Best Christmas present ever! (Binghamton Press Article December 17, 2014)

An old coot remembers his first bike; the best Christmas present ever. 

by Merlin lessler

It happened two Christmases in row! The best presents a boy (in the fifties) could hope for were under my tree. But, I had to wait an “eternity” to play with them. The first time it happened, I was seven; it was a set of electric trains; I didn’t get my hands on them until late in the day, after my father finally had his fill, “showing me how.” The next year it was a bicycle; I didn’t get to ride that until the following spring. My sister, Madeline, and I both got bikes that year, second-hand, but freshened up with a new coat of paint. We didn’t care; they sparkled, as did our eyes when we saw them under the tree. But, into the basement they went for three long months.    

Finally, the first robin arrived in Binghamton and the bikes came out. We lived on Chadwick Road; it was too steep to learn to ride a bike on so my father helped us push them up the hill to Moore Ave, a flat street with hardly any traffic. I can still remember the exhilaration of staying upright while he pushed me. I remember even more vividly, the terror I felt when I looked over my shoulder and discovered he wasn’t there. I panicked and crashed to the ground. He eventually convinced me that I’d kept the bike upright all by myself and didn’t need his help, except to get started. I hopped back on, and like Hop-a-long Cassidy, my cowboy hero, rode off into the sunset. One problem; I didn't know how to dismount. When I came to a stop, I simply fell over.  

My sister solved the problem. She raced ahead, jumped off her bike and caught me as I came to a stop. Later on, I just stopped near the curb and put out my foot. It wasn’t my fault; the bike was too big, like everything in those days. We had to “grow into” stuff: shoes, clothes, skates, sleds and yes, bikes. I went around in oversized jeans (we called them dungarees) with a six inch cuff, shoes with wadded up newspaper stuffed in the toes and to top it off, I had to use a curb to get on and off my bike. 

I developed a deep relationship with that two-wheeler. It allowed me to leave behind my three-wheeler and the ridicule that went with it. I don't think a cowboy ever loved his horse more than I loved that bike. It was freedom; it was status; and it taught me how to fix things. I learned to take it apart and convert it into a racing bike, by removing the fenders, reversing the handlebars and raising the seat. Sometimes, I decorated it with red, white and blue crepe paper and rode at the tail end of the parades in downtown Binghamton. A lot of kids did. We also “clothes pinned” a piece of cardboard to the fender support so it would flap against the spokes and made it sound like we were riding motorcycles. It didn’t take much to entertain a kid back in the fifties.    

My mother loved the bike too. She sent me off to Bill Scales’ market on Pennsylvania Avenue just about every day. My favorite errand was a bread run. I always snuck a slice out of the middle of the loaf; it was the price my mother unknowingly paid for delivery service. I lost my concentration on one of those bread runs, distracted by the freshness of the bread I guess, and crashed into the side of a delivery truck. I was only slightly injured. More startled than anything.  A neighbor passing by ran to my house and yelled in the door to my mother, “Come quick; Merlin has been hit by a truck!” Mom got a terrible scare, but I paid for it. Once she discovered I was OK she started yelling, and kept it up all the way home! Those gray hairs I allegedly gave her were painful for me too. The bike got fixed and served me well for years. Then, the year I turned 12, I found a lightweight, English bike, with hand brakes and three gears under the Christmas tree. It was brand-new and the exact right size. I was ecstatic, but I’ll always think of that used, repainted bicycle as best Christmas present ever.

My sister and I the year we got our first bikes

My sister and I the year we got the English bikes

My friend Woody (on the back) and I (last year on a trike)

Greenhorns at West Junior High (Binghamton Press Article September 7, 2014

Greenhorns! 1954 style.

By the Old Coot, Merlin Lessler

It’s that time of year again. Back to school time. It’s a big deal when you’re going to a new school. That was the case 60 years ago for me and the rest of my sixth grade, Longfellow Elementary School graduating class. We were swimming out of our little pond on Binghamton’s south side and merging with the graduates of seven other neighborhood schools around the city in the big pond at West Junior High School. It was a short journey in miles, but socially, it was a continent away.

