Everything That Happened

to me and sometimes to other people

Month: July 2019

Stuff My Mother Threw Out

By

On July 31, 2019

In Family

This is my version of the story everyone seems to have, Stuff My Mother Threw Out. My family moved from 224 Rayburn Terrace in Orange, right next door to number 222, when I was about 14 . This was during the time of the Korean War, and my brother knew he was being drafted.

A while after the move, I discovered all my military stuff was missing: my German spiked  helmet from WW I, my copy of the WW2 Aircraft Spotter’s Guide including photos and instant-identification silhouettes of every American, German and Japanese fighter plane and bomber, some random bullets, a dummy hand grenade, and my uncle George’s WWII uniform insignia and medals.

I understand why, but I miss them.

1915 Prussian Pickelhaube, ima-usa.com

WW2 Aircraft Spotter’s Guide

A favourite aunt

By

On July 31, 2019

In Family

At the onset of World War I, my Aunt Alice’s family in England sent her here, at age 15, to live with relatives to avoid the bombing and anticipated invasion of England by the Hun. Here she met and fell in love with my Uncle Rob Becker, a horse-and-wagon milkman and professional golfer who for a while was good enough to be on the tour with Bobby Jones. After they married, Uncle Rob entertained Aunt Alice inexpensively by bringing her on the tour to watch him play, something she wasn’t crazy about. After his golf game stopped earning a living, he went back on the milk wagon for the next 25 or 30 years.

Looking back, Aunt Alice was probably the most cultured woman I ever met. I think my Uncle Bert et al. thought she was putting on airs when she broke out the candelabra for Bert’s annual visit from Michigan (Bert would move it off the table “so we can all see better”), but she wasn’t being snooty, she was just being the way she was.

Alice Becker

During their marriage, Aunt Alice developed lung problems that brought her to the specialty hospital on High Street, where she was operated on. I stopped by to see her on my way home from school, and she was thrilled to have a visitor. Her operation had been a success and she was feeling fine. I later overheard one adult confiding to another that the “mass” in one lung had turned out to be an unfinished twin.

When Uncle Rob’s company eventually sold their dairy farm to real-estate developers, he retired and became a school-crossing guard. After a few accidents driving, his children forced him to give up his license. He said at the time “Well, that’s it, my life is over.” But it wasn’t.

Their son Robert Becker Jr., aka Bobby, also a milkman, was in the infantry during WWII but happily came home from  Europe unscathed. Upon his return, his much-hated-by-the-family wife Vera told him, in effect, “If you think I’m going to stay married to a milkman, you’re crazy.” So, Bobby went back to school, worked hard, got  rich and became a genuine big kahuna in the insurance industry. In fact, his portrait still hangs in the boardroom of the  insurance company he built. True story, kids. Stay in school.

Music class

By

On July 31, 2019

In Music, Race, School, Teachers

In seventh and eighth grade, we have music class twice a week. The class is divided into two groups for tonal management of the parts we sing. There is an alto group, mostly boys, and a soprano group, girls and boys like myself whose voice hasn’t changed . When not accompanying us on the classroom piano, Miss Barnett spends her time correcting and verbally abusing the sopranos. We can do nothing to her satisfaction. After a few weeks, I tell Miss Barnett that my voice is changing. There is no test to confirm my claim; she simply tells me to sit on the alto side of the room from now on. Goodbye to twice-weekly stomach knots.

Our repertoire comes from a long-out-of-print song book of standards, spirituals and other royalty-free music, for example “Comin’ ‘round the mountain”. Music is timeless, and our school board believes deeply in that thrifty adage.

One song in regular rotation is Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe”. It has of course been modernized since then, but in our classroom Old Black Joe grieves for “my friends from the cotton fields away”, with the chorus

I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low,
I hear those darky voices calling “Old Black Joe”.

In our class are two black kids, Joe Stokes and Richie Strickland. I don’t look over to see if they are singing along, but I’ll bet Joe Stokes isn’t.

Richie and I are friendly, and one day he comes to my house with two fishing poles and we board the Number 20 bus to Branch Brook Park. As we pay our fares, I see other passengers nudge one another.

We try various spots around the lake but don’t catch anything. We come back to my house and sit in the sunroom, talking about baseball. After an hour or so, my grandmother takes me aside and says “Tell Richie he has to go home, we’re going to have dinner now.”

