Binghamton Press Article Published circa January, 2017

An old coot explains the Boot Generation.

by Merlin Lessler (AKA the Old Coot)

I was thinking about boots today. It started when I glanced out the kitchen window at a group of high school kids waiting for the bus, on this, a snowy winter morning. It’s the fourth or fifth set of kids I’ve watched grow up at the bus stop. Today, they wore several different forms of winter wear, at teenager’s version anyhow: spring coats, sweatshirts, T-shirts, sneakers, flip flops and the like. Only two wore winter coats. No one was wearing winter footwear. Nothing close to the buckle boots I trudged off to school in on snowy mornings. That’s when it hit me, my generation is misnamed. We’re not the Silent Generation, especially those of us born at the very end of the period when the world was at war and just before the Baby Boomers started emerging.  We’re the Boot Generation.

We started off, in “booties,” graduated to baby shoes, that weren’t shoes at all, more like boots since they came above our ankles. Then came cowboy boots. We had to have them, having cut our hero worship teeth on the likes of Roy & Dale, Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry and The Lone Ranger. Mine came from a boot and saddle shop on a street now buried under the Broome County Arena. It was my favorite store. The owner let us sit on the display saddles that were propped up on sawhorses. It was almost as good as the pony rides we waited in line for when the carnival or circus came to town.

Next came high-cuts, military looking leather boots that rose half way to our knees and had a pouch on the side for a jack knife. The world we lived in was awash in WWII surplus military goods and the high cuts were a fashion necessity for kids in my south side neighborhood. We spent much of our time hiking in those high-cuts through the woods on South Mountain. An Army or Navy knapsack was on our back and a canvas wrapped, metal canteen hung from our belt. Some kids wore low-cuts; they were a buck or two cheaper at the regular shoe store, but we opted for high cuts and bought them at the EJ outlet. Even cheaper yet. (The store is also buried near the Arena, only a little closer to the river)

Buckle boots (overshoes that adults called galoshes) got us back and forth on our journey to and from school on snowy days, though it took a lot of effort to jam our shoes into them. Next, came ski boots (and Army surplus skis) from the downtown Salvation Army store. The store was loaded with donated items, including a huge section of military surplus goodies, at deeply discounted prices. (Yet another buried memory, this time, a little north of the Collier Street Bridge, which started out as the State Street bridge when it was built in the mid 1950’s. Buried Binghamton was a pretty cool place before the urban renewal swept it away.) Anyway, when we put on those boots and skis (with a bear trap clamp system, guaranteed to break your ankle if you fell, and trudged to the top of the hills above our neighborhood, we pretended we were in the Alps, tackling the steepest slopes in Europe.

Then came the “COOL YEARS,” teenage days in the 1950’s. The boots were desert boots, a late arriving competitor to the white bucks and dirty bucks that were all the rage. Especially when paired with an oxford cloth, button down collar shirt and a pair of pegged, black flannel pants, the legs so narrow at the ankle they were a challenge to get on. Lastly, at the end of that growing up phase of our lives, which seems like just a few years ago, came shinny black leather, pointy toe boots that we saw teenage hoods wear in movies like Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause.

Booties, baby boots, cowboy boots, high cuts, buckle boots, ski boots, desert boots, and hood boots. What else could you call my generation but the Boot Generation.  

Binghamton Press Article - Published 9/11/2016

An old coot earned ink privileges in third grade the hard way.

By Merlin Lessler

It’s that time of year again; school is back in session. It was over 60 years ago when I was a kid heading back to start my prison sentence in 3^rd grade at Longfellow Elementary School on Binghamton’s south side. It was with mixed feelings that I left the playground and ran to the side door as the morning bell rang. I was sorry, because summer vacation had come to an end, yet excited to see my fellow classmates and to make the transition from pencil to pen & ink. We’d been working toward this transition for two years, filling pages and pages with letters of the alphabet, various size loops, endless coils and other shapes, imprinting writing skill patterns into the cortex of our brains. Those exercises were carried out under close supervision of the teacher who roamed the aisles, observing and correcting our pencil holding technique, and "tsking" when the coils or loops started to wander outside the lines. We did this every day, working toward the payoff that would ultimately come in 3^rd grade. Ink day!