My friend Woody (Walls) and I were conned into spending our summer vacation as indentured servants to Woody’s older brother, Stewie, and his friend, Vincent DiStaphano in return for their protection when we faced greenhorn hazing on the bus that would pick us up at our old neighborhood school and take us to “West.” Woody and I witnessed this ritual every September from a safe vantage point on the playground next to the bus stop. We watched the greenhorns board the bus, spiffed up in new school clothes, relaxed and cocky. We peeked into the windows and saw upper classmen shove them like rag dolls to the back of the bus as it pulled away from the curb. We also saw them at the end of the school day, the last kids to totter off the bus, hair mussed, shirts pulled out or turned around backwards, and a look on their face signaling terror and defeat. Yes, we knew what to expect, and bought into the salvation offered by Stewey and Vinnie, hook, line and sinker.

We spent that entire summer of 1954 as lackeys, running to the store for bottles of soda and a candy bars, doing yard chores, washing family cars, shagging fly balls. Whatever Stewie and Vinnie asked, we did! We were the lowest of the low in the neighborhood pecking order that summer, but it was worth it if it would save us from the greenhorn massacre awaiting us in September.

I'll never forget that 1^st day of school in the fall of 1954, the day we left behind our safe playground at Longfellow to board the Junior High bus for the first time. Woody and I hung back at the bus stop with our protectors, waiting for the doors on bus #1 to open. Our nervous classmates must have wondered why we were so calm, in light of the pending doom that awaited us on the bus. The doors opened; Stewey and Vinnie scrambled over to bus # 2 and yelled, "See you later, Suckers!"

We looked at each other in disbelief, and then over at Denzel Kelly, the Longfellow bully we were leaving behind. He stood on the playground grinning, as his older brother, Chuck, grasped our carefully combed hair and dragged us to the back of the bus, laughing and cackling, "This way, girls! I've been expecting you." We were pushed, shoved and mussed up right along with the rest of the freshman class, made to stand at attention, to respond with "Sir, yes sir," to endure being called sissies, babies and girls by Chuck and his gang of junior high bullies.

This went on for a week or more, coming to an end when the upperclassmen got bored and found more pleasure in singing derogatory songs to the bus driver, like, “We love our little driver, yes we do, yes we do. Oh we love our little driver, yes in a pigs rear end we do!”

There was one student for whom the greenhorn ritual didn’t come to an end, Earl Landon. He could yodel. So, everyday he was forced to stand in the aisle on the bus and perform.  He did it all through our junior high years, yodeling his way to and from school most every day. If it weren’t for him, it probably would have been Woody and me in the aisle, playing our band instruments. Woody his clarinet and me, my French horn. Thank you Earl! The whole thing taught me a valuable life lesson. Never duck out on your fate. Face the music; it will cause less pain in the long run.

Footnote #1 -  Denzel ultimately transformed from school bully to south side good-guy. He even saved me from a beating late one night when I was walking home alone and was grabbed by some members of a west side gang. He happened by, just as things were getting rough and charged into the fray like a knight on a white horse.

Footnote #2 -  I reminded Stu Walls of this incident at an AZ reunion this summer, but he disagrees with my memory of that summer of 1954. He claims it would have been much worse for Woody and me if he and Vinnie hadn’t protected us. He’s made the same claim for 60 years and I still don’t buy it.  

Footnote #3 – Earl Landon died in February 2012. A good guy! A Longfellow classmate I’ll never forget.

Woody, Top picture, top row 2nd from left.

Me, bottom picture center of row 2 (bow tie and all)

White wall tires made us cool! - Binghamton Press Article August 10, 2014

Cool cars! 1950’s autos with port-a-wall tires.

