EDITOR’S NOTE A Trip to Deepest Ellum

when millard lampell, 77, told me he wanted to spend several weeks hanging out in Deep Ellum to write about young people who listen to loud music, adorn themselves with tattoos that look like a disputed map of Bosnia, and attach little rings to unthinkable regions of their anatomy, I politely cleared my throat and put on my best serious-editor face.

“Uh, well,” I said, looking across the lunch table. “Uh, aren’t you a bit old for that story?”

Sure, I was risking an age-discrimination suit, but it was for his own good. How could a man born when only sailors had tattoos possibly “get it” about Deep Ellum? More than 30 years his junior, I don’t “get it” about Deep Ellum. When it comes to tattoos and (shudder) tongue rings, I’ve reached that point fit’s called middle age) when the aesthetic of the younger generation seems not just baffling but downright ugly and sometimes a little frightening.

But Millard Lampell, long past middle age, gets it. He has gotten it for a long time, ever since he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. That was in his second life. In his first life, in the early 1940s, he toured with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger in a group called The Almanac Singers, playing, he recalls, at “union meetings and left-wing benefits for Spanish refugees, striking Kentucky coal miners, and starving Alabama sharecroppers.” Having grown up poor and seen the ravages of the Depression, the band espoused “a primitive, folk version of what Franklin D. Roosevelt was saying in his fireside chats, ” As Lampell recently told a large audience at SMU, he and his buddies did attend a few Communist Party meetings. Guthrie was usually the first to fall asleep.

The music stopped during World War II. After his discharge from the Air Force, ex-Sgt. Lampell did radio broadcasts with Bill Mauldin, debating generals on subjects like “What the GI Wants.” Having given up performing ( “I was always a lousy singer anyway” ), he continued a writing career that had taken off in the service, which inspired his novels The Long Way Home and The Hero. By 1950 he was making a five-figure income doing screenplays, radio plays, and television dramas.

Then something happened. Producers he had known for years stopped taking his calls. Without explanation, he was passed over for projects, His income plunged. Several months later, his agent, in a furtive meeting, told him he had been added to that same nonexistent but real list that already held the names of the Hollywood Ten-Dalton Trumbo, John Henry Faulk, Zero Mostel. In a sad reversal of our justice system, Lampell was sentenced and punished, then “tried” in 1952 before the Senate Committee on Internal Security. Was he now? Had he ever been? Would he name names? He wouldn’t.

So Lampell spent the ’50s as a ghost wandering what he calls “the strange world of the nameless.” Cloaked in pseudonyms, he took whatever literary odd jobs he could get-fixing up screenplays, writing industrial training films, anything. On projects that demanded a writer’s presence, a sympathetic colleague might agree to take credit for the work. The friend would show up for story conferences or rehearsals, nod thoughtfully, then pass off Lampell’s revisions as his own. In the ultimate irony, one of Lampell’s pseudonymous scripts won a coveted award-which had to be accepted by the stand-in who had pretended to write the piece,

The thaw began as the ’50s waned. Joe McCarthy died drunk and discredited. The Korean War faded in memory. By 1962 Lampell was working again under his own name; a tew years later he won an Emmy for Eagle in a Cage, a story of Napoleon in exile, and found himself cheered by producers who had been afraid to return his calls.

Today, with albums, books, and screenplays to his credit, Lampell is a grandfather living in a Dallas suburb and writing his memoirs, which I can’t wait to read. In the meantime, you can read about his journey to Deepest Ellum starting on page 68, A guy who’s seen what he’s seen is not afraid of a few tattoos.