Summer 1963

Oh the vagaries of life! I thought I'd write and write and then work and stuff gets in the way and next thing I know I'm getting yelled at by Carolyn in the office that I haven't written anything.
So.
I've spoken in the past about the 4th of July in Wenonah but I've sort of left off how it was different then from now. The principal difference was the dancing. I know, you say what dancing. Well in 1963 and I would imagine for years before there was a dance band that performed on Mantua Avenue after the traditional Pitman Hobo Band concert in the park. The fire department would hose off the street in late afternoon and all us knuckleheads would go to get knocked down by the spray from the hoses. Then immediately following the concert a smart dance band playing all the hits of the fifties and early sixties would set up and every one in town would dance in the middle of town across from Margie's luncheonette and the park.
The sweet sounds of swing and Sinatra would waft across the night air and grown ups and kids would fill the street. This was both weird and cool. In 1963 I was in love with Diane Evans and wanted to dance with her with all my heart. I got my wish. Like some weird little wind up child I approached her and we danced and that might be the last time I ever spoke with her. The same night something stranger happened.
Young people from out of town tried to join the fun. A fight nearly erupted. An alarm spread through the celebrants. The tiny police department and the firemen and the town elect banded together to expel the intruders.
What the fuck?
We might have been in a tiny village in England in the Middle Ages. We might have been Miller's Men doing our spring dance for the Maidens. We repelled the invasion of alien peoples from our sacred precincts. I don't know if the kids were black or white, tough or stupid but they were sent packing. This was for our town...not for anyone else.
When people talk about racism and shit like that they forget that all of this was based on tiny little towns scared to death of strangers. Of the other. So when some kids came to our town to dance they were beaten back. Huh?
Meanwhile the strains of Glenn Miller filled the air. It was hot and wet all at once. I was dancing with Diane Evans. Life was as good as it might ever get.
The only other thing I truly remember about this is that I was small. There comes a time in a childs life when he is suddenly as tall as everyone else. This was not one of them. I came up to everyone's waist. That's how I saw the world. Maybe that's still how I see the world. Maybe that's how you see the world.
Next post... Mrs Myers and 6th Grade. Jack has his last shot at cool Stay tuned.

Practice Runs; Summer, 1963

Well, my year with Mrs Fuller came to a close and another glorious summer began. I seem to recall this summer being the summer my father and mother felt it would be good to teach us something and show us America. “See the USA in Your Chevrolet” was the operating phrase here. We didn’t venture too far afield but after a week in Ocean City we took to the road in a series of trips designed to stimulate our young minds and get us out of Wenonah.
We visited Gettyburg, PA, and on the same trip, Strasbourg, PA and the railroad museum, Pennsylvania Dutch country and many other cheesy tourist sites en route. This particular trip was a big favorite for all us boys as it involved Civil War battlefields. Mick and I were mad Civil War fans with Mick even more rabid than me. We had our Civil War hats and our muskets and flags and our Civil War soldiers and games and books and so the chance to see where some Civil War battles actually happened was a rare treat. Or so we thought.
We arrived in Gettysburg after a trip of several hours and headed straight to the Diorama. This was a major tourist attraction and consisted of a huge miniature layout of the battlefield. Lights flashed, music played, and smoke billowed. Still and all it was just little men on paper mache but we loved it. We bought a few souvenirs with money we’d earned from shoveling snow and then it was off to the battlefield proper.
This proved to be a modest disappointment. No, a major bummer. It was just fields. Well mowed fields! No dead guys! No bones! It might as well have had corn growing in it and in fact did in some places. We were not real clear on the fact that dead guys were probably right under our feet and that this was essentially a vast military cemetery and memorial built after a terrible battle. Screw that! We wanted gore and guns and what we got was birds chirping.
Oh, there were some pictures of dead guys. Enlargements of Matthew Brady photos were placed at strategic intervals to illustrate the carnage and that was cool and all. I mean back then you didn’t usually see actual pictures of dead people on the news or in print so seeing the dead rebel sniper by the big rock was cool. Beyond that though we were probably happier swimming in the motel pool.
On our way back we visited the stupid railroad. We went to Strasburg cuz Ted was a railroad lunatic. Ted was an odd little child. He didn’t grow hair till he was like five and he took enormous interest in arcane pursuits and subjects. Railroads were on of them. Old railroads in particular. To give you a real sense of how weird Ted was one year his birthday gift was a push lawnmower from Sears. He loved that mower! Mowed grass for hours when he got it.
Anyway, then we saw the Pennsylvania Dutch people who it turned out weren’t Dutch but German and really not much to look at cuz they were working on their farms most of the time. They’re called Amish apparently and our parents didn’t bother to mention or didn’t know that they were a weird religious sect from Germany that came here to escape persecution. What they got was people following their carts in station wagons taking pictures and buying sho fly pie from them or pretzels. Pretty sad and not way up on the must see list for 11 year olds.
Our next big adventure was a drive down the Skyline Drive in Virginia. I’m fairly certain this was my mothers pick because she was real impressed with the scenery. We could give a fuck about that and mostly moaned about being hungry or tried weird southern food like hominy grits. It was mostly a long, long drive with three yelping boys and two hot adults (no ac in the car) through tourist trap after tourist trap and then back to Wenonah. If I recall correctly Mary Louise was parked with Nonny and Aunt Gersh for this one.
All these trips were, I think, test runs for the mother of all trips. The next summer we were going to drive across country to visit my Aunt Gert in Ventura, CA. You’ll get more of the lurid details on that one in a few months.
The rest of the summer was spent in blissful play. Well, swimming in the pool, running in the woods, and then getting bored. Really, really, really bored because after two months there was nothing to do. What fools we were. Had we known then what we know now I’m certain we would have felt otherwise. Instead we hunkered down on the front porch for marathon games of Monopoly and Risk for the last two weeks of summer and cried like girls because we were bored. My parents must have thought we were insane. I certainly think we were.

Wenonah Wolf Pack

My fellow cub scouts left to right (thanks to Bob Thomas)
Top Row: Unknown,Robbie Cook, Jackie Russell, Me, Unknown
Bottom Row: Don Eberly,Chris Anderson, Rickie Alexander, Don Fisk.
My brother Mick was thoughtful enough to tell me I'm an idiot and that it wasn't Bobby Holt but Donny Fisk. Ooops! I need the names of those two twins. Help!!!!

Gateway Regional Class of 1970 Reunion

Oh! By the way, I've thrown up a site for our wacky reunion! You can go and log on and make yourself feel part of another group that never really accepted you! Here's the link: www.GatewayClassof1970.classquest.com.
Please if you read this, visit the site, set up a profile and invite all our other loser, geek, jock, motorhead, prom queen, cheerleader, egghead, friends to visit and join us in July. There's room for everyone under the tent. Plus alcohol. Plus cheesy sixties music which I'm certain will feature line dancing. Plus hot chicks and fat guys! Or bald guys! Or skinny old guys! Or fat guys that are now fat girls! Should be a gas!
I'm going to be there with bells on! Pass it on my brothers and sisters! We have a need for the geator with the heater, the Bristol Stomp, and slow dancing! See you all in July!

Boys in Groups

Most boys in the 60's were shunted to some kind of youth group or another. Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, Explorers, Indian Guides, Summer Camp, Bible studies, whatever. I was no different. Being at the total direction of peer and societal pressure as well as parental orders what would be would be.
My own first brush with organized groups of young boys was in Woodbury, NJ when I was in Kindergarten. This was my fathers weird attempt to bond with me and other boys and young fathers. God knows what popped into his brain to hatch this scheme. My father may be the least outdoorsy type on the planet. While he is athletic and loves sports he has no clue what to do in the wild. Camping is not something he would do unless all the houses and motels in the world burned down. But being a dutiful 50's father he dragged me to one or two groups of kids and dads where he participated in some oddball Indian like rituals and made crafty things. Then, much like his association with Catholicism, he stopped at the first chance he got.
Which brings me to Wenonah in 4th and 5th and 6th grades. I was a Cub Scout. Wolf Pack. God knows what group of Cub Scouts, it was a long time ago but I had a little blue and yellow uniform and a whittling knife and I went once a week with several other assorted losers to meet and whittle and learn woodcraft and dream of being Boy Scouts and living life in the woods. Cub Scouts is kind of strange because you don't ever camp out or cook over a fire or any of that shit. Instead you make stuff out of wood and leather and recite oaths and generally act like probably the biggest geeks on the face of the earth. I'll throw up a picture of me and my Pack for your perusal. You'll see what I mean.
The biggest nightmare for me in Cub Scouts was the Soap Box Derby. For this little exercise in humiliation you were given a balsa wood body of a racing car, two spindly metal axles, four tires and a couple decals and told to craft a racing car that would carry you and your Pack to glory in the Soap Box Derby. Let me be clear. This involved several skills at which I did not excel. Whittling or rather slicing off your fingers, painting (refer to the post on models), and design. I'm an artist not an engineer. This meant that even in the world of geeks I was a bigger geek.
My mis-applied decals, smeared paint job, hacked up hunk of wood would invariable finish last. Thank God. Till next year. The only time Cub Scouts got interesting was in Webelos. Webelos. What kind of nincompoop name is that for an organization? Fake Indian, like Wenonah, but rich in recently manufactured tradition. But at least in Webelos we learned actual shit you could do. Like tie knots or make a fire or cook food.
All of this would prepare me for the humiliation of Boy Scouting. Did I mention I wet the bed? Oops! Big problem on camping trips. After years of preparation, purchase of a nice green uniform, and cool induction into the local Boy Scout Troop, Troop 50 it would all go to shit because of one minor problem. That's right, I washed out on my first overnighter to Elk's Neck Campground in Maryland. Pissed my sleeping bag and out of humiliation, quit. I re-upped when I was 16 but that's for later on.
In the meantime there were of course many other boys organizations you could join that didn't require adult consent. "The He Man Woman Haters Club" for instance. Terry, Chris, and Gary started this one up. The high point of the club, after the scary oath was melting wax on your skin.
Years later in New Brunswick I had a roommate who did this for sexual pleasure. We did it because you could drip fire on your arm and it didn't set you on fire. It was just a little warm. So you looked brave but with little or no actual danger. Aside from setting the house on fire because in general we held our ceremonies in crawl spaces with poor ventilation and old dry wood just ripe for burning.
The nicest thing about all these groups was no matter who you were you always felt like you didn't belong. Cool. None of us felt like we belonged. I was wetting the bed and wheezing, Mick was struggling in school, Sam Stewart was fat, Tommy Wood was everything wrong. We were all broken and all trying to get in some group that would accept us. And they all did! Problem was we all still felt like geeks and losers. Thank God we've grown up. That's sarcasm. Or irony. I forget which.