By the Old Coot, Merlin Lessler

White walls were the only tires acceptable to teenagers in the fifties. It was “uncool” to drive, or even ride, in a car with blackwalls. It announced to the world that the owner had no taste - the equivalent of strutting around in a black suit, high water pants and white socks. The problem us “cool” guys had was our fathers’ indifference to our taste in tires. They all sang from the same hymnal when we pestered them to pay a few extra dollars for white sidewalls. They claimed that white wall tires weren’t as strong as standard blackwalls, that the color was achieved by bleaching and it weakened the sidewall. It might have been true, but we didn’t care about tire safety; we cared about our image. Good old “free enterprise” provided the solution, Port-a-walls, those flat donuts of white rubber that fit under the rim, turning a blackwall into a whitewall. For three dollars, we were able to convert a drab family sedan into a "cool" machine. I spent many hours removing tires from my parents cars, painstakingly going through a laborious process: taking the wheel off the car, letting out the air, jacking up another car on the tire to break the bead, slipping the port-a-wall under the rim, pumping air back into the tire with a hand pump and then remounting the wheel. I often had to repeat the process because the port-a-wall would shift when the tire popped back into the rim. Then, and only then, did I feel cool behind the wheel of our family car, my left arm hanging out the window, an unlit Marlboro hanging from my lips and best of all, glistening whitewalls adorning the spinning wheels below. 

Even my mother’s 1953 Hudson Jet was cool, this scaled down ¾ sized Hudson. (“A car for the lady of the house.”) But mom’s Jet wasn’t just cool because of the whitewall tires. It was also cool because it was a world champion coaster. It could glide farther than any car on Binghamton’s Southside. Every day after school we rode into the nearby hills of Pennsylvania. Traffic was light and cops were scarce. We didn’t have much money for gas, so we sought routes where it was possible to coast for long distances. We sped recklessly down the hills and around the curves so we could make it over the top of the next ridge. My mother’s Hudson Jet beat all comers; it hardly lost any speed as it coasted up a hill that brought other cars to a halt.

When we coasted, we turned off the key to minimize gasoline consumption. On one after school ride, I accidentally turned the key off and then back on again while the car was still in gear. BOOM! It backfired; I thought a cannon had gone off. I did it again and the same thing happened. I’d discovered something that ultimately cost my parents dearly. I made it backfire whenever I wanted to scare or impress someone strolling along the side of the rode. I didn't know that the bang was caused by the ignition of unburned gas in the exhaust system. It didn’t take long before it blew my mother’s muffler to smithereens. And then, a few weeks later, it did it again. My father became suspicious. He doubted that replacing two mufflers on her car had anything to do with faulty equipment or shoddy workmanship at Brown's service station on the corner of Pennsylvania and Vestal Avenue. The truth came out when I blew the entire exhaust system off his pride and joy, his 1958 Edsel. It was a financial disaster; the lemon of the century had two mufflers and two resonators. All four had to be replaced. I was cool! And, then I was a pedestrian.

Happy Father's Day Pop. Published June 15, 2014, Binghamton Press

An Old Coot wishes his pop a Happy Father’s day!

by Merlin Lessler

I stumbled on an old picture of my father the other day. It lay hidden for decades in a box of memorabilia. It was taken in 1970, a few months before he died. He was sixty-eight. Something about the picture struck a chord in me. It looked familiar in a new way. Then it dawned on me. I’ve been seeing a semblance of his face in my mirror for several years, when I really looked. Usually, I’m not paying close attention; I see myself in a memory haze. We all do. None of us can believe how old we really are. Even a thirty-year-old sees a younger face in the mirror. Every once in a while the haze clears and we’re startled. “Who the heck is that?” That’s the way it was for me when I looked at my father’s picture. He’d been appearing in my mirror of late and I didn’t know it.

