A Utica Boyhood

[Dave]

“You know,” I said evenly, “that was a lot for a fifteen year old to be put through.”

“I am truly sorry,” she said, with compassion in her eyes. “My sister died ten years ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said, but I could not have sounded sincere.

A man came up behind her and she turned as if familiar with his footsteps. As he approached us I recognized him, Angelo Altomare. He didn’t even glance at me.

“Are you ready to go?” he asked her.

Mrs. Spina’s face reddened and she smiled up at me. But it was not a smile of embarrassment. The elder Santini sister had the smile of a winner. Who wins is the winner, she told me long ago. Sometimes it takes a while.

As they disappeared out the church’s door, I wondered what I would have said to the man if he had acknowledged me. I would not have spoken it, but as a prize Angelo Altomare struck me as a distant second to a cake or a dish of ziti.


Copyright 2012, David Griffin

[Dave]

I can still roll a newspaper tight, but can't remember how to solve a quadratic equation. I haven't tried swallowing air and loudly belching in quite a few years. I think I'd be afraid to at my age.

[Dave]

As I remember it, my little brother was the trouble maker, the Clint Eastwood type. He even looked like him as he grew older. I suppose anyone could say it's a cheap shot to blame everything on one's little brother, but isn't that what they're for?


Gunsmoke


One of the smells of my boyhood I’ll never forget is that of a recently fired roll of caps from a silver toy pistol. I always wondered if there were boys in that era who used cap guns in a responsible manner to imitate a wholly imaginary but courteous skirmish between cowboys and Indians. I imagine each side would later put down their weapons, shake hands and come up on the back porch to share a pitcher of Kool Aid. But I knew very few boys in our neighborhood who might pass for such gentlemen. Maybe
well behaved children lived elsewhere in the city, or on television shows that my parents liked to watch, or in some kind of parallel universe populated by angelic little darlings who probably didn’t even play with guns.

[Dave]

But a typical young gunslinger on our block would have been my little brother Jesse. In 1959 when I was sixteen, he was eight years old and, when he wasn’t holstered up with two six-shooters hanging on his hips, he carried a small derringer cap pistol in his pocket wherever he went. Unfortunately, he had a habit of pulling it out and firing off a few rounds at the most inappropriate times. He almost turned our baby cousin’s baptism ceremony into chaos when a kid from school he didn’t like showed up at the
church. Jesse jumped up in the pew and cussed the kid out with G-rated invective from a favorite cowboy movie … something about a lily livered polecat, I think. Jesse had the derringer half out of his pocket when Dad quietly disabled his gun arm with a pincer-like grip that left him with a sore elbow for the rest of the day. Too bad my father had not been present to save a quartet of Gospel Witnesses on our front porch the previous week.

On the other hand, Jesse was lucky Dad missed his shootout with Mr. Lynch, the mailman. In his grey Postal Service uniform, the big Irishman soon tired of serving as a regular target for Jesse. Mr. Lynch was also running out of G-Rated curses and he had raised the bar to just below four letter words, rebuking Jesse with Biblical denouncements such as, “you little son of perdition.” Jesse




repeated many of these and even called Mom a Daughter of Darkness the night she sent him to bed early for refusing to stop shooting at our canary. On a Saturday morning when my brother sprang out from the bushes shooting and hollering, “Die, you whited sepulchre of a storm trooper!” Mr. Lynch had had enough. He reached into his mail bag, pulled out a starter pistol loaded with real blanks and shot Jesse at point blank range. The shots were incredibly louder than those from a mere cap pistol. Jesse twirled around twice and fell to the ground, playing dead in case Mr. Lynch wanted to finish the job. Then the boy burst into tears as Mom came running out of the house to find her youngest son shot by a government servant.

“Are you all right?” she screamed at Jesse.

“So far,” he whimpered as he sat in the dirt feeling all over
himself for bullet holes.

[Dave]

Mom was livid and the postman was apologetic, but the starter pistol served its purpose. With Jesse neutralized, the U.S. Mail courier was no longer stayed from the swift completion of his appointed rounds. Mom hid the cap pistol where she thought Jesse would never find it. She probably should have driven a stake through it and buried it.




“Why do you carry a gun all the time, Jesse,” I asked him as we helped with the dishes that night. “What are you afraid of?”

“Jack booted storm troopers,” he said.

“Jesse, that was back in the War, and in another country,” I said. “You don’t even know what jack boots are, anyway.”

“No,” he replied, “but Uncle Harry got punched by a trooper last New Years.”

