Let me say, that I love to fish now that I am old enough to have the patience for it. I don’t care how or with whom. I don’t care what I fish with, what I fish for, or even if I don’t catch anything at all. Fishing is a state of mind. The Act of Fishing is its own reward. The serenity of the water gently lapping against the shore, the fragrance of Cedar trees in the breeze, the warmth of the sun, the clear blue sky. The strategy of choosing the lure, the technique of making the lure behave realistically, and if you’re lucky you’ll experience the surprise, the thrill and the sense of accomplishment when you land the elusive bass, perch, pike, trout, or bluegill you were stalking. Like I say, I love to fish…but this love of mine wasn’t handed down to me by my father. Oh no. In fact, the experiences I describe above are the antithesis of my experience as a child.
There’s an old adage that goes something like “Be careful of what you ask for, you just may get it.” This especially held true when we wanted to spend time with Dad. Now its not that Dad didn’t love us – he just had his own limitations. Patience and tolerance might be virtues, but they were lost on a man with 3 jobs and 8 kids. He worked those two, sometimes three jobs to send all 8 of his kids to parochial school. Going to work at 4 am, coming home by 6 pm, eating dinner and going to sleep at 9 pm just to do it all again 6 days a week. At the end of his workday, more often than not he was greeted by my exasperated Mother at the front porch with words like, “do you know what your boys did today?” And more often than not, my memories of Dad returning home from work are unpleasant for these reasons.
Anyway, it was a rare pleasure for Dad to enjoy a few moments of peace doing something he enjoyed. Fishing was one of these little releases he tried to sneak in. For some reason, it seemed Mom would take advantage of Dad’s spare moments to get a little peace as well. When Dad would yell across the house to say, “I’m going fishing”, Mom would reply with an equally vociferous response of “Ask the kids if they want to go too!” I’m sure this would set Dad off, but he did what Mom wanted (as we all did) and would ask us if we wanted to go with him.
Now as I said, I didn’t really like to fish, but the prospect of having Dad’s attention all to ourselves was a pretty enticing notion for the following reason. With a Dairy Queen store along the way, it was quite possible that the two of us could stop for a treat on the way home. Once committed, I immediately realized that I wasn’t going to be alone. One couldn’t go with Dad without the others thinking that you were going to get something that they weren’t. Before long, what was going to be Dad going on a relaxing fishing trip alone, morphed into babysitting 3 restless kids with the collective attention span of a herd of cats. This is how every fishing trip with Dad went. In retrospect, I now feel a bit sorry for that poor man.
The Act of Fishing was a collection of activities that - even as individual acts - stand on their own as something that energetic young boys love to do, but little girls would find most disgusting indeed. These necessary activities include such fun things as digging for worms, descending down lakeshore bluffs to reach your favorite spot, baiting the hooks, taking fish off the hook, and climbing said bluffs to make it back to the car.
Digging for worms
The technique you use greatly depends upon the bait you choose for your outing. Hunting for nightcrawlers is a unique process that requires watering the harvest area with a garden hose, the use of flashlights, etc. Nightcrawler hunting is an outing all by itself. However, ad-hoc fishing trips like the ones my Dad tried to take always meant leafworms. Leafworms were easiest to find and the least bothersome to gather. It was also something my Dad could turn us loose on with some degree of success.
We had our favorite places to look for them. The rhubarb patch alongside of the garage had rich dark soil that was easy to turn over with a spade. The dirt around the fire-barrel in the back corner of our backyard was another good place to look because my Dad said the ashes “sweetened” the soil – whatever that meant. It was simple. Place the tip of the shovel where you wanted to dig, give a big jump and land on top of the spade. If you struck it right the spade would deeply cut into the clay-based dirt. From there, even if you were small, you could turn over a big clod of clay by pulling hard on the end of the shovel’s handle. The next step was to break up the big clod with your hands in to smaller pieces until you spotted that squirmy worm and placed it into a Chase and Sanborn coffee can with a little dirt.
Walking down to the lakeshore
Our house on “the east side” of Ypsilanti was close to Ford Lake – and Ford Lake was where my first fishing experiences were. It was actually a carrot farm, flooded when the Huron River was dammed up by Henry Ford to create a large water reservoir for his factory. Very deep and long, with high bluffs on all sides, Ford Lake was quite picturesque from a distance. But get close…not even real close… and one could pick up the stench that years of factory pollution had caused. Because the factory abused this resource, everyone else did too. Abandoned cars, washing machines, and old Christmas trees were common sites on the shores and in the waters of poor Ford Lake. Yep, it was polluted – so much so that we heard rumors of people swimming in the lake and coming out of it with welts and yellow patches on their skins from too much exposure. I don’t know if these rumors were true, but as a kid you believed it.
We didn’t have a boat, so we had to fish from the shore. The only way to get to the shore was to first drive to Lakeview Swim Club (it was located on the closest bluff to our home, overlooking the lake), trek across the field behind the pool, climb the 6 foot tall cyclone fence (and you already know how I feel about fences by this time) and descend down the steep bluff in knee-high weeds, poison ivy and trash, to get to the lakeshore. There were a whole bunch of sites and smells along the lakeshore that you just don’t encounter in a subdivision. Rotting fish, algae, water birds, and the like each have their own characteristics to explore, but enough of that, we were going to fish!
