“I’ve always felt that she was the best teacher I ever had, including college. She made an incredible impression on my life.”
— Jay Baumstein, August 6, 2023

I knew Eleanor Lindner for only ten months over sixty years ago, from September 1962 until June 1963. But she left a lasting mark, not only with me but with so many others during that same short period.

She was my 6th-Grade teacher at Cross Country Elementary School in Baltimore. I had joined the 3rd-grade class there in 1959; the student roster had remained intact throughout the rest of the elementary school years.

As I wrote in a previous blog essay,

“Mrs. Lindner was unlike the other teachers our class had had before. She was a bit older, more learned, more cultured. There was a reserved intelligence, something deeper going on with her that was left unexposed. She was sympathetic without suffering fools, someone one sensed had led a meaningful past.” (1)

(1) https://donzblog.home.blog/2023/07/23/1959-a-slice-of-my-life/

While writing that blog essay, I became interested — obsessed, really — knowing more about her life. One inquiry led to another, then to another, and suddenly I was corresponding with Norman Mailer’s daughter, Susan, and his biographer, Michael Lennon.

Both then led me to Mrs. Lindner’s daughter Marged, and then she to her siblings Dan and Rick. Their willingness to share their mom’s life voyage was overwhelming, and I’ll never thank them enough for their kindness. These are wonderful people, and now, in their 70s and 80s, their memories are as fresh as ever. Their own lives are as fascinating as their mom’s, and including them here is integral to honoring Eleanor.

It’s also impossible to pay tribute to Eleanor Lindner’s life without highlighting her husband’s, Dr. Robert Mitchell Lindner, and his unique friendship with Norman Mailer, a relationship that began in 1952 and lasted until Robert’s own life ended at a ridiculously young age of 41 in late February 1956. Their lives are intertwined. The key word here is “highlighting,” because his activities and accomplishments are so vast, and he deserves his own full biography.

Before initiating my contact with others, I dove into Ancestry.com and The Baltimore Sun‘s archives for basic and tantalizing information about Eleanor’s and Robert’s life. But those served only as a skeletal outline. The substance came from their children.

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Laura Eleanor Johnson entered this world on April 10, 1912. Her family was rooted in Chester County, Pennsylvania, for generations, going back to as early as the mid 1700s, when Joseph and Mary Philips emigrated from Wales to the Chester County township of Uwchlan. (2)

Eleanor’s mother, Ola Philips, came from that family heritage. Her father, Wilmer Johnson, likewise had family roots in Chester County where just a generation before included sons who had fought and died in the Civil War. The township of Downingtown became their home, where Eleanor’s sisters Annawyn was born a year after her and Dorothy eleven years later in 1923. (3)

Eleanor’s birth certificate, April 10, 1912.

(2) Joseph Philips was born in 1716 in Wales and died on May 17, 1792; Mary’s life began in 1710, also in Wales, and ended on December 26, 1792.
(3) Ola Philips Johnson, born on April 12, 1883; Wilmer C. Johnson, born December 28, 1885.
Annawyn Johnson, born on October 20, 1913; Dorothy Johnson, born January 24, 1923.

“There were descendants named Thomas, like Ola’s brother, who played organ and piano in the Baptist church in Downingtown. I have memories of him taking me to the church and to the train station to watch the trains come in. The track ran right behind Grandma’s house. (4) And that house, on Lancaster Ave. (U.S. Route 30), was right beside the elementary school where Eleanor, Annawyn, and Dorothy attended. Pretty convenient for lunch.” — Dan Lindner, the oldest of Eleanor’s two sons.

(4) Grandma Ola had been separated from Wilmer by then.

Wilmer’s family came from a Quaker background, where personal moral behavior was strictly enforced — no drinking, no swearing. Eleanor, though, would have little to do with that and rebelled as subtly as she could. She loved dancing, especially then with her male cousin. A photo exists of her dancing with an unlit cigar in her mouth. She’d embrace a life forbidden in her home.

Wilmer himself was referred to as “Squire Johnson,” an old title of respect; he was one of the few Downingtown residents who was kind to the Black community that lived in the segregated neighborhood called Johnson Town. The family maid, Rosie, helped raise the daughters and was a significant influence on Eleanor. She was considered such an integral part of the family that when she passed away, per her wishes, Wilmer had her secretly buried in an unmarked grave in the Whites-only part of the town cemetery. “Rosie was absolutely beloved,” writes Dan.

In high school or perhaps earlier, Eleanor played on the women’s basketball team. “Both she and her younger sister Annawyn were both called ‘Johnnie,’ but the name stuck only with Eleanor. She liked it, so friends and family called her that throughout the rest of her life.” — Eleanor’s daughter Marged Lindner

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College approached. The family took pride in getting an education; many of the Philips family women had attended West Chester State Teachers College. Eleanor’s great aunt had gone to Bucknell in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and had become a physician. So Eleanor applied for and was accepted to Bucknell as well, entering in mid-August 1930. She would major in American History. 

Eleanor as a college student at Bucknell. Photo courtesy Marged Lindner

While in a college class, she met a student two years her junior. Robert Mitchell Lindner, born on May 14, 1914, and raised in The Bronx, entered Bucknell as a Freshman in 1932. He was brilliant and graduated in only 3 1/2 years with a double-major in Psychology and English. He always wanted to be a professional writer. An early-1957 Baltimore Sun profile on Robert included this nugget:

“The only student who dared criticize him, in a writing seminar, was a Pennsylvanian named Eleanor Johnson. … Ever after, it was she on whom he tried out his words and sentences, page by laborious long-hand page.” (5)

(5) “Books and Authors” by James H. Bready, The Baltimore Sun, January 13, 1957. It’s a remarkable profile, much of it little doubt aided by Eleanor herself, and is provided in full in Appendix 2 below. Years later, when their daughter Marged was in her teens, Robert would wake her up and ask if a certain sentence or two made sense to her, which she found very flattering that he would turn to her for advice.

A 1933 Bucknell yearbook includes Eleanor’s profile as a Junior, her nickname “Johnnie” prominently displayed.

Eleanor as a Junior in the 1933 Bucknell yearbook.

The 1933 and ‘35 yearbooks include Robert in group photos of the only Jewish fraternity there, Sigma Alpha Mu.

Group photo of the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity at Bucknell, 1933.

Group photo of the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity at Bucknell, 1935.

Eleanor chose not to join any of the sororities there.

Eleanor graduated in 1934. Her youngest son, Rick, remembers: “I’m pretty sure that after she graduated from Bucknell she returned to Downingtown for a while. She told me about taking the train into Philly every day for a job she had there, which was not teaching; some kind of office gig.”

Robert graduated from Bucknell a year later. Here’s his 1935 yearbook photo:

Robert’s 1935 Bucknell yearbook photo as a Senior.

Three months after, in August 1935, Robert entered Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, as a graduate student with a Simon Gage fellowship in Psychology.

He continued his Sigma Alpha Mu membership during his first year there, as shown in the school’s 1936 yearbook:

Robert’s Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity group photo at Cornell.

Shortly after his first year at Cornell, Robert and Eleanor married in a private ceremony on June 1, 1936, in a Sunbury, PA courthouse. Here’s their marriage license:

Eleanor and Robert’s marriage license, June 1, 1936.

Under their respective “Occupation” entries, Robert’s was as “student,” while Eleanor’s as “teacher.” What’s known is that she had begun teaching either Junior High or High School in Morristown, New Jersey around this time. The marriage license suggests that she was already there, perhaps by Fall 1935.

Eleanor and Robert initially lived apart after they married. He returned to Ithaca while she taught in Morristown. Married teachers there were prohibited, so Eleanor kept hers secret. Still, the two would often get together, she to Ithaca and he to Morristown.

Robert received his Ph.D at Cornell in 1938 as a psychologist and non-medical analyst. In the next year he would work as a clinical psychologist for the New Jersey Board of Mental Hygiene, study psychoanalysis in New York and Philadelphia, have his own analysis done with Dr. Theodore Reik, study Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Physicians College, and, as an assistant professor, teach Psychology at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA, then Criminology back at Bucknell. (6)

(6) The Baltimore Sun‘s February 28, 1956 obituary.

All of that within a year after receiving his Ph.D.

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It was the following year, in 1939, when he began his association with the United States Public Health Service. He was first assigned to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, working at the Federal Penitentiary back in Lewisburg. Two years later, he would be appointed chief of their combined psychiatric/psychological services, focusing on his then-iconoclastic theories on less-draconian approaches to treating criminal behavior.

It’s not certain when Eleanor rejoined him after his Ph.D. degree, but she surely had when he returned to Lewisburg. His draft card from November 26, 1940, lists their residence there. (7)

Robert Lindner’s Draft Card, November 26, 1940.

(7) It’s uncertain what the crossed-out address was. It wasn’t for Robert’s office; he didn’t have his own. The family address was the written-in addition.

Marged, their first child, was born there in Lewisburg in 1941.

From this point on, until Robert’s death fifteen years later, Eleanor’s own career path took a back seat to his. Her input remained vital to his success, but she stood in the shadows.

Since Robert had already been serving in the Public Health Service, in 1943, still living in Lewisburg, he began fulfilling his military obligations, assigned to psychological services with the Navy. He was given the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade.

Earlier that year, in February 1943, Eleanor gave birth to their first son, Dan. Six or seven months later, their now-family of four visited Robert’s parents, still living in The Bronx.

The Lindner family at Robert’s parents’ place: Robert’s parents Charles and Sadie, who’s holding Dan, who’s maybe six or seven months old; Robert in his naval uniform; and Eleanor with 2-year-old Marged. Photo courtesy Marged Lindner

Robert’s work at the penitentiary led to his first published book, which was based on the case history of one of his unnamed penitentiary patients. Robert wrote, “He was an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program, a rebel without a cause.”

Rebel Without a Cause was published in 1944. Hollywood would approach him about the book two years later. The Los Angeles Times reported on February 18, 1946, that “‘Rebel Without a Cause,’ written by Dr. Robert M. Lindner, has been announced by J. L. Warner as a major feature on the Warner program. It is a study in criminology, especially the psychopathic type, and is a documentary account of the experience of the physician with hypnoanalysis of incorrigibles, and methods of treatment at the penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa. The film will have an important cast when it is brought to the screen, and ventures on a new path entirely.”

Hedda Hopper chimed in two days later: “Warners have bought Dr. Robert M. Lindner’s ‘Rebel Without a Cause.’ As the case history of a man in a Pennsylvania prison, the story was first written up in the American Medical Journal. Producer Jerry Wald read it, and immediately put in his bid for the screen rights. Next day both Elmer Rice and Robert Sherwood wanted to buy the story for a play. The tale is told by a criminal, while hypnotized by a powerful drug. Ironical as it may seem, he revealed he took to crime while seeking for an affection he couldn’t find. This is Jerry’s answer to the question: Why can’t we find better stories?”

However, by the time the film went into production in 1954, the storyline had been changed to such an extent that Robert disowned any participation he had had at the beginning:

“Lecturing in California once, he was invited to watch ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ being made into a movie (this was before the plot became so unrecognizable that Lindner withdrew his name from it). He met the male lead, James Dean, and liked him. The studio employé who shook his head over Dean’s foolhardy driving seemed unworthy of notice. When Dean was killed in a mashup, Lindner, back east again, grieved; he grieved, and went on driving too fast.” (8)

(8) “Books and Authors” by James H. Bready, The Baltimore Sun, January 13, 1957.