“Uncle Harry was drunk,” I said, “and that was a STATE trooper.” He appeared unconvinced.

When I began to notice a certain swagger creep back into his eight year old demeanor, I assumed he had found the gun in whatever secret place my mother had hidden it. I didn’t want to inquire and then have to squeal on him, however. I remembered from my younger days that a boy forms a special bond with his cap pistol, but I had to admit Jesse’s attachment to his Riverboat Gambler Derringer seemed obsessive. And the recent incidents of gunplay were worrisome. Shooting up a church offended only God,
who I always figured had a sense of humor, but if for some
reason Jesse carried his cap pistol into a bank, he might get himself into real trouble. As it turned out, on the following Sunday afternoon Jesse got all of us in a lot of trouble.

[Dave]

We were out for a ride on a lazy Sunday Afternoon Car Trip To Nowhere. It was a beautiful fall day in October and Indian Summer had brought a break in the cool temperatures normal for that time of year. Dad rode in the copilot’s seat and allowed me to drive the old Ford as long as I heeded his commands as soon as they were issued. All the windows were rolled down to catch the warm afternoon breezes and my left arm hung out the driver’s window in a hallmark teenage style designed to impress any young woman who might be seriously lacking discernment. (Who knew there were so many!)




Jesse squirmed around in the back seat while Mom smoked a Chesterfield and happily hummed a tune to herself, pleased to be out of the house for a ramble of an hour or so through the countryside.

A great idea occurred to me and I suddenly wanted to know how many seconds it would take for the Ford to accelerate from zero to sixty miles per hour. Every teenage boy in America has conducted that experiment on his family car and I was no exception. When there were no cars up ahead, I hit the brakes and brought us to an abrupt halt in the middle of the highway, stopping quickly before the traffic behind us caught up. As I slammed on the brakes, Mom and Jesse lifted off the back seat like a pair of seagulls and began to fly forward. In that exact instant, I kicked the accelerator all the way to the floor and we were whipped backwards and flattened against our seats as if blasted off in a rocket ship.

Mom’s head snapped to the rear. She disappeared in my rear view mirror, leaving a puff of cigarette smoke where her face had been. Jesse was elated to find himself weightless for 2 seconds, he said, just like an astronaut. Had I not been driving, Dad would have swatted me. Shaking his finger at me, he missed what was brewing behind us. Jesse was first to sound the alarm as a red light began flashing in our back window.

“Oh, dear,” said my mother, “it’s a trooper.”

It occurred to me that “policeman” might have been a less incendiary description of the fellow now after us.

[Dave]

“Pull over,” said my father, “you’re about to get your first
ticket.”

“For what?” I asked innocently.

“How about a dumb, stupid stunt?” he replied.

“I think he just wants to pass me,” I said hopefully.

“He would have done that by now,” said my father. “Pull this car over NOW!”




I drove off the highway into a small rest area and the pursuing cop parked to my left across the narrow lane of macadam. New York State Troopers are often quite impressive in their dark grey uniforms and this fellow fit the role magnificently. Seemingly ten feet tall and square jawed, he exited his door and walked around the front of the police cruiser, marching over to greet us with his hands poised just above his hips. John Wayne could not have done it better.

From behind me in the back seat I heard a metallic clink and my heart stopped.

“Jesse!” I shouted, “don’t ….”

But it was too late. He was already firing at the trooper. Bang, bang, bang … in rapid succession Jesse pulled the trigger of his cap pistol. “Take that, trooper, you sodomite son of a harlot!” he bellowed. “Here’s some lead from Uncle Harry!”

The trooper dropped to the ground on one knee and pulled his service revolver from its holster. It was just like in the movies, but I lost sight of him as I quickly slid down to thefloor of the old Ford, hoping against hope the door would stop any bullets coming my way at almost twice the speed of sound.




I don’t remember what Dad did immediately, but Mom grabbed Jesse in an arm-lock around his neck and pulled him down on her lap.

When the shooting stopped, I was still slumped down near the pedals on the floor. To this day, I have never forgotten the sight of my father getting out of the car with his hands up, trying to explain to the trooper what had just happened.

[Dave]

Lucky for us, the State Policeman never fired his weapon. He quickly recognized his nemesis was no more than a eight year old with a cap pistol. But even if the trooper had put only one shot over our heads, charges may have resulted along with a tremendous amount of paperwork and lawyers and defense fees. The only costs that day were the Trooper’s pride and all of our near heart attacks. And that’s not counting my father’s underwear. We did have to endure a very stern lecture from Trooper McAllister, which he bellowed out once and then a second time as he continued to let off a lot of steam. Then he gave a great
sigh, got back in his cruiser and left. He’d been tremendously upset to think he could have killed an entire
family, but was now relieved to be ending his shift without having executed anyone.

