Chapter Two
Early Days
Tourist to local yokel: “Have you lived here all your life?”
Local man: “Not yet!”
Most folks cannot make that answer in truthfulness, as that would mean that they never once left their hometown to visit any other place on the planet. That would be most miserable.
And so it is with me. Born in central Pennsylvania in 1964, I moved to Florida from Pennsylvania with my parents in the spring of 1968. My father was in the U.S. Air Force, stationed in Miami. They rented a small flat near the end of a cul-de-sac, not too far from the air base. (It wasn’t until I was in my 20s, before I ever heard the word “cul-de-sac”, a fancy borrowed French phrase that basically means a dead-end turnaround in a residential neighborhood.) The planes would roar overhead at all hours of the day, so I was told.
There is very little that I remember from those days. It is funny how our early memories are usually only still snapshots of quick events that happen, then fly away. I don’t remember my brother being born, or the compact Chevy that my parents drove. Or the beauty of the palm trees and the tropical air.
But I do remember the magical cypress tree. It had low, thick branches, by which one could quickly climb to get a better view of the street and the neighbors. Of course, the neighbors were watching me, too, as I climbed that tree every day. One of the mid-level branches had a dimple where possible decay was setting in. It was deep enough to place a pencil upright without it falling over. Well, one day while climbing that tree, what did I find in that dimple but a lollipop! And that continued for many days. It was as if the tooth fairy had made a deal with the dryads to compensate me for having less-than-white teeth. After several weeks of finding a lollipop every day, a strange gift took the place of the lollipop – a banana. I wasn’t sure whether I should be happy or just perplexed. I don’t remember how long the lollipops continued thereafter. That video is long gone.
After my father got out of the military, it was time to find a job. A local mining outfit in the town of my nativity had decided to move its headquarters to one of its smalltown mines in the heart of West Virginia, in a town called Benchmark. Maybe it was an optimistic name for where West Virginia wanted all of its towns to be one day. It was a middle-class town, due in part to the burgeoning company, which employed hundreds of the locals in the mining operations, and now would be employing another hundred in its new main office. Some friends of the family who worked for the company, and who were set to move to Benchmark, got my father’s foot in the door. And so, [singing] “we loaded up the truck and moved to Bev-er-ly, Hills that is, swimming pools; movie stars”.
Well it wasn’t to Beverly; that was another town deep in the mountains, but it was to the hills. I suppose a few people had swimming pools, as did the town park. While there were no movie stars, the town did have an old movie theater called the Asterisk. The Washington D.C. Elite used to take summer vacations, before World War II, to this part of West Virginia, to escape the summer heat in the city. There was a large hotel in the center of town that attested to these annual visits, with large framed photos of visiting government big-wigs and their lackeys, the photos hanging in the lobby and hallways. So the town, at least in part, benefited from a decent, yet dwindling, tourism industry.
My family spent that year, my first school year, living in a 2nd floor apartment, of which I have no recollection, whatsoever. I have seen the pictures, but none jog my memory. We then moved into a 1900s house, just outside of town in a somewhat friendly neighborhood. On the last day of kindergarten, the entire class took a long walk from the school. We meandered past my house, where I remember seeing the moving van being unloaded. I was graduating to elementary school and to a new house, all in the same day.
The “new” two-story house was laid out nicely. It had a living room and adjacent parlor, separated by glassed pocket doors, the kind that conceal themselves inside the walls. They were rarely revealed. The walls were made of plaster and lathe with a covering of wallpaper. I thought it was funny and a little false, when I was told that the plaster had horse hair in it in order to help hold it together. It sounded like an old wives’ tale to me, as if I had enough wisdom as a young boy, to know what wives’ tales were. However, one year the wallpaper came down to make way for a fresh look. Lo, and behold, that plaster actually had dark hairs embedded in it! The basement housed a coal furnace for the house’s heat source. I remember the coal truck coming to the house in the fall, putting the chute into the small window, and loading up the blackened room. The room was definitely not a place in which to play. I stayed out of there as much as possible.
Early in the 20th century, the town had a yearly festival in the fall, called the Black-and-Blue Festival. It turns out that blackberries and huckleberries grew like wildfire in the lush countryside. Nearly everyone in the country picked the berries and canned them or made preserves from them. So, annually, there was a big hullaballoo to the berry god, with a parade and a dance at the high school and games for kids at the town park and lots of hot food and berries for sale. There were three-legged races,turtle races, and eggs tossed. There was a hog-calling contest. Of course, no hogs came, so no one won. Soooo…….we just sat around and listened to the bluegrass music. (Or was that blackgrass music? It was the Black-and-Blue Festival, after all.) Well, I didn’t listen to the music, because the festival had not been held in 20 years. Apparently, a blight showed up in the ’50s and wiped out both types of bushes in the county. The blackberries, however, were making a comeback by the time my family moved to Benchmark. When I would spend the night with a friend who lived about 10 miles from town, he would take me to the berry patch in summer, where we would pick and eat to our hearts’ content.
