To Celebrate the Life of
Ralph Larsen
February 24, 1931 - August 7, 2018
I imagine the greatest challenge I will ever face as a
writer is the attempt to condense the long life of Ralph Larsen into a couple
pages of text. Is it even possible to do justice to 87+ years of enthusiastic
living in such a short space?
We first find Our Ralphie as a squalling (I imagine) infant
in Brooklyn NY on February 24, 1931. He claimed to have made his entrance at
Norwegian Hospital, but I find no written proof of this. The only certificate that has surfaced is a
Certification of Birth issued by the City of New York on October 11, 1966,
stating that a Birth Record No. 7826 of Ralph Larsen being born on Feb. 24,
1931, was filed in the Brooklyn Office of the Bureau of Records and Statistics,
Department of Health, The City of New York on February 27, 1931. It will have
to suffice.
It makes sense that he should be born at Norwegian Hospital
in Brooklyn since his father, Rolf Larsen, was a Norwegian seaman from (to the
best of Ralph’s knowledge) Bergan, Norway, and in the 1930s Brooklyn had a
large Scandinavian population. His mother, Bertha Larsen, nee Polomski, was
part Russian, her mother’s maiden name being Kuroczka. This eulogy effort makes me wish I had written these
stories down at the time Ralph told them. The good news is that there is much
personal history in Ralph’s four novels, No
Place for Charlie, Cushlamachree, Evangeline and The Amazing Adventures of Joshua Survivo. If you would know the
man better, read his novels. Not every aspect of those plots is drawn from real
life of course, but many are, especially in No
Place For Charlie.
At the age of three, Ralph and his half-brother John Larsen
were put into the care of Catholic Charities. Apparently Ralph made such a fuss
when the two boys were separated that they were eventually placed together with
foster parents on Long Island where they flourished in spite of the antipathy
of many toward “county kids.” He
describes it briefly here: My first home was a garbage scow on the East River.
Then I lived in apartment houses and once on a house on stilts over the ocean
in Ramblersville, Howard Beach, Long Island.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Beach,_Queens
There are scenes from the Ramblersville era in both No Place For Charlie and The
Amazing Adventures of Joshua Survivo. Also this from the Grandparent’s
Questionaire he once filled out: #7. What were clothes like? “I wore whatever I
had. I was a “county kid” a foster child, so I wasn’t taken school shopping. I
do remember one pair of parachute jumper boots of which I was particularly fond
that my foster father got from army surplus at Fort Hamilton where he worked.
Mostly we just wore dungarees for school and play and I also had a brown
Eisenhower jacket that I liked. When I was a kid (+/- 1935-1945) all little
girls wore short dresses to school and changed into old short dresses to
play in after school. Some very young girls were allowed to wear overalls.
Adults dressed up whenever they left the house. Ladies wore dresses, hats,
dress shoes (often high heeled shoes) and gloves and always carried purses.
Men, even working class men, wore jackets when out in public.”
Ralph describes sliding down the drain pipe from his second
story bedroom window and spending the nights running around in the woods with
other neighborhood children, roasting potatoes on a fire and playing war, etc.
He was, apparently, the leader of the gang and mostly their activities were
benign…except for the few described in his writings. Years later, he met a man
on the subway, an adult neighbor from that era, who remembered him and said
that he couldn’t wait to get home from work each evening in order to hear about
what Ralph and his little gang had been up to that day.
His elementary school life was great fun by all accounts
until he was skipped a grade and was put into a class where he was the smallest
and the least mature. He never felt at home with the new group and missed being
the president of the class each year. Test scores qualified him to attend a
special high school in Manhattan that drew students from all the NY boroughs
and he attended for a couple/few years until his then foster mother died and
our Ralphie began his hobo adventures. I’ve heard these stories so many times
and now I see I should have paid closer attention for I am pathetically bereft
of details.
One detail I did capture: he fell in love with the State of
Maine during his hobo wanderings. This article tells the tale:
Falling In Love With Maine
by
Ralph Larsen
as told to
Burndett Andres
September, 2003
In the autumn of 1946, I was
fifteen years old, about five feet tall and couldn’t have weighed more than a
hundred pounds. I had lived in foster
homes under the aegis of Catholic Charities for more than a decade and got into
a lot of scrapes because I was a “home kid.”
I also got into scrapes with bullies.