It started one month into the term. Our teacher, Mrs. Babcock, walked over to Alex Palmer’s desk holding a quart bottle of black ink, a tiny nozzle protruding from the top. She slipped open the flap on an inkwell recessed into the upper right hand corner of Alex’s desk and filled it with that black magic. We sat in awe as she handed Alex a wooden penholder, a pen point, a small wiping rag and a blotter with an advertisement for Gardner Motors, the Olds dealer on Front Street. Alex’s face was bright red with embarrassment. Our faces were dark green with jealousy.

Alex now did her schoolwork in ink. All of a sudden, those loops became important; we wanted ink! Little by little, the inkwells around the room began to fill up. Finally, came my turn. By that time, the ink filling duties had been handed over to the students. It joined hall monitoring, eraser cleaning, blackboard washing and other classroom tasks on the chore list by the door. Teacher’s aides didn’t exist in that era. The school staff consisted of a single teacher for each classroom, a principal and a janitor (Mr. Vanick) who took care of the three-story building, inside and out by himself, except for the chores we handled in the classroom.

Blots and spills were common sights on the papers handed in from the boy’s side of the room. The girls, on the other hand, proved yet again, that moderation is best. Like the rest of the boys, I dipped deep and filled my pen point to the max. I didn’t want to bother dipping it into ink every few seconds. As a result, my paper was decorated with a variety of blobs and blots. I didn't know that ink privilege could be withdrawn if I was too messy. I wasn’t the last kid to get ink, but I think I was the first to have my ink well removed and told to use a pencil again. I’d spent too much “discipline” time standing in the hall, the cloak roam and the principal’s office to make the required progress in my pen and ink skills.

I still remember the thrill of dipping the pen point into ink that first time, and even more, the agony I felt when I lost the privilege. I couldn’t produce a single page that didn’t contain at least a blot or two. And, when I tried to use an ink eraser to remove the evidence, it usually tore a hole in the paper. I eventually mastered the technique and by the time I graduated from 6^th grade and entered West Junior I was pretty proficient. But, that’s when we put the inkwell, wooden penholder and steel pen point behind us; we moved on to fountain pens. My first one was an Esterbrook. Later that year I ascended to fountain pen “nirvana. I bought the “Cadillac” of pens, a Sheaffer Snorkel. You didn’t have to dip it into an ink bottle and have the point become a dripping mess; you manipulated a mechanism that pushed a snorkel out the end of the pen point, and then dipped that into the ink, pushed a small lever on the side and the ink was sucked into an internal bladder. My messy days were behind me.  

Writing with was a big deal back then. It wasn’t called cursive or script. It was just called writing, an important aspect of public education. The Binghamton School System employed a Penmanship Director, Elizabeth J. Drake. She oversaw and audited the writing curriculum in all six of the Binghamton elementary schools. At the end of each semester we submitted our best writing sample for evaluation. It was pasted in a "Penmanship Progress Folder and sent to Mrs. Drake.  When we graduated from Longfellow we received a diploma for class work and a penmanship certificate. We also got to keep our writing progress folder showing how much we’d improved from 3^rd grade to 6^th grade. I stumbled upon mine a few weeks ago and all those ink memories flooded back. My proudest accomplishment was getting the highly prized gold seal on my writing certificate. Today’s kids don’t need to bother with what was once an educational requirement. Keyboard skills have replaced writing skills. I’m so jealous. School life would have been so much easier.

 

  

Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin Article June 12, 2016

Silt piles, a sure sign of spring. 

by Merlin Lessler (The Old Coot)

A silt pile by the curb. It was a sign of spring! You’d see them all over town. Oh sure, robins started showing up long before the silt piles, they were the proverbial early birds, but I didn’t put my faith in them when I was a kid growing up on the south side of Binghamton. Not while enduring a biter cold April and seeing them sit around on snow-covered branches.

