Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Poughkeepsie Odyssey, Part One by Greg Dziawer

This week, we travel back to Ed Wood's hometown of Poughkeepsie, NY.

1 Fountain Place: Your Dreams Were Your Ticket Out

In this week's Ed Wood Wednesdays, two days after observing what would have been Ed's 92nd birthday on October 10, we're travelling back in time to his 17th birthday in 1941.

Less is doubtless more, and this brief snippet from The Poughkeepsie Journal (the second-oldest daily newspaper in the United States), dated October 13, 1941, is a picture-window on Ed, albeit a smudged one.

Note the discrepancy regarding Ed's age.

Ed was early into his sophomore year at Poughkeepsie High School at that time, and the Netco Theater Corporation (Paramount's northeast subsidiary) ran the Bardavon Theater on Market St in the the city's downtown district, where Ed worked as an usher. The usual record places Ed as usher at the Bardavon in the "late '30s," but this indicates he was still working there not long before joining the Marines. The Bardavon is still active (as the Bardavon Opera House), a performing arts venue now, as it was when it opened in 1869. During Ed's youth, it showed vaudeville acts (Burns and Allen played there) along with films. A few months before Ed's birthday party in 1941, a young Frank Sinatra performed there as vocalist for the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. And it's worth noting that the Bardavon is haunted by Roger, once a stage-hand there.

Bet you never thought Ira Glass' name would come up in this series.

And here's a look at the Bardavon's entryway.

Ed would have been very familiar with these doors.

Ed's first residence was 115 Franklin Street in Poughkeepsie, a multi-unit residence of over 4500 square feet, built in 1890. Until it was torn down recently, real estate listings as late as 2013 mention six units, pictures showing a boarded-up building.

Eddie's first home, 115 Franklin Street.

Today, with the house demolished, the location looks like this:

The lot where 115 Franklin Street used to be.

At some point, the Wood family moved into an apartment building at 1 Fountain Place, a mere four blocks from Poughkeepsie High.

1 Fountain Place as it looks today..

One of Eddie's classmates was George Keseg (last name spelled incorrectly in the birthday article, which also connects George to Ed as fellow employee at the Bardavon), who also lived in the same building as Ed at 1 Fountain Place. They must have been tight. The two enlisted into the military together on the same day.

A newspaper clipping about Ed Wood and his pal and neighbor, George Keseg.

It's worth mentioning—as always seems the case in Woodology, there's a wrinkle— that the birthday article has Ed turning 18 in 1941. Ed's birth year is everywhere listed and universally agreed to be 1924. While I'm no math expert, if he was born in 1924, his 17th birthday would have occurred in 1941. 

Expert Woodologist James Pontolillo speculates: "So far, that one newspaper clip about the party is the only source that doesn't add up. If nothing else turns up to support it, a typo is the most likely explanation."

Map of Poughkeepsie. Fountain Place is in in the upper right quadrant.

1 Fountain Place is the sort of brick apartment building you'll find on street corners in plenty of old northeastern industrial towns, of which Poughkeepsie is a prototype. I don't know why the Wood family moved there, but for whatever reason, they left their apartment on Franklin St. 

1 Fountain Place turned out to be Ed's final residence in Poughkeepsie. Once he left for the military, he never returned. 

But we'll return to 1 Fountain Place, and meet some of his neighbors, and we'll return to Poughkeepsie again...in future episodes of Ed Wood Wednesdays!

Special thanks: To my friend James Pontolillo, whose amazing research into Ed's early life infuses this article throughout; and to Woodologist Stash Surowiec, who graciously shared photos of the now-empty lot at 115 Franklin St and the Bardavon from a trip he made to Poughkeepsie earlier this year, in February.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Poughkeepsie Odyssey, Part Three by Greg Dziawer

In the realm of the census: The 1930 US Census records the details of Ed Wood's life and family.