They didn’t pick on me because I was a home kid; like all bullies, they
picked on me because I was small and not so good at defending myself. I was little for my age; I was really cute,
with black curls and the girls loved me, but I was a shrimp.
I had picked up a slim volume,
probably in the candy shop or the drug store, about a number of sports
figures. One of them was Jack
Dempsey. When his trainer, Doc Kearns,
had wanted to toughen up Dempsey’s hands he had taken him to a lumber camp; he
said there was no better place to toughen up.
I wanted to get tough fast, so I decided to take a page out of this
book, so to speak.
My brother Johnny and I were living
with the McAlisters on Long Island at the time, in Howard Beach, on a canal
that went out to Jamaica Bay. Our house
was built on pilings right at the water’s edge; at high tide we could dive out
the second story windows into the water.
We were dirt poor, but so was everyone around us, so we didn’t really
know it. My foster mother had just died
and there was no one else around who cared if I stayed in school or not, so one
day I just packed up an old cardboard satchel I’d found in the house, said
good-bye to my brother and left. I was
heading to Maine to be a lumberjack.
I don’t remember what I took with
me. A shirt perhaps. Some underwear, I guess. Everything I owned would have fit in that
satchel. I had my hunting knife for
protection. Mr. McAllister was a truck
driver and managed to get our clothes from the U.S. Army at Fort Hamilton by
one means or another, so I imagine I was wearing my olive drab Eisenhower
jacket and I surely would have had on my paratrooper boots with high tops and
laces. I was very proud of those boots;
they were very macho and considered to be quite a trophy at a time when I had
precious few trophies of any kind.
I had a little money from caddying
at the North Hills and the Glen Oaks Country Clubs and from doing odd jobs,
raking leaves and such, and I believe I must have taken a Greyhound bus to
Bangor, or perhaps to Portland and then hitchhiked the rest of the way to
Bangor. I really don’t remember how I
got there; it was fifty-seven years ago.
I do remember inquiring around about where to apply for work and being
told to go home, that the only work available for kids in a lumber camp was
sweeping out shacks and such. Well, I
hadn’t come up there to clean house, so I started hitchhiking south.
I remember walking along country
roads and getting rides for a few miles off and on. They were all country roads; I didn’t have a
map, so I don’t know exactly where I was.
I know I was out of money; I had expected to get a job so hadn’t allowed
money for getting home. I subsisted
entirely on apples for a couple of days.
The trees where I walked were laden with them. They were so crisp; I remember the snap when
I bit into them and the juice running down my chin. I often think of that experience at harvest
time as they spoiled me for apples forever; store bought apples are unbearable
by comparison and the farther removed in time the experience becomes, the
greater the difference seems to grow.
A few times I stopped at
farmhouses. “I’m hungry,” I would say
and the woman of the house would take pity on me and give me some cookies and a
glass of milk. Like I said, I was a cute
kid. I don’t remember getting a meal
although I might have done. I slept in
the fields in the grass; the air was so cool and fresh. One sunny afternoon, I remember just lying
down in a field by the roadside and taking a nap. You could do that then.
I remember sitting on a hill
somewhere along the coast, under some pine trees, just gazing in awe at the
crashing surf and the jagged shoreline covered with evergreens right down to
the water’s edge. That sight is etched
in my mind till this day, even though I don’t know exactly where it was.
By the time I got to Portland, I
was dead broke and very hungry. I hung
around, looked around and walked around, trying to nose out some sort of
lumberjacking connection. When the
hunger got beyond bearing I would go to this little drugstore/luncheonette in
Congress Square and order a hamburger.
After I ate, I’d go into the bathroom and crawl out the window. Hamburgers were five cents then and I didn’t
even have the five cents. Some
indication of how hungry I was can be gleaned from the fact that I had the
nerve to go back there more than once.
Looking back, I think the waitress must have liked me because she never
squealed and a few times she gave me pie and coffee, too.
When I finally accepted the fact
that I was not going to become a lumberjack, I decided to return to New
York. I started hitchhiking again and
got a ride just south of Portland. The
driver dropped me off in a little coastal village. It was late at night and only one street lamp
eerily penetrated the fog. I remember
walking to the water’s edge and sleeping there that night huddled up against
some building. I’ve always called that
place Wales by the Sea, but since there is no such town on the coast (or
anywhere else for that matter), I have come to believe it must have been Wells
Beach.
