I came from a fairly disciplined place in the early sixties to another place that has become increasingly less hostile, less rigid. But even back then discipline always fought hand-to-hand with leniency.
In many ways, it was a simpler time when my parents always believed the nun's word over mine and we were actually encouraged to hang out with priests. Platonically of course, but still unsettling when I think back on it. There was the nuns and priests club, and then there was our club, and sometimes lay persons like us were allowed to enter for brief visits into their club.
Things were not always black and white, of course, and when it came to discipline the lines really became blurred. It was a mixture of the yin and the yang.
The nuns in my Catholic school were the sheriffs of my neighborhood. They were the ATF agents, the mafia goons, the swat team swatting with all their might. The year long, we suffered many slings and arrows, some shaped like crosses. The yard stick was the weapon of choice for the Darth Vader lookalikes, just as the wooden serving spoon was the weapon of choice at home. The only thing that would garner you a little praise at school was a win at one of the frequent spelling bees. I have to admit, I was a champ at these contests. After the glow of each victory wore off though, the nun would go back to calling me slow as molasses in January.
We all waited throughout the school year for the annual school picnic at Bushkill amusement park where nuns let their hair down, what little there was of it, to ride the bumper cars. It was here that my passive aggressiveness turned active as I rammed nun-filled cars with abandon. It was a death race, without the death part, the smell of revenge mixing deliciously with the aroma of cotton candy. Occasionally, we'd see a nun off in the corner with a parent, talking business, but generally they seemed to be enjoying themselves.
I had trouble reconciling the two phases of nun-hood, one a disciplinarian, the other a person just like us, caring, personable, even fun-loving... kind of. One dark, the other light. Admittedly, it's this dichotomy I now try to embody as a parent to varing degrees of success and failure.
Take my dad, for instance. He was a bundle of nerves, I could tell, but he kept it well hidden, in reserve for sporadic outbursts. These were explosive moments that seemed to last forever and were none too fun to be a part of, I can assure you. But looking back, I'm guessing this was his own way of dealing with that same duality: good cop, bad cop in one neat little package.
Yes, there was responsibility, but we were left alone to our own devices quite often. We were allowed to go out for the day and not check in till supper time, taking long walks to the next town, stopping at the pharmacy there to drink the free quinine water. We dawdled about the old factory ruins on the bank of the river. We hung out at the river, which had already swallowed up a few locals. And we walked the train trestle by the canal. All in a day's work, you might say, with no helicoptering parents, at least until we got home and had to answer a few pointed questions.
My feeling was that Rita Millheim had to answer for a lot, even though I didn't hear the expected cries of terror from her house as she tried to atone for her one big mistake. Actually, in retrospect, I'm sure she was treated quite fairly by her parents. But this is how it went down:
Johnny Shugart and I were sitting on the curb next to the fire hydrant in front of Whitey Sodl's corner store eating ice cream as we were wont to do in those hot summer days. Johnny, a polio victim, had a leg with the girth of my arm, and he wore a brace from hip to ankle. He got around pretty good though. He could run to the ice cream truck as though it wasn't going to come around anymore. Me too. As we sat musing about the day's events, which weren't many, we looked up from our cones to see little Rita Millheim-- she was probably five years old then-- come out of the side door to her house and run across the lawn to her dad's Oldsmobile. We watched as she got into the driver's seat, and before we knew it, the car with Rita in it was rolling into the intersection towards us, slowly at first, then quietly picking up speed. It moved silently past us like the shark just missing Sheriff Brody's son. In a standard transmission car like the Oldsmobile it was easy to let it coast without the engine running. We didn't care about the mechanics of all this. We just wanted to get out of the way. Johnny was so shocked that he jerked his whole body backwards, knocking the back of his head on the pavement behind him. There was ice cream all over his shirt and pants. The Olds was veering now, heading down Arch Street, past us, but jumping the curb alongside the store. As we peered around the corner, we saw the car up on the sidewalk and halfway into the wall of Whitey's basement. It crashed through the wall. Just weeks before my dad had built it on one of his moonlighting jobs. And now it was demolished. Worse yet, the car came through the wall, hunting down Helen Sodl, stopping just two feet from the piano on which she was practicing. Where were Rita's parents, I wondered both silently and aloud.
