Saroyan Friends, Fresno Boosters in ‘Hoopla’ Fight

Author William Saroyan cut a distinctive figure in the neighborhood where he spent the last years of his life: a portly man with a magnificent walrus mustache, wearing a floppy brown fedora, riding about town on a lime-green bicycle.

Saroyan, who celebrated bicycles and bicycle-riding in many of his short stories and novels, was not fond of cars. And in his later years, when he lived in a Fresno tract home, he refused to drive.

So when a local organization proposed commemorating Saroyan by naming a new freeway after him, many of his closest friends and relatives felt the gesture was inappropriate.

The freeway memorial, they say, is just one of the many tributes that cheapen Saroyan’s memory and are contrary to everything the author represented.

Way to Attract Tourists

The squabble over how best to commemorate Saroyan has divided Fresno and pitted the author’s friends and family against civic boosters hoping to use the Saroyan mystique to lure tourists.

Saroyan, a Fresno native, was a very private man. When he won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1939 play, “The Time of Your Life,” he rejected the award. In the 1970s, when Fresno officials wanted to name an elementary school after him, he rejected that, too. And while he lived in Fresno, he refused all interviews with the press.

But as soon as he died in 1981, Saroyan memorabilia began proliferating around Fresno. There are now two statues of Saroyan, three plaques and five large wooden billboards throughout town commemorating the author. Since 1985, there has been an annual William Saroyan Festival featuring a Saroyan Writing Contest, a Saroyan Town Walk, a Saroyan Folk Festival, a Saroyan Film Festival and a Saroyan-in-the-Park Band Concert.

“Bill would have detested all this Hollywood hoopla,” said Janet Saghatelian, a distant relative of Saroyan who owns an Armenian bakery in Fresno. “He didn’t like it when he was alive and he didn’t want it after his death. No family members have supported this publicity circus.”

But Ben Amirkhanian, the driving force behind memorializing Saroyan, has been undaunted by the criticism. Amirkhanian, who is backed by the Fresno Convention and Visitors Bureau, said he hopes to establish Fresno as “Saroyan Country,” in much the same way Monterey has capitalized on the legacy of John Steinbeck.

Amirkhanian, interviewed while wearing a purple William Saroyan Festival T-shirt, said Fresno does not have many celebrities to boast about. Besides Saroyan, he said, the only other famous Fresnans are former baseball player Tom Seaver and a Depression-era boxer who held the world middleweight title for three months.

“Saroyan’s still the biggest name we’ve got,” said Amirkhanian, president of the Saroyan Festival Committee, which proposed the freeway memorial. “I don’t agree with people who say we’ve overdoing it. Saroyan put Fresno on the map, so it’s only natural that we’d want to honor him in return.”

Amirkhanian, a retired post office manager who also was a major in the Army Reserves, has managed to honor more than just Saroyan. At the bottom of each bronze plaque and each Saroyan monument is the clearly embossed listing: “Maj. Benjamin V. Amirkhanian, U.S.A. Ret., Chairman . . . William Saroyan Festival Committee .”

Ruben Saroyan, the author’s cousin, said Amirkhanian has managed to get more publicity recently than William Saroyan. And, he said, he finds many of the Saroyan memorials “cheap and unnecessary.”

Billboard Memorials

One large billboard commemorating Saroyan is on a chain link fence encircling an empty lot. This is the site where Saroyan’s elementary school once stood. Another billboard graces a mustard-yellow building housing a credit union, former home of the Fresno Evening Herald, where Saroyan once sold newspapers.

“Some of these things are really reaching . . . like putting a sign in front of a room: ‘Washington once slept here,’ ” Ruben Saroyan said.

He also finds the site memorializing his cousin’s birthplace highly inappropriate. The spot is now an oil-stained patch of concrete occupied by a radiator company. In addition to a plaque on the side of the building, there is a large red, white and black sign hanging out in front: “Thomas Radiator Co. . . . Cleaning, Repairing, Recoring. . . . Saroyan Birthplace.”

In addition to being in poor taste, Ruben Saroyan said, it is also inaccurate. Amirkhanian said a friend of the author’s told him this was the birthplace. But Ruben Saroyan pulls out one of the author’s stories where he writes about his own birthplace.

It is a block away.

The controversy over how to memorialize the author began right after his death. Saroyan clearly stated in his will that he wanted the two adjacent tract houses he owned to be preserved as residences for visiting students and young writers.

But hundreds of neighbors, worried about traffic from tourists, signed a petition vowing to fight Saroyan’s plan. As a result, the Saroyan Foundation, the executors of the estate, sold the two homes.

“All the things Bill wanted to happen after his death, didn’t happen,” Saghatelian said. “And all the things he didn’t want to happen, did happen. Everything’s so turned around and contrary to his wishes.”

