A few weeks ago, newspapers everywhere reported the passing
of Doreen Tracey, best remembered as one of the fresh-face youngsters who sang
and danced their hearts out on The Mickey Mouse Club. I remember Doreen
well. Like all the girls my age (and maybe the boys too) I had my special
favorites. I liked Darlene, Annette, and Bobby. That left my little sister with
Karen, Cubby, and Doreen. Neither of us was too crazy about Sharon, despite her
outstanding dance skills. But all of those squeaky-clean kids served as
role-models for us mere mortals. How we longed to be in their tap shoes! (Who knew that years later spunky Darlene would be
sentenced to prison, along with her third husband, for a check-kiting scheme?)
One daily feature of the Mickey
Mouse Club, aside from those frolicking Mouseketeers, was a live-action
serial in which young people did brave and exciting things, usually in the great
outdoors. Like racing horses, fighting off rustlers, and solving crimes.
Remember, for instance, “Corky and White Shadow”? And “The Adventures of Spin
and Marty”?
When I look back at the programming of that era, I realize
one thing that never occurred to me in the 1950s. Not only was everyone
on-screen white, but it was rare to see any performer or character who strayed
into ethnic terrain of any sort. No Jews, of course, needed to apply. There was
much comment, even back in the day, that Annette Funicello was the single most
popular Mouseketeer, even though she (given her name and appearance) was
overtly Italian-American. Everyone else, though, had WASP surnames like Burgess
and Pendleton and Burke, or the occasional O’Brien and Gillespie. Original
Mouseketeer Don Grady, whom I knew slightly in later years, was born Don
Agrati, but his Italian last name disappeared when he started his showbiz
career.
I bring this up because my colleague, Laurie Gwen Shapiro,
has just published a rollicking true tale of derring-do. It’s called The Stowaway: A Young Man’s Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica. And it’s all about a seventeen-year-old lad who in
1928 persistently stowed away on sea-going vessels, until he could finally
fulfill his dream of joining Admiral Byrd on his historic trip to the bottom of
the world. It’s a thrilling story, but not one that Disney would have pursued
back in the Mickey Mouse Club days.
An essential fact about this young stowaway, Billy Gawronski, was that he was
Polish-American, the son of immigrants, and had a deep cultural connection to
the land of his parents’ birth. When Shapiro stumbled upon his story, it
appealed to her partially because she too (a product of New York’s Lower East
Side) knew what it was like to come from immigrant stock: the pride, the
parental expectations, the urge to prove oneself in the wider world.
One of the fascinating details I learned from Shapiro’s book
was that at the outset of the voyage to Antarctica from Hoboken’s harbor, there
were no fewer than three stowaways. The one who managed to remain undetected
the longest was an African-American named Bob Lanier. Though for a time Lanier
was accepted onboard as a crew member, racism reared its ugly head and he was
eventually sent back home, long before reaching his dream destination. Despite
several attempts, he never managed to walk on Antarctica. It took another 12
years, until 1940, for a young navy man named George Gibbs to be the first
African American to visit Little America.
That’s one more story that Walt Disney and The Mickey Mouse Club of my youth would
never have chosen to tell.
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