The Methodist Church had a large presence in the county, with two large church congregations in town, and several more scattered about the countryside. My mother was raised in the Methodist Church, so we would attend Sunday service at Francis Raspberry UMC. I always thought that was an odd name for a church’s namesake. My grandparents had a widow neighbor named Frances; she was the only Frances I knew about. So I thought Francis was a feminine name that was just spelled incorrectly. As my reading skills improved, I was able to see that the church marquis did not display “Raspberry” but Asbury. I was made to go to Sunday school as well, which was no fun at all. (I don’t remember if my parents went to Sunday school; if they did, they never talked about it.) However, I was given a large Bible at a young age. Since I loved reading as a child, I would often read the Bible, aloud, to myself. However, I have no recollection that anything in the Bible made an impression upon me.
I fell in love mostly with the Hardy Boys mysteries. I remember spending countless hours on the single bed in my brother’s room, reading those novels. They were so captivating. Both of my younger brothers (yes, now there were two) shared a large bedroom on the 2nd floor of our turn-of-the-century house. My own bedroom was smaller, overlooking the side and back yards, with a window to the roof over the back porch. However, even though it was my room, there was never any heat in that room in the winter time. For some reason, the ductwork did not allow any air through; so, it was too cold to spend any time in there. That is why I slept in the single bed in the big bedroom. I suppose it was an even trade for my partial independence.
One year my parents had purchased a set of encyclopedias – yeah, the entire set of books A-Z, with new yearbooks arriving every year thereafter for several years. What a fascinating set of books they turned out to be. I don’t know how my parents had the money to purchase them. Somehow I inherited those books and still owned them till the day of my death. The “E” book had been lost over the years, but I had managed to purchase a replacement. Its red cover stood out like a sore thumb amid the black and brown covers of the original set.
Those were the days of playing wiffle ball in the back yard with the
neighborhood kids in any kind of decent weather. We had a long thin sidewalk that went from the back basement door to the end of the property, where the old outhouse used to be. That area was home plate. Like the big green monster at Fenway, we had the big white monster, which was the house itself. If one hit the house with the ball, it was a home run. There were round dirt spots on either side of the sidewalk for first and third base. The only person who hit more homers than me was Dale, a kid two years younger than me, who lived a block away.
If we weren’t playing wiffle ball, then we were riding our bikes. One year for Christmas, I had gotten a green chopper for a present. It was actually fairly dorky-looking, but at the time, I was the coolest kid in the neighborhood. Our street only ran for five blocks, but that was plenty for some high speed shenanigans. The first block was where I lived; the second block was flat like mine; the third block was sloped on both ends. The fourth and fifth blocks were one downhill slope to the third block, which was slightly offset from the third block, so that one had to make a quick turn, coming to the third block. At that turn was a large blue mailbox for outgoing mail. Hence, we kids called that Mailbox Hill, because it was at the top of a perpendicular street that was a steep hill. We never rode down that hill because it was too dangerous, as the first intersection below was quite busy. It was thrilling and challenging to ride down the sloped section as fast as we could, heading straight for that mailbox, then taking the slight turn as sharp as we could. For all the years that we did that stunt, we never had a run-in with any vehicle. However, there was one time that could have been disastrous. I had Kelly’s bike instead of my own. Kelly was a neighbor girl, who had a girl’s bike. (I’m not sure why I was riding her bike at the time.) As I came flying down the slope, the front wheel started to shake violently, eventually wrecking the bike and throwing me head-over-heels to the pavement, right in front of the mailbox. Fortunately, I was not hurt at all, to my utter surprise, but nonetheless, quite shaken. Of course, I did not tell my parents about that joy ride.
There was plenty of work to be done as well. With an old house, there were always improvements to be made. So my dad made me help him on Saturdays with his projects, or with mowing the grass, or with trimming the hedges. He made me work hard, which wasn’t enjoyable at the time. Looking back, I was glad for having received a good work ethic.
The neighbors were of all ages. They had names like Chicken Joe, Slim Jim, Ginny, Pearl and Mutt, and an elderly couple across the street, Garland and Sarah (she never learned how to drive a car). One kid down the block had a myna bird, that would say certain phrases over and over, like “Where’s Robby?” His sister’s name was Weeble, like the name of the round-bottomed toy people (Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down). And then there were the Puffinburglers, who lived on the lower street. They never smiled, and drove very old cars. Their house always had too many trees and bushes around it, so the property always looked dark. They kept their dogs in pens in the back of their property, but never showed them any attention. The dogs would bark incessantly and drive us batty. We kids had to walk by their house on the way to the bus top, which gave us an eerie feeling – just what we needed right before school.
The Steinbecks also lived on the lower street. They had seven kids with widely varying ages. The mother would sometimes come to the house in summer and help my mother to can homemade ketchup. It was the worst stuff you ever tasted. It would ruin a helping of french fries in an instant.