The next day I got a ride with a
trucker into Boston. I remember being
outside Fenway Park that night; the Red Sox were playing St. Louis in the 1946
World Series. I eventually hitchhiked
back to New York. The truckers loved me
because I helped keep them awake; I never shut up. I grew another foot before all was said and
done, got into weight lifting, personal training and even some professional boxing
and ceased being a target for bullies.
I have vacationed in the state many
times over the years and finally moved to Cherryfield in 2002 at the age of
seventy-one, because I fell in love with Maine in the autumn of ’46 and never
did get over it.”
Ralph spent his young adulthood
living with his mother, her then husband Bob Jochim and his three
half-brothers, Billy, Gerald and Bobby. They lived in various apartment
buildings in NYC where Bob was the building superintendent and Ralph worked as
porter. The family also spent some years in Fleischmanns, NY where, from what I
understand, Ralph’s maternal grandmother
kept a farmstead with a barn filled with antiques rather than animals. Ralph
worked as an electrician, serviced refrigeration units in many of the big
resorts in the Catskills with his friend Charlie and worked as a custodian at
the local high school. Apparently, although they kept a boarding house while in
Fleischmanns, the family must have been in some straits while they lived there
because Ralph told many stories of robbing food from the store and developing
the ability to win at high-low poker in addition to pretty much running the
school single-handedly, i.e. shoveling coal, driving the school bus, cleaning,
etc. etc.
Although I find no written
evidence of these years, fortunately the 1950s are well documented on film for
it was during this time that Ralph became an avid self-taught stereo
photographer. He obtained the book 3
Dimensional Photography – Principles of Stereoscopy by Herbert C. McKay,
bought the cameras and tripods, timers and filters and mounting supplies and
took hundreds of pictures of family and environs, mostly New York City and
Fleischmanns. He became a student of the subject, did his own developing and
experimented with lighting and timed exposures, etc. etc. etc. and kept
detailed notes on each photo. Fortunately these 3-D slides with notes survived
Ralph’s first marriage to one Lillie Santos.
Ralph and Lillie were wed in NYC on
August 14, 1964. Lillie was born in Bayamon, Puerto Rico, on May 1, 1919. It is
my understanding that Ralph picked Lillie because she was tough and more than a
match for Ralph’s domineering mother who had interfered with a number of
previous liaisons. Lillie might have been high strung and have a hot Latin
temperament, but by all accounts she was never dull and she could cook with the
best of them – rice and beans in particular. She was extremely proud of her
handsome, younger husband and loved to show him off by having him hoist her
aloft and spin her around, which he declares was easy because she was “a little
thing.” It was from his years with her that Ralph developed an intolerance of
vacuum cleaning because Lillie vacuumed at all hours of the day or night
whether it was appropriate or not. Ralph appreciated Lillie because she got him
away from his mother, but their relationship was fraught with strife and in
January of 1967 we find them in Family Court being ordered to “remain away from
the other until further direction of the court.” She was extremely jealous and
Ralph swears she had no cause to be. In the end, she destroyed everything they
owned that she could get her hands on including his clothes and memorabilia,
their furniture and subtle sabotage of his 3-D camera. She even made a couple of
attempts on his life including hiring someone to kill him. On February 1, 1967,
because of Lillie’s outlandish behavior, he resigned his job with Anne Popkin
Real Estate Inc. as superintendent of their building at 225 E. 79th
Street. He LOVED working for them and told so many interesting stories of the
occupants of that building. He received the following letter from Anne Popkin:
“Dear Mr. Larsen:
Mr. Popkin and I regret very much
that circumstances beyond your control have necessitated your leaving our
employ.
We want to tell you that you have
been the best superintendent we have ever had and that we were always proud of
225 E. 79th street because you made it so attractive and kept it so
beautifully.
We hope that when your affairs
are in order, that you will contact us and hope that in the future we may be
able to re-engage you.
If there are any inquiries for
references we will be very pleased to answer them promptly.
Good luck in whatever you do and
many thanks again for your loyalty and for all you have done.
Very truly yours,
Anne Popkin.
The next document we find in the
file is a divorce decree issued in Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, on May 16, 1967
liberating Ralph and Lillie Larsen for reason of Incompatibility of Temperaments.
