Five-Year Diary Offers Slice of Life

  A slice of life…that is what an old diary of mine offers when I am able to unscramble the handwriting.

   As I mentioned last week, I kept a daily log book starting in 1969. Beginning in 1971, I switched to a 5-year diary that chronicles almost every day of my life from sophomore year in high school through sophomore of college.

   The diary hardly reveals my inner thoughts. Instead, it reads like the log of a detective assigned to follow a suspect.

   On October 11, for example, I bought an Army jacket at the Army Navy store in 1971. A year later I had a half day of school and drove around all afternoon with a friend who recently got his driver’s license. In 1973 I spent October 11 taking a math quiz and working in the school darkroom. As a college freshman, I played pinochle all evening and in 1975 I was camping in the rain in the mountains of New Jersey.

   Little can be learned from reading the diary up and down but it does include special days like the very first day of college in 1974: “Drove to Glassboro (NJ) with Bill. Got lots of pamphlets and moved into dorm room and went to a movie on campus.”   The following day I “stood in registration lines all morning, got my schedule, bought books and went to a coffeehouse.”

   Wow – that just about captures all of the excitement and anxiety of my first two days at Glassboro State College.

   Some entries do a better job of capturing the seventies.  “Hitched to the mall and bought a Moody Blues album at Sam Goody’s.” Another sign of the times refers to my first paycheck from the Garden State Farms dairy store: “Got paid $26 for my first week at Garden State.” In another entry I put $3 in my father’s gas tank.

   Two stars in the margin show that an extra special event in 1973 was seeing Elton John in Madison Square Garden for my first big concert. The only other entry over 5 years that earned stars in the margin was the purchase of my first car; a ’57 Chevy that I’ve written about on several occasions.

   Movie theaters were a cheap date in the 1970’s and the book is filled with references to movies like Poseidon Adventure, Lady Sings the Blues and The Godfather for example.  Cabaret was the most memorable movie but not because of its Academy Award.  The entry on June 27, 1972 explains that “snuck into the Newton Drive-In and watched Cabaret outside – got tons of mosquito bites.”

   A phrase that most readers can relate to is “hung out.” Throughout high school a bunch of us (without girlfriends) hung out a lot.  We hung out at the mall, at Friendly’s Ice Cream Parlor, at the park, and at each other’s houses. Hanging out was also free- at least for the kids. 

   The 5-year diary is not a literary work of art.  Like most people, I wouldn’t want people to read my diary but not because of its personal revelations. I just wouldn’t want to bore people with days like May 26, 1974. “Slept late, had lunch, hung out at Gary’s all afternoon, had to go home for dinner.”

   It’s like Déjà vu all over again.

On This Day In (My) History

   For all of the toys and clothes and albums I received from my parents as birthday gifts, I never would have guessed that my favorite is now a small black book.

   The peculiar book had the days of the week but no dates and embossed on the front cover was the word Diary.  Beginning in January 1968, I filled in each day with a short sentence or two describing the day’s activities. Unlike most diaries, there were very few personal thoughts although I did admit that I hated math.

   My mother gave me the book because she saw I was interested in writing. As always, mom was on target.  I enjoyed filling in the book so much that I was given a five-year diary the following Christmas. That book chronicles the daily activities of Timothy Carroll from 1969 – 1974. Together the books let me go back in time to almost any day from 7^th grade to my first year of college.

   The first entry was made one day after my birthday on December 28, 1968. It says “I had to serve the 8:45 / went to Paul’s house / watched the Colts beat the Browns 34-0.”

   It’s not exactly prose but it tells a story.  I served an 8:45 a.m. mass as an altar boy in church, went to my friend Pal Gilroy’s house for the afternoon and watched the Baltimore Colts earn a berth in the 1969 Super Bowl. To make this easier I will insert explanations along the way and offer a glimpse into that first diary.

   For example, (12-31-68) Saw Yellow Submarine movie with Peter Kremer / ate dinner at Biviano’s (family friends) for New Year’s Eve.  On New Year’s Day I served the 12:30 mass / went to Ray Kenny’s and played Batman and Twister.

   With a few exceptions, the school week entries outline various homework, punishments or highlights. A phrase that comes up often is “punish lesson.” The practice has fallen out of favor today but homework as punishment was common at St. Thomas the Apostle School and I seemed to attract a large share of those assignments.

   (1-3-69) Mrs. Bulmer gives us punish lesson; (1-6-69) Mrs. Donahue checks my homework every day now; (1-7-69) Donahue gives me punish lesson for not doing homework; (1-8-69) Mom makes me stay in after school cause of homework; (1-14-69) Granger and I got in trouble with Sr. Adrian (principal) for talking; and so on.

