(Some people mistakenly
call you a swamp, but don’t
take it personally.)

Somewhere on the Georgia coast…

The spartina in sunlight
stands like a gilded crop
planted by the gods,
the tall grass some
combination of green,
yellow and brown
depending on the
season.

The flat land is laced with
serpentine maze-like channels
of brackish water, rising
and falling with the tide.

This, as it has been since
melting glaciers at the end
of the ice age 12,000 years
ago sculpted barrier islands
of sand, buffeted by receded
ocean waters, behind which an
unfathomable amount of
sediment accumulated,
creating - the salt marsh.


Spring

Spring has arrived.
It is warmer now.
The bugs love it.

Scattered here and there
hugging the edge of the marsh
are ‘hammocks’ - clusters of
pine, cedar, oak, wax myrtle,
marsh elder and cabbage palms -
huddled together as if for protection.

The earth beneath the trees
is littered with pine cones.

Nearby bunched together in
tight clusters are long established
saw palmettos, so named for their
serrated branches.

To the southwest is a lone palm,
much taller than the others.
At sunset it soars out of the
crimson horizon as if silhouetted
in fire.

Schools of fish come and go with
the tides. Their submerged movement
roils the surface of the water,
often azure in color at sunset.

Herons and egrets abound.
Standing statuesque for long minutes,
then slowly moving on legs like stilts,
gracefully hunchbacked,
their long necks extended, then coiled,
their sharp beaks ready.

They have eyes on the side of their head
and can see behind them. When stalking
prey they move their eyes forward,
focusing them like binoculars.

The head cocks when prey is sighted.
A hapless little fish or crustacean.
The strike is lightening quick.
The tail of an eel squirms
before it is quickly swallowed.

All this life, the plants, the animals,
the birds, and the land itself, the
not so ‘terra firma’- is the result
of millions of years of the ocean
rising and falling, the tide constantly
ebbing and flowing, the beach
being formed by pulverized rock
transported by rivers from eroding
inland mountains, and the formation
of the marsh itself by accumulated
silt and other detritus.

As I stand on the edge of the marsh
that extends for miles as far as the
eye can see and beyond, I realize
my presence here is so very short.

The house I live in, despite being on
stilts, will inevitably wash away in
a cataclysmic hurricane. The crumbling
concrete foundation left behind may
last, maybe a hundred years?

I fear my own existence in terms of
cosmic geological marsh time
will not be that much longer
than a sand gnat’s.

I think these thoughts as I swat one
of the little buggers.

On to the next life you go.
I will follow soon enough.

****

Less elegant than
the egrets and blue herons
but also abundant are
clapper rails.

Their appearances leads
some folks to believe
they are related to the
chicken.

(See Audubon’s Clapper Rail Plate 310)

Called “marsh hens” by the
locals these rails seldom
reveal themselves
but they can be heard,
clacking and calling.

They make a big racket when
communicating with each
other or when disturbed.
You can definitely hear them
but don’t often see them.

(Best time to catch a glimpse
of them foraging: not long
after sunrise at low tide.)

The marsh hens mate in spring.

There is a rush of activity as the males
scramble to build nests in the perfect spot,
a mix of grasses, tall and short.

****

The tide goes out and yet again
the oyster beds are revealed,
standing in tight reef-like clusters
scattered in the exposed mud.

Wood storks search for food
in the muck and shallow water,
gangly on long legs
that support a large body,
sweeping their heads
back and forth as if grazing.

They sometimes travel alone,
sometimes in pairs,
sometimes in a group.
They congregate in big pine
trees and linger, sometimes
for hours. They prefer to nest
in more inland cypress swamps.

They are not everyday visitors
and are considered endangered,
thus their appearance prompts
me to grab my binoculars.

Up close, the wood stork is
rather ugly, it’s head more
like a turkey’s than a heron’s.
But in flight, its long legs, neck
and black tipped wings fully
extended, its body perfectly
aerodynamic, it is
spectacular to behold.

Anhingas like to perch
on my neighbor’s dock.
They spread their big
black wings like Dracula’s
cape, but unlike vampires,
they seek the sunlight.

This is not exactly how Audubon
might describe an Anhinga
but they look like a cross between
a cormorant, a loon and maybe a vulture.

Audubon noted that Anhingas
were called “Snake-Birds”
because their long necks
resembled a serpent’s body.
He depicted them in graceful
yet exaggerated courtship.

(See Plate 420)

Then there is the Kingfisher.
It looks like a large demented
woodpecker. Squealing,
clacking and screeching
to claim its territory, it dives for fish,
spinning like a jet fighter. The female
boasts brighter plumage than the
male and they sometime nest
in burrows.

Jays are large birds and raucous.
They don’t like to wait their turn
in the bird bath. Mockingbirds are
another rambunctious - and
vociferous - visitor to the bird
bath. They seem to be
announcing ‘here I am’ to
prospective mates.

****

The old confederate jasmine
growing in our yard
has become a monster,
it’s massive root base
looks like a twisted anaconda
escaped from the Everglades.
It has taken over a good part
of the deck and blankets
a decrepit fence that would
collapse if not for its clinging
vines.

In spring and summer the
jasmine blooms white flowers,
gushing a heady perfume.
It is not native, has nothing to do
with the southern confederacy
and isn’t really even a true jasmine.
But it has found a home
near the marsh where it thrives.

****

The clouds roll in, massive
cumulonimbus thunderheads,
laden with moisture…

The rain falls, at first a few
drops, then it pours,
drenching the swaying
spartina - also called
cordgrass.

It soaks the sea oxeye,
blooming bright yellow flowers.

A prolific marsh inhabitant,
oxeye grows in dense
patches, two or three feet
high stalks with fleshy
blue/gray and green leaves
that crowd the edge
of the water.

The yellow buds
will be hard dark
brown burrs by
summer’s end.

The downpour pummels
the trees, gathering in
rivulets in the exposed
mud.

You can almost hear
the thirsty plants sigh.

Thunder rumbles.
The birds hunker
down, going silent.

The deluge continues
long enough for the
frogs to start singing.

Ecstatic.

The rain also brings out the
box turtles.

Box turtles are not aquatic
but terrestrial. Surprisingly,
they can move rather swiftly.

Not rabbit swift.

But they can crawl across a driveway,
then traverse a back or side yard
in short order. How they survive
where humans have paved
and fenced the land, it’s amazing.

I must try to remember
to look under the car
to make sure a turtle
isn’t loitering there when
I pull out of the driveway.

Meanwhile, in the spring,
the nearby highway that
crosses the marsh is littered
with the shattered carapaces of
female terrapin turtles,
crushed by cars as
they migrate in mass
to mate and nest.

When the rain tapers off
some raccoons venture forth,
enjoying the fresh rainwater
puddles as they forage in
broad daylight.

The sky gradually clears,
as does the mind.
Cleansed, refreshed.

****

Just before sunset
a lone swallow appears.
Is the swallow a scout
looking for bugs?

Does it return to the roost and
alert the other swallows to
scramble if a swarm of insects
is detected?

At twilight, hungry bats appear,
diving and pivoting in pursuit
of their oblivious insect pray.
The insects are invisible to my eye,
but appear innumerable to the
gorging bats.

(Did I mention bats eat bugs?)

The spiders in spring are small.
Then they grow bigger
and bigger. Their webs are
everywhere. In the trees,
the bushes, blocking access to
the garden hoses. Boobytrapping
doorways.

Spring has brought plenty of
bugs for them to eat. By the
end of summer some of these
spiders will be the size of a
small child’s hand.

But they eat the bugs
and the bigger they get
the bigger bugs they eat.

(Did I say they eat the bugs?)

Competing with the spiders
for precious real estate
in the carport are wasps,
mainly mud and paper wasps.
They feed on caterpillars and
aphids and seldom sting
unless provoked. (These
are wild creatures.
Sometimes your mere
presence is provocation
enough.) The wasps
also sometimes find
themselves trapped in a
spider’s web.

(Did I mention they also eat bugs?)

****

Thoreau said: “In wildness is
the preservation of the world.”

Our section of the marsh is
not wilderness, but the marsh
is still a wild place. Not as wild
as it once was. You know that
when you see dolphins taking
advantage of high tide to do
some fish feeding in the marsh
having to dodge people buzzing
about in power boats.

Still, I suspect the marsh will be
here, along with many, if not most,
of the creatures that inhabit it
long after we and our motor boats
are gone.

A few of us humans may still be
around, reverted to hunter-gatherer
status, skulking about,
competing with the birds,
the raptors, the rodents
and raccoons for fish
and crabs and shrimp.

Maybe it will be paradise
again.


Next: Part II - Summer

Read now at galoshes.blog

My interest in reading - and writing - started when my dad, who like I said was not a big fan of television, encouraged me to read books, mostly the classics. Our Lady of Fatima school also had a “book club.” This was basically a school fundraiser but I came up with half dollars to order paperback classics, from Swiss Family Robinson to Huckleberry Finn. Even Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Tarzan of the Apes, complete with an ape/English glossary. The club offered up more modern fare as well, including Howard Fast’s revolutionary war saga April Morning and the classic western Shane. I don’t think the good sisters read many of these books before marketing them to us. When I managed to finish The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1276 pages), often reading it surreptitiously for weeks in my sixth grade classroom, I considered that an achievement of some merit.

My dad knew I was interested in nature and animals and I remember him presenting me with a copy of Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat. He also got me a copy of The Big Sky, A.B. Guthrie Jr.’s depiction of mountain men, and not really a book for kids.

My dad mainly was a voracious reader of non fiction and he kept up with contemporary voices. When I saw him reading Hells Angels by Hunter S. Thompson, I was drawn by its paperback cover featuring a biker sporting the infamous motorcycle gang’s colors, with the distinctive winged death head. When I expressed interest, dad pronounced the book was unsuitable reading for a 13 year old. Of course I knew exactly where he would hide it - in his chest of drawers - so I was able to skulk into my parents’ bedroom and read most of it in quick takes sitting on the edge of their bed.

By now I ran with a gang of guys I knew from school and the scouts and the football team: mainly Tommy Valentine, Brian McGee, Jack McKnight, Nick Variabo and Steve Patton. We would hang out on various street corners, drink soda, smoke cigarettes and look for stuff to do. I had a paper route and was making money, so I could afford to buy myself cheesesteak hoagies and pizza and I had started buying my own clothes, because my parents wouldn’t buy me what I wanted to wear.

I delivered The Bulletin, which then was the dominant paper in the market. The Bulletin was an afternoon paper, except for Sunday, when I had to get up early. The Inquirer, where my dad worked, was a morning paper, which was probably one reason why it survived in the long run and the Bulletin eventually folded.

I got the paper route from my friend Nick, when he got a job making more money as a golf caddy. For awhile I hired my brother Tim, at a buck a week, to help me deliver the route, which included an apartment complex that bordered the other side of the creek, over which I had to haul 60 papers or so in order to get to it.

My brother and I found an unused storage locker in the basement of the apartment building and turned it into our “office” complete with a padlocked door. We furnished it with a discarded easy chair and stored stuff in it, not just newspapers but scavenged comic books and magazines, including the occasional Playboy discarded by one of the swinging single guys who lived in the apartment building. On a cold day we would retreat there to warm up and read, while we rested. On Fridays we counted the collection money and that also was payday for my brother. (To this day he insists I underpaid him, the ingrate.)

The “branch office” where I picked up the papers after school was in a garage that the Bulletin rented from somebody in the neighborhood. The branch was managed by a teenage kid, so there was no adult supervision. The delivery guy was often late in getting the papers to us. We called him Beetle for some reason. He drank and would swear at us as he tossed the bundles off the truck. We took to playing cards while we killed time waiting for Beetle to show up. Usually we played five card poker for nickels and dimes.

It wouldn’t take long before those who rented us their garages tired of having 20 or 30 teenaged boys hanging around for hours seven days a week all the while gambling, doing wheelies on bicycles, swearing, fighting and littering the place with empty soda bottles and Tastykake wrappers. So they would kick us out and ultimately we ended up with just a dirt lot in an alley, with a heavy wood table, and a few trash cans for the snapped wires the bundles came wrapped with and for leftover inserts and other junk.

Beetle was getting later and later with the deliveries, and surlier and surlier. One day it rained, and since we had no protection from the elements, our mood was becoming pretty foul. To pass the time waiting, we gathered up a bunch of old bundle wires and pieced them together into a long metal rope. We fashioned a sturdy hook at one end and attached the other end to several trash cans in the alley. We then camouflaged everything with old newspapers.

Finally Beetle showed up, drunk and nasty. He tossed the newspaper bundles onto the wet ground, then got back into his truck. Before he could pull away, the hook came out and was attached to his back bumper. He gunned the truck and took off down the alley with three or four trash cans bouncing along behind making a terrific din and spilling garbage everywhere. He went a block before he realized what was happening. Then he stopped the truck and got out, shaking his fists at us and screaming. We shouted back that he was an asshole and took off on our bicycles.

We did the occasional good deed, as when the school decided we should write letters to our boys fighting in Vietnam. Names and addresses of soldiers were passed out in class and we dutifully wrote them letters that told them we thought they were doing a great job defending god and country. The letters were mailed off and forgotten when, after several weeks, I received a reply to mine.

The letter was from a PFC A. Lynch, who was assigned to the 580th Sig. (Const). He thanked me for writing to him and enclosed some Vietnamese currency in the envelope. I took the letter and the money to school and showed it off. I think I was the only one in class who ever got a reply. I wrote PFC Lynch another letter but this time there was no answer. For a while I worried that something might have happened to him. Years later I looked for his name among those listed killed in the war and was relieved that I didn’t find it.

It was around this time in the late 1960s when my friend Jack McKnight took me into his bedroom and pulled a small portable record player out from under his bed, saying he had something he wanted me to hear. We were all getting more into music and caught up in the counter culture ideas and yes, fads, that marked the era. Jack pulled out a 45 rpm record and slapped it on the small turntable: Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone.

I had never heard anything like it. For one thing it was long. (More than six minutes.) And it was more like a poem than a song. The lyrics more spoken than sung. It wasn’t a love song either. It had been out for a couple of years but I had never heard it before. Apparently it wasn’t getting played on the AM radio stations I listened to. Up until then I had listened to music on a small transistor radio. I realized I needed to get a record player so I could get records like A Rolling Stone and listen to them over and over if I wanted.

(The Bazaar of All Nations, a prototype shopping mall on Baltimore Pike that we hung out in, had a pretty cool record store. We spent a lot of time browsing there looking at record covers and such - I particularly remember the cross dressing cover to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention album satirizing Sgt. Pepper’s called “We’re Only in it for the Money.” Nothing, not even the Beatles, was sacred to Zappa.)

