James Lee Cobb was born into a repressive New England community in rural southeastern Connecticut called Procton. A tight, restrictive world of puritanical dogma and religious fervor worlds away from Utah Territory. Set in a remote forested valley, it was a place where the moonlight was thick and the shadows long, where isolationism and rabid xenophobia led to inbreeding, fanaticism, and dementia.
First and foremost, Procton and its environs were agricultural, farm country, and had been since the English first hewed it from the encroaching forests and wrestled it from the hands of Pequot Indians. The people there were simple, ignorant, and backward even by the standards of the early nineteenth century. They shivered by October fires when the wind clawed coldly at doors and windows and dead tree limbs scratched at rooftops. They clutched their dog-eared bibles and books of prayer, begging for divine protection from lost souls, haunts, revenants, and numerous pagan nightmares.
In everything there was omen and portent.
Folk still read tea leaves and examined the placentas of newborn calves searching for prophecy. Blood sacrifice in the form of sheep were given to ensure the harvest. But these things, of course, were done purely in secret…for the churches frowned upon them.
At night, entrances were sensibly bolted, livestock locked-down in barns, windows carefully shuttered. Horseshoes were nailed over thresholds to turn back demons, salt sprinkled in cribs and at doorways to keep witches at bay. No sane man ventured out into the midnight fields where frosted pumpkins were shrouded by ropes of fog and nebulous shapes danced in dark glades and oceans of groundmist.
Squatting in their moldering 17 ^ th century brick houses, the people of Procton mumbled White Paternoster, hung out clumps of Vervain and St. John’s Wort, and prayed to Christ on the Cross.
For evil was always afoot.
And for once, they were right…James Lee Cobb was about to come into the world.