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.

Her outgoing nature and gift-of-gab, combined with a true sense of the dramatic, made her an unparalleled journalist-gone-actress-manqueé. Over the years she bombarded the local newspapers with every sort of item imaginable, and forever the doings of Little Herbert Moulton, which is what I was called until the end of grammar school, to distinguish me from my Dad, Big Herb.
Any- and everything of the slightest interest got written up, birthdays, anniversaries and reunions, out-of-town-visitors, contests entered and won, lost pets, carnival prizes, vacation trips, illnesses both trivial and serious, amateur theatricals, and excursions into town for an opera, a play, a circus, even an autograph session with a famous star for Little Herb’s collection: they all found their way into print, often with an accompanying photo, courtesy of the various editors,, who snapped up without question anything my mother Nell submitted. Parties especially – the last nipper was still being sick on the carpet and the neighbours themselves themselves to one final snort in the pantry as Nell, the veteran reporter, sat herself down at her faithful Corona Portable to shoot the details off to the waiting media. Not a second to be wasted in getting the news out to the people.
How did she manage to do it? Either nothing of any import ever happened in our town except cake-bakes and sales of Girl-Scout cookies, local elections and committee meetings, bridge marathons, bankruptcies and lawsuits – Or Nell had the goods on all of them: rumrunning in the 1920’s? Trafficking in drugs? A white slave ring in the nearby Cicero? Mafia connections (her brother and my uncle Marmaduke apparently had them, he always arrived in a black suit with helpers and lavish gifts)? Maybe they just didn’t want to waste time arguing with this little ball of Irish fury. Whatever the secret, Nell and her accounts of our activities served to brighten up a lot of murky corners in those depression days – all in keeping with the family motto “Hard times, but you’d never know it!”. All she had to do was invite a few neighbourhood knitting women in for an afternoon cup of tea, to have the event written up sometimes complete with photo, perhaps even mention a recent visit to the local theatre to see Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel or Cab Calloway live on stage.
Those were improvised occasions, but when you think of the countless events that were actually planned that got into newsprint, it’s no wonder that her social climbing sister Bess was constantly driven round the bend. A pretty good egg at heart, but shallow and pampered, in later years she wished to be called Betty, just plain old Bess wasn’t fancy enough. For her, an evening of bingo at the Oak Park Chapter of the Elks Club was the equivalent being presented at the Court of St. James. Poor dear, she could not abide the merry times we had on practically nothing, spiritually thumbing our noses at the prevailing economic doldrums. How she loved telling us how deprived we were. As poor as church mice, or so she said. All right! But at least we were swinging church mice, right?
Birthdays, of course, were just about Nell’s favourite stamping grounds, but she likewise rejoiced in what Humpty-Dumpty (from the “Alice”-books) was pleased to call UN-birthdays. These included seasonal holidays (Halloween, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day filled with hails of cheers and loads of Irish whiskey – but naturally!) which helped spark the whirligig of the turning year – never forgetting important national happenings like presidential elections and inaugurations. Damn-Democrats like us barely stood a chance in this Republican bastion dominated by Col. Robt. R. McCormack.
One acquaintance of Nell’s once told her, “Nell Moulton, you’re the only Democrat and the only Catholic I’ve ever known, and we’re still friends!” Nell’s sweet reply was “You sure my horns don’t bother you, honey?”
As you recall, the only President ever elected more than two times was F.D.R. - that meant four inaugurations and four reasons for partying. You can imagine how popular we were.
Let’s get on with the birthdays, shall we? As good a launching-point as any. All three of us had ours in summer – mine and my Dad’s in July, Nell’s September 13th. That meant music and refreshments out-of-doors, with every kid in the neighborhood invited, any many of the parents, too.
***
Headline: Herbert Moulton, Jr. Has Birthday Party (15.07.1930)
Little Herbert Moulton, son of ... etc., celebrated his third birthday party on Tuesday and was host to 18 cunning youngsters who thoroughly enjoyed the party. (Remember “cunning has a neat double meaning.) They danced happily and romped on the lawn to the accompaniment of a Victrola, and two of the little tots drank from the bird bath, thinking it a fountain. (A nice touch, that, very Nell.) They all had had their pictures taken with fancy hats and balloons. The usual “birthday goodies” were served, while a number of mothers sipped coffee. (And if I knew Nell, perhaps with a shot of something or other to get it up on its feet.) And all went home tired but happy. The guests included ...
***
But this was but a warm-up for my fifth, known as the Bryant Avenue Bacchanale. (We moved several times in those days – in fact, whenevr the rent was raised!)
