You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman Read Online Free Page B

certified Tenderfoot Scout, and his Troop 77 spent weeklong summer stints earning merit badges, hiking, and sleeping in tents with wooden floors at Camp Emerald Bay on Catalina Island, twenty-six miles off the L.A. County coast. “Water was a big part of it,” Jones says of their camping excursions, during which merit badges were handed out for mastery of sailing and distance swimming, among other disciplines. Jones can’t recall if Phil was present when a group of boys sneaked off (inadvisably) to the nearby garbage dump, where packs of Catalina’s indigenous wild boar population gathered to feast at night, but says that may well have been the case in light of his playful personality. “Phil wasn’t a bad kid, but he was a jokester,” Jones says. “He could entertain everybody and come up with crazy stuff, but not go too far.”
    By the time Phil was thirteen or so, with the help of Rupert’s shuttling, he’d taught himself to surf and soon became a regular at several L.A.-area beaches, including Dockweiler, Ballona Creek, Hermosa, Rincon, and Malibu. It was at one of those locations where he first dispensed wave-riding wisdom to brother Paul and then set him on a board to have at it. Paul rode that maiden wave all the way to the beach, where Phil stood drop-jawed and obviously jealous. As Phil got older, secured his own transportation, and moved closer to the water, his love of the sport and its philosophical underpinnings only deepened.
    Art, too, became an ever more time-consuming hobby as he grew more confident of skills passed down from his artistically inclined mother and grandmother. Looking back, Paul thinks his and Phil’s semi-regular jaunts to Disneyland and the iconic characters they encountered there might have sparked Phil’s interest in cartooning, which blossomed during his two years at Orville Wright. “Phil could draw anything,” schoolmate Ettore Berardinelli says. Wright is where he got his first taste of theater, too, studying Shakespeare and Molière in drama class, where meeting girls was every bit as important as learning the stage classics. He also won the lead role in Wright’s production of Li’l Abner. Appropriately enough for a budding artist, the musical (which had its Broadway debut in 1956) is based on Al Capp’s long-running comic strip of the same name.
    Grade-wise, Phil scored mostly B’s and C’s in English, social studies, math, “electric shop,” metal shop, Algebra II, art, music, and senior drama, with only two A’s—for physical education, in which he also earned a couple of C’s—tossed into the mix. Marks for “work habits” and “cooperation” were almost all “Satisfactory” or “Excellent.” The only classes for which he apparently was somehow uncooperative and thus earned an “Unsatisfactory” were mixed chorus during both semesters of eighth grade and social studies that same year. His work habits in the latter subject were equally underwhelming.
    Upon exiting Wright with the class-voted title of “Happy-Go-Lucky Girl” (classmate and future Charles Manson disciple Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme co-won the category “Personality Plus” with another student), Phil entered Westchester High on W. Manchester Avenue, amid a thriving residential community that sprang from what had been acres of bean fields. Increasingly in need of cash to support his surfing hobby and other teen necessities, he earned extra scratch by tricking out his peers’ trendy three-ring binders (they were clad in a blue denim-like material) with funky designs. He often sketched at home, too, on pads of paper and on far more expansive surfaces. In his La Tijera bedroom, part of one wall and the adjacent ceiling eventually bore a pencil sketch of Auguste Rodin’s renowned sculpture “The Thinker.” Phil jokingly described it to friends as “Oedipus contemplating the death of Rex.”
    Berardinelli, one of Phil’s first pals in the area, lived across an alley from the