Highly detailed

By

On July 31, 2019

In Family

I am usually the first to grab my family’s copy of Life magazine. As touted on this week’s cover, the next-to-last page is a black-and-white photograph remarkable for the time, the first crisp, highly-detailed aerial view of the North Pole, or maybe the South Pole, I forget. It shows a complex, craggy and absolutely featureless mass of ice and snow. A bit off from the center, I draw a tiny barber pole.

While my brother reads the magazine that night, I watch. When he gets to that page, he studies it for a long while. He stares and stares and says half-aloud, “Hey…”. Once he realizes, he is annoyed, but laughs.

At the Met

By

On July 29, 2019

In Family, NYC

Temple of Dendur

One Sunday in March, I drive into New York City with my young family to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is nowhere nearby to park, so I drop my family at the side entrance and keep looking. I work my way across town, still no luck. At a parking lot with a “full” sign posted I get an inspiration and show the attendant a ten dollar bill. He agrees that there is just enough room for one more car, and I walk back to the museum to catch up with my family. While we are in the Arms and Armor room admiring Henry the VIII’s steel codpiece, we hear the noise of a brass band out on Fifth Avenue. We have forgotten it is Saint Patrick’s Day!

We step out onto the museum’s broad front steps. Many people are here already, watching the remaining groups and bands organize and warm up before they march off to connect with the  parade’s main body. The groups nearest us are at a momentary standstill. One man standing near us on the steps incessantly blows a green plastic horn. Blat. Blat. Blat. Finally, from half a block away, we hear “HEY YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER, STOP BLOWIN’ THAT HORN!” Our step-mate pauses to consider, tucks the horn under his arm and departs.

The following day, the New York Times features a photo of Ed Koch at the parade, wearing a tweed cap and cable-knit sweater. Hizzoner is shouting at someone out of frame, his hand to his mouth like a megaphone, probably just repeating his catchphrase “How’m I doing?” demand. I entertain  myself by  giving him a  felt-tip word balloon of the demand we heard yesterday.

Thought crime

By

On July 27, 2019

In Army Days, Scams

Clarksville,, Tennessee relied on the soldiers from the nearby base to support their businesses, but the town didn’t really like us. One Sunday four of us took the bus into town and headed for the bars. After drinking beer for about an hour in one bar, we decided to move on to another. As we walked, one of us, or maybe all of us, decided to duck into an alley to take a whiz. We had no sooner stepped inside the alley when a police car pulled in behind us. Assuming it was on its way to a crime somewhere, we stepped against the wall to let it pass, but it stopped instead. Two good old boys got out, the elder ranting about “You Army guys pukin’ all over our town, pissin’ all over our town.” I think we were just astounded and stayed silent. We hadn’t puked, and had only thought about pissing. Then the senior cop said “You boys are all going to the police station, you’re under arrest for indecent exposure.” Being a logical person and having won many arguments in the past with my grandmother, I countered “What!? We didn’t have our penises out!” to which they replied “You boys get in the car”, to which we countered “WE DIDN’T HAVE OUR PENISES OUT!”, to which they replied “You boys get in the car right now.”

So we piled into the back seat of their shitty police car, only to have them discover that the battery was dead. I don’t know why we did it, maybe just to move things along, but the four of us got out and pushed their car out of the alley and into the street, then down the street until the driver popped the clutch and it started up. I think we all half expected they would let us go based on our good deed getting their shitty police car started again, but no. They ordered us back into the car and we headed for the Clarksville police station.

Once at the station, the desk sergeant took over. He had us empty our pockets, listing the contents and placing them into manila envelopes. Particular attention was paid to our wallets – he counted out each guy’s money in front of him, made sure he agreed on the amount, and gave us a signed receipt for everything. Knowing we were not guilty, based on the U. S. Constitution’s it-technically-never-happened clause, we asked to see the judge, but were informed the judge was not available on weekends. Some interesting math was done with our collective cash. The four amounts were added together, then the price of four bus tickets back to the base subtracted from that, then the remainder divided by four to calculate what our bail would be. Perhaps it wasn’t that overt, but that’s just exactly how it worked out.

So far the day had all been sort of a hoot, but now we were walked into the cell block and locked into what I would call a strap-iron cell. I don’t remember the facilities exactly, but it was not totally inhumane.

