In the summer of 1965 my grandmother who lived with us took a six-week summer trip to Washington State. It had been her longest and most ambitious trip to date. Normally she took one or two trips a year with her older sister, Jess. They would vacation in western Massachusetts if it was summer and Florida in the winter, where they would stay with their only surviving sibling, an older brother. They were a sight---a pair of 5-foot, 1-inch elderly ladies with their Bingo night hats and valises boarding the Greyhound for Pittsfield, or on this trip, an airplane to Seattle, where they had a second cousin (or was it a first cousin once-removed?) living in Everett.
There had been a resurgence of World's Fairs or Expos in the '60s. The previous summer, my family, along with millions of others, had visited the New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadows. The Montreal Expo '67 was on the horizon. The Seattle Expo had taken place in 1962, and of course one of the largest and enduring attractions had been the Space Needle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Needle
My grandmother and great aunt were excited about visiting Seattle and The Cascades and Puget Sound, and of course the Space Needle. They had both come from Brooklyn, and for a time had been raised by Catholic nuns, because they'd lost their mother at a very early age. Jess never left Brooklyn where she was the matriarch of a large family. My grandmother had married in 1928 and emigrated from Brooklyn to North Jersey, and her descendants were smaller in number.
Here is an interesting site about Worlds Fairs and their history.
http://www.worldsfaircommunity.org/
My grandmother lived on the second floor of our house. You could hardly call her living space an upstairs "apartment"; it was more of a semi-finished half floor, or attic, with stacked up cardboard boxes and random junk, with an overwhelming odor of mildew and must. There was a plain bedroom, a practically unusable bathroom, and a central room with torn red linoleum flooring, an old sofa, TV, a mahogany coffee table and end table with lamp. That was it. My grandmother lived downstairs with the rest us during the day, but spent her evenings on the second floor. It was an enchanting but usually off-limits place for me. Sometimes I would sneak upstairs at night and sit with her for awhile. A crucifix hung above the TV and another one over her bed. Nan (as we called her) would not smoke her beloved Kent cigarettes upstairs, but would instead eat hard candy as she watched Lawrence Welk or some other variety show of the era. She would always give me candy, and she also pressed dollar bills into my hand with the stern warning not to tell my mother, as if I were a spy and the money was some secret code or plan I needed to carry with me behind enemy lines . . .
While my grandmother was away my mother often took the opportunity to clean out the years of detritus that had accumulated over a few family moves and the blending of stuff from her mother's house with her own. Occasionally I dared to venture upstairs myself. I had never been in the bedroom before. I remember a rosary on her bureau, and an old photograph of my grandmother as a young woman, possibly in her teens. She looked quite pretty in that portrait. The ceilings sloped, the wallpaper was corrugated and yellowed from dampness, the bed was a twin. My grandmother, now in her mid-60s, had been a a widow for over 10 years and had only one child who'd been stricken with polio at the age of 12, and then the child later married at age 18, already pregnant . . . this room was a lonely place to be.
But unlike most of my friends, I had never lived on a second floor, and I was always mystified at the way in which more of the world was revealed to me from the two small windows in her bedroom and two more throughout the floor. I would watch the cars and buses---altered and scaled down---as they passed below on the street. I could see a greater number of houses and yards, and people going about their daily routines, and I felt more omniscient and privileged gazing down from this second-story, almost dizzying, height . . . I must have been seven or eight years old when I'd first come up here, a time in my life rich in epic dreams. There were storage cubbyholes below the sloped eaves, and you could enter them through a weirdly-angled door, like a door in a play house, a little skewed and unreal, and the space in there was dark and dusty, and you could not see too much. Soon after discovering the cubbyhole, I had a recurring dream of entering these tight spaces, but the spaces would expand into long passageways that I would follow and eventually emerge onto a higher floor, and then reenter the passageway and come out on an even higher floor. On the third floor all the furniture was draped in long veils of light blue silk, and on the fourth floor there appeared enormous beds and sofas and ottomans of fine linen with green and gold embroidery---white, open and airy rooms---and by the sixth, or maybe seventh floor, I would emerge from the passageway into a realm of mostly formless and heavenly illumination.
When my grandmother returned from Washington State (and the Space Needle), I remembered asking her about her trip.
"It was such beautiful country out there," she'd said, elated, her life changed, her horizons broadened, "and every place you go the people treat you so nice."
She lived to the age of 94.
Memory is not a single lane; it's more like a highway. All names used in this blog have been changed.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Halloween '74
I had been in Portland, Oregon less than two months, living in the upstairs of a house with the Lane Brothers and Sam Clemens when we had a Halloween party for the neighbors. As newcomers in a strange city some 3000 miles from where we'd grown up, we had thought the party would be a good way to meet some people (girls) and gain some new friends (girls).
We had gotten friendly with a pair of guys who lived on the first floor. In those early days in Portland we'd spent many a night at the Belmont Tavern playing pool and eating bar pies. The downstairs neighbors both went to Lewis and Clark College. Dale was a music major and Mark was studying Serbo-Croatian language. They had lived in the neighborhood longer and suggested some folks to invite to the party.
It wasn't a large turnout. I remember we had a keg. Sam Clemens had a bozo mask and another friend showed up dressed in drag, which had proved interesting because at the time no one guessed that a few months later he'd come out. There were a couple of girls from the neighborhood and one was very pretty, but they were local and homespun, and our shared experience diverged in a number of ways. Still, it hadn't been a bad idea to invite them.
