The Cottage was a modest two-bedroom bungalow in Shawnee Hills, a community built in the 1920s as a fishing resort on the O’Shaughnessy Reservoir of the Scioto River. The reservoir was created with the construction of O’Shaughnessy Dam in 1925; it was only a mile or so from the Cottage. The Zoo-Park was on the shore opposite Shawnee Hills; at night we'd hear the big cats and other animals. We loved that.

There was no running water; we'd lug five-gallon bottles of drinking water hoisted into place on a dispenser next to the fridge. A filled bottle must have weighed around fifty pounds. Modern dispensers use plastic bottles but ours were glass, and the clear surface let you watch the huge bubbles created when you pushed down a lever on the tap for a drink. I had a Sony Portapack setup by 1976 and I took a long video of an afternoon at The Cottage; the image sequence to the left was fashioned from that.

Dish-washing was done with well-water from a pump just outside the kitchen windows. The toilet was in a crude WC on the back porch that was also home for a ladder and outdoor tools. A large collection of spiders and centipedes were in residence and brushing away cobwebs when we arrived for the weekend was a familiar part of the process. Nobody liked the bugs. We flushed it with buckets of rainwater from a green corrugated collection tank a few steps away.

Hanging just to the left of the front door was a handmade wooden sign saying EN-RITE-EN. Immediately inside that front door was a screened-in porch. This was where we did our TV watching in the warm summer months after an hour or two of pursuing lightning bugs outside. There were always thousands of them.

My grandfather was chief bailiff of Columbus for over thirty years. He knew everyone; in Columbus politics, he was connected. One of his acquaintances was cartoonist for the evening paper, the Columbus Dispatch. His name was Harding and he painted this for grandpa in 1938. It hung in the screened-in porch just right of the front door.

I’ll bet grandpa got the place at an auction during the Depression. He haunted auctions; the entire bungalow was filled with oddball items: a framed print of a costumed Spanish swordsman, two large portraits of the walled city of Carcassone, and, hanging over the fireplace, the taxidermied head of a fully-antlered deer. The deer met his fate before grandpa got him: no Enright went hunting, especially these Irish Catholic veterans of the Great War. Their turf was the saloon, the VFW hall, the courthouse.

One of his duties as bailiff was dispossessing people when the banks foreclosed on a loan. Everything was then sold at auction. The family didn’t like to think of him in that regard; we knew him as the kindest of men. There were stories about him holding up evictions for one reason or another. I hope they were true.

Columbus Ohio, an average town—THE average town, in fact. An extraordinary environment for product testing because of its demographics, a perfect cross-section of the United States (as Charles Foster Kane had described his second wife). Test City was a nickname. There was little zoning: no barriers to business. As in so much of the sixties USA, expansion was rapid and without a plan.

Imagine a late spring day, eighty-five degrees and no wind. I walk out the door of a tract house in a suburb built just a few years before. I see my father rolling the sod on the front yard. I see him planting a few trees. I walk past one little house after another, all with similar designs, all without trees, all with identical driveways. No garages, just driveways. Sidewalks. The sun on the asphalt—the vast expanse of asphalt—is blistering. I’m sweating on my one mile walk to school. Everything around me is sun-blasted and empty.

Bladed fans are in every house, but the only time I feel AC is at the movies. Central Ohio is a summertime swamp. I think about two things: my eminent atomic destruction—every passing airplane is a Russian bomber—or the sun and how hot it is on the streets and sidewalks. It makes me depressed. I am often depressed. I watch other kids playing, running around on blacktop schoolyards. I never know what is on their minds. I’m the kid with the book.

Then, suddenly, in an air-conditioned cinema in the Northland Mall, The Sound of Music opens and runs for eighty-four weeks. Ohio recedes into the distance and I’m on grass-covered mountaintops near Salzburg with the best babysitter ever. Without even knowing it I become a lifelong fan of Rogers and Hammerstein.

It is one of the last successful sixties "roadshow" pictures, and by far the biggest—reserved seats, programs, intermissions, overtures, even exit music. I love every minute even though everybody else does, too; my snobbery somehow disappears. Julie Andrews is a revelation and I develop a crush. I think whoever put this together (Robert Wise) is exploding space and time in that format of formats, staggering 65mm Todd-AO. Those nuns on multiple soundtracks!

In ’65 my brain exploded. That summer we moved from the working class parish of St. James the Less to the middle class parish of Our Lady of Peace. A lot of seeds that had been planted earlier came to fruition. I’d become a follower of Hitchcock a few years before, for instance, and had danced around an interest in the Beatles since their arrival in the States. The cultural interests I developed in 1965 were all more important to me than anything experienced before. Everything was intense and new and mattered terribly. The writers, the movies, and finally, The Beatles.

At some point that summer there was a rerelease of Hard Day’s Night on a double bill with Help! Somehow I’d avoided both films; I think my initial resistance to the band was a contrarian impulse: something that popular couldn’t be any good. I remember walking out of the room when they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. It’s for girls, I said. I believe my friend Jeff was instrumental in finally getting me to the movies. Help! was a lot of fun but Hard Day’s Night was a revelation. I was a permanent fan after seeing it.

I wonder if the dramatic change in my consciousness that year came about because of our move to a new neighborhood. Certainly meeting my new friend Jeff set something off. I don’t want to be maudlin but it was the first time I had a friend. Up to that point the males I’d met—and I was only beginning to talk to the girls—had nothing in common with me. What was on my mind was not on theirs. Many of the guys I saw at St. James were mired in a tough-guy thing and the school grounds weren’t safe for nerds. I turned over the books I was carrying so they couldn’t see the covers; they’d assume school books and leave me alone. It was a tough Catholic grade school in a tough neighborhood. The new neighborhood introduced me to the American middle-class.

What a serious look on the face of this young man! He’s still a serious and focused guy and still working hard at the same advanced age as myself. He’s written a series of literary crime thrillers occupying a prominent space on my bookshelf.

It was the first time Hitchcock's indispensable movie was shown on network television: November 13, 1965. I turned thirteen that summer and was moved to the very core. I watched it on a black-and-white portable, a Zenith we brought with us on trips to The Cottage.

Contemporary viewers are lucky enough to have difficulty envisioning how primitive our TV ecosystem was. Images were never clear and precise like in contemporary displays, even today’s over-the-air broadcasts. Reception was often bad, especially during storms; antenna adjustments were constant. (When is the last time you adjusted an antenna?) And although widescreen films had been common since the fifties (Vertigo for instance) cathode-ray TV screens used a four-by-three ratio, so both sides of a Cinemascope or a Vistavision or a Todd-AO frame were cropped using a crude technique called pan and scan. Movie purists were as outraged as they were ignored.

People were acquiring color sets at a rapid pace, but they were expensive and many still hadn't made the investment. NBC Saturday Night at the Movies was broadcasting in color—it was the first network film showcase to do so—and the films were usually recent. Depending on the film a lot of people I knew watched it through most of its seventeen years. It went off the air in 1978.