Baiting the Hook
So far, so good. We finally arrived at the lake. As far we could tell Dad was still in a good mood. Tom, Mark, and I weren’t arguing yet (“you touched me,” “well you touched me first!”), there was the possibility of catching a lot of fish or simply one big one worth bragging about, and Dad still thought he might find this to be a relaxing outing. Ah, hope sprung eternal back then, but chaos was about to rear its ugly head.
When it came to dividing up the equipment, our problems began to surface. You see, when you carry four fishing poles in a bunch, fishing lines and hooks tangle quickly – especially with the hillside we had to traverse to arrive at our destination. When Dad saw the tangled mess, his fuse was lit. We could see it glow, and he tried to conceal it, but we knew we couldn’t stop it.
He divvied up the rods, gave us each one and told us to bait our hooks. Tom knew how and enjoyed doing it (Dad always loved him the most!), but I didn’t know how and Mark was afraid of worms. When we whined about it, he baited our hooks and his fuse began to burn. Finally settled in with four bobbers floating in the water, Dad finally began to relax a bit. My bobber started to come alive. “Set the hook!” Dad yelled. I lifted the rod tip quickly, but to no avail. Reeling it in, I quickly learned that the worm was cleaned off the hook, and I still didn’t know how to re-apply the bait.
“Dad…” I said with reticence, “I need another worm!” “Get one out and if you want to wait, I’ll put it on, otherwise, try it yourself.” He was playing with a fish on the end of his line and wasn’t in an immediate position to stop what he was doing for me. No sooner did I grab another worm, when Mark said “I got one! I got one!” He reeled his in and yelled “Dad, get it off for me!” Tom said, “ I got one too!” And I said, “Dad, I need help baiting my hook.” By now, Dad had lost his fish, and saw two of his sons with better luck than he.
Still, the novelty of the first fish of the day kept Dad’s fuse from burning too fast. He quickly removed the hook from the smallish bluegill that Mark caught, put it on a stringer and re-baited Mark’s hook. “You know a boy your age should be able to bait his own hook.” Dad would say. Tom was able to manage the bluegill that he caught, and put it on the stringer too, but I was still baitless, but it was now my turn for Dad to bait my hook. Tom was immediately fishing again, and Mark had just cast his bobber back into the water while Dad was finishing with me. “Dad, the worm flew off my hook when I cast.”
The fuse was burning quickly now. Dad left me and attended to Mark, and told him to bait his own. Mark looked scared and told him he couldn’t. I cast my line in the water, only to have the hook catch the bobber in mid-air and fall to the water 10 feet in front of me in a bird’s nest. Mark tried to thread the thin ribbon of an earthworm onto his gold hook by placing the worm on a rock and pushing the hookpoint toward it. Dad went back to his rod only to find that whatever fish that was attracted to his offering made off with his bait while he was tending to us.
The glow of his fuse was now moving closer and closer, following its path of destruction. Unaware of how close Dad was to the edge, I told him my line was tangled. “Gosh damn fool kid” I heard him say under his breath. He always said “gosh damn” because, of course, saying the Lord’s name in vain was wrong. Even though he said “gosh damn”, he coupled it with ”fool kid”. I knew it was going to happen any minute now and my stomach began to turn and my palms began to sweat.
Dad untangled my line without a word and I promised myself I wouldn’t interrupt him again. Convinced I could sit quietly, I watched my other two brothers as my Dad returned to his fishing rod. “Go ahead and fish!” My Dad commanded. “ I will in a minute.” I replied. Now I could feel the dreaded pressure that only comes when you have to go to the bathroom. “Dad, I have to go to the john.” “Dammit” Dad said. “Number 1 or Number 2?” “Number 1” I said, afraid to tell him the truth. “Then go behind the bush!” he replied. My stomach rumbled loudly, warning my Dad that I didn’t fully disclose my disposition, but then the rumbling stopped, my stomach settled down. I was safe for now.
Now Mark was completely engrossed in his attempt to bait his hook without touching the worm. Not seeing that Dad’s frustration level was already at Defcon 3, Mark said, “Dad, I can’t get the worm on the hook!” That was it. The fuse had made it to the powder.
“GODDAM IT! I may as well be back at work. So much for a fun, relaxing trip. I try to do a little fishing and your Mom made me take you anyway. You damn fool kids spoil everything. To hell with it. We’re going.”
I started crying, Mark started crying, and Tom yelled, “I’ve got another one!”
Tom’s luck didn’t matter. Dad knew what his fate was if we stayed. At that point I didn’t really care anyway. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be there anymore. If I didn’t get to a bathroom and fast, Dad and I would have even bigger problems on our hands, legs, and feet.
We gathered our gear, climbed the bluff, walked the field, piled into the car, and drove the 15 minutes home. Mom yelled, are you back already? You were only gone an hour! Dad said nothing, Mark said nothing, Tom went out to play, and I stood outside the sole bathroom door in the house, dancing a jig, waiting for whoever had beaten me to the toilet to finish his paperwork.
I didn’t go fishing again until I was in my twenties. Mark enjoys both hunting and fishing, and Tom is a diehard outdoorsman. Once we were men, we each took turns taking Dad out for fishing, trapshooting, or hunting trips. As adults though, the tables turned with us being frustrated as Dad provided the comic activity you will read about in subsequent stories.
Friday, January 12, 2007
My Love and Hate Relationship with Jimmy Durante
Television reruns are nothing new. Growing up in the 60’s, we watched The Mouseketeers, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and so many others. But long before then, when our parents were young and didn’t have television to rot their brains, they went to the movies. For a dime, they could see movie serials like The Bowery Boys and The Little Rascals. They watched The Marx Brothers, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, Laurel and Hardy, Red Skelton, and then later Abbot and Costello. All of these actors and their movies found their way to a new audience via our black and white TV screens in the 50’s and 60’s.