One of the strangest characters at the party was a poet who'd looked as if he'd stepped out of Medieval or Renaissance England. He had long neat hair cut like a knight's (or false representations of such) and a finely trimmed Vandyke beard. We had recently met his girlfriend in the neighborhood and invited them to the Halloween party. I recalled seeing the poet with his girlfriend playing pool at the aforementioned Belmont Tavern. The poet (a composer of sonnets, or vilanelles, or epics, I guess) told me he'd been reading all the novels of Sir Walter Scott. His girlfriend, who was beautiful and Jewish, made me think of Rebecca in Ivanhoe, which as we all know, was a thinly concealed attack on antisemitism in England dressed up as a tale of knights and jousting. Had Rebecca been the reincarnation of Sir Walter Scott's girlfriend for that reason? I couldn't tell. I noticed he seemed to have a mesmerizing effect on people, especially women. He also coveted my collection of Poe's complete works, 10 pocket-sized hardbound volumes printed in 1904 with an illustration or engraving, some by famous artists, on the front of each book. I had acquired the set in 1972 for 50 cents (a nickel a book) at a flea market. The poet held one or two in his hands, and with a wicked gleam in his eye, not unlike Rasputin or Svengali, or Mesmer or Manson, he offered to buy the collection for considerably more money than I had paid. It was a little uncanny and disturbing the way he tried to will the Poe books away from me. And it was Halloween, after all. I stubbornly held firm and refused to part with Poe. I still have those books.
But the biggest and funniest and scariest star of the party was a full-sized skeleton we had named Abdul. I forget the connection but the skeleton was on loan to us from someone Lane knew at Reed College and supposedly the skeleton was of a middle-eastern man, but to our untrained eye that would have been difficult to corroborate. For the Halloween party we propped the skeleton (Abdul) next to the keg and he was a big hit. And we kept him for a few weeks after Halloween which gave us further amusement.We took lots of photos---the skeleton sitting on the couch with us, wearing a hat, a lit cigarette in one hand, a can of beer in the other. Or the most bizarre thing we did was to take the skeleton with us on joy rides through the city. We would seat Abdul in the passenger's seat, one "bony" arm crooked on the open window. This play of the unexpected got quite a few reactions from other drivers, especially the ones stopped to the right of our car at a traffic light. Looking back on it, the humor seems in rather poor taste, and juvenile, but we were adolescents, or post-adolescents back then and in a strange far away rainy city on Halloween.
We had gotten friendly with a pair of guys who lived on the first floor. In those early days in Portland we'd spent many a night at the Belmont Tavern playing pool and eating bar pies. The downstairs neighbors both went to Lewis and Clark College. Dale was a music major and Mark was studying Serbo-Croatian language. They had lived in the neighborhood longer and suggested some folks to invite to the party.
It wasn't a large turnout. I remember we had a keg. Sam Clemens had a bozo mask and another friend showed up dressed in drag, which had proved interesting because at the time no one guessed that a few months later he'd come out. There were a couple of girls from the neighborhood and one was very pretty, but they were local and homespun, and our shared experience diverged in a number of ways. Still, it hadn't been a bad idea to invite them.
One of the strangest characters at the party was a poet who'd looked as if he'd stepped out of Medieval or Renaissance England. He had long neat hair cut like a knight's (or false representations of such) and a finely trimmed Vandyke beard. We had recently met his girlfriend in the neighborhood and invited them to the Halloween party. I recalled seeing the poet with his girlfriend playing pool at the aforementioned Belmont Tavern. The poet (a composer of sonnets, or vilanelles, or epics, I guess) told me he'd been reading all the novels of Sir Walter Scott. His girlfriend, who was beautiful and Jewish, made me think of Rebecca in Ivanhoe, which as we all know, was a thinly concealed attack on antisemitism in England dressed up as a tale of knights and jousting. Had Rebecca been the reincarnation of Sir Walter Scott's girlfriend for that reason? I couldn't tell. I noticed he seemed to have a mesmerizing effect on people, especially women. He also coveted my collection of Poe's complete works, 10 pocket-sized hardbound volumes printed in 1904 with an illustration or engraving, some by famous artists, on the front of each book. I had acquired the set in 1972 for 50 cents (a nickel a book) at a flea market. The poet held one or two in his hands, and with a wicked gleam in his eye, not unlike Rasputin or Svengali, or Mesmer or Manson, he offered to buy the collection for considerably more money than I had paid. It was a little uncanny and disturbing the way he tried to will the Poe books away from me. And it was Halloween, after all. I stubbornly held firm and refused to part with Poe. I still have those books.
But the biggest and funniest and scariest star of the party was a full-sized skeleton we had named Abdul. I forget the connection but the skeleton was on loan to us from someone Lane knew at Reed College and supposedly the skeleton was of a middle-eastern man, but to our untrained eye that would have been difficult to corroborate. For the Halloween party we propped the skeleton (Abdul) next to the keg and he was a big hit. And we kept him for a few weeks after Halloween which gave us further amusement.We took lots of photos---the skeleton sitting on the couch with us, wearing a hat, a lit cigarette in one hand, a can of beer in the other. Or the most bizarre thing we did was to take the skeleton with us on joy rides through the city. We would seat Abdul in the passenger's seat, one "bony" arm crooked on the open window. This play of the unexpected got quite a few reactions from other drivers, especially the ones stopped to the right of our car at a traffic light. Looking back on it, the humor seems in rather poor taste, and juvenile, but we were adolescents, or post-adolescents back then and in a strange far away rainy city on Halloween.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Saturday Odyssey
On Saturday mornings in September and October I would often wake up early and meet up with two or three friends to have breakfast. There was a Walgreen's near my house and at the time Walgreen's had a soda fountain and grill connected to their drugstore. They served a "breakfast special" 2 eggs, bacon, home fries, toast and coffee for only 59 cents. I was smoking back then, at the age of 13, and usually, after one of these fine breakfasts, I would get a coffee to go and have it outside the store with my cigarette. It's almost impossible to recapture the sensory rush of smoking a cigarette with a steaming cup of coffee on a cool September or October morning.
What was best about Saturdays at this time of life, and younger, was that the day, unencumbered by school, or church, or Sunday dinner, was an 8- or 9-hour Odyssey. If you started out around 8:00 in the morning, you found yourself by 4:00 in the afternoon at a place you could not have foreseen. The location was unimportant: maybe you were at the stores, or in the park playing football, or helping a friend rake leaves, or walking home from the woods or those fields I had once burned down. The fascinating part was trying to recall how you got there, realizing how many different stories, and connections with different kids or people and changes had occurred since early in the day, the less eventful spots already nearly forgotten, discarded from the narrative, or maybe kept for the purpose of transition to a more eventful scene---say, an hour or two with a girlfriend.