Something like this, but with better mattresses and more space

 Two of our group decided to pay the bail right then and get back to base, rather than risk being marked AWOL next morning. My buddy and I, seekers of justice, would wait and explain everything to the judge tomorrow.

The next morning after a trustee brought our breakfast (grits, bacon, milk, coffee), we inquired as to the judge’s hours and were informed “He’s here every Thursday.” So, we gave up our quest for justice, paid our bail, collected the remainder for bus fare, and bussed on out of Clarksville. When we got back to base, our company was already standing in formation. Our sergeant spotted us approaching and demanded “Where the hell have you men been?” When we replied “In jail, sergeant!”, he just laughed. He knew how the town worked, and didn’t ask us for any details.

Bucky Bug

By

On July 26, 2019

In Family, NYC

One day during the summer my mother takes me on a bus trip to New York City to visit her cousin. I don’t think I was ever in the city before that. As soon as we get out of the bus on Eighth Avenue, I am impressed by the rich stink, not the garbage-and-urine city stink we know today, but the honest, heavy stink of cows and massive amounts of cow shit. We are at the block-long cattle pens of the West Side stockyards, in the city’s slaughterhouse district. My mother half-apologizes for the stink and we start walking east. After a few blocks the air freshens and we go into an Automat, the fast-food restaurant of the day. At the change booth my mother pushes two dollar bills over to a bored clerk and a brass chute delivers a shower of nickels.

There are walls of sandwiches, pies and much more, each on its own clean plate and behind its own swing-up glass door. Drop enough nickels into a slot, turn the knob, lift the door, slide out your choice. Coffee is a nickel – grab an empty cup, insert your nickel, turn slowly the S-shaped arm to dispense an exact cupful. We grab a table for four, sitting across from each other. Very soon a man approaches and asks “Is this seat taken?”. It isn’t, we say, and he takes the seat between us. Unlike myself, my mother seems unfazed by this strange event. There is minimal but cordial conversation. We finish, say goodbye to our new friend and leave. The Automat did not expect its customers to bus their tables.

We head eastward to Third Avenue, home of the Third Avenue Elevated, sort of an above-ground subway line. When we get to our cousin’s building, it stands facing the El and about fifty feet from the tracks. Her apartment is on the third floor and the windows are open. I remember our cousin apologizing for the train noise but it really didn’t seem so bad after a while.

After the ladies get settled in the kitchen, I go back to the front room. Trains come by in one direction or the other every five minutes or so. I am old enough to read and I lie on the carpet by the window and read my Bucky Bug comic.

Automat, Berenice Abbott

 

Presbyterian Minstrel Show

By

On July 25, 2019

In Music, Religion

My church, and I call it “my” church because East Orange Presbyterian was the closest Protestant church that my mother could get a neighbor to give me a ride to every Sunday, decided to give a minstrel show. I know what you’re thinking, but it was a long time ago, we didn’t know any better, and the nation was young.

Church members with an interest in show business  volunteered for the various roles of minstrelsy,  and rehearsals began on the fellowship hall stage. Maybe there is some sort of widely available, generic script for a minstrel show, for everyone seemed to know what they were doing. There was  singing (Swanee River, Polly Wolly Doodle), tap dancing, and comic skits — for example, one included a collection of one-off fruits and vegetables, and a woman who says to her suitor “But darling, we…”,  then  holds up, wait for it, a cantalope!, as immediately recognized and shouted out by a willing audience.

Was there blackface? I honestly don’t remember, but yes, probably. Burnt cork  is easy to manufacture,  apply and remove, and also makes a fine beard for a  Christmas Wise Man or Halloween hobo.

The players rehearsed religiously, seated onstage in the traditional minstrel-show arrangement of chairs. At  only nine or ten years old, I was a  stagehand, my sole duty being to open and close the curtains between  acts. The show was scheduled  for one night only, a Thursday. On that Thursday, as I was getting ready for bed, a stray thought crossed my mind and I froze and said to myself “Shit.”

I assume the show started  just fine without me, but I never went back to that church  and never knew  for sure what happened that night at eight o’clock. Whenever I tell this story to someone, they always say “Wow, maybe they’re still stuck behind the curtains.” That’s crazy, right?