But, the silt piles! That confirmed it! Spring was really here.

I lived on Chadwick Road during the silt pile era. There was a storm sewer grate right in front of our house. Something I was well acquainted with since it gobbled up a half dozen of my baseballs, tennis balls and rubber balls every summer. I kept a look out for a city truck to pull up to the curb. When a worker hopped out of the bed of the truck with an iron bar and a long handled, spoon shovel I made my move, ran out the door, crossed the yard and stood by the curb as he pried off the grate with the iron bar started pulling up silt with his shovel.

He was there for the silt; I was there for the balls. The ones I’d tried to retrieve with a hoe or a long stick with a nail sticking out the end. My attempts failed most of the time; the sewer won. The city worker would grunt as he lifted out a shovel full of silt and placed it in a pile next to the curb. I watched for a ball, reaching over and grabbing it when he turned to dip his shovel back into the catch basin. Eventually he lifted out all the silt, left the pile behind and moved on to the next one. I followed. There were two of these ball-eating storm sewer grates on our street.

The neighborhood was eventually dotted with silt piles, awaiting the arrival of the pick up crew, who drove up in the same truck they used in the winter to spread ashes across the road after a snowstorm. The same guy who spooned out the silt in the spring, stood in the bed of the truck tossing long swashes of ash, mixed with sand and cinders across the road in the winter. This combination was the primary source of the silt that ended up in the storm sewer.

We always begged the ash crew to leave a strip along the curb so we could ski and ride sleds down the hill. Sometimes they did, but most often they ignored our pleas. One of the times they left us a strip, my mother skidded her car on it and smashed into a brand new demo in a neighbor’s driveway. I thought I was in for it; I had not only begged for and received a snow strip, I’d bragged to her about it. But, she didn’t blame me; she blamed my father. For buying a car with a “new fangled” automatic transmission (a 1954 ford hardtop). “You can’t control the darn things!” she complained. “It just goes where it wants!”

Anyhow, the silt piles are long gone, as are the city workers with long handled spoon shovels. A giant vacuum machine has taken over the task. All we have now are the robins. And again this year, their prediction of spring weather was premature. 

My sister patsy finishes up clearing the driveway on the 

ill-fated day my mother's car slid down the hill and into a neighbor's car.

Highway to heaven on a pair of ball bearing roller skates (Published May 15, 2016 - Binghamton Sunday press)

Highway to heaven on ball bearing roller skates.

by Merlin Lessler

Roller skates were a big deal for kids who grew up in the 40’s and 50’s. We slipped into our first pair when we were kindergarten age. No big deal. No big skill needed. We schlepped about, pretending to glide along like the older kids who had ball bearing in the wheels of their skates. The wheels on our  “baby” skates barely turned at all.

Then came the big day. Move up day. To “ball bearings.” Like most of the toys that came our way back then, they only came on a special occasion: Christmas, Easter or birthday, unless you were lucky enough to break an arm or leg in a bike or tree climbing accident. Then, you could cash in on it. Pity paid. A new toy was a perfect way to speed up ones recovery.  

I received my first pair of ball bearing roller skates on the Easter when I was seven. I still remember that cold April day; I sat on our front step and put them on using a skate key to tighten the toe clamp and buckling a leather strap around my ankle. I stood up, took one step and was instantly airborne. My arms flailed, my legs kicked, and then, WHAM! I fell back to earth, HARD! I knocked the wind out of myself. I thought I was dying. I crawled over to my father and squeaked, “I’m dead!” There wasn’t enough oxygen in my lungs to speak above a whisper.

It took a few weeks, but I eventually got the hang of it. I could glide along a sidewalk like my older sister Madeline and her friends, often sporting a huge scab on one knee or the other. It was freeing, this newfound ability to cover ground with so little effort. It wasn’t on a par with a bicycle, but a close second. That world was different from today's world. If you looked around a

residential neighborhood in Binghamton, or any small town in America, you’d see kids everywhere: gliding by on skates, playing in school yards, whizzing along on bicycles with baseball cards flapping in the spokes, bouncing on pogo sticks, walking on stilts, tossing baseballs and footballs back and forth. Kids, kids, kids! Outside! Moving! Unsupervised!