Athletics in Grade School

First, as an aside, an update: Johanna is well and doing fine. As am I and our three nincompoop dogs. Thanks to our friends and the doctors and nurses.
Next, on to more important issues. In Wenonah there were three kinds of athletics in elementary school: Organized sports, like Minor League or Pony League or Babe Ruth League baseball. School sports, like softball or touch football or dodge ball. And our own disorganized sports, like our Olympic Games around the block or golf in the back yard, or wiffleball, or street football. Each type had its own odd conventions and values.
Let's start with organized sports. When I was young all there was in Wenonah was hardball. You started in Minor League ball, moved up to Pony League and thence to Babe Ruth League. A few gifted young men went on to play American Legion Ball. This was a kind of semi-pro hardball with actual stakes. Each league consisted of one team from several neighboring towns and games were played twice a week, either home or away. Wenonah's baseball field was wonderful, with actual dugouts. It had once been the field for the Wenonah Military Academy in the twenties and so was pretty much regulation. No fences though. Right field was the railroad tracks and left and half of center were wooded. But it was a good 325 to any boundary so not many people banged one that far.
Back in the day you weren't put on the field to boost your self esteem. You were put in the game based on your abilities. If you sucked you went in in the 9th inning. That was if we were winning. I played a couple games a year and got one or two at bats. No hits. Several missed flies. I was always in right field which was a blessing because nobody could hit there except southpaws and no one was a southpaw till Pony League.
At the end of the season, in the fall, we would have a banquet to honor the Most Valuable Player, the Most Improved Player, etc in all the various leagues. We went with our dads and wore suits or sport coats. At the end of the awards and the dinner there was an inspirational talk by a professional athlete. I remember Tom Brookshire but that's about it. They weren't too inspirational but we had seen them on tv and they autographed our programs. Most of these athletes had regular jobs so this was a quick $200 bucks for one night. A lot of money back then.
School sports were just stupid. Rarely enjoyable and never allowed to be played to their conclusion. The only time it was fun was when we played touch football or soccer in the snow. That was a gas. Otherwise you'd play for a very brief time and then back to numbers and books all hot and sweaty.
Disorganized sports were our metier. We developed 18 hole courses in our backyards. I remember excelling at chip shots over the garage roof in particular. We played hour upon hour of street football. Everyone, everywhere, knows that gig. Ten steps, cut behind the Cadillac and I'll hit you. Chris you go long. All day long.
We played dozens of games. Workies Up, Horse, you name it, we played it. We invented our own version of the Olympics with everything from the 100 yard dash to pole vaulting (a failed experiment involving bamboo poles). High jumping was done over yard fences, etc.
The odd thing was that I learned from all of them. I actually became okay at hardball. I learned fundamentals even though I rarely played. I learned strategy and good sportsmanship and how to razz the opposing pitcher. I learned how to have fun playing our sports. Hell, I even developed a fairly good golf swing. Years later, never having actually ventured on a course, I had to play for business. My first drive on a real golf course went 200 yards, dead straight, off the tee. Not too shabby.
Playing was serious business for us. So serious that we played from sun up to sundown with no let up. So serious that we played with bloody knees and lips and elbows. So serious I would run the 100 yard dash again and again and again till my asthma was so bad I had to take my meds and lay in my bed and cry because I couldn't run again. It was as serious as work. Sometimes it was fun.

Hospitals and Fun

This post is only a little about Wenonah, although everyone in Wenonah probably has a similar story to tell. I've spent the past two days caring for Johanna. She developed a severe infection from a sinusitis and we had to go to Christ Hospital. The hospital was deluged with flu patients and she was very ill and so for a variety of reasons there was no bed immediately available. I've been at her side most of the past few days along with her dear friends Sandy and Oscar and Douglas and Teresa. Finally after nearly two days she got a bed and was able to rest in comfort.
Maybe you've been ill. Maybe you have a friend who has been ill. You know what I'm talking about. The long hours waiting for doctors to make decisions, the stressed emergency room workers, the poor sick people who fill the ER. It's not a broken system but it's a system that is often ill equipped to deal with actual people. Johanna's nurses and caregivers were kind and thoughtful but we sat in a cold room with little information for hour upon hour upon hour. It's tempting to say it was because she was undocumented or because she was HIV positive or whatever thing you want to put out to make yourself feel angry but the simple fact is that the American system for caring for the ill is totally fucked the fuck up. We make rules to help people and we make rules to protect ourselves against litigation but we don't make latitude for care.
I watched a young latin girl leave the hospital because she didn't get pain killers fast enough. She was angry and in pain. Her sister was filled with rage. They screamed at all the women in the ER that it was their fault. When I arrived this morning Johanna wanted to leave. No rest. No solace. No calm. No beds.
When I was ill it was the same. When you go into a hospital you are a patient. And sadly that's what you must become. Patient. Patient while you are in agony. Patient while you are afraid. Patient while you are at the mercy of people who have dozens of other people in the same straits.
You could say fuck this shit. Maybe we should. Maybe litigation and money have changed the landscape of healthcare so that it makes no sense. But all I could think about while we were sitting there was men in Civil War hospitals and the men and women who cared for them. For them there was no medicine for the most part to save anyone. There was only solace and kindness and concern.
I think we should go back and look at what the fuck we're doing in healthcare and identify the core of healthcare. Care. Solace. Understanding. For patients. For caregivers. For the men and women who wipe shit off our backsides and listen to us scream in agony.
It's not money that we need to focus on. It's how to deliver care without regard for procedure, regulations, or money. We don't need as many machines. We need more nurses. We need more doctors. We need to stop separating people by their race and disease and personality.
It's very sad when the most wonderful moment in the day is that you get a hospital bed. The most wonderful moment in the day should be when you feel well. When someone claps you on the back and says thank you for saving my mother's life. When a doctor can say I've done my best and I've been successful. I guess I don't believe there are really that many sick people that we couldn't really find a way to address this. Many people here were there only because they had the flu. What the fuck is that. You have to go to the hospital because you have the flu?
We're voting over the next year or so for someone to change this shit. Fuck Iraq. Fuck Afghanistan. Fuck Al Queda. The worst thing we can do is ignore our humanity. I'm on the side of Walt Whitman who tended the dead and dying. All he had to give was kindness. No penicillin. No morphine. No beds. Only care. If we go back to care maybe we can sort this shit out.
I am the lucky beneficiary of healthcare. I would have been dead 20 years ago. I'm not. Nor is Johanna. But no one should be treated like a piece of meat in a hallway by rules and regulations.
People should be able to see their doctor for the flu. Not a hospital. People all people should be able to ask for help. Documented, undocumented, uninsured, insured. Who really cares. I know this is idealistic and stupid and naive. But maybe we need to go back to that.
There was a young man in the hospital named Eric. He greeted patients by name and engaged them in a real way. He made them feel like he could help. He helped cut through red tape and talked to doctors and nurses to make things move along. How sad it was only one man and not an entire hospital.
God Bless men like Eric and God Bless the women who cared for Johanna and gave her solace and goddamn the stupid rules and regulations and bullshit that stand in the way. If you vote over the next months vote for people that care. Vote for a country that cares for all it's citizens, not just the well to do or the privileged. We are a rich nation built on hope. Vote for hope.

Spring et al in Wenonah

Wenonah in Spring is always beautiful. When I was in 5th grade my father and mother would give my brothers and sister Easter gifts. Just one and a piece of clothing along with our coconut egg and jelly beans. In 5th grade I got a Sears fishing rod and reel. I'd used fishing tackle as a boy down the shore but this was different. It was a spinning reel. In this case, closed face. I also got line and some hooks and a bobber and a lure or two.
My father knew pretty much nothing about fishing. That meant that my brothers and I took to reading the instruction book and practicing in the back yard with the rod and reel. I mustered a few casts and then it was off to Davis Lake to catch some carp. In Wenonah there were about two fish you could catch. Carp and small mouth bass. None of us caught small mouth bass. That's probably because we just put balls of wadded up bread on a hook and tossed it into the lake. Oh, sometimes you'd get an eel or a minnow but mostly you caught carp. Carp are basically giant goldfish that grow in little lakes. They eat vegetation and that's about it. They are not, repeat, not, sport fish.
They do struggle a bit when you hook them but pretty much any idiot with a hook can catch one. What you do with them after you catch them is somehow unhook them and throw them back in, only to catch them again. For all I know there is only one carp in all of Davis Lake and I caught him dozens of times along with my friends.
Under a certain age you don't need a license to fish so we were able to stand there like idiots for free and catch carp. Once in a while we'd go to Sutton's Lake or down to the Mantua Creek. The creek actually had fish in it you might eat. There were catfish in the creek and they were catchable and if you were ballsy enough you could skin them and cook them and eat them. I never got past the trying to skin them phase. Catfish for those of you who didn't grow up in a rural or semi-rural environment are some weird prehistoric fish like sharks without scales. You have to peel their skin off them. This is neither easy nor pleasant and they are not happy about it. They're ugly, nasty, and don't like dying. Pretty much like every creature on the face of the earth.
So there we were in the middle of the woods, lines in the stupid little lake, waiting for carp. All around us the dogwoods and peach were erupting in bloom. The scent of blossoms, lilacs and hyacinths and a thousand other flowers filled the air. We didn't notice. We were looking at a muddy little pond stocked with ornamental junkfish and trying to be like the men we read about in Boys Life.
There is a horrible lesson to be learned here. I do remember at times forgetting I was fishing. Just lying back in the new grass on the shore of the creek and breathing in the air in the warm spring breeze. That might have lasted for twelve minutes. It should have been savored. Perhaps it still is.