Of course I wanted to grow my hair longer. I didn’t expect to be allowed to have a mop hanging in my eyes like Brian Jones from the Stones, but I thought something more than a small pompadour should be permitted. It was not. I was sent to the barber with strict orders to “get it all cut.” I was no longer the kid from California with the buzz cut but my hair was not much longer than that. We boys were pretty much all trying to achieve a longer hair style, no longer pasting said pompadour in pomade like a wave rising above our foreheads, but letting it droop naturally toward our eyebrows. This was pretty much met with outrage from the authority figures, including the sisters at school, and barbers were caught in the middle, knowing the parents wanted a shorter cut than the kid sent on his own was requesting. It took years for my dad to relent and stop bugging me about my hair being too long, which after a while, in my late teens, it probably was.

We adolescent suburb dwellers we’re not unaware of the latest fashions hopping across the pond from Carnaby Street and elsewhere in the mod world. I recall trekking with my friend Steve Patton to the local Robert Hall, at the time a well-known mass merchandiser of men’s clothing, so he could purchase a Nehru jacket, then in the height of style as they were worn by the Beatles and hip cats like Sammy Davis Jr. Not everyone could pull off this look, but Patton could, looking about as cool and hip as you could for an eighth grader.

I had made some good friends by now and was settling in so of course it was around this time my dad decided he had enough of Philadelphia and the East Coast, and it was time to get back to his Midwest roots. He managed to land a job in Milwaukee at The Milwaukee Journal. This was not far from Chicago and Peoria and our relatives, so it would bring us all closer together again.

He left to start work at this new job and we were left to tell our friends goodbye and wait for him to find a new rented house and send for us. I told my friends I was moving and they held a surprise going away party for me. They gave me a new radio as a going away gift. I was touched by this and sad to be leaving. It had taken me years to make the good friends I had. I even had picked up some of the local accent (but I still said wah-ter not wu-ter).

Then after a couple weeks word came from the old man in Milwaukee that he was having second thoughts about the new job and the move was off. I had to tell my friends - uhh - I’m not moving after all and I asked if they wanted the radio back. They gave me some guff but didn’t confiscate the radio.

I remember the evening when himself returned. I was seated at the dining room table with my mom and brothers and sister having supper, when I noticed the door from the basement open a crack. The old man was there and when he saw that I had seen him, he put a finger to his lips for me to be quiet. I could tell he had been drinking, and I knew this would not impress my mother, especially after his being gone for weeks. Then he opened up the door and everyone screamed dad’s back!

Dad apparently couldn’t get or didn’t want his job at the Inquirer back, so he ended up taking a job for a newspaper in Pottstown, a much smaller paper than the Inquirer, to which he had to make a pretty long commute, which he hated because he didn’t like to drive.

Eighth grade was pretty much like seventh grade. We were so skilled at subversion now that we could play covert games of poker at our desk without the nuns knowing it.

Apparently wanting to know just how smart or stupid we really were, the school administered a standardized IQ test. When the results came in, we were lectured about not living up to our potential. Then, in what must have seemed like an inspired idea to the nuns, we were seated in class based on our IQ scores (I’m not making this up). They explained that, based on what brains God had given us, this is how we should rank in class. As with the reading test in sixth grade, this test haunted me because it showed I had a high IQ (but not genius level). I was now seated either first or second in the first row based on my IQ (among the boys at least), even though I ranked much lower in the class based on grades.

One highlight: We were CYO league champs in football that year and all of us on the team got red jackets, as Fatima’s uniforms were red. When we hung out on the street corners in these jackets we became known as the red coats. I played first-string tackle, with Nick and Brian also on the line. We were undefeated in eleven games.

We were all growing rapidly and this was becoming especially noticeable among the girls.

I never understood the logic behind the girls’ uniforms. The skirts didn’t do a very good job of hiding anything and despite constant inspection and policing by the nuns, some girls always managed to keep their hemlines above the knee. With the saddle shoes and all, these outfits were, and are, almost fetishistic. Some families simply couldn’t afford to go out and buy new uniforms for their kids when they suddenly spurted an inch or two. By eighth grade it made little sense to do so when the kid would soon graduate anyway. So some of these uniforms got very tight fitting as the year wore on, with every quarter inch of expansion beneath the smock-fitted tops of the girls’ uniforms becoming more and more obvious.

This seemed to greatly perturb the nuns, who could tell which girls were on the verge of serious puberty. These girls seemed to be selected for special attention as to skirt length and so forth. Some girls at 13 years old were much more mature than others - certainly more mature than the boys - and the nuns could tell this as well. It was fascinating to follow the conflict of strong wills between a defiant eighth grade girl, and a nun, especially since the nuns couldn’t use the same methods of discipline so summarily applied to the boys.

Our interest in the opposite sex was increasing. We followed girls around the Bazaar.

One time I decided to purloin some whiskey from an opened bottle that my dad had put in a kitchen cabinet and not yet consumed the rest of. I poured some of it into an empty pipe tobacco can and smuggled it to a friend’s house whose parents were divorced and whose mom worked. It tasted like crap from the tobacco residue and there wasn’t enough for us to get inebriated from. Unfortunately for me me it was around the holidays and my grandmother was in town. She had observed me in the act of stealing the whiskey and reluctantly ratted on me to my parents. I didn’t feel much remorse about deceiving my parents but I did feel bad about creating a dilemma - to tell on me or not - for my grandma because it was obvious the affair upset her.

When I had told my friends that I was moving to New York because my dad had a new job there, the announcement was understandably met with some skepticism. It hadn’t been that long since I was supposed to move to Milwaukee and hadn’t. So there was no going away party this time but this time we were really going. Moving to another state, going to a new school and trying to make new friends.

In fact my dad had been working for the New York Daily News for months now, commuting from Philadelphia to New York City every day. Once he had gotten sick in New York and took the train all the way back to Philly before he was taken to the hospital for an appendicitis. Fortunately, in those days an appendicitis didn’t bankrupt you because you didn’t have health insurance, which we didn’t have as my dad hadn’t been employed long enough at his new job to be covered.

I would stay in touch with my friends in Philly. We wrote letters in those days. (Long distance phone calls were still a luxury.) I would even visit from time to time. The guys did show up on the day of our departure to say farewell and to make sure that I really was leaving this time. I remember them sitting on the curb, watching as we pulled away, driving in dad’s car to what would be our new home – a place called Long Island.

Postscript:

Ever year Fatima held a carnival in the school parking lot with rides and all kinds of chance games and other gambling. One of the most popular booths was the record booth. Philadelphia was a soul music city, but rock also was big and getting bigger among us middle class white kids. The dilemma in 1968 if you won something at the record booth: whether to choose Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles or The Four Tops Greatest Hits.

I think it was just after carnival time that word spread through the neighborhood that Bobby Kennedy, running for the Democratic nomination for President in 1968, would make a campaign stop that evening in the Fatima parking lot/school yard. I recall him as a slight figure in a suit, waiting in the dusky parking lot for people to approach him. I stood at a distance and never did shake his hand. I don’t remember a lot of security around him and he seemed very alone standing there with a few people milling around. A few weeks later he was dead.

Researching online I’ve verified RFK was in Philly around that time but I haven’t found anything about Bobby being in the school parking lot at Fatima that night. Sometimes I wonder if I really did see him, or I just dreamed I did.

This seemed to be the logical place to conclude a memoir about childhood. Thanks for reading! (I will be posting other stuff.)

Read previous installments here on Substack or at galoshes.blog.

GOING STEADY

That summer I had my first “steady” girlfriend. The ritual of going steady involved the purchase of a cheap ring that you gave to the girl to wear. The ring was reusable i.e. when she broke up with you she would give it back to you - hopefully not throw it at you if you were the one to initiate a break up. Then you could give it to your next girlfriend. The routine was some kind of holdover from the fifties, like in the song - “she’s wearing his ring.” The more popular guys ringed several girls during the next couple of years.

A friend of mine from the neighborhood was dating my girlfriend’s friend, as these things seemed to work in pairs. So every day for a few weeks we headed over to where the girls lived, hung out with them, rode them around on the handle bars of our bikes and spent sometime making out someplace where nobody’s parents could see us. One day my girlfriend sent my ring back via messenger with the word that she had a new guy she liked better than me. So that ended that, but I did get the ring back.

THUNDERBIRD

We didn’t get to see a lot of the extended family and taking six people on a vacation was not something we could easily afford and not something my dad even thought of as a good idea if we could. But when a guy my dad worked with was planning a holiday somewhere in the Midwest and offered to take all of us along in his car to Chicago, where my grandmother and uncle still resided, my dad went for it. After all, the price was right - some gas money maybe - and the friend offered to do all the driving. I guess he just wanted company.

This guy had a mid-sixties Ford Thunderbird. Thunderbirds from the 1950s are classic hot cars. The Thunderbird later, like the Corvette, evolved into more of a luxury vehicle than a sports car, but it still was sleek and had a very powerful motor. That Thunderbird could fly. It was like a rocket ship on wheels.

There was only one problem. Thunderbirds were not designed to transport families on long distance drives. There were two bucket seats up front. The driver and dad took those. Somehow mom and us four kids squeezed into the backseat, also designed with a bucket seat configuration and a console, upon which I sat. I’m sure there were no seat belts, at least not more than two for the backseat.

We took off from Philly around sundown. The plan was to drive overnight and get to Chicago by around noon the next day. In order to do this you had to drive fast, which we did. Still, it was a long ride. I wasn’t used to basically being up all night and I remember how eerie the rest stops seemed at 3 am. My dad didn’t like to drive and my mom said he was a nervous wreck the whole time worrying about his whole family being inside a vehicle flying down a dark freeway as his work friend chatted and pressed his pedal to the metal. It turned out being seated on the console, even though it lacked cushioning, was an advantage because I could extend my legs forward between the bucket seats in front, at least a little ways. There was some elbowing and complaining as we were packed in like sardines but my mother was back there too and managed to maintain order. A couple of times when we got too restless the old man stuck his mug between the bucket seats and glowered menacingly. All the while dad’s friend seemed to be enjoying the company, which was good, because I could imagine him pulling over and telling us all to get out.

Sure enough we made it to Chicago and were dropped off at my Uncle Jim’s place. Chez Uncle Jim was a studio apartment where he had moved after falling out with his wife. He worked a night shift as a police officer and was still asleep when we arrived. He let us in, and growling a little like a bear, tried to make the place more welcoming by picking up tossed clothing and such. I remember he had an official police blackjack - a leather sap that contained lead that was used to “subdue” unruly prisoners. He said I could have it and he also was willing to present me with a sawed off shotgun he had confiscated from someone. My dad immediately vetoed my taking possession of the sawed off shotgun but didn’t really notice when I slipped that blackjack into my pocket. (A year or so later he would confiscate it when he spotted it on my person.)

My uncle took us to see my grandmother, who lived in a hotel that served as a nursing home for the elderly residents. His car had a shattered windshield so I asked him what had happened. There was some muttering and my grandmother, seated shotgun, said a swear word in her Irish brogue. Eventually I figured out that Jim’s wife had busted up the windshield with the heel of her shoe in a spasm of anger and frustration directed at my uncle, or at least his car.

Soon mom and all of us except dad were on the Rock Island Railroad heading for Peoria and a visit to grandma there. Lola still lived in the house where for the most part my mom had grown up. She was a widow and lived there alone. It wasn’t as big as I remembered from our visit during winter a couple years earlier but is was comfortable. It was summer now and we chased fireflies at night in the front yard.

There was a zoo nearby and one day I was allowed to go there myself. I couldn’t find the entrance so I just went around a fence and wandered. It turned out I was in an area where I wasn’t supposed to be because there were caged animals there. I don’t remember actually encountering a lion or anything but I thought I heard some growling.

We were supposed to drive back to Philly with my dad’s friend but dad decided he was going to pop for the train as he had been so miserable on the long car drive to get to Chicago. So we rode back to Philadelphia in relative luxury and comfort on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

SEVENTH GRADE

In seventh grade, we had an ancient nun as our teacher. This woman had to be in her eighties, maybe close to ninety. She had some sort of palsy, so her hands shook and her lips trembled. She had seventy students in her class to control, and I almost felt sorry for her. Her title was something that rhymed with mumbles, so in light of her condition, we called her Sister Mumbles, among other names.

Like I said before, many of the kids in this class were veterans who had survived since the first grade and I myself had become pretty recalcitrant. By this point there wasn’t much anyone could do to us to keep us in line. The nuns could slap us, garret the boys with their own neckties, hit them with rulers, pointers and other objects, stick their heads into trash cans, hang them from coat hooks and make them stand outside in the playground/parking lot in all kinds of inclement weather, but we could not be broken. So this was about the time the nuns started saying stuff like, soon you’ll be in high school - Catholic high school of course - and there the priests will teach you a thing or two about good behavior. This would briefly strike a note of terror with us, because we knew the priests didn’t just slap you. They would haul off and wallop you with their fists. But in the short run these threats only caused us to take greater advantage of the nuns while will still had the chance.

One of the nuns did come up with an ingenious method of punishment for the chronic misbehavers. We were out of the improvised church basement classroom now and back in the main building and these classrooms had a skylight that ran near the peak of the roof. This skylight was right above the first row.

When the weather was hot, the sun beat through this skylight and could become quite uncomfortable. There was no air conditioning in these classrooms and when spring rolled around it could get very hot. The nuns took advantage of this kind of weather to torment us, especially we boys, because we had to wear blazers as part of our uniforms. Days of hot weather passed and the temperature became truly ferocious before we would finally be allowed to remove these blazers. I guess the nuns wanted us to experience a little of what they did, having to wear their own suffocating uniform all the time no matter how hot it got.

It was during this weather that the bad apples would all be moved to the first row, beneath the skylight, and they were not allowed to remove their jackets no matter how hot it got. We called this the ‘torture aisle” and it was pretty brutal.

Speaking of how the nuns were outfitted, there was one very advantageous aspect, to we students anyway, in how the habits for our order of holy women were designed (different orders sport different habits). The headgear they wore - properly a called a wimple (seriously) - covered the forehead and included a helmet of stiff white material that straddled their faces. This design effectively functioned like horse blinders, eliminating peripheral vision. So, unless they were looking directly at us, they really couldn’t see us.