And, when we were inside, it wasn’t in front of a TV. Our sloth time came when we lay down on the living room rug in front of the radio, listening to Suspense or Captain Midnight. More often than not though, we were in our bedroom or down in the basement when we couldn’t go outside. A basement that bears no resemblance to the finished rec rooms and man caves of today. There was room to skate in mine, as long as I avoided my mother’s ringer washer and the wet clothes hanging from a line strung along the ceiling. It was a good place to “hang out” on a rainy day. It didn’t matter to us what we did, skate, play games, read comic books, as long as we were out from under the thumb of adults. Kids and adults resided in separate worlds back then and both camps liked it that way.

Ball-bearing roller skates expanded our arena. They took us out of the neighborhood to other parts of the city. Most often, mine took me downtown. I lived on a hill, the third house from the top of Chadwick Road on the south side so I had to walk down to Vestal Ave before I put on my skates. And, like all kids, I skated without a helmet, elbow or kneepads. My route downtown took me through the fifth ward shopping district, past Armand Emma’s Drug Store, which was kitty corner from the Grand Theater where Hop-a-long Cassidy and Roy Rogers graced the silver screen most Saturday afternoons. Past the Baby Bear Market, the Busy Bee 5 & 10 cent store and the Fire Station #5 (now the Number 5 Restaurant). Kids from Longfellow and Lincoln Elementary Schools went there on field trips, and once a year, we lined up in front of an open bay with our dogs to get a free rabies shot. (The dogs, not us) I left the south side, crossing the Washington Street Bridge, which carried cars across the river back then, past the statue of a soldier standing on one leg holding a rifle in the middle of Memorial Circle and on to the center of town.

Planter’s Peanuts on Court Street was my first stop, for a free sample from a guy in a giant peanut costume, then on to McLain’s Department store for a ride on the demonstration saddle in the equestrian department and finally to the soda fountain at Woolworth’s or Kresge’s. Kids had freedom in those days. How different it is now. My friend Woody (Walls) and I took it a little too far one Sunday afternoon when we were about five years old; we decided to walk to State Park. We made it across town to Clinton Street before deciding we’d gone far enough. Our parents never knew we left the neighborhood. If a kid did that today his parents would be charged with child neglect. Even dogs had freedom in those days. My dog, Topper, so named because he was the first of seven puppies to climb the basement stairs, accompanied me wherever I went, even downtown. He patiently waited for me on the sidewalk outside a store or movie theater, while I was inside enjoying a special double feature: two cowboy movies and ten cartoons.

I eventually outgrew the roller skates. They weren’t macho enough. I took them apart and nailed them to a couple of boards to make a hot rod. If you couldn’t afford a set of wheels it was another way to get you racing down the steep south side hills. Sometimes making it to the bottom with the vehicle still intact. It was a male right of passage in the 1950’s. I’d love to strap on a pair of those skates today, but I’m sure I’d be airborne all over again. And, this time I might really end up dead.  

My 2nd best Christmas Present - my first car.

An Old Coot remembers a Christmas past.

By Merlin Lessler

It wasn’t best ever Christmas present! But it was a close second. The first, was a 3 speed English bike with hand brakes that was under the tree in 1954. This one, I gave to myself. A 1953 Ford convertible. The year was 1961. I’d just come off a 3 month co-op stint at NYSEG in Auburn, New York, a hiatus from my Electrical Technology Classes at Broome Tech, as it was called back then, having risen from the ashes as State Tech in Downtown Binghamton, moved to upper Front, renamed, renamed again, and now is SUNY Broome. I was flush with cash from my two-dollar and eight cents-an-hour engineering assistant job. Perfect timing to hear classmate, Jack Tyler, announce in the school cafeteria that he was auctioning off his car. There was a hitch. The car died in the Cloverdale Milk Company parking lot on Conklin Ave. (little to the west of what is now the Relief Pitcher). Died in a snowstorm and then was plowed under. It resided in a frozen snow bank. No one but Jack and the snowplow guy knew it was there.

