When, at age 5, I moved with my parents to suburban Baldwin, I became an instant hit with the other kids in the neighborhood. Why? I had a shiny new wagon that I could pedal while another kid stood on the back platform. Or vice versa. How to win friends and influence people.
I’m sure I didn’t win any friends among my adult neighbors with my play with the wagon when I sometimes peddled it alone. With nobody on the rear platform I would sometimes pretend I was driving a car and running out of gas. I would put pebbles on the rear platform, peddle along, of course dropping pebbles as I went, and then run out of gas when the pebbles had all fallen off. At the time I wasn’t thinking about the sidewalk sweeping the neighbors would have to do.
I taught my beagle, Buddy, a number of tricks. Shaking hands. Sitting up. Catching treats in his mouth. Playing hide and seek. Only one downside: When I took him out for a walk, I could never make him heel. He would always pull ahead. Guess you can’t have everything.
My beagle was great at predicting bad weather. He could hear thunder well before we could. And he’d let us know.
In Baldwin we could often hear rain coming. When the wind blew north from the ocean toward us, it could soon rain. And the railroad was between us and the ocean. . So, if we heard train whistles loudly, it usually meant rain was on the way.
In the summer I could multitask. With no air conditioning back in those days, our windows would be open. And when we kids tossed a baseball around out in the street after supper, I could play catch and hear our radio at the same time.
In place of the tennis court where we kids ice-skated in the winter, there are now houses. On the vacant lot where we played baseball in the summer, there are now houses. And they call this progress?
Ten cents and a box top. That was often the price I would pay for a prize from a radio program. A make-up kit from Tom Mix (Ralston). A pedometer from Jack Armstrong (Wheaties). A coder/decoder from Little Orphan Annie (Ovaltine). And back then a postage stamp was only 3 cents.
When it came to reading material when we were kids, we were definitely not a throw-away society. I would gather up a bunch of my comic books that I had read and meet with other kids and their used comics. And we would trade. More bang for the buck. (Except that, back then, a 64-page book cost only a dime.)
Sunday mornings was a pleasant time when I was a young teenager. While my mother prepared to fry bacon and eggs, my father and I would walk or drive to the local bakery to pick up hard rolls and crumb buns. Also the Sunday paper. Then we would eat a leisurely breakfast. And I would catch up with what the Brooklyn Dodgers and Dick Tracy were doing.
The Dick Tracy comic strip in the early 1940s was breaking new ground when author Chester Gould imagined two-way audio communication via a device so small one could wear on the wrist. That was before television was available to the general public, so even Tracy’s device seemed advanced at the time. Now we have text/audio/visual devices the size of which is limited only by how small a screen you will tolerate.
Growing up, I never knew another family who had cats. Everyone I knew had a dog, if anything. It wasn’t until my second marriage that I got to know cats. And they’re not bad. A lot lower maintenance.
My Rule of Thumb regarding dogs and cats: If you like affection, get a dog. If you admire indifference, get a cat. If you call a dog, he comes to you with tail wagging. If you call a cat, she walks away to find a place to sleep.
Generally teenage boys aren’t much for fashion trends, but one did take hold when I was in high school. Seems like many of us wore flannel, buttoned jackets with large squares. The squares were black alternating with some other color. Mine was white, but others were red, blue, and green.
In the high school cafeteria, sitting at our table until the bell signals the end of lunch period, we would play finger football. With a penny on your side of the table, you score a touchdown if, in three hits with you fingernails, you can get the penny to hang over the far edge of the table. (No pushing; just hitting.) If you make it, that’s 6 points for your side. If you fall short or knock it over the edge, you failed. For the extra point, you must flick the penny over the goalpost, which your opponent is forming with his hands.
Would you like to compare prices for a baseball game, now and back when i was a kid? Compare this with today’s ticket prices, Back in the Forties, when we went to Ebbetts Field to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers play, general admission tickets were $1.25, and outfield seats were $.65.
Back in the 1940s, athletes weren’t so secluded from the public. At Ebbetts Field, before a game, we would wait by an entrance to watch the players drive up and enter the ballpark. And we could call to them too. I remember calling out to Joe Hattan, “Hey, Joe. Good game.”
They used to say that the Dodgers were so popular in Brooklyn that, in those days before very much air conditioning, with many open windows, you could walk down a city street and not miss a play because almost every apartment would be tuned to the radio broadcast.
As much as I rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers, I have to give Yankee Joe DiMaggio credit for his play in center field. The instant a ball was hit his way, he would turn and run to a spot in the outfield and stop. Then he would turn, look up for the ball, and take no more than a few steps to where the ball would come down into his glove. Must have been some kind of computer in his brain.
Shortly after my family moved to a new neighborhood, a family friend and my Dad took our beagle out to see if he was a suitable rabbit hunter. Our friend fired his rifle and Buddy took off. And, although we had lived in our new house only a short time, Buddy found his way home. What is it about animals? Do they have some kind of gyroscope in their heads?
