Uncle Harold always wore a hat, and Dad never did. I mention it as a sign of the times,
because in those days approximately 50% of men wore hats and 50% did
not. This had changed from earlier
times when most men wore hats. In
fact, it was explained once that the way that reporters estimated crowd size
was to count the number of hats. They
already had estimates of the percentage of the crowd that were women, and of
the percentage of men who wore hats.
From their vantage points, the easiest thing was to count the number
of hats and extrapolate to the number of men in total and then the total
crowd size. (Don’t count the feet and divide by two!).
The other interesting thing is the controversy about
whether wearing a hat contributed to baldness, and whether it contributed to
dandruff. The men who did not wear
hats could argue that the hair needs fresh air and sunshine, etc. I guess the baldness thing has been
debunked, but I wanted to talk about dandruff. Young people today are probably unaware
that dandruff was a major problem until companies developed and marketed
shampoo that was not so harsh on the hair and scalp. People only shampooed their hair about once
per week, due to the harsh products and the permanent damage they
caused. As a result, a lot of people
had unsightly dandruff problems that were very embarrassing.
The flakey white stuff was especially visible on the
collars and shoulders of men’s and women’s dress clothes, thus ruining
whatever favorable impression one was hoping to make. In addition to hats and shampoos,
controversy swirled around whether dandruff was a sign of tension, anxiety, nervousness,
stress, etc. At first the companies
marketed “anti-dandruff” shampoo, which was met with the kind of skepticism
you would expect, but eventually all shampoos were reformulated to limit, if
not eliminate, potential harm to the hair and scalp. People began shampooing every day, and the
dandruff problem largely went away.
I’m sure some people still have dandruff today, but not many. You never hear about it anymore.
Yes, there was actually a time when even teenage girls
did not shampoo their hair more than about once per week. I remember how Patty Hyland and her crew
would hang out on Saturday afternoon with their hair in those large, ugly
curlers after shampooing. It was (or
at least was supposed to be) a sign that they were going out that night…that
they “had a date.” Well, I fell for
it, anyway.
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I’ve lived in California since 1964 (age 20), where we
don’t have those cold winters. One year
I noticed the pleasant feeling that comes over me when I hear a lawn mower
outside or an airplane overhead – not the commercial jets so much as the small,
privately-owned planes. I eventually
figured out that these sounds were taking me back in my mind to warm summer
days on Long Island when we could have the windows open and hear the airplanes
and lawn mowers, although not many people owned power lawn mowers in those
days, at least not at our socio-economic level.
Anyway, the point is that the sounds that we hear from
indoors year round in California, with our windows or doors open, are
associated in my mind with sounds we could only hear indoors during the summer
on Long Island. As a result I sort of
relive the happy feeling of being in my room, no school, maybe just waking up,
and hearing what really would be the sounds of summer. I’ll bet I have other such associations and
that most of us have many associations, maybe on a subconscious level, that we
take for granted or do not wonder about.
I remember that Dad was an avid Brooklyn Dodger baseball
fan and would have friendly arguments with the NY (baseball) Giants and NY
Yankee fans. The guy next door (Mr.
English, I think) was a Giants fan, and one time declared that the Dodger’s
centerfielder, Duke Snyder, was too chubby, and that their right fielder, Carl
Furillo, was too skinny. Dad asked me
for my baseball cards; saw on the statistics that both players were listed as 6
feet tall and 190 pounds; and promptly marched over to the neighbor’s house to
settle the argument. Predictably, I grew
up as a Dodgers fan and could recite every starting player and position.
I also “hated” the Yankees, as every good Dodgers fan
should. At the time I thought that the
starting lineup for the Brooklyn Dodgers was just as permanent as the Brooklyn
Bridge. In fact, in the references I
just made to Duke Snyder and Carl Furillo, I recited from memory the names of
those outfielders and the spelling of their names, with no hesitation. Ah, the innocence of youth. I could sit here and recite the rest of the
Brooklyn Dodger line up of the mid-1950s just to prove my point, but there is
no way I could prove that I didn’t just look it up on the Internet.
Some aspect of my innocence was shattered for good by the
decision in 1958 to relocate the Dodgers to Los Angeles. The Giant’s moved to San Francisco the same
year, but I was not concerned about that.
The decision and announcement was actually made in 1957, and I think I
went into a form of suspended disbelief.
I remember the newspaper article that said the Dodgers would henceforth
only be a small box score or line item in the newspapers once they move. I was only 13 in 1957 and getting a sad dose
of reality.
Oddly enough, life went on. I suppose the 3 years away in the military
helped. The only two baseball teams
people were rooting for when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1964,
were the SF Giants and the Oakland A’s. Oakland was a colorful team, but I
never could relate to the American League, thanks to the hated Yankees, and
that was before implementation of the designated hitter (1973). After that I really could not relate. I
marvel at how easily I became interested in the San Francisco Giants and
uninterested in the Dodgers, who were about 500 miles to the south. By 1965 I don’t think there were any players
left on the Dodgers roster that I had followed in 1957 or earlier. The Giants still had Willie Mays, who played
for the Giants from 1951 to 1972, except for 2 years in the military (’52-’53).
