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

The Old Coot remembers the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre at PS – 13.

Young Love and Broken Hearts

Published in The Binghamton Press February 1, 2015

By Merlin Lessler

Elementary schools celebrate holidays! Major, minor and a few fabricated ones. Longfellow Elementary School, on Binghamton’s south side (or, as we called it, PS-13), was no exception. We dragged home odd shaped turkeys & pilgrims at Thanksgiving, jack-o-lanterns at Halloween, images of "George" with axe in hand on February 22nd, and a multitude of tributes to the day at hand, crudely put together with layers of colored construction paper and excessive blobs of white paste. Halloween was the most celebrated holiday at our school. The teachers encouraged us to wear costumes to school. They organized a parade of goblins and gremlins, letting girls and boys march together for a change. Playground games, apple dunking and a feast of cider & donuts were the order of the day. The climax was a "best costume" contest judged by a panel of our peers. Most outfits were home made. It's amazing what a kid could do with cardboard, crepe paper, Popsicle sticks, crayons, glue and a few of mom's kitchen utensils. Today, in most public schools, the administration doesn't allow the celebration of Halloween. It's true; on October 31st you can spot kids scurrying to school in what appears to be Halloween costumes. And yes, there is a parade, games, snacks and even a costume contest. But these events mark the celebration of such things as the "Fall Harvest of Good Books" or some other politically correct festivity, not Halloween. Halloween you see, has religious roots, and thus is not condoned in many public schools.

My friends Woody (Walls), Buzzy (Spencer) and I ranked Halloween very high on our list of favorite holidays. Second, only to Christmas.  Third, and moving up the scale at the same pace that hormones were starting to race through our bodies, came Valentine's Day. My memory of Valentine's Day starts with the box, decorated in pink and white crepe paper with red hearts on the side and a mail slot in the top. Classmate, Phyllis Otis, made ours. The box loomed on a perch at the front of the room in full view of the class, haunting us for days. "Will she put one in for me?" "Dare I get one for her?" Those were the questions that ran through our heads as Woody, Buzzy and I sat there in an armed camp on the boy’s side of the room. We knew we'd put in silly ones for each other and some of the girls, but what about the girl whose affections just might be worth enduring the teasing of our peers, the girls we on rare occasions walked home from school, to the taunt of "Merlin has a girl friend,” or “Woody’s in love!” Should we buy and sign a mushy Valentine? The box dared us to act!

Day after day, the love box grew heavier. Each morning we were allowed to make a deposit. I, like the rest of the "chickens," would drop in a handful of joke cards every day or so. A special card for a heartthrob like Nancy Wolcott or Diane Stack never made it until the very last day, if it made it at all. A few times in my years at PS-13, I mustered enough courage to buy a card, sign it, and bring it to class, only to answer the dismissal bell with it safely hidden in my pocket.

Finally, after a week of anxiety, Valentine's Day came to PS-13, a very long day. The box seemed to glow and vibrate, as though alive, holding its' secrets in silence. The teacher called a halt to formal classroom activity late in the afternoon. Homemade cookies and glasses of juice were passed around. The box was moved to her desk, the lid opened and the distribution ritual begun. One by one, valentines were pulled from the box, securely sealed in red and pink envelopes. She called out the name on the envelope, and when summoned, we made our way to the front of the room, grabbed the treasure with a sweaty hand and sheepishly returned to our seats, depositing the card on the top of our desk, unopened. After fetching our "first" card of the day, we breathed a sigh of relief, knowing we would not suffer the humiliation of "getting stiffed" by the entire class. The respite was brief, and the tension returned as we remembered the sentimental mushy card we had signed, sealed and deposited in the box.

Valentine's Day was a day of atonement. If you'd been a jerk, teased the girls and overdid the "double-dares" to the boys, then it was likely you would sit through the entire valentine distribution ritual without hearing your name. You became a victim of the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre. Then you would understand that you reap what you sow. It’s different today; kids are required to bring a valentine for every kid in class. They miss out on a valuable life lesson. Did you get any valentines this year?