This allowed for much unseen nefarious activity in the classroom, and left the nuns dependent on their hearing and also the uncanny sixth sense many of them possessed for detecting any sort of fun or pleasure as it occurred. Because the nuns would very often know that we were misbehaving but didn’t actually see anybody in the act, this led to a lot of threats that if whoever shot that spitball didn’t stand up and admit it or if somebody doesn’t tell me who that person is, then the entire class will stay after school for a week and you won’t get to go to the bathroom or get a drink for the rest of the day and it will be all the more time you spend in purgatory after you die.

Sister Mumbles was so old that her hearing wasn’t good and with the blinders on, she couldn’t see us most of time, especially if she was actually trying to teach us anything and had her back to us when she wrote on the blackboard.

There were days when I was forced to stifle my laughter so often I almost peed in my pants. The kid (Tommy) who sat behind me was a true comedian - completely deadpan. He could carry on a monologue that went on for hours. He made the tall kid (also Tommy) who sat in front of me laugh so much that his face turned deep crimson and he broke out in a sweat. This tendency betrayed him almost every day and when Sister Mumbles scanned the class looking for guilty perpetrators his flushed face stood out like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. So she would call him to the front of the class and slap him a couple of times and he would do his best to look truly remorseful but then his lips would start to quiver and his eyes would bulge and another spasm of uncontrollable mirth would take over and he would bust out laughing and the furious nun would set into him again and we would practically fall out of our seats it was so damn amusing.

At the end of the day it was time to go to the cloak room and fetch our jackets and so forth. The cloak room was a series of hooks on the walls behind a partition with openings at either end. Boys hung their stuff on one side and girls on the other. We were dispatched one row at a time and were to enter one end in orderly fashion and exit the other. The nun stood in the front of the classroom and called out the rows. This situation provided opportunity for an end of day stress release. We would enter this darkened claustrophobic space, which was about three or four feet wide, and once out of sight of the nun, there would be an outbreak of much shoving and pushing. Instead of fetching our coats and exiting promptly, we loitered, creating a backlog of bodies, which would lead to more pushing, shoving, kicking and stifled shouts. Seated at your desk, you could hear the thumping and banging that got louder as more rows were sent back. With 70 kids in the class, it was nothing to have 20 or so packed into the cloakroom at one time, despite the nun’s shouted exhortations from the front of the class to promptly return to your desk. Eventually student lackeys were appointed to stand watch at either end of the cloakroom and call out the names of those misbehaving. These poor kids would stand there as if struck dumb, as coats and books and shoes sailed into sight above the shaking partition wall, with the nun shouting at them for names. Meanwhile, those causing the ruckus inside the cloakroom shook their fists at them, threatening a beating if they ratted.

Alfred E. Neuman

By now I was a big fan of Mad Magazine. One day Sister Mumbles caught me reading a paperback edition - a “Mad book” - during class when my keep it hidden inside a text book technique failed. She confiscated the book. At the end of the day I marched to her desk and requested the return of my property. Shocked at my impertinence, she asked me if my parents approved of me reading such filth. I said they did. She said bring me a note that says you are allowed to read such trash and I will return the book to you, but not until then. With that, satisfied it would be the last she heard of the matter, I was dismissed from her sight.

I had no intention of confessing to my parents that I had been busted reading a Mad book in class, so I had pretty much written it off as a loss. A couple nights later, however, I was at the dinner table with the family and my dad was there, which wasn’t all the time because he worked odd hours at the newspaper. I tried to shut up but eventually heard myself telling my dad that the nuns thought Mad Magazine was bad and that they had taken one from me and would only return it if he wrote to them saying he approved of me reading it. The expression of interest on his face made me immediately nervous. Sure enough, a couple days later he handed me a typed tome - two or three pages long - explaining that he approved of Mad Magazine because it satirized our contemporary culture of crass materialism; it critiqued and exposed the hypocrisies of mass media funded by advertising; it depicted most television shows and Hollywood movies as the trash they were and it was one of the only publications that did so, especially in a way that appealed to young people, who were bombarded with an endless stream of mindless pablum from the tube and being corrupted by salacious pop music and movies and wasn’t this exactly what the church was trying to teach but by different means and the good sisters surely could appreciate such humor and its place in a free society that valued its First Amendment rights.

I wanted to kick myself for opening my big mouth. Now I was gonna have to deliver this to Sister Mumbles and her reaction, I knew, was not going to be the enlightened one it appeared my dad seemed to actually expect. I took the letter to school and showed it to my amazed classmates before class. They watched with great interest as I stepped up to the nun’s desk. She saw me approaching with the letter in hand and her puzzled expression quickly shifted to one of annoyance as she realized what was happening. I quickly returned to my desk and watched as she opened the letter and read it, her jaw dropping in the process. Then, without a word to me or the class, she swept out of the room, carrying the letter, leaving us alone and unsupervised, a very rare event. My mates could barely contain their glee at the prospects for retribution that awaited me for this boner of a maneuver. You’re gonna really get it now Murphy, huh huh huh...

The nun finally returned, a smirk on her face, said nothing to me and started the day’s lessons, leaving me in suspense. I stared at the classroom door for what seemed like hours. Then came the sound of the bony knuckle tapping it. The door was opened and a bony finger curled at me to follow. I could hear the snickers and giggles as I rose and exited.

I followed behind the specter, down the hallway to the nurse’s office. For a moment I thought they must have installed a rack or some electric torture device that had to be administered by medical personnel. Why else would we come here? But we took a seat on the couch there and Mother Superior explained to me in a tone of voice that was only slightly contemptuous that while she did not agree with my father’s evaluation of Mad Magazine, she respected his opinion and, reluctantly, had instructed that my book be returned.

Triumph! I returned to class, a small smile on my face, which surprised and disappointed my classmates, who had no doubt expected me to come back chastened and bleeding.

Coming soon:

PART VI

I become a newspaper boy and other misadventures

Read now at galoshes.blog

Fifth Grade

When school resumed in the fall, I was relieved to find that we had a lay teacher - a person, usually a female, who is not a nun - as our assigned fifth grade teacher. She was a young woman, but her’s was a brief tenure as we were such a difficult class to manage that she soon quit.

An older lady was brought in as a replacement. The woman was a kindly sort, which meant she was a sitting duck for mistreatment at the hands of the more hardcore misbehavers in the class, who were used to having to put up with nuns and who scoffed at the threats from a mere lay teacher.

We were not, however, to escape completely the attentions of the habited ones. A nun named Sister saint something or some such angelic sounding adopted title, was sent in on a regular basis to teach us, ironically, Religion. She was not an old nun, but it was difficult to really gauge the age of nuns below the age of fifty or so.

One thing I do know: She was the meanest, nastiest person I ever knew in my life, or have ever known since.

For some reason she took a particular dislike to me. I don’t know why because I was not one of the misbehavers. In fact, at this point in my career at Our Lady of Fatima, I was still too terrified of her sort to be any kind of a discipline problem. I knew if I got in trouble at school I would be in trouble at home and be punished twice. I don’t know what it was, whether she simply hated young boys or what, but not only was she violent and brutal, she was vindictive and cruel.

One afternoon she gave a test. It was her habit to patrol the aisles looking for any sign of cheating while we trembled in our desks lest she so much as even look at us directly. She passed by my desk, then suddenly, as I watched in horror, she reached down to my test paper and put a big zero on it with her pencil. She thought I had been cheating, which I wasn’t.

I was terrified, because I knew that this was just the beginning. She would surely have some hideous punishment in store for me and sure enough I was not to be let down.

It was her custom, that after administering a test, we would each bring our test paper to her desk. That way she could individually mock and humiliate us in front of the whole class, one at a time.

She called us one by one and it was torture as I waited my turn. When it came, I took my goose egged test in hand and shuffled to her desk. My fear was obvious, but it only seemed to feed her aggression and antipathy toward me. She watched me approach with an expression of utter contempt on her flaccid face. She accused me of cheating and my denial provoked in her a fearsome rage. She reached out and grabbed me by my hair (as I now had grown my own pompadour in order to fit in). She shook my head violently, held on, and yanked my face up against hers. Her cheeks turned bright red and her eyes burned with an expression of anger and disgust that seemed way out of proportion to any transgression a kid my age could have committed. I don’t remember what she said, but she screamed at me with spittle flying until I broke into tears. Yet not even this satisfied her, as she held onto my hair and berated me some more.

Finally, I was released. I returned to my desk, hot tears on my cheeks, completely humiliated and embarrassed to be crying in front of my classmates. I sat down and slowly regained control of myself. Then something strange happened. My emotions gradually shifted from fear and anguish, to numbed anger and also resentment. It was the beginning of a subtle hardening of the heart, a sudden loss of childhood innocence, an innocence that had been ripped away in only a few moments by someone who claimed to represent God and all his great mercy. Even though I had been taught that to hate was a sin, I detested this person, and I resolved that I would never cry like that again no matter what she did to me.

Now I also better understood some of my more alienated and incorrigible peers. Their sullen faces when the nuns screamed at them suddenly seemed like expressions of quiet dignity. Their calm indifference to threats and intimidation reflected a hard earned inner tranquility. Most of them had been in this place since the first grade! They were hard cases by now. Instead of disdain for them, I had respect. From that day on I would become a lot more like them: more defiant, irreverent and a lot more opportunistic. The nuns were now the enemy and we, my classmates and I, were prisoners of war who depended on each other for survival. From then on I started to have a lot more fun too, because I didn’t care any more and I no longer believed what they told me about anything. I was liberated that day, and I have Sister Psycho Saint somebody to thank.

This new attitude would help me survive in the coming weeks. The second lay teacher only lasted a couple of months before she had a nervous breakdown. There was to be no lay teacher replacement this time. Mother Superior herself took over the class. Order was to be restored.

Meanwhile my siblings were facing many of the same challenges I was coping with, including dealing with bullies.

My brother Brendan was tall and big-boned (he eventually topped out at 6’ 4”). But he also was sensitive, with a gentle personality. So we were surprised when he got into a couple of confrontations with other kids.

Bren at this time wore corrective shoes. In fact, all of we kids except myself had worn corrective shoes. My mother said this was basically my fault because her womb had tilted with my birth and had shifted a little more with each birth thereafter and this had caused my brothers’ and sister’s feet to be misaligned.

My sister Ann had “corrective shoes” in California - a pair of white baby shoes with a metal bar attached to the soles - worn at night. I don’t think they make any kid wear anything like this apparatus nowadays. Back then they did, and fearing Ann would somehow fall out of her crib in this contraption, my parents moved my bed into her room. I was to watch over her to make sure she didn’t injure herself. I was the one who ended up risking injury.

My sister’s crib was filled with toys, and, as she was a toddler with no real responsibilities, she could amuse herself to all hours of the night playing with these toys. I was in grade school and had to get up at the crack of dawn in order to make it to class on time, so I wanted to get some sleep, at least when I wasn’t clandestinely listening to my little plastic radio with an earplug that operated by connecting an alligator clip to the metal window sill. No battery or electric plug required.

There was a night light in the bedroom with a little dial that adjusted the brightness of the light, like the phases of the moon. When I would attempt to adjust the night light so my portion of the room was little darker, Ann would cry that it was too dark and she was scared, even though she really wasn’t. Worse yet, she decided that the only thing more fun than playing with her toys in her crib was throwing those toys out of the crib at me in my bed, a short trajectory. Some of these toys were more like weapons than playthings, including sturdy Fisher-Price products made of wood and steel. Her aim was pretty good and the toy would be hurled and land squarely on my body. I would yelp and look up to see my sister’s cherubic face smiling at me over the headboard of her crib. Complaints to my parents garnered no sympathy. Eventually the device was removed and I was sent back to the bedroom I shared with my two brothers. It was like being in a barracks but it was better than being used for target practice.

Brendan’s corrective shoes, which he wore during the day, made him look a little gawky, and apparently some kids decided to harass and make fun of him. This was a mistake. One reportedly was knocked off the sidewalk into a gutter and another tossed into some bushes. We had learned that Brendan, sweet as he was, had a temper.

Speaking of bullies, around this time one hot summer afternoon myself and my brother Tim and a couple of other boys made the several block trek to a large park that seemed a fair distance from the suburban Philly row house neighborhood we lived in, at least in kid distance. There was a creek in this park that was even deeper in spots than the one near our house. The best swimming hole was in an isolated spot under an old railroad trestle. We eagerly removed our sneakers and shirts and still in our shorts waded into the water, which very likely contained DDT and god only knows what other cancer causing contaminants. There certainly were no trout making their home in this water, just minnows and a few snapping turtles that seemed to be able to survive in any type of liquid. We were happily splashing and swimming when several older punk kids, a couple boys and a girl as I recall, appeared and started to harass us. They called us names and made fun of us. They tossed our clothes and shoes into some bushes and threatened to beat us up. They terrorized us a good while and as I noted about the “big kids” who threw rocks at us in California I could very well see these guys in a few short years torching villages in Vietnam. At one point one of the boys threatened to try and force me to perform a sex act on him, something I had never heard of before and couldn’t imagine why one would want such a thing performed on them. Eventually these delinquents grew bored with harassing us and left, but not before telling us to say nothing about our encounter with them or they would seek us out for retribution.

I believed them and kept my mouth shut but one of the younger boys was traumatized enough that he told his parents and they called the cops. The cops apparently easily figured out who the perpetrators were and we victims and our parents were called to a kind of meeting at the police station where we identified them. I don’t think the cops ever charged these punks with anything as they were juveniles.

When I told my dad what the one boy had said he was going to make me do dad grimaced and made a face that suggested he had never heard of such a terrible act before. Years later I realized that he had of course heard of such behavior and I thought he had missed an opportunity to begin cluing me in about such things as I was on the cusp of adolescence and my ignorance made me more, not less, vulnerable to predators. Dad never did get around to telling me about the birds and the bees. I was left to learn about such things from my peers, which didn’t always lead to the most accurate information.

Eventually I discovered, that in addition to the centerfold, there were in fact informative articles and an advice column in Playboy magazine, which I read eagerly when I could get my hands on one.

Ann, meanwhile, was too young to attend school, so she had not yet been exposed to Fatima’s brand of primary education. Maybe it was prolonged exposure to the girl child at home, but my mother claimed that the move from California had adversely affected my sister’s personality. She just wasn’t the sweet young child she had been in Los Angeles. She was edgier and cried more. Well, I thought, this isn’t Southern California now is it? Here, the sun doesn’t shine bright nearly every day. No waves crashing on the shore and all that laid back West Coast stuff. This was the East Coast, richer in history and tradition. Great!