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld (born and raised in Massapequa,
by the way, but not while I was there!) is famous for taking the everyday
things of life and showing us how funny they are. He once pointed out that the players on a
baseball team change continuously, what with free agency, annual contract
negotiations, trade deadlines, the draft, retirements, etc. He says what you are really rooting for is
the uniform, since the players keep changing.
You are really saying, “My clothes can beat your clothes!” That line of (admittedly flawed) reasoning
would have been lost on me back when I was an avid Brooklyn Dodger fan. But like most of Seinfeld’s material, there
is some truth to it.
We had dinner at Aunt Dot’s house fairly frequently,
though as a youngster I paid no attention to how often, and whether it was
appropriately reciprocated at our house.
Come to think of it, I don’t remember Aunt Dot or Uncle Harold ever
being in our house, though that could just be a memory lapse on my part. One of the family stories told and retold is
the time we were about to sit down for a spaghetti dinner at Aunt Dot’s, and
Cousin Harold yelled, “Oh boy, skeddies!” whereupon Donald promptly corrected
him: “No, Harold, not skeddies, buhskeddie.” Harold was notorious in our family for making
up his own words or pronouncing them in whatever way was easiest for him. Family pediatrician Doctor Pisk sounded more
like ‘octopus’ when Harold referred to him by name.
If I am not mistaken, it was Harold who climbed or fell
into a garbage can that was loaded with yellow jackets, and received so many
bites that he swelled up unbelievably and of course was in tremendous pain and
discomfort. By the time I heard about it
he was in recovery. I don’t know where
they took him or what they did for him, but I know that some people are
dangerously allergic to bee stings and would have died from that
experience. As with me and penicillin,
we were just lucky that Harold was not allergic to bee stings.
Another favorite that Mom and Aunt Dot loved to tell was
about a friend of Harold and Donald’s whom they apparently would pick on and
torment mercilessly. His name was
Neuman, and he lived on the next block over.
They were all around 5 or 6 years old, and Neuman really wanted to be
their friend and play with them. They
were probably the only kids his age in the neighborhood. He used to come down the sidewalk with his
tricycle shouting, “Harold! Donald! Here’s Neuman!” and they would usually end
up sending him home bruised and crying, with a banged up trike. His mother probably gave him a pep talk and
told him to tell Donald and Harold right from the start that they were not to
hit him or throw rocks at him or harm his trike.
So, sure enough, here would come Neuman down the block
yelling, “Harold! Donald! Here’s Neuman and you better not hit me or throw
rocks at me or touch my bike!” or words to that effect. And of course Donald and Harold would set
about doing the exact things to him that he said they shouldn’t do. Poor kid. Aunt Dot says that one time she and
Mom and Neuman’s mother, Fran, were having coffee together when Neuman came in
crying and somewhat mortified to report that Harold and Donald “pissed on me,”
as he put it. Per the story, Fran told
Neuman to go back and piss on them!
Mom and Aunt Dot were, of course, friendly with Fran and
tried to get their kids to be nicer to Neuman, but it was fairly hopeless. As far as Harold and Donald were concerned,
Neuman came down the block almost asking them to abuse him, and they were happy
to oblige. Fran used to call him by a nickname: “Noonie” (Not sure how it would
be spelled, but that is what it sounded like).
So Mom and Aunt Dot would refer to Noonie when they would tell the
stories. I recall a time when Neuman’s
dad announced that he wanted to put in his own below-ground swimming pool and
needed to dig a big hole in his backyard.
I was young enough to think it was quite feasible for us kids to get
some tools, start digging and be a big help.
It must have been springtime, and we had an urgency to get finished
before summer, so we could all enjoy the pool.
I remember how enthusiastically we started and how quickly we realized
that digging a hole that big was way, way beyond our capabilities.
Over the course of an hour or so my enthusiasm went from
very high to non-existent. It was
probably a good experience for me, or at least a lesson learned, given that I
still remember it. I don’t recall
whether Neuman’s father really thought he could dig such a big hole without
equipment, and I never knew if he was serious and was planning on renting some
equipment. I don’t think he planned on
paying a crew of men to do it…no one had that kind of money in our neighborhood
in those days. I’m sure he didn’t think
we kids could do it. Hopefully he was
just letting us figure it out for ourselves.
We were pretty young.
Not many years before, I recall how we had announced that we were going
to dig all the way to China. Someone had
told us about the shape of the world and how directly opposite us was a place
called China. We weren’t sure how they
could live upside down (since we were living right side up), but we wanted to
find out. If nothing else, I learned
that the deeper you want to dig, the wider the hole needs to be at the
top. Who would have thought? This was around the same time that one of our
buddies announced that he could count to the highest number, and the rest of us
debated whether we believed him. I mean,
if you can count to 100, how many more numbers can there be?
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