   Boy Scouts were a big part of this 12 year-olds life. From the mundane “patrol meeting today / did auto safety merit badge” to the exciting “…lots of snow for the Klondike Derby,” my years with the Scouts are well documented. Some great entries in April 1969 detail a scout bus trip to Washington D.C. Apparently we saw the Washington Monument, Mount Vernon, the Smithsonian Air and Space and Jefferson Memorial all in one day – wow!

   Reading the first book carefully, I found a few details that I had forgotten over the years.  I bet my friend Gary $1 on the Jets-Colts Super Bowl on January 12 and lost. I also proclaimed that I liked Patrice and no longer Eileen. Years later, when Patrice (Keegan) and I were dating in high school, I wrote down every date she drove me on and every movie we saw and every restaurant we visited. In 1969, I was content to pass notes with codes like TPCEKP on the front.  Texting would have been so much easier.

   In the coming weeks, we will continue with the amazing story of this columnist. I think I will title it “The Altar Boy Who Couldn’t Do His Homework” or “Love Struck Scout Strikes Out In Class.”

Buzzing About Electric Football

   The nation is buzzing over the news that Normam Sas recently passed away at the age of 87.  Sas is the inventor of electric football, a game that has captivated kids for more than 60 years.

   A mechanical engineer by trade, Sas worked for his father Elmer who owned the Tudor Metal Company. The company had created a motor that vibrated a metal sheet for horse and car racing games but Norman used the technology to invent the electric football game in 1949.

   Considering that the game is extremely noisy, unpredictable and somewhat futile to master; it is amazing that it became so popular.  Yet despite its flaws, Tudor sold 40 million electric football games over the next 63 years.

   The game was a hit because it allowed kids (and dads) to recreate NFL action on their dining room tables. In the days before video games, controlling the actions of players in a sports game was a unique experience.

   Of course the game only gave the impression that kids could control it. It was actually impossible to control the game because the small plastic players wandered helter-skelter around the field like they had recently attended a campus keg party.

   I inherited the original 1950’s version from my brother in the late 60’s. By then most players had lost their “cleats” and the teams had been painted and repainted at least 4 times. We overlooked its flaws and played the game for hours changing the rules to accommodate the lack of mobile players.

   A quick Internet search shows that some guys never stopped playing. Electric Football Leagues exist in numerous northern cities (think long winter days). The 17^th  Annual Electric Football Super Bowl and Convention was held in Columbus, Ohio in 2011 although no record exists of the 18^th annual event. It is possible that the other hotel guests complained at the buzz of 50 game tables below their room.

   I asked Facebook friends to post their own electric football experiences and found a common theme of futility.

   Tom Heline had an old game with metal players who had a mind of their own. He even kept a notebook of which direction players ran in so he wouldn’t give a ball to the guy who ran in circles.

   When the electricity was out, we just tapped on the board and it worked the same, said both Jim Cummings and Barry Lanier.

   “We used to stick a wad of cotton in the quarterback’s arm and let it fly. Unfortunately he almost never made a touchdown. Instead he would fall over and shake to the sidelines,” commented Mark Sceurman.

   Mike Keenen remembers being frustrated that his game vibrated too much and the players quickly fell over and just laid there shaking.

   I once bought an electric football game on Ebay and tried to convince my ten year-old son that we could spend some quality time together.  I didn’t remember the game being “that noisy” and it took way too long to set up plays. We played it about five times and then resold it on Ebay.  It just couldn’t compete with Madden 2003.

   So thank you to Norman Sas and Tudor Games for all of the collective hours that we played the most annoying and noisy game in our closet.

A Tribute To TV Theme Song Composers

If I could have dinner with three famous people, I might choose Hoyt Curtin, Vic Mizzy and Earle Hagen. You probably never heard of them but you know every word of their work. That’s because they wrote theme songs for ten of the most popular television sitcoms and cartoons of the 1960’s.

Popular television today still uses opening musical themes but the golden age of theme songs with lyrics was the 1960s and early 70s. It was a time when the opening music set up the whole series.

How did those castaways get on Gilligan’s Island again. We all know it was a three hour cruise because we can sing it. The composer of “Gilligan’s Island,” Sherwood Schwartz also wrote The Brady Bunch and the theme song for a short lived sitcom called It’s About Time.

When you step back from the shows and listen to the themes as complete songs, you begin to appreciate the art of composing 60 second songs that are informative and catchy.

Hoyt Curtin, for example, was writing a Schlitz Beer commercial when he was approached by the Hanna-Barbera studios to write a jingle for a new cartoon series. That project earned him a full time gig with the studios where he wrote their most famous theme songs such as The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Huckleberry Hound, Quick DrawMcGraw, Johnny Quest, The Smurfs and Superfriends.  When it came to cartoons, the guy had the golden touch.

Another composer who had the golden touch was Earle Hagen. Like many people in the music business in the late 50s, Hagen started with the big bands of the 40s playing with Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey among others. He began writings cores for movies and ultimately moved into television.

He co-wrote a little song called The Fishing Hole which became inseparable from the popular Andy Griffith Show. He also wrote themes for the Dick Van Dyke Show, GomerPyle, That Girl, Make Room For Daddy and The Mod Squad.

Howard Greenfield lived in the same Brooklyn apartment building as Neil Sedaka and co-wrote many of his most popular hits like Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, Oh Carol, Calendar Girl and Love Will Keep Us Together.  He took time out from his pop song writing to compose the theme songs to Gidget, Bewitched, Hazel and The Flying Nun.  Listen to some old Neil Sedaka and follow that up with his TV theme songs and you will hear the similarities.

I once devoted a column to Vic Mizzy and his traffic safety song about jaywalking called In TheMiddle, In The Middle.  Mizzy also wrote the classic Addams Family and Green Acres tunes. He went on to write the scores to all five Don Knotts movies.

Fans of country rock music in the 70s might remember a pedal steel session player named Pete Kleinow or Sneaky Pete. He was also a founding member of the Flying Burrito Brothers but before his hippie days he wrote the odd theme songs for Gumby and Davey and Goliath – go figure.

My favorite TV theme song story takes us to the talking horse Mr. Ed.  His theme song was written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingstone. According to an interview with the pair, they never saw film before writing the music or words. They just imagined what the horse would say.  It was first sung by an Italian opera singer but the producers used Livingstone’s demo version and voice instead.

“I feel sorry if anyone ever has to sing these lyrics,” he said in the interview which is posted on YouTube.

The truth is that all of us have sung the lyrics to Mr. Ed and many more silly sixties theme songs. For that we say thanks to Hoyt and Vic and Sheldon and friends.

Blowing Stuff Up

There were three unrelated incidents that led to my respect or fear of personal fireworks.

Our family was visiting my mother’s clan in Chicago and I was introduced to Billy, a thirty-year old who had three fingers on one hand.  He had lost two fingers in a fireworks accident as a kid. It made an impression on me.

A year or two later I read a paperback book called “Follow My Leader” by James Garfield.  The book details the story of Jimmy Carter, a young Boy Scout who is permanently blinded by a firecracker. The book, which is still in print, probably doesn’t get a lot of checkouts from the library these days but it was a cautionary tale that made an impression on me.

Neither of the events above made a lasting impression though because we were shooting off fireworks ourselves just a few years later.

Like most states north of the Mason-Dixon line, New Jersey deemed all fireworks illegal with the exception of sparklers. That didn’t seem to stop the 13-16 year-old crowd from obtaining them. It just made the purchases more exciting.

My favorite experience was the day an older kid (at least 16!) approached us in the park and offered to sell us firecrackers.  “Give me $5 and I’ll get them from my basement,” he said. We followed him to a house on the edge of the park and gave him our money.  He went inside and just never came out.

It took about ten minutes to realize we had been swindled.  As you can imagine, our options were rather limited. We could knock on the door and demand our money back but even two dumb kids like us knew the answer would be “what money?”

We could indignantly tell our mothers that we wasted $5 buying illegal fireworks but we knew the answer would be “that’s what you get for dealing with criminals or something like that.”

Instead we quietly sulked away and ate a few less sundaes at Friendly’s that week.  I recently drove by that same house in Montclair, NJ and remembered that incident like it was yesterday. Maybe I should have stopped to ask for my money back or threaten exposing his crime to readers of the Allen American Newspaper.

Most readers my age know that firecrackers were only a gateway explosive.  Cherry bombs “blowed stuff up real good” and the waterproof ash cans were great for blowing stuff up real good in water. M-80’s were a whole different explosive.

According to Wikipedia, the M-80 was originally created for the military as a simulator for live explosives. The M in the name stood for Military and the 80 referred to the size of the tube. They typically held 3 -5 grams of explosive. It was the damage to property and people by M-80s that led the U.S. Government to pass the Child Safety Act in 1966 banning the use of most consumer (Class C) explosives.

I never actually bought an M-80 but the older kids would recklessly set them off at the local park and schoolyard around the Fourth of July. Rumors that an M-80 was equal to a quarter stick of dynamite (not even close) were enough to keep us at a safe distance.

The only thing more entertaining than blowing stuff up was watching stuff fly.  Fireworks with names like bottle rockets and pinwheels added suspense to the backyard activities because they were so unpredictable.

Unpredictable and unsafe – it sounds like a recipe for trouble but there will always be a new crop of kids looking for a thrill as they blow stuff up.

My Father The Safety Officer

   I recently saw a Facebook post where a friend was lamenting that she had become her mother.  It seemed like a strange thing to worry about.  She said that she had just chased her kids outside for the day – on the second day of summer.
 

