Installment # 50

The mental harassment in Jump School included the seemingly constant blaring from a PA system of some chilling lyrics to the tune of “Glory, Glory Halleluiah,” some of which included:   “There was blood upon the risers; there were brains upon the chute.  His intestines were a-hangin’ from his paratrooper’s boots…”  The chorus went: “Gory, gory, what a hell-of-a way to die…” etc. The harassment also included instructors screaming in our faces from a half-inch away and demanding instant obedience to any and all commands.  I saw an instructor spit in the sand and tell a trainee to pick it up, which he did along with a handful of sand.  Then he was told to put it in his pocket, which he immediately did.  No real harm done, but you lose your ego fast, which is the point.  When jumping from a real airplane, whether in training or in combat, it is critical to obey commands instantly and completely.  Those who can’t do that identify themselves and drop out of Jump School.  Of course, it is easier if you are only 18 years old and not inclined to question authority, anyway.

The purpose of jumping from the 34-foot tower on the cable was to get us accustomed to standing in the door properly, jumping on command, and assuming the proper body positioning in the air (elbows in, head tucked, etc.) I remember the instructors amused themselves with a young man named Finnegan, who had red hair, a baby face, and lots of freckles.  He looked about ten years old!  In his first jump he did something incorrectly, so was sent right back up ahead of the others in the queue.  The instructor up in the tower evidently told him that when asked to shout his name he was to yell “Master Blaster Finnegan, Sir!”  A master blaster is a grizzled veteran who has more than 125 jumps – way more than any person gets in three years during peace time.  Well, we all laughed in spite of ourselves, and the instructor on the ground pretended to have an angry fit, and when Private Finnegan got down to the ground he was subjected to additional ridicule.  As I recall, he took it in stride and graduated from Jump School with the rest of us who stuck it out.

Medical science was still in the Dark Ages in 1962, at least in the Army.  They would keep us out in the hot sun for four hours or so between meals, and the only water available was from a “lister bag” that hung down vertically and was loaded with salt at the bottom where the spout was.  It tasted like salt water, which it was, and really discouraged consumption.  Then we went through the chow line and were required to take two salt tablets before we could get any food.  Modern science established at least by the late 1960’s and the first running boom in America that the working body supplies its own salt; what it needs is water.  No one in the long distance running community takes salt supplements; they take water and maybe some electrolytes.

One other indictment of Army Medicine is that they almost disqualified me on the basis of low blood pressure.  My blood pressure has registered on the low side for my age ever since.  But at the time, I didn’t know I had this tendency, and of course did not know what the ramifications might be, if any.  Fortunately a higher-level medical professional made the determination that I was physically qualified to be a paratrooper.  Years later I asked my civilian doctor if there was any significance to having low blood pressure.  He just shrugged and said, “It means you have less chance of ever having high blood pressure.”  My blood pressure has crept up over time, but is still on the low side for my age.  This just in…November 15, 2013: at a routine Kaiser visit my blood pressure was 102 over 57, and my resting heart rate was 54!  Wow!

Many of the guys in Jump School could say that the first time they were ever in an airplane, they jumped out of it!  I could almost say that.  My first flight was from Fort Dix to Fort Benning.  We jump three times during jump week.  A lot of the guys worried about breaking a leg or something on landing.  I just worried about the chute opening.  I had a lot of confidence in my athleticism and ability to apply the techniques we were taught about landing properly and safely.  Besides, broken bones were not fatal, but malfunctioning chutes could very well be.  I was fond of saying that when that chute opened, it was the most beautiful skirt I ever looked up!

They issued us chutes at the airfield, never the same one twice.  In Jump School I didn’t have the common sense to wonder: Where do these chutes come from?  Who packed them?  What was the quality control procedure?  During my tour of duty in Germany I learned to wonder:  What if there was a disgruntled soldier or a crazy person who deliberately “rigged” some chutes not to open, and I got one of them?  We heard rumors and stories about that sort of thing – probably untrue.  I noticed that the beer hall was very quiet the night before a scheduled jump, but very boisterous the night after a jump. 

We were taught how to use our small emergency chutes, but it was all theory; there was no practical way to practice.  Also, we understood that if we landed using only the reserve chute, we would be coming down too fast, and there were going to be some broken bones.  The reserve chutes could not be designed big enough to provide the slower descent that would help keep us from being hurt.  A complication was that a malfunctioning chute seldom completely failed to open.  Rather, it opened incorrectly, causing us to drop too fast for safety but not fast enough to permit complete reliance on the reserve chute.  In fact, if you were not careful in deploying the reserve chute, it would get tangled up with the partially opened main chute and possibly do more harm than good.

Malfunctioning main chutes usually took one of two forms: The “cigarette roll” or the “Mae West.”  The latter is easier to visualize: a shroud line accidently loops over the canopy as it deploys, forming what looks like a giant bra and causing you to drop too fast.  The cigarette roll is long and narrow.  For some reason, the canopy never inflates and you drop way too fast.  In either case, the paratrooper needs to keep his wits about him, open the reserve chute carefully and feed out small portions of the canopy material until it catches the air and starts to billow properly.  If he panics and just pulls the handle the reserve chute probably will get tangled up with the malfunctioning main chute and possibly speed up the descent, rather than slow it down.  Common sense or not, I mentally rehearsed many times, but never knew if I would be patient and careful enough, if I found myself plunging toward the earth and only had a matter of seconds to do it right.  Guess I’ll never know!

One other thing to worry about is dropping a bit faster than someone right below you, and ending up standing on their canopy hundreds of feet off the ground.  It slows you down and your chute starts to collapse.  That only happened to me once.  It was a helpless feeling as I tried to push off from his canopy and get away from him.  But we drifted apart as magically as we had drifted together and all ended well.  All together I had about 21 jumps, including the three in Jump School.  When I was assigned to an infantry company within our brigade, I jumped at least once per month.  But after I was transferred to Headquarters Company, I only jumped once every three months, the minimum required to remain eligible for jump pay.  I found, by the way, that it was a lot scarier to jump once every three months than more routinely.  As with many things, the more frequently you do it, the less traumatic.

I lost several teeth in the Army.  They died of natural causes, I think.  I was cursed with lousy teeth.  My mother said it was because she had scarlet fever and had to take sulfur drugs during her pregnancy with me.  I don’t know if that was it, or not.  A hygienist commented recently that “It’s as if your teeth are made of butter,” because small cavities become big cavities so quickly for me.  I suspect that the Army dentists were inclined to take the easy way out and pull teeth, rather than save them.  As with other aspects of Army life as a teenager, I never wondered about the review and quality control process, if any.  One would think that decisions of dentists would be reviewed by an oversight panel or something.  Anyway, several of my teeth were pulled, whether they were “goners” or not.  My first Army root canal, which was my first ever root canal, was rather unique.  The dentist left the opening exposed so it could drain, and he gave me no pain medicine, because he felt there was too much foreign matter in the area as it was.  I had to keep my mouth closed for about a week, as cold air and cold liquids created incredible pain.  No civilian root canal has been like that.

I’m sure it was pain that drove me to the Army dentists, rather than any sense on my part.  The dentists, in turn, were probably the reason I made an appointment for cleaning.  Similar to my approach to the lack of clean underwear, when I went for my first cleaning I didn’t bother to brush my teeth first.  The dental hygienist scolded me soundly in her broken English.  I tried to explain my reasoning: Why bother cleaning my teeth myself, since she was going to do it that day and would no doubt do a better job, anyway? The hygienist said that pieces of food were splattering all over and could even get into her eyes.  Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.

That reminds me of the time we were relocating our group from one building to another on base.  We were given instructions on assembling our foot lockers, bedding and duffle bags, and were told to carry our own bunk beds down the stairs and across the grounds to the new building.  They were single bunks, made of metal but not too heavy for us healthy young men.  I don’t recall whether I hadn’t seen how the other guys were doing it, or what, but I did not think to collapse the legs to make the bunk narrower and easier to navigate down the stairs and out the door.  What I have never forgotten is the sergeant’s colorful yelling as I fumbled and staggered out the door, “expletives deleted, Zades, use your head for something besides a hat rack!”