Several years later, as I was preparing (in my own slipshod way then) to embark on a cross-country hitchhiking trip with one hundred dollars in my pocket and a headfull of ideas, my parents and siblings were all too present. My backpack was stuffed, but that didn't impede my mother and older sister from jamming into it various household items, including clothes pins. All that was missing was the fabric softener. It was as though they thought I was going to set up housekeeping out on the prairie somewhere. The trip was filled with many adventures, including sleeping on a cliff on California's Highway 1, lining up my sleeping bag perpendicular to the dropoff so as to not roll off the edge in my sleep.
These days, I see my teenaged son going out the door alone on a regular basis into Philadelphia via mass transit, and my wife and I, we say "Wait. When and how are you coming home? Better yet, we'll come and get you." Your mind races. There he goes, off with little Rita Millheim in the Oldsmobile. It's nuts, like sleeping on the edge of a cliff.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Icarus
Like a scrawny referee wedged between two prize fighters, Catasauqua with its population of around 5,000 stands between the cities of Allentown and Bethlehem. History lesson: About 1910 Catasauqua had the highest per capita income in the United States. This is a far cry from the working class town of my youth. In fifty odd years the place had taken an economic nose-dive. It was like the sled rides we took down the alleys near my home, riding high, only to reach the slushy cross street below.
Catasauqua's own versions of robber barons had put it on the map with money from iron foundries and textile mills. But the gothic mansion of iron magnate Mr. Thomas was by the 1960s an apartment building. Mr Dery had an even greater abode several blocks up the street, adorned with Grecian columns (Ionic, Doric, Corinthian? I can't remember.) It was a Hearst kind of castle. It too was fitted with apartments by the time I had come along.
When the silk industry failed due to the arrival of synthetics, Dery failed too, proving the classic cautionary tale about putting all of your eggs in one basket, even if they are golden. Directly across the street from the mansion, there was a modest clapboard house painted gun metal gray, one that my parents could have afforded. And in this typical working class house the broke Mr. Dery lived out his final days still able to look out across the street at the block-long edifice which he once owned.
In my youth there were certain iconic kids who led the rest of us around like so many grains of metal in an Etch-A-Sketch (a popular toy of that era operated by dragging metal filings around an enclosed screen using dials, which would... oh, hell, never mind.) Jeff was one of those guys who didn't follow: he got followed. He was one of five brothers whose dad managed the local movie theater. Not he nor any of his siblings had decent teeth. But Jeff's were the worst, with a couple of front ones missing and others blackened, only adding to his menacing appearance. He had concurrent cupcake and pinball addictions which he nursed simultaneously at the local malt shop. A couple of years later I saw Jeff get beaten to a bloody mess in a schoolyard skirmish. So much for heroes, or even anti-heroes like Jeff.
We would attend fights religiously like medieval townsfolk watching a beheading. Not much soul searching would happen after one of these events, except the usual sour grapes if your guy lost.
As they say in today's parlance, it should have been a slam-dunk for Doc, the almighty Doc. He was a few years older than our tribe and tall, taller than most guys his own age. Some of us looked up to him, and his pronouncements were welcomed with a certain reverence. I think a few of us, the Struss brothers for instance, saw him as a protector. I guess we overlooked the gentler side of this giant, the one who raised rabbits in his backyard and did chores around the house. What we saw was an overlord. So it wasn't much of a stretch for us to back him one hundred percent in a fight with the smaller, younger Jake, someone from the othere side of town about whom we knew little. We would have put money on Doc if we had any.