Like in the Spring, the air and light by late afternoon had taken on a mystical quality, which made the concatenation of scenes and experiences and sensations (and the linking of scenes), made the recollected Saturday Odyssey all the more compelling, all the more transcendent and mysterious. And years later, with any random play of light and shadow, or a change of season, or a stray sound or a smell, a gesture even, we return to the old places once again. We never really leave them, do we?
What was best about Saturdays at this time of life, and younger, was that the day, unencumbered by school, or church, or Sunday dinner, was an 8- or 9-hour Odyssey. If you started out around 8:00 in the morning, you found yourself by 4:00 in the afternoon at a place you could not have foreseen. The location was unimportant: maybe you were at the stores, or in the park playing football, or helping a friend rake leaves, or walking home from the woods or those fields I had once burned down. The fascinating part was trying to recall how you got there, realizing how many different stories, and connections with different kids or people and changes had occurred since early in the day, the less eventful spots already nearly forgotten, discarded from the narrative, or maybe kept for the purpose of transition to a more eventful scene---say, an hour or two with a girlfriend.
Like in the Spring, the air and light by late afternoon had taken on a mystical quality, which made the concatenation of scenes and experiences and sensations (and the linking of scenes), made the recollected Saturday Odyssey all the more compelling, all the more transcendent and mysterious. And years later, with any random play of light and shadow, or a change of season, or a stray sound or a smell, a gesture even, we return to the old places once again. We never really leave them, do we?
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Paper Oy
Traffic increases on the Memory Highway at certain times of the year. September and Fall would be one of those times, with being back in school, night and darkness coming on much earlier, games of manhunt in the chill air, and the sounds of marching bands coming from a football field somewhere . . . Although much of what follows used to take place in the fall, it also spanned the other seasons too.
Larry Leeper was the paper boy in my neighborhood from the time I was in 4th grade through 6th or 7th grade. Leeper was three years older than me and for a couple years I helped him as an assistant on his paper route. "Helping" him amounted to my doing the majority of the work, after he'd come back from the dispatcher with the two pannier baskets on his bicycle loaded with folded papers and a burlap bag stuffed with folded papers slung across his handle bars. I would take the heavy bag and lug it down the street, pausing at each customer's house to either place the paper on the front porch or, if there were special instructions, leave the paper inside the front door, or side door, or breezeway or patio. I helped Larry Leeper every day after school during the school year and often in the summer when we delivered papers in the early afternoon. He paid me a paltry fraction of what he made from his route, abused me with little games of torture which will be disclosed, and, to rub salt into my wounds, made me go around door-to-door with him when he was collecting on Thursday evenings as an inducement for my getting a measly dollar or two, if that. I needed the candy and soda money.
As it turned out, "collecting" was a fascinating business interaction with adults, a real eye opener into the harsh realities of the world. Elderly women with gin on their breath, dressed in fuzzy bathrobes, staggering to the door, saying what nice boys we were, but would we mind coming back next week to get paid? Other women and men whining about missed deliveries and threatening to stop service. Loud, bitter-with-their-lot-in-life men, some drunk, cracking ribald jokes or telling endless stories of The Depression, or The War, or past feats of derring-do, their faces flushed with road maps of veins. And there were the every day curmudgeons who didn't answer the door but sent their German Shepherds as willing emissaries. Leeper had a stack of cards attached to a metal ring about as large as a horse tether, but thinner. Each card was for a customer, and when a customer paid for our services and the daily delivery of his/her newspaper, Leeper made a heavy pencil (no. 2) mark on the card. I seem to recall that if the customer missed two weeks payment, they were given a warning; if they missed three weeks, they were warned that delivery would discontinue by the following week, and by the fourth week delivery would stop altogether if there was no payment for the current week and all the skipped weeks. Unfortunately, no one took a kid, or a pair of kids, seriously who were trying to politely persuade them to cough up a few dollars like good citizens for the privilege and enjoyment of having a finely written, finely edited and printed newspaper delivered to their doorstep each evening.
Most evening newspapers, or morning and evening editions of daily papers clearly have left us. In fact the existence of major newspapers and print media in general has been seriously undermined in the Digital Age, and it is no revelation. Around the time I was helping Larry Leeper with his paper route, New York City had at least two other dailies long gone: "The Journal American" and "The New York Herald Tribune" Extra! Read all about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Herald_Tribune
Northern Jersey had the Star Ledger, but right outside New York City where I grew up, "The Bergen Record" was the most popular paper and the one I helped deliver. In the morning, you got "The New York Daily News" and in the afternoon, it was "The Bergen Record." Think they still might be in print.
Larry Leeper treated me as one of his unfortunate charges and told me in a big-brotherly way that he was always looking out for my welfare. Like a big brother, he abused me accordingly. Sometimes, when we were nearly at the end of the route, he would make me stop at a basketball net on a side street near his house and play a game of one-on-one with him. He was 14 years old, about 5-foot, 8 inches tall, and I was 10 years old and 4-foot, 11 inches---a fair match up in Leeper's eyes. He would also make me practice boxing with him: guard with the left, jab with the right, and when you had an opening, swing and punch with the left. I took some shots to the head, but I guess I learned a few things, like stop letting this idiot push you around.
But the cruelest torture was reserved for Winter. My hands were so frozen and red all the time, whether you were wearing your gloves or not (gloves were usually the cheap cloth variety and would become soaked with snow and therefore worthless). Leeper had a good left arm. He displayed his pitching prowess for me by directing a snowball to a high street lamp across the road. The snowball made a lovely arc and hit the lamp with a shatter and brief cascade of crystal powder. As I delivered papers with my freezing hands, Leeper would pack perfectly spherical snowballs with his highest quality gloves---they were really a marvel to look at (the snowballs not the gloves). Then, once I'd dropped the paper in a door or inserted in a mail slot, Leeper would tell me to start running while he counted to 5---fast. I was usually nailed with one of his ice missiles, and the worst spot to be hit was the back of the neck, because even wearing my winter coat and cloth cap some of the ice managed to slide down into my back and even sometimes further down to my waist. I should have worn a hood.
Some years later I heard that Larry Leeper lived near Phoenix and was working as an officer with the Arizona Highway Patrol. No longer having snowballs at his disposal, I guess Leeper had to settle for writing tickets and fines instead.