The beer in Germany was much stronger than what I was accustomed to, and it took me a few months to adjust.  I remember waking up with a mean hangover one morning, and borrowing someone’s electric razor, rather than risk slicing myself up with a regular razor.  After a few seconds I said, “Wow, I am so drunk I’m numb.   I can’t even feel the razor on my skin.  He came over and found that I had not removed the plastic cover on the razor.  How should I know?  I never used an electric razor before. When Tom Harris and I were staying at Mom’s place in Inwood before leaving for California, we found that we could drink seemingly unlimited quantities of American beer and not get much of a buzz at all.  It took a few weeks to make that transition back to weaker beer.  

In the meantime, we also discovered something about those new aluminum cans with the ring tops that you pop open with your thumb.  After a week in the U.S. Tom and I both had mysteriously lacerated thumbs.  We were initially perplexed.  When we had left the U.S. in 1961, beer was still sold in cans that required the old fashioned can opener known to this day as a “church key,” for some reason.  Evidently, our thumbs needed to adjust to American beer just as our systems did.  In Germany, by the way, beer was sold in large bottles with a stopper-type close operated by popping a hinge with both thumbs at the same time.  We called them “pop tops.”

We were encouraged but not required to stay on the base on the weekends.  To encourage us to stay on base we were given ample access to great, strong German beer for 15 cents per bottle.  And many weekends they had 2 for 1 night, and even nickel night, where we could drink ourselves silly for less than a dollar.  They didn’t want us taking the bottles to our rooms, but we found that if you removed the liner from your helmet, it would hold 5 to 6 bottles of beer, which you could then carefully carry to the room where the guys were gathering.  I think we would dip our canteen cups into the helmet to scoop out a mug of beer.  Each of us had a helmet, so we maintained a steady supply of beer by taking turns going back to the beer hall and filling another one up and bring it back to the room.

Some Saturdays or Sundays we would sit around with copious amounts of beer and amuse ourselves by listening to our own voices and the funny things that were said.  Tape recorders were a fairly new novelty for us in the early 1960s.  One time we had two tape recorders, and we would record ourselves on one as we played back and laughed at the other one.  One of the guys set up a gag where, when he turned on the recorder, he had one of the other guys say, “(Expletive deleted), lady, you’re big enough to play with the Green Bay Packers!”  Whereupon he said, in a Scandinavian woman’s accent, “Ooh, no…I only play with Ollie’s pecker!”  None of us were expecting that, and the room just erupted with our laughter.  Then he played that one back to us and the other guy taped us as we laughed even more hysterically…laughing at ourselves laughing at the joke.  Well, the first guy recorded us laughing at ourselves laughing…you can see where this is going.  We sat there drinking that strong German beer, playing those tapes back and forth, rolling on the floor with laughter, tears streaming down our cheeks.  That may have been the highlight of my 2 ½ years in Germany, come to think of it.

Installment # 49

As I was descending, what I saw reminded me of pictures I had seen of race cars trying to come to a stop at the end of a race by deploying those little parachutes out the back end of the car.  I soon realized I was seeing soldiers who had landed being dragged across the ground at frightening speeds, unable to release their chutes.  My only previous jumps were the three during the 3^rd week of jump school, and there hadn’t been any wind those times, so this was a spectacle I had no expectation of seeing.  Skipping my GI vocabulary at the time, I thought the equivalent of:  “Oh, my.  I am in for a rough time.”

We were taught in jump school how to land and roll onto our backs and hit the large release button that was located in the middle of our chests.  I hadn’t given it any thought at the time, but the release mechanism was designed not to open accidentally during descent.  I guess the resistance of the deployed chute made it difficult to pop open, even intentionally.  Well, that is why the guys were being dragged across the drop zone and not releasing their chutes, though I didn’t figure that out until I was one of them.  I remember being rudely thrown face down and dragged as soon as my feet hit the ground and the resistance began to diminish from the deployed chute.  The drop zone was just unplanted farmers’ fields, with rows of ruts and rocks.  Here I was, face down, trying to slow myself down with my hands, trying to keep the dirt out of my face, bouncing and jarring over these ruts and rocks, trying to roll over on my back so I could try to activate the release button.

The equipment that we wore, including backpacks, rifles, canteens, ammo belt, etc, made it almost impossible to roll over while being dragged like that.  I must have hit a bump or something and gone airborne for a second and was able to flip over.  Once on my back it took what seemed like forever to release the chute.  Again, I didn’t understand until later how the mechanism was not supposed to operate easily if there was the resistance of the chute being opened and filled with air.  I finally hit a lull in the wind at the same time that I was hitting the button, and chute released from one shoulder.  That was enough to stop it, and I was soon able to get to my feet. 

I think every fingernail was broken or caked with dirt.  While being dragged on my back, my helmet was digging into the back of my neck as I bounced from rut to rut.  I had cuts and lacerations for weeks afterward that I thought might leave permanent scars – but they didn’t.  It was later that day that we found our platoons and I had the privilege of digging that foxhole.  For the next couple of weeks back on base I remember seeing a lot of guys with neck braces or arms slings or walking with a limp.  I never heard who made the decision to go ahead with the jump.  I wouldn’t think the dignitaries were terribly impressed with what must have looked like organized chaos.

It seems like we would spend a week or so “in the field” two or three times per year.  Even though that must have included summertime, I always remember being cold.  One of the purposes of field training was to get us accustomed to using all our gear.  We would take these heavy duffle bags with us, stuffed with changes of clothes, etc, and there were times when I think I was wearing everything that I had brought, plus had the empty duffle bag pulled up around my waist or chest as high as it would go.  It was here that I first heard the term, the “angry inch”.  We were commiserating about the unique difficulty in trying to “take a leak,” if you will, outdoors – particularly in the dark -  through 5-6 inches of clothing with something that has been shriveled to almost nothing by the cold.   If you are not careful, and make your inner clothes wet in that area, you are going to be even more miserable than before.  And our little fellows didn’t much like being brought forth into the freezing cold, hence the “angry inch.” 

I used to mumble that I had left New York because I hated the cold, and then I ended up spending 3 winters in Germany!  We used to say that Germany had 3 weeks of summer, and the rest was bad weather.  I will say, though, that I learned to trust my equipment.  One time I had to sleep on the ground out in the open.  I slipped into my sleeping bag in the pitch dark, then fumbled around and got by boots off and left them in the bottom of the bag near my feet.  Then I slipped out of my heavy overalls, as my body heat started to warm things up.  In the morning I poked my head out of the sleeping bag just enough to look around and saw that it had snowed.  I was lying on the frozen ground in the snow, and was “snug as a bug in a rug,” as the saying goes.  I always appreciated my equipment after that!

The great deprivation of being in the field for 5-7 days or so was trying to have a bowel movement (“BM”) on a regular basis.  We mainly had C-Rations to eat (now called “meals ready to eat” or MREs).  These were packed into tins, and none of us knew what they were really made of.  The consistency was similar to spam, or today’s canned pet foods.  Having never been too particular about what I ate, I didn’t see this as a great deprivation, but the impact of such a diet on my “regularity,” if you will, was a real problem.  I would become constipated; try to squat at length with my bare bottom hanging out in the freezing cold, unable to go; become more constipated, yet hungry again; so more C-Rations: it was a true vicious cycle. 

I remember the time we finally got back to the barracks, and I thought all I had to do was sit in the relative warmth and comfort of the commode for as long as it took to “break up the log jam,” so to speak.  After several lengthy “no go” sessions, I started to make some progress when I realized that the feeling was literally like trying to pass a large cube-shaped object, about the size of a frozen solid ice cube.  It wasn’t cold, but it was that shape and size.  There were beads of sweat on my forehead; my legs had fallen asleep from sitting there; I was hanging onto the pipes, and my face was contorted with pain as I worked away on my project.

