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“What is well-loved in youth never disappears. It is
always present in some form or other however wayward or submerged.”
—Robin Holloway.
Click
on any thumbnail to see a larger photo.
This is the first of several pages. Here are links to the others:
 Somewhere
around 1900, Eleazar Thomas (thumbnail, left) migrated
from Wales to settle in the coal-mining community of Dickson
City, Pennsylvania where he met his wife Martha and had four
children: Mary, Benjamin Llywellen, David Wesley, and, my father,
“Buddy” (Arja Worthington) born in 1917.
 (Thumbnail
at right is a detail of a 1929 photo of Eleazar and his three
sons at a picnic.)
Buddy’s two
older brothers, Ben and Wesley, had each begun to work in the
mines at the age of nine but Martha refused to allow Buddy,
her youngest son, to join them, or so goes the official family
story. Martha took her children to her sister’s boarding
house in Newark, New Jersey; Eleazar joined them sometime later.
It was there that my father met  Helen
Edna O’Connell (thumbnail, left), cousin of his friend
Terry Foy, Jr. and they were married in 1940. I was born in
1942, and my brother Glenn in 1944.
Bud (thumbnail,
right) was a self-taught amateur pianist  who
deduced the laws of harmony and melody from observing and analyzing
piano roll performances. His mother, Martha, and sister, Mary,
sang duets to his accompaniments at home. He was deeply attached
to the musical traditions into which he was born. He and his
brother David Wesley (“Wes”) exchanged records, listened
to music together, and clashed noisily over their often conflicting
musical convictions and opinions. I grew up listening to Buddy’s
piano playing and record collection which contained classical
and romantic music and also the great master piano stylists
of 20th century American jazz. My mother too loved music, her
taste indicating a slightly more adventurous sensibility, Errol
Garner and Reinhold Gliere, for example.
The first books
I read were in my parents’ library: Taylor Caldwell,
John O’Hara, Daphne DuMaurier, Ben Ames Williams, the Rubaiyat,
Oliver Goldsmith, the Psalms of the Bible, Deems Taylor’s
essays on music, Shakespeare, poems of Shelley. My mother took
me to the Public Library early and when I was old enough, I
eagerly began to explore it on my own. In the beginning reading
was a kind of competition I engaged in with myself. Norman Mailer’s
Naked and the Dead, was the first grown-up book
I completed (followed very quickly by The Young Lions)
and I was very proud. I loved air war adventures such as Thirty
Seconds Over Tokyo. I joined the Civil Air Patrol still
in post-war operation. I was sent a Directory of Silhouetted
International Aircraft which I dutifully carried up to our
roof, searching the New Jersey skies for Enemy Aircraft.
Buddy started
me playing piano when I was three or four years old. I was
able to improvise music at the piano early. I know he taught
me this but I have no recollection of how! Maybe I just knew.
Piano lessons followed in 1948 when I was six from Gladys Ogden
who instructed me in the rudiments of reading music, practicing,
and playing piano pieces.
 My
parents enjoyed family life and our house was mostly happy and
orderly. We loved movies and the popular entertainment scene
generally. Eleazar stayed with us often after Martha died in
1945. My mother’s mother, Edith O’Connell, lived next
door; Bill (Willy) Fredericks (who eventually married Edith)
visited regularly. My mother’s sister, Doris, lived upstairs
with her husband Jim Tombyll and their children--Jim, John,
and Kathy. Helen’s brother, Danny, and his wife, Irene,
lived nearby with their daughter, Linda. There was much laughter
and music in our household and my brother Glenn and I absorbed
it all along with the usual joys and terrors of childhood.
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to continue.
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