Scratching the Surface

Adventures in Storytelling

Harvey Ovshinsky

• Publisher: Painted Turtle
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780814344750
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

Scratching the Surface: Adventures in Storytelling is a deeply personal and intimate memoir told through the lens of Harvey Ovshinsky's lifetime of adventures as an urban enthusiast. He was only seventeen when he started The Fifth Estate, one of the country's oldest underground newspapers. Five years later, he became one of the country's youngest news directors in commercial radio at WABX-FM, Detroit's notorious progressive rock station. Both jobs placed Ovshinsky directly in the bullseye of the nation's tumultuous counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. When he became a documentary director, Ovshinsky's dispatches from his hometown were awarded broadcasting's highest honors, including a national Emmy, a Peabody, and the American Film Institute's Robert M. Bennett Award for Excellence. But this memoir is more than a boastful trip down memory lane. It also doubles as a survival guide and an instruction manual that speaks not only to the nature of and need for storytelling but also and equally important, the pivotal role the twin powers of endurance and resilience play in the creative process. You don't have to be a writer, an artist, or even especially creative to take the plunge, Ovshinsky reminds his readers. "You just have to feel strongly about something or have something you need to get off your chest. And then find the courage to scratch your own surface and share your good stuff with others." Above all, Ovshinsky is an educator, known for his passionate support of and commitment to mentoring the next generation of urban storytellers. When he wasn't teaching screenwriting and documentary production in his popular workshops and support groups, he taught undergraduate and graduate students at Detroit's College for Creative Studies, Wayne State University, Madonna University, and Washtenaw Community College. "The thing about Harvey, " a colleague recalls in Scratching the Surface, "is that he treats his students like professionals and not like newbies at all. His approach is to, in a very supportive and non-threatening way, combine both introductory and advanced storytelling in one fell swoop."

Part 1

My First Childhood

1

Shouts and Whispers

In 2006, three years after Fred Rogers died of stomach cancer, his production company, Family Communications, Inc. (now called Fred Rogers Productions), was desperate to find a new series to replace Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. PBS had already decided to discontinue airing reruns of the beloved children’s program, and time was running out for the company to create a replacement show.

Many in the industry deemed the challenge an existential dilemma of the highest order, what Mister Rogers might have called a “pickle.” Without its creator, star performer, head script- and songwriter, and lead producer, what was his production company to do?

What could it do?

Rolling over and accepting its fate as a one-trick (albeit glorious) pony was one possibility but a horrific option for the award-winning team that produced Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. FCI’s mission impossible? To find a way to save the Fred Rogers brand and build a new children’s franchise based on the Neighborhood’s guiding principles of kindness and caring, and their goal of nurturing the emotional, intellectual, and creative development of children and families.

That’s where I came in. In 2007, myself and my best friend and production partner, Bill Pace, were invited by Family Communications, along with two other production companies, to help save the Mister Rogers franchise. Our proposal, The Playful Universe of the Mighty Hubble, featured the adventures of a high-spirited, fun-loving, intergalactic space child who travels to Earth for the sole purpose of learning how to learn through play.

Poor Hubble. It wasn’t his fault he was clueless about how to have fun; nobody ever taught him how. On his home planet, children were exceedingly well educated and well behaved beyond their years, but they didn’t have time in their busy and overscheduled lives to simply enjoy themselves and “just be kids.”

The Mighty Hubble, “just burstin’” to take off for his next adventure.

(Courtesy of Family Communications, Inc. and Play Shop Productions. Character design by Paul Andrejco, Puppet Heap Studios.)

I loved Hubble, and creating him with Bill was a highlight of my several careers, even though we ended up losing the bake-off to a worthy competitor, the amazing Angela Santomero, who went on to produce Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. What I loved most about our interstellar Pinocchio was his exuberance. The eternal optimist, the Mighty Hubble had more enthusiasm and gusto than he knew what to do with. “I’m just burstin’!” was one of his favorite expressions, and he’d say it beaming with the joy of both discovery and mastery that came from playing with and learning with others.

In other words, in his bravery and his courage, his cheerfulness and his unbridled lust for life and learning, the Mighty Hubble was everything, as a child, I was not.

I’m a Machinist, Not a Mechanic

In the 1940s and ’50s my father was a machinist and a budding inventor, a Sacco and Vanzetti, Eugene Victor Debs socialist married to his high school sweetheart, Norma Rifkin, an Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey Democrat. According to family lore, Mom’s family warned her against marrying Dad because he was a radical and worse. According to Lillian Hoddeson and Peter Garrett’s brilliant biography, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow: The Life and Inventions of Stanford R. Ovshinsky, he was “a troublemaker who carried a lunch pail.”

Mom was beautiful, artistic, and intensely devoted to her husband and her three children. Although they had their differences, it didn’t hurt that both my parents were very physical people, and their sexual attraction to each other was as immediate as it was mutual.

Unfortunately, when it came to Dad’s other passions, what he called his “creative urges” and his “advanced methods” of tool making and machine building, my father came to bitterly resent what he saw as my mother’s lack of understanding and appreciation for his work.

There were bumps in the relationship almost immediately. The most obvious hurdle, at least from my father’s perspective, was that Mom didn’t share his passion for radical politics.

Or, in my father’s opinion, much of anything else.

“I tried to teach her how to love me,” Dad recalled years later, “but she didn’t know what I was talking about.”

My mother and father in happier days.

(Photo by Herb Ovshinsky. Courtesy of the Ovshinsky family and Bentley Historical Library.)