Did I mention that there were no stalls in the bathrooms?  There was just a row of some 6-8 commodes – no privacy.  A guy could come back for a second pee, glance over in surprise and ask, “Are you still here?”  I don’t know what child birth feels like, but this must be pretty close!  There is an expression, “Nervous as a pigeon shittin’ peach pits.”  I can relate!  For years thereafter I found that my BM system would go through a cycle of: constipation – normalcy – diarrhea – normalcy - and back to constipation about every 28 days, just like a menstrual cycle (which I have never experienced, either).  For many years now, however, family members have known that I could be counted on to disappear into the bathroom shortly after every meal and sometimes between meals, usually with some success.  But in the early years of our courting I recall being in the middle of eating dinner at Sandy’s parents’ house and having to jump up and run to the bathroom.

At the other extreme, I recall visiting Mom in Vermont when the kids were little, and spending an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom to no avail.  With the rights and privileges granted to her as my mother, she of course had to make inquiries and then advise me that I was going to give myself hemorrhoids and other problems if I continued to sit and strain for such long periods of time on the pot.  I think I did more waiting than straining, but in any case I tried to heed her advice.  I’ve read that, in terms of frequency of bowl movements, there is no “normal.”  There are averages, but no “normal.”  Therefore, I am not abnormal, only above average.  I suppose, dear reader, that you could have gone your whole life without this information and not felt any loss of knowledge. 

I just wanted to include some of the main ways in which my 3 years in the Army impacted the rest of my life.  So I guess I might add that a lot of us in the Army had some serious bouts of bleeding, painful hemorrhoids.  When Johnny Cash’s hit song, “Ring of Fire”, came out, we had an additional way to describe the condition!  After awhile I realized the kinds of activities that were causing them, such as sitting on cold and/or hard surfaces, like the bed of a truck or bleacher benches for extended periods during training.  In civilian life I have had occasional, mild reminders and have thus managed to avoid the situations that cause hemorrhoids.

If I may jump back to Fort Dix, I spent the eight weeks of Advanced Infantry Training, after Trainee Leadership School, dreading ever running into those sergeants again.  I heard through the grapevine how hurt some of them were.  One confided that he had fought to keep me in the leadership program, because the other instructors thought I was too young and immature…and that was the thanks he got.  I didn’t have the common sense to see the wisdom of taking the high road; of trying to spread goodwill; of trying to help someone in their career; of expressing appreciation and respect, instead of the opposite.  It never occurred to me, either, that these evaluations remained in their records, and that it mattered to them, because they were career military - Lifers.

In AIT we received training with hand grenades.  They were non-explosive, except for one drill at the end of the week.  But we were to use all safety precautions in training, whether the grenades were live or not.  One of those basic precautions was wearing our helmets.  Sure enough, on the day of training with live grenades, I showed up without my helmet.  It was so cold that day that I was wearing a beanie with ear flaps and strings to tie at the chin.  I had taken my helmet off during a bumpy jeep ride and left it on the seat in the jeep.  With the beanie on, I could not feel that I did not have my helmet on.  I showed up for live grenade training, as a platoon leader, completely unaware that I was not wearing my helmet.  The sergeant made a big to-do about informing me of my lapse, and when I reached up with shock and fear on my face to confirm his statements, the entire platoon laughed themselves silly at my expense.

If I had heard the saying by then, maybe I would have pointed out that “everybody is good for something, even if it is a bad example,” or as I recently read, “My purpose in life often seems to be to serve as a warning to others.”

My memories of Jump School in Fort Benning are somewhat antidotal.  It started with them calling the roll and pronouncing my name “Zandez,” (rhymes with ‘Sanchez’.)    I was thought to be absent for a long while before someone read my name tag and asked if that could be me.  I was accustomed to people making a two-syllable word out of Zades, but no one had ever inserted an ‘n’ in it.  The sergeant was not impressed with the fact that someone who had never seen my name before figured it out before I did.

Jump School consisted of three weeks.  The first week was called “ground week,” the second was called “tower week,” and the third week was called “jump week.”  Ground week was all physical training and attempts at breaking our resolve through taunts and insults. During the second week we jumped out of 34-foot towers on cables, and we were released from 250-foot lifts to free-fall with open parachutes.  The third week we actually jumped from airplanes.  At the end of the first week there was a PT test, similar to the one I aced in Boot Camp.  But this time, there was a cut-off, below which the candidate would wash out of Jump School.  I probably didn’t need to do this, but I faked illness and said I was constipated the day before the PT test in order to be well-rested and not sore from the day’s training.

I actually was constipated, and they gave me a bottle of something to take a little at a time over a 24-hour period.  I recall being all alone in the barracks, sitting on the pot, sipping this medicine and trying to have a bowel movement.  Nothing was happening, and I ended up drinking the whole bottle in about 2 hours.  Of course, I was up and on the pot numerous times during the night, and arrived drained and exhausted for the PT test the next morning.  I did pass, but I certainly did not do my best that day.

During ground week they had us running with no shirts on in the hot Georgia sun.  I remember seeing a black soldier ahead of me who appeared to “foaming at the mouth” from under his armpits.  Knowing very little about black people, I thought something weird like that must be happening.  I had come to know some young black men in Fort Dix, but it was so cold there, I never saw one sweating with no shirt on.  Years later, when I had finally started using deodorant, it dawned on me that that is what was creating what appeared to me to be foam.  I went from feeling superior to realizing that he was the one who was civilized enough to use deodorant, and I was not. 

Throughout my three years in the Army I did not use deodorant.  I thought that was a bunch of marketing malarkey; if I showered on a regular basis, why should I need deodorant?  It was decades later that I realized that my sense of smell is quite poor.  I think I started using deodorant shortly after I was married, to be polite and to help avoid unsightly underarm sweat stains.  It wasn’t common sense: Living with a woman was beginning to civilize me! 

There was a period of weeks when I first arrived at my assignment in Germany that I did not take any showers.  At the end of the first week we were instructed to deliver our dirty laundry, with our names on the laundry bags, to a central collection point, to be picked up all clean a few days later. In the States they must have issued us laundry bags with our names stenciled on them, or something.  I paid no attention to the instruction about putting our names on them…I would recognize my own bag and contents, surely.  Little did I realize how many units were being serviced by the central laundry facility!  There was no way for my unmarked bag to be returned to my unit for me to recognize and claim.

The story gets worse.  It was several weeks before payday.  I had no money to replace my underwear.  My little pea brain thought: What is the sense of showering, when I have to put on the same underwear and socks that I was wearing and sweating in yesterday? This went on for two or three weeks, until I could buy new underwear and socks.  The men around me may have tried to drop hints, but I was not picking up any signals.  Surely I could have borrowed a few dollars and took care of it right away.  Maybe I kept hoping that my laundry bag would show up and I wouldn’t need to spend my scarce resources on more underwear.  (I never wasted money on that phony deodorant stuff).  If I want to blame any of this on my upbringing, our place in Inwood, where we lived the last year or so before my induction, had a tub but no shower.  I hadn’t taken a bath since I was little, so didn’t get around to it very often as a teenager.  Yikes!

With similar pea brain logic in the Army, I used to crush my cigarette butts out on the floor and leave them there, instead of using the butt cans that were tacked to the posts, explaining that we had to sweep the floor every morning, anyway, so what’s the difference?  In this case the men around me actually were dropping hints, but I thought they were just not thinking things through far enough.

I remember being assigned to a crew to clean up the bathrooms.  These were large rooms with lots of urinals, commodes, sinks and tile floors.  We had soaped up the floor and I was trying to rinse it off with hot water.  I remember one of the guys spoke to me like I was a moron: Didn’t I know that hot water only made more suds?  Didn’t I know enough to use cold water?  Actually, I didn’t.  I think it was years later that I learned that when we heat water we change its properties.  The molecules start moving a lot faster, and this makes a difference in how water interacts with soap.  At the time, I just had to “go along with the gag” and use cold water to rinse the soap off the floor.

