Building a Library Builds Character

Teachers and parents spend a lot of time trying to “improve” children. In the sixties in grammar school one of their tactics was the Arrow Book Club or Scholastic Book Club. Each month we’d get a newsletter with different books and we would take them home and show our mothers and then buy one or two. Then we’d do book reports on them. “Encyclopedia Brown”, “Homer Price”, and many others.
In Junior and Senior High School we were introduced to the Bookmobile. This was a trailer filled with bookshelves and books. We would be given time each day for several days to visit the bookmobile and select books and purchase them. The selection was more sophisticated than in grammar school and the reading levels ran the gamut.
For me and my friends this was a chance to buy books on war. History books, war story books, anything with Nazi’s and bombs would do. Our other obsession was science fiction. This was one place I was allowed to purchase whatever I wanted. I just asked my mom for money at the beginning of the week and we were off to the races.
Since we were becoming young adults we were now being permitted to choose our own books for book reports. Bruce Catton’s Civil War books, Shirer’s Hitler, and a million other books on WWII. We read Heinlein and LeGuin and Bradbury and in general tried to find the coolest book to report on in class so we’d look cool.
Of course this was a serious error since only eggheads think reading is cool. But there we were, at the front of the class reading our reports on illustrated men and the battle of Midway and D-Day and robots.
We were reading…that was good. But we were still separating ourselves from everyone else. We were on a slippery slope to meaninglessness and didn’t even know it. By the time we woke up to see what we had done it was too late. Being smart wasn’t a skill set you needed in 1965. Nobody sent us the memo though so we went on raising our hands and buying our books and trying to out know it all each other. This is a habit that persists in me to this day. Perhaps it’s no accident that in my office my nickname is Encyclopedia Jack.

Avalon Hill and the World at War

In 8^th grade I fell totally and completely into the role of geek and egghead. I hung around with the weirdo’s in my class, I read books even more than before if that’s possible, and I began playing extraordinarily complicated board games. Principal among these were the games put out by Avalon Hill.

These games were simulations of historical battles (with one exception) such as D-Day, the battle for North Africa (Afrika Korps), Guadalcanal, and the Battle of the Bulge among many. You used small cardboard squares that represented some military unit such as a brigade or a division and moved them on a hexagonal grid superimposed on the map of the battle in question. Each game had slightly different rules to address geographic and supply issues but once you learned one the others were easy to master.

Battles were fought and won with the roll of a die using a chart to determine the outcome.

A single game might take a week or more to play and this, along with the complexity of the games and their attempt to simulate reality made them geek heaven. We would play for hours and hours. Pale, pasty, greasy haired eggheads sitting around a card table discussing the arcane realities of battles that were twenty years old. Could the New Jersey beat the Bismarck? Should you play 1914 using the original line of march or choose your own innovative strategy? And then there was Blitzkrieg which wasn’t an historical battle but an attempt to simulate a wide ranging war across a modern Europe using today’s weaponry.

That meant atom bombs were on the table. Of course the game ended way to quickly if you used the nuclear option.

This was not a recipe for socialization. We learned no people skills other than how to trick people into doing something they shouldn’t by lying. No girls played these games. No athletes played these games. No greasers played these games. Just kids with good grades and few friends who had nothing better to do than sit around for hours playing at war. Frittering away our adolescence. Squandering our youth. Behaving like any other kid with a Play Station or an Xbox blasting away at aliens. Had we an Xbox we would never have picked up those cardboard squares but geeks use whatever is at hand to hide from the world and for us it was games of war played out with cardboard squares moving across a colored board.

Poetry in the Schools, 60's Style

And so we return to school in the fall of 1965. The 9^th graders of last year have vanished, they’re off to Woodbury HS. Now all of us are bound together for the next four years.

The school is now complete. The auto shop, the wood shop, the gym, the auditorium. All done. We’re settled in with our teachers for five long years.

I think, though I can be wrong because I am old, that this is the year teachers began teaching us with methods designed for the kids. You may ask, what are you talking about Jack? What I’m talking about is the horrible, misguided attempt by older men and women to relate to teenagers by incorporating various elements of the teenagers life into the education process.

In our case it was bringing Simon and Garfunkel into poetry. And as I write this I realize I’m off by one year (because my enfeebled old guy brain remembered the album came out a year later) but I’ll continue anyway because I just finished National Poetry Month and participated in dozens of examples of teaching for the kids. Not all misguided but all spotted a mile away by their charges.

