I grew up (‘Yeah, right!’ some might say . . .) in a very white-bread, extremely middle-class environment in the 1960s and ’70s, in a somewhat undeveloped rural area about 35 miles west of Philadelphia and my formative years had some interesting highlights. Every time I tell these stories, all of which I swear are absolutely true, people say “You should write a book!” Trouble is, a one-page book wouldn’t exactly be a page-turner…
Herewith, some tales of growing up in the Wild, Wild East, with some recent ones first. . .
A Fowl Odor
Back in the early 2000’s, my mother in law lived with us. She was in her 80s, and was often sort of . . . forgetful, let’s say. She liked to wash the dishes after dinner, even with a perfectly functional dishwasher. She’d fill the sink with soapy water and spend the next hour washing three plates, a couple of forks and spoons, and a skillet or two. She’d then spend 20 minutes celebrating Chinese New Years putting all the pots and pans away in the wrong cabinets.
One day, we started smelling a fairly rank odor somewhere around the kitchen and dining room. Somewhat like dead meat crossed with boiled cabbage and a Mexican restaurant bathroom. We supported a population of active cats, each prone to displaying their captured, and often still alive, rodent trophies to us proudly. We suspected a dead mouse or mole somewhere on the premises of La Maison d’James.
I checked the crawlspace under the house, but no evidence. Dust and cat litter in the sand, but no carcasses. I spent much of the next day sniffing at the HVAC registers, trying to pin down the source. Nothing was conclusive. We checked around the kitchen again, under the sink, behind the fridge, even moving furniture around. Nothing.
Daily, the horrid miasma grew worse, We moved carpets, tilted very piece of furniture to check cubbyholes and corners where a dying or dead animal would prone to be . . . well, prone. Then, one day I decided to completely empty the base cabinets of our pots and pans. Oddly, one small pot way in the back seemed heavier than it should have. I pulled it into the light, and it seemed we had found our source.
I evacuated the neighborhood. Small children and seniors were moved to a secure bio-hazard locations. The ERT team from the local nuclear station was put on alert. I tentatively lifted the lid on the small saucepan, and immediately regretted it.
A greenish cloud of vapor rose from the milky contents that, a week ago, had been some sort of chicken breast in gravy. Calling ahead for oxygen and respirators, I dashed outside and tossed the goo, saucepan and all, as far into the river as I could. I swear that as it sank, the water boiled around it like those Nature Channel programs about “Piranhas of the Amazon eating a Capybyra”
Apparently, mom had finished washing the pots, missing one with the lid still on it, and then it went into the cabinet with all the others, the unclean one blended into the crowd. And then, nature and salmonella bacteria took over.
Suicide Hotline, Please Hold . . .
Back in the 1990s, a large group of otherwise very boring IT nerds and power engineers from the electric utility that I worked for would caravan down to Myrtle Beach for a week-long golf outing. One year, to make sure that all of my coworkers knew my support for all their projects would be on hold, I sent a nearly company-wide email late in the last day before we left , telling all it was vacation time and that I was going “away, where you can’t reach me, and they don’t have TV or phones, or even radio.”
About an hour after I got home, as I was packing up the car, two Police cars came rumbling up the driveway, lights flashing and everything. Two policemen got out of one car and knocked on the door, asking, when I answered, if I was who I am. I foolishly confessed, and they asked me to “please step outside here away from the house.” Now, you have to understand, these two guys were huge – both easily six feet five inches or so, about 260 pounds, and both with completely shaved heads. They looked like twin Kojak’s on steroids. My wife and young son looked on in a mix of fear, horror and disbelief. I don’t know if you’ve ever been asked questions by a large police officer who has one hand on his gun while he looks you up and down, but it can be a rather unnerving experience for an otherwise innocent person like me.
They asked if I felt ok. I said, “Sure, I’m fine. What’s up?” They asked if I knew anyone “on the internet”. I said, “no, not specifically…” Remember, this was about 1996 or 1997. The web hadn’t quite taken off yet. They said that someone who “knew me” had called 911 and said they were afraid I was going to go berserk and kill myself, and perhaps others. I assure the cops that I was fine, and that I wasn’t about to run around with an axe and massacre my family, and I really didn’t know how anyone could have reported that I was about to flip the switch and go insane. They looked at me one last time, and finally drove off, after warning my wife to keep an eye on me and call 911 if it looked like I was about to go postal.