While Rebel Without a Cause certainly put Robert’s writing career on the map, it was his presentation at a newly-created institute on alcoholism held in Baltimore on September 14, 1944, that likely gave him an exposure to a wider psychoanalytical audience. No less than five articles in The Baltimore Sun were written about the day-long meeting. One article included many quotes from Robert’s speech, and another was devoted solely to it.

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Robert was discharged from military service on September 8, 1945, and with that the family relocated to Catonsville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore, first to an apartment, then to a house on Rolling Road. There, Robert, having resigned his work with the Public Health Service, was now Chief of the Psychological Division of the Maryland Department of Correction, but for only once a week. His main professional activities were elsewhere: a private psychiatric hospital called Chestnut Lodge, and the start of his own private practice.

The family would live there for the next ten years. In June 1946, their second son, Eric (known as Rick, nicknamed Willy) was born. Robert’s second book, Stone Walls and Men, was published that same year.

Eleanor was in great physical health. She enjoyed walking long distances. She could stand on her head. While in Catonsville, Robert wanted to buy her a car. He had his own English bicycle (which was later turned over to their daughter Marged); Eleanor preferred to bike to the stores to buy food. She’d then get a taxi to drive the food supplies back home while she rode the bike.

Soon after moving to Catonsville, Robert would lead and participate in many local and distant forums, and his expertise was sought in countless articles in The Baltimore Sun on, among many topics, prison reform, studies in psychoanalysis, mental health, and the weakness of the court jury system. (9)

(9) A more-complete accounting of his activities sourced from all found newspaper clippings will be added later.

Both Robert and Eleanor were supporters of Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign, Robert having been elected the year before as Chairman of the Maryland chapter of the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) political party. They were disgusted with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Robert speaking out against it in a May 3, 1948, public meeting that was covered by The Baltimore Sun. Both despised the Communist Party and were aghast at the accusations thrown Wallace’s way.

It was Robert’s third book, Prescription for Rebellion, published in 1952, that drew Norman Mailer’s interest. At 25, Mailer had published his first novel in 1948, The Naked and the Dead, to universal critical acclaim. His second in 1951, Barbary Shore, not so much. Discouraged, he went to work on his next, The Deer Park, when he came across Robert’s Prescription for Rebellion. He was searching for a like-minded “rebel,” and he found it in Robert, even though he was working within the “system,” while Mailer was working outside it.

Mailer began the correspondence with Robert, his first letter dated November 18, 1952. At first he badgered Robert on roads he felt should have been taken but didn’t when writing his new book. But the two soon fell into an intimate personal friendship, one of the few that Mailer had ever had with a contemporary writer and professional psychoanalyst, one he didn’t consider as a threatening competitor. They would often visit each other, Norman to Catonsville and Robert to New York City. (10)

(10) All of their letters can be found here:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/Lipton%E2%80%99s_Journal/Correspondence_of_Robert_Lindner_and_Norman_Mailer

Which is itself a page from Mailer’s “Lipton Journals” site:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/Lipton%E2%80%99s_Journal

In the Summer of 1954, Mailer honeymooned in Mexico with his second wife Adele, and it was there when he was first introduced to marijuana. He began writing a personal journal about his experience with the weed, calling it the “Lipton Journals” (Lipton = tea, see), frequently exploring his own world that few could understand, but he didn’t care. He enjoyed this new experience and frequently mentioned Robert, to whom he would mail near-daily entries for his feedback.

Robert wasn’t crazy about Norman’s growing reliance on the pot, and Eleanor was downright angry with him. For whom Mailer found a new-found respect. In his journal entry of February 21, 1955, Mailer, joining Eleanor’s family and friends in calling her “Johnnie,” wrote:

“The greatest arrogance is to assume that one knows the potentialities of one’s dear friends and one’s mates. If one knew them then they hardly would be potentialities. But I do hope that the next weekend we spend together isn’t pissed away by Bob exhausting himself before it begins. And the bloody arrogance of the Lindner ‘Don’t write novels, write expository works. Adele, let me tell you about my ideas about painting.’ When it comes to painting he can’t tell an ass-hole from an appetite.

“I much prefer Johnnie’s aggression. She comes out with it, she slams it down, she invites you to sock her back. She says, ‘I think smoking marijuana is going into a dirty urinal.’ So you can talk about it. You can fight about it. But the Lindner [Bob] tries to play chess. He talks about marijuana as if it were a charity case and he’s the kind matron who accepts all, even dirty children — one can always wash their ears. When the kid says, ‘Get your fucking finger out of my ear,’ Mother Superior Bob shrugs sadly and says, ‘The poor neurotic child. I was trying to help it.’ In a way I have more respect for Johnnie than for Bob. She doesn’t pretend to be helping you when she feels like whamming you with a plate. Her aggression is her health. One of these days I hope the Lindner realizes that his aggression-concealments make him act like Uriah Heep.”

In a later journal entry that same day, Mailer calms down:

“I’m so tolerant today I see good in everything. Except for passing rage at the Lindner. But notice the mellowness of this note now that I gave vent to my irritation.”

In the following day’s journal entry, Mailer owns his regret at lashing out at Robert:

“Today, I’m completely down. The sup depression came on last night after rereading the journal for the day and being struck forcibly by the fact that it seemed far less profound and much more ‘gushy’ than I had thought. Particularly the enthusiasm about having my ass whipped. In bed last night that seemed really de trop. And today, I regret the note about Bob, although of course it served its purpose. I vented the spleen I felt, and today I like him as much as ever. But will he like me? The balance between obeying one’s swings and social consideration is of course the great difficulty.”

After reading the earlier entry that Mailer had sent him, Robert fired back with his own venom. While strained for a short while, their relationship was like two brothers, full of love and fight and disgust, then love again.

A week earlier, on February 14, Mailer had written of Eleanor:

“Kill or be killed is the lingua franca of hatred. It recognizes the motile power of hatred. For if the enemy symbolically kills us, then we change, we enter a new world. And if we kill the enemy then too we enter a new world. So hatred understood, accepted, even accentuated (which is the hysteric’s knowledge) leads to love. Which is Johnnie’s power. She is potentially a great lover and hater, and actually is a much larger hater and lover than most people admit to. It is the secret of her health, it is what keeps her going. If she were less guilty over her hatred, less ashamed of her raw love, she would be even healthier.”

In a 2007 interview with his biographer Michael Lennon, Mailer reminisced about Eleanor:

“Mailer described Johnnie as ‘a sort of pepper pot blonde, pepper pot fire. WASP, very strong in a breakable way, in other words vulnerable, vulnerable as hell. She was in the best sense of the word, a dame. She was full of strong feelings, full of love, full of lust, full of fire, full of the inability to pardon.'” (11)

(11) J. Michael Lennon: Norman Mailer A Double Life, p. 166. Eleanor had converted to Judaism after she married Robert. She wasn’t devout, but she did observe Kaddish in honor of her husband.

In late June 1955, Robert resigned from his once-a-week position as criminal psychologist in the Maryland Board of Corrections. Two months later, the family moved from Catonsville to a home in Baltimore on Winding Way, best described by his son Rick as “a stately older home in Roland Park.”

Robert discussed the new home in a letter to Mailer in July 1955:

“The house we’re moving into in August represents something big for all of us. As far as I’m concerned, I’m intending to use it for a real change in my style of life. I’m hoping to alter the pattern somewhat…but this is something we’ll be talking about.”

“I have clear memories of the house on Winding Way: A big stone house, pretty old as it had a dumb waiter running to the kitchen from some place upstairs, suggesting a butler, cook or some other domestic help at some point in its past. Three stories, a steep slate roof that we used to climb on, no yard to speak of so we couldn’t play ball there, which bummed us out.

“Our parents were sociable and often hosted cocktail parties, in Catonsville for sure, and probably at Winding Way, though I don’t specifically recall any there. I do have clear memories of Norman Mailer and especially Phil Wylie, whom I liked tremendously.” — Dan Lindner

“Mom supported Dad with her skills as a social entertainer. She was a marvelous cook, she set a beautiful table, and both entertained often — visitors from all over the world, the celebrities Norman Mailer, Phil Wylie, Theodore Reik, and many local friends.

“Mom was also a creative decorator. She chose a very unusual furniture and color scheme for Dad’s office in the Latrobe Building, quite different from the conventional ones of his colleagues, and people would visit just to admire it.” — Marged Lindner

The Lindner’s new home on Winding Way.

1955 also brought to publication Robert’s fourth book, The Fifty-Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytical Tales. It included two case studies that would be adapted for television after Robert had died. The first had earlier appeared as a two-part article in Harper’s called “The Jet-Propelled Couch.” That article would turn into a television play two years later.

Hedda Hopper in The L.A. Times, September 12, 1956:
“Stanley Roberts, who bought ‘The Ninth Wave” which he’ll put on the screen, has also acquired ‘Jet Propelled Couch,’ story by Dr. Robert Lindner, author of ‘Rebel Without a Cause.’ It’s about a patient who visits an analyst concerning his problem of making trips to various planets. Stan is aiming for first magnitude stars for this one. He wants Lonesome George Gobel on the couch and Cary Grant as the psychiatrist — a very funny combination.”

The production would air fourteen months later on November 14, 1957, as part of CBS’s Playhouse 90 series. George Gobel and Cary Grant ended up being replaced by Donald O’Connor as the analyst and David Wayne as his patient. Peter Lorre was also included in the cast as “Dr. Ostrow.”

The second case study was “Destiny’s Tot.” It aired on NBC February 7, 1960. Donald Kirkley reviewed it in his Baltimore Sun column “Look and Listen” two days later:

“Two attitudes toward psychiatry — violently different — were illustrated on NBC-TV Sunday, one in a foolish, hackneyed farce, the other in a sober, penetrating study of an important social problem. In every way they were poles apart.

“‘Destiny’s Tot’ was a powerful dramatization of one of the case histories in ‘The Fifty-Minute Hour,’ by the late Dr. Robert Lindner, of Baltimore. The subject of this analysis, conducted in prison over two years, was an American Nazi, jailed for emulating Hitler; a psychopath spitting venom when first seen. S. Lee Pogostin, the adaptor, did not try to improve on Dr. Lindner’s account; he stuck to the facts, shaping them for better showing, with a minimum of changes and flashbacks. It was a very fine piece of translation.

“The acting, of Alexander Scourby [portraying Dr. Lindner] and Robert Duvall [as the psychopath] in the main roles, and the overall production made this a contender for the year’s prizes in this category….”

(The production Kirkley panned was Tony Webster’s “After Hours.”)

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By late 1955 Robert had finished his fifth and final book, Must You Conform?, and was preparing to visit various venues to help promote its publication. He had begun that on December 5, speaking at the Donor Day luncheon at the Cheb Shalom Sisterhood.

But his health was turning into a growing concern. He had addressed it in that same letter to Mailer the previous July:

“The days go by and I find myself more hard pressed for time to write to you. Today I’m cutting through the crap to do what I’ve been wanting to do for weeks — spend a few minutes with my brother [his younger brother Manuel, a dentist, referred to in the family as Manny, born in 1918]. Bingo, I have missed you. Actually, my inability to write has not been due entirely to other preoccupations, but due to the fact that — I’ve been — as you seem to sense — close to illness with exhaustion. About two weeks before I went to California I picked up a viral infection. Out there I seem to have been able to pickle it in alcohol and burn it to an ember with the excitement. On my return it flared up — busting out this last week with severe gut pain, agonies in my back and chest, and a sort of quacking ague. Over the weekend I loaded myself with stuff and slept almost continuously. Today I’m better — and even have a few ideas. I hope I’ve got it licked — because despite my notorious hypochondria I resent, hate, despise the weakness in my body.”