I remember watching them all, but I don’t remember when I first became interested in these shows. However, I can tell you that I was 4 years old when I began my imitation of Jimmy Durante. The 8mm home movies my Dad took of us actually recorded my obvious obsession with this silver screen comedian. Don’t ask me why I chose Jimmy Durante. I think because he was my father’s favorite. My dad would say “Ha-cha-cha-cha-cha…I gotta million of ‘em!” to make us smile. In fact, my imitation was likely more of my Dad’s imitation of Jimmy Durante, rather than Durante himself. In any case, as a goofy looking 4 year old with missing front teeth, my dad thought it was cute when I did it and it made everyone laugh. The more they laughed, the more it encouraged me.
Soon, I added plastic, fake glasses courtesy of my father. You know the kind - the ones with the enormous nose and bushy eyebrows and mustache attached. Also added to my repertoire was the catch phrase, “that ain’t my banana, that’s my nose!” and a dance that began with a Russian leg kick and finished off with a Chubby Checker Twist where I shook my fanny. I knocked ‘em dead with the act whenever anyone came to visit.
On one particular day, however, my siblings’ laughter turned into teasing and ridicule. Was it out of jealousy? Perhaps they were just tired of the act or the attention it drew. All I know is what I am told now by my brothers who recount the events. Apparently, their teasing turned my “Make ‘Em Laugh” demeanor into “I’m going to Kill ‘Em!” My brothers tell me I picked up the first thing I could swing and chased them around the yard. It was an Al Kaline autographed Louisville Slugger bat and it was bigger than me. There they all were - Tom, Mark, and maybe even Dan – all running far enough away from me to stay out of harm’s way, but close enough to appear to me to be within reach through my wet, rage-filled eyes.
Crying, swinging, screaming, and running – the event was all too much for me and I tripped over the very instrument of destruction I was wielding – ass over teakettle. My brothers, the antagonists of my tirade, were now roaring with laughter as my father captured the entire show on his precious movie camera. As I laid on our lawn chair sobbing from the humiliation and the taunting, my dad shot a closeup of my sad face. It was a movie clip that all of my family remembers. If it weren’t for the video that has since been transferred from 8mm to VHS, to now DVD format, I would only remember the one thing from that fateful day – the punishment I got from my Dad after I slapped his face and knocked his precious camera down to the sweet summer grass of 1962. I never did Jimmy Durante imitations again.
I remember watching them all, but I don’t remember when I first became interested in these shows. However, I can tell you that I was 4 years old when I began my imitation of Jimmy Durante. The 8mm home movies my Dad took of us actually recorded my obvious obsession with this silver screen comedian. Don’t ask me why I chose Jimmy Durante. I think because he was my father’s favorite. My dad would say “Ha-cha-cha-cha-cha…I gotta million of ‘em!” to make us smile. In fact, my imitation was likely more of my Dad’s imitation of Jimmy Durante, rather than Durante himself. In any case, as a goofy looking 4 year old with missing front teeth, my dad thought it was cute when I did it and it made everyone laugh. The more they laughed, the more it encouraged me.
Soon, I added plastic, fake glasses courtesy of my father. You know the kind - the ones with the enormous nose and bushy eyebrows and mustache attached. Also added to my repertoire was the catch phrase, “that ain’t my banana, that’s my nose!” and a dance that began with a Russian leg kick and finished off with a Chubby Checker Twist where I shook my fanny. I knocked ‘em dead with the act whenever anyone came to visit.
On one particular day, however, my siblings’ laughter turned into teasing and ridicule. Was it out of jealousy? Perhaps they were just tired of the act or the attention it drew. All I know is what I am told now by my brothers who recount the events. Apparently, their teasing turned my “Make ‘Em Laugh” demeanor into “I’m going to Kill ‘Em!” My brothers tell me I picked up the first thing I could swing and chased them around the yard. It was an Al Kaline autographed Louisville Slugger bat and it was bigger than me. There they all were - Tom, Mark, and maybe even Dan – all running far enough away from me to stay out of harm’s way, but close enough to appear to me to be within reach through my wet, rage-filled eyes.
Crying, swinging, screaming, and running – the event was all too much for me and I tripped over the very instrument of destruction I was wielding – ass over teakettle. My brothers, the antagonists of my tirade, were now roaring with laughter as my father captured the entire show on his precious movie camera. As I laid on our lawn chair sobbing from the humiliation and the taunting, my dad shot a closeup of my sad face. It was a movie clip that all of my family remembers. If it weren’t for the video that has since been transferred from 8mm to VHS, to now DVD format, I would only remember the one thing from that fateful day – the punishment I got from my Dad after I slapped his face and knocked his precious camera down to the sweet summer grass of 1962. I never did Jimmy Durante imitations again.
My summer of broken bones
Like I said, it’s not that we weren’t athletic or didn’t like to play baseball. In fact, we played baseball all the time in the field at the end of the block. Everyone that we could get would play ball with us. Young and old, liked or hated, skilled or not, it didn’t matter the field was big and if you didn’t want to run all the time, you needed bodies. But again, like I said, our first love was swimming.