“I’m a machinist, not a mechanic,” he implored, looking for the words that would explain to her why he was always so preoccupied and wrapped up with his efforts to make his lathes, milling machines, and other shop tools work faster, harder, smarter. “Machines,” he wrote to her, “are always to me what writing [is] to a poet, painting is to an artist. That’s what I mean by sounding stilted, but so help me, it’s the key to what’s happening to me . . . I feel my personality being gripped by it.”

Mom was sympathetic and tried to understand what Dad was trying to tell her, but, in the end, she couldn’t get past what she considered my father’s grandiosity and inflated sense of self, once described even by his own mother as “Stan’s big headedness.”

“One of the reasons I didn’t want to talk machines with you,” he struck back at my mother in one of his letters, “is that you, too, doubt. You’re thinking like a wife and a mother about the future & what’s going to happen without money, etc. etc. Your fatal error is that you think it is a business to me; I guess everyone does, but it isn’t & never will be [for me].”

Eventually, my father’s festering unhappiness took its toll, and not only on their relationship. “Please come home. Or at least write,” Mom wrote during one of his many business trips, when I was about four years old. “Harvey is having a rough time of it. Benjie gets so much attention since he goes to school. If you were here one of us could preoccupy Harvey while Benjie talks about his school. He hasn’t napped even once since Benjie started and he cries a lot.”

My father (third from the left) with one of his first inventions, the Benjamin center-drive lathe, named after his father.

(Courtesy of the Ovshinsky family and Bentley Historical Library.)

Dad attempted to comply. At least on paper: “Dear Harv, I wanted to write to you to tell you how much I miss you—I know that you are taking good care of mommy, especially when Benjie’s at school. When I come home, I would like to tell you all about the interesting machines I work with here—and maybe I will draw you a picture of the shop, too. Keep on being a good boy—and look after Dale for me. Love, Your Daddy.”

Although my father may have felt some guilt over his being away so much of the time, he was adamant about what he believed were the roots of the problem. What “the boys”—my older brother, Benjie, and my younger brother, Dale—really needed, he scolded my mother, was a father who was happy and wanted to be home. “Will you be a good girl?” he wrote to my mother. “Try to be happy & helpful and make me happy like the devoted wife you are.”

Well, that explains a lot, I thought, reading these letters many years later. Even when he was home, it often felt like Dad wasn’t there. Where do you go when you’re with me? I used to wonder when I would talk to him and he would not respond, his “advanced thinking” and “creative urges” taking him a million miles away from me.

I missed my father whenever he left, and years later, when I was writing guest columns for the Detroit Free Press and in my early days of parenting, I imagined how his frequent departures might have impacted my own relationship with my two children, Natasha (Sasha) and Noah. Although I love my work, I have always considered the relationship I have with my wife and children to be my most satisfying and proudest of my accomplishments. And yet . . . “Dads don’t stay,” I wrote in the Free Press, second-guessing myself. “Noah, my ten-year-old, is convinced that when it comes to tucking him in and saying goodnight at the end of a hard, grueling day in the fourth grade, his mother is really the expert. Mom cuddles. Mom crawls into bed. Mom pays attention. She talks and listens.

“And stays.”

Dad with Benjie, me, and Dale on our way to “church” at the Cranbrook Institute of Science.

(Photo by Norma Ovshinsky. Courtesy of the Ovshinsky family and Bentley Historical Library.)

Mom with “the boys.”

(Courtesy of the Ovshinsky family and Bentley Historical Library.)

No Noise

Dad’s space travels were compounded by the fact that when he was around, he was often so angry. Mom tried to keep the peace. She swore Dinah Shore was Jewish; it was a game she enjoyed playing with me when we watched TV together. She loved identifying celebrities she insisted were of the tribe even if they were not. Sammy Davis Jr., OK. Charlton Heston? I don’t think so.

My father, on the other hand, did not share her sense of child’s play, especially when he was tired. On one of his rare return visits home, he expressly warned her to keep the boys quiet so he could sleep in. My poor mother even failed at that. That morning my brother Ben and I were playing in his bedroom with our pet parakeet. Petey was a gift from my mother, her way of trying to calm things down in the house and give the boys something of our own to care for and, I suspect, in lieu of our father, to play with.

Suddenly, the door of our bedroom burst open, and Dad was no longer in lieu. His teeth were clenched, his fist raised. “I told you,” he screamed in a high-pitched rage. “No noise!” He reached out to push me against the wall, but I ducked, the blow striking and killing poor Petey, who was resting on my shoulders, trembling and every bit as terrified as we were.

I don’t remember an apology, but I will never forget the chilling look in my father’s eyes when my mother walked into the room. How many times do I have to tell you? He wasn’t talking to me, but I got the message.

No noise.

The World Situation Is Looking Kind of Bad

It wasn’t all doom and gloom.

One of my favorite memories as a child was when Dad agreed to join us for a week at Camp Tanuga, an overnight secular Jewish summer camp for kids and their families. I appreciated Tanuga’s intention to, as it promised in one of its brochures, “give youngsters a chance to explore the great outdoors and to learn a little about themselves,” but what I really loved about the place, and for which I will forever be grateful to my mother, was how, even though by then she knew Dad was having an affair and deeply involved with another woman, these overnights at Tanuga gave my brothers and me a rare opportunity to spend quality time with our parents.

Both of them, in the same cabin. As if we were a family.

Family time at Camp Tanuga.

(Courtesy of Harvey Ovshinsky and Bentley Historical Library.)

What I remember most about that summer was that for the first time in the longest time, I realized I wasn’t afraid or worried about the world situation. Like so many of my generation, I grew up in the 1950s convinced that if a thermonuclear war with Russia or Red China didn’t kill me, surely the fallout from the nuclear testing in the atmosphere would, or at the least...