That reminds me of the time I was brushing my teeth next to someone at a row of sinks in the bathroom (latrine, as the Army calls it).  He admonished me for using warm water instead of cold water to brush my teeth.  He said, “You’re not a child anymore.  You don’t need to use warm water!”  I promptly started using cold water thereafter, thinking it made a difference, just like soap suds on the floor.  But I soon learned from the Army dentist that my gums were sensitive to cold, because of the condition my teeth were in.  I then went back to warm water, and could explain if anyone asked.  It never occurred to me to wonder why some other guy would even notice, let alone feel compelled to admonish me about the temperature of the water I was using to brush my teeth.  Maybe his parents taught him that there is only one way to properly brush one’s teeth, and he was just passing on this “wisdom” to me.  The guy on the bathroom cleanup crew had said, “I thought you were supposed to be so smart!”  I thought of my IQ score in basic training, but wondered how in the world he would know anything about that.  I guess word of mouth information precedes a new guy coming in to a unit.  They want to know what to expect.

It wasn’t long before I was transferred to the Headquarters group.  I might not know how to mop floors, but my facility with the English language separated me from the pack, plus I had learned to type in high school.  Come to think of it, maybe I was not a very good “fit” in my infantry squad.  Not only was I happier, but so were the guys I was leaving.

But to return to Jump School for a bit, the drop-out rate was very high.  Some dropped out during ground week due to the grueling pace in the hot climate; some after failing the PT test.  More dropped out during tower week: If it is this scary to jump under these controlled circumstances, how scary is it to jump from a moving airplane at 1,250 feet?  I recall one of the men asking me how often I thought about dropping out.  To my credit (or lack of common sense), I was taken aback by the question.  I told him honestly that the thought had never entered my head.  There is probably a success principle involved there somewhere.  It was similar with my marriage.  We had no “back door” or “plan B” in case it didn’t work out.  The thought never entered our heads, despite those “dropping out” around us.

Installment # 48

After the 8-week basic training course, most of the men stayed in Fort Dix for Advanced Infantry Training (AIT).  I was sent to Trainee Leadership School first, and served as a platoon leader when I eventually got to AIT.  Unfortunately, that meant losing contact with virtually all of the guys I knew from Basic Training.  It also delayed my arrival at Jump School in Fort Benning, Georgia, until May of that year (1962).  It was really hot!  A month or two earlier would have been much better.  More on that later.

I was only 18 and looked about 14 when I accepted the assignment as platoon leader at AIT.  Regardless, I told everyone I was 22 in hopes of gaining some acceptance as their leader.  I had a New York State driver’s license which I had previously doctored up to show my birthday as February 29, 1940, instead of 1944.  I had done that so the bartenders would serve me.  The legal drinking age in New York at that time was 18, so I was passing for 20 when I was 16.  Actually, the bartenders just wanted to be able to protest their innocence if they were accused of serving a minor.  They really didn’t care if I was 12, as long as I could pay for my beer and maybe attract other young people to their clubs. I don’t know whether any of the trainees ever believed I was 22, but I stuck to my story.  I don’t remember how well or poorly I did as a platoon leader, but I got through it.  Common sense would indicate that they thought I was a joke.  The “Army way” was always a joke, so that fit.

I do recall that at the end of Trainee Leadership School we were asked to complete brief evaluations of each of the instructors.  I must have thought I would never see these instructors again, because I chose this opportunity to give vent to my petty prejudices – not racial, but intellectual.  In those days of the military draft, most of the people who were making a career out of the military (“Lifers” we called them) were noticeably lacking in literacy.  For example, one of the verbal instructions for completing the evaluations included: “If you think the man ain’t wuf a shit, you put down ‘ain’t wuf a shit.’”  I suppose growing up white on Long Island did nothing to prepare me for southern accents, or for the expressions of the black ghetto.  I still snicker over the use of “onliest” to mean “only.”  For example, “This man is the onliest one who followed the instructions.”

That, in turn, reminds me of the fellow who came staggering back to the barracks late one night literally bouncing off one wall, wobbling across and bouncing off the other wall, heading in the general direction of his bunk, announcing proudly that the bartender had said that he was “the onliest man to ever drink an octopus and an old tennis shoe in one night and walk away.”  I never knew, but I’m guessing that an octopus has equal parts of 8 different kinds of liquor.  Old tennis shoe?  No idea, but it sounds nearly fatal if swallowed. 

In my permanent airborne unit in Germany the sergeants liked to use the term “airborne” to indicate anything that was the best or the toughest, etc.  A favorite example of mine is how the instruction, “Get a good grip on it,” became, “Get you a good airborne holt to it.”  They were totally serious!  I remember in Basic Training how one of the sergeants with a heavy Spanish accent had us out on a cold, windy day learning to respond to marching orders.  Between his accent and the wind whipping past the microphone, we couldn’t understand much of what he was saying, and he didn’t seem to realize it.  He would bark a command and we would do a variety of things, depending on what each of us thought he meant.  It must have looked hilarious from where he was standing, although to him I’m sure it was more of a horror than a comedy. 

My favorite is when he barked what sounded like “Left Face!” and we all executed a left face.  He then proceeded to lecture us with: “Do not anticipate the command!”  He explained that what he had said was “Left Fish” and that we should not have executed anything.  It took us awhile to even understand the point he was trying to make, and I don’t think he ever understood that we weren’t anticipating the command; we were doing our best to understand it and do it.  I never forgot the incident, because it was so comical.  With his accent, he was the last person who should have been trying to make that point, and outdoors on a cold and windy day was the worst place to try to make it.  As I matured I realized that the sergeant was no doubt being evaluated on how well he conducted the training session, and he wasn’t doing very well.

The individuals who conducted the various training sessions were called “cadre,” and I think they were all sergeants or above.  The first level of sergeant (3 stripes) was E-5.  A private first class (PFC) was E-3 (1 stripe).  During my time in Germany an E-4 was called a Specialist, for some reason.  A corporal (2 stripes) was also an E-4, but I think the only way one became a corporal, at least during peace time, was to be busted down from an E-5.  I was a PFC for nearly all of my time in Germany, but finally was promoted to E-4 a few months before discharge.  I think it was worth $25 per month to be promoted to E-4, but I guess I was not much of a soldier: young, bad attitude, clueless, etc.  I could have used that money, though!  We were paid once per month in cash.  We would line up in alphabetical order, so I would be back at the end of the line with the Williams’ and Zimmerman’s of the world, hoping they didn’t run out of money before they got to me (they never did).  I used to watch the loan sharks milling around the exit door, collecting from the guys who owed them money as they came out the door.

I was pretty good about not running out of money too early in the month, and not borrowing to spend on things I didn’t need.  If I did need to borrow $10 or so, it would just be for a few days, from a friend who would not charge me interest.  The loan sharks charged some serious interest, and preyed upon guys who got themselves into a hole and couldn’t get out.  Of course, with interest, once you found yourself handing over most of your pay envelope on pay day, you had some 29 days to go with almost no money, so you were always in the hole and, with interest, it kept getting worse.  I suppose the guys who got themselves into such a mess were maybe guys with a gambling addiction or something, and no friends or relatives who could or would help them.

They also gave us medical injections in alphabetical order, so I would watch the guys exiting, holding their arms, blood dripping down in some cases, and appearing (probably pretending) to be in pain.  There were always a few guys who started to feel faint while waiting in line and would need to go sit down.  I think they felt too lousy to be embarrassed, but the rest of us would generally snicker and kid about them.  That is probably where I learned to handle shots, mentally.  They used to have us take our fatigue shirts off as we entered the door and proceed to the first pair of medics, standing one on each side of us.  For these mass-injection sessions they would use something that looked like guns, instead of needles, press them against our skin at the shoulder or triceps level, and shoot almost simultaneously on both sides.  We would then step up to the next pair of medics and receive another shot on each side.  There might be a third pair, depending on what the doctors had ordered. 