It was my 5th birthday that put Nell in her mid-season stride for good and all, with pink and blue streamers flying, unquestionably the high point of the 1932 Kiddies’ social season ...
***
Headline: July 17, 1932 –
Herbert Moulton Jr. Celebrates Birthday
... AND TWENTY-FIVE OF HIS FRIENDS GATHERED AT HIS HOME FOR A GALA PARTY. The day was extremely hot but everyone was comfortable in the large rooms of the house, although the original plans were for games and music on the lawn. Shirley Fleming of Oak Park danced an acrobatic number for the children, which gave them all a great treat. The donkey game was won by ... etc. --- The house was profusely decorated with flowers from Mrs. Moulton’s garden, while the dining room was done in pink and blue streamers. The long table was covered in pink, and in the center was a huge basket, trimmed in pink and blue tulle, which contained colored caps, each containing a pink or blue ribbon to each plate, attached to pink birthday candles adorned either end of the table, and five bud vases, each containing a pink gladiolus, formed a circle around the basket ... After refreshments, consisting of sandwiches, plums, orange ade, ice cream and cake, Herbert’s daddy took some flashlights (1930’s lingo for photo) of the entire group. Then, the children formed a circle on the floor, and Mrs. Moulton presented each guest with a gift, and as the children opened their packages, each exclaimed with delight “Just what I wanted most!” Herbert received over thirty cards, many gifts, and the usual birthday spankings to “grow on” ... The following children attended, ... etc.
***
Note Nell’s description of what she liked to call “our humble abode”, in this case a neat bungalow consisting of smallish but cheery rooms and beautiful landscape gardening, including two grand and grassy terraces rolling down to the sidewalk below; all of the artful work of our landlord-of-the-moment, an Armenian name of Borian. All this she made sound as sumptuous as a Pompeiian villa, complete with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon – anything to trump her sister Bess. These two were no longer on speaking terms at that date, due to a casual remark of Nell’s made during the post-party washing-up, at which Bess snatched up her three-year old son Jackie and flounced out, signalling a new Ice-Age that would last until Thanksgiving, if we were lucky. Nell was on a genuine roll here which would carry her buoyantly right up to the next glittering event, and it was just that – the last hurrah and final burst of dazzlement to light up the old homestead of Eastbourne for the last time ... front page stuff, and the next it was right down the center of Page 1 with the headline about my grandparents:
***
9. September 1932: C.L. Moultons Are Married 50 Years
Mr. And Mrs. C.L. Moulton celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary last night, Sept. 8. The family reunion was held in the old Moulton home, 643, N. Main St., where they have lived on and off since 1895. The surprise dinner which started at 7, and given by the Harper Moultons who live in the old home. Fifty yellow roses adorned the table as a centerpiece and a golden gift was presented to commemorate the occassion. It was in every sense a golden event to mark a long and happy marriage which has given six children to the world, all living, as well as twelve grandchildren. That the Moulton offspring. Five sons and a daughter, “grew up”, right alongside our much-loved town, is well known. It can be truly said that all of us have benefitted from the philanthropic zeal and good works of this civic-minded and generous couple and their progeny, scattered as they are over several continents. Among those present last evening were ... etc. ... This was more than just a wedding anniversary, golden as it was. It was a true celebration of the golden values that have made this family, this community, indeed our whole beloved nation the golden ideal of democracy for the rest of all mankind.

Can anybody here detect the fine Florentine Irish hand of Nellie Eyre Moulton in this tone-poem of pure hype, or “Blarney” as the first Elizabeth once dubbed it? 110 per cent correct, my friend. Yep. Herself. And if some of the stuffier members of the clan took exception to it, as they almost always did with Our Nell, who in every way was much too much for them. They should have written it themselves. I’ve always been told how thrilled my dear grandparents were with it, so what more does anybody want? Nell wrote us some of best notions ever!
Our cavalcade of festivities goes toddling along. An extravagant blow-out like my 5th birthday would be impossible to repeat, so my parents wisely decided on a day’s splurge for my 6th at what I still consider one of the greatest shows on Earth – ever ...
***
Headline 14th July 1933: Celebrates Birthday at World’s Fair
Little Herbert Moulton will celebrate his 6th birthday tomorrow. Instead of a birthday party this year, he is spending all of the day with his parents at the Century of Progress, where he will “do” the Enchanted Island to his heart’s content.
