TOWER -- What is the Tower District? My friend William Saroyan defined it. He invented it. And now people who cannot answer the first question, ask this,"Who was William Saroyan?"
     He wrote stories and sketches about Fresno drawn from his experiences in and around this part of town. People from all over the world read him.
     Today, there is probably only one place where his books are not read, his plays not performed, his movies not shown.
     Ironically, today there are precious few in the Tower who know or even care that it was Saroyan's subtle influence that made the Tower District a beacon for the arts.
     Fewer still know of his importance in making the Tower District a place worthy of listing on the Register of Historic Places.
     In his later years he spent a lot of time hanging-out here. He was the only world famous writer who spent his formative years in the Tower District. He brought honor to us and a Pulitzer Prize for his trouble.
     He could have saved the Tower District Marketing Committee and Tower residents a lot of trouble and wasted expense. If those who say they are so concerned with the future of the Tower had ever read his books and plays or seen his movies they might have avoided the dilemma now facing down this community.
     We all might have been saved from ourselves if we were more aware of Saroyan. Now we are faced with an inescapable truth and its consequence.
     Lest we forget our past entirely, several of Saroyan's works were based upon his personal experiences in University Village, as it was known in the 1930's. He found his strongest themes in the spirit of the neighborhood, he praised the freedom here, and declared its kindness and brotherly love as human ideals for the entire world.
     The Tower District could still attract writers and playwrights from all over the world. However, the merchant committee leadership has been reluctant to change its mass marketing activities.
     Tower resident Mike Starry told the Tower News, "If the neighborhood is not safe, businesses lose. Please spread the word - Do not ever again sponsor anything youth oriented like the Mardi Gras debacle. I do not want my son anywhere near violence...Stick to safe adult programs & events or the Tower will die!"
     Saroyan, perhaps anticipated the demeaning of the Tower when he depicted himself, in 1958, as the dispassionate observer who is, "... everybody's best friend and … neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them." This is the ethic that made Tower the way it was and what could remake it that way again.
     The public record shows Saroyan was born in Fresno as the son of an Armenian father trained to be a minister in the Presbyterian Seminary. However, after arriving in New Jersey the family moved to Southern California where his father was forced to take on manual farm-labor work to feed his family.
     His father died in 1911. William Saroyan was put in an orphanage in Alameda with his brothers. Six years later the family reunited in Fresno. At the age of fifteen, his mother showed him some of his father's diaries and sermons. After reading them the younger Saroyan decided to become a writer, himself.
     Saroyan continued his education by reading books he obtained from the Carnegie Library in Fresno and found a means of earning money by writing stories from his own experiences in Fresno.
     He hawked late editions of a local newspaper as a newsboy on the Republican Corner at Van Ness and Fresno streets. He was later hired as a journalist by the newspaper. He soon found he was capable of making a living on income from sales of his writing.
     It was 14 years later that he found a publisher for his manuscript of "The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze," a story of an impoverished young Armenian writer during the economic depression of the 1930's in Fresno.
     Saroyan was a playwright whose work was drawn from deeply personal sources. The context of his knowledge was the human interaction near Fulton and Van Ness streets.
     What he learned in University Village was that the commnity was in transition. He was right. The Village would soon give rise to the Tower District. It became the essence of an upscale hang-out for an eclectic mix of college crowd and local residents of a vital neighborhood on the move.
     People began to buy land and houses north of University Ave. The movement to suburbia gained its zenith with the construction of the Tower Theatre in 1939. The Tower was suddenly sophisticated and it had arrived.
     One of Saroyan's best-known plays was published that year. The Time of Your Life! (1939) won a Pulitzer Prize. Closely following on this was sale of movie rights to his short story My Name is Aram in 1940. He then sold the film script of The Human Comedy, to MGM.
     His movies were once shown in the Tower Theatre. He was once acclaimed in Tower coffee shops as a model for writers at Fresno State College just a few blocks away.
     Later, Saroyan would publish essays and memoirs on themes and people he had encountered in the Tower District and while traveling in Europe. In the late 1960s and again in the 1970s he produced works that earned him substantial income and increased worldwide acclaim.
     Among the newer works were autobiographical sketchbooks. In his later years he moved back to Fresno acquiring a modest bungalow not far from his beloved Tower District of the old days.
     He had used his old Schwinn Bicycle for transportation to the Carnation Ice Cream Fountain on Olive. When he arrived he discovered the shop had closed and was for sale.
     He was not pleased to see what was beginning to happen to the community spirit of the area. He was secretly gratified that no one recognized him as he slowly rode the Schwinn quietly away.
   He had peddled that Schwinn all the way down West Ave. to Shaw where Swenson's Ice Cream Parlor welcomed him. He parked his Schwinn outside and walked in. He spoke a greeting to me and asked how I'd been. He ordered an ice cream. He smiled as he told me, "The Carnation is up for sale! Its a damn shame too. There goes the Tower District!"
    That was the last time I saw him.  Saroyan died on May 18, 1981 at home.

 [Editor's Note: Saroyan's personal memoirs express his life vision as shaped by his own experiences in University Village and The Tower District. His later books are The Bicycle Rider (1952), Here Comes, There Goes, You Know Who (1961), Not Dying (1963), and Obituaries (1980), was nominated for the American Book Award. His final work of reminiscence, Births (1983), was published posthumously.]

Letter to the Editor