The guns looked less intimidating to me than the needles, but they hurt worse.  In my usual naiveté it didn’t occur to me to wonder how qualified or well-trained these so-called medics were.  Anyway, to this day I have no qualms about receiving shots.  Including all the dental work I have had done over the years, I have remarked on more than one occasion that if I had as many needles sticking out of me as have been stuck into me over the years, I would look like a porcupine. 

The cadre in basic training and in the military in general seemed to have one set formula for giving presentations or teaching: 1) Tell them what you are going to say; 2) say it; 3) tell them what you said.  It sounded organized, yet “squeezed” very little information into a lot of time.  The result seemed to be: “Now you can’t say I didn’t tell you.”  We learned to disassemble and reassemble our weapons; learned the names of all the parts, and when it came to maintaining our equipment, it seems that everything could benefit from putting a light coat of oil on it.  They were sticklers on not calling a rifle a “gun.”  If you were overheard doing so, you were ordered to stand in front of the group and with appropriate hand gestures recite: “This is my rifle; this is my gun.  This is for fighting; this is for fun.”  I have to admit, that was an effective deterrent to using the wrong nomenclature.

Something else I learned in Basic Training that helped me throughout my three years was to keep a low profile.  It started with learning the technique of turning my torso slightly away from the drill sergeant, so that he couldn’t read my name tag.  My name was a little intimidating, anyway, until one learned how simple it was to pronounce.  They were often looking for “volunteers” to perform some distasteful task or another, like dig a latrine or “police up” some debris on the parade grounds, or something.  They would simply call off some names they could see from name tags, say to step forward, then say “You men just volunteered to do…” whatever it was.  While the rest of us were inside out of the wind and cold, the “volunteers” were outside doing something and cursing their luck under their breath.  Another piece of advice I never forgot, probably because of the poetic way in which it was said was “If you ain’t gonna do shit, don’t say shit.”

In my day, in the early 1960s, our civilian government representatives had very little power to protect us from unfair treatment.  My basic conclusion, even at the time, was that the Army owned me; they could do whatever they wanted with me; I was basically powerless to do anything about it; and this would continue to be the case until I was officially discharged and became a private citizen again.  If in the interim I was court-martialed and thrown in jail for something (guilty or not) I could rot there forever.  That may not have been entirely true, depending on who my congressman was and what my parents were able to do to bring my case to his attention.  We learned early on that “GI” stands for “government issue.”  Not only were all our clothes and equipment government issue, we ourselves were considered “government issue.”  We were called GIs because they owned us.

Within the first few weeks that I was stationed in Germany we conducted some “war game” training against Denmark’s military, jumping into a drop zone in Denmark, regrouping, and pretending to be making an offensive against them.  I remember how my squad leader (an experienced corporal) and I (a green private) were marching along together when the sergeant muttered something to the corporal, whereupon he and I stopped and he had me digging a foxhole with my “entrenching tool,” as they called.  You try digging a hole wide enough and deep enough, with a portable, collapsible shovel, to serve as a foxhole of any real use!  I worked my butt off for hours on a mid summer’s day, every so often asking, “Is this good enough?”  Meanwhile a few dozen Danish civilians, mainly children, joined the corporal in watching me dig a hole for no apparent reason. 

Long story short, it was getting dark by the time someone from our unit found us and wanted to know what in the blankety-blank we were doing back here.  My experienced, ignorant, lifer squad leader said we were told to drop back for R&R, and he figured that meant “rear reserve,” or “rear reconnaissance,” or something, so we dug a foxhole.  (We nuthin’ - I dug a foxhole (for nothing)).  I couldn’t believe that anybody in the Army didn’t know that R&R meant “rest and relaxation,” or “rest and recuperation” or simply, “Take a break.”  Imagine what it would be like to be led in combat by a bunch of illiterate lifers!

To back up a few hours, I recall that we were reaching the drop zone in a formation of C-130s when the signal came to stand up and get ready to hook up to the static line.  The doors opened, which was always a literal breath of relief (fresh air), but then they closed again and we were told to sit back down.  We learned later that it was considered too windy and that they were considering calling off the jump.  But the Danish dignitaries and others assembled around the drop zone had been standing and waiting for an hour or so, so the decision was made to go ahead with the jump.  We made another pass, and this time we jumped.  

Installment # 47

I used to earn some money caddying, but it started interfering with my lost weekends, so I took my first real job stocking shelves at the local A&P grocery store during the week.  I started at $1.05 per hour, which I didn’t realize was minimum wage until they raised it to $1.25 per hour a month or so later, because the minimum wage was raised.  Actually, I had worked from age 12 (paper route) to age 17 when I joined the Army.  I caddied from age 14 to 17 and worked at the A&P for a few months before enlisting.  When we lived in Massapequa and later rented in Bethpage, I caddied at the Bethpage public golf course.  When we moved to Inwood I caddied at a nearby private country club.  I guess only the pros use caddies these days.  In my day we had a few “cart pullers,” as we derisively called them; hardly anybody used an electric cart.  I don’t recall whether they did not exist or were just too expensive compared to using a caddy. 

At Bethpage I think the minimum was $2.50 or so for one bag.  I do recall that $3 for a single and $6 for a double, including tip, was on the low side, while $4 and $8 was considered good.  Between waiting around in the caddy yard to get out, and then caddying 18 holes, I basically spent all day to earn $6 to $8.  But for a kid with no bills and no responsibilities, that was good.  Cigarettes cost 25 cents a pack in those days, a cheeseburger was 35 cents, and beer was $1.25 a six-pack, so two days of caddying on the weekend set me up pretty good for the week ahead.  The other point, though, is that when some speaker brags that he has worked since he was 12 years old, I can truthfully say, “Well, so did I.”

When I enlisted, I indicated I wanted to be assigned to the Corp of Engineers, where I might learn something useful for eventual civilian employment.  The draft sergeant was of course very accommodating – there was just this minor matter of passing the aptitude test.  What a joke!  A lack of common sense shows up glaringly in an engineering aptitude test.  For some reason, I always remembered one question that I got wrong (out of many):  There was a drawing of a river flowing in a certain direction, going around a bend, and they asked which bank of the river would erode quicker from the constant flow of the water, the one on the inside of the turn, or the outside.  Even if I had never heard of centrifugal force, intuition probably should have led me to see that the outer bank would receive the most force and erosion (“wear and tear” in my vocabulary).  I was probably visualizing rounding first base, heading for second, where you want to keep the turn sharp and not drift out toward the outfield grass.  It slows you down if you allow yourself to drift to the right.  Actually, I don’t know what I was thinking.  Long story short, I was assigned to the infantry (common foot soldier).

I wonder how many Christmas mornings Bobby went ahead and assembled a complex toy while I was still trying to understand the instructions.  When I read instructions, evidently written by a technical person, I get hung up on some of the nomenclature that seems deliberately vague or subject to more than one interpretation.  Just this past weekend I was trying to light a barbeque where the instructions said to light the main one first.  But there were three knobs, all the same size, and none of them labeled “Main.”  I can only guess they meant the middle one.  (I also suspect it doesn’t matter which one you light first).  But why don’t they say “middle one” or else label the correct one “Main”?   And then there are assembly instruction words like “grommet.”  Where in the world did they come up with a word like that to describe some little thing?  Even a word like “washer” can distract me.  We know what it means to wash something.  We have washing machines and washrooms, but why would a little round thingy be called a washer?  What were they thinking?  Then the instructions say that before starting, I should match the pictures and descriptions of all of the parts against the bag of parts that came in the box.  I have to go by the pictures, since none of the words were included in my high school reading assignments.