I was 8 years old, going on 9 during the summer of 1967 when I first learned what physical pain was all about. It was a typical summer day at Lakeview Swim Club. We had rode our bikes in the morning and spent all day. Jack was the LifeGuard on duty that evening, when we called our Mom to tell her we were having too much fun to come home. She agreed that Dad and her would pack a quick picnic and bring dinner to the pool to join us. This was always a treat because it was extra special to stay out late and swim when the pool lights came on in the evening.
We played until Mom and Dad arrived. We ate dinner, which typically amounted to grilled hotdogs, sandwiches, or something quick and easy. We waited the obligatory 30 minutes after we ate to digest our food. (As the old wives’ tale said, if you go into the water to soon after you eat, you could get a cramp and drown! Have you ever known someone to die from a food-related cramp? I guess the wives’ tale works because no one ever drowns.)
We went right back into the water. The game at hand? Creating the largest splash the diving board. Every kid does it, or at least tries it from a diving board sometime in his life. However, most never advance past the regular, one meter diving board, fearing to hit the water with a dreaded “bellysmacker”.
The High Board, now there was a test of courage. And creating a big splash from a High Board dive? Well that was showing off our machismo, which we all did in spades. What is the High Board? Also known as the 3 meter board, every pool worth anything has one – but the best ones had a fiberglass (it had to be a Duraflex® Board) diving board attached to it. Fiberglass boards could catapult even the smallest, meekest child into sub orbit. Can openers, cannonballs, and sleepers were the best for creating the largest, noisiest splashes from the High Board.
It isn’t important to get a big jump off the High Board – after all, you are already 11 feet above the water. What was most important was how you entered the water. The position of your body upon entry determined the splash result.
For example, your basic cannonball requires a flat impact of your butt against the surface of the water, causing a SPLATT, and a wide exploding coverage of water. This resulted in a low, tsunami-type wave, good for splashing the girl on the pooldeck that you had a crush on. The people who made the biggest cannonball splashes were the fat kids that had plenty of surface area to greet the water with.
The next favorite splash dive was the ever popular can opener. You could always tell the rookie – he was the one who held his ankle in a straight “up-and-down” posture, as if he were pulling his heel up to his butt. This incorrect position freed up the geek’s other hand to plug his nose before he entered the water. The only good thing that came from this poor execution was that it signaled to us just what kids we could give wedgies too in the Locker Room when the pool closed. Nope, any expert splash diver will tell you that the proper position for an effective can opener is this: knee pulled to the chest with BOTH hands, with a slight bend at the waist backwards. The idea is not to contact the water with surface area like the cannonball, but to cause a vertical displacement in the water that will shoot a column high into the air. Of course, as impressive as the splash of the accomplished can opening diver can be, equally impressive is the concussive sound one hears both above and below the water. Holy cow! We never said it, but we all knew deep inside that the best can opener would surely win the hearts of the hottest sunbathers on the deck.
As I said earlier, Jack was the lifeguard on duty that evening when it happened. He was sitting on the Lifeguard stand talking to “Fat-Pat” Roe ( some girl he either went to school with, had a crush on, or couldn’t shake for some reason or another).
We were doing our dives as fast as we could to keep the water stirred up, laughing and joking as we watched each other on our kamikaze missions, smacking the water, coming out with red backs, and making fools of ourselves. We would race up the High Board’s ladder, run to the end of the board, and take a fearless jump to gain altitude over the water’s surface. Once our flight peaked we would position our body appropriately for the desired effect.
We would go, one by one, in the same order, over and over again. By the sixth or seventh time, we were pretty well delirious. It was my turn and I scampered the obligatory 11 feet to reach the height of the ladder. After my feet reached the last step, I carelessly grabbed for the bar to pull my body onto the board with my slippery, wet hand. When my hand slipped off the bar, my body fell backwards, away from the bar, away from the ladder, and down the eleven feet I just climbed.
The next thing I knew I was staggering, crying, and bleeding. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jack running towards me. The rest was just a blur until the doctor set my broken arm the old fashioned way, by pulling on it from opposite directions. Not only was my arm broken, but so was my nose. However, that didn’t look nearly as bad as the contusions, scratches, cuts and raw skin I had on the entire left side of my body from the impact of hitting the solid, cement pool deck from an 11-foot free-fall.
I had a full cast on my arm, from my shoulder to my fingers, for 6 weeks. Afterwards, that cast was removed and was replaced with a half-cast that allowed me to bend my elbow. Freedom at last, but short-lived. The very next day, the kids on the block gathered to play baseball and I came along.
I shouldn’t have.
I think it was Kenny McGregor, an older kid that lived 3 houses down on the same side of the street, who hit a foul ball over the fence along the makeshift, rightfield line. The wisest kid in the group decided it was best to lift the smallest ballplayer over the fence to retrieve the ball – me. So, they lifted me up and over the fence to the point where they realized they couldn’t lower me all the way – so they dropped me. Now the fence wasn’t that tall, probably just 5 feet high. But neither were the kids I played ball with. When they dropped me, I landed in a funny manner (not funny – haha, as we so often said back then) and twisted my left leg in such a way that it caused a spiral fracture of the tibia bone. The pain was immediate, but I would have endured it happily if I didn’t have to tell my Mom I was playing baseball with a broken arm.
I again went to the hospital, and again had a full cast put on, again on the left side of my body, but this time from my crotch to my toes.
Mom used to tell stories of people thinking that everything happened at the same time, like a car accident or something that made sense. She also remarked more than once about being embarrassed taking me in public anywhere, fearing people would believe I was a victim of child abuse. She also said that people never believed the real stories behind the broken bones. In fact, she often thought it would have been easier to lie about what happened and tell them something more believable than the truth.
Needless to say, I was miserable. After I broke my leg, I initially had no choice but to use a wheelchair. I couldn’t use crutches with my arm in a cast and a heavy leg cast to boot (no pun – really). Because I was so miserable, Mom used to make my brothers take turns playing with me in the house. To get even, Tom would torment me during his turn. He would push me fast across the Living Room floor only to stop abruptle – just short of a collision. One day, either intentionally or not, he pushed me so fast that he lost control and crashed me into the Living Room wall. Now, in the 60’s full casts were made of plaster, with no flexibility, no hinges. While sitting in a wheelchair with a full, inflexible leg cast, what do you think would have hit the wall first in a run-away collision? If you guessed the big toe on my left foot, you guessed right. What do you think happened to my big toe? That’s right too.
It broke. I was never so glad for a summer to be over, as I was that summer. I’m sure my mother would have agreed.
I was 8 years old, going on 9 during the summer of 1967 when I first learned what physical pain was all about. It was a typical summer day at Lakeview Swim Club. We had rode our bikes in the morning and spent all day. Jack was the LifeGuard on duty that evening, when we called our Mom to tell her we were having too much fun to come home. She agreed that Dad and her would pack a quick picnic and bring dinner to the pool to join us. This was always a treat because it was extra special to stay out late and swim when the pool lights came on in the evening.
We played until Mom and Dad arrived. We ate dinner, which typically amounted to grilled hotdogs, sandwiches, or something quick and easy. We waited the obligatory 30 minutes after we ate to digest our food. (As the old wives’ tale said, if you go into the water to soon after you eat, you could get a cramp and drown! Have you ever known someone to die from a food-related cramp? I guess the wives’ tale works because no one ever drowns.)
We went right back into the water. The game at hand? Creating the largest splash the diving board. Every kid does it, or at least tries it from a diving board sometime in his life. However, most never advance past the regular, one meter diving board, fearing to hit the water with a dreaded “bellysmacker”.
The High Board, now there was a test of courage. And creating a big splash from a High Board dive? Well that was showing off our machismo, which we all did in spades. What is the High Board? Also known as the 3 meter board, every pool worth anything has one – but the best ones had a fiberglass (it had to be a Duraflex® Board) diving board attached to it. Fiberglass boards could catapult even the smallest, meekest child into sub orbit. Can openers, cannonballs, and sleepers were the best for creating the largest, noisiest splashes from the High Board.
It isn’t important to get a big jump off the High Board – after all, you are already 11 feet above the water. What was most important was how you entered the water. The position of your body upon entry determined the splash result.
For example, your basic cannonball requires a flat impact of your butt against the surface of the water, causing a SPLATT, and a wide exploding coverage of water. This resulted in a low, tsunami-type wave, good for splashing the girl on the pooldeck that you had a crush on. The people who made the biggest cannonball splashes were the fat kids that had plenty of surface area to greet the water with.
The next favorite splash dive was the ever popular can opener. You could always tell the rookie – he was the one who held his ankle in a straight “up-and-down” posture, as if he were pulling his heel up to his butt. This incorrect position freed up the geek’s other hand to plug his nose before he entered the water. The only good thing that came from this poor execution was that it signaled to us just what kids we could give wedgies too in the Locker Room when the pool closed. Nope, any expert splash diver will tell you that the proper position for an effective can opener is this: knee pulled to the chest with BOTH hands, with a slight bend at the waist backwards. The idea is not to contact the water with surface area like the cannonball, but to cause a vertical displacement in the water that will shoot a column high into the air. Of course, as impressive as the splash of the accomplished can opening diver can be, equally impressive is the concussive sound one hears both above and below the water. Holy cow! We never said it, but we all knew deep inside that the best can opener would surely win the hearts of the hottest sunbathers on the deck.
As I said earlier, Jack was the lifeguard on duty that evening when it happened. He was sitting on the Lifeguard stand talking to “Fat-Pat” Roe ( some girl he either went to school with, had a crush on, or couldn’t shake for some reason or another).
We were doing our dives as fast as we could to keep the water stirred up, laughing and joking as we watched each other on our kamikaze missions, smacking the water, coming out with red backs, and making fools of ourselves. We would race up the High Board’s ladder, run to the end of the board, and take a fearless jump to gain altitude over the water’s surface. Once our flight peaked we would position our body appropriately for the desired effect.
We would go, one by one, in the same order, over and over again. By the sixth or seventh time, we were pretty well delirious. It was my turn and I scampered the obligatory 11 feet to reach the height of the ladder. After my feet reached the last step, I carelessly grabbed for the bar to pull my body onto the board with my slippery, wet hand. When my hand slipped off the bar, my body fell backwards, away from the bar, away from the ladder, and down the eleven feet I just climbed.
The next thing I knew I was staggering, crying, and bleeding. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jack running towards me. The rest was just a blur until the doctor set my broken arm the old fashioned way, by pulling on it from opposite directions. Not only was my arm broken, but so was my nose. However, that didn’t look nearly as bad as the contusions, scratches, cuts and raw skin I had on the entire left side of my body from the impact of hitting the solid, cement pool deck from an 11-foot free-fall.
I had a full cast on my arm, from my shoulder to my fingers, for 6 weeks. Afterwards, that cast was removed and was replaced with a half-cast that allowed me to bend my elbow. Freedom at last, but short-lived. The very next day, the kids on the block gathered to play baseball and I came along.
I shouldn’t have.
I think it was Kenny McGregor, an older kid that lived 3 houses down on the same side of the street, who hit a foul ball over the fence along the makeshift, rightfield line. The wisest kid in the group decided it was best to lift the smallest ballplayer over the fence to retrieve the ball – me. So, they lifted me up and over the fence to the point where they realized they couldn’t lower me all the way – so they dropped me. Now the fence wasn’t that tall, probably just 5 feet high. But neither were the kids I played ball with. When they dropped me, I landed in a funny manner (not funny – haha, as we so often said back then) and twisted my left leg in such a way that it caused a spiral fracture of the tibia bone. The pain was immediate, but I would have endured it happily if I didn’t have to tell my Mom I was playing baseball with a broken arm.
I again went to the hospital, and again had a full cast put on, again on the left side of my body, but this time from my crotch to my toes.
Mom used to tell stories of people thinking that everything happened at the same time, like a car accident or something that made sense. She also remarked more than once about being embarrassed taking me in public anywhere, fearing people would believe I was a victim of child abuse. She also said that people never believed the real stories behind the broken bones. In fact, she often thought it would have been easier to lie about what happened and tell them something more believable than the truth.
Needless to say, I was miserable. After I broke my leg, I initially had no choice but to use a wheelchair. I couldn’t use crutches with my arm in a cast and a heavy leg cast to boot (no pun – really). Because I was so miserable, Mom used to make my brothers take turns playing with me in the house. To get even, Tom would torment me during his turn. He would push me fast across the Living Room floor only to stop abruptle – just short of a collision. One day, either intentionally or not, he pushed me so fast that he lost control and crashed me into the Living Room wall. Now, in the 60’s full casts were made of plaster, with no flexibility, no hinges. While sitting in a wheelchair with a full, inflexible leg cast, what do you think would have hit the wall first in a run-away collision? If you guessed the big toe on my left foot, you guessed right. What do you think happened to my big toe? That’s right too.
It broke. I was never so glad for a summer to be over, as I was that summer. I’m sure my mother would have agreed.
Lakeview Swim Club
It seems odd that with 6 boys in the family, not one of us played Little League baseball. It wasn’t that we weren’t athletic or that we didn’t like baseball. In fact, I remember asking Mom if I could join the local Little League. Mom’s response was always, “Sure, if you can arrange a ride” or “Sure, if you can pay for it”, knowing full well that as a 10 year old kid, neither was possible.
That’s why summertime never meant “baseball” to the Ceo kids. Nope, summertime meant swimming to us. And swimming we did – day and night, every day of the summer, officially beginning on Memorial Day and ending just as officially on Labor Day.
It wasn’t even the act of swimming that was the best part. Not even close. It was where we went swimming at – Lakeview Swim Club. We didn’t know what it meant to belong to a club like this. We simply took advantage of it in a big way. My parents knew though. They were always quick to point out that Lakeview was a private club – one that a family had to pay a membership fee and annual dues to join. So how did we get in? Church mice would donate cheese scraps to us we were so tight on money. Here’s how we swung it. Our family could afford to join Lakeview because my brother Bob was hit by a car. Yep, Bob was hit by a car, my parents sued the insurance company of the guilty party, and they used the resulting settlement to pay our “lifetime” membership fee.
How did Bob get hit? I don’t remember.
How badly was he hurt? I couldn’t tell you.
How long was he laid up? I never heard the details.
However, I can tell you that I swam every day of every summer during my childhood thanks to Bob’s accident.
My Dad was on “The Board” at the swim club (whatever that meant). I remember thinking he was special because he was on “The Board.” That meant that we received special privileges. Yep…we got to help prepare the pool and locker rooms for the summer and winter seasons.
If you think that we were scammed into working for free, well…maybe you’re right. But we had great fun doing it. Painting the empty, dry pool from the inside out, then filling the enormous, Olympic-sized pool with water for the first time each season was worth it to be the first ones to swim in the pool before it officially opened. It was fun work that came with great reward because there was something special about being the first at anything while growing up.
Anyway – like I said, the pool opened on Memorial Day every season with a Potluck Party for all of the members and their families. From that day through September 1, our day would start by:
Eating breakfast (usually Cheerios with two teaspoons of sugar and NonFat Dry Milk)
Making our beds and getting dressed.
Finding our swimsuits on the clothesline in the backyard and grabbing a beach towel.
Performing “the ritual.”
What was “the ritual?” “The Ritual” was something you only did as a rite of passage in preparation for the long bicycle ride to Lakeview. You see, Lakeview SwimClub was located by the Hickory Hill area of Ypsilanti – on the other side (that is, the “good side”) of Interstate I-94. For young boys to go swimming, we had to ride our bikes a half mile to what seemed to us to be a supersteel structure we called “The Overpass”. We would then go over The Overpass, and then ride another mile straight down Georgina Avenue, turning left on Jay Street, and another left on Grove Road.
Back to “The Ritual.” It wasn’t that we couldn’t ride our bikes with one hand, and hold our suit and towel with the free hand. Oh no…we were cool. Anyone could ride their bikes with one hand. Even girls could do it. The troubles began when the rider lost control of his towel. Have you ever had a beach towel unravel and get caught in spokes of your bicycle wheel? Let me say that when it happens, it happens quickly. The results can leave you picking gravel out of your knees and palms in a heartbeat. Okay, so even if you are an expert towel holder and bike rider, you still have to deal with the simple fact that you only have two hands and you need them both to pull your bike up the two flights of stairs necessary to go over “The Overpass.”