In our English class the teacher and God alone can remember who that was brought out the Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel and played “I am a Rock”. Then she played “The Sounds of Silence”. Then she asked us what we thought the songs were about. I should note at this point I was an egghead. Which meant I had to have an answer or I was a failure. So were most of my classmates. We instantly shot our hands in the air and offered our various thoughts on the meanings of these songs. Keep in mind that before this moment I’d never thought a song meant anything other than some vague, undefined feeling, like being sad or happy or lonely or brave. Now I intellectualize shit like this all the time but back then I had no idea this might be important to anyone.

Suddenly like a bolt of lightning we all understood “poetry”!!!! It was full of secret meanings and codes and all we had to do was figure them out! The “Rock” was something other than a rock. The sounds of “Silence” weren’t just silence but something else that only we the smart kids could understand. Oh, and the artists who made the songs and poems.

We also got to swing away at Edgar Allen Poe and his “alliteration” (the bells, bells, bells, the tinkling tintinnabulation of the bells) and a couple other minor league knuckleheads. I suppose if we were older they’d have tossed in Dylan and Baez but for now we got Art and Paul.

Years later I found out that every kid in every NJ HS in 1966 had the same lesson plan. It felt like the Ed Sullivan Show had come to all our schools with one for the kids. Then they went back to the jugglers and Perry Como and Topo Gigio. No wonder we hated poetry. Our teachers had no idea how to teach it so they resorted to some cookie cutter technique that seemed hip (they were all young) that they learned at the teachers convention in Atlantic City that fall. Poetry was as alien to them as it was to us. They drove to work listening to the Dave Clark Five or the Beatles or if they were older Elvis and Sinatra and then had to find some way to talk about something that looked like it had just landed from Outer Space.

Wenonah in the Summer

We'd leave the shore at the end of June, beginning of July, and return to Wenonah. Two weeks in the relatively balmy climate of a shore town. We'd pull into a near tropical climate 45 minutes later. South Jersey in the summer is hot and humid. Very hot and very humid. The trees by now were a deep, deep green. The garden we'd begun in May was filled with weeds and vegetables bursting out all over. The grass was high and thick. The house close and hot.

There was no air conditioning in the Wiler house until a few years later. We cooled off with a big ass attic fan that sucked air from below and blew it out a window, essentially creating some sort of breeze. We lay in bed in our sweat and listened to the crickets.

We'd wake up early and run to our bikes and head right to the pool. We spent the day swimming and getting a great tan and working up the nerve to flirt with girls.  Of course we never did. Some of our friends were on the swim team. The Wenonah Swim Club had a great swim team for a little podunk town in South Jersey. I hated swimming on a team. Way too much work. In fact, although I liked swimming in general, the swim club itself could be a trial. I wasn't a particularly fast freestyle swimmer so in our games of tag I was always it.

But then, you've probably heard that before.

We'd end up back at the house for dinner. Then we'd head out to play the Gun Game or Kick the Can or just sit on the porch and watch the world walk by. It was as if we were in heaven. The night was filled with the sounds of cans rattling down the sidewalk, lightning bugs, the chirp of crickets and the sound of sneakers slapping cement.  No, it wasn't as if we were in heaven.  We were in heaven.

1965: Year of the World's Best Music

I talked a little about the music of that summer of 1965.  But the whole year was filled with ungodly tunes.  Hit after hit after hit.  When I was living in New Brunswick in the '80's there was a band that only played music from 65 & 66.  They played at my second wedding.  But Jack, you say, it couldn't have been that good.  You must be just fondly remembering it; every year is pretty much the same when it comes to music.  Well, here's my proof:  The hits of 1965:


