Just another WordPress site

Tag: Ivory Tower Bookstore

  • October 1st in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1961, the following ad for the Ivory Tower Bookstore ran in the Long Beach Independent. The Ivory Tower has appeared here in posts for May 5th and June 11  because the crackerjack editorial team here at “This Date in Seal Beach History” are fascinated by bookstores.


    The Ivory Tower was opened at 113 Main Street in September 1961 by Jim Scully and Norma Brisson, but Jim Scully was the personality and face of the business.

    Scully grew up in Butte, Montana where he excelled at gymnastics in school. In 1946, while he was studying Japanese in the Army, he took a spill in the gym and broke his neck and became a paraplegic.

    In spite of having only limited use of his hands and arms, he continued to study and write, graduated from UCLA in 1952, and took classes towards his masters at Long Beach State while running The Ivory Tower. He even found time to write a column for California Paralyzed Veteran News Bulletin, called “The Ivory Tower.”

    Late in the sixties, Scully married another paraplegic and even adopted a little girl.

    In a March 3, 1962 profile of Scully and the bookstore in the Long Beach Independent, he noted that Seal Beach had “grown from a sleepy little village into an artistic town. It could become the Carmel of Southern California.” Scully felt that the west side of Main Street (the side where the Ivory Tower operated) was more arty with a coffeehouse (probably the Rouge et Noir) and artistic shops while the east side had more traditional businesses. Scully saw his bookstore as “at the center of a blossoming cultural revolution.”

    The bookstore as described in March 1962, was not only filled with books, but modern art — some of it risque — adorned the walls and offered coffee, conversation and foreign magazines filled with propaganda. Scully also mentioned their bestselling book in 1962 was Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer at 50 copies sold in three days. “I wish we could get more.” 

    (At the time, many felt Tropic of Cancer was smutty and was the subject of many obscenity court cases until the Supreme Court declared it non-obscene in 1964. This explains why Scully had trouble getting more books and why it was such popular reading in 1962)

    It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the Ivory Tower closed its doors for good, but I have faint memories of the store still operating around 1971 or 1972. It did not last much longer than that. It definitely was part of its era, along with the Arts Center, the Rouge et Noir, the Bay Theatre running foreign art films and the plays at the Peppermint Playhouse. (Although both of those businesses were on the east side of Main Street in 1961.)

    – Michael Dobkins

    Have you enjoyed this and other This Date in Seal Beach History posts?

    If so, please consider making a small donation of a dollar or more to help defray the online subscriptions and other research costs that make this blog possible.

    Donations can be made securely with most major credit cards directly through PayPal. Just click on paypal.me/MichaelDobkins to go to PayPal. Thank you.

    This Date in Seal Beach History also has an online store hosted at Cafepress where you can order shirts, tote bags, stationery, and other gift items imprinted with vintage Seal Beach images. Visit the online store by clicking here.

     

  • June 11th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1962, Long Beach Independent columnist Ralph Hinman Jr. recounted his search for a disappearing breed, the bearded beatniks, “devotees of Zen Buddhism and Jack (On The Road) Kerouac” who once dwell in cold-water pads in the seaside communities south of Long Beach.

    After being told by a Seal Beach bartender that beatniks don’t hang around Seal Beach anymore and the corner espresso house* is only open nights since they left, Hinman ventured southward to four other establishments in Surfside and Sunset, but apparently all the beatniks have Ferlinghetti-ed out-of-town. (Sorry. Shameless, I know.)

    Faced with the awful prospect of coming up with a new concept for his column, Hinman shifts his focus from writing about an encounter with beatniks to two burning questions. First, were beatniks “for real,” or were they “merely publicity-seeking phonies?” Second, if the beat generation movement was truly over, what would replace it?

    Hinman conveniently drops by Seal Beach’s Ivory Tower Bookstore** and encounters three young Seal Beach intellectuals who supply a slew of quotable and column-filling answers.

    “They were too lazy to shave… preferred to live in ‘pads’ because they didn’t have to clean them… and tried to live well without ever washing,” stated Beth Walker, 19, of 609 Beachcomber Dr., a Long Beach State College student. “Your Beats were nothing but thrill-seekers with no real values.”

    “They often were only pseudo-intellectuals, and they only messed up things for the rest of us.” added Ron Tremaine, 22, of 1223 Ocean Ave., a Long Beach City College student.

    Having dismissed the Beat Generation with pith and vinegar, they move on to Hinman’s second question.

    “Always in history there have been ‘angry young men’ — who never disappear from the scenes,” said Walker. Hinman decides that Walker included herself and her friends in that category.

