When John Huston was making Moby Dick in the early 1950’s, it was wondered if he’d be making much of the movie in New Bedford, the city where I was raised and the story starts.  His response, I believe, was “Ah hah.  Haha. Hahahahahah…..”  and shot it for the most part elsewhere.   New Bedford was a dump.  A violent fishing town of deep divisions, gangs so vicious the Mafia stayed in sissy towns like Providence and Boston.  Of course, there was hardly any money to steal then.  I left it for good in the mid 1960’s, and I’ve not been back since 1990 for hours that passed liked weeks.  I can say with no thought of hypocrisy that no day goes by that I’m not glad I left.

But there is a new movie out called Passionada that takes place in New Bedford, about a love affair between an Anglo man and a Portuguese woman.  It is well reviewed, and Roger Ebert used a quote from Moby Dick as he praised the beauty of the city and the environment.  I almost departed this life.  New Bedford has been the punch line to so many bad jokes, not excluding rapes on pool tables in Big Dan’s Tavern, which was the only other movie credit sorta/kinda New Bedford had in my memory, and got Jody Foster an Oscar.  Or maybe Susan Sarandan.  Does it matter?  A movie about something horrible in New Bedford.  Got it.  I laughed, I cried, it’s part of me.  Live it, move on.

 

Bear in mind even the very tough fishermen in The Perfect Storm knew New Bedford was a notch-below town by any standard, and while I led a sheltered life there, you walk a city for your first sixteen years, you know it. 

 

Apparently the Native Americans have developed Casino gambling on their land, and good for them.   Perhaps the tax base is up, perhaps things are looking good in the city that I, if not God, forgot. 

 

I watched the movie trailer for Passionada, and there were the lovely elms and oaks and maples of my childhood, and Buttonwood Park.  Buttonwood had a zoo, when I was growing up, containing animals and curiosities about as exciting and fascinating as the squirrels and birds feeding on the peanuts on the lawn.  There was a comatose elephant that did not move.  At all; it just stood there.  For a while, there was a bison, which also just stood there.  Their lack of movement might have been due to the fact their cages were barely enough to turn around in.  There were some deer.  There was a monkey house at one time.  Monkey houses were famous for smelling like a houseful of monkeys but I don’t recall this one standing out in the general atmosphere of smog, fog, and low tide.  There was a duckpond that looked like a lemon meringue or maybe key lime pie left too long in the back of the fridge, beneath the white froth of guano was all sorts of green and yellow stuff.  Schools took tours here.  Oh yes they did.

 

But since I left, the park has become a bastion of zoodom, lots of money, lots of cool animals, lots of people visiting and having picnics and fun.  This is not computing in my mind.  I believe it, but Buttonwood was a place you wanted your children out of by sundown when I lived there.  No, not because of me.   Pretty sure, anyway.

 

So my hometown has changed.  I have numbers of photos from my youth, of my family and their homes and none whatever of the city of New Bedford, not even of the whaling museum where my Great Uncle Jack worked for a while.  My cousin thinks he was let go because he exaggerated in his story telling.  His father, John Layton for whom I am named, was a whaling captain of the Charles W. Morgan in one of her last voyages of the 19^th century.

 

In her earlier years, the Morgan actually ran slaves north to freedom.  Not many, but the Quakers who owned her were abolitionists.  Probably called extreme abolitionists by the moderates of the time, who socially disapproved of slaves and their owners but didn’t know what to do about it till Lincoln forced their hands.

 

Back then, our alleged sea shore was rippling with the odors of diesel fuel and garbage, dead fish, and god knows what else of effluvium washed down the Acushnet River.  I doubt there was a single seaside restaurant with open windows some years.

 

So I found myself wondering if I ever visited there again, would I ever be tempted to stay?  My family is long gone, all left.  I had few friends back there, back then.  I cannot imagine it.  Ever. 

 

But you know, I have to say seeing those lovely trees again that run up and down Hawthorne St. past the park, past the lot where my grandparents had a big old house a block from mine and two up from St. Luke’s Hospital, I remembered.

 

I remembered the days when the big deal was dinner at the Wamsutta Club, an actual honest to God Men’s Club in New Bedford, of all places.   New Bedford, where I was held at gunpoint to go to Debutante Balls and worse for my grandmother’s sake.  New Bedford, that had society events that cannot be parodied because they were a century behind.  But I remember the lovely trees and the lazy summer days.  And one where Gregory Peck came to premiere the movie at, I think, the State Theater and visited a friend of his who lived a few doors down from me.  I was asked if I’d seen Gregory Peck, and I answered “who’s she?” thus relegating myself to the social backwaters of the bike set for a week.  But I remember, I was standing on the Parker’s lawn, and later that summer I broke their window throwing a softball.

 

Those weren’t exactly ‘the’ days, but they were okay.  And I remember.