Personal tragedy struck Robert’s family in October. Manny had passed away. “It was terrible. He had been quite ill for some time with colitis, had lost his dental practice, was getting much better and was to be discharged from the hospital (and would probably come to live with us in the big house until he regained full strength), then was killed by an embolism.” — Marged Lindner

And by January 1956, Robert himself was in the hospital. His last letter to Mailer on January 13, 1956:

“Dear Norman,

“Perhaps you will forgive my silence when you learn that all the nightmares have finally had triplets and have caught up with me. As of this writing, I am a patient at John Hopkins Hospital, where they are going to try to give me back my tight ass hole. There is nothing more to say, except love.

“Bob

“P.S. Last week I was a patient at the Doctor’s Hospital in New York and Billie and Cy came to see me at Johnnie’s urgent request, since she needed Billie. I asked them not to disturb you with all this worry, and that’s why you weren’t told. I would be very grateful to you if you would call them and tell them what’s happened.

“Dictated but not read or signed.” (12)

(12) Billie was the wife of Charles Rembar, Mailer’s first cousin and lawyer who would defend and win court battles concerning the publication of banned books. Cy was Rembar himself.

Robert Lindner would die in John Hopkins Hospital of congestive heart disease on February 27. He was 41.

“It was terrible for all of the family to have my father’s death. His parents lost two of their three sons [Manny and Robert] within months. A parent’s worst nightmare doubled.” — Marged Lindner

A week after Robert’s death, Norman Mailer would pay tribute to him in his new column “Quickly, a column for slow readers” in The Village Voice, a culture paper he had helped found months earlier:

“One of my few really good friends died last week at the age of 41. he was Robert Lindner, the psychoanalyst, and he had been suffering from a heart ailment for many years. …

“Bob Lindner was so good a friend that I simply have no heart to write about him now. I should go on at length about his charm, his generosity, his intellectual curiosity, his foibles, his weaknesses, his kindness, his ambitions, his achievements, his failures, and his great warmth (he was truly one of the warmest people I have known), but to write immediately about a man so complex, so individual, and yet so much part of our generation would be to him a disservice, for Bob Lindner was nothing if not alive, and he would have loathed a facile eulogy.

“So, rather, let me give the rest of this column over to a few passages from his books. These passages are undoubtedly not the best which could be found in his work, nor the most exciting, but they are representative of the main themes which preoccupied him. In addition to his early work on the criminal psychopath, Lindner was almost alone among analysts in his sustained argument that the healthy man was a rebel, and that it was crippling for psychoanalysts to try to adjust a patient to the wrappings of an unjust world.” (13)

(13) The Village Voice, March 7, 1956.

In his last interview with his biographer on September 8, 2007, before his own death that November, Norman Mailer reflected on his relationship with Robert:

“…As time went, we drifted apart a bit because of [their fights over Mailer’s marijuana use]. And then he began to get ill. He had a problem; he often said to me, ‘I’m going to die young.’ What it was is that he had high blood pressure, which was hard to reduce because the medicines used to reduce it widened the hole in one of his heart valves. This was at a point when they couldn’t operate on heart valves. Today I’m sure he’d be alive. But in those days, he had this problem. One medicine he needed was there to kill on the other side. So at a certain point it got hopeless.

“He was in his early forties and I talked to him on the phone one day and he said, ‘There’s nothing they can do; I’m going to die.’ And he burst into tears. And I was so cold and so full of anger at where we’d gotten and when I look back, it was one of the most unpleasant moments in my life. I didn’t feel a fucking thing for him. I felt contempt that he was weakened. You see, my feeling was, ‘We’re soldiers and if we die, we die.’ I have that feeling when one’s not there with a friend, but not really giving him what he needed. And I didn’t believe he was going to die.

“And then, some weeks later, he died. And it was one of the great blows of my life because I couldn’t believe it. And then I felt woe, and then I felt contrition. … I spoke at his memorial service. …” (14)

(14) J. Michael Lennon: Norman Mailer A Double Life, pp. 202-203.

“His children were affected terribly by the death. They adored their father. I didn’t know them well enough to know if they adored him more than they adored [Eleanor], but it would be easy to make such a statement because she was more forbidding. She had a strong disposition; she had a very strong sense of what was right and what’s wrong, whereas he was more adaptable. I’m sure she got into more intense set-tos with the children than he did, whereas he was their Papa and they adored him. So they may never have recovered altogether. It was really tough.” (15)

(15) Quoted in “The Lipton Journals” postscript, link cited above.

“I had an abiding hostility that I harbored toward Norman because of his cruel response to our father’s emotional call to him from the hospital. As a 9-year-old, a lot of what went down during that period of our father’s illness and death escaped me; I think I was purposely excluded from some things, and rightly so.

“But at some point I learned of the phone call at the hospital and, despite fonder memories, it triggered anger toward Norman that I had felt for the next thirty-plus years.

“Until the early ’90s; I had been writing around five editorials a week for The Times Argus, and I decided to send one of them to Norman, thinking it might interest him. Whatever it was I had written, sending it overcame that decades-long anger towards him.

“He wrote back, thanked me, told me I was a very good writer, and invited me to stay in touch. I did, and [in 1996] I let him know that our mom had died. I received a very kind reply. That was the last time we corresponded. Marged and I and our spouses rented a cabin on Cape Cod together for a number of years, and at one point we talked of trying to visit him in Provincetown. As I recall, we decided that he was too infirm by then and we shouldn’t impose.

“While Norman acted despicably in that phone call, I’m more forgiving now. Slightly. I act despicably sometimes, too. But life is long, and it encompasses contradictions, nuances, and growth. I know the Mailers have treated Marged almost with reverence, and I appreciate that.” — Rick Lindner

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1956 was perhaps the most challenging year of Eleanor’s life. Her husband had died, and she had to carry on, now raising three children on her own, and figuring out how to support them.

Without her husband’s income and further burdened with insufficient to nonexistent life insurance, Eleanor had few options. She hadn’t worked on her own in twenty years. “She wanted to but was conflicted. But finances were dire, which forced her hand.” — Marged Lindner

The private school her three children were attending, Park, offered all of them scholarships for the remainder of their time there. Years later, Eleanor would repay them. (16)

(16) Park was a K-12 private school. Marged was there from Grades 7 to 12. While living in Catonsville, her parents insisted that their children attend public schools, and they did, at least up to Elementary school. But by Junior High, the public school they were to attend functioned on a half-day schedule. Robert and Eleanor strongly felt that that was insufficient education, so they decided their kids should go to a private school. Their first choice was the Friends school, but there was a quota for Jewish children, so they settled on Park.

“Our mom was devastated by the loss of her husband. I do recall her talking with friends while trying to figure out what to do next. She figured she’d go back to teaching, but some of her friends thought she could find something ‘better’ to do — that probably meant more lucrative. But she certainly made the right decision, as teaching opened up new ways for her to use her intellect, compassion, and the many skills required in that profession.

“My memory is that she sold Winding Way in a hurry, taking a considerable loss, but it was what she had to do.” — Dan Lindner

Eleanor sold the house on Winding Way and moved her family into a smaller but still comfortable home on Oakshire Ave. in the Baltimore neighborhood of Mount Washington. “It wasn’t hard for us to move out of Winding Way. We hadn’t been there much more than a year and didn’t really have friends there. The Oakshire house was just fine, with lots of kids in the neighborhood, and it worked out well that Mom got the [teaching] job at Cross Country, which wasn’t far away.” — Rick Lindner

Once moved in, she spent considerable time studying to teach again. She began taking summer classes at the University of Maryland for an eventual Masters degree in Human Development.

“She worked very very! hard — possibly over the spring, and certainly over the summer, of 1956 to prepare herself to meet the prevailing requirements to resume teaching. She was worried about teaching math, but then later ended up writing an unpublished math guidance book for other teachers.” — Marged Lindner

“This was perhaps one of the first major decisions Mom had to make on her own after becoming a widow.” — Rick Lindner

While all that was going on, Robert’s colleagues and friends helped set up the Lindner Foundation, whose purpose was to support psychoanalytical research, “particularly in fields to which Dr. Lindner devoted special study, including the dynamics and theories of rebellion, psychopathy and criminal behavior.” (17)

(17) The Baltimore Sun, March 6, 1956.

Within a week after Robert’s death, $15,000 had already been contributed. Among the sponsors were Robert’s close friends Philip Wylie (also an early patient), Gerald Johnson — both would write Letters to the Editor in The Baltimore Sun in support of their friend — and Norman Mailer. The Baltimore Sun would report on the annual late May recipients for the next seven years, until 1963.

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Cross Country Elementary School was a new school with groundbreaking ceremonies in December 1953 and its first classes in September 1955. Eleanor would begin teaching 4th grade there the following year.

“She went to a meeting with the Cross Country School principal, Grace Naumann, before the school year started, and there was another new teacher there who was crying about having just lost her dog. Mom told me that her first reaction was to be appalled, because she had just lost her husband, but she soon realized that grief is grief, and she had sympathy for the other woman.” — Rick Lindner

My own association with Eleanor Lindner would occur six years later when she became my 6th-grade teacher in 1962. I have two vivid memories of her; the first was a small thing, but it meant much to me. She began referring to me as “Don” instead of my birth name “Donald.” The shortened name made me feel more mature, more confident, less a child. Just that small gesture cemented my respect and love for her.

A close-up of the Grade 6 class photo in 1963, Eleanor surrounded by her students.

The second most vivid memory was a Spring 1963 class play she had prepared for us to perform. Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time had been published the year before. Eleanor loved the book; she would visit the author in New York City several times, and they would become friends. (18)

(18) Around fifteen years ago, one of the tenants in my apartment building told me that Madeleine was one of her massage clients, and that she had lived just one block away from us. She was there as early as that Spring 1963, as evidenced by letters she had written to our class.

“Producing A Wrinkle in Time was a big deal for Mom. She was very taken with the book (which I’ve read a couple times and thoroughly enjoyed) and I do recall that she met the author.” — Dan Lindner

“[A Wrinkle in Time] was very important to our mother, one of her favorite things she did as a teacher. We used to have color photos of the performance. It’s even possible I still do, as somehow I ended up with the family albums (or at least some of them). And not only did she meet Madeleine L’Engle, they became friends.” — Rick Lindner

“She visited Madeleine L’Engle quite a few times, and they maintained a correspondence for many years.” — Marged Lindner

“I remember that production of ‘A Wrinkle in Time!!!’ Spring 1963 was my last semester at Cross Country. I was in Bill Koutrelakos’s fifth-grade class. Steve Halperin played The Man with the Red Eyes. He was sitting on a black throne stage left when he was defeated; he disappeared through a false bottom in the throne, just like Margaret Hamilton disappeared through a trap door in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ after she melted.” — Steve Kluger, August 17, 2023

My role was bouncing a ball in one scene. A thespian I was not. But Eleanor made sure to include everyone in the class, no matter their acting expertise. (19)

(19) Marged tells me that Eleanor also created a class play based on Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, which was published in September 1961: “I know she used The Phantom Toolbooth as a favorite book, and I’m pretty sure that she did a play of it.” It’s probable that this had occurred the year before the A Wrinkle in Time production, during the 1961-62 school year.

The program cover for the Grade 6 production of A Wrinkle in Time.

The program itself, listing the entire cast and crew, all students in the class.