I was in my twenties when he died. His face showing up in my mirror has been a long time coming. So long that I didn’t expect it. It’s why the long-lost snapshot gave me such a start. I came face to face with my mortality. I can remember being irked with him when he died. The national life expectancy for a male at the time was sixty-nine. He died short of the mark. I thought he should have stayed around longer. We’d just started to develop a nice friendship. The salad days of suffering through the “old man’s” unsolicited advice had finally worn away; we both had come to realize that each had a unique perspective on life, to value, to treasure. Then he was gone.

Now it’s my turn. The face in my mirror is looking very much like his. I’ve got to hang on longer than he did. My son is a few years from discovering that his “old man” is okay. I can’t rush the process. I couldn’t with his sisters and I can’t with him. He won’t grow up right unless he goes through the transition, rejects the nurturing and flies from the nest. It’s nature’s way and you can’t mess with Mother Nature.

My father would be 111 if he were still alive. I know he would get a real kick out of the technology we take for granted today. He was a technocrat himself, an inventor. His name is on dozens of the patents for Ansco cameras. He loved to tinker, especially with cars. His favorite vacation was driving us to the Jersey shore. We almost always ran into car trouble. He’d somehow patch things together so we could limp to the motel. While we enjoyed the beach he took on the car problem. He’d spend all day leaning in, or lying under, the vehicle. If you stood within hearing range you’d hear him yell, “Sucker,” every once in a while, when his hand slipped off the wrench and he skinned his knuckles. He never swore; he just yelled sucker.  The whole thing is easier to understand when you realize that our car was a Ford Edsel. He bought it brand new, the first year they made it. He liked being on the cutting edge. It was the lemon of the century. The repair bills added up. He didn’t care. He loved it. I did too. It was the car I got to drive when I turned sixteen.

It was one of the few things we agreed on during my teen years. When I bought my first car, a well used, 1953 Ford convertible, for sixty dollars, it made two things we agreed on. It made me a Ford man too. Cars had magic in those days. They brought fathers and sons together, under the hood, taking on the beast. It was a time when a regular Joe could fix a car - change the spark plugs, replace the generator, adjust the brakes. You could even pull the engine and overhaul it if you were especially handy. The automobile had a social context. That’s gone now. The manufacturers have put the backyard mechanics out of business. The secrets of today’s automobiles can’t be passed on from father to son. The secrets are locked up in computer chips and buried in a web of pollution control components. Even the design engineers aren’t sure how it all works.  It’s too bad. Cars helped fathers and sons stay in touch through the difficult teen years. Now that bridge is gone. Happy father’s day Pop! I hope the Edsel is hitting all eight cylinders.

me and my dad at my 2nd birthday

my father at his desk at Ansco

Knee Driving World Record? Published May 4, 2014, Binghamton Press

Knee Driving to Quaker lake

by Merlin Lessler

This was it! The day I was finally going to make it! Drive to Quaker Lake with my knees! (Yes, steering the car with my knees.) A spectacular, “Look ma, no hands,” moment. 

I backed out of our Chadwick Road driveway, desperately maneuvering the wheel with a knee-over-knee technique to get the car pointing down hill and on the wrong side of the road so I could get it around the corner onto Aldridge Avenue. Thankfully, my father’s pride and joy, his red 1958 Edsel, had power steering. The turn was tricky, but I made it with ease. It was the summer of 1959. Eisenhower was in the Whitehouse, Rockefeller in the Governor’s Mansion and John Burns was running the show at Binghamton City Hall. I’d had a driver’s license for six months. A “Junior” license, which in those days meant you had to be off the road by sunset. Not 9 pm. Not after a school function. Not at the end of a work day. SUNSET!

I turned right at the end of Aldridge onto Pennsylvania Ave. It was my last 90-degree turn in city traffic.  John Manley was sitting next to me, a little nervous as I threaded my way along the serpentine route to the lake. Tommy Conlon had called, “Shotgun,” and sat in the catbird seat with his arm hanging out the window. Jim Wilson, Walt Zagorsky and Don Campbell settled comfortably in the sofa sized rear seat.  It was smooth sailing. I’d honed my skill on many, many, previous attempts and had become quite adept at knee driving.