So we trooped down the alley behind my house to a row of garages, a neutral territory of sorts where no homeowner would chase us off. (We were accustomed to getting run off of properties, and we were wary of this.) It was there behind the row of garages that we saw our future as Jake pummeled the stomach of the towering Goliath that was Doc. And then we saw with dismay how Jake landed an upper-cut to Doc's face, drawing blood and reducing Doc to tears.
Those were real tears. We couldn't believe it. Then Doc pleaded for Jake to stop which he was reluctant to do. We couldn't look away from this derailed train, and the jumbled wreckage stays with me over time and place. On the way back up the alley afterwards there were the usual sour grapes.
When not dealing with these earthly matters, I looked to the skies. A bunch of us would fly kites in the town's ball field. On that day, I remember Tips was there, as was Jim S., his brother Johnny, etc. The entire cast of five characters eludes me now. We each had our own kite, vying for the title of whose went the highest and farthest. We must have been at it for a good half hour with our necks bent backward, gazing at the air above, before Jim's kite began to falter, then swirl in widening spirals, finally hitting the ground awkwardly on the other side of the field. Shortly thereafter, Tips felt an uncertain tug of his string and knew that the end was near. His kite crashed too.
One by one, kites looped, dipped, then kissed the earth as strings were reeled in and wreckage examined. We stood over a crumpled kite, surveying the damage, murmuring to each other. "It might have been the tail: it was too long." "No, the frame is off kilter." "The bow string could have been tighter." We didn't know, but we were like CSI officials. We were crazy serious.
We now had four kites on the ground, but mine was still aloft. I hadn't had many crowning victories in those years, and flying a kite now seems rather pedestrian, but it was all I had on that afternoon.
With only one kite up there, our minds became one. We all had a stake in this game now. Tips tied the end of his string onto mine, and one by one, each comrade tied the end of his own string onto the previous one until the combined length of string released my kite to an unimaginable height and distance. It became smaller and smaller in the atmosphere above as it became larger and larger in our imaginations.
At times we wondered if the kite had somehow gone into the stratophere, breaking free of the string, but then we'd see the string still arced upward, and with a glint from the sun the kite would show itself once more. It crossed my mind that this might be wrong, that we were defying the laws of science and the laws of our Roman Catholic God at the same time, that this wasn't meant to be.
The takeaway from this as I look back was the sense of teamwork on that day. We were our own NASA crew there in the final stages, each one of us contributing to the whole experience. You don't get many opportunities like this, not then, not now.
The inevitable was finally upon us, however, and reality brought us back down to earth. I think it was Tips who noticed it first. The string, it lagged, it went slack, it was becoming horizontal. The kite, a mere dot, looked miles away, but not straight up now. Then it was gone from sight. It was down; there was no denying it.
It was obviously not in the realm of the ball park anymore. We followed the string, traipsing through town to find the fallen kite. At times the string would go from the ground up over a power line then down again then over a rooftop. It had been run over by cars on it's way, invading people's backyards, decorating their front stoops, until we found the broken and dismembered kite itself in the middle of Bridge Street.
We knelt in reverence to delicately pick it up as though it were a wounded bird. Oh, noble craft that had been to the heavens and back! We paused for the proverbial moment of silence, or do I just remember it this way, all of us standing in a circle before turning to go, the onset of traffic breaking the silence. Our day was done, and we all went home after that. Our heads were filled with a feeling of accomplishment and the promise of even greater things to come.
Yet even such triumph had to come to an end. Why do I tell you all of this? It may be instructive, but I don't know about that. Things fall apart, and they will always fall apart. Things come crashing down. We repeat history with a vengeance. And there will always be Docs and Derys. The mighty are falling all around us to this day: Elliot Spitzer, Anthony Wiener, The News Of The World... In the early sixties, we were no strangers to this same forboding, yet we tried to make the best of things as they were. We were so hopeful, and I don't know why. Maybe it was the kite flyer in all of us.