At the time I had added some missing names.

The 1962-63 school year at Cross Country many have been Eleanor’s last there. “After several years [at Cross Country], Mom took a transfer to another public school, which I think was a Junior High School.” — Rick Lindner.

That transfer may have been for one school-year only, 1963-1964, because her name begins to appear in available Baltimore School Directories as an Elementary School “Specialist,” beginning with the 1964-65 year at the Department of Education Office at the Administration Building in midtown on East 25th Street. “She became a supervising teacher within the Baltimore school system for quite a while.” — Marged Lindner (20)

Directory Specialists roster for 1964-65, truncated here.

(20) Her name also appears as a Specialist in the 1965-66 and 1966-67 directories. No other years after 1966-67 are available online.

During this period, Eleanor’s father, Wilmer, passed away on March 15, 1964. Her mother, Ola, would die eight years later, on September 9, 1972.

“She then worked as a curriculum specialist the last couple of years before she became eligible to retire. She didn’t like it. It was an office job, and she missed being out with the students and teachers.” — Marged Lindner.

Those born in 1912 could begin to collect retirement benefits when they turned 65, so Eleanor probably retired in 1977. The year before, her daughter Marged, who lived in Philadelphia, gave birth to her first daughter, Lauren. Eleanor, still living in Baltimore, would travel to Philly to babysit her new granddaughter and, then later, another, Kate.

“My mother was very important to both of my daughters, especially after she retired and cared for them one or two days a week, or had them for weekends or vacations.” — Marged Lindner

After retirement, Eleanor moved to Thorndale, Pennsylvania, a small community just west of her hometown, Downingtown, and lived with her sister Annawyn.

“When she went to live with her sister, she was about an hour away from us, so her presence was much of my daughters’ childhood until my oldest went to college in 1995.” — Marged Lindner

When she wasn’t caring for her granddaughters, she’d be playing Bridge. “My mom was a fierce Bridge player in Bridge groups. She would play a game, then replay it. That was her main activity.” — Marged Lindner

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Eleanor had become ill in her early 70s (early to mid-1980s), having developed COPD and then peripheral neuropathy.

She passed just before turning 84 on March 26, 1996. She was survived by her three children and five grandchildren. Her sister Annawyn would die on October 30, 2005, at 92, and her youngest sister Dorothy on August 25, 2021, at 98.

Eleanor was buried beside her husband in the Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery.

“Mom was truly the hero in my life, because although her pain and grief lasted for years, she somehow buckled down and got her career started at Cross Country Elementary and devoted herself to raising us on her own. It was also clear to me that she devoted herself to her students, and I remember the special class she created that apparently included you.

“So yes, you espied deeper qualities in her, and a part of that was how seriously she took her work, and the fulfillment that came from that. I was a little jealous because she talked about her students so much and they were almost my age. But that was silly. She was a wonderful mother.” — Rick Lindner

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A Postscript

Marged discussed with me her last encounter with Norman Mailer in around April 2007, seven months before the author would pass away:

After my father had died, I had been in contact with Norman for some years, and I visited him in New York a few times in the ’60s, when he was living in the brownstone with the crow’s nest. Then, in the late ’60s, I lost contact with him.

I have a couple of signed books from him. He had this terrible habit: He would write something like “Cheers,” which he wrote in everybody’s book, and then he would say to me, “Bring it back to me, and I’ll write something else,” but he rarely ever did.

It was his last book [The Castle in the Forest]. In around April 2007, he was in Philadelphia at the main library, where he gave a very interesting, provocative talk. I had a copy of the book, and I just got in the line of a gazillion people to get the book signed.

When it was my turn, I said, “Norman, I’m Bob Lindner’s daughter.” And he looked up, and he just lit up! And he said, “Marged!!” I was really surprised that it moved me, because I didn’t know what he would remember. And then he said, “I want to see you. Call me.” And he wrote down his phone number in Provincetown. “Come to Provincetown and see me. I’m getting deaf, so I won’t answer the phone, but whoever answers the phone, tell them who you are, and they’ll put me on. We’ll get together.”

My husband and I had been going to a nearby community during the summers. So, while there in the summer of 2007, I called him, but there was no answer. I assumed he wasn’t there. I probably should have driven over and knocked on the door.

I didn’t know quite what was wrong with him, but i know he was walking with sticks or something. He was not a well man when I saw him at the library.

Norman was a very sweet man. There was a lot of aggression and super-masculinity and tough guy, but, my God, he was a very, very, very sweet man underneath all of that stuff.

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Appendix 1: Eleanor Lindner’s Children

“There was a common perception, which I share, that Dan was the heir apparent. Professionally speaking, of course, Marged was that. I was often said to be more similar to our mother.” — Rick Lindner

This essay wouldn’t be complete without some words about Eleanor’s children. Dan and Rick became and remain two of Vermont’s preeminent bluegrass performers and recording artists, Dan’s main instrument the banjo and Rick the mandolin. But it was Marged who introduced them to such an historically vital and uniquely-American genre.

Marged did indeed become their father’s heir apparent, professionally. Her career positions included a research psychologist in behavior genetics; an assistant director of a program to rehabilitate drug addicts; handling assessments and recommendations for Philadelphia judges, earning a certificate in Family Therapy from the Family Institute of Philadelphia, and incorporating brain-wave biofeedback while in private practice.

And then on Tuesday…

The Lindner household in the early ’50s wasn’t particularly focused on music, but it was present. Robert had some opera records, and he would often listen to the Saturday Met performances on the radio. He loved the popular singers of the day, like Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Eddie Fisher. He and Eleanor would frequent live shows in nightclubs and both white and black music joints downtown. At home, Eleanor would play songs on the family piano, her favorites being the hymns “I Come to the Garden Alone” and “How Great Thou Art.” (21)

(21) An exquisite version of “I Come to the Garden Alone” can be heard here:

When their father died in late February 1956, Marged was in the 10th grade, having turned 15 that year; she had skipped Grade 9. Dan had just turned 13, in 7th grade, and Rick four months shy of 10, in Grade 4. By the mid- to late-’50s, they were into the rock ‘n’ roll, as were most their age.

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It was the Summer of 1959, Marged’s first since entering Swarthmore College as a Freshman the previous fall. She fell in with a group of students who were all interested in folk music. They traveled to the first Folk festival in Newport on July 11. Marged remembers seeing a then-unknown singer named Hazel Dickens perform back in Baltimore. (22) Raised in a mining family in West Virginia, Hazel and her parents had moved to Baltimore in the 1950s, following her sister who had gone there a decade earlier. Their migration was part of a massive influx of Appalachian workers into the city.

(22) “I have a cyrstal-clear memory of a house party where Hazel Dickens, Mike Seeger and others were jamming. The music was captivating; Hazel was mesmerizing. I don’t think I’d ever encountered a real mountain gal like that.” — Dan Lindner

Rick Lindner:
“Baltimore, in the ’50s and ’60s, had a significant population of people from the mountains in southern Virginia and also North Carolina, who had moved north during World War II for work in the Martin bomber factory, steel plant, and other industries. They brought their music with them, so there were hillbilly bars in some of the working-class neighborhoods downtown.”

Dan:
“Our older sister, Marged, first developed an interest in traditional music. We use the word ‘traditional’ to distance it from ‘folk’ music, which was popularized by groups like The Kingston Trio, The Limelighters, etc, and artists like Joan Baez and, not long afterwards, Bob Dylan.

“To our way of thinking, this diluted its authenticity. The older, more authentic forms of roots music appealed to us more. One of the first groups that caught our attention, The New Lost City Ramblers, was actually a trio of young city guys (including Mike Seeger, younger half-brother of Pete Seeger) who did a great job capturing the sounds and styles of country and mountain musicians who had recorded in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Marged turned us on to that group and we bought their first album, soon followed by their subsequent recordings.

“This quickly led us to bluegrass, a style that had grown directly out of that mountain music, but blended in elements of blues, gospel and balladry. I couldn’t tell you just when we started emulating and trying to learn traditional and bluegrass music, but it was in our teens, and definitely after our dad passed away.”

Rick:
“Our sister hung out with other young people who were kind of the vanguard of the counter-cultural movement. As Dan notes, there was a growing interest not only in folk music but also traditional music, and she was old enough to go, with her friends, to some of these places.

“There was one bar in particular — The 79 Club — that featured Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys. The way I remember it is that she brought home, or at least introduced us to, a Folkways album that this band had just released. It was pure, high-powered mountain bluegrass, and it just blew us away.

“Our interest spread from there to the New Lost City Ramblers, who played ‘Old Time’ music (largely the music from which bluegrass evolved) and were gaining a lot of attention. They also had a connection to Baltimore, as Mike Seeger lived in the city for a while and cultivated relationships with those folks. So we got their records, too.

“I think this started for me when I was in about the 6th or 7th grade, not sure. As for me, I liked Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. Our mother must have thought all this quite strange, but she indulged us, and in later years she actually went to some shows with me. When I got old enough to go to the Baltimore bars, she went with me to see the Osborne Brothers in some dive, and she also went with me to see Bill Monroe in Pennsylvania.”

Marged:
“There were musicians living in West Virginia who came to Baltimore and perform at The 79 Club. One night I brought Dan with me to see Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys there. Dan was only 16; we sat at a table in the back corner. Dan fell in love with the music.”

Dan:
“Yep. I was 16, should not have been permitted in the bar, but that was down in a rough section of Baltimore, and no one cared. It was my first live bluegrass show. We had an album by that band, probably the first bluegrass album I ever had, too. I was hooked.”

Rick:
“Those boys had cred; even though they were playing this little dive in Baltimore, all of them grew to be significant in bluegrass circles.” (23)

(23) Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys: “Foggy Mountain Top,” recorded in Baltimore, 1959:

Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys performing at The 79 Club in the late 1950s. Photo courtesy here: https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/artsentertainment/history-rebirth-bluegrass-baltimore/

Marged would drive Dan to a folk festival in Pennsylvania and to Washington D.C. to see the Country Gentlemen perform. When they were old enough, the brothers would drive there themselves.

Dan:
“Not sure when we started going down to The Shamrock in Georgetown to see the Country Gentleman. Could have been soon after I turned 18 [1961]. Rick would have been underage, though I doubt the management cared much about that. They just wanted to sell beer, and if we didn’t order enough, we were asked to leave, because people were waiting at the door to get in.”

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Dan:
“I was starting to learn banjo at the end of my high school days [1961], but really took off when I got to Oberlin College in Ohio and found a thriving folk music scene with a heavy bluegrass presence, and I got some informal banjo lessons from a couple guys there. The banjo player in The Plum Creek Boys graduated, and I moved in to that position as a Sophomore and sort of led the band for the next three years. We actually recorded an album when I was a Senior.”

The Chronicle Telegram in Elryia, Ohio, announced an upcoming “Folk Dancing Lessons” weekend to take place on Friday and Saturday, March 1 and 2, 1963: “Dan Lindner’s combo will play at intermission Saturday night.” This would have been during Dan’s Sophomore year, and, while he has no memory of this, it would probably have been The Plum Creek Boys.

The Chronicle Telegram, February 28, 1963.

Dan and Rick’s first public performance playing bluegrass was in a Junior High School auditorium, the school where their mom was both teaching and perhaps also in an administrative position. “Most likely our mom set it up.” (Dan) This would probably have been during the 1963-64 school year.