Next we find documentation of the
annulment of the marriage between Barbara Larsen and Ralph Larsen dated July 1,
1969. I was told her maiden name was Ness, but that doesn’t strike me as a
Jewish name and was given to me after Ralph’s memory was totally
reliable…if it ever was. I’ve heard some bad stuff about the reliability of
memory at the best of times. Anyway, this marriage was short-lived, but lived very
intensely while it lasted. Barbara
helped him get his High School Equivalency Diploma and encouraged him to begin
studying on the college level which he did, first at Miami Dade and later at
the New School in NYC. He began writing
while he was with Barbara and that became a life-long interest and practice –
fiction and poetry. He and Barbara even wrote a song together, “Breathe The
Wind.”
I rather think this marriage was
annulled because our Ralphie wanted to marry Karen Marie Wilhelm of Akron,
Ohio. The Marriage License is dated November, 1969, and Karen was a practicing
Roman Catholic and therefore unable to marry a divorced man. Where there’s a
will, there’s a way. Or as Winston Churchill famously said, “Where there is a
will, I want to be in it.”
This third marriage was enduring
and produced an adored daughter, Cynthia Ann on Thursday, February 11, 1971 at
8:20 p.m. Cynthia is alive and well and can tell her own tale. Suffice it to
say that never was a daughter more dearly loved.
I am the last in the long line of
wives and lovers. He liked me because I “could pick and shovel, too.” You will
learn all about my relationship with Himself when I croak and my obituary
becomes available…or not. For the past sixteen years, our lives have been as
open a book as they’re ever going to be and you can read all about it in Maine, At Last available from
Amazon.com.
https://www.amazon.com/default/e/B004SJIDOO/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1?redirectedFromKindleDbs=true
11 volumes and more on the way.
If you know Ralph at all you know
of his great love for Christmas and most especially his enthusiasm for his
Christmas village, Christmas Crossing. The following pictures were taken by my
son-in-law Eric Nicklos:
I imagine the folks in
Cherryfield will remember him mostly for our outdoor Christmas decorations –
picture by Lisa Jacoby:
Creating that village gave Ralph
more pleasure than perhaps any other single pursuit with the possible exception
of his flower gardens in Sparta NJ and Cherryfield ME. It always amused him to
wonder what his friends of yore, from the rough and tumble days of his youth
and those many years as a cigar-smoking, tough
New Yorker, would make of him tending roses. Finally, this summer, the
pink climbing roses in our back yard covered the arbor and I declared he could
now die happy, so he did.
Ralph was a true renaissance man.
I’ve written all this and have only scratched the surface. I haven’t mentioned
how he tamed a chipmunk named Charlie (all Ralph’s pets were named Charlie),
how his heroes were Randolph Scott and Don Quixote, how he spent years working
on self-improvement and tried to share his knowledge with his friends until he
learned better. He was into throw-back fly fishing decades before it became de rigueur, LOVED baseball, boxing, and
weight-lifting and kept up an exercise regimen well into his eighties. He was
interested in everything and his home library of 3,000+ volumes is proof of the
range of his interests.
His handsome face, high-energy
personality and bad boy aura made him irresistible to women and like everything
else that had an upside and a downside. His official photographer, Cat Cirone,
says, “He was the only man I knew personally over eighty who was still sexy. He
had “it.”’
Ralph Larsen is survived by his
daughter Cynthia and her husband Stanton Michael Mobley and their two
daughters, Amelia & Dagny of Doylestown, PA and by his ex-wife, Karen, also
of Doylestown. He was the half-brother of Bobby, Billy and Gerald Jochim. The
late John Larsen was also his half-brother. (Although everyone including John
thought they were full-blooded brothers, they shared only the same mother.)
Ralph is also survived by a variety of half-nieces and nephews. We recently
became acquainted with John’s son, Kirk, an impressive person and artist and
are thankful for this connection to the next generation. https://kirklarsenfineart.com/works
A series of memorial parties are
planned to celebrate the life of the man, the myth, the legend.
September 1 – Sparta NJ;
September 8 – Doylestown PA; Late September – Cherryfield ME
Please call me or Cynthia for
details.
If you wish to remember Himself
with a gift, please make a donation to the fabulous hospice organization that
cared for Himself in his final days: http://www.chcs-me.org/index.php?id=2&sub_id=186
and/or to http://projecthealingwaters.org/
Ralph’s passion for living was
contagious and my life with him has been a joy to me beyond what words can
convey. As one of our favorite vocalists, Nana Mouskouri sings, “Loving Him Was
Easier Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again.”
