Memories of Three Personalities in New Hope

 

The Bucks County Playhouse

I often saw Charlie Shaw wandering through town from the parking lot at the Bucks County Playhouse. I was tending the cars, and he was wandering. I got to know him a little when he meandered down to the lot and business was slow for me and we could talk.

He looked like an old hippie, with long gray hair and beard and loose-fitting clothes that hung on his thin body. I don’t know what his state-of-mind was, but it seemed altered, most likely by drinking. At the time, I thought all hippies were young. It seemed peculiar this elderly man was one of them.

He was most definitely not a hippie or a drunk.

He was a former newspaperman and journalist, with the biggest feather in his cap his work with the great journalist Edward R. Murrow in London during World War II. He was one of Murrow’s “boys,” a crack team of writers and investigators who often broke stories about the conflict as the bombs fell around them. He had also been news director and a broadcast journalist at WCAU-TV in Philadelphia, where he was one of the first to speak out against Senator Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch hunts. That was before Murrow did. He also plied his trade for the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Pittsburgh Press earlier in his career, and in the 1950s traveled into the mountains in Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro and his brother, Raul, as a journalist. He was later given a commendation by Fidel when the Cuban leader came to Washington, before relations between this country and Cuba soured.

He passed away in Doylestown at the age of 76 in 1987. He had been born in Chareloi, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, in 1911.

For a time near the end of his career he was editor of the New Hope Gazette. When I was parking cars and he was roving the streets of New Hope, I believe he was retired and unhappy with things in general. His career was not the problem, other than the fact that at that advanced age it was over.

Situated at the entrance to the playhouse parking lot was the old barn that housed The Golden Door Gallery. It was run by his former wife, Nancy Shaw, whose artistic bent led her to open the gallery and whose vivid personality and party-girl mentality made her a celebrity in town. I don’t recall very much about why she and Charlie were no longer married, except for what he said to me once when he wandered down off the street to my parking lot for a little conversation.

“I don’t know,” he said, the sadness and regret evident in his hoarse deep voice. “She had brain surgery and was never the same after that.”

I’m unsure what the brain surgery was about, but I assumed it was to remove some sort of tumor, and probably not the good kind. Despite her brush with death, Nancy was a sparkling person with an fine quick sense of humor and easy prevalent smile. She did show some evidence of advanced age, as she was a little stooped over and had a nice blond perm, but her eyes were still a bright blue. She lived with a much younger man named Pablo in a house by the river on Waterloo Street.

“Thank you so much,” she’d say, when I helped her out of her car in front of the gallery.

I believe, if memory serves me right, that Pablo had escaped Castro’s Cuba, but I’m not sure of that. What I do remember is that he sparkled as much as Nancy did. I think he was nineteen-years-old at the time. He was dark-skinned and wore colorful bandannas on his head, had his arms covered with bangles and he dressed in brightly colored clothes. He was the quintessential young hippie man of the time, and he, too, became a friend. He and Charlie were two peas in a pod, but at opposite ends of the pod as far as age went.

“Hi, man,” he would say whenever I saw him.

“Hi, man,” I’d respond.

He’d wave to me from Main Street, or I’d see him on the bridge over the mill pond and we’d greet each other and talk and ask each other how we were. He had a quiet sweet voice that told me something bad had happened to him in the past. I imagined what that might have been and thought it probably happened in Cuba. Everybody knew Pablo, but I don’t know if he had many friends other than Nancy. I don’t know what his relationship with Nancy was, but I often saw them together and sometimes he came down to The Golden Door Gallery.

I bought a Picasso from Nancy when the artist died. Rather it was a Picasso apre, which means it was an exact copy made by another artist. I couldn’t afford a real Picasso but thought forty dollars was a fair price, even though that was a lot for me as a parking lot attendant.

I was friends with all three of these characters.

I had the most affinity with Charlie because I had studied journalism in college and he had succeeded at it at the highest levels. I knew him after his career was over, and that scared me because I thought it presaged what was in store for me if I pursued journalism after my life parking cars was done.

Nancy was fragile and kind, and I remember parking her car for free, since she was so close to the playhouse and artistic and I saw her almost everyday and I liked her. We joked and laughed together and in the cold weather I’d sometimes go inside her gallery to warm up.

Pablo was a tall thin sweet young man who seemed scared somehow and badly in need of help, which I’m sure Nancy gave him. I have no idea what became of him, but I saw him often in those days on the streets. He was such a physically beautiful man and dressed so colorfully that he helped decorate the village and helped paint it as an artists’ Mecca. I believe he pursued some art, but I can’t remember what. I think it might have been painting.

Perhaps I did become like Charlie Shaw in the end, not famous but perpetually stuck in a triangle of work, love and decline.