Well, at least I kept both eyes! (Published in Binghamto Press, December 22, 2013)

I didn’t shoot my eye out. Not with a BB gun anyhow. And, not in one of the many BB gun wars we waged in the cow pasture to the west of Denton Road on Binghamton’s south side. (The area is now populated with houses, but back then it was a war zone in the summer, a toboggan & ski resort in the winter). No, I did it much later in life, when a tree branch shot back into my eye on a riverbank in Owego. But that’s a story for another day. An old coot story. This is a kid story.

My, “didn’t” shoot my eye out story took place after I’d paid my dues for years and finally waited expectantly, like Ralphie in A Christmas Story, to find a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun under the Christmas tree. I’d posed for dorky Christmas cards with my sister Madeline, year after year. I’d forgone my desire for a BB gun and asked for eye safe toys: footballs, sleds, board games and electric trains. But when I turned 10 in 1952, I decided it was time to launch the campaign. Woody, my friend from the next block, had access to BB rifles and BB pistols. I used him and his gun friendly parents as the centerpiece of my case. But, things looked pretty glum. My mother batted every pitch I threw her way out of the park. “Woody has one, why can’t I?” - “Because you’ll lose an eye!”  This was before the term “shoot-your-eye-out” came into vogue. You lost things in those days. Your eye. Your arm. Your life.

“No I won’t! Woody didn’t!” She pointed out that Woody wore glasses; his eyes were protected. Something I knew all too well. Especially after so recently doing the dishes for 25 cents every night until I’d earned three dollars to pay for the pair I’d broken in one of our backyard disagreements.

“We don’t shoot at each other. We just pretend to shoot,” I argued, lie that it was, with me sporting a tender, red-rimmed pockmark from taking one in the leg just that morning.

“We only shoot at stuff,” I said, adding to my lie. She was too smart for that one. She was as concerned for the “stuff” as she was for my eye. She knew the stuff included dopey robins that sat still while enduring shot after shot. Squirrels that scampered back and forth making the game even more exciting. The glass window pains in Mr. Soldo’s garage, Mrs. Bowen’s tulips and the Merz’s dog. But, I had an answer for all those damaged goods. It was home made arrows that errantly misfired in a game of cowboys and Indians. “A BB gun is accurate; it would never damage stuff, ” was my weak-brained argument.

The whole thing was of her making anyhow. She’s the one who dressed me in cowboy suits since before I could walk, who equipped me with 2 six-guns and helped me mount a wooden rocking horse in the driveway with my faithful dog Lassie at my side. How did she not see this growing into lust for a weapon that could really fire? A BB gun!

Christmas finally came, in those waning days of Truman’s presidency. It took what seemed like years, those four weeks following Thanksgiving, when the count down started. But it came. Christmas morning on Chadwick Road. Under the tree was a three-foot long, slender package with my name on it. I saved it for last. I unwrapped the mittens knitted by my aunt in Connecticut. And, like the other pairs she sent every year, they were too short and would leave me with red, raw wrists when I played outside in the cold.

Next came a pair of ski pajamas, the fashion rage of the day. Then, a big surprise, a radio of my own. A radio for my room, so Woody and I could listen to Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, Suspense and The Shadow in private. Finally came the long skinny box. I tore off the paper. The carton underneath didn’t say Daisy Air Rifle: it was unmarked. I didn’t care; I’d settle for an off brand. I pried open the lid and pulled out the weapon. A single shot, ping-pong ball rifle!

My chagrin lasted less than an hour; I found the lemonade in the lemons. I could shoot at people. I could shoot at stuff! I no longer have that eye-safe, engine of warfare from the 1950’s. But, I do have a BB gun, a Daisy Red Ryder Carbine, No. 111, Model 40. My wife, tired of my complaining, found it in an antique store and gave it to me for Christmas in 1983, the same year A Christmas Story aired and Ralphie got his. It’s a little scuffed up and the squirrels laugh out loud when I stand guard at our bird feeder, but it shoots just fine. And, I haven’t shot out my eye out! Now, if I could only get the old south side warriors together, the Almy, Burtis and Spangoletti brothers, Woody, Warren and Buzzy, for one last BB-gun battle, my story would have a perfect ending. Long overdue.

a dorky Christmas Card example

another dorky card with my sister Madeline

Me and my dog Lassie (where my bb gun trouble began)

PERILS OF A PAPERBOY (Published Binghamton Press, September 22, 2013)

I was nine years old when I started in the newspaper business. The impetus came from a book I read in my fourth grade classroom at Longfellow School on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a story about two boys who published a neighborhood newspaper called the Tom Thumb. I’ve forgotten the name of the book, but not the rush I felt when my friend Woody (Walls) and I formed a partnership and produced our own neighborhood paper, shamelessly stealing its name from the one in the book.