"S" Is For "Street"

Although October 29, 1929 is historically considered the day of the stock market crash, and a key precipitator of the Great Depression, the US economy had been showing signs of ill health in myriad ways throughout 1929. Ed Wood turned five years old in early October 1929, and six months later, in early April, his residence was hand-recorded by a US census taker, Mrs. Van Etten.

In this week's edition of Ed Wood Wednesdays, we're visiting Ed's home in Poughkeepsie in 1930, a year when this country undertook its fifteenth official census. While the popular record of Ed's life in Poughkeepsie from his birth in 1924 until his enlistment in the military in 1942 locates him at 115 Franklin St, in previous Ed Wood Wednesdays, we've found Ed living at 35 Delano St from at least 1935 to 1940, and at 1 Fountain Place in the early '40s. Did Ed reside at any other residence as a kid growing up in Poughkeepsie? Bet your life on it!

The 1930 US Census Records contain over 2,000 pages for Dutchess County, New York, the vast majority listing residents of Ed's hometown of Poughkeepsie. It took me quite a while—a patient three hours or so scanning through the pages—to finally locate the listing for Ed and his family at the bottom of page 701 in one of the files. Not long before, I had run through the listing of residents at 35 Delano St, where I knew Ed resided as early as 1935. I only found a man and wife there, and knowing it was a multi-unit apartment house, I immediately felt deflated. If Ed was living there in 1930, clearly the census record was incomplete and we'd never know for sure.

Undaunted, I quickly bounced back, and it was only minutes and pages later that I found Ed's family listed at yet another residence: another apartment building at 44 Conklin Street. Conklin, like Delano, is a short L-shaped street on the interior of a larger block, in this case Mansion and Catherine Streets, concentrations of apartment houses and single-family homes on opposite sides of the street. The bottom end of Conklin intersects with the East-West Arterial, which takes you right on and over the Mid-Hudson Bridge a dozen or so blocks to the west. Within a couple of blocks of Conklin, there are three churches today: Baptist, Lutheran and Congregational. The neighborhood was designated entirely "W" for "white" in the records. 

House beautiful?: Some interior shots of 44 Conklin Street.

    

Scanning the Poughkeepsie records, I noted a number of interesting things. Wood was not a common family name, for instance. Gentrification was in full effect. And the "race" column in the records often referred to persons of African-American descent, direly, as "Nig."  

44 Conklin St. as it appears today.

44 Conklin is, like Ed's residences at Franklin and Delano, another multi-unit apartment house. The building hails from 1910, housing an upstairs and downstairs unit. Still standing, the original look of the building is now hidden beneath cheap vinyl siding. With four beds/two baths and six beds/two baths, respectively, the units at 44 Conklin were far more spacious than Ed's other residences in Poughkeepsie.

The 1930 Census Record lists the head of household at 44 Conklin St as Frances J. Phillips, Ed's maternal grandmother. She was living with her daughter Lillian and son-in-law Edward, and their two young sons Ed Jr. and Howard. A year and half younger than Ed, Howard W. Wood went by William, but the 1930 and 1940 Census Records corroborate his real first name as Howard.

In the spring of 1930, at the dawn of the Great Depression, Ed's dad was working as a factory machinist, common male employ. Less commonly, Ed and Howard's mom worked, too. The immediate aftermath of the crash necessitated change and adaptation. Living with the in-laws. Working moms.

Lillian was a department store "saleslady."  Among the ephemeral details in the record, the residence had (commonly) a "radio set." Rent was thirty bucks a month. Ed's grandma is most likely listed as "W" for "widow," but the recorder clearly first wrote "M" for "married" and then smudged it over with a nebulous correction.

And the whole Phillips' line of Ed's family was born in New York, at least as far back as Ed's matriarchal great-grandparents. The roots of the Wood family lie deep, in Poughkeepsie and beyond. 

We'll go there, and travel back a millennium to Scotland, dissecting the Wood family coat-of-arms, right here in future Ed Wood Wednesdays.