Suicide by whisky

By

On July 24, 2019

In History

While doing family tree research, I ran across a file that listed the cause of death and other details for 15,339 burials in the Wilkes-Barre, PA city cemetery . They date from the mid-1800s up to about 1960, when they slow down and stop, probably because of computers. Causes include such as “dropsy”, “fits”, “powder mill explosion” and “suicide by whisky”.

Here is what people were dying of back then, with the count for each cause. Many of these 2,300+ causes are duplicates, except for small spelling or stylistic differences. I didn’t try to fix anything. When there was only a single instance of a particular cause, the count was left blank.

Trigger warning: some of these will make you very very sad.

[table id=1 /]

Original file from
https://www.wilkes-barre.city/sites/wilkes-barrepa/files/uploads/wbcemeteryrecordscomplete.pdf

I, (say your name), promise not to screw over the other Cub Scouts

By

On July 23, 2019

In Selling, Theft

When I was in Cub Scouts, our pack sponsored a show, with us selling tickets to our families and neighbors, first prize being a new bicycle. I sold tirelessly every afternoon after school and all day weekends, wearing my Cub Scout shirt and knocking on doors far afield from my own. If the lady (it was almost always a lady) answering had some lame excuse like “We have other plans that night”, I would say in my best sad-orphan voice “Well, won’t you buy just one ticket to support the Cub Scouts?”. This worked pretty well, and, after all, the tickets were only two dollars.

I got tired of selling tickets  and stopped a week before the show. When my “friend” and fellow Scout “Glen” asked how many I had sold, I answered honestly with (as I recall) “176”. A week later “Glen” had sold 180 and had himself a new bike.

After dark at the A&P warehouse

By

On July 22, 2019

In Working

While going to Automation Institute during the day to learn computer programming, I worked nights at the A&P produce warehouse in Newark. Pre-employment testing showed I was too smart to be jockeying crates of lettuce and celery around, so I got to be a (non-union) desk jockey instead, at a rate of quite a bit less per hour.

Our general duties were to create the paperwork needed to ship produce to A&P stores in north and central New Jersey. The forms  included E-1 order sheets listing non-perishable special items. Each had to be copied in an ancient pre-Xerox copier. The sheets were supposed to be submitted only on Tuesdays or Thursdays, but needy stores could get special dispensation by phoning the daytime warehouse manager. There were five or six of these special cases every week, and Johnny Byrne treated each as a personal insult, loudly announcing each one as he rose from his chair and trudged the ten feet to the copier, usually with the words “Cocksucker! Fucking E-1 sheets, every night of the week!”

Johnny was also what might be called the “window man”. As tractor drivers arrived to hook up to loaded trailers, Johnny made the call of who went where. Favored drivers knew he could be bribed with a few packs of cigarettes to assign a “good” route, that is, one with easier traffic or better chances of earning overtime. These deals were made surreptitiously, when no other drivers were in sight. Particularly favored was the route to Store 37 in Toms River, way down in South Jersey.

Steve, the warehouse-floor foreman, occasionally visited the office to rant about some problem or indignity on the floor. Steve had been to prep school in his youth, as he would often remind us, saying “I don’t have to work here, you know. I went to fucking Saint Benedict’s!” Steve also had a favorite compound-word curse that was so vile and improbable that I won’t repeat it.

Steve II was the day foreman. The Vietnam war was grinding on, and Steve II was angry and disappointed with anyone who believed the war might be a bad idea. He had a son in the army.

My buddy Louis had an annoying catch phrase he used whenever he wanted to borrow an eraser, which was often, sidling up and asking “Got a rubber on ya Dick?”

Walt and I were the rookies, still learning how the world worked.

Across the street were some low buildings and an all-night diner, and beyond them apartments with a clear view into the pool of light that was our office. Many times the guy at the desk might be alone.

One night I came back from break to find Walt almost in tears. In one of the overlooking apartments was a lewd and perverse individual who had our phone number. The next few times he called, we simply hung up as soon as his obscene suggestions started. Once I handed the phone to Walt and said “It’s for you”, but that was a prank I felt guilty about later.

