Stories
The First Leap:
from Neosho to New York
David Rounds
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My reading of Thomas Wolfe's novel, "Look Homeward, Angel", when I was still in Neosho inspired two dreams, one was to be a novelist and the other was to live in New York. From the perspective of little Neosho in the Ozarks lost between Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, it seemed like New York was the big world "out there."
Typical of the kids around me, this played out in terms of the sport of baseball. My team was the St. Louis Cardinals and our arch-rival was in New York, the Brooklyn Dodgers. As I tell in my recollections of running, my first real experience with New York came in 1955 when I ran home from Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to Dwight Rogers' apartment on the upper East Side of Manhattan.
Photos I took with my little Brownie camera passing through New York in 1955. Click on photo to enlarge.
Hence, when my high test scores and science aptitude gave me the choice of going to any college in the country, I chose Columbia because it was in New York.
More photos from 1955. Click on photo to enlarge.
I arrived a few days early in the fall of 1957, and to amuse myself I would go down to Riverside Park near Columbia early in the morning and throw rocks at the river rats or jog with a boxer from Harlem who would come by each morning as part of his training.
In the mid 1950's, an editor of Life Magazine (which at that time was the dominant magazine in America) decided to retire to Neosho. Dan and Mary Longwell came to the city determined to "lift it up" in the world. They brought money for a competition of flowerboxes to make it the "flowerbox city." and when they heard I was going to Columbia College in New York, they took me "under their wing" and gave me introductions to high society in the "big city."
Hence it was that I was invited to dinner with a famous journalist, originally from Kansas, who had made good in the "big time" and lived in an Upper East Side brownstone. And hence it was that I was invited to a cocktail at an apartment on Mitchell Place leading from First Avenue up to Beekman Place where the Rockefellers lived. And later, through Dan Longwell, I would meet Mary, the daughter of the Iowa poet laureate Paul Engle. She was baby-sitting in the Rockefeller apartment on Beekman Place when I went to see her.
But "high society" was not what I was looking for. I wanted to make my name, like Thomas Wolfe, as a novelist.
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1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme