--NOT PROOFREAD ---- SUMMER 1965, addenda, ::::::: I was, I believe, turning the corner of West Philadelphia and North Pershing near the bridge and there was a guy with his car door open, sitting on the side of his carseat, listening to a York High football game. Noone in NYC ever cared about high school football.. .......... I was glad my loud, explosive, rude, nasty, unfeeling father wasn't there for the Summer. He was always only nice if he was separate from someone for a while. Then he'd be nice for a couple of days only._____________ In a real shocker Vi and the kids went BACK to Astoria to go to the World's Fair again that August 1965. It seemed weird that the kids would now be in my room 24 hours a day without my being there while I was in York,Pa. Vi sent us a card from the World's Fair saying, "Ha, ha. We switched places" (Its in a box next to my bed now). My father took them to see the Ben Gielbeda family in Greenpoint. The boys told me thet Lor had a crush on Joey G. She told me that I was cute but he was 'dear'. Actually he was also a hell of a lot healthier and athletic than I was as well and probably just as smart. Lora and Dale must have been running around together as they were writing back and forth after that. They bragged about how they got to see some things at the Fair that I didnt get to see as they weren't open in 64 but they had been open in May 1965 and I could have seen them but didn't care. I was into the science stuff. It had NEVER occurred to me that they'd go back a second time to my house like that. They also went to see 'my' American Museum without me._____________________ In one of the very first local papers I read it was a big front page news story that the city got a new snowplow and I found it amusing! _________________ While walking way down East Philadelphia for the first time I saw there was an 'American Opinion' bookstore just a block before the turn from East Market Street on the north side. It was a John Birch Society thing. I had heard of them during the 64 election campaign but we had none in NYC.________________ My mother and I would play cards late at night in the kitchen. And once we were trying to guess the hidden card to see if anyone was psychic. My mother mentioned that I had a habit of not naming the one turned over but the next one to come up! She got really depressed one night and suddenly said, "Oh, life is so short, Walt" out of nowhere! Did she foresee her soon to be insanity and early death?_______________ Still a lot of JFK worship in Summer 1965 and most people still very pro-Vietnam War ____________ Vi's kids always got lots of toys and in Summer 1965 the boys got a skateboard. They were big wooden things then._________________ 9-7-99 (Major died 9-7-70).. 9-16-99: Viola took my mother and me to the racetrack. I was surprised that Pa. had one. I thought they had to go to Maryland. I was also surprised I was let in at age 15. We were getting on an escalator (must have been new or the kids would have been on the escalator) and she asked me to pick a number. I say 5. She says she needs TWO numbers. So I go with my 'lucky' number 13 for 13 Clifford Place in Greenpoint. I pick 1 and 3. The DAILY DOUBLE was 5 and 5 !!... 9-16-99.... 9-21: They had nothing but OLD phones in York from their phone company........ It was all farmland around York then. Very little of this so-called 'suburban sprawl'. Lots of farm stuff on TV and radio...... My father would wonder why York had so many people with a shrivelled arm who walked a bit hunched over. He said he hoped it was nothing in the water...... We went to the kids Fairyland Park in Lancaster for some reason. Whatever its name is on the main pike. It was an off-day and only a couple of other people there...... My mother put her red pin cushion on the wooden board behind the phone in 1965 (unless it was still there from the previous people). In about 1997 my father says, "Whats this pile of sawdust on the wooden phone table?" Then we noticed the pin cushion finally gave up the ghost and fell apart..9-21-99 236pm
Fall 1965, age 15/16:::: At some point I heard of the NEWBERRY STREET BOYS and I was surprised that there would be any 'gangs' in York,Pa but figured they werent one-tenth as bad as the ones in NYC. And our house on Cottage was between Manor and Newberry and Newberry didnt look like anything to me. BUT I didnt know what was on the other side of the creek and way up north on the street,,,,, My mother liked GREEN ACRES. I did too but nowhere as near as much as she did. But she usually let me watch my shows instead,,,,, Did we have a door in the front of the garage? I forget.,,,,, I couldnt grasp the idea of where York High played its football games. In NYC schools had whatever fields they did have right next to the school. The idea that York High would have a stadium far away didnt make any sense to me. And when I heard it called "Small Athletic Field" I thought they were referring to the size,,,, There was a FOX BREAD company on North George Street a few blocks north of town and just before the RR tracks and depot. My mother and I tried the bread and it was great soft yet would not toast without getting hard as a rock. Across the street from it and maybe a little south were a row of stores and at least one restaurant that were razed later and I cant recall what they looked like at all and I cant find photos. Fox went under. Untoastable bread?,,,, I dont recall when I got that CHALLENGE THE YANKEES game but it really got me more interested in baseball when I first saw Probability and Statistics used in a board game like that,,,,, I was downtown on West Market St with two guys one night and they see some girl across the street and start making comments on her attractiveness. I dont see anything. Ive always thought that the lower the IQ the more easily it is to turn a male on,,,,, Commercial on TV at this time for snowmobiles or small