    “Yes, you can have intellectuals in suburbia, but what is an intellectual?” said Gary Kemper, 20, of 112 3rd St., who would be enrolling at Long Beach State College in the fall, but had already mastered the smooth collegiate trick of answering a question with another question.

    And what would be a good name for their generation?

    “The ‘cool’ generation politically,” offers Kemper.

    “The ‘terrified’ generation,” is Walker’s answer before hitting an atypical note of uncertainty. “Who knows? Perhaps ‘nowism’ — or some other ‘new” philosophy will replace beatniks. One thing is certain: there always will be seekers after truth — as they see it.”

    I conclude today’s post with a deep and profound feeling of gratitude that there were no reporters or columnists around to write down the things I said in my late teens and early twenties.

    * The Rouge et Noir perhaps?

    ** The Ivory Tower Bookstore was last visited here in “May 5th in Seal Beach History.”

    – Michael Dobkins

    Have you enjoyed this and other This Date in Seal Beach History posts?

    If so, please consider making a small donation of a dollar or more to help defray the online subscriptions and other research costs that make this blog possible.

    Donations can be made securely with most major credit cards directly through PayPal. Just click on paypal.me/MichaelDobkins to go to PayPal. Thank you.

    This Date in Seal Beach History also has an online store hosted at Cafepress where you can order shirts, tote bags, stationery, and other gift items imprinted with vintage Seal Beach images. Visit the online store by clicking here.

  • May 5th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1963, Jim Scully, owner of the Ivory Tower Bookstore at 113 Main Street in Seal Beach ran an ad for a book in the Long Beach Independent and enjoyed a semi-private joke at the expense of his fellow advertisers on the same page. This is the ad.

    May_5_1963_Ivory_Tower_Books

    I’ve seen this ad a few times while doing research on Seal Beach businesses, and it’s always been a bit of a puzzler. As an ex-bookstore clerk, I knew Philip Wylie’s name and a few of the titles of his novels and was vaguely aware that “Generation of Vipers” was a book of essays, but it seemed an odd choice to advertise, especially since this seems to be the only the Ivory Tower Bookstore ever placed an ad. For a little more context, here’s the page that the ad appeared on.

    May_5_1963_Mothers_day_adIt’s a page of small ads for Mother’s Day nearly sixty years ago, and the Ivory Tower Bookstore ad is the second one up from the far left corner.

    So why advertise “Generation of Vipers” on Mother’s Day? Some quickie research on the book revealed that the book was originally published in 1942 and was a relentlessly vitriolic polemic on the mediocrity, hypocrisy, and corruption of American society.  

    The book, of course, became a sensation. It outsold all of Wylie’s previous works and made him a bestselling author, a fact that perhaps supports evidence of the mediocrity, hypocrisy, and corruption of American society. Wylie attacks all facets of America living , but his most famous essay in “Generation of Vipers” is titled “Common Women,” in which he coined the term, “momism.” Here’s a sample of his dull humorless and plodding rant on motherhood:

    Meanwhile, Megaloid momworship has got completely out of hand. Our land, subjectively mapped, would have more silver cords and apron strings crisscrossing it than railroads and telephone wires. Mom is everywhere and everything and damned near everybody, and from her depends all the rest of the U. S. Disguised as good old mom, dear old mom, sweet old mom, your loving mom, and so on, she is the bride at every funeral and the corpse at every wedding. Men live for her and die for her, dote upon her and whisper her name as they pass away, and I believe she has now achieved, in the hierarchy of miscellaneous articles, a spot next to the Bible and the Flag, being reckoned part of both in a way.

    On it goes on and on and on, just like that, for pages. Bleh.

    bleh
    bleh

    So Jim Scully had his tongue impishly placed in cheek when he advertised “Generation of Vipers” twenty-one years later on Mother’s Day. Columnists from the Long Beach Independent seemed to like visiting the bookstore in the early sixties, so my theory is that Scully came up with the gag, and one of his columnist pals dared him to place the ad.

    – Michael Dobkins

    Have you enjoyed this and other This Date in Seal Beach History posts?

    If so, please consider making a small donation of a dollar or more to help defray the online subscriptions and other research costs that make this blog possible.

    Donations can be made securely with most major credit cards directly through PayPal. Just click on paypal.me/MichaelDobkins to go to PayPal. Thank you.

    This Date in Seal Beach History also has an online store hosted at Cafepress where you can order shirts, tote bags, stationery, and other gift items imprinted with vintage Seal Beach images. Visit the online store by clicking here.