I tried to figure out what has just happened. I didn’t know anyone “on the internet”. Then it hit me. Someone email-recipient at work, who obviously didn’t get the nuance of my inflection, more or less, was led to believe that I was about to do a Jimmy-Cagney-in-White-Heat ‘top of the world, Ma, top of the world” act. They called the cops and the cops thought ’email’ meant ‘internet’.
I connected back to our email system and posted a SECOND message, explaining the first one a little better, and assured the masses that I was just going on vacation. I also explained the reason for this second message with a rather breathless and perhaps frantic description of my interrogation, and I may have said something along the lines of “storm troopers” and “King Kong”. My long-suffering wife who also worked at the utility, had to endure a week of her co-workers gossiping about her husband’s apparent mental collapse.
But the worst part of it was, a woman at work who knows both of us thought the messages were pretty funny. She especially thought my description of the Storm Trooper state cops was funny. So she printed out my email message and showed it to her fiancee – who just happened to be one of the storm troopers – luckily, he understood the spirit in which it was written and didn’t come back and give me the full Rodney King experience.
Born to be Mild
When I was about 14 years old Mom and Dad, in a futile attempt to instill respect for money and hard work, suggested I earn the cash for a bicycle rather than be gifted it like any normal kid. After a couple of months of golf-course caddying on weekends, I had enough to get a nice set of wheels. To save money, we bought it unassembled. Once we got the box home, I dumped all the parts out on our back porch, and Mom and I started figuring out where “Front Tube Bracket A” fit into “Cross Member Sleeve B” without puncturing “Front Tire”. My mom’s a great lady, don’t get me wrong, but she has the mechanical skill of a piece of gorgonzola cheese. I didn’t know it at the time, but she cross-threaded the right-side foot pedal into the sprocket arm by about 3 1/2 threads.
I was so jazzed about my bike I decided to ride over to my best friend Jay’s house. He lived about five or six miles away. When I got there, I waxed eloquent about the speed and maneuverability of the machine, paying special attention to the extremely well-designed coaster brake on the rear wheel, which have long since been replaced by caliper brakes, for reasons which will soon be obvious. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the braking system, I went up to the top of his street, which was quite a steep and long bit of a hill, and yelled “Watch this!”, the 14-year old equivalent of “Hold my Beer”. Pedaling wildly down the steep incline, I attained what I now believe to be near-supersonic speeds and just as I passed the bemused Jay, stood up and stomped down on the right foot pedal, which promptly broke off.
The rear tire locked solid, laying virgin rubber in a snaking line an inch wide and three hundred feet long down the street. I swerved from curb to curb like a maniac, totally out of control and bouncing from one foot to the other in a vain attempt to regain control of the rocket-sled. Applying the front brake would have been the act of a madman, catapulting me over the handlebars like a cork over Niagra Falls. Besides, I think they didn’t work right anyway. My forward momentum finally halted thanks to my firmly planted US Keds, about six inches from the flanks of a 1963 slab-side Lincoln Continental. I collapsed off the bicycle and lay gasping in the street until Jay ran down to congratulate me on the performance and request an instant replay for the benefit of his older brother Frank who had just returned from the jungles of Viet Nam, and was in the mood for some excitement.
We picked up the bike and checked it out. By a miracle that vastly outweighs anything in the Old and New Testament, both I and the bike came through with hardly a scratch. Except for the rear tire, which now had a flat spot you could see cord though, about four inches long. And the missing pedal, of course. We trudged back up the hill to retrieve it, and attempted to re-attach the pedal, but it was totally ruined.
If you ever want some real exercise, try pedaling a bicycle with only one foot. For six miles. Up and down hills. In the dark. And you know, I don’t think that damn bike ever worked right after that.
Grin & Bear It
In 1964 when I was 11, the four of us siblings were somewhat forcibly abducted by our parents on a cross-country auto vacation scheduled for the entire month of August. We piled into a brand new 1964 Volkswagen Micro-Bus that had been modified by Dad, with a white-gas Coleman stove and small ice chest at the rear storage area where Mom constructed approximately 2,387 baloney and cheese sandwiches over the next weeks, and two large roof-top carriers for the tents, poles, air mattresses, sleeping bags, lanterns, and all the other assorted paraphenalia you needed back in those days, to camp out. We motored across Pennsylvania, making brief stops in Oberlin, Ohio to see Mom’s old college campus, and then onto Michigan for some relatives, up into Wisconsin Dells, across Minnesota, into South Dakota, and made our way westward about 300 miles a day. Even after 50 years, I distinctly remember the Albert Lea State Park Indian burial mounds in Minnesota, the Corn Palace, Wall Drug and the Badlands in South Dakota and I believe we passed by Devils Tower, and then made our way westward through Wyoming. Our first really anticipated stop was Yellowstone National Park.
