Right! We'll Have Ourselves A Party!(Charles E.J. Moulton) RIGHT! WE'LL HAVE A PARTY!

from the autobiography "DAMN THE DEPRESSION, ANYWAY!"

Written by my father

the late great

Herbert Eyre Moulton (1927 - 2005),

who worked as MCA-Record’s Show-Star Herbert Moore. He also conducted the Camp Gordon Chapel Choir during the Korean War, toured with his wife, the operatic mezzo-soprano Gun Kronzell, around the world as “The Singing Couple”. This true story takes place in the posh, spiritually rich but financially poor 1930’s. The picture here to the right is of my father many years later, during a party in the 1960’s (how fitting), drinking wine, chatting with his good friend, the famous Swedish opera tenor Nicolai Gedda.

Now, fasten your seatbelts. Step into the time machine. Get ready to visit the culturally endowed relatives living the posh life back in the Illinois that was, sometime in the 1930’s. Here we go. Over to Herb.


As long as anyone can remember, our home had always been THE HOUSE OF HOSPITALITY. Through thick or thin, palmy days or the Depths of the Depression - between the extremes of my father Big Herb's practicality and Nell's "To Hell with Poverty - we'll sell the pig!" liberality, we always managed to make every visitor feel happily at home.

Most of the regulars at this snug little oasis of ours were survivors of a picturesque world that, since the Stockmarket Crash of 1929, had evaporated fast. Their families had once held sway in a score or more of vast old turreted wooden-frame mansions which still ornamented the town, left over from the Gilded 1880's, a few of which still stand to this day, plaqued (as they say) as Historical Landmarks.

One of these - Eastbourne - had from the mid 1890's been my Dad's family home, last occupied by my Uncle Harper and his peripetitic family - three sons and his great billowing Southern Belle of a spouse, Clara by name, but known to all and sundry (all except us, that is) as 'Honey". They blowsily occupied the old manse until late in the 1930's, when it was unfortunately demolished. To this day it forms a marvelously gloomy, House-of-Usher background for a lot of my earliest memories - fifteen huge, high-ceiling rooms, many with fireplaces. Of these, the room I remember best was the library, a museum really, cluttered as it was with bayonets, shell-casings, dress-swords with sashes, handguns, even spiked officer's helmets from the old German Imperial Army, just the thing for our boyhood extravaganzas inspired by the historical movies we saw on Saturday afternoons. These were souveniers of the time in France in 1917-18 by my Dad Herbert Lewis Moulton and his two younger brothers, Wes and Harp.

The rest of this spacious old mansion contained family and servants' quarters, hotel-sized kitchen and laundry facilities - Eastbourne had been a popular cross-country inn until my Grandfather bought it to house his lady-wife and brood of six children, plus servants that included at least one live-in nanny. One of them was a wonderful black Mammy, Maisie - pardon the lapse! - with her daughter Rachel, my first experience with folk of other colors, and a delightful one or was, too. (Rachel, grown to young womanhood, was my baby-sitter when I was a nipper.)

Further amenities included a billiard room, a glazed-in conservatory (south side, of course), and a large lofty attic filled with memorabilia of untold splendor, a porte cochere, and two pillared porches, which Honey in that booming Texan foghorn used to call Galleries, much to Nell’s unconcealed disgust: “Haw-puh! Frank! Leeeeeeeeeeee! What yawl doin’ on that gall’reh?”

On the sloping, wooded lawns were the remains of a croquet- and a tennis-court, outbuildings where the cows and the horses were billeted (named Chummy and Princess, and Duke and Lightning, respectively) and by the time we began playing in it, a slightly ramschackle summer house.

People can talk all the like about the delight about the ante-bellum Southland, but its post-bellum northern counterpart, based, not on slavery, but on industry and commerce, had a no-nonsense charm of its own. It was in settings such as these that was played out on that long, in retrospect lovely American twilight up to the start of the first World War, which is celebrated in plays such as O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” – tea-dances, ice-cream socials, masquerades, and amateur family theatricals, with house-music provided by all five of the Moulton boys, with sister Minnie at the piano. After the war, the twilight lingered on spasmodically until the grand old memory-drenched house was sold off and demolished. Even then, in the late 1930’s, we’d gather a carload of friends and drive over on a summer evening to pick basketfuls of the fragrant lillies-of-thze-valley which still flourished in a corner of the original garden.

It was the dispossessed heirs of these once proud dynasties, the greying sheiks of yesteryear with nicknames like “Babe” and “Bunny” and “Wop”, with their ex-flapper Shebas, all raucous voices, middle-age spread, and clouds of perfume with names like Mitsouki or Emeraud, who used to crowd our little dining room on Saturday evenings (the table top decked in an old army blanket) for intense penny-ante poker sessions, sometimes using matchsticks for chips, laughing at off-color jokes way above my head and puffing their Old Golds and home-rolled “coffin nails”, while the Budweiser flowed and soda crackers got crumbled into bowls of Big Herb’s special chili-con-carne, to the accompaniament of Paul Whiteman records or Your Hit Parade on the radio-phonograph hard by in the living-room.

I loved these gatherings in my parents’ cronies – Big Herb’s out-of-work business colleagues or American Legion (Forty-and-Eight) buddies and their wives or lady-friends. Many of them had been the blithe and breezy Charleston-dancing, hipflask toting young marrieds, who (I was told); used to switch partners on weekend treasure-hunts, and in that still infamous Crash had lost everything but their social stature (whatever that amounted to) and their sense of humor. Thus had John Held, Jr. given wa to the late Scott Fitzgerald.

To me these people were as fascinating as visitors from another galaxy, caught in what today would called a time-warp. Authemntic “Twenties-Types” (if one thinks about them now) and I couldn’t get my fill looking at them – everything they did shone with enough of the glamour of lost wealth which set them apart from everyone else we knew (God, was I that much of a snob at the age of nine or ten?).

Special fun were those evenings which suddenly turned musical, like the time when a lady with hennaed hair unloosed one of Delilah’s arias from “Samson” in a rich boozy contralto, then huddled at the keyboard with a lady friend to harmonize “Sing to Me, My Little Gypsy Sweetheart”. (Nell later reported that they were both sharing the same “beau”, who happened to be our family dentist. (What a sensation that was!)

So the poker sessions rolled merrily along, spiced now and then with one of the men getting sobbing drunk and passing out on the livingroom couch, or one of the married couples indulging in a strident battle which mesmerized me even while being hustled out to my bedroom by one or the other of my parents. Boy, it was as good as having a movie-show right in our own living room. Besides which, they were all exceedingly nice to me, slipping me a shiny new dime now and then or taking time out to show me card tricks or draw pictures, or sometimes work with me on my pappet theater or Erector Set. One of our occasional guests was the cartoonist Dick Calkins – Lt. Dick Calkins, as he signed his Buck Rogers in the 25th century newspaper strip. One Saturday eveing, though half-sozzled, he spent a good hour painstakingly drawing cartoons of Buck and his girlfriend Wilma Deering on facing pages of my autograph book and dedicated to me alone. (Naturally, treasures such as these eventually disappeared – gone, alas, like our youth too soon.)

The smoky, sometimes emotion-charged pow-wows weren’t quite the proper fodder for the local newspapers, but there were plenty of other tidbits lovingly provided by Nell at the drop of a phone-call.

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