CORKY HUBBART

Peter Dinkledge is starring in the movie Cyrano Debergerac. An ambitious role for many reasons. I cannot wait to see it.

     It will be fifty years ago next spring when I met Carl, Corky, Hubbert, 1973. I met him when I joined a small company performing a musical comedy of the middle East situation wherever we could rent stage space. It was called 'MIRAGE' and was written and directed by Penny Allen, a local writer and professor at Portland State, now an expatriot living in Paris (not Texas).  She went on to write more successful plays, an independent film called, 'Property', and a documentary of a soldier from the Iraq War suffering from too many  deployments. It had been five years since the Six-day war, on that day when I walked into rehearsal space. OPEC was choking off supplies of crude oil to drive up the price, and people were buying gas based on the odd or even number on their license plate. The play was the right thing at the right time. We needed humor. 

     Corky was the visual and comedic center of the play, he was in nearly every scene and a player you could not take your eyes off of. He suffered dwarfism, though he preferred the term, little person. With his halo of blonde, wiry hair, his flattened nose, his stubby fingers, and his shortened legs, and stiff gait, he was funny enough. But he had a wit sharpened by 2 decades of being the butt of cruel jokes. He could pounce on a topic and have you holding your stomach in laughter. In his spare time he did stand-up in Portland, one of his schticks being to make fun of the emerging feminism of the time. If you had the XY chromosome in that day, we were all male chauvinist pigs,  and he did not miss the humor. A common response from women in the audience was to dip their cocktail napkins in their drink and throw them at him. We became good friends and when we would be out barhopping, in my favorite place, Peter's Inn, or his favorite haunt, The Leaky Roof Tavern, my sixfoot two and his lack of height drew comments and much room for him to ad-lib a joke.

     After the play had wrapped, we continued getting together for drinks or for illicit herb in his rented room or mine. In every room of his small apartment was a drawer with a pen or pencil and a small notepad (in those days a notepad was a small sheaf of lined paper bound with spiral wire). Whether sleeping, eating, or in the bathroom, he would write down any joke that came to him. One day in a haze of blue smoke, he expressed an idea to write a satire based on the movie, 'Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore', later to become the TV sitcom, Alice. I was not a writer, nor was I as funny as Corky, but I accepted the challenge. "Truckstop Melody" was the result. My humble contribution was a truck driver taking correspondentce courses in philosophy, common on the covers of matchbooks. We aspired to be smarter in those days. Correspondence courses were common, then., and as worthless as enrolling on-line to Trump U or Praeger U today. Bif Slovak was the drivers name, "Bif with one F, two F's are redundant (it might be a lame joke but it was my joke, there was another joke that grew stale with time, so I won't linger). Corky created the other characters, starting with  a theatrical dancer, Honey Gillespie, whose stage name was Lola Desmond because her real name was "too stagey". After three years in the chorus  of Jesus Christ Superstar, she gave up her dream and headed north in her VW Micro-bus, which broke down at an out of the way truck-stop named Pop's Truckstop Cafe, with the blinking neon sign that said, 'Good Eat" the 's' on eats not functioning. Pop was another of Corkys characters. A gentle, man with a ready smile. He gave Honey a job and a room above the Cafe so she could get her van repaired. There was another room above the Cafe occupied by a sweet old lady, Mrs. Busbaum, who liked to talk of her younger days in England, singing in the underground during WWII air-raids. She and Honey became good friends. 

     There was a coffee-cup rack on the wall, each cup with a name written in red fingernail polish. It included one with the name Bif. One day the bell above the door tinkled and a tall, broad-shouldered man walked through it and sat at the counter. Pops came out from behind the pass-out window, greeted him and introduced Bif to Honey. It was love at first sight. A newspaperman, Sparky O'Connor, was another character. He had gained some fame when he discovered an abandoned warehouse where Patricia Hurst was held for ransom.

     One day, Sparky comes into Pop's with the bad news that Bif had gone missing. A witness had seen his truck run off the the Rosemary Wood Expressway, at the 18 1/2 minute Gap, by a bus with NIXON-AGNEW campaign signs. It was to be later revealed that Bif had suffered a concussion and amnesia.

     We did not finish Truckstop Melody, though we had plans for a sequel called, The Sparkey O'Connor Story. Corky wanted to go to Hollywood to follow in the footsteps of Billy Barty, a little person who was a frequent character actor in TV shows, most notably Peter Gunn. We kept in touch during the ups and downs of his career. He had a small role in a movie, Under The Rainbow, was cast in a sitcom that ran one season, as a bellhop. And for several years he could be seen on American Express ads at Christmas as, you guessed it, one of Santa's elves. He hated stereotypes. And then he was not heard from again. Later I was told that he died from influenza. 

Those were wonderful times and I am privileged to have known Corky. We were all evolving in those days, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, Palestinian rights, the rights of mentally and physically challenged people. We were children of the Age of Aquarious,  we were expanding our consciousness and we embraced change. Some of us slower than others. But always was that altruistic dream of young people for a better world.

     What happened to us?