Speaking of sharing the same bedroom with my brothers, in the row house we were tucked into a small chamber with two windows. My sister had a room not much bigger than a large closet. Bedtime was chaos, with all of us procrastinating about brushing our teeth and having to go to the bathroom one more time and my dad downstairs threatening to come upstairs with the belt and wail on us if we didn’t get our asses in bed this instant.

The belt threat was not idle as my dad did use the belt on us from time to time. One time, in California, he had come home from having a quick beer and found me still awake and about after he had specifically told me to be in bed by the time he returned. I was in the bathroom, naked before the sink with the door open and he spotted me as soon as he came through the door. I guess he knew he was going to catch some grief from my mom about being out at the bar or was just generally pissed off at the world, so he took it out on me. Off came the belt and he whipped my naked backside pretty good that night.

My brother Tim always managed to be the last one into bed. He would dash into the bedroom and leap into his bed as if it were a trampoline. One night, I decided that booby trapping Tim’s bed would perhaps dissuade the annoying little brother from further late night displays of aerial ability. I gathered up a collection of hard and sharp-edged objects, building blocks and such, and spread them out beneath his covers. Then I propped myself up in my own twin bed and waited. Sure enough, after shouts of ‘get in bed’ from downstairs, Tim bounded into the room, went airborne, and got his just desserts.

There was a cry of surprise, followed by a pitiful wailing, an outpouring as artificial as it was loud. Tim had figured out years before how to get me into trouble with my parents whenever I got physical with him, which was often enough, as he frequently needed a good thwacking. He had learned, for example, to grab his crotch, fall to the ground and moan: Gavin kicked me in the testicles! Aannnhhhh! This would send my mother into a frenzy as she would go crazy at the notion I had targeted a sex organ and had in the process diminished her prospects for healthy grandchildren.

Tim had quickly surmised I was the culprit who had booby trapped his bed and he launched into an award winning performance, claiming injury and screaming in agony. The commotion sure enough brought the parents charging upstairs and almost got me whipped by the belt.

Brendan probably slept through this whole thing. He was such a sound sleeper that he could fall out of bed, land on the uncarpeted wooden floor, and not wake up. Sometimes he would just stay there and sleep, even when we would shake him and step on him all in an effort to wake him and get him back in the bed.

When Halloween came to this neighborhood, there was an outpouring of trick-or-treaters that made the streets of Calcutta seem deserted by comparison. The logistics of row house trick or treating resulted in a tremendous take of sweets. And unlike California, Philadelphia had a fall season. The leaves turned and the moon came out and it was even a little spooky.

Easter was another big holiday. Many of the neighborhood kids got new dresses and shark skin suits and they spent the day parading around in their expensive new finery.

We didn’t. One year I got a new Navy Blue double-breasted blazer, which was the style at the time, but mostly my parents were perfectly happy to accept used clothes from the neighbors, even though my dad probably made more money than most of these people. These folks would never have accepted hand me downs, but my parents eschewed such false bourgeois pride.

My mother started a tradition of lining us all up on the front lawn in our new used clothes to take an Easter photo. My dad had heard, I imagine from one of the pro-photogs he worked with, that for a photo to come out properly, the sun had to be behind the photographer, preferably at an angle over the shoulder so that it shone directly on the subjects. This meant that we were told to look directly into the sunlight. The result was a series of annual photos that capture us, hands clasped behind our backs, lined up as if condemned before a firing squad and squinting into the camera as if lemon juice had just been injected into our eyeballs.

Our Lady of Fatima had a big beautiful modern church, but even on Sundays we were not spared from the oversight of the good sisters. The Baby Boom years had so taxed the facilities, that Masses were held in the basement of the church to accommodate the overflow from upstairs. As a method of crowd control, it was determined that we students were not to attend Sunday Mass with our parents, but attend church with our classmates at assigned times. So the sixth graders went to 9 a.m mass and sat together and the seventh and eighth graders went to 10 a.m. mass and sat together. Of course the appropriate nuns were on hand. So even on Sundays we had to look at their scowling faces, listen to their threats of recriminations to follow on Monday morning and put up with being dragged about by the ear lobes and other appendages.

It was about this time that altar boys were recruited and a I think about a half dozen of us boys were selected as finalists for the privilege to serve mass and perform other duties with and for the priests at all hours of the day and night. I’m not sure how I was selected to be a finalist - I don’t think it was exemplary piety - but they only took five of us and I would have been the sixth. I wanted to be chosen - the altar boys often escaped class when called to perform some sacred duty - so I was disappointed when I wasn’t among them. I largely got over it when I saw that the chosen often had to show up to serve Mass well before the sun came up in all kinds of bad weather.

As I also mentioned earlier, I attended sixth grade classes in the basement of this church. We had a lay teacher that year, for which I was grateful, because I could hear the nun who taught the other sixth grade class on the other side of the church basement haranguing her charges as only one inspired by a vocation could do.

Our teacher was a younger woman, the sort hired at low salary to teach in Catholic schools: dedicated and conscientious with a sincere desire to relate to the children and leave them better for the experience. At least until she was tossed into a classroom of 60 kids with little or no support from the nuns who in fact must have relished the suffering of these poor women doomed to a life without vocation and who would one day probably end up having a slew of their own sniveling brats as they had chosen to forego the celibacy route.

That fall I went out for the football team, which thrilled my dad as he liked to see me participate in sports. Fatima was part of a CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) league and the sixth grade team was the junior varsity. The problem with being JV at Fatima was you didn’t get very good equipment, because the school saved its money for the varsity team of seventh and eighth graders. Many of us sixth graders didn’t even get kneepads. So within a couple months, after being blocked, tackled and bashed about, I developed water on both my knees. The doctor evaluated me and told my parents I had to quit the team, at least for the duration of this season. It was obvious that this doctor thought football was the worst thing a kid could play. But, he said, if you’re gonna play next year, at least get some knee pads. I played tackle for the next couple of years and in eighth grade we were the champs in our league.

I don’t remember my dad coming to any of my actual games, but I do remember him coming to one or two practices. I remember glancing over to him on the sidelines. When he saw me looking, he energetically ran in place, kicking his knees as high as possible. This is what he thought I should be doing. It was maybe a Notre Dame thing, how they did it on the old gridiron to break a tackle or just show aggressiveness. Later he wrote a column in the Inquirer describing how he had visited his son’s football practice, and while we efficiently ran the plays, we didn’t play with the same intense ferocity that he and his peers had exhibited in their rough and tumble depression-era sandlot games back on the South Side of Chicago. Nevertheless, in eighth grade, with the help of a new young coach from Villanova, Fatima was undefeated for the season.

This taught me an important lesson about sports: It’s way more fun to win.

Mostly I was just bored during school. I was becoming an avid reader, devouring Hardy Boy books and other adolescent fare, including the appropriate classics - Call of the Wild, Treasure Island etc. I had learned how to covertly place a book inside a text book to make it look like I was reading said text when I really was reading something else, such as The Count of Monte Cristo. I actually managed to read all of the unabridged Dumas novel, hundreds of small print pages, in this manner, all the while relating to the count’s seemingly endless incarceration in the infamous island prison before his triumphant escape against overwhelming odds.

All this reading apparently had me primed, because when I took a standardized reading test that year it revealed I had a tenth grade reading ability. Because I didn’t display any exceptional ability in the classroom, I was told to take the test again to verify the results. The results of the second test were the same. This would haunt me.

Now I had drawn attention to myself. The parents were summoned to the school and the Mother Superior conferred with them about my failure to live up to my obvious, quantified, academic ability. I believe it was she who said I had a “lazy brain” and that expression was thrown in my face countless times by my mother during my ensuing academic career and for years after that.

That summer I turned 12 and all I wanted to do was join the Boy Scouts so I could go camping. My parents never went camping. In fact they hardly ever went anywhere and rarely took us anyplace. Once my dad piled us into the old station wagon he used mainly to drive to the railroad station and drove us out to Valley Forge to see the historic battlefield from the Revolutionary War. It rained, so we sat in the car parked near a couple of cannon replicas and ate Colonel Sander’s Kentucky Fried Chicken. Another time we went out for a pizza to a place owned by someone my dad had written about at the Inquirer. The owners felt they needed to repay my dad for whatever it was he had written, so when my dad ordered a pizza with anchovies they put so many of the little salted dead fishes on it that we couldn’t eat it and had to throw it away.

My dad, a liberal Democrat by party affiliation, was convinced that the Boy Scouts were run by a bunch of right wing nuts, closet fascists who liked to parade around in brown shirts. And some were perverts to boot. I didn’t care about any of that and eagerly joined the local troop as soon as I could. I wanted to carve things with knives, shoot rifles, go canoeing, camp and light campfires. I liked nature and the woods and I didn’t really care if dad, the city boy, didn’t. I became a member of the Pioneer Patrol. Our patrol patch featured a frontiersman character in a coon hat.

Sometimes we camped in tents, sometimes we stayed in one of the cabins at Camp Delmont, located in what was to us at the time the wild country someplace north of Philadelphia. I’m pretty sure nobody in our troop got the cooking merit badge. I recall an attempt to make eggs for a camp breakfast using powdered milk or powdered eggs or both. Of course the result was inedible. On weekend camping trips we typically stayed in a large cabin and survived on snacks and candy. Somebody once brought some giant sized gum drops that one night became weaponized. We were supposed to be asleep in our sleeping bags, but instead were engaged in gumdrop warfare. This lobbing of sticky big gum drops back and forth across the cabin went on for a couple of hours despite threats from the scoutmaster to cut our adventure short and transport us home first thing the next morning.

When it came time to go to summer camp - the big event of the scouting year - it was required to bring a parent to sign up. Usually it was the father who showed up, but dad said he wasn’t gonna go down and sign me up because the Boy Scouts was just a crock and he wasn’t going to have any part in enabling my participation in such ridiculousness. In a panic, I told my mother that she would have to do it. My mother, who at this time didn’t even have driver’s license let alone a car, huffed and stamped around the kitchen. Usually she and dad maintained a united front when it came to disciplinary matters and the denial of permission to do something fun. But she knew I really wanted to go to summer camp and if I couldn’t because dad was being an obstinate jerk that I would hold this against him - them - for the rest of my life. So mom said she would do it despite the fact that it would be a major hassle for her to do it and she would be embarrassed likely being the only mother at the sign up meeting. Realizing that mom was aligning with me on this one and that she actually was getting pissed off at his stupid recalcitrance about something so trivial as my desire to be a Boy Scout, the old man finally said awright! He would do it, even though he didn’t want to and let’s go before I change my mind.

We went to the sign-up and my dad hung about on the periphery with his arms folded across his chest and a derisive expression on his mug because he wasn’t one of these yokels excited to see their kid in a pansy scout uniform. But I didn’t care what he thought, just as long as he signed me up, and he did, but he never participated in anything having to do with the Scouts (even though he himself had been a Sea Scout as a kid in Chicago and this was an experience that led him to later join the Coast Guard).

Fortunately for me, my neighbor was the scoutmaster and he or one of the other dads drove me to campouts and other events so I managed to participate and have a good time even though I was once almost struck by lightening and another time was stranded in the middle of a lake when I forgot how to turn the canoe around when going for my canoeing merit badge, which I didn’t get.

I continued to have encounters with reptiles. Once we scouts were doing “conservation” work on a stream, actually just tossing rocks around and building a dam for no apparent reason but to give us something to do. One of the boys turned over a rock and screamed: Snake! It was a beautiful red and copper banded specimen I would later learn was a milk snake. It was retreating down a hole so I reached down quickly and pulled it back out, then swiftly grabbed it behind the head, holding it so it couldn’t bite me, as it was now trying to do. The scoutmaster saw the reptile coiling itself around my arm in constrictor fashion and its gaping jaws and he pretty much freaked out, fearing I was going to be injured by this horrible serpent. But I assured him I knew how to hold the snake and wouldn’t be injured or injure the snake for that matter. I didn’t let the snake go as I probably should have but put it into a box or something.

There happened to a be a naturalist at the camp, a guy who kept a nonvenomous snake in a wooden crate and had a buzzer he buzzed to try and scare us into believing he had a rattlesnake. He wanted my milk snake. I knew I couldn’t bring the snake home so I struck a deal with this guy. After some negotiation I came away with $15 and a box turtle, a reptile the scoutmaster would transport home and my mother would let me keep.

Coming Soon: Part V - We fly to Chicago in a Thunderbird/Alfred E. Neuman

Read now at galoshes.blog

The City of Brotherly Love

Our cross country Odyssey began when we boarded the train at Union Station in Los Angeles. This was the old Santa Fe line, before Amtrak took over, and there was still a bit of romance left to the rails. The train was clean and the dining car was spotless with immaculate white table clothes and silverware. The food was better than good and we eagerly awaited our next visit to the diner throughout the trip.

We passed the time reading, talking or just gazing out the window at the passing scenery of desert, mountains and plains, small towns and large cities. It was a long but pleasant enough 3-day train journey from L.A. to Chicago.

When boredom set in, I wandered off to the men’s bathroom - I believe it was called the men’s lounge - where I seem to recall when you flushed the toilet you could see the tracks below the train racing past and hear the clacking of the wheels on the rails.

There always seemed to be somebody sitting on the couch in the men’s room, an off-duty porter, or traveling salesman type or an old guy just wanting to get away from sitting next to the wife. They read newspapers or wanted to talk, even to a kid.

There were some moments of melancholia. When someone on a front porch would wave to the train, I would wonder who they were and what their lives were like. Or when the train stopped in a little town late a night and luggage was thumped about and voices muttered in the darkness. A peek out the window from our darkened Pullman sleeper would reveal a ghostly abandoned train station, a scary place at 3 or 4 in the morning. And the farther we got from California, the more it sunk in that we had left our lives there behind and who knew what waited for us ahead?

But then the adventure of it all would return when dawn revealed an massive gorge between red buttes or an immense expanse of golden prairie. There would be french toast in the dining car with orange juice that tasted a lot better than the stuff we made at home from the frozen round carton.

When we finally pulled in at Union Station in Chicago we piled out onto the platform, mom and dad yelling at us to settle down! Come back here! Watch your little brother! Watch your little sister while we get the baggage! One of us kids spotted a pile of filthy crusted frosted white stuff piled beside the platform. Snow! We were on top of it in a second, stomping it with our feet and clawing at it with our bare hands in a futile attempt to break it into suitable material for snowballs.

Passersby must have thought we were a demented lot, frolicking ecstatic in grimy slush. But we seldom had seen snow, the last time being when someone in our neighborhood in San Pedro returned from a weekend in Lake Arrowhead and produced a plastic bag full of the melting stuff, which we kids futilely attempted to fashion into snowballs.