Before we depart, a few bonus items:

• An interactive map of Conklin Street today

• The US Census record for Ed Wood and his family from 1930

• Additional maps of Conklin Street in Poughkeepsie

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 1: The Early Years (1948-1953)

Ed appears in one of his own commercials, circa 1949.

When Edward D. Wood, Jr. arrived in Hollywood in 1947 at the age of 23, he'd already had plenty of life experience. Or at least he said he did. The ambitious young man claimed to have seen heavy combat action in World War II and been decorated for gallantry in action, though his actual military record suggests otherwise. (In truth, his duties were mostly of a clerical nature.) Eddie also boasted that he'd traveled with a freak show as a "half-man, half-woman" and studied the dramatic arts at the prestigious Frank Lloyd Wright Institute in Washington, D.C. None of that has ever been confirmed either.

It's difficult to know what is true and untrue when discussing the early life of Ed Wood. He took an active role in cultivating his own myth, and even his widow Kathy described him as a consummate "bullshitter."

The son of a mailman and a jewelry buyer, Ed was born into a middle class family in Poughkeepsie, NY on October 10, 1924. His mostly unremarkable childhood was changed forever when his father gave him a movie camera for his eleventh birthday. Eddie also claimed that his penchant for dressing in drag stemmed from his childhood. Supposedly, his mother Lillian would dress him as in girls' clothes as a peculiar form of punishment throughout his formative years. This is yet another unsubstantiated story in the legend of Ed Wood.

The camera fueled Eddie's obsession with cinema that had begun with his viewing of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi in 1931. The cross-dressing, meanwhile, became a lifelong habit for Ed and a major theme in his work as both a director and writer. One could argue that the fetishizing of all things feminine -- not only women's clothing, but their hair, makeup, jewelry, movement, physiognomy and physical contours -- is the defining characteristic of Ed's films and novels. While a few of Ed's characters dealt with the issue of transvestism directly (e.g. Glen in 1953's Glen or Glenda?), many more had an obsession with "feathers, furs, and fluff," to borrow a phrase from Ed's script for Orgy of the Dead (1965).

Ed Wood's birthplace, 115 Franklin Street in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Patriotic and hungry for action, Ed joined the Marines at the age of 17 in 1942, America's first full year as a belligerent in the Second World War. He was finally discharged in 1946.

The war had not extinguished the romantic, movie-loving side of Ed Wood's personality. Far from it. He was still an enthusiastic "idea man" and a handsome, dapper young gentleman in the Errol Flynn tradition when he made the trip west to California to pursue his show business aspirations in the late '40s. With no connections whatsoever in Hollywood, Ed began his new life as a stage actor. Within a year, he had made two very important professional associations: one with Monogram Pictures cameraman Ray Flin, who would become the first major cinematographer of Ed's career, and the other with fellow actor John Crawford Thomas, with whom Ed briefly formed a production company.

It is with Flin and Thomas that Ed made his first film in Hollywood (he'd made home movies as a child, but nothing of significance), so it is there we begin our journey into the filmography of Edward D. Wood, Jr.


CROSSROADS OF LAREDO (1948)

Don Nagel as Tex in Crossroads of Laredo (1948). Ruth McCabe comforts him.

Alternate title: The Streets of Laredo

Availability: The Haunted World of World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Image DVD, 1996) [buy it]

The backstory: As a child, Ed was especially interested in cowboy movies and attended them regularly, so it is natural that his first attempt at filmmaking would be in the western genre. Ed wrote, directed, co-produced, and acted in this feature, but it would never be completed or released in his lifetime. Ed shot the film without sync sound and, according to all participants, got every bit of footage he needed to tell the story. He intended to add, according to Rudolph Grey's book, "cowboy ballads and sparse dubbed dialogue" on the soundtrack, but this was never carried out. Stories differ as to why. Actor Chuck La Berge, who played the Sheriff in the film, claimed that producer and financier John Crawford Thomas was "nutty as a fruitcake" and "on dope" at the time. Thomas says that he simply ran out of money (which embarrassed his family) and that Ed just left the fledgling production company without even saying goodbye.