Larry Leeper was the paper boy in my neighborhood from the time I was in 4th grade through 6th or 7th grade. Leeper was three years older than me and for a couple years I helped him as an assistant on his paper route. "Helping" him amounted to my doing the majority of the work, after he'd come back from the dispatcher with the two pannier baskets on his bicycle loaded with folded papers and a burlap bag stuffed with folded papers slung across his handle bars. I would take the heavy bag and lug it down the street, pausing at each customer's house to either place the paper on the front porch or, if there were special instructions, leave the paper inside the front door, or side door, or breezeway or patio. I helped Larry Leeper every day after school during the school year and often in the summer when we delivered papers in the early afternoon. He paid me a paltry fraction of what he made from his route, abused me with little games of torture which will be disclosed, and, to rub salt into my wounds, made me go around door-to-door with him when he was collecting on Thursday evenings as an inducement for my getting a measly dollar or two, if that. I needed the candy and soda money.
As it turned out, "collecting" was a fascinating business interaction with adults, a real eye opener into the harsh realities of the world. Elderly women with gin on their breath, dressed in fuzzy bathrobes, staggering to the door, saying what nice boys we were, but would we mind coming back next week to get paid? Other women and men whining about missed deliveries and threatening to stop service. Loud, bitter-with-their-lot-in-life men, some drunk, cracking ribald jokes or telling endless stories of The Depression, or The War, or past feats of derring-do, their faces flushed with road maps of veins. And there were the every day curmudgeons who didn't answer the door but sent their German Shepherds as willing emissaries. Leeper had a stack of cards attached to a metal ring about as large as a horse tether, but thinner. Each card was for a customer, and when a customer paid for our services and the daily delivery of his/her newspaper, Leeper made a heavy pencil (no. 2) mark on the card. I seem to recall that if the customer missed two weeks payment, they were given a warning; if they missed three weeks, they were warned that delivery would discontinue by the following week, and by the fourth week delivery would stop altogether if there was no payment for the current week and all the skipped weeks. Unfortunately, no one took a kid, or a pair of kids, seriously who were trying to politely persuade them to cough up a few dollars like good citizens for the privilege and enjoyment of having a finely written, finely edited and printed newspaper delivered to their doorstep each evening.
Most evening newspapers, or morning and evening editions of daily papers clearly have left us. In fact the existence of major newspapers and print media in general has been seriously undermined in the Digital Age, and it is no revelation. Around the time I was helping Larry Leeper with his paper route, New York City had at least two other dailies long gone: "The Journal American" and "The New York Herald Tribune" Extra! Read all about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Herald_Tribune
Northern Jersey had the Star Ledger, but right outside New York City where I grew up, "The Bergen Record" was the most popular paper and the one I helped deliver. In the morning, you got "The New York Daily News" and in the afternoon, it was "The Bergen Record." Think they still might be in print.
Larry Leeper treated me as one of his unfortunate charges and told me in a big-brotherly way that he was always looking out for my welfare. Like a big brother, he abused me accordingly. Sometimes, when we were nearly at the end of the route, he would make me stop at a basketball net on a side street near his house and play a game of one-on-one with him. He was 14 years old, about 5-foot, 8 inches tall, and I was 10 years old and 4-foot, 11 inches---a fair match up in Leeper's eyes. He would also make me practice boxing with him: guard with the left, jab with the right, and when you had an opening, swing and punch with the left. I took some shots to the head, but I guess I learned a few things, like stop letting this idiot push you around.
But the cruelest torture was reserved for Winter. My hands were so frozen and red all the time, whether you were wearing your gloves or not (gloves were usually the cheap cloth variety and would become soaked with snow and therefore worthless). Leeper had a good left arm. He displayed his pitching prowess for me by directing a snowball to a high street lamp across the road. The snowball made a lovely arc and hit the lamp with a shatter and brief cascade of crystal powder. As I delivered papers with my freezing hands, Leeper would pack perfectly spherical snowballs with his highest quality gloves---they were really a marvel to look at (the snowballs not the gloves). Then, once I'd dropped the paper in a door or inserted in a mail slot, Leeper would tell me to start running while he counted to 5---fast. I was usually nailed with one of his ice missiles, and the worst spot to be hit was the back of the neck, because even wearing my winter coat and cloth cap some of the ice managed to slide down into my back and even sometimes further down to my waist. I should have worn a hood.
Some years later I heard that Larry Leeper lived near Phoenix and was working as an officer with the Arizona Highway Patrol. No longer having snowballs at his disposal, I guess Leeper had to settle for writing tickets and fines instead.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
The Graces
True, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer
-- Rilke
I barely knew the Graces family. Rollo and Vincent were both ahead of me in school and well known, and hardly knew me, if at all, which often happens between older and younger kids in school. My first sight of Rollo was the back of his leather jacket with some Greek club lettering stitched upon it. He was at least five years older than me and nearly out of high school, a tall good-looking kid in tight black jeans and boots with the silver zippers on the side, a pack of smokes in his shirt pocket. He had wiry-to-curly hair depending on the length and had a darker complexion. His younger brother Vincent was also tall but slightly gangly, and not as good looking as Rollo, but still popular with the girls. My best friend’s older sister, who had a beehive hair-do for a while and then one that looked like Leslie Gore, and let us play her records, knew the Grace Brothers because they were part of a crowd known in those days as “hoods.” Rollo sometimes hung with this crowd and also the club whose letters were embroidered on his jacket, but he had no real affiliations and was his own person---an individual who was popular at the same time.
I didn’t know the Grace parents, or anything about them, until one fall dance at the middle school, some time in mid- or late September. That’s when I heard that the mother, Mrs. Grace, had just died, and I saw their father for the first time because he managed Rollo’s rock-and-roll band and they were playing that night at the dance (there had recently been talk of a record deal). Why the son and his band were playing so soon after the mother’s death was anyone’s guess. No one had any details. It was late 1964, “Hullabaloo” and “Shindig” era. The band was very tight with theatrics by Rollo, who sang lead and played bass. During one number, Rollo jumped off the stage, and sliding over to a group of beehive-hair girls wearing silver lipstick, he quickly executed a cartwheel that ended in a split. As if rehearsed, the girls shrieked, and needless to say they were drawn to him, not only for his looks, but for his pain too. His mother had just died.