When I first saw the wide-spread, out-in-the-open use of “the male end” and “the female end” to describe various hardware items, I was scandalized.  I glanced around the store to see if there were women and children in the same aisles as me.  (There were!). I’m pretty sure this would never have been allowed back in my parents’ day.  Women probably don’t even blush now when they take such items to the checkout counter, or when they ask for help finding the “male/female adapter.” The instructions also tell me to read all of the warnings, and to read all the instructions all the way through before beginning.  I suspect that if something goes wrong and I have to return the product, they are going to look me in the eye and ask, “Well, did you read the instructions all the way through to the end, including the safety warnings?”  If I say “Yes,” they may test me on the spot and know that I am lying.  Alas, the world of inanimate objects always had it in for me. I am much more comfortable in the world of ideas than in the world of physical objects. 

A little off the subject but in a similar vein, it really bugs me that so many written advertisements have what I call “undefined asterisks.”  A recent one was a cruise with “from $7,899* double occupancy.”  Nowhere was this * defined or discussed.  This is so common place that I suspect we have all come to accept that it is like a ‘wink’ that says something like: “We, the advertiser, and you, the consumer, both know that the conditions under which this price applies are so onerous and unlikely that you can count on paying more than this.  Our lawyers insisted that we put this * in to avoid legal exposure caused by anyone who actually believes that this price has meaning.”

I also pay way more attention than I should to advertising slogans partly because I am aware that the advertiser has paid an agency maybe millions of dollars for their ideas and for the air time and they come up with things like these actual advertising slogans from the 1950s: “Ivory Soap: 99 and 44 100^th percent pure,” or “It floats.”  Cigarettes: “LSMFT – Lucky Strike means fine tobacco.”  Morton’s Salt: “When it rains it pours.”  That’s it?  Do these things mean anything?  The message I get is that they have no real value proposition or way to differentiate themselves from the competition, so they are saying something that is literally true, but makes no difference.  Are we supposed to make the mental leap that other brands of cigarettes do not use fine tobacco? By the way, does “fine” mean high quality or finely ground? 

Then there are advertisements for products like gasoline or detergents that say that there are “none better.”  That of course leaves the possibility (the literal probability) that there are several competing products that do equally well – just none that do better.  What about products that say they do “more” or “better”, but they never say more or better than what!  The implication is that they do more or better than their competition, but they are not saying that. (They probably would be sued or fined if they did).  I remember when Avis started advertising, “We are #2, but we try harder.”  Harder than who or what?  The implication, again, is that they try harder than whoever is #1 (and we all knew that Hertz was #1).  But of course they wouldn’t say that.  The targets of the advertising (us) brought our own assumptions to questions like: #1 or #2 as measured by what? In what way does Avis try harder?  Is it noticeable?  Does it benefit me?  Oh, the curse of having a literal mind!

Young people have never been bombarded with television ads encouraging them to smoke and drink.  In my day, TV presented these glamorous women and macho men enjoying their cigarettes and recommending that we do the same.  Smoking was made to seem not only acceptable, but highly desirable.  It was the same with whiskey.  These wealthy-looking, intelligent-looking, sophisticated-looking men and women made the drinking of hard liquor seem like a really smart thing to do.  The scene was as far away as possible from the image of the wino waking up in the gutter, which is where whiskey will lead some people.  In the 1950s and 1960s, cigarette brands were frequently sponsors of television programs that ran in prime time. One of the most famous television jingles of the era came from an advertisement for Winston cigarettes. The slogan "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should!" proved to be catchy. Another popular slogan from the 1960s was "Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch!" which was used to advertise Tareyton cigarettes.

America's first regular television news program, Camel News Caravan, was sponsored by Camel Cigarettes and featured an ashtray on the desk in front of the newscaster and the Camel logo behind him. The show ran from 1949 to 1956. The ban on liquor advertisements is actually a voluntary ban by the major TV networks and their local affiliates.  Industry watchdogs are still saying that it would be a mistake to start treating distilled drinks as just another commodity to be sold on-screen, since they have a greater concentration of alcohol than beer or wine and pack a stronger punch. But we are seeing more and more exceptions creep in, such as for Jack Daniels Whiskey, Bailey’s Irish Cream, and Seagram products. 

There were about 250 “men” in boot camp with me in Fort Dix, New Jersey, in the fall of 1961 and winter of 1962. I say “men” because that is what they called us, but we looked and felt so young it was almost laughable.  I am very proud of the fact that I had the highest score in the PT (physical training) test among the 250 or so, and also that I earned the expert badge in the light machine gun.  In 2012 (fifty years later), I placed the PT high score trophy on Justin’s dresser in High River.  The expert badge seems to have disappeared. 

Looking back, I see that I won these things by listening to the instructors, understanding and internalizing what they were saying, mentally rehearsing my performances and, perhaps most importantly, not knowing that I couldn’t do it.  I never understood why others did not do the same thing.  I didn’t have the common sense to realize that most of them did not have the mental ability to do so.  It never occurred to me that maybe my high school guidance counselors were right, even after I learned that my IQ score had come in at 132 (not genius, by any means, but considered “gifted”).  Among that group of 250 young men, none of whom would have been considered college material, an IQ score of 132 may have been the highest.

Just to show off for a minute, I recall that there was a lengthy policy or regulation posted on the wall, and for some reason I bragged to one or two of the guys in my immediate bunk area that I could probably memorize the posting in a few minutes and recite it from memory.  They challenged me, and I did it.  They were amazed.  I can still do that, although I am generally too lazy to go to the effort.  I do not have a photographic memory, by any means.  I have to put my mind to it.  Just a few Christmas’ back I wanted to demonstrate to Brianna what our minds are capable of, so we read “The Night Before Christmas” together and I told her that on Christmas Eve I would recite the entire poem from memory.  I did that, and I think her Dad, Jim, was even more impressed than she was.

Installment # 46

I think of the summer of 1961, from the time I graduated from high school until I joined the Army in early November, as “the lost summer.”  Perhaps more accurately, every weekend was a lost weekend, characterized by increasingly wild and irresponsible behavior, culminating in being arrested for disorderly conduct a few weeks before our scheduled induction.  The arrest actually threatened our eligibility for enlistment, but our attorney was able to convince the judge that we were “good kids” who would soon be off the streets, thanks to the Army.  Come to think of it, the judge probably figured that there could be no more appropriate punishment than three years in the Army!  We would probably make for better, more productive citizens after military service than after starting down the road to a life of periodic incarceration.  There is another major, pivotal game-changer in my life!

The arrest took place in New York City.  After a night of beer-drinking we decided to take the train into “The City,” as we called it.  About all I remember of the train ride is that it was crowded and we were standing holding on to those chrome poles and annoying the people around us with our rowdiness, when suddenly we all detected a very foul smell emanating from our midst. We all started blaming Dennis, of course.  As soon as things quieted down and all the passengers were staring in disgust, Dennis turned to a young woman nearby and said, just loud enough for all to hear, “Don’t worry, lady, everyone thinks I did it!”  That may be an old gag now, but hearing it for the first time, under such ideal circumstances, had me laughing so hard it was all I could do to hang on to the pole and stay on my feet until we reached the station we wanted. 

Anyway, compared to the other characters that the judge saw all day in downtown New York City, we probably did seem like “good kids.”  We were white; we were high school graduates; our parents were married (mine separated) and could afford their own attorney.  Dennis’ parents owned their own home on Long Island.  (We had lost ours).  The judge probably hadn’t seen such fine, upstanding citizens in months!  I can tell you that exposure to the penal system was enough to sober me up in more ways than one.  We were only in for one night overnight, not counting the night we were arrested and thrown in the drunk tank, but I never forgot the way I felt during the experience.