Though Eddie was proud of Crossroads and would speak of it often to friends and associates, this film would not see the light of day for nearly half a century. In 1996, the "completed" Crossroads of Laredo, assembled into its final form by Thomas, finally surfaced as a special feature on the DVD of a documentary about Ed. To the existing silent footage, Thomas added a credits sequence, an introduction featuring himself and Dolores Fuller, Ed's longtime girlfriend and occasional star, plus a new soundtrack with a few sound effects, narration by country singer Cliffie Stone (who died just two years later) and a few songs written by Fuller and sung by the eccentric Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr., who claims to be the illegitimate child of Elvis Presley.

An effective image: Tex's death.

The viewing experience: Crossroads is very primitive and somewhat of a chore to watch, even at 23 minutes. One commentator, director-actor Ted Newsom, astutely observed that, while filmed in 1948, the production looks like it was made in 1918. Very often, Cliffie Stone's folksy voice-over is the only thing which gives the film any narrative cohesion at all. It feels like someone showing home movies of a family vacation and trying to explain the footage to people who weren't there.

Viewers will probably be most interested in the participation of two actors who would become regular members of Ed Wood's repertory company. The hero, Lem, is played by Duke Moore, who would turn up in five more Wood films, with very prominent roles in Plan 9 from Outer Space, Final Curtain, and Night of the Ghouls. Nagel would return in Jail Bait, Bride of the Monster, and more. Unlike Moore, Nagel actually got acting jobs outside of Ed Wood's films, appearing on episodes of The Bob Newhart Show and The Rockford Files.

The basic plot revolves around a conflict between Moore and Nagel's characters. Nagel is Tex, a murderous thief who marries sweet Barbara (Ruth McCabe) and has a child with her but then ignores her and spends all his time boozing and womanizing at the saloon. Moore is Lem, the honest man who truly loves Barbara and despises Tex. Lem kills Tex in a gunfight, then must go into hiding. He boldly appears at Tex's funeral and is taken into custody. Just as he's about to be hanged, a witness corroborates Lem's story that Tex drew his gun first, and Lem and Barbara walk into the sunset together.

Clumsy as the film is, there are one or two effective shots. I liked, for instance, an image of the dying Tex on a makeshift stretcher fashioned from a wooden door, and there is a nice moment near the end when Barbara stands alone and is silhouetted against the western skyline.

While the musical soundtrack is well-intended and a sweet attempt by Fuller to pay tribute to Ed Wood, the electric guitars and synthesizers are all wrong for a 1948 production, as is the Las Vegas crooning style of Presley, Jr. These songs should have been performed in a traditional cowboy style with only acoustic guitar as accompaniment. It is perhaps significant that the character name "Barbara" would be reused in Wood's 1953 feature debut, Glen or Glenda?, and that part would be played by Dolores Fuller herself.

Undeterred by the failure of Crossroads of Laredo, Ed Wood returned to the stage until his next screen venture and the next stop on our tour...

THE STORY-AD FILMS (1949)

Availability: YouTube [link]

The backstory: Not much is known about Ed Wood's advertising career, but Rudolph Grey's book does contain a September 18, 1949 article from a Poughkeepsie newspaper about it. The piece claims:

Edward D. Wood, Jr., former resident of Poughkeepsie, has just completed negotiations with Rene Lenoir of Switzerland, Robert Ganon, photographer of the Nazi war trials and Jack Ganon, sound technician, for the incorporation of 'Story-Ad Films,' in Hollywood, Calif. Mr. Wood, the quarter owner of the new firm, is the writer and director of all films produced by the establishment. He previously has done custom work for such national sponsors as the Dudley Steel Corp., The Aluminum Body Works, and the Crosley automobile manufacturers. 

