To her, Thomas Pynchon is just Tom

[Dave Monroe]

To her, Thomas Pynchon is just Tom

Phyllis Gebauer, who with her late husband befriended the author in
the 1960s, has donated the couple's collection of inscribed Pynchon
first editions to UCLA Extension.

May 27, 2011|By Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer


In the early 1960s, Phyllis Gebauer and her husband, Fred, were living
in Seattle. She was a Spanish teacher, and he was a mechanical
engineer doing defense contract work at Boeing that he couldn't really
discuss. At a party celebrating a mutual friend's new piano, the two
met a technical writer employed at another part of Boeing doing work
that he also couldn't discuss. His name was Thomas Pynchon.

Fred and Tom began clowning around at the party. At one point they
reached into the piano and plucked out the "Yogi Bear" theme song on
its strings — "which did not delight the host," Phyllis Gebauer said
recently.

The relationship between Pynchon and the Gebauers lasted over the
years. It was based on a strange combination: a shared reticence
paired with playfulness. And a fondness for charades. In the early
days of their friendship, Pynchon didn't tell the Gebauers that he was
writing a novel. They only found out when an inscribed copy of his
first book, "V," arrived in the mail in 1963. Pynchon eventually left
the aerospace business and became one of America's most famous and
reclusive writers.

But he was still Tom to the Gebauers, and after each of his books was
published he sent inscribed copies to his friends. The couple had what
is believed to be the only known collection of signed first editions
of Pynchon's works.

Phyllis Gebauer — her husband died in 1998 — recently donated the
collection to UCLA Extension, where she taught for more than two
decades. "When Tom lived in L.A., he did a lot of research at the UCLA
research library," she said. "He likes the idea of these books being
used to fund scholarships."

In a mini-memoir of the couple's relationship with Pynchon, "Tom and
Us," that was distributed at the event announcing the gift, Phyllis
writes that Pynchon and Fred used to shoot toy rockets off the roof of
their Houston house. She recalls that more than once she'd be talking
to Pynchon on the phone, hand it over to Fred when she left for one of
her graduate school classes — and return hours later to find Fred
still sitting in their knotty pine-lined family room, still talking to
Tom.

"Tom at the time was working on 'The Crying of Lot 49,' and when that
book came out and I read about his heroine — Oedipa Maas — 'layering
lasagna' at the beginning of Chapter One," Phyllis writes, "well, I
can't prove it, but hey — I'm sure that was our lasagna!"

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/27/entertainment/la-et-thomas-pynchon-20110527

Phyllis Gebauer, with Claude the pig pinata, and Thomas Pynchon waving
a peace sign from behind the door in Southern California in 1965.
(UCLA Extension, UCLA Extension)

http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2011-05/61914907.jpg