The afternoon we got there, we visited the area known as the “Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone”, where the Yellowstone River cut a deep canyon through the rock, cascading from the famous Yellowstone Falls. There was a buzz of excitement around the ranger station, and people were pointing across the canyon at what appeared to be some sort of gathering. In a few moments, we learned that a young boy about 16 had slipped and fallen down into the rocks to his death, and what we saw was the rescue party returning to the rim with his body. It was a very sobering afternoon. We toured around that area for the rest of the day, and then set up camp for the first night.
A chilly breeze woke me the next morning, in the tent I shared with my younger brother and sister. Bill seemed overly excited about something. “Hey man, did you wake up last night?” he asked. I said “No, what do you mean?” He pointed to the tent wall next to my head. There was a hole, completely shredded, about ten inches wide and 18 inches tall. He continued. “A big old bear was sniffing around last night. It woke me up, and then I looked over and it ripped into the tent and stuck it’s head in right over you! It sniffed and then left! I almost crapped my pants!” he related, rather off-handedly it seemed. When Mom and Dad were apprised of event, they about shit, if you’ll pardon my French. We realized I missed having my face ripped off by about three inches. And luckily, we kids had remembered the official admonishments to NOT to bring ANY food into the tent at night.
It could have been much worse. I remember Dad using about half a roll of grey duct tape to patch up the tent, which we amazingly used for several more years and camping trips. We spent three days in Yellowstone, and then made our way across Idaho, Oregon, and down the California coast to San Francisco, to spend a day or so with my uncle and his family, whom Dad had not seen for several decades. Our first afternoon in California was highlighted by Dad getting completely lost and driving several miles up onto a muddy, barely one-lane logging road the middle of the redwoods. We met a lumber truck coming down, and Dad reversed all the way back to pavement. We toured Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, and then ended up making a mad dash all the way back to PA to get home one day before school started, and Mom later swore we pulled into our driveway with about $1.38 left in the bank account.
Strangers in the Night
A bunch of us were goofing around one summer evening at the home of one of my best boyhood pals, Steve Ashbridge. His mom and dad were out partying or working or something, there were no adults in the house, just us kids. It was about eleven or twelve o’clock at night, and I happened to look out the living room window, and I saw a face looking back in at me. I jumped about six feet in the air and let out a holler. Within seconds after my arrival back on the floor, a bunch of us guys took off out the back door after the prowler. We chased him out the back yard but he eluded us in the undergrowth and bushes.
Imagining the most gruesome results this side of Lizzie Borden’s little hissy-fit, we were certain the madman would return and hack us all to death with a machete. I think this was about two weeks after the Charles Manson/Sharon Tate murders, so we were kinda jumpy. We propped chairs against all the doors and fortified the house as best we could. This was a very old house, from about 1810 or something, and I think they still had the original hardware on the doors, so we couldn’t get them very secure. With no other way of barring the door, we put a huge piece of iron bar over the top sill of the back porch door, which led directly into the kitchen.
Finally falling asleep around three a.m. or so, we were awakened a while later by a tremendous crash and a roar like a wounded water buffalo, coming from the vicinity of the kitchen. Quite a sight greeted us there. Steve’s dad had returned home after paying his respects at most of the neighborhood taverns, it seemed, and was unable to enter the front door. He did the logical thing (amazingly, considering his mental state) and went around to the back door. It swung open without a struggle, dropping our 12-pound safety device / burglar alarm onto his cranium, and that’s what all the shouting had been about. 
Had he been sober, the bar probably would have killed him, but, like the drunk in the back seat of the car, his…well, call it “pliable” physical state probably saved his life. Pop crumpled to the floor like tissue paper, and luckily, didn’t bleed all that much. But he had a knot on the back of his head the size of a Cadbury Easter Egg for the next two weeks. Needless to say, we kids were severely admonished, but the next day, the footprints outside the window proved our point, even if we did go a little overboard with the security system.