Given Ed Wood's reputation as a notorious "bullshitter" (in the words of his own wife, Kathy), it's impossible to know how much of that story is true. But at least four commercials do exist from this era. You'll notice that they conspicuously avoid mentioning any actual brand names.

The viewing experience: These are a lot of fun -- eccentric, inventive, and naive in the best Wood tradition. Wood has made tremendous technical advances from the Crossroads of Laredo days, though the dialogue and acting are stilted in that strange way of seemingly all Ed's projects. True to the name of the company, these commercials tell miniature stories, and each has its own title. There are four little vignettes: Surprise (for used cars), Treasure and Curves (jewelry), The Bestest (footwear), and Magic Man (men's clothing).

The last is the most intriguing, as it features Wood himself in the role of a dapper magician, clearly having fun with the role. But there are amusing little details in all of them. Note that the bride-to-be in the first film is named Babs, a variation on Barbara. Treasure and Curves has a band of all-female pirates, led by the brash "Captain Kitty." And then there's The Bestest, yet another western with yet another Tex. In this one, though, instead of fighting over a girl, the two cowboys ditch the girl and go off to the shoe store together! By the way, I recognized some of the stock music in the background as having also been used by the great radio comedy team of Bob & Ray during their many soap opera parodies of the 1950s and 1960s.

The success or failure of Story-Ad Films is undocumented. I'm guessing it was a flop, since Ed's next big project would be a brief made-for-TV drama two years later....

THE SUN WAS SETTING (1951)

Alternate title: The Sun Also Sets

Availability: YouTube [link]

The backstory: Wood wrote and directed this 13-minute piece at KTTV Studios at the corner of Sunset and Van Ness in Los Angeles during the week of December 17, 1951. Ray Flin returned as cinematographer. The cast included Phyllis Coates, soon to portray Lois Lane on TV's The Adventures of Superman, in a supporting role. The lead was played by Angela Stevens, actress and sometimes model of the 1950s and early 1960s, who went on to play minor roles in two iconic films, From Here to Eternity and The Wild One (both 1953) and even appeared in one of my favorite Three Stooges shorts, He Cooked His Goose.

For serious Wood-oligsts, though, the most important cast member is ultra-bland Tom Keene, billed here as "Richard Powers," a former second-tier movie cowboy who had changed his name when his western career fizzled out. Wood, a fan of Tom's, would later have the actor revert to his old name and appear as the star of Crossroad Avenger and as a supporting player in Plan 9 from Outer Space. By the way, Ed Wood fans will instantly recognize the stock music which plays over the opening credits from its use in Glen or Glenda? That music has become so synonymous with Wood that Howard Shore even incorporated it into his marvelous score for Ed Wood (1994).

A much sexier Angela Stevens.

The viewing experience: This short film is claustrophobic and more than a little depressing, though it marks another step up in terms of technical proficiency. Angela Stevens plays June, a young woman who is confined to her New York apartment because of an "infection" and who has only a few months to live. She is visited first by her boyfriend, Paul (Keene), who is willing to marry her but is not willing to take her out clubbing or to Chinatown since that would kill her. They argue, and he leaves. Later, June is visited by her best friend, Rene, who wants to take June to dinner and a movie but, like Paul, refuses to take her out for a wild night on the town. Paul then returns and agrees to take June anywhere she wants, leading to the sad, ironic final twist. Coates and Keene are both quite flavorless and unmemorable here, but Stevens digs into the part of June with a certain ferocity.

The Sun is Setting is talky and slow-paced, sort of like the soap operas of that period, and the mood is very dispiriting and joyless. In short, this isn't much fun. June seems perfectly healthy, and the idea that this woman needs to be confined to her apartment at all times seems silly. The sets and costumes, to me, were completely inappropriate for the plot. Turn off the sound, and you'd never even know that June was sick. Those looking for quirky Wood-ian touches will want to take note of a couple of intense closeups of Angela Stevens which are rather awkwardly edited into the film and disrupt the continuity. Vintage photos reveal that Angela Stevens was quite the dish back in the 1950s, but she's given a frumpy hairdo and outfit here which spoil her appearance. Darn.

