I wanted to add some things about my “growin’ up” years
on Long Island. I remember that we had a
baseball team and talked one of the dads into being our manager, though we
often conducted team practices without him.
I think he helped with contacting other teams, transportation to away
games, and the like. He must have helped
us with the raffle we ran to raise money for uniforms. If I recall, our uniforms were white with blue
trim, and we were the Royals. We only
played two seasons. We would have club
meetings and not be able to agree on anything; we would hurt each other’s
feelings, and some boys quit. We didn’t
have enough players to allow some to quit and still field a team. Donald Lyons and Jessie DeGenaro were the
oldest (maybe 14), but I was one of the best players (around age 12), which I
evidently thought gave me the right to boss people around. Come to think of it, I may have been the
problem…ya’ think?
The raffle was successful, somehow. Parents and other relatives bought a lot of
the tickets, of course, but so did some of the local merchants – grocery
stores, candy stores, pizza parlors and the like. I don’t remember what the prize was that we
were raffling off or who won or if we even went out and bought the prize. I’m pretty sure the adults didn’t care about
the prize. Years later I heard a story
that reminded me of our baseball raffle.
I’m not sure whether the story is true, but it certainly is feasible
enough to be true. A speaker was saying
that his uncle and some of his buddies had raffled off a horse. After collecting the raffle money they
approached a farmer who had a horse that was so old it was of no use, could
barely walk, and would be dying fairly soon, no doubt.
The uncle and his buddies agreed on some nominal price and
said they would come back in the morning with a trailer, pay the farmer and
pick up the horse. Well, the horse died
during the night, so when they showed up at the farmer’s place the next morning
the farmer said the deal was obviously off.
Knowing that they had to have a horse to give to the winner of the
raffle, they agreed to take the dead horse, free of charge, and haul it
away. The farmer was surprised and
delighted to be rid of it. So the
speaker said that his uncle gave the raffle winner the dead horse, whereupon he
had asked his uncle, “Weren’t the people mad?” and his uncle responded, “Only
the guy who won, and we gave him his money back!”
At around age 11-12, during a Christmas season, someone
showed me and a friend how to make Yule logs that we could sell to the
neighbors. We excitedly went out and
rounded up some fallen birch tree branches of appropriate thicknesses and cut
them to the approximate right lengths (maybe 14-16 inches). We made 2-3 holes and stuck some candles in
them, glued some pine cones and other decorative things to them, and went
around selling them for 50 cents each.
Actually, we went around ahead of time and asked people if they would
commit to buying one, so that when the Yule logs were ready, we knew where to
take them. I remember learning what “pay
in advance” means. The first lady I said
that to started to reach into her purse to give me the 50 cents and I explained
that by “in advance” I meant “in the future.”
Actually, I meant “upon delivery.”
Anyway, that is how kids learn things.
When we first moved to North Massapequa, into the row of
ten houses on North Kings Avenue, we were surrounded by woods but also, the
equivalent of maybe three blocks away, by a stinky farm, owned and operated by
a man named Mike Yankee. I recall that
he had cows and goats, but I think he also had pigs, which smell worst of
all. I remember the adults lamenting
that when they were going through the decision process of buying the homes on
Kings Avenue, they were told that Mike Yankee and his farm would be relocating
“by the end of summer.” The lament was
that several years later they realized that they were never told which
summer! Basically, the sales people told
prospective buyers whatever they needed to hear. Mr. Yankee and his farm were there for many
years while I was growing up, and when the wind was blowing towards us, we
needed no reminding. It stunk!
As rows of houses were built on the blocks between our
street and Mike Yankee’s farm, the pressure to get Mr. Yankee out of there
grew, and he finally left. I don’t know
what leverage the authorities had to force the issue. Maybe he left for his own reasons. I do remember to my shame and regret that
when the new houses were first built, the developer planted young trees in the
dirt between the sidewalk and the street, and we kids thought it would be great
fun to run along and manually break each little tree along the way. I think most, if not all, of the houses were
still unsold, but the developer did not bother to replace the trees we had
destroyed. He probably figured that we
would just come along and break them again, so what was the point? I’m not a “tree hugger” by any means. I feel it is not that hard to replace young
trees with new ones, but I have always regretted being such a rotten kid and
doing something so mean and destructive.
There was another development in a nearby tract, with the
model homes close to our end of Kings Avenue.
A bunch of us were playing on the structure of one of the model homes,
which was something we did a lot, but for some reason we got carried away on
the inside. We may have had some one
with us who was more of an instigator than we were accustomed to but in any
event we became destructive. We pounded
nails into finished window sills, splashed paint on walls and floors, put a few
holes or dents into some walls and thought it was all great fun. None of us told our parents, but mysteriously
(to us kids) some scary-looking adults wearing suits or uniforms showed up at
our houses.
They were probably either insurance claim adjusters or
detectives or something. It wasn’t
difficult to trick us kids into confessing our involvement and naming a few
other names in the process. I remember
that they saw a pair of my sneakers outside with paint on the soles and said
the footprints matched those on the floor of the house that had been trashed. Mom and Dad were of course shocked and dismayed. It was news to them! I heard that each family involved had to pay
a share of the damages. I don’t know how
much that was, but I know I was punished with being grounded for several weeks.