After a few nights of calls, Walt and I were both in the office when our admirer called for what would be the last time. I knew he could see us, and after listening for a while to his elaborate plans for me, I made a show of looking around to be sure I was alone. I was not, he could see that, and in my best might-be-interested voice I said ”I’m very busy right now, but give me your number and I’ll call you back as soon as I get a chance.” I guess he was so surprised he didn’t really think it through, because he gave me his number. I read it back to him as he watched me write it into the company logbook. When Walt left on break later that night, I knew our caller was watching for me to pick up the phone, but wondering whether I’d call him or the police. We had a laugh about keeping him in suspense, and he never bothered us again.

Our paperwork required some old-school multiplying, tedious and error prone since pocket computers didn’t exist yet. I discovered the way to do this on our Comptometer model WM mechanical calculator, which was only being used as an adding machine. Wanna multiply 24 times 1.69? It’s similar to  multiplication on paper: push down the 1-6-9 keys simultaneously 4 times, shift left one column, push down the 1-6-9 keys simultaneously 2  times . Easy-peasy, and always right.

Comptometer model WM mechanical calculator, Ezrdr

When I finished computer school, I put on my tweed suit and started looking for jobs. The warehouse manager, Mr. DeBow, sent me to the real A&P office in downtown Newark to interview for a job as an auditor, and they made me an offer. “Auditor” is a good and respected job in the supermarket business, but there’s not much money in it.

Clarksville, Tennessee

By

On July 22, 2019

In Army Days, Race

Clarksville was right across the state line from the Army base where I took advanced infantry training in 1957. When we had a day off we’d put on our civilian clothes and hop the bus to get some beers or just a change of scenery. My earliest memory of the town, and of the South, came on our first trip, when I was walking along the sidewalk with a buddy. Two black guys  about our age were also on the sidewalk, coming in our direction. Just as I stepped behind my buddy so the two parties could pass in single file, the two black guys stepped into the gutter and continued walking, not breaking stride,  and all just as natural as could be.

Later when it came time to go back to base we headed for the bus station, stepping through its front door into a dim and dirty waiting room. It was crowded  with people seated and standing, most of them appearing unfriendly or even hostile. Two older women in particular were giving us barely concealed glares and dirty looks.

One wall of the room stopped about a foot short of the ceiling, and over it we could see bright fluorescent lighting. Assuming the space next door was a luncheonette or other place where we could get something to eat, we stepped out of the room we were in, walked 40 feet down the sidewalk to the first door we came to, opened it and stepped into… the White waiting room.

Striped Shirt, 1945

By

On July 21, 2019

In Early days

I was on vacation between first and second grade. We were living at Uncle Jim’s house. One day all the grownups started acting crazy and laughing and hugging and hollering and crying. I asked them what was going on, and they said the war was over. I asked them who won, but they just ignored me. I ran up and down the front steps for a while.
I knew it was important. I had on my brown and orange striped shirt.

Before we lived there we had our own house. A few other things happened. I got hit on the head with a rock. I broke my brother’s radio and looked at a girl’s hiney hole. Italian kids moved in and came to my kindergarten. I asked my mother what a fucking cocksucker was. My father stopped coming home. My teacher made me hide my face in her lap. I had to clean the school steps with a bucket and scrub brush because I wrote on them. While I was scrubbing my mother walked by on the way to the store but she didn’t look at me. I cut off the tip of my finger slicing bread and got a red wagon for not crying too much on the way to the doctor’s.

At Uncle Jim’s house I jumped off his garage roof with an umbrella. I broke off enough roof shingles to build a fort but he made them not punish me. He had a Civil War rifle hanging on a rafter in the cellar.

When we got our own house again I used to play under our dining room table and make believe it was my fort. There was a metal lever there to pull the two halves of the table tight together and I would slide it back and forth and pretend it was the speed control on a trolley car. I wrote ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ in chalk on the underside of the table and the day the movers took the table apart to bring it to our next house they walked past my brother and me with the words facing out and he laughed, but didn’t tell anyone.

Foul footsteps

By

On July 20, 2019

In History, Music

The Star-Spangled Banner has four verses, not that you’d know it from seeing any ball games. I have never heard verse 2, 3 or 4 sung in public. Verse 3 is especially interesting because it dumps all over that ‘band’ of dirty Redcoat bastards. It goes like this:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Link to all four verses

John Trumbull, “The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, January 3, 1777,” courtesy Yale University Art Gallery

 

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