Louis Roney: Educational encounter - A true story

In the mid-’30s I was a teenager on a bicycle on the streets of Winter Park, and saw many things that intrigued me and were etched in my memory.

My parents were active in the social life of Winter Park and I knew a lot of the main players in our local social drama. The most beautiful and voluptuous woman (whom I shall call Chloe) was a friend of my mother’s, and the wife of a staid and colorless member of the academic community. The difference in the attractiveness of this man and his wife was apparent to anyone and everyone.

The most innocent-looking town can be deceiving, i.e. the same things that happen in New York or London probably go on everywhere. That strange activities went on in our placid little town were emphasized when I later read Trollope’s “Barchester Towers” early in my college studies. The banal saying, “People are the same everywhere,” is a simple truism.

In the ’30s, Winter Park’s social life changed abruptly when a titled “nobleman” (a possibly bought title by the Frenchman) and his wife leased a home on a lake here. The Noble Henri (I’ll call him) was un-swayed by the ordinary rules of the American social game: he once wore white tennis shoes with his tuxedo, explaining, “My feets hurt.” Noble Henri spoke several languages and he and his wife soon became the de rigueur social rage, lending an international flavor to what were previously modest local get-togethers.

In those pre-air conditioning days, Winter Park in summer was Dullsville, USA. The sultry, humid climate drove most people of means to the mountains of North Carolina or New England. In September, after school opened, the town perked up and boarded store windows on Park Avenue were open once again.

My family spent summers in Atlanta, where my grandmother maintained a lovely home in Ansley Park.

Over a period of time, I enjoyed a retinue of Atlanta friends. “Bill” a boy of good family, was my closest friend. He was a year older than I and introduced me to hitch-hiking, a means of transportation that was quite safe in those days, but a mode I would scarcely recommend today.

Bill suggested that we hitchhike “out west.” I had a tussle before my parents would let me undertake such a madcap adventure. It was, I admit, a pretty foolhardy undertaking to attempt for two 17-year-olds. But finally fathers and mothers gave us their OKs and Bill and I loaded our backpacks, and rode to the farthest outskirts of Atlanta on a streetcar. There we began “thumbing” our way west, an awesome trip through a dozen states with mountains, caverns, canyons, deserts, surprises and beauty around every corner.

After three weeks, Bill and I found ourselves in Hollywood, no less — home of so many of the great movie stars I had seen at the Baby Grand Theater on Park Avenue.

We actually sneaked onto the set of “Reap The Wild Wind” a movie being made with Paulette Godard, and Ray Milland. We saw a few stars on the street shopping — cool for a Winter Park kid.

Outside, at a private girls’ school on Sunset Boulevard we met a nice girl who took us home to lunch with her family in Beverly Hills.

However, the most interesting people I saw in Hollywood were not movie stars, but a couple I ran into walking down Hollywood Boulevard. They were two family friends now 3,000 miles from Winter Park and people I hardly expected to meet in California.

The couple consisted of Noble Henri and the sumptuous Chloe — sans spouses!

We stood in granitic silence for a moment and then exchanged highly embarrassed fumbling hellos.

When I returned to Winter Park, I found that the newsworthy scandal had somehow preceded us home!

Does scandalous news travel faster than sound?