George Paul Wagner Jr. was the best of my best friends, although for much of the closet part of our relationship I felt Dean Anschultz was. I met George at New Haven State Teachers College after had I left Caltech and he had left Syracuse University. We had gym class together ("He could hit home runs while reading Rilke."), Miss Irma Pelz's health education class, and Prof. John Osborne's English Composition class. George had a fullback's body and a handsome Germanic face, neither of which had gone to seed when I last saw him as we approached our fifties. I wish I could say the same for myself. He looked a little like Robert Redford. He was in my health education and gym closes but my first memory of George is walking down the road after listening to e.e. cummings read his poetry at nearby Eli Whitney Trade School and telling him that my first poem had been accepted for publication, my first acceptance outside of a college magazine or the local newspaper. George looked like a lineman for a small college football team (NHSTC had an excellent small college football team) but he was uninterested in sports, even though he regularly hit home runs in our softball games in gym. George introduced me to the works of Jack Kerouac and we walked the streets of Nee Haven till dawn or closing time, whichever came first, looking into ground floor apartments at the corner of Lynwood Place and Elm Street, dreaming of leaving home and traveling around the country. We discovered a coffee house on Howe Street, La Gallette, first in what had probably been someone's garage then across the street in an old house. We listened to a guy play classical guitar at one table, ogled the blonde waitress, and drank Turkish coffee out of tiny cups. We dreamed of being beatniks and going down to Greenwich Village and meeting Kerouac and Neil Cassidy. George was editor of the campus newspaper, the Laurel Leaf for a period and through him I met Pat Cox (another editor), John Fazzino (a writer), George Camera, Arthur Guglielmo (an artist whom everyone called Nemo), and Bob Dingwall (an artist and the campus beatnik--Dingwall was the first person I ever met who smoked marijuana). George was a year older than me and had transferred from Syracuse University: he lived in North Branford. We formed the nucleus of the campus intellectual beatnik society, such as it was. Pat was an Irish immigrant who lived in Waterbury and later got mixed up with some Communists--I never found out what happened to him, George Camera, Fazzino, or Dingwall.
Keith Beggs and George Wagner
One evening George and I drove the 75 mils or so down to New York City in George's old car, getting to Columbia University around midnight. Neither of us knew anything about New York but somehow we found our way down to Greenwich Village via subway (I have to say that I sincerely believe I was the one who got us down there--my audacity still amazes me), where we spent a couple of hours in the Cock'n'Bull coffeehouse just drinking ordinary coffee and being stunned by the jukebox, which had jazz and classical numbers alongside the usual pop and rock'n'roll. Somehow I managed to find our way back to George's car at ColumbiaUniversity and drove it home while George slept. I left it in the parking lot of the high school at about five in the morning. and walked the short distance to my parents' house. Sometime later, the police woke George up and he drove home. A couple of months later we went back to the Village, this time with Ray Locke and Bessie Shove. We may have been my 1953 Chevy or Ray's car or George's--I don't remember. I'm pretty sure it wasn't Bessie's jeep. We wound up at a place called The Commons on Minetta Lane, a narrow winding side street that led off Sixth Avenue then curved and ran parallel to MacDougal. Later it was called The Fat Black Pussycat. We weren't allowed to clap. We had to snap our fingers, supposedly because of the people upstairs. There were were three performers--one of them may well have been Dave Van Ronk and another the Reverend Gary Davis. The third was a young flamenco guitar player. About this time, George started working in the Yale Library, where he worked for about ten years. I would meet him there in the great hall, reminiscent of the Library off Congress in DC. (In my case, the other way around.) Sometimes I'd go back into the stacks with him, where we found an old New Haven Register with my stargazing "article" in it and made a Xerox copy. We'd sit in the open air commons area next to the reading room, eat lunch, and talk excitedly to each other. When I went to NYU, he came down only once to New York to see me. We walked around the Village, he bought some wine and drank most of it. We eventually found ourselves in a small park along he East River where we are startled to see the body of a baby. It was a doll. As we walked back to the Village, the city canyons echoed with the sounds of sirens. We used to meet at a parking lot near the Yale Library. One day we agreed to meet downtown at a certain time. I went to our usual spot and George didn't show up. I finally went over to see Ray Locke, who at the time was working at the Library with George. He told me that George chad been kicked out of that lot and now was parking over by the New Haven Hospital. I went over there and there was George's car but no George. I went looking for him and came back to find George's car gone and an empty wine bottle on the roof of my car. i went back to Ray's and vented my wrath at George to him. Apparently Ray told him how I had acted because the next time I saw George he was very apologetic. When I moved to Maryland to work at Goddard Space Flight Center in 1962, I kept trying to get George to meet in New York. Finally he agreed to meet me at the Washington Square arch on Labor Day weekend in 1965. I started up and, as I went around a curve on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway just before the exit for tunnel under the bay at Baltimore, there was a girl hitchhiking with a guitar. Going too fast, I went past her and began looking for a place to turn around on the divided highway. I finally got turned around and could see her still there as i went the other way, took a couple of cloverleafs, and got back just in time to see her get picked up by someone else! I went through the tunnel then, depressed, turned around, and went home. Meanwhile George finally went to New York and I wasn't there. A year later, I met Eileen Goenner at Dupont Circle and she and I figured it was probably her. I continued to see George whenever I came home until I finally came back to Connecticut from September 1970 to Novembr 1971. Then I got a job working as a book clerk at Book World, where George was assistant manager and buyer. It only lasted from September 1970 to January 1971, when I was rearended at a stoplight and injured my back. But it was fun while it lasted.
