with probably very few more (if any) mentions in the paper. As a species, we’re so enthralled with politics and popular culture that small stories hold no interest. They don’t make money, so they don’t get told.

As part of a college history project, the professor gave us a name, a date of death that between the late 1600s and early 1700s and tasked with compiling a biography on that person. It introduced me to how little the lives of the non rich and famous have always meant in America.

I don’t know if they use the term “Human Interest” anymore, but it used to be opposed by this floppy notion of “hard news,” which for the last two decades has consisted in analyzing influencer tweets and the public reaction there-to. In 2004, when I landed a job as the only staff reporter at a local weekly. As part of the job, I covered local politics, which is a horror show. Six months in, the county commissioners appeared to me as children playing dress-up, the women with ill-fitting Sunday hats, haloes over their theatrically knitted brows, and the men swimming in suits and speechifying through huge false mustaches. The performative absurdity was a scales-from-the-eyes moment. Clearly, they all were thinking, “This is how IMPORTANT people act.”

Even as a kid I nursed a pretty good sense that most grownups were completely full of shit, but it never had occurred to me how many politicos were aspiring caricatures, hack actors playing community leaders playing politician. Concerned citizens did it as well, clearly disappointed when their wandering, muddled, stuttering speeches didn’t draw a slow clap from the assembled.

Fuck. That.

I’ll write about your art show, your new business, your hobby raising racing huskies on the beach, but important people are tedious, flat characters. After a decade I decided I’d rather focus on those unused to the attention or interest.

Even though I didn’t find more stories about them, I’m sure there’s a lot more worth knowing about the Elliot sisters and their husbands. They all left New Orleans at some point and headed west, I like to think they had happy and interesting lives. The sisters are both still around, I think. Sandra’s wedding was a little more than 60 years ago, Annie’s a little less.

I tracked down what I believed to be their phone numbers and was sure they’d say something interesting. Maybe they’d even say something interesting on the record about these pens I found. I contemplated the real possibility of asking what they’ve been doing for the last 60 years.

One thing they’ve probably been doing recently is learning not to talk to people who call them out of the blue asking for personal information. It’s a problem I’ve encountered in much of my book research. “Hi! I’m a stranger. Will you tell me about your traumatic event?” I’ve learned to be careful and patient. It helps a bit that I am a really easy person to find online. Having legitimate journalism clips and credits has gotten a number of unlikely people to respond to my requests for interviews. Still, I let my decision to call the sisters marinate a while. This was an apple I’d only get one bite at.

An Oscar Nominee

I’m not in the habit of recommending movies. Nor am I in the habit of confusing divine intervention with luck. Still, what I have to share suggests a bit of both. Why pretend otherwise?

As streaming has spiraled into a haze of must-sees, I’ve started deciding to just watch a random movie. If the film is stupid, I turn it off and do something else entirely. That’s how I found The Matador, a dark comic-thriller with Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear. I had forgotten how much I liked Greg Kinnear, especially in off-beat things, and resolved to pick one of his movies next. A couple nights later, I pulled the trigger on “Phil,” a black as night comedy. I laughed a lot, and it wasn’t uncomfortable laughter, it was existential laughter. We are all such small, scared creatures slowly going mad in the chaos and that’s pretty funny when you think about it.

Phil, a suicidal dentist played by Kinnear, stalks Michael Fisk, a patient who exudes genuine happiness. Fisk has a loving family, an enviable career, is kind, and has a solid grasp on what makes a good life. One day Pete follows him into the woods to find Fisk hanging from a tree, dead by suicide. He insinuates himself into the family to investigate why this man would end his life, and hilarity ensues. Throughout the story, his assumptions about Fisk and his family get wronger and wronger, and I glimpsed myself.

Watching Phil, I saw a pure-hearted guy behave monstrously in a desperate effort to make sense of one stray fact. Only his lack of malice made the movie a comedy. Without that incongruity, it would be a straight horror film.

There was no real good reason to believe that Herman, the father, owned a shop on Roman Street in the 1960s, that he sold these peculiar pens, or that either sister would remember these pens 50 years later. Forcing the premise made everything that followed from it more specious.

In my monomania to beat these characters into my (now disintegrating) story, I’d stalked these women all over the internet. Had I really planned on cold-calling them on such thin evidence? Thinking about it, I was only barely sure the Herman who was their father was the same Herman who lived on Roman Street.

I let the deadline pass. It was only fair to at least see if I could find out a little more about Stan Kessler.

Next Time: Right Train Wrong Track