***
For the stupendous blow-out celebrating the founding of Chicago in 1833 right there on the shores of Lake Michigan, some genius had come up with stupifying gimmick to turn on the lights for the first time. Talk about hitching your wagon to a star! Someone – Somehow, and without any of the electronic gear of our own Space Age., had managed to harness the faint glimmer from an obscure and unsung star over on the far side of the cosmos, and would use it to switch on the power to illuminate the Fair. And it worked! A nice symbolic touch, really, the Fair like a beacon of hope in a darkling world.
A few months earlier, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been sworn in as the 32nd president of the U.S.A., and at once had turned Washington D.C. upside down with an unprecedented broadside of new laws and ambitious plans aimed at getting an ailing nation back on track. In the process he unloosed a bloodless revolution, in contrast to the one already festering on the opposite side of the Atlantic. In Jules Vernian absurdity of that opening star-powered gesture had lifted the heart and refreshed the spirit. One unimportant little star, never noticed till then and due to vanish soon from memory, had helped cause a happening crackling with the optimism and self-confidence then sadly lacking in all phases of American life in those hard times. Suddenly, however, people could say to one another, “Hey, look! We’re still here and very much alive! Let us take hold of the moment and run with it!”
The timing was flawless, allowing people to forget their gloom for a while and start living again. All of a sudden, right there on the lakefront, there was this magical city, a glitter with new-found wonders, all with an admission charge of a quarter – tenty-five cents. How could anybody lose?
It was the only the Enchanted Isle that my heart was set on, but the enchantment wrought by all the collective wonders of the Fair. The Skyride with its shiny new cars gliding along on cables hundred of feet overhead. It was the Sinclair Oil exhibit with a jungleful of life-size creatures that moved and bellowed and ate branches and stood up and fought. Nearby, a mammoth thermometer many meters tall, registering the delights of a sizzling Chicago before air-conditioning was ever thought of – as usual, I’m plucking these from my memory. After half a century it is all more vivid to me than what happened yesterday. To continue: the exquisite, formalized barbarity of the Japanese temple, a splendor of golds and blacks and reds, dismantled in its homeland, shipped to the U.S.A., then reassembled at the Fair. The vast cantilevered Travel and Transport Building and attendant glass-and-steel palaces displaying the latest in shiny new autos from Ford Motors, Chrysler, and General Motors. The Hall of Science and the Hall of Religion, and the perfect replica of Fort Dearborn, near the very spot where it and Chicago were born a century before.
Oh, what larks to sit outside on a bench, enjoying Nell’s special packed lunches while watching the whole world moseying by in the sunshine – the world: villages and pavilions from a score of different lands: Sweden, Denmark, Holland and Belgium, Spain, the Black Forest, China, the Ukraine. All the exhibits connected by open, leisurely moving Greyhound transports at a nickle a ride. One landmark in particular jostled me back into reality half a century later: the Swiss village dominated by an exact copy of the famed Clock Tower of Berne, in 1984 the starting-point of our tour of Switzerland with Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap”, which actors loathe and the public adores. It was a reunion with an old friend.
Oddly enough, I was not taken to the Streets of Paris to see Sally Rand do her notorious fan dance. “Oh, ish!” was Nell’s concise comment. “Applesauce!” She ought to put some clothes on and get a decent job like everybody else – and put her hair in a nice bun while she’s at it. ART! Is that what they’re calling it now? Art, me eyeballs! If that’s art, then I am the Queen of Sheba!” So much for Sally Rand.
Then there was Marrie England and a full Tudor-costume replay of one of the outstanding non-events in history, the confrontation between Good Queen Bess and the doomed Mary, Queen of Scots, terminated by a sweeping gesture from Bess and her command: “Take her to the Tower!” You can be sure that we included that bit every time we got dressed up to play King at Eastbourne.
This Century of Progress was a much-needed tonic and a new high for anyone doing it to their heart’s content. The Great Depression was by no means past history yet. We’d had to sell the two-storey house my folks had been paying for since 1928, and move to series of smaller, even cosier bungalows, each a fresh challenge to Nell to do her thing with curtains, flowers and plants, while Big Herb installed his workbench and tools in the basement.
No matter what, our home continued to be a refuge, a human bird sanctuary for the displaced, the hungry and thirsty, and the just plain bored, and all those who could say and mean “Damn the Depression, anyway!”
By then, our theme song had become the lilting Anti-Depression tune “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries”, introduced by the trumpet-voiced Ethel Merman in 1931:
“Life is just a bowl of cherries, so live and laugh at it all!”

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