Galoshes

After a quick visit with my dad’s mom Mary, a crusty old soul who still spoke with an Irish brogue, mom and we kids were promptly dispatched to Peoria. Dad stayed in Chicago for several days to visit with mom and his brother, my Uncle Jim, and, this remained unstated but understood nonetheless, have a drunk with his old pals.

We got reacquainted with grandma in Peoria and then my mother busied herself with the crucial task of outfitting me, my brothers and my sister for winter, as we had no clothes for that season since it didn’t really exist in Southern California.

We were taken to the store and I was outfitted in a gray jacket with a large zipper that my mother made sure was way too big on me so I could “grow into it.” This coat had a multicolored collar of some scratchy material that insulated my neck like a limp sock. Then she insisted that I try on galoshes, clunky black rubber boots with a slew of buckles and clips, and again she made sure they were too big so I could “grow into them.”

She bought us corduroy pants and flannel shirts and big floppy mittens. The matching of colors was dispensed with given the urgency of the situation with the temperature already frigid and the burden on my mother of having to do all this shopping for four kids with no help from the absent husband.

In California, my usual outfit had consisted of white t-shirt, faded blue jeans and sneakers, so my sense of fashion was understandably limited. In this new winter get-up I felt absolutely smothered by layers of vulcanized outerwear.

But my mother was not yet finished. I had to have suitable head gear. Mom settled on one of those fur and leather deals that Minnesota state troopers wear, with a vertical brim of fur snapped to the forehead and fluffy ear flaps that are strapped overhead when not lowered over the frostbitten lobes.

As I have a large head, there was a limited selection of colors and I ended up with red - a fire-engine red that seemed to make the top of my head glow like a fire hydrant covered with fluorescent paint.

Now that we were ready for the worst that old man winter could serve up, we settled in at grandma’s to wait for the old man to show up to retrieve us so we could resume the journey to the East Coast. I remember watching a lot of television, which was turned on even when other relatives came over to see my mom and her brood. One evening the Ed Sullivan Show was on and my great uncle Homer, a good-natured old coot with rheumy eyes and a cigarette surgically attached to his hand, was ogling some dancing girls on the tube. Homer’s wife Dorothy - my mom’s Aunt Dot - scolded him for his harmless lechery as she cackled and lit a cigarette for herself.

Someone mentioned that maybe those long-haired fairies The Beatles would be on the show again tonight and weren’t they a sight. And wasn’t rock music - if you want to call it music - wasn’t it just dreadful and those outfits they wore and the teenage girls all screaming, and what was the world coming to when men could dress like that and grow their hair long and shake it around like a bunch of - well I won’t say it in front of the children - and they shout into the microphones so that you can’t make out what they’re singing - if you can call that singing - and on Ed Sullivan for kids to see and ...

Suddenly I was all ears. I had listened to a good deal of pop music in California, the Beach Boys and whatever else could be picked up on those new little AM transistor radios that everyone was buying. But I had never heard of The Beatles.

What else had I missed by being on the train for so many days and being stuck shopping in stores with my mother and younger siblings and being completely out of touch with my peers? The image of screaming teenage girls and long-haired English blokes plucking electric guitars, all of it so wild and shocking that it horrified the older generation, this had instant appeal to me. So now I watched the Ed Sullivan Show with renewed interest, eagerly awaiting my first glimpse of The Beatles. But they weren’t on that night and I didn’t hear about them again until I arrived in Philadelphia, where by then they were on every radio station and juke box in the land.

Eventually my dad made his appearance and we returned to Chicago and got back on the train - the Pennsylvania Railroad this time - and our journey resumed. The train - the “Pennsy” they called it - was not as nice as the Santa Fe. It was old, dank and dirty. (I didn’t know it but passenger rail lines in those days were on the brink of bankruptcy as everyone - not us apparently - went everywhere by car instead of train. The bankrupt operators would be conglomerated into what we now call Amtrak.) The landscape visible from the train windows was different now too - more industrial and seemingly cluttered with rusted heaps of stuff, corrugated metal and junk cars and now the sky was overcast a lot of the time and gray. Everything seemed more gray and brown, even the houses and the buildings. The people were starting to sport a pallor as well.

I was getting apprehensive now. Where was the old man taking us?

After a long day and overnight on the train, we pulled into Philadelphia, where winter was now despotically in control and the gloom was pervasive. The snow was dirty and the cars were grungy with crusted road salt. The streets were old and cracked, and there was more trash in the gutters than I had seen in L.A. People didn’t seem very friendly either, in fact they were kind of mean, and they had funny accents and when you spoke to them they thought you were the one with an accent.

When we finally arrived at our rented home, after traveling 3,000 miles to get there, we pulled up in front of a drab brick row house fronted by a frozen lawn of dead brown grass.

I looked at our new home and I looked over at my dad. I didn’t dare express disapproval or start complaining but he could see disappointment in the glum expression on my face. His own face took on a ‘what’s your problem?’ scowl. I turned away.

I wanted to go back to California, to blue albeit smoggy skies and sun baked pastel colored stucco homes and suntanned people and bright shiny clean cars barreling down the ice-free highways. I would go back, eventually.

Eventually I also would make good friends in suburban Philly and nowadays I pretty much jump at a chance to visit the city. I think the people there - though they still have an accent - are great. But back in 1964 I was the new kid in a strange new neighborhood going to a new school where not everybody was welcoming to a kid from a far away place who didn’t dress or talk like them.

Our Lady of Fatima

I had already missed some school due to our cross-country move so I was immediately outfitted in my new winter ensemble and, along with my two brothers, transported to the local Catholic School, Our Lady of Fatima.

We didn’t know it at the time, but we were to be inmates at this institution for the next fours years. Had I understood this fact and its implications on that first day, I would have quickly progressed from being merely apprehensive to a dangerously depressed mental state.

The school facilities were modern enough, but beneath this facade was a place that at times could be every bit as Gothic as the darker parts of the middle ages.

We were introduced to the Mother Superior, a tight-lipped skeleton of a female whose flinty-eyes regarded you with all the warmth of a predatory bird. She and the other nuns were from the Immaculate Heart of Mary, an order regaled in full habits of elaborate blue vestments and stiff white head gear that included side blinders and covered every inch of the saintly skull except for the pale visage. These outfits were accessorized with a huge rosary worn like a belt around the waist, with a great brass crucifix drooping down. We would later learn that this blessed relic, in the pious hands of an enraged member of this most sacred order of holy women, could be brandished as a terrifying weapon.

Mother superior explained to us that we would all enjoy our time at Our Lady of Fatima provided we behaved like good little Catholics and did what we were told, when were told, but if we did not, well, we would have to suffer the consequences. During this speech her bony fingers receded into the long blue sleeves of her habit, her face tilted towards us like a raised hatchet, and my brother Tim looked like he was about to make a break for the door.

I was then separated from my siblings, who were dragged off to their own fates, and Mother Superior herself escorted me to the fourth grade classroom of Sister Bartholomew. I followed behind as she moved through the deserted hallways like a specter floating on air. Her hard black heels seemed to make no sound at all.

A light tapping on a heavy wooden portal with the bony knuckle brought a boy in navy blue tie and blazer to the door. I was instructed to enter. Seated in the classroom were about 60 students, blazer-clad boys in front and girls in blue skirt uniforms assembled in back. These were the peak baby boom years and every class at Fatima had at least this many students, which also required that the place be overseen like a stalag in order to maintain discipline.

All these eyes watched as I shuffled in, the buckles on my new galoshes making a muffled rattling noise, somewhat like leg irons. Mother Superior also entered and addressed a short pudgy-faced nun who stood in front of the classroom.

Sister Bartholomew, this is Gavin Murphy. His family has just moved here from California and he’s joining your class today.

The nun focused quizzical eyes on me through wire-rimmed eyeglasses and said: We’re glad to have you Kevin, aren’t we boys and girls?

The class in unison uttered a perfunctory ‘Yes Sister’ but the sea of malevolent stares sent me a very different message. I stood before them in my oversized gray winter coat and bright red hat, beneath which my hair was buzz cut in what had been the fashion in California. I stared out at the boys and their lacquered pompadours and suddenly my ears felt very large.

Sister Bartholomew instructed me to remove my burden of winter garb and take a seat. I was shown to a wooden desk with black iron legs attached with other desks to split wood rails on the floor. A hard bench attached to the front of the desk behind provided a seat.

I sat down at one of these old desks, complete with empty obsolete inkwell (though we would be required to use fountain pens), and for a moment wondered if I hadn’t been transferred back to Victorian times, not that I knew what Victorian met. No one in the vicinity seemed to acknowledge my presence until a few minutes later, when Sister Bartholomew turned to the board, and someone tossed a folded note on my desk. I stared at it for a moment, then apprehensively opened it. Scrawled on the piece of paper were the words:

Go Home F**got!

I had never heard or seen the f**got word before but I knew it wasn’t good. ( I was to find out that these good Catholic children knew words I had never heard before and wasn’t supposed to utter, certainly not as a child.) There was some malicious giggling and then over the course of the day some whispered threats about what was going to happen to me after school. Ooooh shit, I thought, this is really bad.

When classes finally ended that first day I put on my ridiculously uncool winter clothing ensemble and watched as the other boys wrapped themselves in pea coats and black leather jackets. Some wore pointy shoes that I later learned were known as rat stabbers or fence climbers usually associated disparagingly with a particular ethnic group. These junior greasers snickered at my galoshes and pointed at my hat and generally were having a really good laugh at my great expense. I cursed my parents for exposing me to the world in such ridiculous clothing and for bringing me to this awful place, this miserable school and thrusting me among these malicious little bastards who were now saying stuff like Yo! Nicky! and who pronounced water like wuter.

We were then marched out of the classroom and down the hallway in twos and remained in formation as we crossed the school parking lot, passed the convent and the rectory and descended a hill. We still remained in twos as we walked onto a pedestrian bridge that crossed a creek and then up a hill to the edge of the neighborhood of row houses, most better maintained than our rental and more welcoming, where we finally were allowed to disperse. During this whole forced march the nuns and appointed students policed the line and enforced silence. But this didn’t stop the whispered threats coming my way and when we finally broke ranks I nervously waited, as I had been instructed, for my brothers to join me, then I fled for home, trying to remember the directions my father had given to find the house.

There was no use complaining to my parents about my treatment at the hands of the little Catholic thugs at Fatima. My dad would just say that I needed to defend myself and couldn’t come running home with tail between my legs every time some bully made fun of me or even threatened me. He would recall his own fighting prowess and how he had to be tough when he was a kid back in Chicago.

So the next day was no different. I was the “new kid” and not only was I a new kid, I was a strange new kid from a far away place. That afternoon when school ended, two of the surliest punks in the class were behind me in line, whispering threats and telling me they were going to get me when we got out of line. They kept stepping on the heels of my shoes, as I now refused to wear my galoshes.

By the time we got to the top of the hill and the line dispersed, I was scared and I walked as fast as I could to get away from these guys without actually running. But they followed me and grabbed me from behind. That’s when I lost it.

My dad over the years had provided me with some basic boxing lessons, usually after he had a few beers and decided it was time to spend some quality time with his oldest son who, as a boy, needed pugilistic instruction. So I knew the basics of the jab, the right cross, the stance and some leg work. Also, as I mentioned before, I was such good friends with one of the lads back in San Pedro that we regularly tried to batter one another in order for one of us to maintain social dominance, so I had hit and been hit before.

Basically I’m a reserved, non-violent sort, but once I lose my temper I also lose most of the fear. This was the situation now. I wheeled around, assumed the stance, and sent two jabs into the startled mug of one of my pursuers. After sending him into retreat, I taunted both of them to try and take me. They fled, running away like the cowards they were. I shouted after them that if they messed with me again I was going to beat the crap out of them both.

This defiant display of violent ability was noted by others at the scene and after that, most of the harassment and threats subsided. Of course, the fists would be called on to do their duty again from time to time, but most bullies don’t mess with you when they know you will fight back. It was sad, but true, especially in those days - you had to fight to have peace, even with kids you considered friends. I was still a long way from being accepted and certainly nowhere near being a cool kid. Taking down a couple of bullies had boosted my confidence but my new peers could still sense fear.

This neighborhood was in Darby Township, a near suburb of Philly. The mailing address was Glenolden, but it was actually closer to Secane, where my dad caught the train into the city, about a 15-minute ride.

It was a white largely working-class enclave, mostly Italian and Irish with some Poles and Germans. Later I was informed there was one Jew on the block, but for the most part everyone was Catholic.

It seemed like there were three or four kids packed into every row house in this neighborhood. These houses were maybe 15 or 20 years old when we arrived in 1964. They were two story affairs with a living room, dining room and kitchen on the first floor. Each had three bedrooms on the second floor but only one bathroom. There was a basement and a single-car garage built into the ground floor, opening onto an alley behind the house. There were five or six of these units per row and there were lots of rows on miles of streets. Most residents in the neighborhood took a lot of pride in their modest homes.

Just about no one in this neighborhood sent their kids to the public schools, which were mostly attended by black kids in other neighborhoods. For the first time in my life I became aware of racial segregation. We whites didn’t go to the black neighborhoods and they didn’t come to our neighborhood.

These factors, combined with the demographics of the Baby Boom, explained why the classrooms at Our Lady of Fatima were bursting at the seams. There were literally 90 or 100 kids per class in the lower grades, and 70 or so in the upper grades. If large classes really are a detriment to learning, and I think they are, it’s a wonder myself and my brothers can spell our names, let alone add two and two.

Some classes were held in the basement of the church. I would have the pleasure of attending sixth grade in this basement, where Masses also were held on Sunday to accommodate the overflow from upstairs. The only natural light in this dungeon came through the grates above narrow basement windows, and threw off a silhouette that appropriately resembled prison bars.

All was not gloom and doom though. I was making friends in the neighborhood and as I said before, the “British Invasion” was in full swing and radios and juke boxes were blaring I Wanna Hold Your Hand and other Beatles hits. Then there were the Rolling Stones and the Kinks and for the next few years I would hear all the great Philly-based pop groups of the ‘60s, the Four Seasons and later The Delphonics and many more.

These were turbulent times for the country. One afternoon my mother found my brothers and I in the basement chasing each other around with makeshift batons and thrashing each other. She asked what we were doing.

Playing “riot” we said.

Riot?

Yeah mom, like on the TV.

My mother was appalled. We were informed we were not to play riot. Riot was not a good game. We groaned about not being able to have any fun. But the expression on my mother’s face, both concerned and sad, made me realize that the “civil unrest” we were seeing on the TV was not something to be made a game of. It was something tragic.