GIANTS!!!

One word: Giants! Two words Gi Ants! Three words: New York Giants! The best superbowl ever! Yes! Never bring your super model girlfriend to the game.

The Lives of Others

When I put up the last post I was disheartened. I realized as I wrote it that I knew nothing about the lives of the men and later women who protected our homes and property. Yes, I rode on the trucks and watched the parade and went home dutifully at 8:00 each evening but what it meant to have your life disrupted by a loud, insistent whistle, what it meant to perhaps see the home of one of your friends in ruin, those were things that meant nothing to me. And why should they. I was a fifth grade boy with a boys concerns. Cub Scouts, grades, book reports, games, baseball, all those things were important. Sure firemen seemed brave but that had been drilled into me constantly as a boy. Why it was a brave thing to be a fireman was not immediately apparent. This may seem dumb but the actual fact that you could die putting out a fire was not something that occurred to me. Burnt beyond recognition was not a phrase that would ring a bell with me. Yet the men who manned the trucks were for the most parts vets of the Korean Conflict and World War II. Many, if not all of them, had seen men "burnt beyond recognition" and far, far worse. Still when the whistle blew they pulled back the covers and rushed into danger.
But this rumination is not just about their bravery it is mostly about my ignorance. And the ignorance of most fifth grade boys and girls in South Jersey in 1963 in the second year of the Kennedy administration. Yes, we saw war on TV and read books about it but it was all a movie or a cartoon. After all, the Coyote always came back alive. And beyond our ignorance of real things like death and sorrow and ugliness there was our ignorance of the lives of adults. We knew precious little about what it meant to be a man or a woman. That was not on TV for the most part. I learned the facts of life in fifth grade from Chris DeHart on his porch. It seemed absurd. You stuck your wee wee in a girls wee wee and some milk came out and then she had a baby. You might as well believe the moon was made of green cheese. We were just a few years away from sexual maturity but centuries away from wisdom.
When our parents had parties we sat upstairs and listened to the Mills Brothers and Frank Sinatra and the loud, sudden laugh of a woman in her thirties. Raucous, rough sounds that were the sounds of a world so far from our own they might as well have been coming from India. Work was just a few chores. Raking leaves or pulling weeds or putting our clothes away. Our fathers left each morning and returned each night but what they did while they were gone bore no relation to anything we could imagine. Death? Oh, maybe your great grandmother might pass away or the grandmother of a friend but no one I knew had lost a brother or a sister or a father or a mother. But wait, I'm lying there. My mother and Aunt's distant relative (sort of a cousin), Madelaine, had lost her brother in a "tragic accident. They said he had hung from a rope on his bunk bed. Suicide? Accident? Who knew, because it was not talked about. It was mentioned among adults and then never spoken of again. That was how death moved in and out of our childhood. We romped through the quick mud in the swamp and rode our bikes no handed down Cherry Street and threw ourselves and our sleds down Cemetery Hill with no thoughts of death or injury or the future. There was only a huge and nearly perfect NOW and that was where we lived.
So, my apologies to all the firemen and women of Wenonah for not taking the time to really envision your lives. I am writing this primarily from my perspective as a child and so that leaves out pieces. Some of them we pick up along the way. Like sex or injury, but many of them won't happen to me until this part of the blog has faded into dust.

One request, if anyone reading this has a photo of the old Wenonah firehouse or Police Station please send it my way. I tried to find one on the net but apparently none exist. Thanks my faithful readers:)

Volunteer Firemen

Bob Thomas suggested I write a bit about the Wenonah Volunteer Fire Dept. since I had just covered the Police Dept. When I was in fifth grade the firehouse was a two story building on South West Ave. It was a white building and the one fire truck was kept on the first floor with the second floor functioning as a social hall for the volunteer firemen and other community functions. On Election Day the first floor was where the voting took place. On top of the firehouse was a loud whistle which was sounded to summon the volunteers should there be a fire. You could hear it everywhere in town. The number of whistles indicated (at least this is what us chowderheaded kids thought) the severity of the fire. It also was sounded at 8:00pm each evening to tell all the children to go home. It was called the Eight O'Clock Whistle. On the 4th of July it was sounded to let everyone know the parade was about to begin. It was also supposed to be sounded as an air raid siren. There would be tests of the air raid function when we were young and if we were in school we either a) got under our desks and put our hands over our heads or b) went into the hall to do "duck and cover". I guess this made people feel safe. I know that in fifth grade we were fairly certain that if there were a real nuclear war we would be toast by the time the dopey whistle went off. We lived about ten or so miles from Philadelphia and the US Navy Yard as well as some of the largest oil refineries and chemical plants on the east coast. There was a Nike missile base in Pitman and it seemed like the Russians would probably know to hit Philly. We read John Hersey's "Hiroshima" and that was just a little bomb. An H Bomb would cook us all. But still we did as we were told.
I wasn't the child of a volunteer fireman so my experiences with the fire department were limited to rides on the truck on the 4th and watching the volunteers speeding to the firehouse when there was a siren. My brother Ted joined the department as a young man and it was then that I found out that one big feature of being a volunteer fireman was that you hung around and drank beer. That probably explains much of the appeal in a town like Wenonah, with no bars and lots of young married men with children. Plus every once in awhile you got to put out a brush fire or a fire in a kitchen. Bob reminds me that Ed Campbell would leave school for fires and return covered in soot and smelling of smoke.
I don't recall anyone ever dying in a fire in Wenonah. I actually don't recall any really big fires. But still there were fires and danger and men willing to help for no pay at all. They still do. In a bigger firehouse with two trucks (at least) and serious training and probably the same amount of beer.
I go to the firehouse each 4th of July to drink beer and meet old friends and remember the good old days. We watch the parade and try to egg the firemen into pulling their sirens. They're not supposed to but they do anyway.
It's kind of strange that a town as small as Wenonah was divided up in little ways. I don't know much about the holiday displays and the care and work that went into them because my father wasn't in the Lion's Club (until much later) and whatever danger the men who volunteered to fight fires faced is something I know nothing about because my father wasn't a fireman. But divided up or not divided still men got together for business or pleasure or to help their town and did it all for free. For free.

Law Enforcement in Wenonah

There was a comment a few weeks back from a woman whose father was a former Chief of Police in Wenonah. There haven't been all that many Police Chief's in Wenonah. When I was young the Chief was Chief Haines. He lived in a home across the dirt road from the Wenonah Lake. He was a likeable guy whose primary job, so far as we kids could figure was acting as occasional crossing guard at Mantua Avenue. I'm sure he had other duties but honestly, crime was not a big issue in Wenonah until the late sixties and even then it was kind of tame.
When I got sick and went back to Wenonah they were just finishing the new Municipal building. Previously it was in the Fire House at the rear on the 2nd floor. Before that the Police Department was a two room building next to the Farmer's and Mechanic's Bank that eventually became the Village Shoppe. The Village Shoppe was owned by my friend Terry's mom, Mrs. Fleming.
You get the picture. We're talking lazy days with not much to do. Still this is a regular town with regular people which means there was domestic violence, drunk driving, even drug abuse. Every once in awhile a team of burglars would target homes in Wenonah over a two or three week period. Then there were black people and other undesirables walking through town. They'd be subjected to an interrogation to determine their destination and intent and sent on their way.
Any major crimes in Wenonah were for the most part swept under the rug. Which is not to say that there was no punishment only that the punishment might not involve jail time and might mean you got to move your ass out of town.
Still, there was the occasional radar trap on Mantua Avenue, speed limit 25 and built for 50. We'd sit on the bus bench at Lincoln and Mantua Ave and wave to the soon to be ticketed. Just behind them the old man we knew as "Parnelli" would speed through town at a blistering 7 miles an hour. Who's to say committed the greater crime?
Teenagers would occasionally act up and commit acts of vandalism. Eventually there was a Juvenile Board that would assess penalties for the crimes and misdemeanors of the malcontents that crossed it's threshold. Maybe you got caught soaping windows on Mischief Night, or trashed an empty house, or got caught drinking your folks liquor. Chief Haines would drag you in and you and your parents would stand one night in front of a group of people who would decide your fate.
Sometimes I think the worst punishment was that you would have to stay in Wenonah forever. Other times I think it was that you would be banished forever. Either one was a curse.