But before anyone had been let into the dance that night, in the great swelling murmur of conversation outside the doors in the auditorium hallway, a few of those same girls had gossiped among themselves, saying the dance should have been canceled or another band should have played. No one knew the reason. Rollo’s father, one of the few adults present (there were no chaperones), was the band’s manager, and there was talk of a record deal. Vincent was also there, dancing with some lovely girls near the stage. It seemed in poor taste; proper mourning was not being observed. Someone mentioned something about the show needing to go on because this dance was different than other school sponsored dances, the space had already been rented and auxiliary police and firemen paid for the evening. Maybe the real reason was that, even though they were all grieving, the father wanted his sons to continue doing what they did best, which was perform, and this dance may have been a diversion from the tragedy they’d suffered, and possibly would help free their thoughts, however briefly, from the sadness of losing their mother.
I met Vincent Grace once at the house of an older kid who was homosexual and used to prey on younger kids like myself. Vincent was two or three years older than me, the same age as the homosexual kid. I remember him sitting in the kitchen of this house, reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette. He wore a black leather jacket and large framed eyeglasses. He had long sideburns. I felt like I was meeting a celebrity, and I guess he was by local standards. He had a better known older brother. But though I knew Rollo was talented, I had not yet heard about Vincent.
Vincent Grace attended a county vocational school but he was clearly destined for the stage. Vocational schools weren’t known for putting on exceptional dramas or musicals, it was enough to get students to show up and keep them on the grounds without trouble until 2:30 or 3:00 each day---but this tech school had a drama department and they had staged a production of “Bye-Bye Birdie” and Vincent starred as Conrad Birdie. He garnered rave reviews in the local newspapers. Professionally, he was a cut above the rest of the cast. He was a born entertainer. Rollo and Vincent clearly had performing in their blood.
And Vincent had something else in his blood . . . Leukemia . . .
I’m not sure if this was the cancer that had taken their mother, but there had either been a family predisposition to cancer, a genetic marker, or there was an environmental risk, or both. Much of the south and west end of Wayward on its industrial borders was a toxic waste dump. The Graces may have lived near one of these radioactive dumps (Thorium had been cited in an EPA study some 15 years later). Leukemia often struck younger people, and successful bone marrow transplants were still nearly a decade away. I can recall turning the pages of my mother’s high school yearbook, seeing a few photos of beautiful young girls in the bloom of life, with their sweaters and blouses, maybe a string of pearls, and then a line of my mother’s handwriting beneath their photos: “died, leukemia,” and the year of death. But could it have been something random, a twist of fate, that had caused a mother and her youngest teenage son to die within two years of one another?
As mentioned, the Graces were popular. There were charity drives and benefits for Vincent, but Vincent went fast. He was 16 or 17.
Then, only a short time elapsed between the death of Vincent from leukemia and the death of Mr. Grace, Rollo and Vincent’s father. I must have inquired about the cause, maybe to my best friend’s older sister (who, by that time, had abandoned the beehive hair-do for a dress style that was a hybrid of that earlier period and the emerging late 60s hippie psychedelia), maybe I had asked someone else. There weren’t any specifics, but yes, as with Vincent and Mrs. Grace, the cause of Mr. Grace’s death was also cancer. If there had been a presence of cancer cells in Mr. Grace earlier on, then assuredly the deaths of his wife and youngest son hastened metastasis, pushed him toward the final stage.
I am writing about the Graces because it is hard to grasp and understand an onslaught of so much senseless and non-accidental loss in a span of a few years in the 1960s. Having lost parents in my 40s and 50s, I can’t begin to imagine what it must have felt like to have experienced that kind of loss so early on, to imagine being an extremely well known kid and musician with a mother and a father and a brother, and by the time you are at the end of your teens, not one of them is still around, and they were all around just a few years earlier. At the point of embarking on adulthood we’re often leaving our families, heading off to college, or perhaps moving out if we can afford it, but what if your family has already left you? Who do you fall back on? How would you know, as you matured, where you even came from? How does this highly unusual spate of dying shape your sense of self and your understanding of the world, when the shadow world, the world where your family has taken up residence, has been a greater force and truth? Face it, at 19 or 20 we're still mostly kids, even if some of us were living on our own, or in the military bound for Vietnam. Having matured way too quickly, Rollo, out of school, working in a record store, was essentially an orphan. Would he ever have a wife and children of his own? Would he ever want to?
A few years later I was hanging out with my girlfriend, and a friend of hers, and her boyfriend at the boyfriend’s house. During the conversation it was somehow divulged that the boyfriend’s mother’s last name was Grace, I asked if she was related to the Graces in Wayward. She said she was, and I could see some resemblance in her face, something around the mouth and deep brown eyes. We briefly talked about her family’s tragedy, the swift deaths that had taken three-fourths of her cousin's family like a modern plague. “It was tragic, so sad,” the mother had said, but she’d had no information or theories as to why the deaths had occurred. “It was just one of those things,” she had told me.
. . . but all of the living
make the mistake of drawing too sharp distinctions
-- Rilke
I barely knew the Graces family. Rollo and Vincent were both ahead of me in school and well known, and hardly knew me, if at all, which often happens between older and younger kids in school. My first sight of Rollo was the back of his leather jacket with some Greek club lettering stitched upon it. He was at least five years older than me and nearly out of high school, a tall good-looking kid in tight black jeans and boots with the silver zippers on the side, a pack of smokes in his shirt pocket. He had wiry-to-curly hair depending on the length and had a darker complexion. His younger brother Vincent was also tall but slightly gangly, and not as good looking as Rollo, but still popular with the girls. My best friend’s older sister, who had a beehive hair-do for a while and then one that looked like Leslie Gore, and let us play her records, knew the Grace Brothers because they were part of a crowd known in those days as “hoods.” Rollo sometimes hung with this crowd and also the club whose letters were embroidered on his jacket, but he had no real affiliations and was his own person---an individual who was popular at the same time.