I was familiar with the car. Jack drove it to school most days of our first year at Broome. The days it started, that is. He’d paid $350 for it the previous summer and hoped to break even. Ha! Not with a dead car buried in an ice cave. The bidding started at $10, made it to $35 and screeched to a halt. I checked my wallet and bid $60, hoping to scare off the other bidders. I got the shut out I was looking for. The guys around the table thought I was nuts. But, I had a secret weapon, Jimmy Wilson, a south-sider like me. I lived on Chadwick; he lived on Hotchkiss. Jimmy could fix cars, any car, any problem. And, his father delivered milk for Cloverdale; it would serve him well to be the one who managed to remove that big lump from the parking lot. 

We went at it early one Saturday morning. It had warmed up the night before and digging the car out was a lot easier that we thought it would be. The battery was dead. Jimmy ran some jumper cables from his car, a much-abused 1955 Chevy with rollover dents and scratches on the roof. It cranked but wouldn’t catch. We thought we might have incorrectly hot-wired it. There were no keys, a fact Jack didn’t mention until I’d handed over the sixty bucks and asked for them. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? I can’t find the keys.” We checked our hot wiring job, hoping a cop car didn’t wander by; the wires were correct. Jimmy had three cans of dry gas in his trunk, a necessity for him since he was a student in northern New England, majoring in downhill skiing and minoring in Business, though his folks thought it was the other way around. We pored a can into the tank and tried again. Bingo! It started, ran for a minute and quit. We added another can of dry gas. Same thing. That’s when Jimmy determined the car was out of gas. The gage was pegged at full, but was a liar. A trip to the gas station solved the problem and I chugged out of the parking lot and headed for home.

I still remember how proud I felt pulling into our driveway with my Christmas present to myself. I remember too, the look on my parent’s faces and the not too subtle suggestion to, “Move that heap out of our driveway and park it out of sight on Aldridge Ave. It sat there for six months, receiving the application of can after can of Bondo, a failed attempt to eliminate the large number of voids in the rusted body. But that wasn’t the only issue. The heater blew cold air. I had to twist wires under the dash to start it. The tires were bald. The trunk was opened by poking at the latch with a screwdriver through a hole. And, there was a bad spot in the starter; it refused to function at the most inopportune moments. But, I did meet a lot of nice people who stopped to give me a push to get it jump-started.

It didn’t matter. I was in heaven. That beast launched me into adulthood. How could it not, with all its little quirks? Now that I’m an old coot, I realize how life changing that $60 bid was. I courted my college sweetheart in that heap. We drove off in a major snowstorm on our honeymoon, bundled up in winter coats, hats, gloves and with a heavy quilt across our laps. The snow was too much for the bald tires. We had to change our plan to drive to Niagara Falls and settle for the Holliday Inn on upper Court Street (it’s long gone now). Did I mention the radio didn’t work either? It didn’t matter; it was the second best Christmas present ever.

What I thought my first car looked like.

What it really looked like.

An old coot remembers a "What's yours is mine" world. (published September 13, 2015)

Woody (Walls) and I walked out the back door of my Chadwick Road house on Binghamton’s south side. We took a path through an abandoned pasture, which, unbeknownst to us, was soon to be replaced with roads and new houses. We stopped at the 2^nd house on Overbrook Ave, waved to Mrs. Harris who was watching us through her kitchen window, went into her garage, grabbed two pairs of stilts that belonged to John and Linda Harris, waved again to Mrs. Harris as she finished up her breakfast dishes, hopped on the low rungs of the steel stilts and clanked down the sidewalk, hoping to make it to the playground at Longfellow Elementary School on Penn Ave. The hardest part came when we reached the seventeen stairs from street level down to the playground. That was the quest for the day, the reason for “borrowing” the stilts that had carried us to downtown Binghamton the previous week.