Getting Sick in 1960

Since I've been sick maybe this is an opportunity to talk about being sick.
When I was young I was sick often. Mostly asthma. But also all the routine illnesses that were a fact of life in the fifties and sixties: measles, mumps, chicken pox, 24 hour flu, 48 hour flu, whooping cough, scarlet fever, and more. A horrible litany of illness waiting to claim our frail bodies. The sad part was, we couldn't wait to get measles and shit!
You got enormous days out of school, bragging rights for the most dire disease, your parents bought you comics and were nice to you. Hell. getting sick was almost a good thing! So good, in fact, that we soon figured out faking it. And it didn't take a genius to realize a good day for a sore throat was the day you had a math test.
It must have been weird for our parents to wake up one morning and realize we were 45 lb con men.
What a terrible loss for them. Innocent sick infant one day, malingering liar the next. Surely they saw where this all might lead, jail, divorce, disgrace and dishonor.
But for the moment there was only lying in your bed with a Superman or Justice League of America and buttered sugar cinnamon toast and a cup of tea. Bliss. Later, when you were feeling "better" you could go downstairs and watch I Love Lucy reruns or Truth or Consequences or The Price is Right. Then lunch, soup, and back to bed you poor boy.
At dinner you might feel like a criminal or a liar with your brothers staring at you but who cared. The only real down side to being sick in grammar school was going to bed really early.
Unfortunately fake sick days had a bad habit of biting you in the ass. Because you still had to turn in the book report, take the math quiz, write the history essay. In other words you were just deferring your own complete and abject failure to complete what you should have completed.
So, you slogged your way into school and got your crummy grade and then several days later got chastised for your poor study habits and inability to understand the times tables or whatever. But in your heart it was almost worth it. Almost.
And what of real illness? What of true disastrous childhood diseases. Well, like sex and race they were squirreled away in each families private closet. Retarded children, cancer, operations, all of these were known and not known. Talked about and not talked about. Girls went away for three month vacations in their teens. Kids left for awhile and never came back and often their families left as well. A void.
But then there were other real illnesses that were mega real and glorious. Third Grade. Jack. Stomach flu. What would now be called a Novovirus. Then...24 hour stomach flu. But more than that it's me in the sixth row, suddenly nauseous, holding up my hand to go to the bathroom and Mrs Ferrara doesn't see for years, decades. Then she calls on me and I lurch to the fifth row, the fourth, the second, and then it blows. A vast projectile vomit that lives forever in the lives of my classmates. They sent everyone home the class stunk so bad. Poor Nick had to clean up vomit for two rows. Jesus. That was the flu.
So now, when I'm home feeling guilty about being sick and wondering when I can go back to work, I remember fifth grade. I'm coughing, I'm sure my throat is scratchy, I don't feel well at all. My mom asks how I am and I croak back, OK. We'll see in the morning and then I know I'm home free, good to go, sick as a dog, out of school, no class tomorrow, mom loves me, bless us oh lord for these thy gifts.

Back in the world; Sort of

Sorry it's been a few days. I went off the Hep C meds 12/31 but came down with the flu on the 3rd of January. I've been sick as a dog since. On the plus side I feel almost alive now and am already thinking about my next post, my next poem, and my new play. God Bless this world.
Stay tuned cats and kittens we're still in the mix! It's time for cars that turn into boats, JFK and Camelot, more fifth grade and Easter and that's just in the next month. Who knows, I may throw in Negroes, Jews, and Quakers into the pot just to see how it tastes.
Happy New Year! God Bless America! Yay Obama! Hooray for Hillary! Vote for John McCain! A vote for Fred Thompson is a vote for Law and Order!

2008 and on beyond zebra

You've probably wondered what happened to me and my posts. Well, it wasn't Christmas or New Years...it was Infergen. The meds for the hep c wiped my holiday spirit, energy, appetite, and apparently my platelets yet again. I'm off the meds for a bit while we evaluate what's the what.
In the meantime to anyone who didn't hear from me or Johanna over the holidays please accept our apologies. You are in our hearts.
God Bless You all and Happy, Happy New Year!

The Holiday Display

The coming Christmas celebration gives me a moment to weigh in on one of the vexing issues of our day. The holiday display. We had one in Wenonah, in the park, on E. Mantua Ave, across from Margies. The Lion's Club erected it shortly after Thanksgiving and the display consisted of a creche (life size figures of Mary, Joseph, the Wisemen, and baby Jesus all 2 dimensional cutouts), several pine trees decorated with lights and carols piped through a sound system. There may have been Santa and some reindeer but I can't remember. I do remember baby Jesus.
It was cheesy and nice. It mostly had a place in our collective little hearts but as a sincere demonstration of the miracle of Christ's birth it might have been lacking. Not that I don't think piped in carols would have made the manger in that long ago Bethlehem a better place but really I would have preferred just reindeers and Santa and we could leave Jesus in church where he seemed to look a lot better.
Last year I visited Suzy Parker's folks in Townsend's Inlet after the 4th of July. Dewey, Suzy's dad, told us about one year, maybe three or four before my 5th grade celebration, when he was in charge of the music for the Lion's Club. He allowed a young woman whom he and his friends found attractive to pick the music for the display. She picked "Rockin Around the Christmas Tree".
Needless to say this did not go over well in little Wenonah. But listening to Dewey tell the story reminded me of how cool it used to be that just a dumb old rock and roll tune could set everybody into high dudgeon. We were blessed with our small town nincompoopery and it's crazy little battles.
I don't know that it matters whether Jesus is in the park on Christmas eve if he's made of colored pressboard. I do think it matters that he's in the hearts of people that profess to believe that's important. I believe that Christmas is a joyous holiday. The Druids, the Christians, the Jews, all of us knuckleheads shaking in the dark, lighting candles and singing songs. God Bless Us Everyone!

Margie's Luncheonette

Downtown Wenonah didn't have much in the way of shopping. There was a BP gas station on the corner of West & Mantua. Across the street was Bowker's grocery store and in the rear of Bowker's was Tony Sacca's meat market. Next to Bowker's was G. Wayne Post and a woman's hair salon. There was a bank further up North West Ave., the Farmer's and Mechanic's National Bank and next to the bank was a building that was first a police station and then a small store run by Mrs. Fleming and Alice Brangan, the Village Shoppe. Across the street on E. Mantua Ave. was another building that housed various businesses and a second where Margie's Luncheonette was located.
Margie's was the center of Wenonah. It was directly across from the park and almost dead center in town. It had a lunch counter, a magazine rack, several booths, school supplies, and a candy counter. It could be said to be almost heaven. In 5th Grade I was finally allowed to eat lunch at Margie's on rare occasions rather than returning home. This meant a grilled cheese or hamburger and a chocolate shake. It was also mega intimidating since all the "cool" kids ate and hung at Margie's. The counter was generally filled with local businessmen and the booths in the back with teenagers and 6th, 7th, & 8th graders. Most of my time in Margie's was spent not in the booths but at the candy counter or magazine rack. Comics and candy. A dual addiction. There was also a cooler filled with sodas on ice. Cokes and vanilla soda and grape and pineapple. You'd stick your hand deep into the cold water and pull out what you wanted. All for a dime.
Candy was still penny candy, which was good if your allowance was .25 cents. My particular favorites were jawbreakers and a sour english candy whose name escapes me. While staring at the counter and making your selection you would steal glances at the kids in the booths. Girls in cashmere sweaters and guys with leather jackets and pompadours. Cool kids cracking wise and all no doubt laughing at me in my cowlicked glory. The Gernaga brothers, the older DeHarts, the Brangans, Bobby McQuaide, and a dozen other kids all too cool for school were back in the booths blowing straws at each other and sucking down fountain drinks. Hanging out.
I was forbidden to hang out. I'm not exactly sure why but I do know that Earl Rowland was one of the kids in the back and he was a real bad egg. Ralph Parkinson and his crew were there as well. Some girls my age were there, Dolores Lorenz, Sandy Fay, Jane Shiflet. All fast girls. Way too fast for me who know idea what any of this meant.
So I'd get my two comics and five pieces of candy and walk slowly home through the gathering dark. Inventing fantasies where the girls would dig me and I'd save them from evil. Then I'd be the cool cat. Then they'd see. They'd know who I really was inside. The fantasies of young boys are deeply disturbing and I'll leave you now to contemplate my terrible revenge. If Bobby McQuaide and Stewart DeHart could hang me in a closet by a fan belt, well, fine. But soon they'd know who they were messing with. I was smart. I was brave. I weighed 65 pounds soaking wet. My hair stuck up in the back and my shoes were scuffed and worn. My shirts screamed loser. My pants had flannel lining in the winter. Oh they'd soon see who they were messing with, yes, indeed.

Happy Birthdays and Gifts

So, tonight is my 56th birthday. Johanna is making a sopa de carne for her friends and I've eaten half a pepperoni pizza from Pizzamasters. I'm drinking champagne and reading the New York Times. I'm slightly whacked from the Infergen and a little tipsy.
What I'm not is forgetful. In 2001 I spent my 50th birthday throwing up. Danny and Patty came to visit me. I proceeded to puke vast quantities for most of the day. I weighed under 100 lbs. I was very, very cold all the time. My brother Mick's birthday gift to me was a warm throw blanket. Now my dog Cookie uses it to sleep in the evenings.
I may not feel 100%. But I weigh a lot more than 100lbs and while I get chilly I don't need a throw rug. I'm alive. God has given me a great and wonderful gift and I will fight with all my heart to be true to that gift.
So tonight I'm raising a glass of thanks and joy. Prosit. Cheers. Nostrovya. Salud. Lift one with me please my friends. It's the beginning of winter. If we all drink deep and sing loud the spring will come and then the summer and all this will be but a dream.
God bless everyone who helped me through my first illness. God bless all of you who hold me up now. Life is a rare blessing. Cheers!

Interior Decorating

It's true that most houses were viewed for just a second from the porch. The exception was the houses of our friends. We spent lots of time in our friends homes and we were being taught lessons, about what rooms were for, about where we could go, and about what we could do.
My own home was decorated in a mix of hand me down furniture and store bought couches. The basic motif was "colonial". At least that's what my mom said it was. Lack of money meant some pieces of furniture were periodically repainted to fit some new color scheme my mom came up with. Some chairs were periodically reupholstered. Once in a while a new couch or chair came to the house from Sears or the furniture store. Once in a while. Not often. It was always a sensible piece. And it was "colonial".
My friend Terry Fleming's house was the exact opposite of ours. One of the few contemporary homes in our neighborhood it boasted fireplaces and a finished basement. The look was "modern". Probably Danish modern but I'm just guessing. There was a kidney shaped table made from weird wood. There were thick odd carpets. There were glasses in the cabinets with racy sayings on them and skimpily clad girls. Downstairs in the basement there was a slot machine that worked.
A slot machine! In Wenonah! You couldn't do anything bad in Wenonah but in the Flemings you could gamble. Sadly you couldn't keep your winnings but then you didn't have to use your own money either.
The basement had wood panelling as did the kitchen and small first living room. Everyone in the Fleming house slept late. Mick and I were up at 6am and banging on Terry's door at 7:30am. Mrs. Fleming would open the screen door and stare at us as though we were martians. Terry was asleep and that's where we should be. Boom. The door would shut and we would meander out to figure out what to do till 10am when Terry woke up.
Mrs Fleming was fascinating to me. The house was filled with the smell of her Toni hair treatments. She was a tall, loud, brassy Irish woman. Big hearted and filled with noise. The exact opposite of my house. Years later I met her sister. She had sung with the Dorsey brothers in the forties and was married to a NY stockbroker. Their son was "damaged" in Nam and spent his days flying a biplane. Their daughter worked at MOMA.
The Flemings went to clubs. The Latin Quarter. Philly. They drank and laughed. They were like grown ups on TV.
Mick and I would go back to our colonial home and bumble around with our soldiers or read some comics then back to Terry's and the slots. It was like going from Christmas in Connecticutt to Viva Las Vegas every day.