I didn’t know the Grace parents, or anything about them, until one fall dance at the middle school, some time in mid- or late September. That’s when I heard that the mother, Mrs. Grace, had just died, and I saw their father for the first time because he managed Rollo’s rock-and-roll band and they were playing that night at the dance (there had recently been talk of a record deal). Why the son and his band were playing so soon after the mother’s death was anyone’s guess. No one had any details. It was late 1964, “Hullabaloo” and “Shindig” era. The band was very tight with theatrics by Rollo, who sang lead and played bass. During one number, Rollo jumped off the stage, and sliding over to a group of beehive-hair girls wearing silver lipstick, he quickly executed a cartwheel that ended in a split. As if rehearsed, the girls shrieked, and needless to say they were drawn to him, not only for his looks, but for his pain too. His mother had just died.
But before anyone had been let into the dance that night, in the great swelling murmur of conversation outside the doors in the auditorium hallway, a few of those same girls had gossiped among themselves, saying the dance should have been canceled or another band should have played. No one knew the reason. Rollo’s father, one of the few adults present (there were no chaperones), was the band’s manager, and there was talk of a record deal. Vincent was also there, dancing with some lovely girls near the stage. It seemed in poor taste; proper mourning was not being observed. Someone mentioned something about the show needing to go on because this dance was different than other school sponsored dances, the space had already been rented and auxiliary police and firemen paid for the evening. Maybe the real reason was that, even though they were all grieving, the father wanted his sons to continue doing what they did best, which was perform, and this dance may have been a diversion from the tragedy they’d suffered, and possibly would help free their thoughts, however briefly, from the sadness of losing their mother.
I met Vincent Grace once at the house of an older kid who was homosexual and used to prey on younger kids like myself. Vincent was two or three years older than me, the same age as the homosexual kid. I remember him sitting in the kitchen of this house, reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette. He wore a black leather jacket and large framed eyeglasses. He had long sideburns. I felt like I was meeting a celebrity, and I guess he was by local standards. He had a better known older brother. But though I knew Rollo was talented, I had not yet heard about Vincent.
Vincent Grace attended a county vocational school but he was clearly destined for the stage. Vocational schools weren’t known for putting on exceptional dramas or musicals, it was enough to get students to show up and keep them on the grounds without trouble until 2:30 or 3:00 each day---but this tech school had a drama department and they had staged a production of “Bye-Bye Birdie” and Vincent starred as Conrad Birdie. He garnered rave reviews in the local newspapers. Professionally, he was a cut above the rest of the cast. He was a born entertainer. Rollo and Vincent clearly had performing in their blood.
And Vincent had something else in his blood . . . Leukemia . . .
I’m not sure if this was the cancer that had taken their mother, but there had either been a family predisposition to cancer, a genetic marker, or there was an environmental risk, or both. Much of the south and west end of Wayward on its industrial borders was a toxic waste dump. The Graces may have lived near one of these radioactive dumps (Thorium had been cited in an EPA study some 15 years later). Leukemia often struck younger people, and successful bone marrow transplants were still nearly a decade away. I can recall turning the pages of my mother’s high school yearbook, seeing a few photos of beautiful young girls in the bloom of life, with their sweaters and blouses, maybe a string of pearls, and then a line of my mother’s handwriting beneath their photos: “died, leukemia,” and the year of death. But could it have been something random, a twist of fate, that had caused a mother and her youngest teenage son to die within two years of one another?
As mentioned, the Graces were popular. There were charity drives and benefits for Vincent, but Vincent went fast. He was 16 or 17.
Then, only a short time elapsed between the death of Vincent from leukemia and the death of Mr. Grace, Rollo and Vincent’s father. I must have inquired about the cause, maybe to my best friend’s older sister (who, by that time, had abandoned the beehive hair-do for a dress style that was a hybrid of that earlier period and the emerging late 60s hippie psychedelia), maybe I had asked someone else. There weren’t any specifics, but yes, as with Vincent and Mrs. Grace, the cause of Mr. Grace’s death was also cancer. If there had been a presence of cancer cells in Mr. Grace earlier on, then assuredly the deaths of his wife and youngest son hastened metastasis, pushed him toward the final stage.
I am writing about the Graces because it is hard to grasp and understand an onslaught of so much senseless and non-accidental loss in a span of a few years in the 1960s. Having lost parents in my 40s and 50s, I can’t begin to imagine what it must have felt like to have experienced that kind of loss so early on, to imagine being an extremely well known kid and musician with a mother and a father and a brother, and by the time you are at the end of your teens, not one of them is still around, and they were all around just a few years earlier. At the point of embarking on adulthood we’re often leaving our families, heading off to college, or perhaps moving out if we can afford it, but what if your family has already left you? Who do you fall back on? How would you know, as you matured, where you even came from? How does this highly unusual spate of dying shape your sense of self and your understanding of the world, when the shadow world, the world where your family has taken up residence, has been a greater force and truth? Face it, at 19 or 20 we're still mostly kids, even if some of us were living on our own, or in the military bound for Vietnam. Having matured way too quickly, Rollo, out of school, working in a record store, was essentially an orphan. Would he ever have a wife and children of his own? Would he ever want to?
A few years later I was hanging out with my girlfriend, and a friend of hers, and her boyfriend at the boyfriend’s house. During the conversation it was somehow divulged that the boyfriend’s mother’s last name was Grace, I asked if she was related to the Graces in Wayward. She said she was, and I could see some resemblance in her face, something around the mouth and deep brown eyes. We briefly talked about her family’s tragedy, the swift deaths that had taken three-fourths of her cousin's family like a modern plague. “It was tragic, so sad,” the mother had said, but she’d had no information or theories as to why the deaths had occurred. “It was just one of those things,” she had told me.
A different friend later told me that for a couple years he had worked with Rollo at a music and record store. According to my friend, Rollo had become quiet and conservative, more reserved, serious, and mature beyond his years. He’d grown up fast obviously. He had a job, a living, possibly attended college at night, maybe was already married. There was little of the former potential rock-and-roll star, or pop music aspirant. I guess at that point you would have described Rollo’s lifestyle as “sober,” not in the main definition entry of alcohol (or sans alcohol) sense of sober, but Devoid of frivolity, excess, exaggeration, or speculative imagination; straightforward: Marked by seriousness, gravity, or solemnity of conduct or character. Marked by circumspection and self-restraint. (Courtesy of the “Free Dictionary”).