The Old Man and the Lake
My grandfather could have passed for W.C. Fields’ twin brother. He grew up in Chicago during the ‘teens and Roaring 20’s, and didn’t get the name “Wild Bill” from any talent at baseball. When I was a kid, he and I used to go fishing at a large public lake about twenty miles from home. He loved to fish. We’d drive up there and unload the craft, a leaky and somewhat unseaworthy wooden rowboat he’d constructed of left-over barn planking one summer “right after the War”, as he said. He never told me which war, but I’ll be kind and assume World War II)
One summer after a typical day on the water, – three hours, two sixpacks and a pouch of Red Man chewing tobacco for him, a couple of Yoo Hoos and a Ring Ding for me, and maybe a fish or two – we headed back towards shore, about a quarter mile away.
Sitting in the bow, and facing me back in the stern, Gramps pulled the oars back and forth with a startling ferocity unsuspected in his age group and weight class. I watched the shoreline approach over his shoulder. I noticed that each time he leaned forward and pulled back on the oars, the bow behind him dipped deeper and deeper into the water. I realized that at the rate we were taking on water, we would not reach dry ground. 
Before I could warn him, the boat took one last dive under the surface and sank out from under us. I had seen it coming, but I think it surprised the hell out of Gramps to all of a sudden find himself rowing a boat straight down into thirty feet of water. I think he got two or three more strokes in before he realized it was futile and sputtered back up to the surface, amid floating cushions, bait baskets, candy wrappers and assorted flotsam and jetsam. We paddled back to shore and hauled ourselves out of the water, the crowd onshore excitedly watching our progress all the way. The perfect example of “Nothing hurt but our pride”, we squelched and squished our way back to his old station wagon, and slunk home, vowing never to attempt a rough sea crossing again.
ProtoBeavis & Butthead
As many adolescent young boys, Steve (see above) and I loved to build plastic models. We built planes and cars and other stuff, but mostly liked ships. Destroyers, PT boats, battleships, aircraft carriers. Whatever. We built them all. We’d float them around his pool or the creek in the woods behind his house, or on a nearby pond. As we grew into the ancestors of Beavis and Butthead, though, our thoughts turned to more “spectacular” diversions. Steve spent several days on a model of the Revolutionary War-era USS Constitution, complete with little cannons and tall masts and black-thread rigging and everything. It was about a foot and a half long. After admiring his work for a few days, we took it down to the creek, draped airplane glue all over the decks and masts, and set fire to it, then floated it out into the creek. We each took a shot at it with his dad’s 12-gauge as it steamed past us, black choking smoke pouring off the model. Now that was historical re-enactment!
We also explored the destructive qualities of the still-available Cherry Bombs and M-80s when they are glued inside of plastic model ship hulls. We were proud to announce that M-80s blew the model into smaller, less recognizable pieces (“hey, look, I think that’s a piece of anti-aircraft gun in your hair!”) but Cherry Bombs made a louder, smokier blast.(Wow! Look at that! It blew it clear out of the creek! Is that a dead fish?”)
It’s really amazing neither of us got so much as a scratch doing this. We must have destroyed 25 or 30 boats in all over the course of a couple of summers. We also had some boats made out of polyethelyne or polypropylene or one of those miracle plastics that just started to come out in the mid 60’s, and we found that if you could get a hunk of that stuff on fire, it would even burn under water. We reenacted many submarine battles that way.
Don’t Bug Me, Man!
In addition to our VW Bus, my family also had a vintage, 1955 black VW Beetle that all of us kids learned how to drive in. Our house was set back from the road about a quarter mile and I remember practicing going up and down over and over. At the end of our drive, there was no real way to turn around, so I spent hours driving back up the hill backwards with my head hanging out the window pretty well. The Bug had a stick shift, of course, with a non-synchromesh transmission, which meant that you had to come to a complete stop before putting it in 1st gear. I got to be pretty good at zooming up and down the drive backwards. Of course, I took my drivers test in the Bug, but the instructor seemed not to be impressed by my reversing skill. I passed anyway. A few months into my 17th year or so, I was playing in a pop band, and we practiced out in the middle of southern Chester County, near the town of Parkesburg, all farm country and mushroom houses, a good twenty five miles from home. One winter night, driving home in the Bug, I came up over a rise in the little country road, and hit a patch of black ice. The Bug promptly spun 180 degrees, and then went careening up and down the sides of the embankment dividing road from corn field. It slowly came to a stop about halfway up one bank, and then tipped over. I actually climbed out of the open sunroof, trudged a mile or so to the nearest farmhouse, and called Dad to come get me. That was the end of the Bug. Again, not a scratch on me.