When I was a kid, one of our favorite activities was going to Jones Beach, a state park that was well maintained and fun to visit. It had both an ocean-front beach and two salt-water pools. Also 25-cent hamburgers and 15-cent hot dogs.
When I fished for bass, I liked to cast artificial lures. When my best diving plugs weren’t attracting any, I would switch to floating ones. A favorite was the Hula Popper. When I twitched the rod, the concave face caused the plug to chug in place and the rubber streamers to move in various directions. Even if I got no strikes, it was fun to watch.
Bait-casting fishing tackle these days has been overtaken in popularity by spinning tackle , so this is probably a memory from the past. The bait-casting spool on which the line is wound has inertia. So you have to thumb it to slow it down as the lure reaches its destination. If you don’t, the spool continues to turn and you wind up with a backlash, or “bird nest,” as it’s sometimes called.
When it was time to separate from the Army, we were expected to turn in our heavy field jackets. Mine was still in pretty good shape, so I went to a surplus store, bought a cheap, ratty one, and turned it in, keeping my good one. It served me well for many years of civilian life. Psst. Don’t tell the Army, okay?
When I was working at Westinghouse in Newark, New Jersey, I went by car on a New England sight-seeing vacation. One stop was at New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain, a unique rock formation resembling a human’s facial profile. As I left, I passed a fellow going in who looked familiar. We pointed at each other as we passed, indicating “You look familiar but I can’t quite place you.” Later it came to both of us. We both worked at the same plant, I in an office and he at a machine on the shop floor. I visited him and we both joked about how we could meet so many miles away.
One day, when I was home alone, someone mistakenly sent a policeman to my house to investigate something or other. He looked upstairs and, when he came down, he phoned headquarters and said “There’s nobody here but an elderly gentleman.” Now I jokingly tell people “I’m not an old man. I’ll have you know I’m an elderly gentleman.”
Unlike vegetables that you can see developing on the plant, with peanuts you don’t know what you have until you dig up the plant because the peanuts grow off the roots. Harvesting peanuts is a lot like opening gifts on Christmas morning.
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Next to gardening itself, the next most fun activity was creating compost. I would save kitchen scraps, layer it with grass I had mowed, penetrated the pile with sticks to provide air, and voila. A beautiful, crumbling compost that would enrich my garden soil.
My attempt at growing corn was foiled by raccoons. They ignored the other veggies but had a passion for corn. I was willing to share, but they would attack at night and eat the corn before we humans would consider it ripe. One tip was to hang a flashing lantern, but the night I tried that they ripped me off for more corn than on previous nights.
A few years after I moved into a new split-level house, I could see that the porous shingles needed repainting. So I bought the necessary supplies, climbed the ladder, and painted. A few years later, when the house needed painting again, I started up the ladder and stopped partway. In those few years I had lost my nerve about climbing the ladder. So I called on a professional to do the job and my career as a house painter was over.
When I hear an employee complain about certain problems at work, I think that the situation cries out for an employees’ problem-solving group, supported by management, such as the Quality Circles sponsored by Westinghouse. Not top-down directives, but rather bottom-up recommendations. It was a philosophy proposed by business consultant Tom Peters.
A Baltimore AM radio station operates at the same broadcast frequency as a New York station I used to listen to when I lived there. So, in the morning, with my radio preset to that frequency, and before the local station comes on, I can pick up the New York station. And I can hear the reports about traffic on the bridges and tunnels I used to drive. And occasionally about Sunrise Highway, which goes through my town on Long Island’s south coast. It’s like being there again.
When I talked with Lenny Moore about how the Baltimore Colts won the 1958 Championship game, I reminded him of the photograph of Alan Ameche scoring the winning touchdown. But, I said, don’t you like it better when a publication doesn’t crop the photo so much that it includes you throwing the key block that let Ameche score.
The Ryman Auditorium, which served as the home of The Grand Old Opry radio show for 31 years, was one stop on our tour of Nashville. As we stood on the stage, our tourguide asked us to sing a chorus of “You Are My Sunshine.” When we finished, she said “There. Now you can tell the folks back home that you once sang on the stage of The Grand Old Opry.”
I brown-bagged my lunch during my working years, and typically the bag featured a peanut-butter-and-something sandwich. What’s the something? Well, it wasn’t jelly. It was a variety of items, changed each day. I liked soft ingredients like raisins, chopped dates, or cut dried apricots. Or it could be hard ingredients like granola, chopped walnuts, or sunflower seeds. And to distinguish between the two I used rye bread for the soft sandwich and pumpernickel for the hard sandwich. I would make a batch of both and freeze them. Then, each day, I would pick what I wanted from my “color-coded” collection.
At a grocery-store checkout counter I got talking with the clerk, and she told me her feet were hurting from standing so long. I asked how much longer before her shift was up, and she mentioned a relatively short time. I joked that she could do that standing on her head. She said, “Hey, if I could do it standing on my head my feet wouldn’t hurt.”