Rick:
“I went to college three years after Dan. Knox College in Illinois. I formed a bluegrass band there called the Stony Holly Boys (I mostly played mandolin). The group included at various times a school janitor and a couple of professors, as well as another student or two. In my Freshman year [1964-65]. I hitchhiked to Oberlin and accompanied Dan [in his Senior year there] and some of his band members at the famous Union Grove Old Time Fiddlers Convention. We won 3rd prize in one of the venues.”

Dan graduated from Oberlin in 1965. “I got married for the first time soon after graduation. My wife, a year behind me, finished up at Oberlin while I went down to Florida with a buddy to pick fruit. The draft board caught up with me down there — by that time they were taking married men — so I got into graduate school in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. Got a worthless degree, then got into the U.S. Public Health Service (like my dad) and worked as a parole officer at the Milan Federal Correctional Institution.

“Did my two years of service, then my wife and I traveled to Europe for several months, When we got back, I went to Vermont to visit a college friend, Al Davis. Fell in love with the state, got a job at the Northwest State Corrections Facility in St. Albans, and worked there another two years. After my first child was born in 1971, I decided I was not meant to be a social worker, so I quit that job and purchased 100 acres in Marshfield.”

Rick graduated from Knox College in 1968, then joined VISTA in Tennessee before traveling to California. Dan invited him to help build his house in Marshfield, so Rick came to Vermont. Both never looked back.

A year later the two formed Banjo Dan and the Mid-nite Plowboys along with Dan’s Oberlin friend Al Davis. Dan would start his own piano turning/repair service, and Rick, who began writing at Knox, would get freelance assignments in a number of Vermont newsrooms. He was then hired as a reporter, then editorial page editor and columnist, for the Times Argus in Montpelier.

In 1995, Rick became the editor of Co-op Currents, a position he held until retiring in 2017.

Banjo Dan and the Mid-night Plowboys would thrive for the next forty years, playing throughout the Northeast as well as overseas in Russia, Soviet Georgia, Finland, and Italy, until they decided to disband in 2012, their final public concert on September 29 that year.

Marged: “My mom loved going to her sons’ performances.”

After countless performances, including one televised in 1983 (24), and acclaimed group and solo recordings, much of which consisted of original tales of early Vermont history, Dan and Rick still perform together as the Sky Blue Boys as well as part of The VT Bluegrass Pioneers. There’s a rich history of their recordings and performances that are well-documented online. The music they discovered and fell in love with in 1959 could not have found better ambassadors in their own careers.

(24) PBS, October 12, 1983: https://www.pbs.org/video/banjo-dan-and-the-mid-nite-plowboys-gn7v8x/

A screen capture from the Plowboys’ televised appearance. Rick is in the center with his mandolin, Dan to the right with his banjo.

Dan and Rick as part of the VT Bluegrass Pioneers, late July 2022.

Dan and Rick’s complete catalogue of recordings can be found here: https://www.banjodan.com/

A note on Rick’s Vermont “stage” name, Will, or Willy, or Willie.

Rick:
“I actually call Dan ‘Mick’ for the same reason he calls me ‘Willy.’ When I moved to Vermont, it was to help Dan/Mick build a house, and since I knew no one there, everyone I met used Dan’s name for me; that’s why ‘Willy’ and ‘Will’ stuck. It was not intentional on my part. Almost everyone from my earlier days calls me Rick, although my wife made the switch.

“When Dan and I were — I don’t know, maybe 10 and 13? — we decided to call each other by the names of our favorite baseball players. He was Mickey (for Mantle) and I was Willy (for Mays, although I later learned that he spelled his name Willie). If Dan mistakenly called me Rick, I got to hit him, and the other way around. I had more wounds than he did.

“Dan’s nickname didn’t go beyond me, but mine did when I moved to Vermont, and people met me through him.”

Marged: “I still call Dan ‘Mick’ sometimes. I escaped being punished for erring.”

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The artistic side of the Lindner family has extended to one of Marged’s daughters, Lauren. Going by Lauren Goodwin Slaughter, she’s published two volumes of poetry, A lesson in smallness and Spectacle, published many other poems and short stories in a number of journals, edits the University of Alabama’s literary magazine for writers who identify as female (NELLE), and is currently on a NEA fellowship to complete a book of short stories as well as a novel. She’s ably emulated both of her maternal grandparent as both a teacher and a writer. Here’s her website:

http://www.laurenslaughter.com/

To close, I want to include one more song that perhaps has more personal meaning to the Eleanor Lindner legacy than any other. Dan, Rick, their wives Nancy and Jaye, Jaye’s daughter Deanna and her then-boyfriend performed around Vermont as The New Bremen Town Musicians in the 1990s and early 2000s. They put together selections from their live concerts into a 2-CD set titled “When Time Was Young.”

Among the live performances they selected was their own rendition of Eleanor’s other favorite hymn, “How Great Thou Art.” A most fitting tribute to Eleanor.

Eleanor’s children at Rick’s home in Vermont in 2023, sorting through their mom’s personal belongings. Photo courtesy Marged Lindner

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Appendix 2

Here’s the full column of James H. Bready’s “Books and Authors” profile of Robert Lindner, published in The Baltimore Sun on January 13, 1957, nearly a year after Robert’s death.

Books and Authors
By James H. Bready

Robert Lindner’s last literary effort, dictated in the hospital room from which he was not to emerge, was a look forward to the world of 2001 and the state of its mental health. Reduced to article length, it will appear shortly in a double issue, dedicated to Sigmund Freud, in the professional journal Psychoanalysis.

Briefly, Lindner foresees the possibility of either a mass psychopathy, leading to one or another form of totalitarianism, or a democratic self-fulfillment exceeding anything so far — and puts the issue to his readers.

He left no completed book. Rather, one of the ironies of his last days was to miss out on the commotion attendant upon publication of his last book, “Must you Conform?” Impairment of eyesight was part of the damage wrought by his degenerative heart disorder; he could not read the reviews for himself.

It will be a year next month since Lindner’s death. His name and writings continue to be known. Four of his five books remain in print; now and again the mail brings his family a copy of still another foreign-language translation.

A Tribute by Wylie

The New York newspaper writer who spoke of doing a biography of him undoubtably has various other projects hight on her list;* on the other hand, there is a solid Lindner tribute in the autobiographical work by Philip Wylie, his most eminent client, that is due out soon.

[* Marged identified the prospective biographer as Lillian Roth, author of I’ll Cry Tomorrow. Eleanor nixed the project.]

Lindner’s wife (who now teaches fourth-graders), and daughter Marged and sons Dan and Eric, have moved to a smaller house since last February. They sent a good part of his book accumulation, which piled up past 2,000 volumes, to the library at Bucknell, his undergraduate college. Not all of them though — some books were saved for Marged. Now a junior at Park School, she counts on being an analyst some day herself.Meanwhile, the Robert Lindner Foundation, formed after his death, is still gathering momentum. Its first public accomplishment was a lecture series here last fall by Theodor Reik, whose viewpoint influenced Lindner more than that of any other living analyst. The lecture series, however, is an unimaginative, not to say conformist, approach; the foundation now projects a program of awards for work in psychoanalysis, work that stands out for its forthrightness and originality, as Lindner’s own career did.

“Rebel With A Cause”

Foundation members like to call Lindner a rebel with a cause—alluding to his first book, written before he came to Maryland, while he was psychologist in charge at the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa. His own willingness to up-end convention went back still further, to high-school days in New York City and especially to more than one brink-of-expulsion row as editor of a magazine at Bucknell (where he whizzed through in 3 1/2 years).

As a graduate student at Cornell, he chose to take a Ph.D. and then entered professional life as a psychologist and nonmedical analyst, thereby guaranteeing himself a permanent minority position over against the conventional M.D. world of psychiatry.

But it was only after the Lindners moved to Catonsville, and he was installed at his desk in the garage which they converted into an office and study, that he formulated the idea which won him probably his widest attention. His idea was that the emphasis in most mental-health work is, incorrectly and harmfully, on “adjustment,” on behavior conforming superficially to everybody else’s. Lindner wrote out a “prescription for rebellion”—book title and detailed history—that stresses the therapeutic value of differing, of constructive non-conformity.

Rejoiced In Argument

Argument swirled up; Lindner rejoiced in it, knowing he could out-write any ordinary opponent.

Writer was what he had wanted to be in the first place. He was writing stories in his teens. At Bucknell, a psychology professor convinced him that the successful writers were those who had something to write about; that people, as intellectual capital, paid off in the highest interest. Lindner majored jointly in psychology and English.

The only student who dared criticize him, in a writing seminar, was a Pennsylvanian named Eleanor Johnson. They were married in 1936, the year after his graduation; ever after, it was she on whom he tried out his words and sentences, page by laborious long-hand page.

Wrote Play And Poems

He turned out poems, a play, the torso of a prison novel, a movie script, technical articles, all deciphered a second time and typed by his secretary downtown in the Latrobe building. He found fiction hardest; the farther he got in psychology, the more his plots bogged down in ideas. But then he conceived a way out, a novel that would convey the psychoanalyst at work, not deified as in a patient’s sight but bare, as man. “The Wizard,” it would be called. Lindner’s method was to think out a book for as much as a year beforehand; when he was ready to start writing on the novel which he expected would stir up the biggest fuss yet, more so than any of his five previous books (or the three others of which he was editor), Lindner had to go into the hospital instead.

It was the only time he attempted dictation, in the hospital. Normally, the routine was pencil on foolscap pad, writing, rewriting, two, three times, carried on long past midnight, often times all seven nights a week. Coffee, a new pack of cigarettes, more coffee; he pushed himself. But his skill increased — “The Fifty-Minute Hour,” published in 1955, left him drenched with critical approval.

When not writing he read, voraciously: the man who reads while tying his shoestrings in the morning and is still reading when he dozes off that night; who argues with authors via marginal notation.

Polite And Restrained

In public, he conformed to the amenities. His last book review, of “The Search for Bridey Murphy,” appeared on this page; his verdict was polite, restrained. A few days before his death, however, a questioner from Time telephoned him asking his private opinion; it was scathing. The ability to withhold antipathy was a part of his success. The psychopath whose successful treatment is the subject matter of “Rebel Without a Cause”—supposedly the first criminal psychopath in American records to attain mental health through analysis—today, as a responsible New Jersey citizen, credits it to Lindner and his patience.

Lindner did not stint himself on pride, and relished national-name associations, such as Wyile and Norman Mailer, the novelist. He exulted when elected to the Fortean Society with Einstein and Justice Douglas. Yet he turned down offers of positions that would have meant leaving Baltimore.

Withdrew His Name

Lecturing in California once, he was invited to watch “Rebel Without a Cause” being made into a movie (this was before the plot became so unrecognizable that Lindner withdrew his name from it). He met the male lead, James Dean, and liked him. The studio employe who shook his head over Dean’s foolhardy driving seemed unworthy of notice. When Dean was killed in a mashup, Lindner, back east again, grieved; he grieved, and went on driving too fast.

Nobody can say certainly whether Lindner killed himself with his own pace. Commissioned by the Navy in World War II, he sailed through the medical tests; in fact, he never did learn of the cardiac malfunctioning that made his prognosis, a year ago, at 41, death.

But his friends, and many of his readers, will believe that even had he known of the hazards, Robert Lindner would not have lived it otherwise.

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This is Part 1 of a planned 3-part series of my formative teachers.