The processing in the morning, after very little sleep and a big hangover, was all about standing and waiting and being sneered at by the well-slept, fresh shaved police officers, then following orders regarding finger prints and mug shots.  They took our civilian clothes and gave us prison outfits.  The process was so dehumanizing and frightening.  To this day, I realize how devastating it is to have your freedoms taken away.  Later that morning I remember that we were transported via a police bus with bars on the windows, and as we neared the actual prison I saw my mother standing with Dennis’ parents.   She looked so devastated that her son had reached this low point, and I’m sure she partially blamed herself for not being able to hold her marriage together and provide a secure, loving home life.  At the time, I didn’t see it as her fault at all, and didn’t know how a parent would feel, but I felt like I had really disappointed her big time, and I couldn’t have felt worse about it or about myself.

From the bus, watching people freely walking the streets totally unaware, it seemed to me, how privileged they were to be free, I was mindful of two things: how rotten I felt and how I would never again take for granted the great privilege of being free.  Perhaps that has been one of the key sources of my “attitude of gratitude” that I seem to have had for as long as I can remember.  Some of the events of that summer of 1961 stand out in my mind thanks to my having told and retold the stories a few times, particularly at family gatherings when someone asks to hear them again.

Dennis was two years older than me, so would have been nineteen during our lost summer of 1961.  He had his own car (Oldsmobile convertible), and of course was old enough to buy beer and liquor in the state of New York in those days.  The other guys who hung out with us every weekend were fifteen and sixteen and still in high school.  There were basically four of us: Donald Canarelli (16), Tommy Porter (15), Dennis (Donovan-19) and me (17).  We were often joined by one or two others, but not on a consistent basis.  We would chip in for gas and beer, and Dennis would go in and get us a case or two of beer, depending on our plans.  By the way, we didn’t worry about keeping it cold.  We drank it warm or cold.  It didn’t matter to us.  It was of course illegal to buy beer for minors, and it was actually illegal to drive intoxicated, though you would never have known it that summer.

The Nassau County police were very lenient about that.  At the time, they called it DWI (driving while intoxicated).  I don’t know if they changed it to DUI (driving under the influence), which California has used since I first arrived here.  That does seem more appropriate, at least from a literal standpoint: It should be a lot easier to prove that the driver is under the influence of something (drugs, alcohol, etc.) than to prove the driver is intoxicated.  In fact, signs reading “Report Drunk Drivers” began appearing along the California freeways a few years ago, and when I see one I think, “How the heck am I supposed to know if one of the drivers in one of the cars around me is drunk?”  If he drives erratically, he may be what we are now calling a “distracted driver,” or he may be having a seizure of some kind.  Maybe he just dropped a lit cigarette into his crotch or something.  How do I know?   Now that I think about it, doesn’t the sign really mean, “Fink on each other. If you see someone driving strangely, call us”?

I remember Dennis’ father arguing one time that if you can smell onion on my breath, how do you know whether I have had one onion or ten?  This was in the days before sophisticated measuring equipment.  But many times that summer the police pulled Dennis over, chewed us out, tried to scare us, gave us warnings, and off we went. I am so thankful now that we never hurt anyone with our juvenile behavior.  We did bang the car up a bit, maybe hit a parked car and kept going.  More than once we pulled over and slept for a few hours and waited for daylight.

Eventually the police started to recognize and remember us from previous incidences.  One day we were at a stop light in downtown Farmingdale when we noticed a truck with a long, high bed hauling watermelons.  I’m not sure whether Dennis left the vehicle or just gave us the idea to jump out and get some watermelons.  In any case, some of us climbed up the side of the trailer, reached in over the top, and handed down watermelons to others on the ground.  I remember using the huge tire to climb up, knowing that if the light turned green at the wrong time, I could get seriously hurt.  It’s a good thing seventeen year olds are invincible (NOT).  When the light turned green we were back in the car with our haul, and Dennis drove around to the parking lot in back of the Bohack’s supermarket.  There we found ways to split open the watermelons and each get a few pieces that were so big it took two hands and a lot of messy slurping to eat them.

Leaving the car, we were walking up the sidewalk on Main Street, laughing and enjoying our ill-gotten goods, when we saw a policeman walking towards us.  He looked familiar from previous escapades.  I hurriedly whispered to Dennis and the others to act natural and innocent, mind our own business and walk passed him.  If he asked where we got the watermelons, we would just say we found them in the Bohack’s parking lot.  Surely the theft of the watermelons couldn’t have been reported to the police already.  (No cell phones in those days).  In fact, there were so many watermelons in the truck bed that the driver probably didn’t care about a few being taken by a group of kids.  So that was the plan: We would act perfectly normal, not draw attention to ourselves, and if asked, say we found them.  But ringleader Dennis could not resist.

The closer we got to the policeman the more obnoxious Dennis became in noisily slurping his watermelon and spitting/spraying the pits all over the place – sidewalk, gutter, store entrances, etc.  I was horrified.  Sure enough, the policeman stopped us and asked where we got the watermelons.  I almost passed out when Dennis said, “We stole them off the back of a truck!”  So back to the precinct station we went.  It was beginning to be a weekly ritual.  While the police were taking our names and threatening to call our parents, Dennis had one more prank up his sleeve.  He casually asked, “Did you ever get those guys who were up on the Bohack’s roof last week?”  The policeman came completely unglued, red-faced, stammering, fuming, etc.  Let me explain.

The prior weekend we were cruising around Farmingdale, drinking our beer and looking for something interesting to do, and we ended up in the Bohack’s parking lot.  After a while I noticed the drain pipes and fire escapes and thought it wouldn’t be impossible to climb up onto the roof.  I was the most athletic and I figured once I made it to the fire escape landing I could reach down and help the others get up.  (We would worry about getting down later).  Dennis was the least athletic among us and said he would stand guard out front.  Long story short, it proved to be more difficult than I had thought and we gave up the idea after 15-20 minutes, at which point we could not find Dennis.  His car was still there, but he was gone.

We ended up in a diner right next to the police precinct station, still wondering where Dennis was and how we were going to get home or wherever we were going next.  Presently, one of us noticed that a person in the police station was looking at us through the window and pointing at us wildly.  It was Dennis!  The police came over and got us and took us back to the station, sat us down across from Dennis and asked him questions like, “Did you see some boys walking around on the top of the Bohack’s roof earlier this evening?”, to which Dennis very seriously and soberly replied, “Yes I did, officer.”  Then it was, “Can you identify any of these boys as the ones you saw?” to which Dennis replied, “Yes, sir, I can.”  I could not believe my ears or eyes.  I was absolutely dumbfounded.  Then Dennis pointed straight at me and said, “One of them looked exactly like him, except he was real tall and had long blonde hair.”

It took a few seconds for me to realize what Dennis was doing, but the policeman got it right away, and was just livid.  Then I went into a laughing fit that I couldn’t stop.  Ultimately, the policeman recorded our names and addresses, parents’ names, etc, warned us that we were becoming known to them as troublemakers, tried to get us to understand the seriousness of taking up the police’s time, etc, and then let us go.  Now you can understand the reaction the following weekend when Dennis asked whether they ever got those boys off the Bohack’s roof.

There was a time when 4 or 5 of us were walking along an expressway – don’t know whether Dennis was too young to drive at that time, or what, but a policeman pulled over probably to tell us it was too dangerous to walk along the expressway or something.  After a little sass from us he decided to try to scare us by taking our names.  Tommy Porter, Donald Canarelli and I answered truthfully, but a guy named Johnny Jones was with us, and when he responded the policeman thought he was making up a fake name and became somewhat agitated and threatening.  When we finally convinced him that our friend’s name really was Johnny Jones, he then turned to Dennis.  Actually we all turned to Dennis, thinking that if he would just cooperate we could all be on our way.  But Dennis had had time to think, so he said, “My name is Yahoo Yavanovich!”  Once again, we about died, first of shock and disbelief, then uncontrollable laughter.  The policeman roughed Dennis up a little, mainly trying to scare him, got his real name, told us he might contact our parents, etc. This was before the watermelon and Bohack’s episodes, so our names did not yet ring a bell with him.