  The Ad Libs - The Boy From New York City - 02-65 - Blue Cat 
Jewel Akens - The Birds And The Bees - 03-65 - Era 
Herb Alpert - A Taste Of Honey - 11-65 - A&M 
Eddy Arnold - Make The World Go Away - 12-65 - RCA 
Len Barry - 1-2-3 - 11-65 - Decca 
Fontella Bass - Rescue Me - 11-65 - Checker 
Shirley Bassey - Goldfinger - 03-65 - UA 
The Beach Boys - California Girls - 08-65 - Capitol 
The Beach Boys - Do You Wanna Dance - 04-65 - Capitol 
The Beach Boys - Help Me, Rhonda - 05-65- Capitol 
The Beatles - Eight Days A Week - 03-65 - Capitol 
The Beatles - Help! - 09-65 - Capitol 
The Beatles - Ticket To Ride - 05-65 - Capitol 
The Beatles - We Can Work It Out - 12-65 - Capitol 
The Beatles - Yesterday - 10-65 - Capitol 
The Beau Brummels - Just A Little - 06-65 - Autumn 
The Beau Brummels - Laugh, Laugh - 02-65 
James Brown - I Got You (I Feel Good) - 11-65 
James Brown - Papa's Got A Brand New Bag - 08-65 - King 
The Byrds  - Mr. Tambourine Man - 06-65 - Columbia 
The Byrds - Turn! Turn! Turn! - 11-65 - Columbia 
Freddy Cannon - Action - 09-65 - Warner 
Mel Carter - Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me - 08-65 - Imperial 
Alvin Cash & The Crawlers - Twine Time - 02-65 - Mar-V-Lus 
The Castaways - Liar, Liar - 10-65 - Soma 
Chad & Jeremy - Willow Weep For Me - 01-65 - World Artists 
Cher - All I Really Want To Do - 08-65 - Imperial 
Petula Clark - Downtown - 01-65 - Warner 
Petula Clark - I Know A Place - 04-65 - Warner 
Sam Cooke - Shake - 02-65 - RCA 
Vic Dana - Red Roses For A Blue Lady - 04-65 - Dolton 
The Dave Clark Five - Any Way You Want It - 01-65 - Epic 
The Dave Clark Five - Catch Us If  You Can - 09-65 - Epic 
The Dave Clark Five - Come Home - 03-65 - Epic 
The Dave Clark Five - I Like It Like That - 07-65 - Epic 
The Dave Clark Five - Over And Over - 12-65 - Epic 
Jackie DeShannon - What The World Needs Now Is Love - 07-65 - Imperial 
Dick & Deedee - Thou Shalt Not Steal - Warner 
Ronnie Dove - One Kiss For Old Time's Sake - 05-65 - Diamond 
Patty Duke - Don't Just Stand There - 08-65 - UA 
Bob Dylan - Like A Rolling Stone - 08-65 - Columbia 
Bob Dylan - Positively 4th Street - 10-65 - Columbia 
Shirley Ellis - The Clapping Song - 04-65 - Congress 
Shirley Ellis - The NameGame - 01-65 - Congress 
Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders - Game Of Love - 04-65 - Fontana 
The Fortunes - You've Got Your Troubles - 09-65 - Press 
The Four Seasons - Bye, Bye, Baby (Baby Goodbye) - 02-65 - Philips 
The Four Seasons - Let's Hang On! - 11-65 - Philips 
The Four Tops - I Can't Help Myself - 06-65 - Motown 
The Four Tops - It's The Same Old Song - 08-65 - Motown 
Freddie & The Dreamers - I'm Telling You Now - 04-65 - Tower 
Marvin Gaye - Ain't That Peculiar - 11-65 - Tamla 
Marvin Gaye - How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You - 01-65 - Tamla 
Marvin Gaye - I'll Be Doggone - 05-65 - Tamla 
The Gentrys - Keep On Dancing - 10-65 - MGM 
Gerry & The Pacemakers - Ferry Across The Mersey - 03-65 - Laurie 
Bobby Goldsboro - Little Things - 03-65 - UA 
Dobie Gray - The "In" Crowd - 02-65 - Charger 
Roy Head - Treat Her Right - 10-65 - Back Beat 
Herman's Hermits - Can't You Hear My Heartbeat - 03-65 - MGM 
Herman's Hermits - I'm Henry VIII I Am - 07-65 - MGM 
Herman's Hermits - Just A Little Bit Better - 10-65 - MGM 
Herman's Hermits - Mrs. Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter - 04-65 - MGM 
Herman's Hermits - Silhouettes - 05-65 - MGM 
Herman's Hermits - Wonderful World - 06-65 - MGM 
The Impressions - Amen - 01-65 - ABC Paramount 
The Impressions - People Get Ready - 03-65 - ABC Paramount 
Horst Jankowski - A Walk In The Black Forest - 06-65 -Mercury 
Jay & The Americans - Cara Mia - 07-65 - UA 
Jay & The Americans - Let's Lock The Door (And Throw Away The Key) - 02-65 - UA 
Jay & The Americans - Some Enchanted Evening - 10-65 - UA 
Jack Jones - The Race Is On - 04-65 - Kapp (written and recorded first by country singer George Jones at the same time on United Artists) 
Tom Jones - It's Not Unusual - 05-65 - Parrot 
Tom Jones - What's New Pussycat? - 07-65 - Parrot 
