Recalling home of human imagination

He met me at a small house downtown; the owner let me stay there while he was away. The place was filled with books, some in bookcases, some on the floor, newspaper clippings in manila files, piles of records, and an old turntable accompanied by two giant speakers. A variety of art work adorned the walls.

I brought my visitor into the cluttered living room and invited him to sit down. He looked around and said, "I've been here before." I was disbelieving. "Oh, come on. You haven't been around Fairbanks for years."

"Well," he answered, "I haven't been in this place. But I have been somewhere that might as well be this place -- your parents' house."

He was right. The scale was different -- the folks' home on Front Street was much larger -- but the way they lived was similar: books everywhere, stacks of magazines, especially the New Yorker, many newspapers, paintings of Alaska scenes and Paris, and a giant Magnavox stereo covered with my Dad's LPs.

When my parents weren't home -- they both worked -- my teenage friends and I would go to the house, play the stereo, give dramatic readings from books and magazines, rave about our heroes, beatniks Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and look through various tomes my parents owned in search of the bizarre. A tall treatise called "The Mushroom" was a favorite. It featured a dramatic description of how a large family died of mushroom poisoning. The mailman found the bodies days later.

The stereo was going all the time, loud unless a reading was in progress. I clearly recall a bunch of us taking turns reading from Montaigne's "On Cannibalism" and something from Schopenhauer. Our hit parade from my Dad's records included the Red Army Chorus performing "Meadowland," Gene Krupa drum solos, Fats Waller's "Ain't Misbehavin," and Jack Teagarden's "Stars Fell on Alabama." Just to prove we were American teenagers, Chubby Checker's biggest hits and the Everly Brothers' "Claudette," which I bought, were in there someplace, too.

My Dad had an LP of "The Sounds of the Third Reich," which included speeches by Hitler, Nazi storm troopers singing "The Horst Wessel Song," and the major defendants at Nuremburg entering pleas. The LP was supposed to provide a lesson in Nazi evil, but to the crowd in my living room, the Nazi leaders seemed clownish. How could anybody fall for Hitler's raving, Goebbels' crude propaganda, and the bluster of that fat fake Hermann Goering? Maybe you only ask those questions if you are 16.

A couple years ago, I got together in Anchorage with one of the guys who came to those reading and record fests. He stayed in Alaska, unlike the fellow who went to the Midwest, but I had not seen him since maybe 1970. He brought up the gatherings of yesteryear and reminded me. "There were poker games too."

He added, "It was at your house I learned there's such a thing as the human imagination."

It was the finest compliment I have ever received -- and undeserved. My parents, not their son, made the house a library, a museum, and a poker parlor where a teenage visitor might get a beer if I could find a wino to buy a six-pack for me after a modest bribe.

Michael Carey is the former Daily News editorial page editor. Email, mcarey@adn.com.