Catasauqua's own versions of robber barons had put it on the map with money from iron foundries and textile mills. But the gothic mansion of iron magnate Mr. Thomas was by the 1960s an apartment building. Mr Dery had an even greater abode several blocks up the street, adorned with Grecian columns (Ionic, Doric, Corinthian? I can't remember.) It was a Hearst kind of castle. It too was fitted with apartments by the time I had come along.
When the silk industry failed due to the arrival of synthetics, Dery failed too, proving the classic cautionary tale about putting all of your eggs in one basket, even if they are golden. Directly across the street from the mansion, there was a modest clapboard house painted gun metal gray, one that my parents could have afforded. And in this typical working class house the broke Mr. Dery lived out his final days still able to look out across the street at the block-long edifice which he once owned.
In my youth there were certain iconic kids who led the rest of us around like so many grains of metal in an Etch-A-Sketch (a popular toy of that era operated by dragging metal filings around an enclosed screen using dials, which would... oh, hell, never mind.) Jeff was one of those guys who didn't follow: he got followed. He was one of five brothers whose dad managed the local movie theater. Not he nor any of his siblings had decent teeth. But Jeff's were the worst, with a couple of front ones missing and others blackened, only adding to his menacing appearance. He had concurrent cupcake and pinball addictions which he nursed simultaneously at the local malt shop. A couple of years later I saw Jeff get beaten to a bloody mess in a schoolyard skirmish. So much for heroes, or even anti-heroes like Jeff.
We would attend fights religiously like medieval townsfolk watching a beheading. Not much soul searching would happen after one of these events, except the usual sour grapes if your guy lost.
As they say in today's parlance, it should have been a slam-dunk for Doc, the almighty Doc. He was a few years older than our tribe and tall, taller than most guys his own age. Some of us looked up to him, and his pronouncements were welcomed with a certain reverence. I think a few of us, the Struss brothers for instance, saw him as a protector. I guess we overlooked the gentler side of this giant, the one who raised rabbits in his backyard and did chores around the house. What we saw was an overlord. So it wasn't much of a stretch for us to back him one hundred percent in a fight with the smaller, younger Jake, someone from the othere side of town about whom we knew little. We would have put money on Doc if we had any.
So we trooped down the alley behind my house to a row of garages, a neutral territory of sorts where no homeowner would chase us off. (We were accustomed to getting run off of properties, and we were wary of this.) It was there behind the row of garages that we saw our future as Jake pummeled the stomach of the towering Goliath that was Doc. And then we saw with dismay how Jake landed an upper-cut to Doc's face, drawing blood and reducing Doc to tears.
Those were real tears. We couldn't believe it. Then Doc pleaded for Jake to stop which he was reluctant to do. We couldn't look away from this derailed train, and the jumbled wreckage stays with me over time and place. On the way back up the alley afterwards there were the usual sour grapes.
When not dealing with these earthly matters, I looked to the skies. A bunch of us would fly kites in the town's ball field. On that day, I remember Tips was there, as was Jim S., his brother Johnny, etc. The entire cast of five characters eludes me now. We each had our own kite, vying for the title of whose went the highest and farthest. We must have been at it for a good half hour with our necks bent backward, gazing at the air above, before Jim's kite began to falter, then swirl in widening spirals, finally hitting the ground awkwardly on the other side of the field. Shortly thereafter, Tips felt an uncertain tug of his string and knew that the end was near. His kite crashed too.
One by one, kites looped, dipped, then kissed the earth as strings were reeled in and wreckage examined. We stood over a crumpled kite, surveying the damage, murmuring to each other. "It might have been the tail: it was too long." "No, the frame is off kilter." "The bow string could have been tighter." We didn't know, but we were like CSI officials. We were crazy serious.
We now had four kites on the ground, but mine was still aloft. I hadn't had many crowning victories in those years, and flying a kite now seems rather pedestrian, but it was all I had on that afternoon.