With notebooks in hand, we went door-to-door, signing up subscribers and gathering news. The premier issue was printed (typos, cross outs, eraser smears and all) on a gelatin printing press, a letter-size tray filled with a semi-solid gel mix that captured the impression from a freshly typed page and transferred it to a blank sheet of paper. It reproduced four or five images before becoming too faint to read; we reimprinted the master and started over again. It took all day Saturday to type and print copies of the first edition. We delivered it to twenty-seven subscribers on Chadwick and Denton Roads just in time for dinner.  By the next afternoon the neighborhood was abuzz. We had a "Best Seller" on our hands. We strutted around with big heads, taking great pride in our literary skills, clueless that we’d simply produced a neighborhood gossip sheet. One that covered dirt from every family on the block.

Our juicy news items came from the kids, not the parents. The paper grew from a single page publication to a multi-page rag. We were forced to switch from the gelatin press to a mimeograph machine at my father’s office. Twelve editions were produced in this manner and then the enterprise imploded. Our news sources dried up, as one by one, the parents figured out who had provided the perfectly accurate description of a plate throwing argument or some other embarrassing bit of gossip that took place in their very own home. The whistleblower was identified and silenced. Probably got a “time-out” too.

Customers had only been mildly interested in the mundane happenings around the neighborhood: a back yard barbeque at the Colavito’s, a visit from out town relatives at the Almy’s, Hank Merz’s new Ford, the newfangled, 6 inch, black and white TV at the Soldo’s or the bite the mailman received from Hunsinger’s pet duck. It was neighbors’ dirty laundry that wet their appetite. When it stopped coming, the paper’s circulation plummeted.  

My second venture into the newspaper business came a few years later. I started helping some of the older kids on the south side to deliver newspapers. It was an unpaid job (an internship of sorts) that I volunteered for, hoping to “inherit” a route when the owner moved on to a better paying and more prestigious job, like bagging groceries at the Loblaws Supermarket on Vestal Ave.

I applied for working papers when I turned fourteen and bought a route from Ronnie Gordon. He moved on to greener pastures, working at his father’s “East End Appliance” store on Robinson Street. I paid thirty-five dollars, an astronomical investment for a kid in 1956. The management at the Press didn’t allow their routes to be sold, but it was a policy they couldn’t enforce. Thirty-five dollars was the going rate on the black market; the investment was usually paid off on the installment plan. I signed a contract on a Saturday afternoon, acknowledging the debt and my promise to pay a dollar a week for thirty-five weeks, and delivered my first set of papers the next morning. And, as any paperboy from that era can attest, it was the heaviest paper of the week, the hardest to deliver. Sunday was the only day the Binghamton Evening Press came out in the morning. The rest of the week it rolled off the presses on Chenango Street just in time for the “man of the house” to sit back with it in his recliner chair and wait for his wife to announce that dinner was ready. It truly was an “Ozzie and Harriet world back then.

The papers for my route were dropped off at the corner of Vestal Avenue and Brookfield Road. Marshal Reutlinger’s papers were dropped there as well, but his route was so big he had to parcel it out to assistants. His cousin (my friend) Woody handled one of the sections, sometimes delivering the papers to his house on Denton and mine on Chadwick. It kind of galled me that I couldn’t deliver my own paper, that it was part of Marshal’s empire. He was the titan of the south side newspaper delivery business.   

I had 63 customers on a route that started at the corner of Kendal and Brookfield, went along Kendal for a block, up Allendale and then westward on Moore where it ended at the intersection with Chadwick, three doors up the hill from where I lived. The newspapers came in a bundle, tightly bound by a piece of metal wire. If you worked at it, you get the middle copy out, easing the tension on the rest of the bundle. A well-equipped newsboy, like Marshal, carried a slotted wire cutter the size of a silver dollar that would break the wire with a few simple twists. The papers were then loaded into a canvas shoulder bag, folded with an interlocking twist and tossed from the sidewalk to customers’ front porches. (I had an accuracy rate of about 75%). Some customers insisted I walk to the house and put the paper inside their storm door. (The very same customers that apparently considered it immoral to tip a paperboy).

On Monday nights I went back over the route for a first pass at collections. Some kids did it as they delivered, but I never found that very productive. Collecting was a chore I dreaded. I heard every excuse in the book  -  “I already paid you. –  My husband paid you! My husband isn’t home. – We paid you for two weeks last week.  – I don’t have any change. - Can you break a fifty, ha ha?  I heard it all, but I had a collection book with a tear off stub for every week of the year for every customer. Even the cheapskates who borrowed a neighbor’s stub couldn’t fool me. But it was brutal; dog bites, multi-calls, lies and doorbells that mysteriously didn’t work when I pressed the button. I earned every cent of the nine bucks I netted each week. I had to make sure I had enough money to pay “Tony Soprano,” the circulation manager, when he came to my door on Saturday morning. He didn’t accept excuses. He didn’t take checks.