5th Grade Report Card

Well, here's my report card from 5th Grade. As you can see I'm doing quite a bit better than I was with Mr. McIntire. Also you'll note Mrs Fuller has nicer handwriting. After a year of hard, hard work 5th grade was proving to be cake.

Parker's Lake

The cold weather and light snow, as well as the coming holiday, remind me that in 5th grade I received my first pair of ice skates. As per usual my brother Mick received a pair as well. Mick got a pair of black figure skates and I got a pair of hockey skates. It's my guess that my parents had no idea of the difference between the two and that my father thought hockey skates might be more manly and make me feel more grown up. Or not.
In any case sometime in early Jan of 1963 my Aunt Gert (I believe this was the case though I could be wrong) took Mick and I to Parker's Lake to ice skate. Parker's Lake was the premier ice skating location in Wenonah. It had a dock for changing your shoes to skates and an island with a fire going all day and all night long. You walked the length of S. Clinton Ave and then down a long dirt road till you came to the lake. If it was frozen of course you just walked across to the dock. Above the dock, up a steep hill, was Dewey and Edna Parker's house. It was the childhood home of my friends Suzy, Danny, and Billy. Behind it Dewey ran his West Jersey Biological Supply business (the rat farm). But we could care less. For us all that mattered was the lake.
There were other lake's to skate on in Wenonah. At the end of Jefferson by the Wenonah lake was Davidson's lake, perfect size for ice hockey, and upstream from Parker's Lake was a much larger lake, Langston's. We didn't much go there till we were in our teens.Over in Sinnott Tract there was Sinnott's lake. We'd skate on any one of these lakes but during my youth everyone in town went to Parker's.
It's gone now. A hurricane in the 80's wiped out the dam and NJ DEP restrictions made it too costly to rebuild the dam so no more lake, no more skating.
In any case that cold January day my Aunt Gert dragged me and Mick and our brandy new skates down to the lake. This is probably going to come as a shock but I sucked at ice skating. Over the years I've attained a measure of competency so I don't look like a complete klutz but that afternoon was disaster piled upon disaster. Most of which were caused by the fact that no one with me, including Gert, knew how to skate on hockey skates. Everyone had figure skates. All over the ice people were executing twirls and figure eights, and tearing up clouds of ice with their toes. But hockey skates have no teeth on the tips of the skates. You stop on hockey skates like you do on ski's. Sideways. With edges. But no one knew that, least of all me.
So once again I was hurtling around on a new Christmas gift with no way of stopping. Except to fall face forward. I grew colder and colder. Mick got better and better. The day dragged forever. The young girls in my class skated around me like I was a lump of coal skittering across the ice.
I'd like to give you some epiphany here. Say that I at last mastered skating that day and executed a gorgeous turn and stop. But I didn't. I hurtled into the dock, banged my knees, cursed what little curses I knew and tore the skates from my feet. I'd be back the next day, and the next, and I sucked just as much.
There were some benefits to this little bit of torture but they bore no fruit till I was in my late teens. In the meantime I looked like the rough tough cream puff at a time when I wanted to glide like a god.

The Sears Catalog

It being the holiday season it seems pertinent to mention the Sears and Roebuck catalog. The catalog came to us on a quarterly basis and in many ways was our primary shopping vehicle. School clothes, spring wardrobes, bathing suits. All from Mr. Sears and Mr. Roebuck. This is from a time when there were no shopping malls. When people had to go to Philadelphia to Wanamaker's to shop. There was an actual Sears and Roebuck store in beautiful downtown Camden but we rarely went there even though it was 20 minutes away.
But the catalog that mattered most was the Christmas catalog. It came out, as I recall, sometime in mid November and we eagerly grabbed it and began our gift choosing. Army men, Easy Bake Ovens, Chemistry Sets, dolls, football helmets, bikes, everything, everything was in the Sears catalog.
But they weren't just in the catalog. No, things were laid out so you could see just how great they were and how you could use them. These layouts were spectacular. The army men were storming the beaches, the tubes and vials of the chemistry set were bubbling with sinister potions, men and boys were playing energetic games of touch football in authentic NFL jerseys wearing authentic NFL helmets. The bikes had gear aplenty, rear view mirrors, dangly shit that hung off the hand grips, lights and mileage devices. It was mesmerizing. It also was perfect for pointing out exactly what you wanted to your clueless parents. Left to their own devices god knows what they might pick but with the Sears catalog you could clearly circle your first, second, and third choices.
The bulk of the catalog was in black and white but the cover was in glorious Christmas colors. It, more than any religious event, marked the beginning of the holiday season. Fuck Thanksgiving, fuck Advent, this was the real deal. And by arriving well before Thanksgiving it stretched out the gap between whatever day it was and Christmas to near unendurable lengths. Ninety years till Christmas, only sixteen thousand shopping days till Christmas. The gap between getting the catalog and the lighting of the tree on Christmas morning was the size of the Snake River canyon. Unfathomable.
So we'd soldier on, day after day after day, the only thing keeping our hopes alive the catalog. In the last weeks before Christmas we'd begin the hunt for hidden toys. This was hard on everyone. Usually the gifts arrived at the Post Office in town while we were in school so Mom had time to squirrel them away before we got home. Over the years their hiding places became more and more obvious. The problem was that if you found them you didn't really know whose gift anything was. It was as if God had created some cruel laboratory experiment in envy. Part of you would be pleased you found a gift, part would think it was for your brother and your parents hated you, then another part would hate yourself because you begrudged your brother a gift. Cruel cruel fate.
The only way your hopes and dreams would be revealed was on Christmas morning. Then we'd run down the stairs to see the tree ablaze with light, our parents in their robes and dozens of wrapped packages scattered about the room. At that instant you were sure you'd get everything you wanted. In that moment Christmas was glorious. It would inevitable come crashing down around you as you opened the gifts. Cold economic realities would raise their head. No radio controlled planes in the Wiler house. Yes, we'd get a set of army men but it was the second best set, yes, we'd get a chemistry set but not the complete set in the catalog. A little knowledge is a dangerous, dangerous thing.
Still and all there was always next Christmas. And at least we could use the Johnny Reb cannon to blow the Christmas balls off the tree one by one. Then there'd be turkey and a week of no school. Not bad, not bad.

Interferon and me

Remember when I got my spleen removed? Not so long ago, really. End of May. Anyway the reason for taking out a perfectly good, working organ was so I could tolerate the medicine for Hepatitis C. That would be Interferon. It's one great drug. You know how most drugs say they can cause skin irritation or diarrhea or shortness of breath? Well this little concoction has, as it's principal contraindication, SUICIDAL IDEATION AND SUICIDAL ACTUALIZATION, and it looks just like that, all in caps on the rather lengthy label. Nice.
The secondary problems are pleasant as well. Flu like symptoms. Anyway I started my interferon regimen last night and spent the next six hours shaking like a leaf in a storm. Teeth chattering, heart pumping, holy shit kind of "flu like symptom". Then I got up and went to work.
Tonight I do it again. You might be asking how long are you supposed to take this nasty drug Jack? 9-12 months I would reply. Every fucking day for 9-12 months I get to induce flu like symptoms. We'll leave off the drastic personality changes and the likelihood my red cells will all die or that my hair, such as it is, will fall out.
Still and all, the alternative is being dead. So my friends, to bed, to flu, to life!

Smells

The world of childhood is very, very small. One or two blocks, a school, some friends, your parents, your grandparents, your brothers, your sisters. Nothing much else. And as it shrinks smaller things grow. Like smells, like odors, like scents. Only an idiot wouldn't be on Proust's side. Of course his Madelaine's could conjure up a world. Of course.
But what smells and where. Start in our basement at 206 W. Mantua Ave. The chlordane wafting from beneath the porch, the smells of melting plastic toys over the ping pong table, the chemistry set and it's sulphur, the oil from the oil tank, the oil for the tools, the bleaches and soaps and detergents. The smell of Lava for removing the oil from the tools and the tank. Maybe the floor had just been painted deep red so there is the smell of the new oil based paint. The mildew. The cool rush of cold from the freezer and the smell of that cold as it fills your hot face on a summer's day. The smell of your dirty shirts and socks piled by the washing machine.
Then up the stairs and into the kitchen and of course there is the smell of food. But also the ever present cigarette smoke and the wax your mother applies to the linoleum and the dish detergent. Joy. And on the kitchen window sill there is an old ceramic bowl with an old, old hard boiled egg and one day the egg breaks and there is that dense sulphur too. And garbage on a hot summer day. Bacon frying on a Saturday morning and butter browning in the iron skillet to make scrambled eggs. On the holidays a turkey in the oven and stuffing and those glorious smells and then out the back door to the garage and the smells of all the things stacked there.
Around the garage the wisteria, purple and thick with scent driving the carpenter bees insane as each of them devour the garage. The tar of the roof shingles, the oil on the floor of the garage from the cars, the three in one oil for the bike chains, the smell of chrome polish, the odor of the wax candle as you rub it on your sleds runners. The paint cans, the cobwebs and dust, the dry smell of old, old wood, dry in the South Jersey heat.
Just to the side the smells of the vegetable garden, the rotting lettuce, the tomatoes thick with smell, the sweet corn, the deep rich brown earth, nearly black and thick with the scent of decay and rebirth, behind the garden the compost and the tree and the scents of barks and old rotting leaves. The air in fall always thick with the smell of rotting leaves.
When Johanna and I were in Barnsboro for Thanksgiving we sat and watched thousands of leaves swirling from the trees in the wind and she said it never smells like this in Jersey City and it never does. The smell of burning leaves mingled with the smell of the cigar from the man tending the fire in the street mixed with the scent of new macadam. Almost like licorice.
And grass and hay. New mown grass, piles of rotting grass, fresh uncut grass. Hay, and weeds, and skunk cabbage. Dead squirrels on a path. Dead mice under a log. The swamp smell of the creek and the creek mud. The smell of your wet woolen shirts and gloves.
The smell of your dog or your cat just in from the rain. The smell of the air just after a thunder storm. The smell just before it snows. The smell of the chlorine pool, the cedar lake water, the smells of my grandmother's paints.
Too many to name too many to remember.
Not enough time to sit back and inhale and recollect. They come rushing in like unwanted ghosts at inopportune moments. When I was very ill and lying in my bedroom I realized my room smelled just like it did when I was six. How odd. How unbidden. How unwanted.
The smells of your first sex and your first after shave and your first blood wiped from your nose in your first fight.
Breath them in. Breath them out. It's like watching or listening. Attend.