With only one kite up there, our minds became one. We all had a stake in this game now. Tips tied the end of his string onto mine, and one by one, each comrade tied the end of his own string onto the previous one until the combined length of string released my kite to an unimaginable height and distance. It became smaller and smaller in the atmosphere above as it became larger and larger in our imaginations.
At times we wondered if the kite had somehow gone into the stratophere, breaking free of the string, but then we'd see the string still arced upward, and with a glint from the sun the kite would show itself once more. It crossed my mind that this might be wrong, that we were defying the laws of science and the laws of our Roman Catholic God at the same time, that this wasn't meant to be.
The takeaway from this as I look back was the sense of teamwork on that day. We were our own NASA crew there in the final stages, each one of us contributing to the whole experience. You don't get many opportunities like this, not then, not now.
The inevitable was finally upon us, however, and reality brought us back down to earth. I think it was Tips who noticed it first. The string, it lagged, it went slack, it was becoming horizontal. The kite, a mere dot, looked miles away, but not straight up now. Then it was gone from sight. It was down; there was no denying it.
It was obviously not in the realm of the ball park anymore. We followed the string, traipsing through town to find the fallen kite. At times the string would go from the ground up over a power line then down again then over a rooftop. It had been run over by cars on it's way, invading people's backyards, decorating their front stoops, until we found the broken and dismembered kite itself in the middle of Bridge Street.
We knelt in reverence to delicately pick it up as though it were a wounded bird. Oh, noble craft that had been to the heavens and back! We paused for the proverbial moment of silence, or do I just remember it this way, all of us standing in a circle before turning to go, the onset of traffic breaking the silence. Our day was done, and we all went home after that. Our heads were filled with a feeling of accomplishment and the promise of even greater things to come.
Yet even such triumph had to come to an end. Why do I tell you all of this? It may be instructive, but I don't know about that. Things fall apart, and they will always fall apart. Things come crashing down. We repeat history with a vengeance. And there will always be Docs and Derys. The mighty are falling all around us to this day: Elliot Spitzer, Anthony Wiener, The News Of The World... In the early sixties, we were no strangers to this same forboding, yet we tried to make the best of things as they were. We were so hopeful, and I don't know why. Maybe it was the kite flyer in all of us.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Names
It was as though we'd all jumped right off the pages of a Damon Runyon story. Because it seemed like everyone around us had a nickmname back then in Catasauqua. From my earliest memory, friends and neighbors were sporting other identities. It was easy enough to hang a "y" on the end of someone's name to give it that G W Bush twang, but we went for bigger stuff. Our sophistication ran to monikers like Bear, Doc, Twiggy (for his ultra thinness), Ham and Eggs (big eater), Lumpy (from the character in Leave It To Beaver?), Jinx, Cookie, and Pooch. There was Jimmy Boy, not just Jimmy, who drowned in the Lehigh River behind his home. He had a brother called Puck, who took a bullet in the stomach. Both bad boys who died of bad kharma. I can't remembr what we called David D., but I do know it was the same nickname his father, a former boxer, had. And then there was Tips, named for his uncle Tips, not for his uncle Skinny. Tips a raconteur of sorts, would never introduce himself by his baptismal name Jerome, or even by the alternate, Jerry.
Even a good number of grown-ups went by other names: Woody and Whitey were owners of grocery stores across the street from one another. Scoby was an itinerant grocer, selling stuff right out of his truck. That was the only name we knew for him. He didn't seem to have a real name at all. On our block, several of the men took on regal sobriquets, including Duke, Governor, and Mayor. There was someone called Dutch, and there was Gyp the jeweler. My dad was hardly ever addressed by anything other than Iggie, short for Ignatius, which I believe he had changed from Ignatz long before. He called my uncle Ed Shpundy. I don't know what that meant.