Bert Kaempfert - Red Roses For A Blue Lady - 03-65 - Decca 
The Kingsmen - The Jolly Green Giant - 02-65 - Wand 
The Kinks - All Day And All Of The Night - 02-65 - Reprise 
The Kinks - Tired Of Waiting For You - 04-65 - Reprise 
Brenda Lee - Too Many Rivers - 07-65 - Decca 
Dickey Lee - Laurie (Strange Things Happen) - 07-65 - TCF Hall 
Barbara Lewis - Baby, I'm Yours - 08-65 - Atlantic 
Barbara Lewis - Make Me Your Baby - 11-65 - Atlantic 
Gary Lewis & The Playboys - Count Me In - 05-65 - Liberty 
Gary Lewis & The Playboys - Everybody Loves A Clown - 10-65 - Liberty 
Gary Lewis & The Playboys - Save Your Heart For Me - 07-65 - Liberty 
Gary Lewis & The Playboys - This Diamond Ring - 02-65 - Liberty 
Little Anthony & The Imperials - Hurt So Bad - DCP 
The Lovin' Spoonful - Do You Believe In Magic - 10-65 - Kama Sutra 
Martha & The Vandellas - Nowhere To Run - 04-65 - Gordy 
Dean Martin - I Will - 12-65 - Reprise 
Barbara Mason - Yes, I'm Ready - 07-65 - Artic 
The McCoys - Fever - 12-65 - Bang 
The McCoys - Hang On Sloopy - 09-65 - Bang 
Barry McGuire - Eve Of Destruction - 09-65 - Dunhill 
Roger Miller - Engine Engine #9 - 06-65 - Smash 
Roger Miller - England Swings - 12-65 - Smash 
Roger Miller - King Of The Road - 02-65 - Smash 
The Miracles - The Tracks Of My Tears - 08-65 - Tamla 
The Moody Blues - Go Now! - 04-65 - London 
The Newbeats - Run, Baby Run (Back Into My Arms) - 11-65 - Hickory 
Patti Page - Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte - 06-65 - Columbia 
Peter & Gordon - I Go To Pieces - 02-65 - Capitol 
Gene Pitney - Last Chance To Turn Around - 06-65 - Musicor 
Elvis Presley - Crying In The Chapel - 05-65 - RCA 
Elvis Presley - I'm Yours - 10-65 - RCA 
Elvis Presley - (Such An) Easy Question - 07-65 - RCA 
The Ramsey Lewis Trio - Hang On Sloopy - 12-65 - Cadet 
The Ramsey Lewis Trio - The "In" Crowd - 09-65 - Argo 
The Righteous Brothers -Ebb Tide - 12-65 - Philles 
The Righteous Brothers - Just Once In My Life - 05-65 - Philles 
The Righteous Brothers - Unchained Melody - 08-65 - Philles 
The Righteous Brothers - You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' - 01-65 - Philles 
Johnny Rivers - Seventh Son - 06-65 - Imperial 
The Rolling Stones - Get Off Of My Cloud - 10-65 - London 
The Rolling Stones - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - 06-65 - London 
The Rolling Stones - The Last Time - 04-65 - London 
Billy Joe Royal - Down In The Boondocks - 08-65 - Columbia 
Billy Joe Royal - I Knew You When - 11-65 - Columbia 
Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs - Wooly Bully - 05-65 - MGM 
The Seekers - I'll Never Find Another You - 04-65 - Capitol 
The Shangri-Las - I Can Never Go Home Anymore - 12-65 - Red Bird 
Del Shannon - Keep Searchin' (We'll Follow The Sun) - 01-65 - Amy 
Silkie - You've Got To Hide Your Love Away - 11-65 - Fontana 
Simon & Garfunkel - The Sounds Of Silence - 12-65 - Columbia 
The Sir Douglas Quintet - She's About A Mover - 06-65 - Tribe 
Sonny - Laugh At Me - 09-65 - Atco 
Sonny & Cher - Baby Don't Go - 10-65 - Reprise 
Sonny & Cher - But You're Mine - 11-65 - Atco 
Sonny & Cher - I Got You Babe - 08-65 - Atco 
Sounds Orchestral - Cast Your Fate To The Wind - 05-65 - Parkway 
The Strangeloves - I Want Candy - 08-65 - Bang 
The Supremes - Back In My Arms Again - 05-65 - Motown 
The Supremes - I Hear A Symphony - 11-65 - Motown 
The Supremes - Nothing But Heartaches - 09-65 - Motown 
The Supremes - Stop! In The Name Of  Love - 03-65 - Motown 
The Temptations - My Girl - 02-65 - Gordy 
Joe Tex - Hold What You've Got - 01-65 - Dial 
The Toys - A Lovers Concerto - 10-65 - Dynovoice 
The Turtles - It Ain't Me Babe - 09-65 - White Whale 
The Vogues - You're The One - 10-65 - Co & Ce 
Jr. Walker & The All Stars - Shotgun - 03-65 - Soul 
We Five - You Were On My Mind - 09-65 - A&M 
Ian Whitcomb - You Turn Me On - 07-65 - Tower 
Wonder Who? - Don't Think Twice - 12-65 - Philips 
Glenn Yarbrough - Baby The Rain Must Fall - 05-65 - RCA 
The Yardbirds - For Your Love - 06-65 - Epic 
The Yardbirds - Heart Full Of Soul - 09-65 - Epic 
The Zombies - Tell Her No - 02-65 - Parrot

