The back porch of the artist’s home had a little room overlooking the yard where he stored his toys and staged his first solo performances. But before long, Junior sought a place to play away from the loud sounds of parents.
Ed Sr. and Louina looked upon their only son with curiosity as he unlatched the paint-chipped wooden door out back—behind which they were accustomed to storing shovels and rakes—to play alone in the now obsolete outhouse. Hardened by the real world in the same way the anthracite coal mined from the mountain behind their home had formed, they didn’t know quite what to make of their son. Little Edward was happy, so they left him pretty much alone.
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| portrait of the artist as a child |
Until one morning he stomped and whined his way into the kitchen, hurling a tantrum. “Rin Tin Tin is gone,” he cried, clinging to his mother.
Louina knew the small clay statuette well. His father won the panting dog for their son at a street fair, and the tongue-sagging canine had become the boy’s favorite toy.
Calming her five year old with cookies, she took a deep breath. After a few minutes she knew the storm would pass. Word circulated quickly throughout the neighborhood, and sure enough, a few days later, Edward spied a boy pulling a wagon up to his house. As he ran out, Edward’s ear-to-ear grin sank at the sight of the broken pieces of clay. Edward's teeth gritted and tears welled in his eyes. But then his mood shifted. He recalled a wave passing through his body, replacing his rage with eerie calm. Skin prickly with gooseflesh, Edward unclenched his fist and bent down.
Suddenly, the autumn chill was gone. Shard-in-hand, he began spitting and scraping the slate.
“The colorful clay pieces were bigger and bolder than the chalk I was accustomed to in school,” the artist remembered, smiling, three-quarters of a century later.
Gray stone gave way to purple, orange, brown and red. With his first mural stewed the beginnings of a conviction to create. Lost in his method, caressing the cold stone below his knees with the make-shift pastels, young Edward colored the sidewalks all the way out in front of his grandfather’s house next door. Later, he sat pondering his work, shouting pedestrians out into the street until his mother beckoned him in.
“Was this culture?” the young boy turned octogenarian asked, giggling playfully, “Or was I just a spoiled brat?”
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| Edward Halter Meneeley Jr |
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| Ed Meneeley with mother, uncle Paul & grandfather |
Every month, when young Edward delivered the rent to his grandfather next door, he preferred the hole burrowed in the hedges out back over the sidewalk and steel gate out front. His mother’s father, Joseph now ran a coal and ice delivery service out of two garages at the end of the property with the help of his two sons.
When visiting, Edward looked forward to exploring his grandfather’s brave new world—pounding on his old piano, sneaking small sips from the basement moon-shine stills and casks of elderberry wine, dipping his fingers inside vats of sauerkraut awaiting to be jarred, breathing deeply above the massive coffee grinder, staring in awe at a workbench full of tools, leaving with nostrils still stinging from the trays of chemicals in his uncle’s darkroom.
“See this nahvonce,” his grandfather said, his accent invoked heavy German roots. “Theesis hahvya adjust the blade,” he explained, working a few passes with a plane over a section of wood.
Handing the whetstone sharpened blade to his grandson, Joseph removed his glass eye and set it on the table nearby. Now detached from the socket, his grandfather's eye remained fixed, looking directly at the youngster. Bound by a surreal sense of someone watching over him, Edward developed natural techniques working with wood, metal and photographic chemicals.
3
Louina Halter Meneeley was a good cook, but most of all she was an excellent baker. As was typical, her kitchen contained a seemingly bottomless cookie jar in which most neighborhood kids had access with a turn of the door handle. Baking was such the center of her life she had set up her own special area with storage bins for flour, soda, yeast and sugar, and a large surface for working the dough.
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| Ed & Louina, his mother |
On
After finishing his icing designs on the fresh sweets, Edward had a glass of milk, cleaned his teeth with baking soda, kissed his mother goodnight and headed upstairs for bed. His was the smaller of two bedrooms, wedged between his parent’s larger room in the front and bathroom in the back. A grille on the floor over the kitchen stove provided heat and also allowed access to many late-night adult conversations.
After falling asleep, Edward dreamed a priest came into his room, woke him gently and led him to see his mother through a haze of fuzzy light. There he listened as the priest read her last rights before instructing the boy to say goodbye.
The next morning, waking up as usual, Edward went to his mother’s room. Her bed was already made up, so he dressed his own before outfitting himself in his party gear and headed downstairs. Helping himself to some pre-party cookies and milk, he went outside to the front porch where he sat in quiet anticipation, the wood warm beneath his legs by the morning sun. The start of his big day was still. The buildup of excitement caused his neighborhood to appear particularly dynamic as he took it all in.