For the rest of his Hollywood career, Ed would be most closely associated with feature films. But he did make one more attempt at launching a television western...

CROSSROAD AVENGER (1953)

Ed Wood (center) poses with the cast of Crossroad Avenger.

Alternate titles: Crossroad Avenger: The Adventures of the Tucson Kid; supposedly, this film and a second (now lost) TV pilot called Crossroad Avenger Returns were edited into a 50-minute feature called The Adventures of the Tucson Kid (1953). All that exists today, though, is this single 25-minute pilot.

Availability: Big Box of Wood (S'More Entertainment DVD boxed set, 2010) [buy it]

Nine-fingered Harvey B. Dunn

The backstory: Westerns were a huge TV fad in the early 1950s, and this was Ed's failed attempt to cash in on it. Ray Flin was back as Ed's cinematographer, this time working in color! Ed wouldn't get to direct a full-length color feature for over a decade. For his star, he brought in the old reliable Tom Keene, who had starred in about 50 low-budget westerns before his studio dropped him and he changed his name to "Richard Powers." He'd been "George Duryea" at the beginning of his screen career in the 1920s and would go back to "Richard Powers" after his days with Ed were through.

According to Nightmare of Ecstasy, Ed Wood maintained that this pilot "was passed up in favor of Wild Bill Hickok with Guy Madison." While this can't be confirmed (par for the course with Ed Wood), what is unmistakable is that Crossroad Avenger is a virtual Rosetta Stone for the rest of Ed Wood's 1950s films. Here, you will find many members of Ed's stock company: stalwart character actor Lyle Talbot; D-list western baddie Kenne Duncan; seedy, withered actor-stuntman Bud Osborne; rotund, jovial Harvey B. Dunn (who had one finger missing on his left hand), and the aforementioned Don Nagel. For the role of a deputy, Wood was able to recruit another one of his cowboy icons, Tom Tyler, who was nearing the end of a 30-year-plus career.

The viewing experience: Although Keene is altogether too vanilla to be the center of attention in a weekly TV series, Crossroad Avenger is a pleasant diversion. I'm not sure why Ed Wood thought this would make for a thrilling series, but Keene's character, the Tucson Kid, works for an insurance company and makes inquiries (with his gun) when a claim seems suspicious. Somehow The Lone Insurance Investigator doesn't quite have the right ring to it. In this installment, Keene rides into a town where a saloon has burned down under fishy circumstances. He almost immediately finds himself framed for murder by Lyle Talbot's character, who perpetrated the original insurance fraud.

Our hero just barely escapes hanging, which doesn't say much for the legal system of the time. Lots of people are gunned down in these 25 busy minutes, including Dunn as a friendly but loopy "desert rat" who might have made an interesting sidekick to Keene if this had been picked up, but eventually the Tucson Kid's job is done and he can ride off to the next assignment. Competently made but not outstanding, Crossroad Avenger has plenty of violence but very little of the trademark Ed Wood insanity. Completists and cowboy fans are urged to give it a watch, though.

And that does it for this survey of Ed Wood's earliest years in Hollywood. Join us here next week for coverage of Ed's first two features: Glen or Glenda? (1953) and Jail Bait (1954).

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Poughkeepsie Odyssey, Part Two by Greg Dziawer

Ed Wood lived here at 35 Delano St. in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Miracle on Delano St.

An overhead view of Eddie's old neighborhood.

In our first Poughkeepsie Odyssey, we recently shared a few details about Ed's final residence in his home town of Poughkeepsie, NY before he left for World War II: a modest apartment at 1 Fountain Place. Previously, the historical record had only identified Ed's birthplace, another apartment house at 115 Franklin St., a structure that was torn down within the last few years. Could he have resided elsewhere in Poughkeepsie while growing up?