So what do you do? You perform “The Ritual.” The Folding of the Swimsuit and Towel for Bike Travel.
Fold the towel lengthwise,
Fold your swimsuit so it would lay as flat on the towel as possible,
Place your suit on one end of the towel, and
Roll tightly. I mean tightly!
Tuck (or force) the towel roll between the support bars of your Schwinn. Guys, you know what bars I’m talking about too – the “rupture bars.” These are bars that spanned that sacred area between the handle bars and the bicycle seat. The bars that girls’ bikes didn’t have. The same bars that taught you the absolute meaning of the words “rupture” and “pain.”
I’m sorry, bad memories just took me off course.
Once you have your towel and suit roll tucked into your bike bars, you take your belt off and wrap it around the bars and towel and fasten it by the buckle. Now you are ready to roll. And roll we did. Down Kennedy Street to Tyler, past the Pelletier’s house (Steve Pelletier was always shooting hoops), past George School’s playground and to the long sidewalk that led up to The Overpass.
The sidewalk went down a steep hill, and stopped abruptly at The Overpass’s staircase. Being careful not to ride too fast down the sidewalk to the staircase (remember the word “rupture”?) we would jump off our bikes at the end of the sidewalk, lift the front of our bikes by their handlebars, and carry our bikes up two flights of stairs to the top. The top of The Overpass was like being inside a long, rectangular cage that was wrapped in cyclone fencing. The Overpass stretched high above Interstate I-94, allowing pedestrians to cross safely over the fast moving traffic. I still remember how it would take my breath away to stand above these vehicles traveling at speeds mostly greater than 70 miles per hour. Often we would stop on our way home to shake our butts and shake our fists at the semi-truck drivers to encourage them to blow their big deep horns as they passed by. But we didn’t play in the morning. We were all business. We pushed our bikes across The Overpass and, again, with both hands on our handlebars, we ran down the stairs with our bikes in a controlled fall all the way down, tires bouncing and bike frame bending. Back on our bikes, it was quickly down Georgina, to Jay, to Grove Road, to our favorite summer destination.
That’s why summertime never meant “baseball” to the Ceo kids. Nope, summertime meant swimming to us. And swimming we did – day and night, every day of the summer, officially beginning on Memorial Day and ending just as officially on Labor Day.
It wasn’t even the act of swimming that was the best part. Not even close. It was where we went swimming at – Lakeview Swim Club. We didn’t know what it meant to belong to a club like this. We simply took advantage of it in a big way. My parents knew though. They were always quick to point out that Lakeview was a private club – one that a family had to pay a membership fee and annual dues to join. So how did we get in? Church mice would donate cheese scraps to us we were so tight on money. Here’s how we swung it. Our family could afford to join Lakeview because my brother Bob was hit by a car. Yep, Bob was hit by a car, my parents sued the insurance company of the guilty party, and they used the resulting settlement to pay our “lifetime” membership fee.
How did Bob get hit? I don’t remember.
How badly was he hurt? I couldn’t tell you.
How long was he laid up? I never heard the details.
However, I can tell you that I swam every day of every summer during my childhood thanks to Bob’s accident.
My Dad was on “The Board” at the swim club (whatever that meant). I remember thinking he was special because he was on “The Board.” That meant that we received special privileges. Yep…we got to help prepare the pool and locker rooms for the summer and winter seasons.
If you think that we were scammed into working for free, well…maybe you’re right. But we had great fun doing it. Painting the empty, dry pool from the inside out, then filling the enormous, Olympic-sized pool with water for the first time each season was worth it to be the first ones to swim in the pool before it officially opened. It was fun work that came with great reward because there was something special about being the first at anything while growing up.
Anyway – like I said, the pool opened on Memorial Day every season with a Potluck Party for all of the members and their families. From that day through September 1, our day would start by:
Eating breakfast (usually Cheerios with two teaspoons of sugar and NonFat Dry Milk)
Making our beds and getting dressed.
Finding our swimsuits on the clothesline in the backyard and grabbing a beach towel.
Performing “the ritual.”
What was “the ritual?” “The Ritual” was something you only did as a rite of passage in preparation for the long bicycle ride to Lakeview. You see, Lakeview SwimClub was located by the Hickory Hill area of Ypsilanti – on the other side (that is, the “good side”) of Interstate I-94. For young boys to go swimming, we had to ride our bikes a half mile to what seemed to us to be a supersteel structure we called “The Overpass”. We would then go over The Overpass, and then ride another mile straight down Georgina Avenue, turning left on Jay Street, and another left on Grove Road.
Back to “The Ritual.” It wasn’t that we couldn’t ride our bikes with one hand, and hold our suit and towel with the free hand. Oh no…we were cool. Anyone could ride their bikes with one hand. Even girls could do it. The troubles began when the rider lost control of his towel. Have you ever had a beach towel unravel and get caught in spokes of your bicycle wheel? Let me say that when it happens, it happens quickly. The results can leave you picking gravel out of your knees and palms in a heartbeat. Okay, so even if you are an expert towel holder and bike rider, you still have to deal with the simple fact that you only have two hands and you need them both to pull your bike up the two flights of stairs necessary to go over “The Overpass.”
So what do you do? You perform “The Ritual.” The Folding of the Swimsuit and Towel for Bike Travel.