Soaking in the peaceful morning, a few friends he expected to see later appeared with gifts before running away without explanation.
“It’s too early for the party,” Edward called out after them.
One called back over his shoulder, “There’s not going to be one.”
Confused, Edward went across the street to call on the neighbors, parading unannounced through the kitchen and upstairs to find the sisters his age still in bed.
Wow, he thought, I’ve finally got the upper hand…and started a pillow fight. The room erupted into squeals and giggles until fabric tore into a storm of feathers. Hearing the commotion, the oldest sister came into the room to calm the fury.
“Have you been to your grandfather’s?” the oldest asked.
Frozen, young Edward shook his head no.
Taking him by the hand, she led him downstairs before starting to cry.
“Go!” she told him.
By then he knew something was up as he headed for his grandfather’s side door.
Inside the large kitchen men dressed in suits sat in folding chairs sipping beer. Two, he realized, were his uncles. Once they noticed him, their murmuring stopped.
Inside the large kitchen men dressed in suits sat in folding chairs sipping beer. Two, he realized, were his uncles. Once they noticed him, their murmuring stopped.
What strange power I now possess, Edward thought, searching for his grandfather. As he moved forward, some of the men jammed money in his pockets.
What is this, he thought, some new birthday rite?
Curiosity led him to the back porch where he kept his tricycle. Saddling the bike, he rode through the cramped kitchen into the dining room where there was more space and a clear center aisle separating small groups of sobbing women. As he rode in, cries gave way to whispers as they picked up their feet to let him pass.
This is so much better than pillow fights, he thought.
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| Ed & his mother |
His uncle Paul approached and lifted him from the bike. Without explanation, he carried his nephew into the living room where, before the front window, a large box stood blocking out the light.
The room was still.
Inside laid his mother, lifeless, her coffin closed off at the waist.
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“I was a wild beast, I struck out at anything. I think they gave me some beer to calm me, and as I began to put it together I realized, where was my father?”
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The slag heaps at the bottom of the hill below his home were full of sunken holes. On this seemingly extra-terrestrial setting of sand, slate and ash it was easy for a child to lose contact with the town, the landscape, the world. If one laid on it long enough, facing upward toward the sky, the mind could be fooled to believe one had left Earth and her limitations behind for a different place in a universe where anything was possible.
Here, weeks after his mother was laid to rest, Edward witnessed a majestic display of Aurora Borealis accompanied by the realization that the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. We are just glued to a giant ball that is floating in space, he thought, as the Northern Lights splashed color throughout the distant sky.
Back on Earth, Edward and his father grew apart. After Louina’s wake, the boy and his father boarded with various relatives on the Meneeley side. At school, the youngster was often beaten at his new elementary for using the “inappropriate” hand (he remains left-handed to this day). Consequently, he developed a stutter and tick, which continued to worsen until he was forced to repeat the 3rd grade.
On Christmas Eve his father uncharacteristically took him to a toy store. The next morning, waking up alone, a huge litter of gifts awaited him under the tree. Young Edward recoiled, “It felt like a pay-off.”
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| Ed Meneeley Sr. |
Finding it no longer unusual to feed and dress himself, the boy called on his father’s friend who often accompanied them to the movies, a close friend to his Aunt Buela whom he suspected he was being groomed to accept as his new mother.
Opening the door to him, confusion rippled across her face, steadying into hardened concern. Biding their time, they sipped tea, nervously nibbled cookies and chatted, the woman’s mother interrogating young Edward about his father’s other affairs, before the sheer dread of waiting set in.
By evening they discovered his father had hopped a train for New York City
Trashing all of his new toys, Edward found refuge with his grandfather Halter.
5
Thrust into an entirely foreign family dynamic, Edward not only had a new step-mother but all-of-a-sudden he also had two step-sisters, Gloria and Beverly.
Ed Sr. and Rose combined their families with his mother and aunt at 88 Wyoming Street
This new household, best remembered for its policy of no children allowed in the living room and tomato sandwiches eaten on the back porch, created an environment in which the children quickly banded together to become a family. In relation to his stepmother, young Edward’s affinities with Hamlet began to manifest.
While Rose spent much of the family’s money elevating her status as an Eastern Star, hosting exquisite tea parties with other women of society, according to Meneeley, he continued to battle a short-circuiting nervous system.