Look at all these names!  The Beatles, The Stones, James Brown, Bob Dylan, The Supremes, The Temps, Barry motherfucking McGuire, The Zombies, The Turtles, Sir Douglas Quintet, Dean Martin, Roger Miller, Sonny & Cher!!!!  All mixed up together.  Patty Duke next to Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs!  The Yardbirds & Patty Page!  Herman's Hermits have more hits than the Beatles, more than Elvis.  The crummy and the great all tossed together!  And all of us chuckleheads walking around humming those tunes, strolling down the beach with all that music in our heads, all that wild world.

Boy Scouts of America

Well, I'm going to break my cardinal rule.  I'm going back a bit in time so I can talk about something I forgot.  I talked a bit about this in an earlier post but realized that I had much more to say.  I forgot that in the fall of 1964 I joined the Boy Scouts.  I'd been a Cub Scout and a Webelo (how's that for a weird name) and it was my goal to become a Boy Scout.  So I joined Troop 50.  I was happy as a clam.  We met every Thursday (I think) in the Methodist Church.  There'd be a reading of the minutes, some discussion of various upcoming events, talk about camping trips, a bit of Scout lore and then we'd play various physical games.  Chief among them was British Bulldog.  I have no memory of what this game consisted of; only that it involved mashing into each other very hard.  There must have been rules but who knows.

Our Scout Leader was (and I could be wrong here) Ralph Leeds father and the senior leaders were guys like Kingsley Lentz.  What a great name.  Kingsley.  It was all about the outdoors.  I couldn't wait to go on my first camping trip.  I was excited and happy.

I forgot one minor thing.  I wet the bed.  So we decamped to Elk Neck, Maryland and on the first night I wet my sleeping bag.  You can imagine this might have been a tad embarrassing.  It was.  In fact it was humiliating and then I got to do it again the next night.

I'd wet the bed for my whole life up until then.  My parents took me to Children's Hospital in Philadelphia looking for help, we tried various homemade cures and strategies but nothing worked.  Like clockwork each evening I pissed in my pants.  This was only pleasurable for about two minutes.  Then it was cold and wet.

My bed had plastic sheets.  I couldn't sleep over at other friend's houses. I told no one about my problem.  It was my little secret.

Then my little secret was hanging on a rope in the middle of our camp site.  My soaked sleeping bag.  

I quit the Boy Scouts after that.  I did rejoin several years later but we'll get to that.  Later in the year or perhaps it was Fall of 8th grade my parents found my cure.  It was a rubber mat that they put under the sheets.  When liquids hit the mat it set off a loud, loud alarm.  I would wake up.  Pretty soon I would wake up before the alarm went off.  I was Pavlov's dog.  It worked.  Within a week or two I stopped wetting the bed.  But I've never forgotten the alarm.  I can't stand a bell that rings for more than a moment or two.  I pick up calls before everyone at every job I've ever had.  I've never forgotten my sleeping bag.  Isn't it odd how secrets come back to haunt you?