We were bused to school in Farmingdale from North
Massapequa. There was a school much
closer in the town of Massapequa but for some reason we were placed in the
district that would attend school in Farmingdale. The bus driver who sticks out in my mind is
the overweight, unattractive guy we called “Lightnin’.” Kids can be so cruel, and I don’t know how a
person can persevere for years dealing with such abuse at the hands of little
punks like we were. Lightnin’ was quite
slow-moving as he was getting on and off the bus or coming down the aisle to
deal with one of us – hence the nickname.
We even made up a song to the tune of “Glow Little Glowworm,” which I
suppose most of my readers (all 2 of you?) never heard of, so it may lose some
impact here. I still remember this much,
more or less: “Glow little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer. Lightnin’s getting slimmer, slimmer. Teeth are false and hair is peroxide; even in
the moonlight he looks cross-eyed. Fussy
fussy fussin’ with his hair; pussey, pussey pimples here and there. All these features for his beau; glow little
glowworm, glow.” (We didn’t know that beau meant boyfriend).
I also remember a phase we went through where after dark
we would be allowed to take our bikes and meet up with our buddies. We called ourselves the Night Riders. We didn’t stay out long after dark, and we
didn’t wander far away. We had strict
warnings from our parents, and we didn’t want to lose the privilege of riding
with the gang after dark. Kids love the
sense of freedom and adventure that comes with being away from adult
supervision, even for a short while. I’m
sure that was part of our excitement.
I remember when Brianna was about 8 years old and a
family friend was 3 years older. We let
them take the elevator by themselves and go to the hotel lobby or game room, or
just for a short walk around the building.
They told us that they also would get off on various floors and explore
the hotel. As we were driving home at
the end of the week, I asked Brianna what her favorite activity was. She said that roaming the hotel was the most
fun. I believe it was because she was
experiencing the absence of an adult for the first time, and it was exciting.
For a couple of years, I was involved in the boys’
activities at Wantagh Baptist Church, where Aunt Dot attended and taught Sunday
school. It was called the “Boys’
Brigade.” I mainly remember playing
basketball, learning military marching, and going on an overnight campout. The basketball did me little good; I still
stunk at it in high school. But the
marching helped me in the Army. We had
learned left face, right face, about face, present arms, etc, so it was natural
for me in Basic Training. For some
reason, what I always have remembered from the campout was that the pastor took
us for a pre-breakfast hike the next morning, and I enjoyed it quite a
bit. It sure gave me an appetite for the
hearty breakfast that followed. The
church had some other activities, like roller skating, that included the girls. We were just coming to the age where it was
fun to be around girls. I was sweet on one
named Edie. In fact, it was with her
that I first began to understand that when a young girl says she loves you, it
doesn’t mean a thing.
The term “juvenile delinquent” or JD was quite in vogue
when I was in the 10th and 11th grades at Farmingdale High
School. We wanted to be considered JDs
or “Hoods”. We pulled our hair down in
front, put our collars up in the back, stuck cigarettes in our mouths, and
tried to act tough. This was only for a
one to two year period for me, but it is a good thing I joined the Army. I was only heading for trouble,
otherwise. The movie version of
Westside Story, which won a number of academy awards in 1961, was a depiction
of the New York City gang wars that stirred the imaginations of us teenagers on
Long Island. We wanted to emulate the
toughness and violence of the gangs we were hearing about. It sounded glamorous and exciting.
At least two to three times that I can remember there
were rumors of a rumble with a rival gang, and I was one of the few kids from
my gang to show up…and there was no rival gang to fight. I somehow missed out on one incident where a
bunch of our guys went into a rival town looking for trouble and the cops
stopped them and confiscated a machete and smaller knives. I remember reading about it in the
newspaper. They had comments from some
of the parents, and the columnist included the percentage of parents they spoke
to who acknowledged that they had no idea where their kids went most nights. I knew many of the kids who were there,
including the one with the machete. The
police said that they asked him if he was really going to use that, and he said
“If necessary,” or “only if I had to” or something like that.
I remember that in high school someone developed a list
of girls who supposedly were “easy,” or who were ‘known’ to have “done
it.” I’m sure it was just juvenile
wishful thinking, but at the time I believed it, or wanted to believe it. I remember that the girls’ mothers got wind
of the list and met with the principal to get the situation handled. I think in the end the girls’ reputations
remained intact. It was just our group
of horney, pimply-faced boys who knew about it in the first place. Most of the kids were probably a little more
mature and paid no attention to such nonsense.
I can understand the moms being very upset and concerned to see that
their daughters’ names were circulating on a list that purported to be a list
of sexually active, promiscuous girls, but at the time I thought they were way
overreacting. It was more accurately
just a list of the nicest-looking, most popular girls in high school – the ones
the boys wished were
promiscuous. Teenage boys can think of
little beyond their pimples and their peckers, it seems.
The summer that Mom, Donald and I stayed at Aunt Alice’s
place in Shirley – out on the Island – the adults would sit around an empty
55-gallon drum drinking beer and tossing the empties into the drum. I remember sitting next to my cousin Jimmy,
who was at least 4-5 years older than me (I was 16), and getting him to slip me
a can of beer. I set it down next to my
chair. I could see that Mom was
periodically glancing over to see how much I was drinking. I would wait until she was looking the other
way, then take a slug of beer and put the can back in the exact spot she had
just seen it in. Once that can was
empty, Jimmy would get a beer for himself and slip me a full one to replace the
empty one. In that fashion I was able to
consume a goodly amount of beer before Mom caught on to the fact that it was
not the same beer can she was seeing next to my chair each time she looked.
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