Fourth grade progressed and Sister Bartholomew, affectionately known as Bart by we students, was a decent sort for a nun. But it did seem to me that she violated the Commandments once, when a couple of my classmates apparently set fire to a tree adjacent to school grounds. After these classmates were indicted on said charges by the Mother Superior, Bart explained to our class that the students had been caught after passing FBI agents spotted them in the act of arson and photographed the crime. She claimed the photographic evidence was then shown to a shocked Mother Superior and the other good sisters, including Bart herself. As a result, the guilty parties were found out and would be punished as it was God’s will that those FBI agents should be passing by at just the right time to capture their sin on film.

This explanation was more than even the most gullible fourth grader could accept and it was quickly agreed upon by we students that someone had ratted out on the guilty pair and that Bart was trying to protect this party from the ritual kneecapping that would surely take place if the traitor’s identity were to be determined. Therefore it seemed to me that Bart was taking serious liberty with the ninth commandment.

I developed a crush on a girl who lived across the street. One afternoon I was sitting with her on the steps in front of her house. There was a lot of front “stoop” sitting in this neighborhood. When the moment seemed right, I bent over and kissed her on the cheek. I thought I had been very discreet about this, but then I turned and saw that we had been observed through the neighboring screen door by a bratty girl who was a little younger than us. There was no privacy in this neighborhood. Of course she blabbed this event to the other kids, who started singing stuff like Gavin loves so and so...

There were lots of kids to play with. Some of these guys were older than me and at one point they organized a Beatles “show” that we staged in someone’s garage. We constructed electric guitars from sticks and cardboard complete with old chord for guitar strings. We constructed fake amplifiers and other props. A couple of the older guys got to play John and Paul. I was George and I can’t remember who was Ringo, but he beat on pillows for drums. We hooked up a record player and then charged admission to other kids on the block to see us mouth the words to Can’t Buy Me Love and shake our heads and go whooo! Kids actually did pay the nickel or dime or whatever it was that we charged and we had a couple of these reviews, which gave us an excuse to play Beatles records - 45 rpm singles - at loud volume.

We all went to see the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night when it came to The Waverly, a theater that served as the local movie house but was too far, as I recall, to walk to. This was quite a scene, with a line that stretched around the block and then the girls screaming hysterically when we all finally got in to see the flick.

We saw other movies at The Waverly and I can remember a black and white version of Dracula that had Tim so scared he crawled under his seat and refused to look at the screen while I derided him as a scaredy pants. That was, until the scene where they pounded the stake into the vampire’s heart and every time they struck the spike, there was a close-up shot of black blood like thick paint gushing. I even got queasy then.

When fourth grade finally came to an end and summer arrived, I learned to play half-ball and stick ball. Half-ball was a quintessential urban game. You cut a hollow rubber ball in half so when hit the ‘half ball’ didn’t travel too far and when it struck nearby buildings it didn’t do any damage. Using a broom stick for a bat, you stood facing the back of the row house. The ball was pitched to you kind of like a Frisbee is tossed and you whacked it. If it hit the garage door it was a single. The first floor above the garage was a double, the second floor was a triple. A “roofer” was a homer and the rooftops of the row houses were littered with half balls.

That summer there also were stick ball games played almost every day in the street with the kids in the neighborhood choosing up sides, which was always a popularity contest. Disputes during these games were settled in a spirit of fairness and good sportsmanship.

Oh yeah! Well why don’t you try and make me go back to first base?

It got pretty hot during the summer and many families went “down the shore” - the Jersey Shore - for a summer vacation at the beach. We went to Atlantic City for one night one time and my dad swung by Cape May where he had been stationed in the Coast Guard. My brother Brendan at one point disappeared into the crowd on the Boardwalk, causing several long minutes of high anxiety before he was located.

There was no public pool in this neighborhood only a private pool for members only. It wasn’t exclusive really but it cost more money to join than my parents wanted to pay so no pool for us. A couple times a summer they would open it to the public and for 50 cents or something you could swim all day and buy burgers and fries from the concession. It was a big pool swarming with kids and those pool days were a highlight of the summer. I can remember staring forlornly though the fence on a hot day when it was open for members only. Sweating.

The neighborhood was pretty much an urban-setting, but there was a creek, straddled by a narrow strip of woodlands, that ran through a portion of the neighborhood. There were minnows in the creek and the occasional turtle, but for the most part the wildlife consisted of large rats who had followed the human residents from city to suburb. This creek passed beneath the bridge beside the school, and there were trails through the trees that provided solace in nature on the walk home from school.

One summer afternoon I had a nasty encounter with hornets nesting in a tree in these woods. I had been stung before by a hornet, in Washington, when I slammed a door exiting the house and the startled hornet dive bombed me. Now I was older but stupider. I joined a gaggle of kids throwing rocks at the hornets’ nest. I saw the shadow of a big, really pissed off hornet, just before it drilled me on the forehead. I shrieked and ran for home. The next day I woke up and my eyes were slits from the swelling. The other kids saw me and said in their enlightened way: Look at Murph - he’s a (derisive term for Asian)!

The hornet attack took place in summer, so it didn’t result in any time out of class. There were a couple of times when I stayed home sick with mom, who had become addicted to several daytime soap operas on the TV. I would lie incapacitated on the couch as my mom explained to me which doctor was having an affair with which nurse, as if I understood what she was talking about. By the time we got through an afternoon of As the World Turns and Days of Our Lives and whatever else she watched I was ready to go back to school, sick or not.

I spent a fair amount of time wandering beside the creek, attempting to catch minnows and other specimens of wildlife, such as the occasional toad, that managed to survive in the vicinity. My dad was no fisherman and there certainly were no trout in this stream. But in some local tributary I had my first experience with bait and hook. There were crayfish that couldn’t resist the little piece of Wonder Bread attached to a string. The little crustaceans would clutch the bread with a claw and hold on while being pulled from the typically stagnant creek, some refusing to let go and ending up captured.

More elusive were what we called sunfish, smallish fish with spiny fins, likely invasive, that would aggressively steal the balled up bread attached to a small hook. Perhaps my finest moment as a young fisherman took place when I realized I could replace the sodden easily snatched bread with a piece of discarded cigarette filter. The fibrous synthetic plastic basically non-biodegradable filters wouldn’t disintegrate on the hook and, after some molding, they looked to the fish like a piece of easily digested bread. Sure enough, when a frustrated fish attempted to snatch this different kind of “bread” that didn’t simply melt upon contact it ended swallowing the hook. Unsure what to do with the little fish after catching several using this technique, I tossed them back into the water, where the crayfish were more than willing to eat one for lunch (if the fish didn’t eat them).

I discovered an ad in a comic book advertising reptiles for sale by mail and after pestering my mom about ordering a snake or two, she reluctantly agreed to a compromise where I could order only lizards. I eagerly sent off my $1.25 for five anoles and within three weeks the anoles came by US Mail in a recycled metal can filled with some kind of moss and with a remnant of nylon stocking stretched over one end so the poor creatures could breath. The mailman seemed relieved to be handing the package - marked Live Animals - over to me and asked if I was planning to order anything else that was alive. He was even more relieved when I told him my mom wouldn’t let me order any snakes.

I obtained a large fish bowl and turned it into a terrarium for my new pets, complete with sand and plants. I caught flies and small moths in jars, and amused myself to no end watching the lizards stalk, attack and devour the bugs when I dropped them through a hole in the screen that secured the top of their glass cage. I carefully provided the small amount of water the reptiles needed to survive by placing a few drops on the leaves of the plants in the cage. Eventually I constructed a larger terrarium from an old 20-gallon fish tank and expanded my live collection to include small toads that I caught in the yard.

I decided I wanted to be a zoologist when I grew up. My dad encouraged me with assurances that there was little or no opportunity in this field and no money to be made in it even if you could find work. Also, I would have to be good in science, which I wasn’t, and besides, what kind of geek collects lizards and that kind of stuff anyway?

My dad was right about one thing, success in a scientific field required an ability in math and science, two subjects for which I didn’t have a natural affinity and also two subjects that very few of the good sisters at Fatima knew anything about and therefore were not in the position to teach their charges much about either. Public school kids had labs with test tubes and microscopes and such. We had science for 20 minutes or so maybe two or three times a week, when it was likely that Sister so and so would spend more time explaining how Noah took two of every kind of animal onto the ark than she would talking about how amoebas reproduce.

This is not to say that the good sisters failed to impart knowledge. When I later attended public high school, the guidance counselor there seemed very impressed by my transcripts from Fatima. Parochial schools in general had a good reputation for achieving impressive academic results on tight budgets (it helped that nuns basically worked for free). The high school guidance counselor got at little bit carried away and ended up putting me in a math class I really wasn’t prepared for. I knew he was being duped when he noted with approval that I had credits for art class. I flashed back to art class at Fatima. Maybe 15 minutes on a Friday afternoon using a raggedy old booklet featuring paintings of angels and the virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus, with an accompanying lecture from the nun about the godless evil that was modern art.

My dad’s job at the Inquirer seemed to be going well but it wasn’t everything he expected and certainly not everything he had hoped for. Anyway, he took to drinking more. I was getting old enough to be more aware when he was on a binge and if I wasn’t, my mother would let me know.

My mom didn’t get much in the way of adult companionship. She still didn’t drive and so couldn’t get to the store or anywhere which also met that I was dispatched to Wynn’s Market almost every day to fetch milk and other groceries. She learned not to send my brother Tim because he wouldn’t buy what she instructed him to, only what he wanted. Oh, they were out of lettuce mom, they only had marshmallows.

My mom did talk to the other wives in the neighborhood. She was a championship gabber, as verbalizing apparently was the major pastime in her hometown of Peoria. But since my dad never really socialized with anybody anymore, it was difficult for her to make friends. Because I was the oldest, she would sometimes dump on me when stressed out about things, like the old man being on the bottle.

What really bothered me about my dad’s drinking was that it upset my mother. Later in life I realized he had an addiction problem, and he wasn’t the only one in his family who struggled with drinking. At one point I thought that had my mother maybe been a little more tolerant and less of a teetotaler herself, maybe, and this is admittedly a big maybe, dad would have stayed home and had a couple of beers and that would have been it. Instead, he drank in taverns and I think that the longer he lingered at the bar, the more he realized he was in for a dose of the sulks and cold shoulder from my mom, and he would have to drink more to face it, since my mom was capable of giving him the frigid silent treatment for days at a time.

One night after I was already in bed, I heard a commotion downstairs. Soon my mother was shouting for me. I ran down the stairs in my pajamas and saw the old man, still in his work clothes, sprawled semiconscious on the couch. He had been too bombed to drive and one of his drinking cohorts had brought him to the door, deposited him on the couch and I’m sure quickly retreated when he saw the unhappy expression on my mother’s face.

She shouted at me. Look at your father! Just look at him!

My poor old man was so incapacitated he could barely move, but I could tell he knew I was there and he knew what my mother was doing and he was mortified. My mother in turn was so desperate that she was deliberately trying to embarrass him in front of his oldest son in hopes that maybe this would bring him to his senses about his problem.

I just wanted to get the hell out of the room and I retreated back up the stairs, with my mother still making a scene downstairs. This experience was such a bummer for me that I took to praying that my dad wouldn’t drink. I was still pretty religious and thought that God might intervene here. One evening, when my I knew my dad was on a bender, I was on the street avoiding having to go home. I told God that if he would make the old man be sober tonight, I would crawl on my knees the last block to my house. So that’s what I did, I crawled to the house, but when I got inside my mom was tense and my dad was nowhere in sight so I guessed that the Lord hadn’t heard me or seen me on my knees.

Coming Soon: Part IV Sister Sociopath, Scouts and Snakes

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California - early 1960s

My father’s exile to the great woods of the Pacific Northwest ended when he landed a job as a reporter with the Los Angeles Times. I was six and already had started first grade in Tacoma at a Catholic grammar school - Holy Cross - where I wore a green sweater and salt and pepper corduroy pants as a uniform.

My parents had made good friends in Tacoma in the four years or so we lived there. My dad and I had even spent a couple days at one of these friend’s rustic cabin in the wilderness and there were drives in the ‘56 Ford to see Mount Rainier close up. Later my mother would bemoan that perhaps we should have stayed in this beautiful area and at one point I learned my dad had considered going to law school there, leaving me to wonder how things might have been different if dad had become a lawyer.

But we were off to L.A.

Our first rental abode was, I believe, somewhere in North Hollywood but we quickly moved from there to Van Nuys. We shared a duplex with a single fellow who took to lizard-napping the “horned toads” I collected in a sand-filled box on our shared front porch. Horned toads, or horned lizards, have wide flat torsos and stubby tails covered with small spikes and heads wreathed with something resembling a crown of thorns. They were abundant in the neighborhood and I usually had two or three at a time residing in my box as they were pretty easy to capture, burying themselves in sand to stay warm, with their horned heads sticking out.

Every night as the temperature fell the lizards buried themselves in the sand in the box, leaving only their pin prick nasal passages uncovered so they could breath. My ritual was to get up in the morning before school - I went to public school now - and run my hand through the sand to find them. On some mornings one would be missing and I would see our neighbor, Gil I think his name was, standing nearby smoking a cigarette with a mischievous glint in his eye.

Okay Gil, let me have him back. Gil would deny possession for several minutes then produce the lizard from his shirt pocket or some such hiding place.

California was wondrous to me because of the abundance of reptiles - from legless lizards to king snakes. I also liked another thing about Southern California - built-in swimming pools.

At one point I made a friend who had a pool in his backyard and he invited me over for swims. I remember his dad was usually around and he was kind of strange. Whenever I was treading water in the pool and breathing hard in the process, the father would say to me - You’re not peeing in the pool are you? I would assure him I wasn’t.

One time I was invited to spend the afternoon swimming and so forth and when we all were done with the pool we went inside the house to take showers. My young friend and I were sharing the stand-up shower stall when the father - naked like us - hopped in. He was rather rotund and we were all three crowded into the shower stall and I remember wondering why we all had to take a shower at the same time. At some point mention was made of my genitalia, whether a compliment or a criticism I can’t recall.

At the time I didn’t think much about this and I never mentioned anything to my parents, but I had encountered my first pervert.

I liked being outside in the fresh air hunting critters and scavenging about and hated it when I had to stay inside for too long, so I remember when we all three kids had the dreaded chicken pox at the same time.