Ocean City 1965

I'm bored with 7th grade.  Okay, I barely remember 7th grade, it being a long time ago and me being old and forgetful.  So let's cut to the summer of 1965.  A great year no matter how you cut it.  

My family went on vacation this year to Ocean City where we took up residence in two buildings along with several other families from Wenonah and my dad's brother and his family.  It was kid heaven.  Our apartments were right on the beach and we were there for two weeks.  A few times we even got out of school before the year was over to go.

The apartments were all the way at the end of OC.  I think between 56th & 57th streets but I'm sure I'm wrong and someone will tell me in a day or so.  They were simple buildings built in the late fifties.  Living room, sort of dining room, bedrooms, bath, shower outside.  We spent maybe 8 hours a day inside unless it rained.  Besides my family we stayed with our parents friends.  The Lakes, the Shepards, the Pistilli's, the Nugent's and others who came and went but these were the standby's.  This meant we had tons of friends.  Charlie Lake, Debbie Lake, Jack and Joe Shepard, Bruce Nugent, Dave Pistilli.  It also meant we had our own little world on the beach.

On the Saturday we were to leave it would invariably be foggy or rainy and we'd be whining about not being able to have fun and my Dad said, always, don't worry it will burn off.  And it always did.  We drove to OC the back way through Glassboro and Buena, past the Mexican movies in Buena, past the old lost taverns along the way until we arrived at the 34th street bridge and in just twenty odd blocks were at our shore place.

We'd unpack like demons, throw on our trunks, grab our towels and race to the beach and the water and OH MY FUCKING GOD THE WATER IS FREEZING!.  And it was.  This is the 2nd week of June and the water temperature on the Jersey shore is typically 52-56 degrees.  This is bone chilling cold.  Your little balls would get sucked up deep inside you, your ankles would ache a terrible terrible ache but you had to go in, you had to go in.

Our parents would arrive moments later and spread the chairs and blankets around like some rude compound.  Maybe an umbrella, maybe not.  We'd run in and out of the water, hike to the point south of 59th street, explore the gullies and the rocks and our fathers would scope out babes while our mothers...actually I don't know what they were doing.  Probably scoping out young men but this is 1965 so maybe not.

We were there for two weeks.  We played box ball, which is some weird combo of handball and baseball, in which Mr. Lake would usually crush my foot and break my little toe.  We'd play handball.  We'd play frisbee.  We'd body surf.  We'd go to the boardwalk!  The boardwalk! The boardwalk!  The Pavilion! Salt water taffy!  Mack and Manco's pizza!  The cool hobby store that sold Airfix little men!  The Taylor Ham Pork roll store with Pennsylvania Dutch Root Beer!  And of course, of course, Gillian's Wonderland!

The ferris wheel, the merry go round, the rides, the cotton candy, the sheer pleasure in pissing away all the money you had from shoveling snow or raking leaves or from your lazy uncles and aunts at Christmas!  It was the greatest place in the world in 1965 for a mess of chowderheads from South Jersey.  We body surfed, we played, we ogled Penny Pistilli and my Aunt Simone's bikini.  We cursed in a stupid 7th grade way.  We wore clam diggers and stupid hats right out of Beach Blanket Bingo.  

We were in heaven.  

Fashion and the Sixties

My actual favorite part of HS and Junior HS was clothes and hair.  Not my clothes and not my hair but everyone else's.  Girls in particular were hotter than hot.  Beehive hairdo's, white boots, over use of mascara and eye shadow.  Guys got to wear skinny pants and skinny ties and sharp shoes.  My erotic ideals were all formed in the mid-sixties.  In fact when the punk era reigned supreme I was happy as a pig in shit.  All the women looked like really fierce versions of my high school crushes.  It was like heaven because this time I could do something about it.

Of course in 1965 I could do nothing about it.  It was the first year my mother let me choose my own clothing.  We drove to Pitman and went to Jack Lang's the premier men's and boy's clothing outlet in our little corner of the world.  This made our little corner of the world very small.  We could have driven to Philadelphia and I could have gone to Brook's Brothers or Wanamakers but we didn't.  We went to Pitman.  I picked out my spring school clothes.  An chartreuse Izod LaCoste polo shirt and a pair of vaguely lime green, glen plaid pants.  Also a zip up spring jacket.