Dad took the pistol and with all his might threw it into a neighboring field. Jesse wisely remained subdued and quiet. I suggested we all calm down by going for ice cream. Maybe Dad would like to buy. But my father said we were going directly home and I was not welcome to drive. It seemed unfair I should be punished when it was Jesse who had probably committed a felony. Mom asked, “What’s a sodomite?” Dad looked at Jesse and the boy shrugged his shoulders.

We all piled back into the Ford with Dad behind the wheel and Mom lit another cigarette in the back seat. My father pulled the car onto the roadway and came to a dead stop.

“You time it,” he said to me. “I bet I can get this Ford from zero to sixty in under eight seconds.”

He stomped on the accelerator and Mom again flew backward. Jesse stopped crying and seemed to forget
about his lost firearm. But he knew where to buy another, as we would discover in a few weeks on Christmas Eve at Midnight Mass.





copyright 2011, David Griffin

[Dave]

I wonder if anyone else from Utica, or any city, remembers walking in the Catholic School May Day Parades of the 1950’s. It could be quite cool on the first of May in upstate New York, but it didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of what seemed like thousands of kids in the 8th through 12th grades from all over the city. Well, OK….hundreds. Many hundreds.

Since the school uniforms had to be on display, no outer coats were allowed. Brrrr !! “Don’t worry, young man,” Sister Catalina told me when I complained I was shivering, “your hot air will keep you warm.” It could get pretty chilly standing around on side streets like Noyes and Sherman until it was our turn to file into the main stream of coats and ties and blue school jumpers already massing their way up Genesee Street to the Parkway.

As an adolescent, I of course wondered just how I was supposed to LOOK as I marched in the parade. Was I supposed to look Holy? No can do. Pure? Outright impossible, but I’ll try next week. Proud and haughty? OK, I could do that.

Arriving at the Band Shell at the foot of the city's ski slope, we tramped into a semi-circular formation….boys on the right, girls on the left, if you please……hauled out our rosaries and got down to business.

[Dave]

Somehow over the next 20 minutes….no one knows how these things happen….not all of the boys were on the right and many of the girls were no longer on the left. Thoughts of purgatory evaporated in furtive conversations about who was with whom at the dance last Friday night. Nuns roamed the edges of the throng watching for Pissers, boys who would shoot out of the crowd at high speed running for the nearby woods. The girls just suffered.

High above us on the hill the lions at the city zoo began making love. They were not known for their subtlety. On a quiet night you could hear them reach some sort of climax all the way down to Rutger St. If my family was sitting out on our porch on Cornhill when Leo began to feel his oats, my mother would leave and go in the house. My father would get unusually quiet. I would pick up a magazine and begin to read. In the dark.




I don’t think whatever we were honoring or protesting or marching about was all that clear to us. Mary was mentioned. As the Mother of God, Mary was vehemently anti-communist and didn’t much like the Soviets. Only God and Bishop Fulton Sheen knew what she thought of the Chinese. Russia had its own May Day to honor communism, we were told, so ours was to counteract theirs. No one ever told us May Day originally honored workers and labor. The Russkys said that was communism. So here we were, in a sense marching against workers’ rights while our blue collar parents cheered us on. Catholicism could be confusing.

It is difficult now for me to fully appreciate just how excited we were about life at age 15. I’m still a happy person, but the chemicals coursing through my blood have evidently changed over the past 50 years. The sweeter ones have been diluted. If my knee were in better shape, I’d take myself back to Utica on an early evening in May and walk the parade route again. Not for religious reasons this time. But to re-capture at least one fleeting moment from my youth. I assume Leo is gone. I hope Mary isn’t.

[Dave]

I've always had a consuming interest in letterpress printing. In fact, I took a few courses in the art in college. Letterpress was on it's way out, even in the 1960's, so I was also required in one course to study modern offset lithography and I did a couple of projects using that technology. But my love has always been for what's called "hot type," either individual letters or symbols cast from hot lead (type) or slugs from a Linotype machine, or the old newspaper plates. In the early 1990's I became interested in printing again and built a small shop of antique equipment in my basement in the Catskills. The presses were manufactured around 1900. I sold it all last year before our big move south, but you can see photos of everything on my website. I don't think the new owner would mind. Click the url below and then click at the top of the page on the "Link to old Windswept Press Photos." There are three web pages of photos beyond the page you land on. Look for links at the bottom of the pages to continue through all of them.

www.windsweptpress.com/impress.htm





By the way, the Impressions project you'll see on the landing page is not quite off the ground. It's another writing project to work on.