The apartment became an infirmary as we were all bedded and mom did her best Florence Nightingale with the wet towels for our fevers and all. Once the initial fevers broke, our close proximity in adjacent beds provoked an outpouring of brotherly love, at first verbal, and then gradually escalating to exchanged projectiles - toys, books, cups, shoes and so forth. A day or two of this and my mother decided we were well enough to be discharged.

I took the bus to school. I was only about 7 but had already attended three or four different schools. I was sociable enough, but sometimes shy and even withdrawn. One day the bus driver passed up my stop after school. I just sat in silence until all the other kids had been dropped off and the bus driver turned around and noticed me still sitting there. She drove back to my stop, where by now my mother was waiting a little anxiously. The bus driver opened the door and told my mother I was so quiet that she hadn’t noticed she had missed my stop. If my mother thought this was odd she didn’t say anything.

California was a car-oriented society so my dad had to occasionally pile us kids into the backseat and take us someplace, like the doctor’s office (where it seemed we spent innumerable hours reading Highlights Magazine while waiting to be treated). Having been both a cop and a reporter, he was petrified by the notion we could all be injured in a car accident, so he decided to have seatbelts installed in the backseat. This was before seatbelts were required in cars, so he was way ahead of his time in this regard. So we three boys were now strapped into the backseat (dad even made my mom sit in the back with us sometimes). Naturally we would sometimes get rambunctious. My dad would yell at us from the front seat and, when that didn’t work, he would reach over the back seat with his right arm and swat anything he came into contact with, usually our heads. One day I shut the car door on brother Tim’s finger and all hell broke loose as neighbors scrambled for crowbars to pry it open. Fortunately nothing serious happened to Tim’s finger, and all I got from my dad as punishment was a verbal lashing and a quick swat on the the head. Sometimes dad used his belt.

Another place my dad took us to was Disneyland but that was only after my mom found out he got free passes at work. He hadn’t mentioned this little perk to her because packing all the family in the car and going all the way down the freeway to Anaheim and mingling with the masses at a giant amusement park was not his idea of fun. But mom made him take us and I loved it. I went on the Submarine ride twice. I can still remember Frontierland and the burning cabin and the dead pioneer mannequin with a flaming arrow in his chest from an Indian attack.

I also remember a trip to the beach that didn’t end well. We were packing up the car to leave when dad put a towel and his wallet on top of the car. I think he had had his fill of family fun for the day and was anxious to get out of there, so we took off down the road. In about ten or so minutes dad realized he had left his wallet on top of the car, where it no longer was. There was some swearing as we turned around and went back to try and find dad’s wallet which we didn’t, so there was more swearing.

Around this time my grandmother from Peoria began making annual Christmas pilgrimages to see her only daughter, my mom, and her only grandchildren. Once we left Chicago and Illinois we seldom got back there although I do recall that while we still lived in Washington, my grandfather in Peoria died. John Trager had come back from World War I in France with a Croix de Guerre and been awarded a Distinguished Service Cross and Purple Heart. He’d been gassed and that didn’t do much for his health.

My brother Tim and I accompanied my mother on the sad flight back home for the funeral. It was a prop plane and I remember that the engine, visible from my window seat, showered sparks throughout the night flight. Mom, is the plane going to catch on fire from the sparks? No, honey. Are you sure mom? Yes dear. It was a long flight on a prop plane from Seattle to Chicago in those days.

My grandmother, Lola Trager, was a prototypical grandma. Not too tall and bespectacled with gray hair and moist eyes. She was the only relative we ever saw with any regularity. She usually paid us a visit during the Christmas holidays. My dad’s mom had visited us in the Pacific Northwest one time and the visit didn’t go very well as she was critical of my mom’s parenting skills. She could be sharp tongued and also liked to take a drink or two and that would bring out more of her challenging personality. I loved grandma Lola all the more because when she came she brought lots of Christmas presents. My mother didn’t drive in those days and my father hated shopping malls and the like, so my mom did a lot of catalog shopping, especially from Sears. It got to the point that I thought Santa made his rounds in a brown UPS truck instead of a sleigh. Those trucks would arrive at our place and the driver would deposit large boxes, which my mother would “hide” in various closets, telling us not to touch or look at those boxes.

Right mom.

Unfortunately, my mother also did a lot of our clothes shopping by catalog. This meant that when other kids had cool brand sneakers like Keds or Converse we had Jeepers, the Sears brand, which were not cool at all. They were so uncool that we would immediately tear off the Jeepers label as soon as we pulled them out of the box.

The real problem with this catalog clothes shopping was my mother would have to guess our sizes. She was pretty good at this but, there were times when I had shoes too big or too small and the like. In fact, it wasn’t until I was a teenager and began buying clothes and stuff for myself that I had my foot measured in a shoe store.

My grandmother would stay for close to a month and I know that this sometimes cramped my dad’s style. My mother, raised Protestant and converted to Catholicism when she married my dad, was a teetotaler. My father, on the other hand, was a drinker, who struggled with a propensity to go off on the frequent binge. He didn’t know how to simply have a glass or two of wine with dinner. In fact, he didn’t drink wine. He had learned to drink in taverns in Chicago, where you had beer with your whiskey or whiskey with your beer.

Actually my father was pretty sober during our years in California. He had to drive to work and back and he was trying to make a success of his career. He had blown jobs before because of booze and now he had real responsibilities, including three kids, with a fourth in the wings. In a fit of middle class propriety he even decided to buy a house.

Dad’s family had always lived in rented quarters, moving frequently as his father, an Irish immigrant, sometimes failed to pay the landlord, preferring to bet the ponies instead. I don’t know that this background really had anything to do with the radical decision to make such a huge investment as buying a house, but apparently someone my dad worked with convinced him that purchasing a brand new tract home in San Pedro would be a good investment, as this person had just done the same.

So dad, a Vet, took out a “VA mortgage” for pretty much the whole cost - maybe about $15,000 - a sum that must have seemed staggering to him at the time - and bought a green stucco four-bedroom house on a cul-de-sac. (Current Zillow valuation: $1,004,400.) We moved into the neighborhood, which was being built on former dairyland and such. These were homes for World War II vets and their burgeoning families.

I quickly made new friends. There was a boy about my age and his brother and sister. There was another boy and his sister. There was Greg, whose dad was a construction worker. They had a built-in pool in the backyard. Greg’s mom took he and I to see Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando when it came to the movie theater. That may have been the first time I ever “went to the movies.” The critics didn’t think much of Brando’s Mr. Christian but it was a three hour color spectacle that blew my young mind as I only saw movies in black and white on TV. I still think it’s a great flick.

We also went to see Bye Bye Birdie. Ann Margaret, with flaming red hair, swooning into the camera while lustily singing the title song, made a strong impression on me. The rest of the movie not so much.

We brats ranged across the landscape, a plague of scruffy young bipeds, rummaging through the homes under construction after the workers had left for the day. These were vast tracts of houses in various phases of completion, acres of framed two by fours and plywood and tar paper and stucco rising on the seared plains above San Pedro. We pilfered wood and material for forts and go carts. Even as a child I was amazed at the piles of empty beer cans scattered about the construction site by the workers. How did these guys get anything built? In those days in California, if you said your dad was a construction worker it was like announcing he was a doctor or lawyer, as they were making so much money with the boom in construction.

There was a big dairy farm, not yet subsumed by the tsunami of residential development. It was easy to slip under the barbed wire fence that surrounded the dairy and spend an afternoon stampeding the Holsteins. There was a small stream that ran through the dairy pasture, brimming with tree frogs and tadpoles, which we hauled home by the bucketful. After several days of storage in the garage, the aroma of brewed amphibian would permeate the residence and provoke edicts from my mother that I was never to bring anything alive home again, not frogs or snakes or lizards.

Right mom.

I once brought a three-foot snake home in an egg carton. I had captured the snake - I have no idea what kind it was - by sitting on it. My mother was terrified of snakes and ordered me to get rid of it immediately. Aaaawwww mom!

Near the stream was a field that contained a mysterious collection of rotting gray Navy beach landing craft, from which we extracted small engines and gauges and other perfectly useless hardware. This stuff was piled in the garage, along with pilfered wood, nails and other junk, until the cache became large enough that it finally drew the attention of the old man when he pulled the car out in the morning. The order was issued. Get rid of all this crap!

Aw Dad! I need this stuff!

                                                         Alfred

The Harbor Freeway was only a few years old and one afternoon, sitting in the back of a neighbor’s station wagon screaming down the freeway, I lost Alfred. Alfred was my favorite pet lizard, a small skink I had captured who was now so tame he would stay in my shirt pocket for hours at a time. Sometimes I snuck him inside the house to watch TV. My neighbor had drafted me to help him and his son, a friend of mine in the neighborhood, transport some large potted plants somewhere. We were to sit in the back of the station wagon and hold the plants so they would not fly out the back of the station wagon because, for some reason I can’t recall, the tailgate was to be left open.

We were carrying out this task, blasting down the freeway, and I remember thinking this was a little crazy as I could see the blacktop falling away at great speed behind the open tailgate of the car only three feet or so from where I braced myself against the precious potted plant. Just then Alfred fell out of my shirt pocket and landed on the metal floor of the station wagon, just out of my reach. Several moments of high drama ensued as my friend and I watched Alfred frantically churn his little legs in a futile effort to resist the draft pulling him across the slippery metal floor toward the open tailgate. “Come on Alfred,” I shouted. I didn’t dare move to help Alfred because I was sure that if I let go of the potted plant I would be hurled out the back of the vehicle myself. I knew there was no hope that a shouted appeal to the adult at the wheel would result in any emergency maneuvering in freeway traffic in order to save the hapless soul of a small lizard. The heart-wrenching sight of Alfred gradually sliding backwards to oblivion ended when his tiny body was sucked from the vehicle at high velocity to an almost certain death. For days after I berated myself at being so stupid as to bring Alfred on such a dangerous mission.

My parents were not as social in California as they were in Washington. My father was not the type to barbecue with neighbors on the weekend or coach Little League or anything like that. And I think he was trying to avoid social situations that would involve alcoholic beverages. My mother, having married my dad at age 29 and having me, her first born, at 30, was older than many of the other wives in the neighborhood. But they must have gone out a couple of times because they hired a babysitter to watch us.

I fell in love with this babysitter. She was a teenage California lovely named Cathy. She had a woman’s curves and a friendly personality that made her smile a beacon to which I was drawn like a bug to a back porch light. She thought it was cute when one day, after some wandering and ringing of doorbells, I succeeded in locating her house in the neighborhood. She answered my knock, smiled, and invited me inside, where we sat on a couch in her living room and read coffee table books about nature, how ant colonies worked and such. I liked nature and I was infatuated with her. Just sitting on the couch cuddled up to her blossoming female form was an early almost erotic experience I’ve always remembered. I visited her a couple more times and she was very nice to me each time. Years later, when I was 18 and hitchhiking around California, I returned to the neighborhood and again found her house, where I stood in front and waited to see if I could catch a glimpse of her. Yes, this was weird behavior. I was no longer a young boy but a long-haired hippie and it was a wonder I wasn’t arrested as a suspicious person guilty of loitering or worse.

The public school I attended in San Pedro was located around the corner from my house. It was a brand new school and I was able to ride my skateboard there and back. I remember once being sent to the principal’s office after I leapt from the top of the monkey bars, a forbidden act, to the rubber-matted ground. I liked this school and my friends from the neighborhood all went there.

So I wasn’t too thrilled when my dad finally got us enrolled in the local Catholic school, which was a fairly long car drive from where we lived, or so it seemed to me at the time. It had taken some effort on the old man’s part to get us into this school. He had to teach weekend confraternity classes to public high schoolers in the parish and pay some other bribes, but he finally got us in. Meanwhile, my brothers and I had been required to attend weekly confraternity classes (formally Confraternity of the Christian Doctrine) held in a garage in the neighborhood, where we were given Catechism lessons.

My First Communion happened to coincide with these garage classes, where I was instructed in how to partake in the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist for the first time, how to ingest the “host” - which was the body of Jesus - properly with my outstretched tongue and so forth. We rehearsed our parts in the procession to the altar, when to kneel, stand, walk etc. When the day came I was instructed to appear Saturday morning at the church where we confraternity Catholic kids would take Communion as group. I relayed this information to my parents and my dad - in typical dad fashion thinking I’m a knucklehead - said I must be wrong, that I meant Sunday not Saturday. I repeated: Saturday. So of course we went Sunday and - I had been right. I had missed the whole rehearsed ritual. I asked my dad: So what now?

“Well,” he grumbled, “just go ahead up there with everybody else.”

Of course there was no bus service to the Catholic school, Holy Trinity I think it was, so my dad made an arrangement with a local woman who had two daughters in the school that he would drive us all in the morning on his way to work if she would carpool us back in the afternoon. I hated this arrangement because the woman’s two daughters were somewhat insufferable and worse, she would never just pick us and bring us home. She always had a bunch of errands to run on the way home and would drag us all along with her. This routine seriously diminished my after school play time. In those days, adults thought nothing of leaving their children alone in parked cars for extended periods of time, and we would sit in the parking lot for what seemed like hours while this woman rummaged through Sav-on or the supermarket or god-knows where.

The school itself was decent enough. The big excitement was waiting for the nuns to emerge from the convent before school in hopes you would be selected to carry their stuff - books, whips, handcuffs and all their essential teaching gear. There was a gate at the entrance to the convent where the biggest brown-noses among us would jostle for position as you were not actually allowed to set foot on the sacred ground of the nunnery itself. When a nun emerged there was pushing and shoving for position in order to get first grab at the stuff in her arms. I quickly tired of this competition and, in fact, took to attending mass before school almost every day. It was quiet in the church with only scattered murmuring of prayers at that hour and I felt devout and my regular attendance impressed the old man to no end when he dropped me off in the morning and I humbly entered the holy sanctuary. This daily mass habit ended when I discovered the before school kickball game, which was a lot more fun than sitting in church with the old adult regulars mumbling responses to the priest. I think I even convinced my parents to get me special kickball shoes.

As I didn’t get to see many movies in color I loved it when we students were gathered one day in the darkened cafeteria and treated to a screening of Brigadoon, the musical with Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. I’m not sure why that movie was selected but I felt swept up in the whole fantasy, silly kilt costumes and all.

                                                              JFK

I was in fourth grade at this school when I heard the news about John Kennedy’s assassination. We were in class and suddenly the public address system came on, with no word of explanation from the usually sonorous voice of the holy mother superior as to what it was we were hearing. It was a radio broadcast and the announcer repeated several times in shocked tones that the President had been shot in Dallas and had been taken by motorcade to the hospital and now there were reports from priests emerging from the hospital room that John Kennedy was dead. This went on for several more minutes and then there was an official confirmation that the president was dead. At first there was only stunned silence in the classroom and then the nun said it was okay to cry if we wanted to cry. Some of the kids, having received permission, wept. I sat, stunned, sad and numb as I tried to process the news, but I didn’t cry.