I had recalled seeing Rollo in that record store, managing the audio section, as I was picking up LPs of King Crimson, Jethro Tull, or Derek and the Dominoes, and his behavior totally squared with my friend’s account, and I remember Rollo looked OK; he was working, functioning. But I couldn’t approach him. For one thing, he wouldn’t have known who I was, and even if he had known me, how would I have said to him, “I remember your brother. I met him once. I’m really sorry what happened to him, and I'm really sorry what happened to your parents, too. . .Why did it happen?”
. . . but all of the living
make the mistake of drawing too sharp distinctions
Just one of those things. . .
Monday, August 29, 2011
Goodnight Irene ... Oh, Donna ... Hurricanoes
With Hurricane Irene traveling up the East coast this past weekend, I was reminded of another hurricane from September of 1960.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Donna
The elementary school was only two blocks from my house, and one morning, the worst morning of the hurricane, it was extremely dark outside and high-velocity, slant-wise rain repeatedly strafed the school windows. Our third-grade teacher was trying to put an educational spin on the impending disaster, telling us students about the "eye" of the hurricane where everything was suddenly "calm." That seemed troubling somehow. You would think the hurricane would get worse the deeper you penetrated inside it. I guess the whole trick was getting to the center, and then you would be OK.
We were dismissed from school by mid-morning and all the kids had to be picked up by their parents, even kids like me who lived two blocks away from school. I recall a stream of water overflowing the curb and washing the sidewalk, A day or two later after Donna had finally ended, I walked through the local park with other kids looking at all the uprooted trees. There were many willow trees that had fallen because willows have fairly shallow roots. I was thankful my father had removed the willow tree in our yard the previous summer because that tree would have certainly come crashing down our house.
But the most exciting thing about Hurricane Donna for an 8-year-old was the loss of electric power. My parents lit several kerosene lamps throughout the house (I wonder how many people have kerosene lamps in their homes anymore, because kerosene is highly flammable for one thing). My family ate dinner by kerosene lamp or candlelight and I went to bed early, snug under the covers with a flashlight for reading comic books. Naturally I welcomed the loss of power as an adventure, as fun, especially in the dark, while my parents and other relatives and neighbors seemed put out and bothered and inconvenienced. Now, a mere half century later, in the "Silicon Age" with our utter dependency on all things digital, the loss of electricity seems more cataclysmic than ever.
And now for a little bathos. . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb9KMnzzAII
Thank you, You Tube . . . Forget Olivier, Jones and McKellan etal . . . I decided to skip them because it would be difficult to compare their stellar interpretations. I love this guy, whoever he is---more of a beer-budget Lear, a working man's Lear, than the vaulted Dom Perignon or Chateau Rothschild performances of The Masters. It's more like "The Duke and Dauphin" characters from Huck Finn. And I always liked the Spanish or Italian lilt of "hurricanoes" better than our current, more tin-eared "hurricanes." We continue to say "tomato" and "tomatoes," not "tomates." I say we petition linguists and usage experts everywhere to restore "hurricanoes" to its once lofty place. But not pronounced Hurri-"canoes" as in those lightweight (but not as light as kayak) vessels we paddle. Hurry, the waters are rising, man the canoes! "Oh, Fool, I shall go mad!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Donna
The elementary school was only two blocks from my house, and one morning, the worst morning of the hurricane, it was extremely dark outside and high-velocity, slant-wise rain repeatedly strafed the school windows. Our third-grade teacher was trying to put an educational spin on the impending disaster, telling us students about the "eye" of the hurricane where everything was suddenly "calm." That seemed troubling somehow. You would think the hurricane would get worse the deeper you penetrated inside it. I guess the whole trick was getting to the center, and then you would be OK.
We were dismissed from school by mid-morning and all the kids had to be picked up by their parents, even kids like me who lived two blocks away from school. I recall a stream of water overflowing the curb and washing the sidewalk, A day or two later after Donna had finally ended, I walked through the local park with other kids looking at all the uprooted trees. There were many willow trees that had fallen because willows have fairly shallow roots. I was thankful my father had removed the willow tree in our yard the previous summer because that tree would have certainly come crashing down our house.
But the most exciting thing about Hurricane Donna for an 8-year-old was the loss of electric power. My parents lit several kerosene lamps throughout the house (I wonder how many people have kerosene lamps in their homes anymore, because kerosene is highly flammable for one thing). My family ate dinner by kerosene lamp or candlelight and I went to bed early, snug under the covers with a flashlight for reading comic books. Naturally I welcomed the loss of power as an adventure, as fun, especially in the dark, while my parents and other relatives and neighbors seemed put out and bothered and inconvenienced. Now, a mere half century later, in the "Silicon Age" with our utter dependency on all things digital, the loss of electricity seems more cataclysmic than ever.
And now for a little bathos. . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb9KMnzzAII
Thank you, You Tube . . . Forget Olivier, Jones and McKellan etal . . . I decided to skip them because it would be difficult to compare their stellar interpretations. I love this guy, whoever he is---more of a beer-budget Lear, a working man's Lear, than the vaulted Dom Perignon or Chateau Rothschild performances of The Masters. It's more like "The Duke and Dauphin" characters from Huck Finn. And I always liked the Spanish or Italian lilt of "hurricanoes" better than our current, more tin-eared "hurricanes." We continue to say "tomato" and "tomatoes," not "tomates." I say we petition linguists and usage experts everywhere to restore "hurricanoes" to its once lofty place. But not pronounced Hurri-"canoes" as in those lightweight (but not as light as kayak) vessels we paddle. Hurry, the waters are rising, man the canoes! "Oh, Fool, I shall go mad!"
Friday, August 12, 2011
Where do the Children Play?
Routes 4 and 17 made up part of my childhood playground. There were drive-in theaters and driving ranges. There were stores but it was well before the onslaught of mall mania. Stores like Two Guys, Modells, Great Eastern Mills, Packards and Sears.