A Flare for the Dramatic
My friend Steve (see above in “Proto Beavis and Butthead) once had an Austin-Healy Sprite. For the kids in the audience, this was a tiny, early 60’s vintage British sports car that seated none, in a pinch. There are HotWheels bigger than the A-H was. There was this junkyard about 20 miles north of us, run by a strange fellow named Gene Matlack. Matlack’s was full of old busted up ambulances and rusty school buses and grimy black hearses and all sorts of bizarre and curious foreign automobiles that no one else for a hundred miles had, like Citroens and Simcas and Renaults. Gene had a huge stuffed buffalo head mounted on the wall above his bed, which always impressed me. His right arm hung from his shoulder like a bird’s broken wing, because that’s exactly what it was. He broke it between the shoulder and elbow in a car accident, and never got it set properly. He also had an Austin-Healy that Steve decided to buy as a spare parts car, sight unseen. Gene said if we’d come up and get it off his lot, he’d take fifty bucks or something ridiculous like that. So one afternoon Steve and my other friend Jay (remember him from my bicycle adventure?) and I drove up to Matlack’s to get the car. His lot was way out in the woods, of course, along a road that had a few houses scattered along its ten-mile or so length.
It wasn’t until we got there and looked around that we realized that the Sprite had already been used as a parts car by somebody else, and had no headlights, no bumpers or fenders, and only one seat, and I think we had to wrench some sort of steering wheel to the column poking out from under the dashboard. We knew we could never get it home during daylight, but hoped that the cover of fast-approaching darkness would assist our clandestine escape. We forked over the dough, and after it got dark enough so that you couldn’t tell the Sprite had no fenders unless you looked directly at it, we siphoned a half-pail of gasoline out of a Cadillac hearse and down the back of the seats while trying to get some in the tank, and set off back home. Jay and I drove in the working Sprite, and Steve followed close behind, following our taillights blindly. About three miles from the junk yard, in the middle of god knows where on Route 282 in western Chester County and in the pitch dark, Steve’s ride sputtered to a halt. Totally. Absolutely dead. It had probably run out of gas, seeing as how we only got about a pint sloshed into the tank. We pushed it about five hundred yards before coming to our senses and realizing we had 15 miles to go. We’d decided to tow it back home.
Normally this wouldn’t have been that much of a problem, but it’s a bit of a test to tow a nine-hundred pound car with another, 40 horsepower nine-hundred pound car. The A-H’s engine would be shamed by a decent John Deere lawn tractor.
Especially when the latter is stuffed with three stout fellows.
Especially when you don’t have a tow chain.
Or a rope. Or anything to connect the two wrecks.
All we had were three size 32 belts. Finally one of us had the bright idea of using the seat belts from the broken car to tie it to the good one. We figured seat belts had to be pretty strong, right? If I recall, the conversation went something like this:
“So, anyone got a wrench or pliers to get the seatbelt bolts out of the floor?”
“Nope.”
“Anyone got a knife or anything, to cut them off?”
“Nope.”
We were nothing if not totally unprepared.
“Hey, I got an idea. Why not use the flame from a flare to cut them loose?”
“Hey, good idea, get a flare from the back of the Healy.”
Scratch, Whoosh! The flare lit up like a Fourth Of July rocket. Steve leaned in and began to work the tip of the flame back and forth across the seatbelt, right above the bolt where it attached to the floor boards.
The greasy floor boards.
The greasy, gasoline-saturated, plywood floor boards.
All of a sudden, it seemed to get really bright in there as the car burst into flames, and something long and thin came shooting out of the back of the car, clanking onto the pavement. Steve had stayed with it until the very end, finally cutting one seat belt loose and tossing it out over the trunk before abandoning the vehicle. We feverishly tossed dirt, stones, and it seemed, a bunch of wood and dried leaves, on the fire, until it finally died out, and then spent ten minutes stomping on the flare to get it out before we set the woods on fire all around us. The charred seat belt was all of about 18 inches long.
I’m sure the housewife who found three scorched, smelly, and sweaty teenagers at her door that summer night didn’t know what to expect when we rang the doorbell, but we managed to convince her that we meant no harm, and as soon as we told her we’d just come from Gene Matlack’s, she said “Say no more. I must get three or four idiots a month come here to call a tow truck after they leave that hellhole.”
After we got the car home and got all the usable parts out of it, Steve and I put it in the creek and blew the hell out of it with a shotgun and some M-80’s.