Rick Scheckman, December 1, 1955 – March 10, 2023

“I went to NYU for several years but was in the School of Business. I knew Steve [Winer] from film screenings around town and such places as The Museum of Modern Art. Though Steve most definitely got me my job at Letterman.” — e-mail from Rick, August 24, 1994

“I began as a film consultant to the show the first week of March, 1982, but at the time I was working on my Masters in Finance. Finally they said I was making too much money as a consultant, so they hired me on staff the first week of June. When I first started out, I shared an office with Chris Elliott and Edd Hall. Although the office was actually just the coffee/supply room.” — AOL Late Show site: Taste Test, February 5, 1997

Rick was one of the longest-employed staffers on Dave’s late night talk shows, starting as a said-consultant a month after Late Night’s February 1982 debut on NBC, and staying on until Dave’s retirement on CBS’s Late Show in May 2015. His official position throughout was “Film Coordinator,” responsible for providing film footage the show would often need at a moment’s notice. For over 33 years it was referred to on both the NBC and CBS shows as “Shecky Footage,” little mind the last name missing the first “c.”

But Rick was far more than that both inside and outside the show. Inside, he was one of Late Show’s producers, though never titled as such, sitting in the back row of the control room during the tapings, being at the ready for any Shecky Footage that might be required ASAP. He was also responsible for distributing clips to legitimate parties requesting them. Viewers, though, knew him more for his on-camera comedy skits in which he was asked to participate, perhaps his most enduring as Late Night’s Elvis Presley. But he also once took a vicious punch on Late Show from Bruce Willis, who in another piece gunned him down, accompanied with his most famous movie phrase, “Yippee ki yay, Shecky!!”

His interests outside the show were far more vital to him: early- to mid-20th-Century films. He had acquired an enormous collection of rare movies and had his own business as the Chairman of the Board at F.I.L.M. Archives. He was highly regarded within the legacy film industry and was known there for his film expertise rather than his decades-long association with Dave.

He had also amassed a gigantic collection of comics, baseball cards, and film posters. Visiting his home was like entering a museum. His basement contained thousands of videotapes, nearly all of them old films. One of his upstairs rooms was filled with thousands of DVDs, all neatly stacked, both his tapes and discs retrievable only via his immaculate computer databases.

Others who knew him far better than me, his decades-long close friends on the show, his decades-long close friends off the show, will choose to share their own Rick memories. Here’s mine:

I first “met” Rick on CompuServe’s Letterman message board in 1991/92, when, while at NBC, he had been producing A&E’s nearly-year-long run of syndicated Late Nights. He had been soliciting suggestions for shows to air from the board members. I remember sending him a list of around 40 Late Nights. Highly impractical, but I’d never had that sort of access with him or any other staffer before, so I went a little nuts.

We then reconnected in 1994, when he was at Dave’s Late Show on CBS. We would trade tapes. He would invite me into his office on one of the top floors in the Ed Sullivan building to watch shows while he worked downstairs.

In early 1995, Rick called me and asked if I had any videos of Academy Award shows. I did, so I stayed up all night dubbing all that I had. Little did I know then that they were meant for Dave to screen as part of his prep work for hosting the Awards show in late March. I take some pride in contributing in my own small way to what many then considered a fiasco.

Other video and data requests from Rick and others at the show soon followed.

Rick became not only an essential contact to Dave’s show but a friend as well. He was extremely generous with his time, sharing all sorts of Late Night/Late Show trivia with me for the next 25+ years, much of it confidential. He was a walking encyclopedia of Dave knowledge and the keeper of the institutional history. That in itself is such an incalculable loss.

After Late Show ended in 2015, Rick would alert me to staff alumni who had begun their final journeys or were about to, so I could then begin preparing YouTube compilations in their honor — Kenny Sheehan, Tony Mendez, Alan Kalter. That he entrusted me with such then-private news was an honor for me that I’ll always cherish.

When I learned of Rick’s illness a few days ago, I distracted myself from the thought of his deteriorating health by putting together a short tribute. Due to various restrictions, I was limited to screen captures and public-domain footage. The piece lasts only over a minute.

Rick’s first on-camera sighting on Late Night was on March 18, 1982 — shortly after being hired as a consultant — standing next to his friend and LN Writer Stephen Winer, both of them staring at Robin Williams as he dropped by the show for a surprise walk-on to join guest Norman Lear at homebase. That’s the first image here.

The rest are selected screen-captures from various highlight appearances on Late Night, plus three of his more-familiar Shecky Footage clips, which would air on both Late Night and Late Show.

The last image is one I took in his home basement on September 21, 2018.

Rick loved old campy-style music. Thus the soundtrack for this small piece. It was extracted from the Monkey-Washing-a-Cat loop found on the YouTubes,  a clip from the Shecky Footage archives, and also included here.

God speed, Rick. You were one of the good guys.

Thanks to Lori Styler, Steve Winer, Jerry Foley, Alex Bennett, and Mike Chisholm for their presence.

The Letterman Channel has uploaded their own tribute, and it’s magnificent:

Part 1. The Players

David Letterman’s final Late Night on NBC occurred on June 25, 1993. As he left to prepare his Late Show’s debut on CBS on August 30, his former network imposed certain “intellectual copyright” restrictions: Larry “Bud” Melman could no longer be called by his character but instead by his actual name, Calvert DeForest. The Top Ten list would now be called “Late Show Top Ten.” And Paul Shaffer’s house group could no longer be referred to as The World’s Most Dangerous Band (WMDB). They were hereafter the CBS Orchestra.

The core members of the NBC band continued on to the CBS show: Paul Shaffer, music director and keyboards; Sid McGinnis, guitar; Will Lee, bass, and Anton Fig, drums. Added for Late Show were two new players: Felicia Collins, second guitar, and Bernie Worrell, second keyboards. Felicia had first performed with Will and Anton at Live Aid in Philadelphia on July 13, 1985, and she had appeared on Late Night backing Cyndi Lauper on May 27, 1993. Bernie was the famed Parliament-Funkadelic co-founder and keyboardist; he had sat in with the WMDB once, on February 26, 1991.

Bernie would leave Late Show after two months, his last day on October 29, 1993. On the following Monday, November 1, he was succeeded by a two-person horn section that consisted of Tom “Bones” Malone on trombone and 5,000 other instruments, and Bruce Kapler on saxophone and, occasionally, flute. Tom and Paul had known each other since the 1975-80 SNL days and had together assembled The Blues Brothers in 1978. Still, Tom had sat in with the Late Night band only once, on August 22, 1991.

Bruce Kapler, though, along with his musical partner Alan Chesnovitz (Al Chez), had been sitting in frequently with the WMDB since their first joint appearance on September 14, 1988. Bruce would make 26 further sit-in appearances on Late Night.

Bruce and Al were hardly the first to sit in with the Late Night band. There’d be 370 Late Nights with music-guest sit-ins; some would have their own music segments, others only to play with the WMDB throughout the show.

(The full Late Night musicians history, along with PDF spreadsheets of all of the music performances, song titles, sit-ins, and substitutions, can be found here:
https://donzblog.home.blog/2022/04/17/the-musicians-on-late-night-with-david-letterman/)

The band sit-ins tradition continued on Late Show. Of the 4,214 Dave-hosted shows and 30 Guest-Host shows, 278 featured sit-in music guests.

Al Chez was a frequent CBS Orchestra sit-in and would officially become a permanent member of the horn section on February 28, 1997. The band personnel would then remain stable for the next fifteen years. Bruce would leave on February 2, 2012, and Al would follow five months later on July 26.

After months of auditions for the saxophone chair, Aaron Heick was officially brought in as Bruce’s successor on June 18, 2012. Auditions for Al’s trumpet chair began immediately after his departure, and on September 17, Frank Greene would begin his permanent position as Al’s successor. The band personnel from then on — Paul, Sid, Will, Anton, Felicia, Tom, Aaron, and Frank — would continue until the final show on May 20, 2015.

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Part 2. The Performances

Of likely more interest to the more casual Late Show fan are the music guests. Gathered in the following PDF spreadsheets are complete rosters of the guest performers and song titles as well as all of the band sit-ins and substitutions.

The first PDF spreadsheet presents the overall history of the music performances and song titles sorted sequentially by show broadcast date, along with all band sit-ins and substitutions.

The rest of the PDF spreadsheets are sub-categories, all sorted alphabetically.

The second is sorted by musical artist.

The third is sorted by song title.

PDF Spreadsheet #4: The band Sit-Ins and the instruments played.

5: Paul Shaffer’s subs.

6: Sid McGinnis’s subs.

7: Will Lee’s subs.

8: Anton Fig’s subs.

9: Felicia Collins’ subs.

10: Tom Malone’s subs.

11: Bruce Kapler’s and Aaron Heick’s subs.

And, finally, #12: Al Chez’s subs.

The core members of the band — Paul, Sid, Will, and Anton — hold individual records for longest-serving players of their respective instruments on late night television:

Paul and Will: quite the appropriate 33 1/3 years (1982 to 2015)
Sid: 30 years, 5 months (1984 to 2015)
Anton: 29 years (1986 to 2015)

No other television band member will ever come close to these numbers again.

My dad was not larger than life. He was a common man with uncommon potential never realized or even desired. He was not an overly ambitious man, and I’ll always be haunted as to whether that was a good thing or not. But he was the most unassuming person I knew. He never put on airs, he never tried to impress, he just was who he was. And he assumed that others were as well, which, of course, wasn’t always the case.

I thought I’d share some biography, and I’ll try not to get too deep in the woods.

To begin, Dad was smart. He grew up in Baltimore and skipped two grades in Junior High and High School, entering The University of Baltimore at 16. Which made his social life a bit challenging. His graduation yearbook:

After graduation he found work in a furniture store called Grand Rapids in downtown Baltimore as both its accountant and business manager.

During World War II, he was inducted into the Army. Because he was good with numbers, he spent his war years behind a desk while serving in Hawaii. He’s told his glider story a few times, and hoping I could someday do it justice, I recorded him retell it in May 2018:

“While training in the U.S., I was in Fort Benning in Georgia, which was a main paratrooper base. There was training for gliders that would carry the paratroopers. And a jeep would back into the front of the glider, its purpose to establish communication over enemy lines after the paratroopers had dropped and the glider had safely landed.

“Unfortunately, the U.S. government military engineers hadn’t thought it through that well. Because when a glider is connected to its mother plane, it has enough power to stay like this [hand in horizontal position]. But when the glider plane is now detached from the engine plane, and over enemy lines, the paratroopers are discharged. Then the glider, with the jeep in the front, is doing this [hand slowly drifting down, still in horizontal position] and losing speed. And then it gets a little top-heavy [hand now curves downward] And it’s very hard to drive a jeep off a plane that lands like this [hand in vertical position, heading downward toward table]. So there was a little thing that had to be worked out.”

My dad had met my mom sometime before he had been enlisted, and while in training, during leave in April 1943, he came back to Baltimore to get married. They wed in her family’s home, which was connected to her dad’s grocery store. They honeymooned in New York City. Then he went back to Fort Benning for more training.

Dad was then transferred out to Indianapolis, then near San Francisco, headed for Hawaii by ship. It took five days, and Dad got seasick, because the troop ship was overcrowded in the seven-high bunk cabins. So he took his blanket and slept on deck. For five days.

After arriving in Hawaii, he was eventually shipped to Okinawa in August 1945, just before V-J Day. His war activities mostly involved paperwork, Bridge, Chess, and Tennis; he was not in the center of the hostilities.

After the war ended, he was shipped back to San Francisco and then finally back home to Baltimore, where he returned to work at Grand Rapids.

At the same time, he also set up his own accounting business at home, first in an area just outside the city boundary, from 1953 until 1959, and then in a newly-built place within the city’s borders for the next eleven-plus years.