Fold the towel lengthwise,
Fold your swimsuit so it would lay as flat on the towel as possible,
Place your suit on one end of the towel, and
Roll tightly. I mean tightly!
Tuck (or force) the towel roll between the support bars of your Schwinn. Guys, you know what bars I’m talking about too – the “rupture bars.” These are bars that spanned that sacred area between the handle bars and the bicycle seat. The bars that girls’ bikes didn’t have. The same bars that taught you the absolute meaning of the words “rupture” and “pain.”
I’m sorry, bad memories just took me off course.
Once you have your towel and suit roll tucked into your bike bars, you take your belt off and wrap it around the bars and towel and fasten it by the buckle. Now you are ready to roll. And roll we did. Down Kennedy Street to Tyler, past the Pelletier’s house (Steve Pelletier was always shooting hoops), past George School’s playground and to the long sidewalk that led up to The Overpass.
The sidewalk went down a steep hill, and stopped abruptly at The Overpass’s staircase. Being careful not to ride too fast down the sidewalk to the staircase (remember the word “rupture”?) we would jump off our bikes at the end of the sidewalk, lift the front of our bikes by their handlebars, and carry our bikes up two flights of stairs to the top. The top of The Overpass was like being inside a long, rectangular cage that was wrapped in cyclone fencing. The Overpass stretched high above Interstate I-94, allowing pedestrians to cross safely over the fast moving traffic. I still remember how it would take my breath away to stand above these vehicles traveling at speeds mostly greater than 70 miles per hour. Often we would stop on our way home to shake our butts and shake our fists at the semi-truck drivers to encourage them to blow their big deep horns as they passed by. But we didn’t play in the morning. We were all business. We pushed our bikes across The Overpass and, again, with both hands on our handlebars, we ran down the stairs with our bikes in a controlled fall all the way down, tires bouncing and bike frame bending. Back on our bikes, it was quickly down Georgina, to Jay, to Grove Road, to our favorite summer destination.
Poops and Pops
Dad wasn’t much for close, personal relationships, but he loved having people around him. Mom would say it reminded him of the days when Dad and his brothers would all be home around the dinner table in the family's rowhouse in Astoria, New York. My Dad and his youngest brother Angelo were always the targets of criticism and sarcasm from their older brothers Rocco, Joe, and Michael. However, negative attention was still attention. I always thought that in each of their own peculiar way that they showed their love by relentlessly picking on each other.
It was always fun for me when my brothers, sisters, and parents were home together – all ten of us. As a kid, I especially enjoyed being around the dinner table when Jack was home. Jack always had a wry, sarcastic sense of humor. He seemed invulnerable to Mom's iron will and Dad's staunch, disciplinarian ways that we younger kids experienced in spades.
Jack enjoyed attaching nicknames to everyone – names that would stick for better or for worse. For example, he always called Dad “Pops”. Why? I have no idea, but he could get away with it when the rest of us couldn’t. I do know this though. Since Dad was Pops, it only made sense to Jack that Mom should be called “Poops.” If you knew my Mother, you would understand just how irreverent this moniker was for her.
Anyway, back to sitting around the kitchen table. When I was scolded during mealtime, it was usually to tell me to “sit up straight,” “stop giggling,” “keep my hands to myself,” or “eat what’s in front of you.” Meanwhile, there was Jack sitting in the kitchen chair at the end of the table directly across from me with his knees up to his chin, balancing himself on the back two chair-legs. Mom would say “Jack, don’t do that, you’ll break the chair.” Jack would say something like “But Poops, I’m not hurting anything!” She would then reply with a smile on her face and say “I hate that name!” In this way, he effectively disarmed Mom. He did it all the time. We all knew what he was doing and we learned our lesson well. We all laughed when we heard her new nickname, but didn’t dare repeat it, at least not until we were in our teens. The nametags on all the Christmas gifts that Jack would buy for Mom and Dad would be labeled Poops and Pops respectively.
It was always fun for me when my brothers, sisters, and parents were home together – all ten of us. As a kid, I especially enjoyed being around the dinner table when Jack was home. Jack always had a wry, sarcastic sense of humor. He seemed invulnerable to Mom's iron will and Dad's staunch, disciplinarian ways that we younger kids experienced in spades.
Jack enjoyed attaching nicknames to everyone – names that would stick for better or for worse. For example, he always called Dad “Pops”. Why? I have no idea, but he could get away with it when the rest of us couldn’t. I do know this though. Since Dad was Pops, it only made sense to Jack that Mom should be called “Poops.” If you knew my Mother, you would understand just how irreverent this moniker was for her.
Anyway, back to sitting around the kitchen table. When I was scolded during mealtime, it was usually to tell me to “sit up straight,” “stop giggling,” “keep my hands to myself,” or “eat what’s in front of you.” Meanwhile, there was Jack sitting in the kitchen chair at the end of the table directly across from me with his knees up to his chin, balancing himself on the back two chair-legs. Mom would say “Jack, don’t do that, you’ll break the chair.” Jack would say something like “But Poops, I’m not hurting anything!” She would then reply with a smile on her face and say “I hate that name!” In this way, he effectively disarmed Mom. He did it all the time. We all knew what he was doing and we learned our lesson well. We all laughed when we heard her new nickname, but didn’t dare repeat it, at least not until we were in our teens. The nametags on all the Christmas gifts that Jack would buy for Mom and Dad would be labeled Poops and Pops respectively.
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