We'll find out in this week's Ed Wood Wednesdays!

Eddie's father and namesake, Edward Davis Wood, married Lillian C. Phillips on November 28, 1922 at the Hedding Methodist Church in Poughkeepsie, New York. Little more than a year later, Lillian was pregnant with the couple's first son, Edward Davis Wood, Jr. Flash forward a decade, and the 1940 US census record has the family living at 35 Delano St in Poughkeepsie. 

According to that same document, the Woods were already living at 35 Delano at least as early as 1935. This residence—and, yes, it's still standing—is located about six blocks north of Ed's first home on Franklin St, and roughly a quarter mile from the east end of the Mid-Hudson Bridge. 

Delano is a one-way street that bends like an elbow about halfway through. It extends east from Clover St. before abruptly changing its mind and plummeting south to Union. The Woods' former residence at 35 Delano is located right near that elbow. The entire block largely consists of apartment houses and buildings.

The apartment house itself is a sturdy colonial built in 1870 with three units—presumably a ground floor apartment and two upstairs apartments—and a fireplace. Totaling ten rooms occupying 3,000 square feet, 35 Delano contains four bathrooms for its inhabitants. In 1940, Ed's neighbors at 33 and 37 Delano respectively were: Edward L. Food, a machinist, and his wife, Anna; and Pete J. Yerganson, a laborer who lived with his mother, also named Anna, his wife, Elaine, and their nine-year-old son, Richard.

Edward Davis Wood, Sr. would have been his mid-forties by this time. He was a custodian at the local post office, a job for which he earned $1,100 in 1939. That was a high-end salary among his (entirely Caucasian) neighbors at the time. And he needed the money, since the Woods had a second child by then: Eddie's oft-overlooked younger brother Howard William Wood, who typically went by his middle name.

There's always a bit of a wrinkle in cases like this. Joseph Masterson, the census taker who recorded these details on April 22, 1940, listed Edward D. Wood, Jr. as 16 years old. If Eddie was born in October of 1924—and I believe he was—he would actually have been 15 in April of 1940.

The 1940 census lists Ed's age as 16.

Meanwhile, a wedding anniversary article for Ed's parents in the Poughkeepsie Eagle News from November 28, 1940 places the Woods at their subsequent residence, 1 Fountain Place. The family, therefore, must have moved from Delano to Fountain Place sometime between April and November of 1940.

Eddie's parents celebrate an anniversary.

Not starring: George Keseg.

Already residing at 1 Fountain Place was Ed's close high school friend, George Keseg. George worked at the Bardavon Theater, like Ed, and was in the same grade at Poughkeepsie High School. The pair enlisted into the military on the same day in 1941, with Ed dropping out of school in his junior year. George was badly injured in the war and returned to Poughkeepsie in 1944. By 1946, when Ed briefly returned home after the war before leaving Poughkeepsie for good, he attempted—apparently without success—to stage his play, The Casual Company, there, with Keseg part of the acting troupe. 

Close as they eventually became, Wood and Keseg did not grow up together. The 1940 census places George at 1 Fountain Place, but in 1935, Keseg lived in Yonkers, about 70 miles due south. By 1940, he resided with his older sister, Helene, and her family: brother-in-law Joseph Wermter (born in Germany) and George's adolescent nieces, Joanna and Janet. Incidentally, Joseph made $1,250 as a bearing grinder in 1939.

What happened in Poughkeepsie wouldn't stay in Poughkeepsie, at least not for long. Ed returned briefly to his home town after the war in 1946, but he left again and soon landed in Hollywood. He never went back. But we'll go back again, right here at Ed Wood Wednesdays!

Special thanks to my friend, expert Woodologist James Pontolillo, whose research into Ed's upbringing in Poughkeepsie infuses this article throughout. For more views of 35 Delano St., check out the Ed Wood Wednesdays Tumblr.