Leftovers

Yesterday was spent in the bosom of my family at my step brother Bobby Murphy's house in Barnsboro. He and his girlfriend Beth live there with Beth's son. It's a beautiful new home at the end of a long gravel driveway. Johanna and I drove down and after negotiating the NJ Turnpike and its traffic arrived at Mick's to meet Mick and my nephew Doug. From there it was on to my niece Louise house in Oak Valley to pick up Louise and her new husband Paul and their infant daughter Mackenzie. It was a warm Thanksgiving day and we arrived moments later at Bobby's. The house was full, my brother Ted and his children, Kelly, Mark, & Justin, my sister Mary, her husband Will, and their son Billy. And then all the Murphy's; Bobby and Beth, Kathleen and her husband Nick and their children, Nick & Victoria, John and his daughter Nicolle, Kenny and his wife Lori and their children, Owen and Gracie. Bah, humbug.
At any rate the garage had a tv in it with the football game on and there was a fridge stocked with beer and cheese and crackers and my sister's signature dip and veggies with other dips. Actually Kenny and Lori came just 45 minutes before the dinner but they were most welcome as they brought the two turkey's we would consume.
We drank and laughed and then sat down to the feast. My brother Mick was loud and big and funny as only Mick can be. He and I embarrassed Doug who was handsome and thoughtful. Johanna spent the night holding Mackenzie and looking beautiful. There were calls for more Beaujolais and beer and then the pies and coffee and more talk and laughter and then the sad parting.
It was a grand night.
Johanna and I drove back to Mick's where we couldn't sleep so at 11:30, a bit sobered up, I drove us home. Where we slept like babies with Cookie and Milo.
Happy Thanksgiving to all of you and most of all to Mick and Doug. You'll note your names occur more than anyone's. While I was in South Jersey Doug asked me why he was never in the blog. I reminded him it's primarily a memoir of my life in Wenonah in the early sixties. He said why don't you have me travel back in time and then I could be in it. Well, Doug, here you are and it's in 2007 and everyone is happy and there is no misery or sorrow and what could be better? What indeed?
God Bless us All! Remember those who have less than us and offer what you can, not just during the holidays, but all the year round.
Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving

This has nothing to do with nothing. Everyone have a Happy Thanksgiving. It's a gorgeous morning in Jersey City and Johanna and I are off to Bobby Murphy's house for the Wiler/Murphy feast. We're gathering in Barnsboro for a great meal with people we love. May all of you have the same opportunity.

Models

Enough serious crap. Let's move on to more important concerns. What to do during the cold months from January to March if you're a fifth grade boy. Models. And not Heidi Klum type models. No. Real, scale models of cars and aircraft carriers and monsters and superheroes. Testors glue and paint and instructions and newspapers strewn across a small desk under a little light at 8:30pm.
My first model was one my father gave me. A Sunbeam. That's this weird car made in the 60's that was half a Volkswagon, half a Fairlane. It was two toned, usually a pale blue with white. It was ugly and we owned one. It was the car my mother got to drive. I guess that's why he gave it to me. As per usual I was given the kit, the glue, and the paint and set to my own devices. Now, in fifth grade I was as awkward as I'd ever be which is to say unable to master any technical skill. Delicate was way beyond my fingers abilities. I could barely color within the lines. This meant I spent several days screaming and yelling at myself and begging my father for help till it was done.
My next model came that Christmas. The Visible Man. This was both an incredible gift and some horrible torture. It had ten zillion parts that had to be glued and painted and then carefully fitted together because it came apart! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as my father would say. My Visible Man resembled the Terminator in late stages of decay. Some parts were painted, some were not, I may have left out the liver. Glue was smeared all over the clear skin of the Visible Man making him more the translucent, smeary man.
I moved up in class. Hot Rods. These were gorgeous models by Aurora that required incredible amounts of patience and skill. I had none. My friend Terry had all of them and more in reserve. He could apparently assemble a model in ten minutes, not counting drying time, and it always looked just like in the magazines or on the box cover. Tommy Jenkins actually spray painted numerous layers of candy coated red on his cars. They gleamed like they were in a car show. The wheels moved. You could almost see some cool cat from California in a white t shirt sitting next to a leggy blonde in a huge bee hive.
Mine looked they'd gone cross country with the Joads.
Up to monsters. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy. Terry's looked real, mine like monsters, only gluey, misshapen attempts by pathetic, arrogant humans to take on the power of God. Stitched together, missing parts, dripping red everywhere except where it should be.
My room stank of glue and paint. My new desk was splattered with red and green and little hillocks of plastic cement. On the plus side one day Terry's mom found him almost passed out at his desk because he'd inhaled so much plastic cement fumes. That could never happen to me. Before that would have happened I'd have tossed the piece of shit plastic torture machine across the room in a fifth grade rage. Then I'd stalk downstairs and sit in my favorite chair reading Classic's Illustrated and sucking a jaw breaker in a stink of frustration. God, life was good.

Secrets

I'm going to cheat today. Because it's important, because it matters. The last post was about what we didn't know about in the homes we entered. What we didn't know about, more than anything, was secrets and those secrets were sexual in nature. We didn't know because we were barely sexual. Because we were children. Maybe we had inklings but it was that and nothing more.
For everyone in Wenonah being sexual was to be a freak. Odd. You married and had children and they came from sex but how that happened was never spoken of. If you had sex and it had nothing to do with making a child it was even more unspoken. Of course there were affairs. Of course there were men and women that had sex. Teenagers, young adults, men and women with great longing, men and men and women and women. But you never spoke of any of this because to speak of this made you a freak. Like Mr. Webb.
Why should this bother me. I'm a grown man who has been a sexual being his whole life. I think sex is normal and natural and important. I've never shrunk from expressing my sexuality. My desires. My needs. That is a lie. Of course I have. I couldn't speak of anything outside of sex which wants a child. Not hetero or homo or any other sex. To think of desiring another for sexual reasons was unspeakable and to think that you might be a person who lives for those reasons. Well. You're a freak.
I live with a gorgeous, generous, person named Johanna. She is not a woman. She is anatomically a man. She is a woman. She is a man. She is everything you could want in a lifemate but according to the world in which I grew up she is a freak. And that makes me a freak by association.
When I came home to Wenonah, sick with AIDS, none of my childhood friends came to vist me. My family and a few neighbors, my friend Crystal and my landlord Rachel and my neighbor Mrs Seville were some of the few who said even hello. I was first angry, then saddened. They didn't come because I was different. First, I might die. Second, I was clearly gay, Third, I was nearby. We can all take pity on those in suffering at a distance but to do so with those nearby requires courage and strength most of don't possess. I walk by people everyday who are in deep pain. So, with my childhood friends.
Johanna came to me some months into my recovery and brought me two bunny rabbits. She relished the joys of a spring in Wenonah. It was not where she belonged but she felt it's great beauty.
In a week or two it will be World AIDS Day. People with far less resources and family than I are dying and suffering everyday throughout the globe because of shame and secrets. The simple fact of the matter is that the virus of AIDS doesn't give a fuck about you or your desires or needs or virtuousity. It's a virus. By virtue of your inaction or stupidity or lack of knowledge it finds a host and lives and thrives and the host dies. Or doesn't.
All of us can do each and everyone of our fellow human beings a great service by remembering this. We can spend a moment on World AIDS Day remembering someone or perhaps more people we've lost and we can commit to never allowing secrets, shame, and being other to destroy a life. We can reach out to people that aren't like us and realize that all of us are exactly the same. Naked. In the eyes of the Lord. In need of prayer and succor.
So please, this Thanksgiving, take a moment to reach out to the people nearest you and least like you and give them some small kindness. And then reach into your pockets and give to those who die from hunger and AIDS and cancer because people don't give.
We can all of us give, everyday, in every way.
God Bless and Happy Thanksgiving!