   With the kids banished from the game room, maybe she started feeling guilty or maybe she sat down and relaxed for the first time in four days. It’s also possible that she had this flashback of her mother saying the exact same words many years ago.

   I had a flashback last weekend when I found myself under the hood of my son’s Nissan Pathfinder. He was heading out for drive to Kaufman County and I was worried about the car’s vitals. With the odometer topping 110,000 miles I have a right to be concerned.

   Unfortunately my son doesn’t share my concern so I checked the oil and the coolant and the washer fluid and the battery connections.  My last words after glancing at the tires were “be careful.” I have become my father.

   He had good cause to worry about my cool but totally unreliable ’57 Chevy in the mid 70’s.  

   “Did you check the oil and do you have an extra quart in the trunk?” he would ask. Then he’d say “be careful and call me when you get there,” as I drove away.  I don’t want to confuse our younger readers but he also asked “do you have a dime for a phone call.”

   Television fathers like Ward Cleaver always seemed to have the right anecdote or advice for the occasion. My father was more practical and less philosophical. His job at New Jersey Bell Telephone also made him very safety conscious.

   My father, the resident safety officer, reminded me to never flip a lawnmower over without disconnecting the spark plug. He cautioned me to always fill auto tires from the side in case they explode and to never flip the boiler switch with the ominous red switch plate that said “do not touch” on it.

   I thought of him last week during the severe lightning storms. I was watching television and made sure not to sit directly in front of the TV out of fear that a bolt would travel through the set and zap me.

   I learned to walk away from the edge of the house in winter to avoid falling icicles and

   Not following dad’s advice could be costly. I nearly started a forest fire when I ignored his advice to never spray lighter fluid on a burning fire. For some dumb reason I stuck a screwdriver in an electric socket once and got hit by an Oldsmobile when I pulled my bike between two parked cars.

   He never said “I told you so” but the fact that I remember those events so well suggests that I learned my lessons well.

   Protecting kids from the dangers of the world is nothing new for fathers.  As the early settlers of Allen left their homes in Tennessee I can imagine that their dad asked “did you check the oxen?”

   On this year’s Father’s Day take a moment to reflect on the advice your father gave you. It just might surprise you how much like him you’ve become and is that such a bad thing.

Piloting The Sedan deVille

A rare but exciting experience in my house was helping my father shop for a car. It was rare because he squeezed a lot out of his cars. We bought a 58 Chevy in 1962 and a 1962 Chevy in 66. By 1972 he was shopping around again.   
It was exciting because the thought of a new car got everybody in the house excited. It must have been a torment for my dad though as each family member had their own opinion about what was cool and what he could afford.

Having read numerous Hot Rod and Car-Toons Magazine, I was an expert in cars by the age of 13. I thought a GTO or Challenger would make a great family car. Instead we bought a 1970 Chevy Impala. It turned out to be the car I learned to drive in but we came close to buying a real beast that year.

For some reason, my father had his eye on a 1969 Pontiac Bonneville. It floated down the road like an airplane and we all got excited about it. On the test drive we took it home and imagined it in our driveway on a permanent basis. Fortunately my father imagined it in our garage and was wise enough to measure it. The signature Pontiac nose wouldn’t fit in the garage unless we poked a hole in the back wall.

I was reminded of that massive Pontiac this week when I came across a 1970 Cadillac Sedan DeVille for sale in our neighborhood. The car isn’t eye catching in the classic car sense but you could say it has curb appeal if you could see the curb.

The car is not the biggest modern Cadillac– that honor goes to the 1976 model – but it is massive in every way. It is more than 6’ wide and about 19’ long. The 472 cubic inch engine could power a fleet of Hondas and the 26 gallon gas tank suggested that fuel efficiency was probably not its strongest selling point.

“The first time I saw the car I thought it would be fun to own,” said Jeffrey Criss, the car’s most recent owner. “My friend was driving it and I suggested we trade. About a year later he came back and swapped the Caddie for a small Ford pickup.” “I think I liked it because it was so long,” he added. “There weren’t many of them around and it certainly caught people’s attention."

After comparing the car’s handling to a boat, Criss let me take the behemoth for a spin. I slid onto the 6’ bench seat and under the thin steering wheel (no adjustable steering wheels here). Just like big dogs take their owners for a walk, the 1970 Sedan DeVille takes its driver for a ride. I barely touched the gas pedal and the car rumbled away.   

My short ride brought back more than a few memories of old cars where half the electrical switches didn’t work and the smell of exhaust subtly filled the car.   

Still, the 26 year-old Criss says it will be hard to see the car go. “It’s just funky and fun but not the most practical for transportation.”   

Anyone who ever pushed and jumped their old, fun and funky car would probably agree.