snowscrapers that I had never heard of in NYC. Had a catchy slogan about, "This is the year of the CAT!",,,,,, Over our big antenna and interrupting our TV shows we'd get hospital calls we figured were coming all the way from York Hospital.,,,,, One guy at York High who had never seen me before said, "You werent in Hanna Penn with me so you must have been in Phineas Davis". And I answered, "Whats a Phineas Davis?",,,, age 15/16,,,, 9-15-99,,, SEPT 19,1966 CBS becomes SOLE OWNER of Yankees. Topping replaced by Micheal Burke......... York Cabs were real cabs in those day with the huge back area and the extra little seat that folded down. I recall getting in one in front of our house one night and using the chair..... My mother toldme to tell Dennis that he smelled of pigeons and he said he didnt. People cant smell themselves very well...... Yorkers joked about the SHELTERED WORKSHOP which was for retarded people....... They painted the downtown windows in October, 1965. All done by York High students who were almost all white in those days........ On the third floor of the house there was NO HEATING DUCT into my room. It went into the little junk room next to it and they were going to knock a hole in the wall and never did. It was never really warm up there but I liked the privacy..... In gym someone took over a long locker and the gym teacher broke it off with a hammer and marvelled that it was made of pig iron..... Howie Bedell was the local baseball hero. He later ended Drysdales scoreless innings streak..... NOVEMBER 22, 1965 was the second anniversary of the JFK assassination and it was all we heard about from the media ....... DEC 8,1965: VATICAN II ended ..... DEC 9, 1965: Orioles get Frank Robinson. I fell over when I heard of this!! I knew from my new baseball fanaticism, and my Strat O Matic Cards, that the AL did not even have ONE superstar during the 1965 season and that Robinson had a great year against the NL which had a MUCH stronger league. I knew FB would tear the AL apart in 1966. He did...... Brooklyn Diocese LARGEST in US of Catholic Church... 9-22-99
There were three snowstorms hitting NYC in late January 1966 but I dont know if they hit York. BUT one of the old ladies who lived in the house on the corner asked me to shovel her walks which were a huge amount of work and i had never shovelled before as we had always rented and it was the landlords job. And I agreed because I wanted to buy that STRAT-O_MATIC baseball game i saw in that Baseball mag in the York High lunchroom. I started doing it but it was really tough for someone who had never done anything physical before. I had to keep stopping and going indoors to rest. But then the woman would come in to see what happened and try to offer me more money as she kept thinking I quit. I told her I just needed rest as it was new to me. It was a high pile of snow from her door out to the street along that front walk. Then along the front of the house. Then around the corner and the length of the house. Then along the length of the long yard. Then to get the garage completely shovelled out. An awful lot for a very first time. But I did it, got my money and got my game. It was based upon the 1964 baseball season. I really got into the statistics and probabilities and wanted to learn how to make my own cards. First times I played it I paid no attention to the at-bats on the cards as I made my lineups so naturally the Mets did much better than expected as they then had three .300 hitters in the line-up. (Hunt, Cannizzaro and Christopher). I had a board I must have gotten from a shelf and Id put it over the chair arms to play. Soon after I got the OLD TIMER teams they then had (Six of them) and played three in each league. The first game in each was a big upset as the 1927 Yankees and 1934 Cardinals lost! But then both won all their remaining games to tie for first with the 1931 As and 1935 Cubs respectively. Then I had playoffs and the Yanks and Cards won. And the Yanks won the WS. I kept detailed records of each game. The other two teams were the 1924 Wash Senators with Walter Johnson and the 1922 Giants with Casey Stengel. I used to store them in a little brown sliding box that I once had a little science kit in that I got in the early 60s. They also advertised a book called Deguerreotypes and I had no idea what it was or what the word meant. Now I know that Deguerreotypes were the original photographs and they were referring to Old Time Ballplayers..9-15-99 ......... 9-16: Mike was always proud of his MATH ABILITY and kept bothering me about what I got in Math on the SATs. I kept sidestepping it. Finally, in the auditorium one day he keeps bothering me so I show him. Its higher than his. So, right in the auditorium, he yells, "So, what do you want? A medal?"....... My favorite TV show was still THE FUGITIVE but I almost never saw it during my two years in York. It was such a nice, safe town I was out all the time........... Of course, both Lora and Vi werent nice. They were obnoxious to me. Back in NYC my relatives were the only ones nice to me. In York, two relatives were the only ones not nice..10-1-99.. ... At some point, I dont recall when, I heard my mother say that Viola caught Lor walking through town holding hands with some guy and jumped all over her. My mother was on Lor's side that time.. She would have been much more if Lor wasnt so rude, insensitive and greedy...... I did hang around with Bill and Steve once in a while but they were almost never around and there was a big age difference between us........ . Once after coming back from being out with Jim Im in a good mood and my mother surprises me by asking, "Have you been drinking?". I was startled. I said no and I wasnt. She just wasnt used to seeing me in a good mood...... Still non-stop Kennedy worship since the assassination and most people still supported the Vietnam War........ Actually I didnt do justice to how good it was to be in York from 1965 to 1967 and why I was always so excited to get back here. I left a city where always feared going out of my home as so many people were so rotten to me. I was constantly uptight in New York City and had to learn to develop a personality that wasnt my natural one in order to survive. NYC is a great place if you are an obnoxious, outgoing, big-family type person. It is not if you spend the first 13 years of your life as a small, very sickly, only child. I didnt even realize how unnaturally uptight I had gotten until I went to York that first Summer and my constant mental and physical 'tightness' started to loosen. For the first time in my life I spent an extended time in a place where I didnt always feel like I was walking through a minefield with attackers lurking everywhere ready to start something. My trips to Seldon were great but none ever lasted more than a weekend, or maybe a three day weekend, so I only had a couple of days of calming down. In York I had no attacks by other males, either verbal or physical, for two weeks and I liked the feel of two weeks of loosening and I wanted to see how much more I would loosen up. Besides being safe York was also clean and prosperous. 9-28-99
SUMMER 1966 addenda::: I recall being in Elizabethtown in the Summer. So it may have been while taking that course and my father coming up. I was in their living room while the Yanks were on TV (Look up 1966 Oriole Schedule? Or was it Game of the Week? Probably a weekend as the relatives there were home. Older Cousin Eugene and his zillion kids. Yanks were awful that year. Out in the back on the side porch they had a game of some sort. Was it a hockey game? Did I then get mine the Xmas of 1966?? Crowd around it playing. Father took motion pictures with his 8mm camera. Im in it with my semi-Mod, semi-Continental pinstripe clothes of the time. Lora dressed in the same fashion. Billy and Steve in another place in the yard. ...............I couldnt believe what I found when I returned to Astoria after being away from June 1965 until July 1966: The Mellinger kids had really fixed up their basement nice and it was their regular hangout. Dale was now into music and had a set of drums he'd play down there. And my father had simply lent him abunch of my stuff without asking or either one telling me. My records and my 45 adapter and some other stuff. (How the adapter wound up in NYC after I had just bought it in York in June 1965, I dont recall. Amazing how I couldnt trust my father with my belongings.)......... After working as a Mets usher I bought a tape recorder as I thought Id need it for college some day. I recall the moment I asked for it over the counter in a very crowded electronics store in Lower Manhattan that was having a big sale. It was a 'portable': a foot wide, maybe 9 inches front to back, and maybe 8 inches high. Black and heavy with tubes. BIG reels. Multi-speed. I THINK I bought it with usher money. Dale and I would sit in his basement and read out of Sgt Fury comic books into it............. I was in Queens and a couple of the Gielbeda kids, I think it was the cousins of the ones I knew in Greenpoint, had a party in the Summer of 1966. Perhaps it was August as I was taking that Physics course in July. It was out in west Queens where the houses were more middle-class or upper-middle-class. The parents knew all about the beer and left deliberately so the kids could party. All about 16. Dancing. Twister Game. Beer drinking. First time I ever drank a lot of beer. Couldnt use the bathroom as a couple was in the bathtub making out all night. And others on beds. I had to walk until I found a place to go. Luckily, I did: a school bldg schoolyard. Very dark. About two/three blocks away. Did I find it or was I told of it? I used a dark corner. Once when I was sitting on steps drinking a couple of girls asked me how much I drank. I said ten. Which was pretty true (I might have spilled some outside as I was carrying the cans with me). One said, "Superboy" as I wasnt intoxicated for some reason. Finally, I went back for the umpteenth time and there was a couple from the party making out on the ground right near where I was going! When the parents came home later they asked if the beer was brought in and the daughter said yes. Nothing much happened though. No fights or meanness. A surprise for NYC. That was the first and last time I was ever in that house. To college soon after that........ In the locker room for Mets Ushers some guy who went to NYU or CCNY who was just a couple of years older then I was wearing a strange button that said, "FRODO LIVES!". I asked him what it meant but he was cryptic and wouldnt tell me. When i got to IU I learned of the big TOLKIEN fad going on at colleges and that 'Frodo' was a character in a book.... 9-27-99 ....... Beatles Concerts: AUGUST 16, 1966: Evening show, electric storm: continuous lightning, in Philadelphia, only 10,00 show up. Some sort of screw up. Lora was at this one she later told me.... AUGUST 23,1966: NY Shea Stadium- 44,000, went straight to plane and to LA, I worked this one. Later when Lora mentioned she went all the way to Phila for her show she asked me if the Beatles played certain songs. I had no idea what they played and I said I wasnt sure but I thought so. Then she jumped all over me saying they couldnt possibly as those ones had to be done in a studio. I should have realized she was just setting me up to attack me.. 9-21-99 229pm. ....... 9-22: I just looked up the baseball schedule for 1966. Turns out that the ONLY time the Yanks played at Baltimore all Summer was on LABOR DAY and then Tuesday and Wednesday. So if I recall what was on TV correctly that means that the story above in Elizabethtown took place Labor Day Monday and that would fit in with the info about my first day in Richards House that may be on yhoffshoot. But why werent everybody at Pinchot?