The second interview: ‘My mind races’
My second interview with Raymond Horsch occurred several months later. I had an ambitious idea, one that never materialized, to write a long piece or a book about Philadelphia’s criminal underworld of the 1960s and ‘70s. Horsch had moved through that world: In 1973, his “Erotic Memoirs” film was funded with money from organized crime, Salvatore LaRussa, or “Sam the Barber;” and in 1974 he was arrested for counterfeiting $10 bills.
I wanted to feel out Horsch as a possible subject, so I asked him to lunch at a Mexican restaurant on Passyunk Avenue. He ordered a sampler of dips: hummus, tomato with goat cheese and sweet pea with ricotta. I ordered the chicken mole and put a microphone on the table. This time our recording lasted about three hours.
The first thing he asked about was our previous interview for WHYY. He described the station’s radio programming as “really weird.”
“Kind of amazing that they played it,” Horsch said. “Was that something you were trying to slip by them?”
“No, no,” I said. “That’s something they were fully aware of.”
Again, Horsch was hesitant at first, unsure of the point of this interview. He did not know what I wanted, and, to be honest, neither did I. I was fishing for possible stories.
He told me he often struggled to converse with other people.
“When somebody asks me a question like, ‘How are you?’ a lot of times I interpret that as this big, philosophical, existential thing. I go into this thing: ‘Well, how am I?’ which can be kind of maddening,” he explained. “My mind kind of races. Even with the most ordinary conversation, I’m constantly going off into tangents and kind of getting lost and I lose track of where the conversation actually is.”
The early years of R.C. Horsch
Horsch grew up in Philadelphia and Stroudsburg in Bucks County, where his father owned a farm.
“I grew up in an idyllic [place], except that it wasn’t,” he said. “I spent my childhood shoveling shit.”
He left his father’s farm and “wandered around a bit,” mostly moving between New York City and Philadelphia.
Horsch said that at 21 he was in Philadelphia working for Louis Kellman Studios, a film processing company on the 1700 block of Sansom Street that processed daily news camera footage for most of the city’s TV stations in the 1950s, before video. It also produced industrial films and the occasional feature. He said he worked on the 1957 Jayne Mansfield film “The Burglar.”
“I was an independent contractor. I did technical stuff, special effects such as it was back then,” he said. “Mostly consisted of shooting titles. A lot of industrial work.”
From there Horsch worked with the security and investigations company Wackenhut. He said he was hired to install surveillance equipment, including hidden cameras and telephone bugs. He said he worked on some surveillance projects associated with the FBI.
Horsch spoke with remarkable technical detail about electronics, photography, chemistry and aviation, but said he always had difficulty holding down a job.
“I was a very bad employee, and I got fired a lot, so I ended up being an independent contractor,” he said. “I did a lot of technical stuff for engineering companies. I was a design draftsman, illustrator, made maps, mostly things involving a little bit of artistic talent and a little bit of technical knowledge.”
”I went for an interview and actually got hired by this company in Malvern,” Horsch said about a job he got in 1972 with what is now the electronics firm Vishay Intertechnology.
“They were taking me around and on a tour of the place and introducing me to all the people that I’d be working with. Eventually got around to this guy, I have no idea what his name was, but they introduced him as somebody who would be my superior,” he said. “I started thinking about that and had a vaguely psychotic moment. The idea that this person would be my superior was not something that I was ready to accept, so I just turned around and walked out.”
The memory pushed Horsch into a short moment of self-reflection. He was aware of the narrative potential of his life story.
“Probably phrased better that could be a funny story,” he said. “Or an illustration of my ego problems.”