He was always working, during the day at Grand Rapids, then at night, either visiting clients or when they would come to our place in his home office. Every month my sister and I would help sort his clients’ checks on the living room floor. That was our family entertainment.

My mom and dad loved each other, though it was never all that physically apparent. To my pre-teen and teenage eyes, they simply got along well. Hey, it was Mom and Dad; what else did I need to know? Still, it was unthinkable that theirs was anything but a stable marriage. One memory that’s stayed with me: On Saturdays Mom would drive me downtown for my weekly piano lesson while she visited her folks at the grocery store they still owned, buying food for the next week. And after spending the rest of the day walking around the city, pretty much killing time, I’d make it to Grand Rapids in time for Dad to drive me home. There was a fellow employee who asked him to drive her home as well. I sensed she had eyes for him. But when we got in the car, he had her sit in the back while I sat in front. Just so there’d be no misunderstanding and that she was wasting her time with him. That’s how solid my parents’ marriage was.

They got along great, but there were times when they’d get into these ridiculous arguments, talking past each other. I remember one night I listened to him arguing about one matter, and my mom arguing about another, neither of them realizing that they were both arguing about different things, and neither understanding why the other couldn’t see his/her point. Finally, I piped in and tried to explain just that: That Dad was talking about A, and Mom was talking about B. I don’t quite remember what happened next. Maybe I returned to my room to record songs from my radio. Who knows.

In early 1971, Mom and Dad had had enough of the Baltimore winters and decided to move to Miami. It wasn’t much of an immediate disruption for my sister and me; she had married the previous fall and had herself moved to Miami, and I was in the middle of my college years. Still, it was a major change.

Dad had some initial difficulty setting up his accounting business, but he got lucky with one particularly wealthy client, and he soon thereafter found solid footing.

In late 1987, my mom found herself afflicted with cancer, and she spent the next year dealing with the radiation and chemo treatments, and they seemed to work; she was in remission. But then the cancer returned in the first half of 1990, and she passed away that late July.

Dad was lost without her. I felt we grew closer because of it.

A year later a friend introduced him to Joan; she’s since said that it was the City College ring that opened her heart to him. That he’d still be wearing it, decades after graduating, moved her. I’m eternally grateful that Joan saved my dad’s sanity and made him whole again.

Joan passed away in April 2020, and Dad spent his remaining years at home, successfully avoiding covid, reading the daily newspapers and working on any crossword puzzle he could get his hands on.

But in mid-March 2022 his 100+-year-old heart had finally caught up with him, and two weeks later he finally found his own peace.

I want to finish this by mentioning the puns. My dad loved puns. He made plenty of them, and nearly all were very bad, obvious, and, well, frankly, pathetic. But he never gave up, and there was one that I thought struck gold – it was a combination of brilliant and cringe-worthy, and I’ll never forget it. It was the mid-‘80s; he came up with the name of a Chinese health-food restaurant: He called it “All Wok and Yoplait.”

That was my dad.

“Hot take: Viewer Mail was the greatest recurring late night talk show segment in history. Its comedic range was just so great, as it went in so many different directions. It was also its own little sketch show inside a talk show.”
— Jason Zinoman, author of the best-selling critical profile, Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night, collected tweets, January 6, 2022.

[Co-creator and Head Writer Merrill Markoe] came up with probably the most artistically fertile segment in the history of the show: Viewer Mail, which she imagined as a parody of 60 Minutes. “Their mail was always intelligent and well considered,” she said. “When we got on the air, and I started reading our mail, I quickly realized it was mainly insane people. So I thought it would be funny to just present our viewers; irrational, insane, illiterate.”
— Zinoman, Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night, p. 56.

“Viewer Mail was key to the scrappy, underground nature of Late Night. Homegrown stuff from freaks across the nation being read on national late-night television and treated and responded to with Dave’s (and his writers’) brand of humor, whether ironic, surreal, wise-guy, sappy, or absurd. It was a high form of public-access type of audience interaction.”
— An anonymous friend

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Viewer Mail was born on July 11, 1980, at the end of the third week of Dave’s 18-week-long morning show on NBC. (It was owned by his production company Space Age Meat.) Its name hadn’t been established when Dave introduced this new Friday segment:

“This television show has been on the air for around three weeks, and we feel that today we would not only like to respond to the accumulated mail but also share it with you, the home viewers. So let’s do that now, shall we? The following is a sampling of the mail that we here at the David Letterman show have received in the past three weeks.”

Dave read eight letters but gave replies to none of them.

The end of the following week, July 18, Dave began the segment with “Friday is Mail Day.” He read six letters. This time, he gave one-line “snappy” replies to each letter.

[Within a week,] Viewer Mail evolved. It was no longer simply the host reading dopey letters and assuming the audience got the jokes. Now he added insulting quips that became known on the show as Snappys. … Viewer Mail had turned from being about the stupidity of the letters to the nastiness of the host. As a result, the bit became more satirical, because who else on television was treating an audience this way?
— Zinoman, ibid., p. 64.

The July 25 show is missing. The following week, on August 1, Dave again introduced the segment with “Friday is Mail Day,” and each of the five letters read were once again accompanied with short Snappys. These retorts were the only replies until August 22 (Week 9) when a prop art card was utilized. While the Snappy replies remained the norm, more elaborate comedic answers would occasionally find their way to replacing the one-liners.

It wasn’t until September 5, the end of Week 11, when Dave deviated from his “Friday is Mail Day” introduction with this: “Today is Viewer Day. Mail Day. Viewer Mail Day is what it is.”

And the name stuck for the next thirteen years.

On its final show on October 24, some of the Viewer Mail letters were submitted by staffers, including Barbara Gaines and Dave himself.

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After his morning show ended, Letterman was without an outlet for Viewer Mail for the next fifteen months until NBC brought him back to host another talk show, this time owned and co-produced by the network and Johnny Carson”s production company, and airing after Johnny’s Tonight Show at 12:30 am.

Late Night with David Letterman debuted on February 1, 1982, airing four new shows a week, Mondays to Thursdays. (The schedule would change in mid-1987 to Tuesdays to Fridays, with repeats airing on Mondays.)

The first Viewer Mail segment occurred at the end of its second week on Thursday, February 11. All five letters were answered with Snappys. The following week, February 18, four of the five letters read were again Snappys; they would eventually be phased out in favor of phone calls to the letter writers, props, live sketches, and comic scenarios prepared on tape. The Snappys would usually be assigned to Letter #1 for the rest of its Late Night history.

“Dave didn’t want to be doing any kind of performance stuff. Like, you would write things where someone would pull a gun on him and he’d have to act scared. And he’d say to us, ‘Nah, I won’t do this.’ Unlike the morning show, the late-night show didn’t want to have fake characters. One way we figured out how to get around this was with Viewer Mail.”
— Late Night writer Tom Gammill (1982-83), quoted in Brian Abrams’ ebook And Now…An Oral History of “Late NIght with David Letterman,” 1982-1993

“Yeah, those Viewer Mails were probably the closest things that we had to sketches. It was more budget-related. They really didn’t have the money to do costumes and weird effects on every episode.”
— Late Night writer Max Pross (1982-83), quoted in Abrams, ibid.

I found that by late 1985, Dave’s mood had become somewhat darker when presenting the letters. But the comedy became more surreal. There were recurring bits, such as appearances by Flunky the Clown (writer Jeff Martin); firing, first, Old Henry (Paul Andor), then writer Gerard Mulligan; the band trashing the set; the Actor-Singer (Jeff again); Biff Henderson’s Realm of Mystery; Peggy the Foul-Mouthed Chambermaid; and a host of other off-beat characters and sketches. One of my favorite bizarre live skits came in the last letter on November 27, 1987, seen here:

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Late Night with David Letterman’s final show aired in late June 1993, as Dave was soon to leave NBC to host an 11:30 PM show on CBS. His Late Show with David Letterman debuted on August 30, 1993, with new shows scheduled on all five days of the week. Due to intellectual copyrights claimed by NBC, the name Viewer Mail was changed to CBS Mailbag.

Three weeks passed before the first Mailbag segment aired, and that was on a Thursday. The next occurred the following Friday. The third Mailbag segment aired two weeks later, and the one following that three weeks later on a Tuesday. It took a few years before the Mailbag fell into its more reliable weekly routine, but on Thursdays before finally finding its more traditional place on Fridays.

By the beginning of 2005, the Mailbag itself was replaced with “Week in Review,” and the 25-year-long tradition answering viewers’ mail had ended.

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To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Late Night’s debut, I’ve cataloged the names of every Viewer Mail letter-writer that Dave (and others) read on the air from both the 1980 morning show and the 1982–93 Late Night. I’ll eventually add the CBS Mailbag names.

The first spreadsheet shown here is a chronological listing of the letter writers to all of the Viewer Mails; weeks that didn’t include them are due to repeats, preemptions (various sports highlights coverage), and Late Night specials. All detailed in the “Notes” field.

A glossary on the fields:

Show:
DLS – The David Letterman show that aired live in the mornings for 18 weeks in 1980.
LSwDL – Late Night with David Letterman, which aired after The Tonight Show, February 1982 until late June 1993.

The corresponding numbers refer to my Viewer Mail system, not to the show episode numbers. For example, “LNwDL 2” signifies the second Late Night show to air a Viewer Mail segment. Of the 1,810 Late Nights, 450 include Viewer Mail segments.

Show #:
The episode number attached to the broadcast. Thus, “LNwDL 2” is Late Night episode #12.

Airdate:
The date the show was broadcast. While aired after midnight, the date reflects the day before. That is, Late Night episode #12 aired on February 19, 1982, at 12:30 am, but every official Late Night database and log IDs it as February 18, and that’s to what I’m adhering.

Letter #:
The order in which the letters were read on each show. The total for each broadcast varied from three to five (and sometimes six and eight) letters from 1982 to early 1989, but by late February 1989 it had settled into a consistent four letters per show.

Cumulative:
The running total of viewer mail letters read. In 1987, the show wanted to commemorate its 1,000th letter but had no documentation as to when that would occur. So the producers reached out to Mark Hamill, an avid Late Night fan, for help. He provided them with a prospective date: December 18, 1987, and the milestone was thusly arranged for that show.

However, while cataloging every letter, I found that the 1,000th letter actually occurred eight months earlier, on April 16, 1987.

Name, City, and State fields:
Self-apparent. Of all of the letters read, there were 61 with no last names, 15 where no names at all were given, and a smattering of nicknames, anonymous, and incomplete name IDs. Likewise, a number of letters provided no home locations. But when they were mentioned, they’re included here.

Notes:
Items of interest or explanation. For example, I’ve identified letters that encored on anniversary shows (with their respective Cumulative # retained to when they originally aired). Also, I’ve included some “Firsts”: the first time an actual photo of a letter was shown rather than a generic card provided by the show’s graphic department; the first time the pencil smashed through the window; the first time Director Hal Gurnee was asked to announce the letter numbers; the first time the “fanfare” was added after a Snappy — Hollywood-like roving spotlights, the confetti cannon, the ping-pong balls, a siren, all accompanied by the band playing frantic renditions of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and other Broadway and patriotic tunes; and the first parade. Also documented are instances when a viewer had a second or third or fourth letter read on the air — Dave Nelson had the most at nine, with Brian James Bancroft and Ralph Mira a distant second at five each — as well as multiple authors to individual letters (Dave: “It took two people to write this”). And more.