We lived in a “what’s yours is mine” era, a lesson I learned the hard way the day I walked out of Bill Scales’ neighborhood grocery store on Pennsylvania Ave. while unwrapping a 5-cent Baby Ruth candy bar. Buzzy and Chickadee Barton were lazing on the empty fruit and vegetable racks in front of the store sharing a Grape NeHi. Buzzy spotted my candy bar and yelled, “Dibs,” took the Baby Ruth, broke it in two and handed half of it back to me with a grin on his face. He then taught me how to protect myself by yelling, “No dibs,” first.   

The “what’s yours is mine” social structure that I grew up with extended well beyond stilts and candy bars. It included the basketball court and baseball field in the Walls’ side yard, the tree house behind Almy’s, the toboggan run in the field behind the Burtis boys house, the ski slope that ran through my back yard and across the pasture to Kendall Ave, the pool behind the DeAngelo’s garage and the two-story playhouse in the Cook’s yard at the corner of Brookfield and Overbrook. Kids from all over the neighborhood constantly occupied it, even though a 10-foot high stone wall and an 8-foot stockade fence protected it.

Short cuts were another form of “what’s yours is mine.” They dominated our mode of travel. We seldom took a road route to and from each other’s houses; we took short cuts, which today would be called trespassing. My route to Woody’s house had me cutting through Bowen's side yard and across the back yards of Krupa’s, Daley’s and Vining’s. Municipal property was also “appropriated” by kids back then. The walled in creek running along Park Ave was the “unofficial” south side playground, including the huge pipe to the river, the winding tunnel under Ross Park and the side pipes that delivered storm water to the creek. We also assumed ownership of the woods that blanketed South Mountain, the farmland at the top and the Swamp on Vestal Ave. where the MacArthur School now sits. The land, I assume, was sold to the School District by the same guy who went on to make his fortune selling swampland in Florida.

Building sites and building materials were plentiful in the “hood.” New houses were going up all around us. We started the appropriation process by playing in the cellar hole once the work crew left the scene. We then moved up a level, into the framed structure, using it as a giant set of monkey bars. The scrap pile that built up by day, disappeared by night. We transformed it into clubhouses, tree forts, swamp rafts and hot rods. Left over scraps of tarpaper made our tree forts rainproof. We hauled the wood and tarpaper ¾ of a mile from our neighborhood to the creek along Hawthorne Road where we built a two-story tree fort with a view. Equivalent to today’s man caves. Whenever we traveled to the site or any other place on South Mountain, our mothers never failed to warn us to be on the lookout for wandering hobos. They came in on freight trains and wandered through town looking for odd jobs and handouts. Nobody called them homeless people in those days. So, along with my dog Topper, we took the Knox’s Irish Setter, Meg, and any other dog wandering around. Of course, we never asked permission; dogs were free to roam back then and we took advantage of it.

Now that I’m an old coot, I walk through the old neighborhood every once in a while and try to visualize it as it was when Overbrook and Kendall barely jutted past Brookfield. Aldrich didn’t even do that; it ended at Brookfield. When the land between Denton Road and Hawthorne Road was part overgrown field and part cow pasture. South Mountain was without roads or houses. Moore Ave, from Chadwick westward, was a one-lane, dirt farm road and MacArthur Park was half park and half veteran’s housing. But, most of all, as I wander around, I squint in an attempt to bring life back to Longfellow School; it was torn down in the 1970’s while I wasn’t paying attention. It was the most important structure in our young lives. We spent endless hours inside, learning the three R’s and even more time out on the playground, learning how to get along with bullies and acquiring our street smarts. Those “what’s yours is mine” rules that governed our behavior would be ill served today. I’m sure the 911 system would be overloaded with reports of trespass, thievery, home invasion, dognapping and bullying. Social scientists claim the new way is better. I’m not so sure.