We came to Vosburgh’s Junk Yard and Wimpy hopped off his chair next to the gas pump and waved. I reached under the dash and pushed a doorbell button that was connected to a truck horn hidden under the starter (unbeknownst to my father, until the day he was under the hood checking the oil and I couldn’t stop myself from pushing the button). Wimpy had a similar reaction. When the truck horn blasted, he jumped back, nearly toppling over. He shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, he was the one who had escorted me to the rusting hulk of a truck the day I bought it.   

We were still laughing at his reaction when we came to Hawleytown. Then we got serious. We knew the town cop would be lurking somewhere, in an unending quest to keep teenage Binghamtonians from speeding through his town. It was a nonevent. He didn’t appear and we climbed the hill toward Giblin’s mom and pop grocery store. We never bought groceries there, just beer; three quarts of Topper for a dollar. The church key was free. We were a year or so shy of the legal drinking age (18 at the time) but the driver’s licenses we carried in a secret compartment in our wallets claimed otherwise. They were unsigned works of art produced by David Wiseman in his basement on Allendale Road, but that’s a story for another day. I pulled off the road and stopped a quarter of a mile past Giblins. A sharp, hairpin turn lay ahead. It had defeated me on three previous occasions. I needed a traffic free road and plenty of room to have any chance of steering through it with my knees. So, I parked and waited. 

The strategy worked; I made it through the difficult turn. Only one obstacle was left, a right turn at the stop sign at the lake followed immediately by another one, into the Brady Beach parking lot. This time it was brains, not brawn that did the trick. Don Campbells’s brain to be specific. “Don’t go for the driveway; go past it and around the lake and come back to it. Then it will be a simple right turn, not a double turn.” So, I did!  I drove around the lake in a counter clockwise direction, passing the field where I’d stood on a frosty morning, two years earlier, covered in a slurry of shaving cream, limburger cheese and rotten eggs, waiting for my turn to be paddled with a tightly rolled Life Magazine, the final ritual to earn membership in AZ (Alpha Zeta fraternity). I winced as I passed it. Soon after that I was kneeing my way into the Brady parking lot. Pat Brady stood defiant in my path; ordered me to back up and drive to an overflow lot around the corner. I started to argue, explaining the quest I was on, but Pat was having none of it. And even though he was several years my junior, I knew he wasn’t about to back down. He was one tough kid. Jimmy Wilson saved the day. He waved a dollar bill from the back window. Pat grabbed it, gave him a friendly (but painful) slug in the arm and waved us through. My knee-driving quest was accomplished! A feat fit worthy of  the Guinness Book of World Records, but alas, I was unaware of such a book, in spite of it having been in existence for four years at that point in time. So instead, it remains, a south side legend, an unpublished, and mostly illegal collection of dubious accomplishments.

I did my share of strutting that summer, but it came to an end on July 18, the day I tried for another driving record. This one, to see if my father’s Edsel could go 100 miles an hour. Unfortunately, I tried it on a Sunday afternoon on upper Court Street, passing an unmarked police car hidden in the rear of the parking lot at the Pig Stand. I didn’t get my license back until November 2^nd. But, I then knew what 100 MPH felt like. (Not that good!) I see knee drivers out on the road all the time these days, texting while driving. And, they’re pretty good. But, I bet none of them could make it from Binghamton to Quaker Lake. 

The Magic Blackboard at Longfellow Elementary School (March 8, 2014)

An old coot learned his lessons well at PS-13
by Merlin Lessler

She walked to the blackboard. It was the biggest one I’d ever seen, stretching across the entire front wall of the room. She reached into the tray, picked up a piece of white chalk (no yellow in those days) and wrote Mrs. Shopper across the top. It was just squiggles to us; we couldn’t read. It was our first day in school, kindergarten at Longfellow Elementary on Binghamton’s south side.