                                           Smoking lesson

One long evening when I was about 8, I sat alone on the curb in front of the house when I noticed a cigarette butt in the gutter near my feet. I picked it up and put it to my lips, pretending I was smoking. I didn’t know that my dad was seated nearby on the small retaining wall that bordered our driveway, actually smoking his own cigarette.

He noticed what I was doing and called out, Hey Gav, you wanna smoke a real cigarette? Yeah, I shouted. I dropped the nasty butt, jumped to my feet and ran to my father. Dad held out his pack of Pall Mall or some other brand of unfiltered coffin nails and I grabbed one.

OK, dad said, this is how you smoke it. After it’s lit, you take a long puff and inhale the smoke deep into your lungs and then you hold it there, like this. He took a long drag, swallowed it all, held it, and then smoothly exhaled.

Got it?

Yeah, Yeah.

He lit a cigarette and handed it to me and I did just what he said, inhaling a large quantity of smoke into my virgin lungs. Within a couple of seconds my throat was on fire and my chest felt like it was going to explode. I heaved the smoke from my lungs, gasped for air and ran for the house, leaving the old man doubled over in laughter.

I ran past my startled mother and into the bathroom, where I swallowed about ten glasses of water trying to douse the burning in my throat.

It was years before I ever put one of those damn things to my lips again.

We continued to hunt lizards and scavenge and build forts and generally we were safe and secure except for the threat sometimes posed by the “big kids.” These were kids in their early teens with nothing better to do than to pick on us younger kids.

Sneak rock attacks were their most frequent tactic as they were cowardly yellowbellies and we were fast runners who could get away from them if given a good head start. One time I remember being pursued by a band of these adolescent misanthropes. They were throwing rocks and a bunch of us were running to get away. My brother Tim was ahead of me, as he could run like a scared jack rabbit. Tim’s sandy blonde hair was cut short so I saw clearly when suddenly a red gash opened on the side of his head. The bastards had hit him with a rock! His head was bleeding and he was crying and I don’t remember exactly how I reacted but I vaguely recall losing my fear and halting to return fire.

Another time these morons surrounded us in a fort we had built and systematically destroyed it hurling large rocks while we cowered inside. People talk about kids being sick in the head nowadays. These guys - actually there were girls too - were true sadists and my only consolation is I’m sure some of them were sent to Vietnam. They were the prime age for duty there and likely participated in the massacre at My Lai if given the chance.

                               California Here We Go

The biggest family event that took place in San Pedro was the birth of my sister Ann. After three boys, I’m sure my parents were happy to have a little girl, even though I doubt it was a “planned” pregnancy. Ann was a little doll, with a sweet personality that in short order would be tested by a cross-country move.

I sometimes imagine my dad around this time, asleep in bed, when his eyes suddenly bolt open and he stares at the ceiling, thinking: What have I done? Dad was a good Catholic (he had been a seminary student after all) and tried to abide by the church’s restrictions on birth control. The result: four kids and a stay at home wife to support. He was responsible for the whole dog and pony show and it was a lot of pressure. I’m sure the situation led to more than one or two benders. My mom told me years later that after the fourth child a priest told dad he could now use birth control because “he’d done his part.” All this baggage didn’t stop dad from pursuing his career. He still was willing to take the whole three-ring circus on the road.

You could say the early 1960s was a golden age for California. With its spectacular natural beauty and perfect climate it was as close to paradise as you could get in mid-century America. There were other beautiful places in the country but they didn’t have all the amenities that California had: the beaches, the mountains, the desert, Redwoods, Yosemite. California also was a model for the country about what progress could look like. Its state university systems and schools were such. It was known for good governance. It was less corrupt. An idealistic place where anyone could make a success of themselves.

As I said, I had made several good friends in San Pedro, one of whom was such a good friend that we had regular bouts of fisticuffs, as true a sign of friendship as can be had between two young boys. So, I was apprehensive when rumors surfaced that a move might be in the works. It was 1964 and I was in fourth grade when my dad formally announced we were moving from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. He had a new job at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The old man, restless in his role as suburban reporter for the Los Angeles Times, had decided that Southern California was too ersatz and that a dose of Eastern traditionalism was in order for the sake of culture and career. Everybody else was coming to California. Not leaving it. Except apparently, for us.

We quickly sold our green stucco ranch house at a modest profit and I said goodbye to my friends. Left behind was my skateboard, a two by four with a split roller skate nailed to each end, and the shoe box that had contained my collection of captured reptiles, now liberated.

As we drove out of the neighborhood we passed the house where, following a recent afternoon of foreplay with her naked Ken and Barbie dolls, a precocious girl named Tracy had given me my first kiss. She took me into her family’s two-car garage and closed the big plywood garage door with the twangy springs and stood me in a darkened corner. There she planted a quick peck on my lips and turned to leave. A warm feeling washed over me, a very pleasant flush of heightened sensation I had never experienced before. I blurted out: “Again please!” Tracy marched back and kissed me again. As she opened the garage door and the light rushed in, I stood frozen in the corner, contemplating my first true carnal experience.

All these memories, of Tracy and Cathy and Alfred and my friends and the golden sun-soaked fields of Southern California were in the back of my mind as we pulled out of the neighborhood, drove past the drive-in theater and the Little League baseball diamond and the Hostess bakery that emitted the aroma of warm Twinkies and headed for the train station and the journey to a new life in a mysterious and far away place called “back East.”

Coming Soon: Part III - City of Brotherly Love

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Memory is porous. It leaks live a sieve. What you think you recall is processed through filters - refracted, diffracted and diffused. So it can’t possibly be anything resembling reality. What follows is a collection of memories, with the occasional attempt at interpretation of their meaning, daresay significance. Accuracy is not guaranteed. Names may have been changed to protect the innocent and not so innocent.

PART I

First Memories - Tacoma

I think my earliest memory is of sitting in dog ****.

It was the late 1950s and I was about 3 or 4. I remember sitting side by side with a young friend on a small hill near my home in Tacoma, Washington, discussing whatever it is that boys our age talked about. As was often the case in the Pacific Northwest, the sky was leaden and it was damp on the ground.

When we stood up I detected that the seat of my pants seemed a bit weightier than when I had sat down. Naturally, I reached back with my hands to investigate. The fingers felt a cold and moist substance, which they instinctively attempted to wipe away. When the hands were pulled back in front for inspection they were sure enough caked with dog crap. A quick sniff of the substance only confirmed what the eyes saw.

While I was knowledgeable enough to know what dog crap was, I was not yet smart enough to know that the only thing worse than coming into contact with excrement is spreading that same excrement about. Accordingly, I attempted to clean the hands by wiping them on the front of my pants. When that yielded less than satisfactory results, I wiped them on my shirt and it wasn’t long before I had dog shit on my face and in my hair as well. In short order, I was basically covered with dog shit from head to toe.

When I made it back to the house, I said something to my mother about having a “little bit of dog poop on me.” I can’t remember her exact reaction but it was to the effect that I was never to get into “dog-doo” again and, if I did, not to use my hands to remove the stuff. Taking mom’s advice to heart, I have endeavored ever since then to avoid sitting in, or stepping in, the shit.

Of course I have other memories from my very early life, such as when my black cat, who was supposed to be a male, gave birth to a litter of black kittens. I believe this biological event provoked my first inquiries about sex. There was the time I crawled behind the neighbor’s decorated Christmas tree and knocked it over. And the sudden appearance of my younger brother Tim, followed shortly thereafter by the arrival of my other brother Brendan.

And I remember the mountain - Mount Rainier - a snow-packed peak that, at 14,000 feet, seemed to always be looking over my shoulder wherever I went, to school, to church or whatever.

I Attempt Suicide at 3

We had a dog, a sort of collie. The dog had a glass bowl.

One day when I was 3-years-old I apparently picked up the dog’s bowl, ran with it, and fell. The bowl shattered and the broken glass slashed my right wrist.

I was hustled off to the emergency room where a doctor stitched me up and told my parents they were lucky, because the gash had cut close to an artery.

Apparently about a year later I did something similar to my left wrist, but that wound was not as bad.

Once, years later, a young woman noticed the stitch marks still visible across my inner right wrist. She said nothing, but stared at the scraggly scar, her face betraying surprise and apprehension at the same time.

“Yeah, I was a precocious kid,” I said. “I tried to kill myself when I was three.”

I had been born in Chicago, where my parents met and married and where my dad - John R. Murphy - worked as a newspaperman until some unfortunate indiscretion on his part, possibly related to drinking, had led to his dismissal from The Chicago Daily News. For a time he returned to his former duties as a fireman for the Illinois Central Railroad. But this line of work wouldn’t do for a future and in order to get back into the newspaper trade, he took a job at a small newspaper in the then quite remote Pacific Northwest. My dad said goodbye to his friends and family in the old neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, where he had lived most of his life outside of time spent in the service and the South Pacific during the War, as a seminarian in Canada and as a GI Bill student at the University of Illinois. My mom - Geraldine “Gerry” Trager - had attended the University of Chicago and left behind relatives in Peoria and friends she had from her own days as a journalist for City News Bureau and the Associated Press. I was bundled up, loaded onto the train, and we settled into a new life at the foot of the Cascades.

I really don’t remember too much from those days. I know my dad did well at his new job and got a job soon at a bigger newspaper in the area. My parents had new friends and my dad was active in an amateur theater group. (He was good with accents and such.)

I do remember one day when I was in kindergarten, which may or may not prove insightful into my personality. One morning my dad dropped me off for Kindergarten, depositing me across the street from the school. (An urban lad, dad only learned to drive after moving to Washington.) Dad was in a hurry to get to work or some other pressing adult appointment and in those more secure times I guess he didn’t feel the need to see me safely enter the building. Off he went.

I stood there for a minute, looked across the street at the classrooms and decided that I really didn’t want to go to kindergarten today. So, having opted to play hooky for the first but not the last time in my life, I turned and started walking home. There was only one problem. I didn’t know the way home. These were suburban streets, with few people in sight, just houses with women inside ironing clothes and gearing up for the afternoon soaps on TV. So I wandered through the desolate neighborhood for an hour or so before I finally stumbled onto some familiar landmarks that led the way home. My mother was surprised when I walked into the house but I don’t remember her being angry. Perhaps she was concerned that I was shy, or worse yet, moody and melancholy.

There was one time when she and my dad were angry with me. We lived in several rented houses during the few years we were in Washington, one in Aberdeen for a brief period when my Dad worked for the Aberdeen World and then a couple in Tacoma, where he worked for The Tacoma News Tribune. One of these houses had a backyard enclosed by a rickety fence constructed of one by eight planks or something similar. One of these planks was missing and we kids used the hole in the fence as a doorway to adventure in the field behind the house. One afternoon, my friend Peter and I were in the backyard horsing around when we knocked another plank out of the fence. We decided that this was fun, so we knocked another one out, kicking it and sending it flying. Then we knocked out another and in a frenzy of childish destructiveness we soon had kicked just about every board out of the fence. The adrenaline rush eventually dissipated and I was left surveying the damage we had wrought in a feverish few minutes. I was now gripped with fear as to what would happen when my parents discovered the destruction. I especially dreaded the words my mother was sure to scream at me when she finally looked out the window and saw the backyard fence reduced to a sorry frame of sagging two by fours and naked poles. You just wait until your father gets home! Peter was still giddy from the afterglow of our fence obliterating orgy and since it wasn’t his backyard, he didn’t really share my escalating sense of impending doom. This was serious and I didn’t have the guts to confess and take my medicine, so I conspired with Peter to concoct a lie, the first significant lie of my life.

We came up with a story about a stranger, a man, who appeared in the yard and kicked out the planks from the fence for no reason at all, then disappeared. When the inevitable interrogation came, I laid this preposterous story on my parents. My dad, who had briefly worked as a Chicago cop following the war, didn’t buy it for even a split second.

Now I was really in trouble. Not only had I done something bad, but I had lied about it in a cowardly attempt to avoid punishment. I don’t think my punishment involved the corporal variety that time, but I was grounded for days, lectured sternly and shamed as a despicable fibber. There were lessons learned here: If you are going to commit vandalism, don’t be stupid enough to do it in your own backyard and, if you’re going to lie, at least think of a believable story. Better yet, I suppose the episode taught me that lying usually only serves to complicate matters.

I remember learning another lesson around this time also involving my good friend Peter. The two of us were playing with toys at my house when I let him play with one of my favorite toys, a fire engine or some such thing. When it came time for Peter to go home, however, he claimed I had given him the toy to keep. I protested to my mother and to my horror she declared that if I had said that Peter could have the toy, then I would have to let him keep it and couldn’t change my mind. I threw a tantrum, which only served to further stiffen my mother’s resolve on the issue, and Peter left the house with my fire truck in his traitorous mitts, while I sulked and plotted terrible revenge.

I recall a lesson in etiquette about this time as well. One of our neighbors was a man who worked with my dad and sometimes I would stop over at their house and bother them, although they were always gracious. One day I visited them and the wife served up slices of pie to myself and her husband. We sat in the living room to eat this treat and when we had finished, he held up his plate, which he had licked clean, and said: See, now it doesn’t have to be washed. This was a revelation to me. Why hadn’t I thought of that? So that evening at home, when I had finished supper, I licked the plate clean and announced to my mother: See, now it doesn’t have to be washed. Well, instead of being grateful at my efforts to save her from washing dishes, my mom said I was a pig and shouldn’t ever to do that again as only uncouth slobs do such a thing. Well, I said, Mr. so and so taught me. Even so, my mother said, I was not to do it and I also wasn’t to tell our neighbor what she had said about people who do lick their plates.

I was left to grapple with the contradictions of life. Don’t lick your plate because only heathens do that, but don’t let on to people who do lick their plates that they are heathens.

Dad was city boy but we did get out into the wilds of Washington once when he and I were invited to spend a couple days roughing it at a rustic cabin. There are photos of this adventure taken by a professional photographer friend of my dad’s from the paper. In one we are standing side by side. Dad is striking a Paul Bunyanesque pose, leaning with one arm against a large axe propped under my much smaller arm. Dad was still a young man then, still ambitious about his career. Mom told me years later he was thinking about going to law school. I’m about five years old in the photo, happy, wearing a somewhat tattered sweater and muddy galoshes.

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Stay tuned for more Galoshes - A Memoir

PART II California

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