We drove from there to Ernie's Shoe Post in Mantua.  At Ernie's I picked out a pair of desert boots.  Plus a pair of PF Flyers.

I was ready to go.  I was going to be one snappy dresser.  What a dope I was.  I would make these mistakes with clothing dozens of times over the years but this stands out as one of my worst.  I walked through the school like a green lollipop.  At least my desert boots were cool.  But I turned no heads.  Instead I retreated further into the world of books and history and all the attendant bullshit of my tiny world.

Next up...Ocean City.

The Book Report from Hell

Let’s go back again to 1965 and Gateway Regional HS. For the first time in our lives we move from class to class. There are announcements on the loudspeaker. We pledge allegiance to the flag along with a disembodied voice. We have new classes, English instead of Reading, Earth Science instead of Science, Mathematics not Arithmetic, and on and on.
My English teacher was Mrs. Oglesby. For our first book report we are asked to do a presentation along with several other students. The presentation would summarize the book and illustrate the reasons you liked it. Nightmare. Horrible, horrible nightmare. Out loud performance was not my thing in 7th grade. You can probably understand since I was a midgety, skinny runt with a cowlick. My voice was as high as a birds. I felt like some monstrous geek and I was.
But there was no way out. As I recall I was hooked up with Jim Maddox and Steven Kaye and the book we selected was “Last of the Mohicans”. This was just about the only part of the assignment I liked. I was a James Fenimore Cooper freak. I read all his books. Books that were universally reviled by any competent writer or critic. But they had war and Indians and sacrifice and forests and blood and an acceptable amount of romance.
The girls all picked “Rebecca”.
This killed us right from the git go. :Rebecca” is a fairly easily summarized story while “Last of the Mohicans” has a jumbled up plot that isn’t clear for a hundred pages. Plus the girls were better at this. Their presentations were funny and inventive and informative. Thank God I can’t remember ours. I do remember it was a miserable failure. We tanked. I remember slinking away from the front of the class thankful only that we’d finished.
This deep sense of embarrassment and humiliation was to walk just behind me till senior year. You can only imagine what a joy it was to go to school each day.

So Much Time So little work

Hi all,

Sorry I've been a lazy fuck.

So, before I give you my post about Wenonah in 1965 let me remind you of three things dear to my heart.

First, Barack Obama was sworn in as President of the United States of America.  Given that there was only one black girl in my class at Gateway Regional HS and given that I drove through a black neighborhood with outhouses to get to high school this is a wonderful moment in American history.

Second, two events dear to my heart and poetry were set aside this year.  The Geraldine R Dodge Poetry Festival and the Frost Place Festival of Poetry.  I could say lots of shit about this but mostly it sucks that money kills an art that makes no money and enriches peoples lives. 

Manana... or maybe Friday... Book reports, Rebecca, and the Last of the Mohicans.

God Bless, Good Night, and my regrets on the passing of my dear friend Rick Sonnenberg, known to many of us as Rick Lopez.  Death comes and steals away and the best are caught in his arms.

New Year's Eve

When I was young my brothers and I were banished to my grandmother’s house on New Year’s Eve. There we drank half an illicit beer and ate ham sandwiches and watched Guy Lombardo ring in the new. That is if we didn’t fall asleep because of the beer.

Or else my grandmother and Aunt Gersh would come to the house and we’d do the same thing in Wenonah as we would in Bala Cynwyd. My parents were engaged in adult fun. We had no idea what adult fun was. So far as we could tell from our few exposures to a grown up party it consisted of laughing loud, drinking, and smoking and staying up late. This did not seem fun. Plus they played the Mills Brothers and Perry Como.

They did not go out to fancy night clubs, they went to friends houses and checked in by phone. No real need to do that as we had been trained well and staying up till midnight was extraordinarily difficult. So it was that my brothers and my little sister and I rang in the New Year of 1965. It may have been that year that my parents had the party at their home. I can remember vaguely one such party so let’s call it that one.

I was sitting at the end of my bed with my cat, Surprise. The warm tones of Frank Sinatra filled the night. There was a woman’s high laugh. The light from our back porch shown out onto the lawn and the clear night sky was lit up with a thousand stars. Happy New Year and noise and fireworks and honking and then the music again and sleep.
I woke the next morning to a house full of half-empty glasses that smelled of whiskey and ginger ale, overflowing ashtrays, and a house as quiet as a morgue.