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| Meneeley's first theater troupe |
Spending most of his time away from home, the youngster found solace with a gang of neighborhood kids who rented out an old garage as a clubhouse. To pay the rent, they sold sodas to lace factory workers during their lunch hour, and whenever they had a little extra, they would go to the movies or build sets, hang curtains and hold performances, sometimes charging admission to non-club members.
In those days of depression era Wilkes-Barre
Despite the Great Depression, there was an odd theatrical element going on in the streets. Rough times bred a community’s close continuity and Vaudevillesque superfluity in which young Edward and his friends attempted to imitate. One performer in particular stood out, entertaining the weekend crowds with acrobatics and hand stands.
In his later years, the artist enjoyed telling the story about the first black man he ever met. In actuality, he was white but covered in soot on his way home from working in the mines. Was it black on white or, rather, white on black?
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| Franz Kline in his studio at 242 West 14th Street, with "CUPOLA" and "TORCHES MAUVE." (image from "Franz Kline 1920-1962," from the Museo D'Arte Contemporanea) |
The origins of this question would later have profound meaning for him upon befriending fellow Wilkes-Barre New York
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His life taken over by the Meneeleys, Edward pretended to go off and play with friends only to steal away to be with the Halters. On Sundays, they ate ice cream and Ed sometimes drank beer from a Kraft cheese cup while his uncles and grandfather sipped from their steins, listening to radio programs like The Shadow and The Green Hornet. A consummate gadget man, his Uncle Paul thrust a large shortwave radio antenna through a rubber ball plugging a hole cut into the attic roof. The signal was so powerful he claimed it picked up broadcasts from
As a freshman at
“I don’t usually char tobacco, but sometimes I do,” he would say on stage while his character courted the prettiest girl in school. And for the first time in his life, he experienced the rush following the applause when people enjoyed your performance.
He was addicted. And his work ethic impressed fellow local thespians, who eventually invited him to join a local theatre group, the same which spawned Lee Tracy. Soon after he became a soloist in the church choir, and eventually landed a role on an anti-fascist radio play called They Burned the Books. Whenever the red light came on for him to speak, he would impersonate the guttural German hyperbole of a young Nazi.
After his first full year in high school, the family moved across the Susquehanna River into a larger home at 142 Third Avenue Kingston Wilkes-Barre
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| vintage postcard depicting Susquehanna River in Wilkes-Barre |
For extra money, he took a job at his Uncle’s gas station, doodling Bugs Bunny caricatures on everything, and began collecting race records – Jazz, Dixieland, Billie Holiday. In the morning, he delivered The Times Leader, but most of the money he made was put away for him by his step-mother. To distract her from scrutinizing his finances, he began secretly rising up his newly purchased records on a hook and string from his second story window. This way, he could walk in empty handed, then go upstairs and pull them up.
Once the records were inside, Edward loved to listen with his stepsisters, prompting the youngest, Beverly
Edward’s relationship with his older step-sister Gloria took a turn after he was injured by a teeter-totter. One afternoon on the playground, the boy opposite him hammered down his side of the ride so the other end slammed up between Ed’s legs, cracking his testicle like a soft-boiled egg. Once he finally waddled home, his father applied Sloan’s liniment, a popular cure-all at the time, but the pain from the ointment only made him howl. The family doctor recommended he rest in order to heal, but if he had to go out he would need more supportive underwear. Gloria must have found the whole incident fascinating as she later surprised Edward by reaching under his sheet to see for herself.
“Although I was aware and interested, I never thought of either of my step-sisters as sex objects, but it turned out Gloria thought of me as one,” the artist recalled. “I got all aroused and couldn’t do anything about it.”
Tension built. To ease it, Edward and Gloria begin having sex while the rest of the family slept. Terrified of impregnating his step-sister, Edward began using a silk handkerchief secured by a rubber band as contraceptive, but stopped after hearing that a disfigured classmate had been born “squeezed through silk.” But the fear of impregnation didn’t stop them from crawling around like cats late at night, getting to know the personality of each creaking floorboard.
As an adult, Edward would later do most of his work during the late hours, remarking about how the moonlight had a special quality. Life felt at ease once the peace of sleep overtook the rest of his family. He felt he could explore his true nature after hours and would often sneak outside on a clear night to dance naked in puddles of moonlight, while off in the distance a neon Planter’s Peanut Man, continually tossing his cane into the air, smiled back in encouragement.
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