Paula Raymond

            I didn’t notice until the sun came up on Saturday that it had snowed a little bit overnight. I guess it wasn’t obvious during song practice because the white stuff wasn’t anywhere in the open but trimming the edges of sidewalk.

            At midday I went down to No Frills where I bought raspberries, strawberries, grapes, an outside round roast and some yogourt.  I was in the personal needs aisle after having just grabbed some Arm and Hammer toothpaste and I was looking at some sponges when a lady that was slowly passing with a walker commented, “It looks like the real deal!” I told her that I didn’t think so because they were too even all around. She agreed that I was probably right and said that she hadn’t brought her glasses. She said she used to pick sponges down at the Key. I assume she meant Key West or another key in Florida. 

            I spent a good hour and a half on my essay but only added about a quarter of a page. It needs to be two pages longer and I still need to pull all of my ideas into one argument.

            Since we'll be studying his work in January I read the short biography of Percy Shelley in the Norton Anthology of Romantic Literature. He was a pretty radical guy. He got kicked out of Oxford after six months because he wrote an essay on the necessity of atheism and mailed it to the heads of the college, some of who were bishops.

            I had an egg and toast with a beer for dinner and watched Peter Gunn. This story begins with Gregory Harrington and a character known only as The Torch getting ready to set fire to Harrington’s own building. At the last minute The Torch’s man The Giant knocks Harrington out. They leave him there, set the fire and leave. A day or so later Gunn walks into Mother’s where Edie is singing “It Could Happen to You” by Johnny Burke and Jimmy van Heusen. Gregory Harrington’s widow Martha is waiting to talk with Gunn as she wants to hire him to find out what really happened to her husband. Afterwards he talks with Edie, who is jealous about him talking Martha. Edie’s character is kind of annoying because Edie is very needy. Outside of being attractive and a moderately good singer she has no character traits other than being in love with Peter Gunn. 

                                       

            Gunn goes to see Gregory Harrington’s business partner Stanley Glidden and accuses him of hiring someone to start the fire for the insurance.

            Gunn goes to see a reformed little pyromaniac with an Irish accent and asks him where he could find someone if he wanted a building torched. Ditto tells him to go to a penny arcade across the river. There the Giant leads him to the owner of the arcade, The Torch. Glidden has already warned them that Gunn might come and that he should kill him. The Giant knocks out Gunn and the Torch ties him up. The Torch decides to torch his own plays but calls Glidden over first, though he doesn’t tell him why he wants him there. He tells Glidden that he is evidence too. Glidden is knocked out. Once again, Lieutenant Jacoby arrives to rescue Gunn. He has a gunfight with The Torch and the Giant. The Torch escapes upstairs to toss a match down on all the gasoline he’d spilled. Gunn, with his arms tied behind his back manages to kick the Torch into the fire.

            Martha Harrington was played by Paula Raymond, who did a lot of films and television in the 50s. She starred in “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” and some low budget horror films. In 1962 she was the passenger in a car accident that horribly disfigured her and her nose was cut off by the rear view mirror. After a year of plastic surgery though she was working again, but she seemed to be accident-prone. Between 1977 and 1994 she broke an ankle, both of her hips and her shoulder in three accidents. In 1999 she started working on her autobiography “I Was Born Right, Where Did I Go Wrong or The Misadventures of a Dumb Dame” but she died before it was finished.