My dad decided to coach a Little League ball team, so I was automatically on the team, although I was just average at baseball. At 9 years old, I got to play the last inning in right field, where nobody ever hit the ball, because there were no
left-handed hitters. The right-handers never pulled the ball in my direction.
By the time I was 11, however, I was the starting catcher, and continued in that position for my last year. By the end of that last year, I was anticipating making the all-star team. To my chagrin, an 11-year old made the team as the starting catcher. I didn’t even make the backup squad. I was very disappointed. Out team, however, was tied for the best record with the Comptinos, who had the star pitcher in the league.
We met in the final game to decide who would be champions for 1976. Well, my vindication came in the game, along with a little surprise from our team’s best pitcher. His dad had recently taught him how to throw a curve ball, which worked brilliantly against the Comptinos. In the final inning, the game was tied at one. We had two guys on base, and I came up to bat. Without having a hit in the game, I came up with a grounder that got through the middle, scoring both guys on the league’s star pitcher. We held them to no runs in their half of the final inning, and we won the championship.
One day in sixth grade, I was in Mrs. Mueller’s room during lunch break, with my pal Alvin Branch. We heard the fire siren in town; then shortly thereafter, we saw a fire engine roar past the school. Alvin’s house was only about one mile away. He flippantly stated out loud that he hoped the fire truck was not going to his house. We thought nothing more of it, but went to our separate classes when the bell rang. About an later, Mrs. Battleship, a young teacher, came into our class sobbing. She told us that indeed the fire was at Alvin’s house. He had been pulled from his class and sent home. His house was not a total loss, but his father had died from smoke inhalation. It was an eerie feeling that came over me as I remembered his words about the fire truck.
I eventually got to spend time with Alvin again about a month later. He, his mother, and siblings were living in a rented house in the country. Alvin had lost all his clothes in the fire, along with his extensive baseball card collection. I remember him wearing some ghastly shirt, that I would never have been caught wearing. He didn’t seem to mind; he was simply glad to have clothes to wear. I also saw a few old clothes of mine, that I had contributed to a collection that the school had organized. Every time that I would go to his rented unit, I could see the grief that his mother bore from the trauma of losing a house and a spouse. It never seemed to lessen, even after a few months when she allowed a younger boyfriend to move into the rented house with her. Alvin did not like him. I did not like him, as he seemed to not care for her loss, but only wanted a sugar momma in his life. Well, she eventually got rid of him, and the family moved into a rented house, where they lived for a few years. In eighth grade, I spent the night with Alvin at his house. It was winter, and his mother had to work the next day, which was Saturday. He coaxed me into going onto the frozen pond behind the house. Wouldn’t you know it – Alvin fell through the ice. He was quickly out of the frigid water, and we hurried inside to dry his clothes in the dryer, before his mother got home from work. She never knew.
As a kid, life was mostly good. We could roam the five blocks with little supervision. In the summer, the retired man across the street with the rust-colored car, Garland, would sit on his high porch, chew his spittin’ tobacco, listen to the local radio station, and watch over us kids’ doings. The stairs to his house would be a thorn in the flesh in the near future.
In the summertime, when school was not in session, we kids sometimes got bored. There was a little corner store about three blocks away, where one could get penny candy, unless one did not have any pennies. Well, we remedied that. My brothers and I had piggy banks that were made from translucent glass. Somehow, scads of change made their way into the banks; I have no idea from where the money came. When we got the hankering for something cool and sweet from the store, we would take a butter knife and coax the coins from the insertion slot in the bank. Since we could see the coins, the quarters were the ones that got coaxed the most. If the banks were mostly full, a few coins missing were not noticed at all. After a few dollars had been purloined from the piggy, we would walk to the store and buy chocolate milk and candy bars!
Christmas Day was usually over-the-top. My parents were not well-to-do by any means. But Christmas Day usually brought a ton of presents. The tree had barely room to stand amid the wrapped goodies. We ended up getting the usual high-dollar items, such as bicycles, stereos, watches, and, of course, tons of clothes. (I still have my valued watch that I got in 1981 – a silver Pulsar lighted digital watch, that has only had a few batteries replaced in over 35 years. And does anyone remember the doomed technology of 2-track tape players? They were mini 8-track machines, and I got one for Christmas in the 2nd grade. They never took off, just like the Beta videotape medium.) Which brings me to the aforementioned word “valued”. I am not sure that I valued any of the gifts that I received, except for a few, namely that watch, and two guitars – one on which I learned to play, and one top-of-the-line Ovation that had a fantastic sound, and of which I owned for about 20 years, partly out of fear/respect for my parents who bought it, and partly because it was a high-quality instrument. I finally sold it because the rounded back became too much of an obstacle when playing the instrument standing up. Out of all the Christmases as a child, the only other gifts that I can still remember getting was an 8-track/turntable combo, with several worldly music albums, and that metallic green “chopper” bicycle, complete with long front forks. Neither lasted that long.
When I was 11 or 12, the time came for that talk about the birds and the bees, which was only a little awkward, when I knew the basics already. That talk was just a precursor to the real bomb that was about to be dropped.