Interiors

One thing about money and work. It brought you into contact with a lot of people you didn't really know and more than that it took you into their homes. Not all the way into their homes, just into their homes. Usually just inside the front door. From there you got a glimpse of their lives. Just that. A glimpse.
Wenonah was made up primarily of Victorian homes and a scattering of homes built in the 1920's. On the northeast corner there was a development built in the fifties. But for the most part we're talking homes with porches and entry halls. What someone in a Jane Austen novel might call a parlor. My own house had it's front hallway, complete with a small bathroom which we called the powder room, and the stairs leading to the bedrooms. Just to the right was a living room with a bay window. When people came to visit they entered by this front door and hallway. When friends came they went to the back or side door.
So it was with me and my friends when we went to earn money. When we knew the people, or more precisely, their children we entered the home from the side door or the back door. In Terry Fleming's case the side door was the garage door, for instance. When we didn't we knocked or rang the bell at the front door. Some period of time would elapse and an adult would open the door a bit, perhaps a foot or two, and say hello and ask us what we wanted. We wanted work. But in asking we were also asking to look inside and look we would.
We'd peer around the adult for the secrets within. Most of the homes were a little dark, maybe that was just a trick of the light, or maybe it was a natural inclination to save electricity on the part of older people. The furniture might be old or modern. You almost never heard a tv in the background. There might be a dog barking at their side. The Marx's dog once leapt up and bit me on the elbow. Hard. Don't come in too far. You never know.
Some of the adults were well dressed, some disheveled. Sometimes a man would answer the door on a weekday and that was strange. Sometimes they would hide from you. Especially if you were collecting for the newspaper. You could hear them inside and you would ring and ring yet no adult would come to the door. That was an interesting lesson.
Sometimes a beautiful young wife or stunning teenage girl would answer the door. That was scary and wonderful all at once. The smells that came from inside were also always different. Musky, perfumes, lavender, pinesol, all the different smells of a house. All just drifting two or three feet away, just past a hulking adult figure asking what did you want after all. What indeed?
Why was the door not opened wide? Why wasn't it flung open? Why didn't they ask us in for a coke or a little talk? It was the rare person who would do such a thing. They had something we wanted and they weren't going to give it up easily. We would have to work hard for what we wanted. To get beyond that door and have them open their wallet or purse and pull out a few crumpled singles for our little hands. Maybe they thought we wanted something more. Maybe we did.

Money and Children

It's time for filthy lucre to raise it's head. You've gathered by now that my family was not rich but happy. Nonetheless there was not a lot of cash to go around. In, I believe, 3rd Grade I got my first allowance. 25 cents. Not a lot but much more than Mick's dime. At the time that would buy two comic books and five pieces of penny candy or one candy bar. My friends, for the most part, got a bit more. But I was fairly happy with this.
What I wasn't happy with was my father's new found insistence on work. Suddenly after we finished Church School on Saturdays we were enlisted in a number of "chores" to earn our meager allowances. Raking the lawn, taking out trash, scrubbing the kitchen floor. All tasks that we did poorly and begrudgingly.
By 5th Grade I was raking in 50-75 cents a week but had also discovered entreprenourship. We could earn money by doing chores for older folks in the neighborhood. And they paid way better than my father. Everyone in my family treated money differently. I spent like a drunken sailor on Saturday night. Mick hoarded and binged. Ted just hoarded. Mary Louise was too small to have any money.
But we did manage to save money to spend when we went to the shore each summer. Money to purchase toy soldiers and rides on the amusements, etc. But mostly we spent our money on frivolities. Spiderman, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Superman, wax candies, jawbreakers, twizzlers, sodas, etc, etc, etc.
I need to talk a bit more about how begrudgingly we performed our chores. My father would invariably grab a rake from our hands and rake the leaves himself screaming that this was the proper way to rake leaves. He was right. It was proper for him to rake leaves. Standing there shaking really wasn't hard work if you think about it. On the other hand we had a penchant for putting tasks off. This was particularly bad with snow shovelling. New fallen snow, even heavy, wet snow, is easily removed. Snow packed by dozens of travellers and frozen into slick patches of ice is not. We never learned our lesson and instead spent hours after school with an ice chopper going over small patches of concrete trying to free them of their ice.
On the plus side we had dough for baseball cards and we could pick up tons of cash by shovelling the Sacca's house. Sometimes even getting up to five dollars! Five, freaking, dollars. More money than I would see for weeks from my allowance.
Oh sure, we also got money from well intentioned relatives at Christmas and birthdays but that was always removed and placed in our savings accounts at the Farmer's and Mechanic's Bank. The Farmer's and Mechanic's Bank. Jesus. And we would have periodic flurries of collecting soda bottles from various families and trading them in at Margies for the deposit money. But mostly there was raking leaves, mowing lawns, and shovelling snow. Hard, hard work done fitfully and by surly little urchins. Wet cranky little dickheads.
It wasn't till sixth grade that I began my misadventures with newspaper routes. But they would come. They would come.

Chemistry Sets

My parents, like all the parents of their day and most likely like parents today, felt a need to improve our minds. We needed to learn and explore the world around us. Because they didn't actually observe what we did when we were in the world around us they supplemented the world with "educational" gifts. Sometimes these sucked. Like classical recordings. But sometimes they were marvelous. Like chemistry sets.
A chemistry set was the best birthday or Christmas gift you could receive short of an actual bb gun. Chemistry sets had beakers and test tubes and things to hold the test tubes and bunsen burners and most importantly...chemicals. Shit in it's purest form. Shit you mix up and use to ruin the world. You were Dr Frankenstein or Einstein or the inventor of the next best, great thing to be invented. Since none of my friends were engineers or inclined in that direction we had no real scientific method. We just mixed shit up and watched what happened. These were actual, real, potentially dangerous chemicals. Now they would come with a host of warnings. Then they came with nothing. Oh, wait...there was an instruction book that we never read.
So we took my chemistry set down to the basement. Set it on our play shelf and began to make poison gases and toxic fumes and potent liquids that would peel the finish off our furniture. Bubbling, smoking, egg shell stinking chemical messes.
We were in heaven. We might have been in Bhopal but to us it was heaven. Naturally we supplemented the meager amount of chemicals the kit came with by appropriating chemicals from our homes. Cleaning solvents, pesticides, paints, and other liquids that appeared similar in nature were added to the toxic brew. Oh the wonders of science.
Many of our skills would come in handy in college when we had to measure and sort various illegal substances but that was really the last time any of this would matter. What I learned was that shit stunk and that it was fun to mix shit up and set it on fire.
When I was working at my company Fleetrak I had the opportunity to work on a regular basis with engineers. These are very strange people who actually understand the inner workings of things. If an engineer gets a toy for Christmas he takes it apart to see how it works and then makes it work better. He does it in an orderly, logical manner. I've had engineers ask me what algorithm we were using in our GPS engine. I told him I didn't have any rhythm but if I did I wouldn't name it Al. He didn't laugh.
We were not engineers. We didn't follow any rules. We didn't try to learn anything. We weren't under the direct supervision of a parent or guardian and so we were more like imps in the machine. We just fucked with shit. And had fun. Lots and lots of fun.

JFK and all that

5th Grade is the year we began to understand the world. We were all fans of our president. He was young and he was cool and his wife was beautiful and he had two beautiful children. This was a time before the time we live in. The press allowed us to indulge in this fantasy. If he had a terrible back problem and was a womanizer and if his wife was not so very nice and if their marriage was less than perfect and if maybe he wasn't the best president in the world we'd never know because it wasn't good form to talk about such things in the press. Thanks be to God.
So me and Terry and Kenny and Bob picked up Our Weekly Reader and read about the latest events of the world. We learned how we should join the Peace Corps so we could help save the poor Africans from starvation and ignorance and we learned about how we should exercise and go on fifty mile hikes. This particular bit of presidential insanity somehow rubbed off on my old man who decided Mick and I were flabby little nincompoops. Nincompoops we may have been but flabby was far off the mark. I weighed all of 60 lbs in 5th grade and I may be stretching it at that. In my Sophomore year of high school I weighed in at a cool 115lbs without even trying. Mick was no better. Nonetheless my father challenged us to see how many push ups we could do. Not many, not many. Which led, somehow, to the Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual. A series of isometric and other calisthenic exercises which we were encouraged to indulge in on a daily basis. And like little puppies we did...for a while.
But being good little boys we also indoctrinated our friends and that led inexorably to the Wenonah Olympics. That's right. We staged our own Olympic games in Wenonah. Of course we didn't have a track and we didn't have a discus and we didn't have a shot to put and we had no arenas but we had willing acolytes (Ted and his little friends) and we had imaginations and we did the best we could under the circumstances. We ran the fifty yard dash and someone had a stop watch they borrowed from their dad. We had relay races. We tried as hard as we could using bamboo poles to do a pole vault. For some reason the pole vault more than any other Olympic or track and field event captivated us. We wanted with all our hearts to be able to launch ourselves twenty feet into the air and land on a soft cushion to the cheers of the crowd (Ted and his little friends).
Sadly we never got over three or four feet. We did a credible long jump and we enjoyed race walking because you looked like an idiot and we passed race walkers in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia so if adults could walk like idiots so could we. And we ran. But then we ran anyway all day long. It was the one thing we did beside ride bikes.
What did this running and jumping and cheering have to do with John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his bride and their two young children? To them, nothing. To us, everything. We were walking in their footsteps. We were playing touch football just like they did. We were active. We were committed. We believed. That's the key word here. Belief. Because now if you picked up Our Weekly Reader you'd say what a bunch of shit. You'd say this is just propaganda or hooey or nonsense. You wouldn't give a shit if they were building a great bridge from Staten Island to New York City because you'd be sweating the costs. You wouldn't care about bringing water to a small African village because you'd be worried about the ozone or the price of gas or your kid who's got a drug problem. But we believed. We believed we should be better. We believed we could be better. We believed that by dint of hard labor and imagination you could change the world. This was to have dire consequences but for now we were just a bunch of kids in dungarees racing around the block as fast as we could trying to be the best and fastest kid on the block.