My friends and I used to explore the reeds and marshes to pick cattails along Route 4 up in north Hackensack.One of these marshes terminated at a grassy embankment behind a golf driving range. A dozen or more of the balls had been hit beyond the fence and they lay scattered at our feet, like discovered treasure. What was inside of a golf ball? We had taken apart baseballs before, peeling back the hide and stripping off the strata of woven rubber bands until you reached a small and very hard indian-rubber ball. It reminded me of pictures in the science books about the Earth: the hide was the crust, the rubber bands the mantle, the indian rubber ball, the core, but not molten like the core of our planet. But a golf ball was already small and compressed---what could it possibly be made out of?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETPrBz5YiLs
As we gathered golf balls, we heard a small vehicle approach. It was a golf cart driven by a young man wearing a hard hat, and the guy stopped the cart and leapt out and began charging towards us. We were laughing hysterically, obviously for being in trouble, but on an unconscious level we were laughing at the ridiculous pose of this helmeted functionary who took golf balls and, by extension, his job so seriously.
On Route 17, at the confluence of Maywood, Rochelle Park, Lodi, we played beneath overpasses to a backdrop of highway noises, a cosmic drone that I could hear from my house a mile away. (actually that cosmic drone was the confluence of Routes 17 and 4, which I liked to call the "Belly of the Beast"). Where we played on 17 was a mixed industrial and residential area. There were the usual tires, hubcaps, shopping carriages, broken glass, newspaper and cardboard that had been jettisoned along the highway. We would find intact, seven-foot cardboard boxes that once held refrigerators. We would crawl into one of these boxes and try to flip the box over, keep it rolling. When the walls of the box finally split apart, we would tear off separate sheets and use them to slide down the grassy highway embankment---cool, sleds without snow! We'd have races to see whose sled went the farthest, and the cardboard sleds became slick with grass stains and the pressure of our weight, their undersides like a gray-green shellac that made them slide faster.
Some time around 1980 an EPA or DOE study discovered that Thorium232 had been getting dumped along this same stretch of highway for about two decades---yes, those same years that we enjoyed our cardboard box recreation, young boys frolicking in industrial waste.
For those of you who no longer remember your Periodic Table:
http://www.chemistryexplained.com/elements/T-Z/Thorium.html
232 of course being a trace isotope (I read that in the link ;)
Ah Stepan Chemical, we hardly knew ye down there in South Wayward behind all those neat Cape Cods.
http://www.em.doe.gov/bemr/bemrsites/macw.aspx
So Stepan (or Ballod) took over waste removal from Maywood Chemical Works to remove Thorium from the Lodi Brook, and what did they do? They dumped it on their property to spread along Rt. 17 and an AEC Study in 1968 said, "That's OK" So, let me see if I've gotten this right---just move the radioactive material---what, a few hundred feet? quarter mile?---and dump it on privately held, non-residential land. Wow. Sounds like The Daily Show..... Oh, that Thorium232
Sooooooo here is the strange black stuff we were sifting through our fingers and flinging handfuls of at one another. And I had thought it was only dust from old roofing shingles. Enough said....
My friends and I used to explore the reeds and marshes to pick cattails along Route 4 up in north Hackensack.One of these marshes terminated at a grassy embankment behind a golf driving range. A dozen or more of the balls had been hit beyond the fence and they lay scattered at our feet, like discovered treasure. What was inside of a golf ball? We had taken apart baseballs before, peeling back the hide and stripping off the strata of woven rubber bands until you reached a small and very hard indian-rubber ball. It reminded me of pictures in the science books about the Earth: the hide was the crust, the rubber bands the mantle, the indian rubber ball, the core, but not molten like the core of our planet. But a golf ball was already small and compressed---what could it possibly be made out of?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETPrBz5YiLs
As we gathered golf balls, we heard a small vehicle approach. It was a golf cart driven by a young man wearing a hard hat, and the guy stopped the cart and leapt out and began charging towards us. We were laughing hysterically, obviously for being in trouble, but on an unconscious level we were laughing at the ridiculous pose of this helmeted functionary who took golf balls and, by extension, his job so seriously.
On Route 17, at the confluence of Maywood, Rochelle Park, Lodi, we played beneath overpasses to a backdrop of highway noises, a cosmic drone that I could hear from my house a mile away. (actually that cosmic drone was the confluence of Routes 17 and 4, which I liked to call the "Belly of the Beast"). Where we played on 17 was a mixed industrial and residential area. There were the usual tires, hubcaps, shopping carriages, broken glass, newspaper and cardboard that had been jettisoned along the highway. We would find intact, seven-foot cardboard boxes that once held refrigerators. We would crawl into one of these boxes and try to flip the box over, keep it rolling. When the walls of the box finally split apart, we would tear off separate sheets and use them to slide down the grassy highway embankment---cool, sleds without snow! We'd have races to see whose sled went the farthest, and the cardboard sleds became slick with grass stains and the pressure of our weight, their undersides like a gray-green shellac that made them slide faster.
Some time around 1980 an EPA or DOE study discovered that Thorium232 had been getting dumped along this same stretch of highway for about two decades---yes, those same years that we enjoyed our cardboard box recreation, young boys frolicking in industrial waste.
For those of you who no longer remember your Periodic Table:
http://www.chemistryexplained.com/elements/T-Z/Thorium.html
232 of course being a trace isotope (I read that in the link ;)
Ah Stepan Chemical, we hardly knew ye down there in South Wayward behind all those neat Cape Cods.
http://www.em.doe.gov/bemr/bemrsites/macw.aspx
So Stepan (or Ballod) took over waste removal from Maywood Chemical Works to remove Thorium from the Lodi Brook, and what did they do? They dumped it on their property to spread along Rt. 17 and an AEC Study in 1968 said, "That's OK" So, let me see if I've gotten this right---just move the radioactive material---what, a few hundred feet? quarter mile?---and dump it on privately held, non-residential land. Wow. Sounds like The Daily Show..... Oh, that Thorium232
Sooooooo here is the strange black stuff we were sifting through our fingers and flinging handfuls of at one another. And I had thought it was only dust from old roofing shingles. Enough said....
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