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The second spreadsheet lists the letter-writer names in alphabetical order, with all of the anomalies (no last names, etc) added at the end. Each name and location corresponds with the show date, episode number, which Viewer Mail within each particular show, its cumulative number, etc. In other words, the fields and the information within those fields are identical to the first chronological spreadsheet, just reordered and sorted by name.

The total number of letters read on Late Night is 1,980. Which corresponds nicely with the year the tradition begins.

I receive many requests from folks who had their letter read on the air, and so this will facilitate finding them.

As a video companion, I’ll be uploading every Viewer Mail in the following year (or years). Here’s the Viewer Mail collection for 1982, presented in two parts:

Part 1:

Part 2:

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As Jason Zinoman tweeted, Viewer Mail was indeed the greatest recurring late night talk show segment in history. It’s long-past its due recognition.

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And now the obligatory ask: I have a Patreon account that helps me pay the bills. It’d be wonderful if anyone is so inclined to donate.

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=26278592

As I was preparing Dick the Bruiser’s 1980 morning show appearance for a YouTube upload, I got caught up on a side tangent: Dave had mentioned in his January 1989 interview with Bob Costas that Dick had long ago been referred to as “The World’s Most Dangerous Wrestler.”

And Dave had introduced him as such on the July 2, 1980 appearance.

So I wanted to trace how the name became attached to Paul Shaffer’s Late Night band, and here’s what I found:

Morphing Dick the Bruiser’s tag into Paul’s band name was clearly Dave’s idea.

For the first five months of Late Night in 1982, Dave would refer to Paul and his group as “The World’s Most Dangerous Band” when closing the show, sometimes alternating it with “Paul Shaffer and the Orchestra,” “Paul and the Organization,” “Paul Shaffer and the Folks,” “Paul Shaffer and the Melody Makers,” and a combination: “Paul Shaffer and the World’s Most Dangerous Orchestra.”

On June 8, 1982, after Dave had introduced Paul at the end of his Opening Remarks, Paul said, “And how about my band, really, the most dangerous, as you coined it, the most dangerous band in show business.”

Calling the group “The World’s Most Dangerous Band” abruptly stopped after that. For six shows in April 1983, Dave referred to the band as “Paul Shaffer and the Party Boys of Rock and Roll.” That continued only throughout the month, though a week later a Viewer Mail letter for the May 5 show mentioned “Paul Schaeffer [sic] and the Party Boys of Rock and Roll.”

Then no special band names for the rest of ’83 and all of 1984 and ’85. Because the band had prepared a music video (“Dress Cool”) for the November 30, 1985, Film Festival special, Bill Wendell included Paul in his opening announce with just “Paul Shaffer and the band.”

In that 1989 Costas interview, Dave and Bob spent a little time discussing their memories of professional wrestling (Dave while growing up in Indianapolis, Bob while living in St. Louis during his early career). Included were the scariest wrestlers “from parts unknown.”

It was a phrase Dave brought back when introducing Will Lee’s performance of “Stagger Lee” on May 13, 1986: “From parts unknown, Will Lee.”

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For the first six and two-thirds years of Late Night, Paul had never been included in the opening announce (except for the ’85 Film Festival). That changed on September 24, 1986. On that date, for the first time, Bill Wendell began adding Paul and his ensemble in his announce with “Paul Shaffer and the Late Night Band.”

On the next night, and continuing until October 6, the announce became “Musical Director Paul Shaffer and the band.”

The next evening, October 7, Bill accidentally messed up his announce by saying “Medical” instead of “Musical” and laughed at his screw-up. The following night, October 8, “Medical” was then written into the script until the end of the month.

Then, from November 3, 1986, and for the next nine months, until August 4, 1987, the announce was shortened to “Paul Shaffer and the Band.”

But within that period, on July 29, 1987, Dave ended his Opening Remarks with “Here’s our good friend Paul Shaffer and the NBC Orchestra.” In the meantime, Bill continued with just “Paul Shaffer and the Band”

Until August 6, when Bill began announcing “Paul Shaffer and the NBC Orchestra.” Every night up to the end of the month. Then a two-week vacation break.

When the show returned on September 15, both Bill and Dave would refer to the band as “Paul Shaffer and the NBC Orchestra,” Bill in his Opening Announce and Dave at the end of his Opening Remarks. Up to the 24th.

On September 23, 1987, Paul and Dave discussed which band title each preferred, “NBC Orchestra” or “World’s Most Dangerous Band.” Paul preferred the latter, feeling that the former rightly belonged only to Doc Severinsen. He again gave his preference for “World’s Most Dangerous Band” the next night, September 24.

With that preference noted, on September 25, 1987, Bill changed his announce from “Paul Shaffer and the NBC Orchestra” to “Paul Shaffer and the World’s Most Dangerous Band,” and Dave followed when introducing Paul at the end of his Opening Remarks. Paul then announced that the group’s name was now officially the World’s Most Dangerous Band.

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The name lasted until the end of Late Night’s run on June 25, 1993. Because of NBC’s “Intellectual Property Rights,” it was prohibited from Dave’s Late Show on CBS, and so Paul’s group thereafter became “Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra.”

Until that show ended on May 20, 2015.

Two years later during the summer of 2017, and twenty-four years after that name had last been used, Paul embarked on a national tour with his CBS Orchestra, renaming it and thus coming full circle, with “The World’s Most Dangerous Band.”

All come about from Dave’s boyhood enthusiasm for professional wrestling.

The Dick the Bruiser upload can be seen here, with clips from the 1989 “Later with Bob Costas” interview, Dave’s introduction to Will Lee, and an audience call-out to Bobby “The Brain” Heenan” from Late Night’s 6th anniversary special at Radio City Music Hall:

I’d wanted to do this for decades, but the enormity scared me away. But with my YouTube channel approaching 100 million views, and wanting to commemorate it in a significant way, I figured if not now, when? I had the resources and the means that no one else had, so it was for me to take this on.

The original concept was to include images of Dave at his desk from every late night show he had hosted from 1982 until 2015. That meant scanning through the video files to select 6,028 images from both his Late Nights (1982-93) and Late Shows (1993-2015). After weighing the task vs. my sanity, I decided to scale it back to just the Late Night era, so just 1,810 shows. Still, I’m calling this “Part 1,” so maybe the Late Show era will follow at some point, like, say, when the channel someday reaches 200 million views.

The other plan was to include every show-image of Paul in the upper right and the band in the lower left. But, again, sanity.

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With the scope now more manageable, I began scanning through every Late Night, searching for the typical Dave expression — not too extreme, not too tame, though I did include a few goofy expressions as well as other images. The aim was to select shots of Dave looking directly at the camera. I later discovered that there were a few where he was instead looking at the cue cards positioned directly under the camera, as seen below, but they were fleeting, so I let them go:

The image order was based on when the show was taped, not when it was broadcast. There were a number of shows — especially in the earlier years — that aired out of sequence from when they were taped, the most extreme being Show #531, taped April 3, 1985, but not broadcast until six months later on October 29. It had been set aside to be transformed into graphic animation. But the project was eventually scrapped, and so the original video finally aired instead.

And, yes, every show, including January 16, 1991 (#1416), the night the first Gulf War broke out with news coverage preempting all regular programming. The show never aired, and there’s reason to believe that I may now have the only copy.

Searching and selecting appropriate screen-captures took a full month. “Tedious” doesn’t begin to describe the slog. Here’s a screen-capture of the computer directory, looking at the screen-capture for Show #71, June 3, 1982:

Next was fixing the color. The shows all came from different sources, from poor- to pristine-video quality, and the hues bounced all over the place. So each image had to go through the color-correction wash in Photoshop. Not having any training, I struggled to come up with acceptable improvements.

Here are some of the more successful Before/After images:

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With the images now prepared as best I could came the next stage: placing them into a video editor. I used iMovie 9 for its relative simplicity. Instead of importing every image into one iMovie file, which would have slowed the processing down considerably, I instead chose the modular approach, creating one file per show year. Here’s what the first 42 images from 1982 looked like when imported into iMovie:

All images were timed at 1 second each, along with a 1-second cross-fade. Exceptions for the first and last, which were set at 4 and 3.5 seconds, respectively, and no cross-fade for the last image. That file was then processed into a 5 1/2-minute video. Here’s what all of the 1982 images looked like after being processed and re-inputted into iMovie:

I then sped up the processed 5 1/2-minute file 500%, which would reduce the duration to just over 1 minute:

After placing the year chyron in position, I processed that into yet another file, now done for 1982. I then set it aside and repeated the inputting/processing sequences for the remaining 10 1/2 years of the show. (This all took considerable trial-and-error until I found what worked to my satisfaction. Also, I had considered ID’ing every image by show number and broadcast date, but I couldn’t guarantee that the placements would be seamless from one image to the next, and, once again, sanity. So I limited it to just the year.)

It was at this point when I realized that all of the color-correction done in Photoshop had been negated when processed through iMovie, so I gave up tweaking everything to “perfection.” The images were what they were.

With all 11 1/2 years now processed at 500% and chyroned with their respective year, I then combined them into one new iMovie file, the “Final Build” (more on that below).

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The next stage involved the soundtrack. Except for the 1982 broadcast performance of “Green Onions,” I used music never heard outside the studio. And made sure the timings fit:

1. “Late Night Theme,” Close, then the Open edited in at the end. From January 20, 1982, the first “shakedown show,” and the first time the theme was ever heard. A cooler, “downtown” jazzy feel. The harmonic twist that transposed the theme to a new tonic center (right before what would later become a consistent 10-beat count) was missing here. That wouldn’t be added until the fourth Late Night in early February.

2. “Green Onions.” From April 28, 1982, broadcast.

3. “Late Night Theme,” Close. From December 6, 1982, post-tape. This was found in one of my source tapes.

4. “The Way It Is.” From September 11, 1990, mid-show music break. With a snippet edited in near the beginning from Late Show, December 2, 1993, to fill in the brief silence when the picture went dark. Both with Bruce Hornsby, who sat in with the band on both shows.

5. “Late Night Theme,” Close. From April 20, 1983, here with the full ending that had been cut off when broadcast.

6. “Late Night Theme,” Open. From February 6, 1992, the 10th anniversary special at Radio City Music Hall, here without Bill Wendell’s announcement voice-over.

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The last stage involved add-ons preceding and following the main event, the last clips from both aired and unaired videos, with audio extracted from still more unaired material. The audio doesn’t sync with the video, because they’re from entirely different shows, but I wanted to include material never previously seen or heard.

The source material:

1. Prologue chat with Dave and Paul from December 21, 1989, broadcast.

2. Empty desk from May 18, 1982, broadcast.

3. End of faces montage empty desk from March 27, 1992, broadcast.

Epilogue audio and videos:

a. Bill Wendell video from February 23, 1982, Cold Open “Audience Point of View” broadcast.

b. Bill Wendell audio from June 20, 1983, post-tape, extremely low volume, raised here.

c. Dave video from April 18, 1983, post-tape.

d. Dave audio from January 7, 1983, post tape.

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Here’s a two-part screen-shot of what the “Final Build” looks like in iMovie, each “Faces” file at 500% comprising every Late Night year (you’ll notice that the 1988 file is shorter due to the prolonged mid-year writers strike):

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This isn’t as polished as I would like, but that’s what happens when one takes on a project with near-zero expertise. I hope I’ve done some justice to the upcoming 100-million-views milestone, a number I never imagined when I began this adventure.

This is dedicated to Pam, who would have loved the concept, regardless the execution.

Enjoy!