 

I don't remember which neighbor this bike belonged to, but Woody and I sure enjoyed it. 

Woody waving the white flag while I sit in a hot rod made from "borrowed" scrap lumber.

Separation of Church and State (Binghamton Press May 3, 2015)

An Old Coot remembers his lessons.

By Merlin Lessler

It was an innocent enough wise crack, “God made me do it!” The problem was, I’d said it in a religious instruction class at Saint Johns School, and then turned around to grin at my friends in the back row. I never her coming, but I sure felt it when she latched onto the flab of flesh on the under side of my upper arm in a vice-like grip and escorted me to a stool next to her desk at the front of the room. I paid the price, but the rest of the class got the message; don’t mess with a nun! I was seven at the time, a student at Public School #13, Longfellow Elementary, on Pennsylvania Avenue.  

Every Wednesday afternoon at two o’clock, a few dozen Catholic students blotted the ink on their school paper, wiped their pen point with an old rag, closed their inkwell, put their worksheets in the drawer under their seat and assembled in the hallway by the side door for an unsupervised, mile long trek to Saint Johns. We lined up in pairs: sixth graders led the entourage; fifth graders held up the rear: the younger kids were cradled in the middle. Separation of Church and State was maintained, yet the objectives of both institutions were accommodated by the one-hour early school dismissal.  

Sending a troop of kids on a 30 minute trek in rain, sleet or snow would not be allowed today, but neither the school administration, nor our parents, had the least concern for our safety on the walk to Saint Johns, nor did they fret over the possibility that we would overly misbehave along the way. Bad behavior was controlled by a well-oiled social pecking order, supported by the application of immediate consequences to unacceptable behavior. (It also was a time when parents didn't sue for every misfortune suffered by their "darlings"). If we acted up in front of adults, strangers or not, we expected a reprimand, a slap on the bottom, a cuff to the side of the head, or worse, a report of our obnoxious behavior to our parents. Older kids just creamed us if we got smart with them.

Our journey to religious instructions was in reality, well supervised. A legion of stay-at-home moms along the route kept an eye on us. The only disruption to our march occurred when we came to a sidewalk square that was imprinted with the logo of the mason who’d poured that section. Most of us, the boys anyhow, felt compelled to leap over those squares. Sometimes, two such squares would abut each other. We had to back up and get a running start. That’s when our parade got a little out of whack. Otherwise, our pilgrimage was an orderly adventure through neighborhoods unfamiliar to us. I never did make it over a double section, though I had skinned knees and torn pants to prove I’d tried.

The instruction we received in the classroom on those Wednesday afternoons was not as informative as the things we learned getting there. The human nature stuff. And, though the nuns were kind and gentle during our first few years there, the gloves came off once we turned seven; we’d reached the so-called, age of reason. We were then thought to be capable of distinguishing right from wrong and responsible for our misdeeds. The lessons got harder and the nuns got stricter, as I’d discovered the day I spent an hour on a stool in the front of the room with a throbbing skin flab.

Don’t get me wrong; the Longfellow teachers were masters at discipline too. They skillfully employed many techniques. I experienced the full range: solitary confinement in the cloakroom, public humiliation in the front corner of the room, at attention long after the dismissal bell had rung with my hands folded on my lap, or laboriously writing, "I'll never again do bla, bla,” dozens, and sometimes, hundreds of times on the board or in a notebook. But, my criminal record wasn’t all that unusual. There were ALWAYS consequences for misbehaving, and most kids, most boys anyhow, had a similar rap sheet. Our fear of public school discipline, though profound, did not hold a candle to our fear of nuns.

As I look back on it, some sixty odd years later, I can’t tell you the capital of South Dakota, even though it was drilled into my head at public school, but I can recite the answer to the catechism questions, such as, “What is man?” (Answer - a creature composed of body and soul and made in the image and likeness of God). It must be because I can still feel a twinge on the underside of my upper arm. 




My Uncle Jack and me, heading to my Confirmation in 1953