The foundation turned over the proceeds from the sale of the homes--about $100,000--to the Fresno Metropolitan Museum for a permanent Saroyan exhibit. The exhibit, scheduled to open on the 10th anniversary of the author’s death in 1991, will feature a complete gallery on Saroyan and will use his words to tell the history of early 20th-Century Fresno.

Opposition, Lack of Support

“We wanted to do what was right, but the neighbors were up in arms, the local county supervisor opposed the plan and Fresno State University didn’t offer support,” said Robert Setrakian, president of the foundation, which is based in San Francisco. “We decided the best alternative was using the funds for the museum.”

Ruben Saroyan is critical of Fresno residents for first opposing his cousin’s will and then capitalizing on his name to promote the city. He also is critical of the foundation “for taking the easiest and cheapest way out.”

And while many have enthusiastically promoted the author, he said, they are neglecting his most important legacy: his work.

Saroyan was a prolific writer who left about 200 unpublished plays, more than 100 unpublished short stories, about 15 unpublished novels and thousands of letters. But out of all these manuscripts, only a handful of the short stories have been published. Most of the books published since his death have been reprints of earlier works.

An investigation by the state attorney general’s office several years ago determined that the foundation moved too slowly in cataloguing the works, denying access to scholars, and that the legal fees it charged the estate were excessive.

Dispute Over Ashes

The squabbling over the author has continued unabated, and Saroyan devotees now are even bickering over the author’s ashes.

Half of his ashes are in Soviet Armenia and the other half are in a bronze urn in a Fresno cemetery. But friends of Saroyan want to move the Fresno ashes to a local Armenian cemetery and build a monument there. The foundation, which has legal control of the ashes, finds the proposal unseemly, however.

The nature of the dispute is so odd that friends of the author have suggested that if Saroyan were alive today, he probably would write a short story about it.

While Fresno always has been quick to boast about Saroyan, the author, in his early years, rarely expressed much enthusiasm for his home town.

“The first purpose of my life after I reached the age of 10 or 11,” Saroyan wrote, “was to get away from Fresno as soon as possible.”

Saroyan was born in 1908 in Fresno--which he called “the ugly little city”--the youngest of four children of an Armenian immigrant couple. When Saroyan was 3, his father died and his mother placed her children in an Oakland orphanage for four years until she earned enough money to support the family.

The family was reunited in Fresno when Saroyan was 8, and they moved into a small house in the old Armenian Town neighborhood. Saroyan was an indifferent student, eventually dropping out of school at 15. He began delivering telegrams by bicycle, the same occupation as Homer Macauley in his best-known novel, “The Human Comedy.”

Wrote Without Recognition

At 18, Saroyan fulfilled his boyhood goal and finally left Fresno. He moved to San Francisco, obtained a job as a clerk in a telegraph office and began writing at a phenomenal pace, which he kept up for almost a decade, even though he was unpublished and unrecognized.

He received his first break in 1934, when he sold the short story “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” A few months later, the story became the centerpiece and title of his first book, a collection of short stories that quickly became a best seller.

During the next few years he produced dozens of stories and a number of popular plays. Some of Saroyan’s most enduring works are his early stories about Armenians in Fresno, based on his childhood recollections or the experiences of his relatives. These poignant and often humorous tales describe life in the old Armenian Town neighborhood, sentimental sketches of the eccentricities and customs of a disinherited people adapting to a new country.

By the early 1940s, Saroyan became one of America’s most acclaimed writers. “The Time of Your Life,” a play about the colorful characters in a San Francisco waterfront tavern, was the first work ever awarded both the New York Drama Critic’s Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the next few years he wrote several other plays that were well received on Broadway.

But after World War II, Saroyan fell out of favor with the literary Establishment, and his work was criticized for being too sentimental, verbose and undisciplined. Saroyan, noted for his enormous self-confidence and his contempt for critics, was undaunted.

After a British critic panned his writing for lacking structure, Saroyan responded, “You can’t expect an Armenian to be an Englishman.”

Drinking, Gambling Problems

Despite the criticism of his work, Saroyan continued to have commercial success. But personal problems began interfering with his writing, and the 1950s were a low period for him. He was recovering from a painful divorce and was plagued by drinking and gambling problems.

His fortunes improved after he brought his drinking and gambling under control and, after moving to Malibu, he sold a number of plays to television. In 1964, he bought two adjacent homes in Fresno--one to live in and one for storage--and finally reconciled with his home town. “The memories of childhood that Bill wrote about so well weren’t in Malibu or San Francisco,” said Ruben Saroyan. “They were here, in Fresno. As Bill got older, he wanted to be around those memories.”