It was alright for the old people to have their try at it, but us kids were in another league altogether. Two were called Soupy, one because it was a play on his last name of Soupon, the other just for the heck of it. In fact, many names were just for the heck of it, more imaginative than based in reality. Soupy had brothers , Mousy and Buckwheat. I know they weren't baptised that way. A lot of times, you could see where the names came from. Wally was Wowie, Tom was Yom, and Ernie was Scern. That's right, Scern. Woodsy was a play on his real name of Forest. My brother-in-law Larry was the first to come up with that one, and it was quickly adopted by us kids. A rare occurence of solidarity with a grown up when we accepted Larry's entry in the name game. Even when Scern's mom began calling her son Hot Lips, it didn't stick with us kids. Parents weren't usually allowed.
Having two nicknames, neither of them laudatory, could not have done wonders for Scern's, um Ernie's, self esteem. It may have been the faint beginnings of his slow downward slide to the point in high school , all bulked up from weight lifting, he clobbered a Marine over the head with a two-by-four in a barnyard scuffle, killing him. It must have been a year of court appearances until the matter was laid to rest. I didn't follow the trial. My good grade school friend who claimed to enjoy Milk Bone dog biscuits and protected me from bullies fell off the path.
Curiously, I can't recall any nicknames bestowed on girls or women. To paraphrase James Brown, it was a man's world back then, but not all for the better.
As for me, for quite a while I was just Huffy, a kind of shortened form of my last name, Hoffman. In later years I'd acquired other tags, Wolfman and Dustin, but those were other times and other places. Names are curious. It is said that our ability and propensity for naming is one of the attributes that separates humans from animals. In Catasauqua, naming was instinctual. We didn't stop to think of the bullying factor or that it might be anti-Semetic or anti-anything. The darker side, I'm afraid, was commonly glossed over.
Even a good number of grown-ups went by other names: Woody and Whitey were owners of grocery stores across the street from one another. Scoby was an itinerant grocer, selling stuff right out of his truck. That was the only name we knew for him. He didn't seem to have a real name at all. On our block, several of the men took on regal sobriquets, including Duke, Governor, and Mayor. There was someone called Dutch, and there was Gyp the jeweler. My dad was hardly ever addressed by anything other than Iggie, short for Ignatius, which I believe he had changed from Ignatz long before. He called my uncle Ed Shpundy. I don't know what that meant.
It was alright for the old people to have their try at it, but us kids were in another league altogether. Two were called Soupy, one because it was a play on his last name of Soupon, the other just for the heck of it. In fact, many names were just for the heck of it, more imaginative than based in reality. Soupy had brothers , Mousy and Buckwheat. I know they weren't baptised that way. A lot of times, you could see where the names came from. Wally was Wowie, Tom was Yom, and Ernie was Scern. That's right, Scern. Woodsy was a play on his real name of Forest. My brother-in-law Larry was the first to come up with that one, and it was quickly adopted by us kids. A rare occurence of solidarity with a grown up when we accepted Larry's entry in the name game. Even when Scern's mom began calling her son Hot Lips, it didn't stick with us kids. Parents weren't usually allowed.
Having two nicknames, neither of them laudatory, could not have done wonders for Scern's, um Ernie's, self esteem. It may have been the faint beginnings of his slow downward slide to the point in high school , all bulked up from weight lifting, he clobbered a Marine over the head with a two-by-four in a barnyard scuffle, killing him. It must have been a year of court appearances until the matter was laid to rest. I didn't follow the trial. My good grade school friend who claimed to enjoy Milk Bone dog biscuits and protected me from bullies fell off the path.
Curiously, I can't recall any nicknames bestowed on girls or women. To paraphrase James Brown, it was a man's world back then, but not all for the better.
As for me, for quite a while I was just Huffy, a kind of shortened form of my last name, Hoffman. In later years I'd acquired other tags, Wolfman and Dustin, but those were other times and other places. Names are curious. It is said that our ability and propensity for naming is one of the attributes that separates humans from animals. In Catasauqua, naming was instinctual. We didn't stop to think of the bullying factor or that it might be anti-Semetic or anti-anything. The darker side, I'm afraid, was commonly glossed over.
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