Ruthie Felch and the Man in the Woods

In 5th Grade we did not understand sex. Oh sure, one day the year before at Chris DeHarts we found out how babies were made. It seemed strange to us. How could your penis make a baby? I mean you pissed out of it. Did you pee into the girl? It didn't quite make sense but enough older boys (Stewart DeHart and Bobby McQuaide) had told us so we bought into the whole thing. We were interested in girls, like I said earlier, but it was all inchoate.
One day in school something odd happened. Our teacher came in the class to tell us Ruthie Felch had been molested by a man in the woods by the railroad tracks. She warned the girls to stay away from the woods. Molested. What did that mean?
There was much speculation and no clear facts. This was after all a time when no one talked about sex. Remember that we learned where babies came from because older boys told us. Having a parent or teacher explain this to you at 11 would be unthinkable.
That meant we were all at a loss to understand what actually had happened to Ruthie Felch. In fact, to this day I actually have no idea what happened. Was she raped? Did he expose himself? Did he touch her? No one but Ruthie and the teachers and the man know what happened.
But this incident brought a bit of darkness into our bright little town. Suddenly there was danger all around us. Much like the Soviet Union menacing our borders there were perverts in our back yards, lurking in our woods.
I had read a number of adult books by now, including "To Kill a Mockingbird", but when sex parts came up I just breezed by them. They made no sense. The author might as well have been describing strange habits of an alien race.
But still, there was a man in the woods. We all knew about the tramp who lived out by the Parker's at the dump. Boys said that he did bad things to them. What those things were we had no idea but we never went past the Parker's in our excursions in the woods. The dump behind the Parker's was by the side of the creek but our trips up the Mantua Creek all stopped at the railroad trestle. We had no wish to find out what the man might do.
So we'd run home from school and play our games and watch tv and go to sleep and dream untroubled dreams. No lurkers in the woods. No communists torturing our families. No danger anywhere in our happy sleep.

I Danced Till a Quarter To Three

I’ve been to a hundred weddings, including two of my own. I’ve danced with women I don’t know and will never see again and had a wonderful time. I’ve danced to dj’s and bands from the fifties and punk bands (my wedding). I’ve eaten tons of bad food and watched people behave like chumps. At my second wedding my wife, Mary, made me leave after our dance because she couldn’t deal with people looking at her. The wedding band was so good that people on the streets in New Brunswick were dancing outside of our wedding but I was in our hotel room with my new wife. Commiserating.
On Saturday night my niece Louise married the father of her daughter. Her husband is Paul. The ceremony was sweet and brief and real. We went from there to the Hollywood Diner for beers and thence to the hall for the reception.
It was the best reception and wedding I’ve ever attended. I went with Johanna who was scared she wouldn’t be accepted. She said to me on the way if someone gives her shit we’re out. I said okay. As it turns out she was the hit of the night. We danced and danced. Johanna was dancing with an older Italian woman who’d just had a hip replacement. Everyone was happy. My brother Ted tried and failed to do a split. The music was perfect the food was divine and we rocked till we dropped. I almost never dance but I danced all night. With Johanna, with Louise.
It was a marvelous night. Young love is so special and weddings for young people even more special. Mick and his friend Greek and Johanna and Brian Moody another friend of Mick’s and their wives and Eileen sat up till all hours yelling and happy. God was smiling on us all.

Girls Against Boys

So here we all are in Mrs. Fuller’s class. Girls and boys. Boys and girls. All next to each other. For some reason things seem different. Normally, at least up until now, boys were repulsed by girls. They were in the parlance of the times, icky. We were gross. But suddenly for some reason none of us could put a finger on we wanted them to think well of us.

Being boys we really didn’t know how to accomplish this and also because we couldn’t put a finger on it we were somewhat ambivalent about it. That resulted in mixed messages. I doubt seriously that any girl is really interested in skunk cabbages or dead frogs but for some reason we thought they might be. We suddenly felt okay with them playing games with us. Not all games but certain ones. Kick the Can and the Gun Game in particular. Also we moved the location of the games to their houses.

All of a sudden we were playing Kick the Can at the Collinge’s which was a half block from my house on W. Mantua Ave. Kathy lived next to the Cook’s on one side and Sharon Hoffman on the other. The games spilled through all three yards. The Collinge home had a large palazzo type front porch with rock walls and slate flooring and we were able to execute daring leaps to escape capture.

The Cook’s house had a small playhouse in the rear corner which was also an ideal hiding place. I think the main attraction of all these games was hiding in close proximity to young women. We weren’t sure what that would mean but we certainly looked forward to it.

I developed my first crushes on both Kathy and Sharon and they continued, switching from one to the other till the end of sixth grade. I’m still not certain which of them I preferred. Kathy was bright and Sharon was cuter so maybe it would have been better if they could have become one person. At any rate when I look at their picture I’m quite certain it was not their stylish outfits that drew me to them. Nor mine.

There were older girls who were far more attractive and even more scary. From Peggy Sacca to Cheryl Furey to Donna Hambrecht the world was filled with girls changing into women and really I had no way of coping.

I’d spend my afternoons on my paper route spinning elaborate fantasies about saving them from an invading Russian Army and taking them to live with me and my band of brave guerilla warriors in the swamps of the Mantua Creek. Of course the woodland there was roughly a hundred yards wide so I’m certain I would never have been found by determined Russian soldiers.

I’ll leave you then with me on my new red, Schwinn Typhoon. Riding one handed down Cherry Street with a basket of Woodbury Daily Times in a bag in the front. I rise up to toss one to the Fleming house and a Russian drops dead from my well thrown knife. Like a ghost I travel these mean streets. A vengeful, sexy, killing ghost. Alone. Cool. With a flannel shirt and lined dungarees and the sure knowledge I had to be home for dinner in a half hour.

Identification Issues

I should actually be saying something meaningful about Wenonah but instead I'll give a shout out to Terry Fleming who called roughly four hours after this went up to start puzzling over the names of people and to Bob Thomas who wrote to complain about my formatting...I guess I could rescan this photo but the reality is I made a pdf when I scanned it then had to change it to a jpg to upload it and, well, Bob can't make it as big as he'd like. I'll think about rescanning:)
Then this morning there was a very helpful post from Bonnie Mecholsky with Stanley Landis and Jane Shiflet's names and her correct spelling. How cool is that? Thanks to this blog and you guys I've now officially talked more with all of you in the past six months or so than I did over thirty years since we left Wenonah. There's a lot to be said for the internet.
Again, several folks from Gateway Class of 1970 are working on a reunion. Tentative date is July 5th and thanks to Greg Jones, tenative site is the Holiday Inn in Bridgeport. Greg thinks some of us will get smashed and not be able to move. I think he's probably right. On the other hand we could all rent limos to drive us home. Please send me your names and addresses if you see this so I can keep you up to date as the day nears.
Much as I'm petrified of going back to 1970 I think it will be fun.

Mrs Fuller's Fifth Grade Class 1962-63

Top Row from left: Stanley Landis (thanks Bonnie), me (Jack Wiler), Tommy Jenkins, Bob Stokes, David Moffat, Terry Fleming (in a typical class photo pose), Ralph Leeds, David Earnhardt, Don Davis (though I could be wrong), Tim Sellen, Ken Fell, and Johnny Hindman
Middle Row from left: Christine Sabetta, Kathy Gillan (sp?) , Kathy Collinge, Sharon Hoffman, Suzy Parker, Bonnie Mecholsky (Thanks again Bonnie, let's hope I get this right in 6th grade), Caroline Stens, Nancy Garrison, June Lang, Irene Thomas, Barbara Conway, and Mrs Fuller (oddly enough)
Bottom Row from left: Madelaine Pillings, Susan Abbott, Margie Loving, Ruthie Felch, Michelle Smith, Dottie Chattin, Jane Shiflet (thanks Bonnie!), Elisa Contarino, Dolores Lorenz, Linda Smith

Fifth Grade

Fifth grade was different. I was entering new worlds. I was done with Mr. McIntire. My eyes were better. I was better read. I was happier. I was discovering girls and feeling like a different person. Fifth Grade begins not in the fall but in the summer. We belonged to the Wenonah Swim Club now. The swim club had it's heroes and heroines. Great swimmers that competed year round. My friend Terry's brothers and kids from Woodbury were stars in the world of swimming. They walked like gods across the grass of the club. Their parents played cards and perhaps sipped cocktails and we ran like maniacs about the pool. As usual my summer began with two weeks in Ocean City and then I returned to Wenonah. Hot and humid now. Deep greens and thick air. We'd ride our bikes to the pool and drink cokes and eat cheesesteaks and watch the teenagers, cool and serene.
We played our swim games, swim tag and we took diving lessons and we were still kids but we were changing. Learning. We showered in the shower before we went in the pool. We wore speedoes and we admired the kids that won meets. I wasn't a kid anymore. I wasn't a teenager either. I was a skinny kid watching how to be.
Then we rode our bikes to the school at the end of the summer to see where we'd be in the fall. Mrs. Fuller's class. Now we were all together. The kids who were smart. The kids who weren't in Ed Campbell's classes. Now we were treated differently. There were still classes well above us. All the way to 8th grade but that would change. In two years we would go to a new junior senior high school.
Suddenly what we had on our backs made a difference. All of a sudden we noticed girls and girls noticed us and we were all dancing an odd dance with no practice and no experience.
We started playing games in the summer nights with girls. We watched them intensely. We watched how some boys were smoother with girls. I always felt awkward. I guess in retrospect all of us did but it was intense for me. But still for two years my ability to know things seemed to make a difference with girls. They seemed to like me. And I like that.
Class was easier than Mr. McIntire. After him everything was cake. I knew the drill. I seemed almost magically to know how to write paragraphs and reports and make them the way teachers wanted. In fact, the thing that most amazes me is that I started to understand I knew what teachers liked.
Our games began to change. Our play began to become more focussed. We were being sucked into the world.
But not in a bad way. We were acknowledged for knowing what we knew. We were encouraged. We read our Weekly Reader and talked about it as though it mattered. We talked about elections. We talked about the world.
It was the oddest transformation and it accelerated exponentially over the next few years. But at least for a few years in Wenonah Public School it was sheltered. We all knew each other. Me and Tommy Jenkins and Kenny Fell and Ralph Leeds had a shared history that kept us kind to each other. We, jeez this sounds dumb, liked each other.