Tips were few and far between. A customer’s weekly bill was forty-five cents. You would think that when I asked for the payment of 45 cents, a customer might hand me two quarters every once in a while and say, “Keep the change kid!” After all, I’d delivered the paper every day and made sure it never got wet. But, NO! I can count on one hand the number of customers who tipped. (And to add insult to injury, Marshall got my parents to tip him because he was smart enough to say thanks and walk away with the fifty cents, leaving it them to call him back for their change, which they, and many of his customers seldom did.) 

Still, that eight or nine dollar profit was a fortune to me. My bike was equipped with every imaginable accessory: chrome fenders, baskets, horns, reflectors and even an expensive and highly coveted generator-light. The rest was squandered too, on soda (which we called soft drink), penny candy, yo-yos, badminton birdies, baseballs, kites and balsa wood gliders. I never saved a cent. But, for two years I was the richest kid on the block (except for Marshal).

Now, more that five decades later, I’m still in the newspaper business, writing “Old Coot” and “Memories” articles that are published here and there, longing for just one more afternoon to pound the pavement on my old route with a canvas paper bag full of papers slung over my shoulder. But alas, there is no Evening Press and the ghosts of the dogs who terrorized me back then are still on the prowl. Someday, my ghost will come by to take them on yet again. This time I’ll be carrying a can of pepper spray! 

Marshal (right, Me (left) 50 years later

Woody (right) and me (left) on a press break

NOT SO PERFECT AFTER ALL (Published June 16, 2013)

I was a “perfect” student in school. I was at my desk every day for 12 ½ years. But I wasn’t so perfect, after all. It began in kindergarten at Longfellow School on the south side of Binghamton. I was one of several students called to the front of the room at the end of the year and presented with a certificate for perfect attendance. I was hooked; I did something perfect? And, got a certificate for it? I wanted more. Year after year, I made it to school every day, on time, and was feted with a certificate for perfect attendance, signed by the superintendent of schools, the school principal and the director of attendance. The last one I received at Longfellow read, “Neither absent nor tardy for 6 ½ years.”

Many of the days when I “occupied” a desk I should have been in bed at home. But, neither head cold, nor sore throat nor measles, mumps or chicken pox (nor the dark of night, I suppose) deterred me from my perfect attendance quest. Eventually, the obsession got me in trouble; it happened in West Junior. My attendance record prevented me from skipping school like everyone else when I hadn’t prepared for a test or finished an essay paper.

I somehow never got into the true spirit of homework. There wasn’t any at Longfellow. We learned stuff in class, not at home. When the bell rang at 3 we ran home with the enthusiasm of escaped convicts. We were free! So, at junior high, I stuck to my elementary school routine, doing little if any homework. The A’s and B’s that once graced my report cards were replaced with C’s, D’ s and an occasional F. My attendance was perfect, but everything else was mediocre. I dragged home my report card after every six-week marking period with extreme dread, until I discovered a flaw in the system. At the end of the marking period we were given a blank report card in homeroom; we took it to each class so the teacher could transcribe our grade from their class book. They signed the card with their initials. Our parents signed them too, proving they saw how we were doing. We returned them back to homeroom. My friends were treated to a sundae or a similar reward; I was treated to the “you better buckle down” lecture.  

Then, fate came and tempted me and I took the bait. I lost a card one “report-card” day and was given a new one for the teachers to fill in again. But, before I took it around to the teachers I found it, the one with an “F” in Social Studies. Why take that home and get in trouble?” fate chided me. “Fill in the blank card with good grades.” So, I did! Carefully copying each teacher’s initials. All of a sudden, I was an honors student, a report card full of A’s and B’s. I finally got my sundae! My father signed it and I copied his signature onto the real card. Life was good! Until the Social Studies teacher made a courtesy call to my mother to make sure she knew I was failing Social Studies and needed to buckle down. “How can that be?” my mother exclaimed. “He got a “B” on his report card.

The next morning I was sitting in the principal’s outer office, awaiting my doom and getting a whack-up-the- side-of-the-head from my mother every time the secondhand on the big IBM clock swept past 12. My trial was a short one; I was convicted and sentenced to confinement at the kitchen table until my homework was completed and checked every day after school. Even Friday! I also had to apologize to each teacher, even the ones whose grades I hadn’t altered. Surprisingly, I started to do better in school. The connection between doing homework and learning the subject matter finally sank into my thick skull.

