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.