I walked there with my friend Woody, under the supervision of his older brother Stu and my older sister Madeline. We took the “long” way, up to the top of my street, Chadwick, along Moore to Pennsylvania, and down to the school that sat on a plot of land now occupied by a UHS sleep disorder and neuro-diagnostic facility. The short way, which we took every day after that 1^st one, was on a path that started in my back yard, meandered through a wood lot, past an abandoned metal hulk of an old farm truck, skirted around a small frog pond and up a hill through an overgrown hay field coming out where Brookfield and Aldridge meet.

I still remember that first day, the bully that pushed me aside at the sandbox and yanked a fire truck out of my hands, but the thing that dominates my memory, is the “magic slate where Mrs. Shopper wrote her name and then turned to us, like every teacher in every grade after that, and said, “I’m your teacher, Mrs. Shopper.” And, added, “That’s my name,” knowing we were illiterate and would be for at least another year and a half. That’s why we were there. Her job was to get us started: the ABC’s, counting, telling time, tying our shoes and enough socialization skills to prepare us for real schooling. Little by little, that long piece of slate, and others like it, converted the mush in our skulls to knowledge. It was a low-tech device yet it was all that was needed. It was a magic slate! The primary tool in a teacher’s arsenal.

But, it wasn’t just academics that came from that inert piece of slate; it had the power to hoodwink an entire classroom, an entire school. It had us chomping at the bit to do chores of the sort we took great pains to skip out of at home. It started when Mrs. Shopper turned from the board one day, after weeks of us gaping at her as she slowly and deliberately moved the eraser back and forth on the slate, mysteriously removing all her carefully drawn symbols (kids were pretty naïve back then) and asked Delbert Geragosian (the tallest kid in class) to come to the front of the room to clean the board. We were stunned, but not Delbert. He never had a problem grabbing the brass ring. Flying to the task, he aped her methodology, carefully and slowly removing all traces of the morning’s lesson. He proudly strutted back to his desk, indifferent to the 18 jealous, yet secretly thrilled classmates who surrounded him. Jealous, because he was the one who had been selected, but thrilled because we had been in school long enough to know the ropes. Our turn would come soon enough, probably in alphabetical order.

The trap had been set and sprung. For the rest of my confinement at PS-13 (as we referred to Longfellow), I never saw a teacher erase a blackboard at the end of a lesson; it was always a kid. And, as we had speculated, the tradition of picking a student at random was short lived. After a month of it, an alphabetical assignment list was posted off to the side of the blackboard, putting us on equal footing with the teacher’s pets. We could recognize our names by then. The list was one of many. Everything was controlled by a list: leading the pledge to the flag, starting the morning prayer, cleaning erasers and washing the board, both of which were performed after the school day ended. And even though I spent all day waiting to break free of my confinement in that brick prison, when it was my turn to do either of those two chores, I eagerly stayed behind as the rest of the class rushed to freedom. Now I understand how easy it was for Tom Sawyer to get his friends to whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence.

Erasers were cleaned on a special device in the school basement. It was a strange contraption bolted to a bench with a crank attached to a rotating brush. When you turned the crank the brush swept across the eraser, agitating the chalk dust and blowing it into a hooded bin. Washing the board also entailed a trip into Mr. Vanick’s (the kindly school janitor) subterranean headquarters. We filled a dented galvanized pail with water and grabbed a sponge from the bin. It was my favorite chore. Like magic, it restored the board to a pristine, black luster. Tom Sawyer’s con job had nothing over the scam pulled off by the all-female staff at PS-13. I loved being called to the blackboard, except when it was to write, fifty times, “I will not throw paper airplanes in class ever again,” while the rest of the kids rushed out to the playground for recess. I learned so much from that simple piece of slate. But as important as the academic lessons were, those blackboards taught me even more about human nature. That was the real magic!

PS - 13 circa 1954

Wood (left), Me (right) last few days of freedom before starting school.