 I kept up my attendance record all the way through high school. I received a check for $25 dollars at the West Junior graduation (a fortune to a 14 year-old back then), got my picture in the paper with the boys counselor at the end of 10^th grade but no picture and no check when I graduated, just a certificate. The school principal was still steaming from catching me going to the pool hall in 11^th grade instead of to St. Pats when we were released from school an hour early to go to religious instructions. But, that’s a story for another day.

Winter Memories, January 27, 2013

Memories of winters past.

By Merlin Lessler (aka The Old Coot)

It snowed more and was a lot colder when I was a kid. Back in the 50’s. At least that’s what us old coots will tell you. But, in spite of our tendency to exaggerate, we really do know the truth about the weather back then; we spent all our free time out in it. We hated to be called home for dinner; our mothers had to threaten us with bodily harm. We couldn’t wait to go back out and spent the entire meal begging for permission. Our moms would eventually give in and say, “OK - but only until the street lights come on.” Which in the winter didn’t give us much time. We quickly bundled up and flew out the back door. 

                                                   my sister, Madeline, and me taking a break



And, boy, were we bundled up:  wool coats, leggings (snow pants), two pairs of socks, leather shoes crammed into buckle boots, knitted hats, scarves and mittens (mine came every year as a Christmas present from my “knitting” aunt in Connecticut). There was always a gap between the end of the mitten and the sleeve of my jacket leaving me with red, raw, frozen wrists. I never was able to convince her to make the mittens longer.

It was a wonderland out there, a real life, snow globe. My sisters and I were lucky; we lived near the top of Chadwick Road (though I never thought so when I had to push my bike up the hill when I came home from playing in the “flats” (the cluster of veteran houses and fields at the bottom of the hill). It was a steep slope, perfect for sled riding (as we called it), as was Denton Road, the next street over. We were a gang, us kids that lived on the two blocks that made up our neighborhood. A gang of winter Olympians.

After a snowstorm the city ash trucks would climb our hill, chains on the tires and a burly worker standing in the back shoveling ashes onto the road in wide swaths. We ran along side the truck begging him to leave a strip of snow by the curb. Usually he would. When the snow on the road melted we shifted our sledding to our back yards and the fields behind the houses on Denton Road. My house was blessed with a steep hill between it and the one next door. It gave us a thrilling ride that carried us across the flat part of the yard and down a second hill into the fields that have since been built over with a cluster of houses. 

We came down those snow-covered hills every way imaginable: face down on a sled, sitting up, standing and holding the rope and on skis with loops of leather as bindings. But, my favorite downhill racer was a flattened cardboard box. It could zip past the fastest of sleds. The Wall’s kids (Woody and Stu) had a toboggan, and like all play equipment back then, it was shared around the neighborhood. No words were spoken, no contracts signed; we just went to the owner’s garage, took the equipment and knocked on the window to let them know who had it. The Walls family had the toboggan, the Harris family had the stilts, I had the Irish-mail, a hand powered, four-wheel vehicle guaranteed to make you as strong as Charles Atlas. The Burtis brother’s back yard, at the top of Denton, was the access point to a makeshift ski lane that started on South Mountain in the woods above Moore Avenue. The slope was so steep we could barely climb it with our sleds. The trail was narrow; trees lined it on the right, thick briars on the left. I could never keep the toboggan out of the briars. As far as I could tell, it was un-steerable, in spite of all the leaning we did from side to side and our desperate tugs on the so-called steering ropes.

Not so, for the Barton brothers (Buzzy and Chickadee). They sometimes came over from an adjacent neighborhood with a wooden bobsled (the only one in town as far as we knew). It was fast and it could be steered. I never got to ride it; none of us younger kids did. We just stood off to the side watching in awe and sucking the moisture out of our sodden wool mittens. I'm envious to this day of that bobsled.

The snow we loved best of all was the wet heavy stuff. That’s when our neighborhood turned into an Eskimo village. Every yard had an igloo and the air was ablaze with hard packed snowballs. We were smart back then. Snow smart! You didn’t see us going around in flip-flops like kids do today. And, unlike the “four-eyed” kid on the ever popular “shoot-your-eye-out” Christmas movie, we knew how to unstick our tongue when we’d been double dared and touched it to a frozen, metal sled runner. If you don’t know the secret, you won’t learn it from me. I don’t have time. I don’t even have time to mention Joe Barry’s ski run and rope tow at the top of Stone Road, or the “bear trap” ski bindings that didn’t release when you fell. Or, the trains we formed with our sleds. Or, the army surplus skis we bought that were longer than we were tall. Or, the new fangled flying saucers that came on the market in the mid 1950’s. Or, the day a frozen rain covered the city and we ice skated on the sidewalks and roads all over town. I don’t have time. It’s starting to snow and I have to bundle up. It’s still a wonderland out there! (To me).

Me at age 1 with Madeline age 3

I guess we'd had enough!

My sister Madeline on left, Patsy on right

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