Dennis always seemed to start feeling the beer before the rest of us.  It just occurred to me that maybe, unbeknownst to us, he started drinking before he picked us up.  One time we had just arrived at the Jones Beach boardwalk, maybe one beer under our belts, when Dennis started acting up.  We were in one of those penny arcade places playing the ski shoot game, where you roll the wooden balls one at a time and try to land them in the highest-scoring circles.  Dennis started giggling and gathering all of the balls into his arms, yelled for us to follow and took off running down the boardwalk.  When the owner/operator started yelling, one of the uniformed security people started giving chase.  He was not a real policeman, but had authority and carried a baton.

We were about 100 feet ahead of him when Dennis stopped and started rolling the balls down the boardwalk at the security guard, who had to dodge and jump over them to continue his chase.  We were all scared and astonished that Dennis would get us in so much trouble right at the beginning of the evening.  I was thinking that we were going to make a mad dash for his car and get away, when Dennis instead jumped up onto the top rung of the boardwalk railing and shouted, “Don’t come any closer or I’ll jump!”  The drop was about six feet into soft sand, so was a completely farcical threat.  We had to laugh in spite of our fears.

The security guy was understandably furious and pulled Dennis down from the rail, ready to use his baton.  But Dennis knew when the gag was over and became polite and cooperative.  The guard whacked Dennis once and asked him how old he was, to which he responded truthfully, “19.”  I remember that we had no shirts on, and the guard turned to me, whacked me across the belly, and asked, “How old are you?”  I said “17” whereupon he whacked me across the belly again and asked again, “How old?” By that time I realized I needed to say “18”, which I did.  He then turned to Tommy Porter and asked the same question.  I guess Tommy was rattled, because he first said “16” which was false, but not false enough.  After his second question and second whack, he said “17” and after the third whack said “18.”  I think Canarelli had it figured out by then and said “18” as a first response.  He only got one whack.  We had red welts on our bellies that were still visible the next weekend.

We were gradually learning that the police and others in authority really didn’t want to get involved with fairly innocent teen-age pranks, and in those days, incredible as it may seem, underage drinking and driving was considered fairly innocent nonsense to be expected of teen-agers.  But that was on Long Island.  As noted, the New York City police were not amused by our antics.  As best I can recall, Dennis and I got arrested in the City for being our usual Long Island selves.  He did something to get a cop to chase him, and then ran through a restaurant and back into the kitchen.  A Nassau County policeman probably would have let it go, but the NYC policeman gave chase and got quite physical with Dennis.  I ran after Dennis and the cop, bursting into the kitchen in time for the cop to grab me by the front of my shirt and stick my head into a sink of soapy, dirty dishwater.  I came up sputtering, with a wet, ripped shirt, but sobering up enough to realize that I was messing with the wrong policeman.  Tommy Porter and Donald Canarelli had wisely stayed out of the action and were able to let our parents know that we had been arrested.

Dennis and I thought the policeman was really over reacting and that we would be released with a warning, once his sergeant got involved.  Guess not.  While in the drunk tank with a few dozen other sorry looking individuals, Dennis had us all laughing, which the police found quite irritating.  There was a cartoon character in those days called “Potsy, the Fat Cop.”  I remember that there was a policeman walking back and forth outside our cell who looked a lot like the cartoon character.  Of course, every time he walked by Dennis would yell in a high, falsetto voice, “Hey, Potsy!” I don’t know if the policeman understood the reference, but our fellow drunk tank buddies thought it was hilarious, which infuriated the cops.

Dennis had been our unofficial leader for several years.  Back when he was too young to drive or buy liquor he instigated pranks such as stealing outdoor light bulbs from houses before Christmas, and Christmas trees from backyards after Christmas.  In the latter case, the joke was on us, because people were only too happy to be rid of the trees.  Our thrill was jumping over their fences, taunting their dogs, throwing the trees over to our waiting buddies, and getting out before being bitten.  In the case of the light bulbs, the people were rather upset.  We again enjoyed the challenge of getting all the way up to their houses, unscrewing the bulbs, and getting away before they heard us and came after us.  There were some young husbands who could easily catch at least one of us and hurt us badly.  Once we had more light bulbs than we could carry we would start throwing them in the air to hear them make a loud pop on the sidewalk.  This led to throwing them against the sides of houses, and then at passing motorists.

Dennis used to like to get a chase going in an area that we knew how to run through in the dark, but that was treacherous for an uninitiated adult to try to traverse in the dark.  Sometimes they would go back and get a flashlight.  We would be well hidden by then, and Dennis would taunt the man with his high pitched, falsetto voice.  There was a stretch of woods in those days bordering Broadway Avenue in North Massapequa, between Kings Avenue and Queens Avenue.  Dennis showed us how to get two-three boys on each side of Broadway at night and pretend to be holding a rope that we were going to pull taught just as a car approached.  He knew that the driver would see the boys on both the right and left sides of the street in his headlights and think he knew what they were going to do, even though he could not see a rope on the road.  The driver would also know that one or more of us were going to get hurt if we were dumb enough to pull the rope taught and hold on.

At least once per night a driver would be angry enough and have the time to pull over and give chase.  We would let him see us run down one of the streets (Kings or Queens, depending on the direction he was coming from).  But before he reached the corner to follow, we would dart into the woods and run across to the other street.  As the poor guy peered into the woods looking for us, Dennis would yell things like, “Here we are” and “Catch us if you can” in his high-pitched falsetto voice, trying to get a chase.  Often the guy would go back up to Broadway and over to the other street (say from Queens to Kings) and we would run in the dark through the woods from Kings back to Queens, and the taunting would start again.  The man would eventually give up and drive away.  I still remember the sound of Dennis laughing while running, barely able to breathe, but having the time of his life.

We also crashed a lot of home parties that summer of 1961.  Even without the social media of today, word would spread about someone (usually a gullible girl) inviting a few friends over because her parents were going to be gone overnight.  By the end of the night there would be dozens of boys she had never heard of partying and taking irresponsible advantage of the situation, breaking things, making a mess, etc.  We would also, of course, be trying to take advantage of any girls we could.  They were usually not that gullible.  I remember Dennis asking me during a party one night how far I had gotten with one particular girl.  I told him what I had attempted and that she said, “I don’t go for too much foolin’ around,” to which he replied, “You should have asked ‘How much foolin’ around do you go for?’”  Isn’t it great that the younger guys can learn from the wisdom of the older guys?

One weekend the usual foursome, with Dennis driving of course, went out to visit my girl cousins at the Carter’s summer home in Shirley, a location commonly referred to as “out on the Island.”  Donald, Mom and I had stayed there during the summer of 1960, so this was a year later and a few months before we joined the Army.  We had our usual one or two cases of beer with us, drank some with cousins Sandy and Maggie, and left in late afternoon to go find something more inappropriate to do.  We were less than a mile from the summer home, driving up behind a young girl riding her bicycle, when we thought it would be fun for all four of us to start throwing the empties at her at the same time, creating a barrage of beer cans.  It was a funny sight.  It probably scared the girl, but surely didn’t hurt her.  Only a few minutes later, however, we were pulled over by a policeman.  I guess the girl’s father saw enough to have a description of the car and called the police.  We thought we were “in the middle of nowhere,” so to speak, and that there would be no repercussions.  Oops!

I guess in order to explain why we were in the area and to seem more harmless and innocent, I told the policeman about Aunt Alice and Uncle George’s summer home.  So he followed us back to their place to confirm and establish our identities, which we did.  I just thought it was harmless and funny, but Uncle George was very mad at us for being so stupid as to 1) do what we did, and 2) lead the police back to his house.  I didn’t see what the big deal was, but he said that when you are raising girls, you do not want police cars in front of your house.  The neighborhood would be all abuzz about what kind of trouble his kids may have gotten into.  Hmmm, I never thought of that.  But then we were on our way back toward Farmingdale and the prospect of having more juvenile fun.  I mention it only because it sticks out in my mind, and just for the record.  If I don’t write these things down, the stories will be lost forever – which admittedly would not change the course of history – but maybe somebody someday will find it interesting.