Another by the way: I've changed the design of my home page. If you'd like to see it,
click here:

windsweptpress.com

Anyway, that's all by way of introduction to the next theme of jobs I had while growing up in my Utica Boyhood.

In high school I earned spending money working for a printer I think some you might know. I didn't want to embarrass him, so in the following few posts I've disguised him.

[Dave]

Pride


The sky is my time machine. It takes me back to another day when the clouds or the angle of the sun looked exactly the same as it does today. I find myself this morning seated at my printing press, staring up through the small window high on the cellar wall. The masons long ago built the rectangular space into the stone and glazed it with old glass that makes the firmament look like it has bubbles. All I can see through the glass is a leaden sky on rainy days and puffy white clouds on a blue background when the weather clears.




This morning’s sky is much the same as that on a Saturday nearly a half century ago when I was a teenager running a small job press for a part time printer in my hometown. “Bedroom printers,” these business owners were called. Many, including my boss, had full time jobs in factories and printed on weekends in their cellars and garages. Al printed in the stable out behind his cousin’s amusements business. The early 1800’s building was made of laid up stone, had minimal heat and housed Al’s print shop as well as pin ball machines and juke boxes.

-more-

[Dave]

I stood on one leg at Al’s press, the other leg pumping away as I printed numbered raffle tickets for a club that was trying to raise money.

I’d had an encounter at home with my father just an hour before and I could still feel the sting of it. We argued over some trifle having to do with my leaving the butter out on the table and letting it get warm. I told myself not to feel bad. After all, I had scored a few good verbal blows against the old man and finished triumphantly by walking out of the house and slamming the door. Yet I felt upset and guilty. I suppose my immaturity prevented me from admitting I was wrong. Dramatics and denial can make sense to the head but not the heart.




Besides, Dad really wasn’t upset about the butter. The two of us were groaning under the weight of something neither of us could bring ourselves to discuss. Two days before I had insulted and hurt him.

Lost in thought, I missed a throw onto the platen and messed up the ticket sequence. I didn’t notice Al come up behind me.

“God dammit,” he shouted at me, “you screwed up the counter. We gotta go back to 2972 and print them all over again!”

“I’m sorry, Al,” I said, “I was …

“You was staring out the God dammed window at the sky is what you were doin! What’re you gonna be when you grow up, a weatherman?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to be,” I said. “Maybe I’ll be a bum.” I said it seriously, feeling down on myself.

“You ain’t gonna be no bum, youngster. I get a feelin’ about people, ya know? Yer one of those lucky bastards that God takes care of. Me, I gotta work for a livin’, so get outta my way while I reset the counters.”

[Dave]

I was soon back pumping the press trying to stay alert and not get the counters out of sync again.

But my mind drifted back to when I was younger. Although my father and I were often at odds in my teen years, I couldn’t deny that he had meant the world to me when I was a little kid.

Dad was a newspaper pressman and an expert at his trade. When I was six or seven years old I thought he was the smartest man in the world. I can’t count the number of times I told anyone who would listen that my father printed the newspapers that went all over the city and even down the valley to the small mill towns along the river. Imagine me a seven year old kid brought down to the newspaper and walked into the pressroom to watch the men mount the heavy stereotype plates and thread the huge rolls of newsprint (paper) up from the basement into the gargantuan Hoe presses. Wrenches clanged and after a few minutes it grew quiet. Someone called, “All Clear.” Lights began to blink in warning and a sharp staccato buzzer blared out from somewhere above, echoing up and down the line of presses. It reminded me of a submarine’s dive alarm I’d heard at the movies when the crew filled the tanks and dove beneath the waves. Soon I was dragged below the surface of the noise as the presses clunked and groaned and quickly got up to speed with a roar that was deafening. I wanted to hold my hands over my ears, but none of the men seemed impressed, so I kept my arms at my side and suppressed the urge to scream in delight over the thundering machinery. The presses began to spit out the afternoon edition and sent a stream of miraculously folded newspapers of 54-pages each along a conveyor contraption that went up and across the ceiling and over to the waiting men who bundled them up in the mailroom.




When I left the newspaper that day with my father I was the proudest seven year old one could imagine. Only a few years later I was a teenager when I stopped by the pressroom one afternoon to get the keys and borrow his car. When his boss asked me to pose with Dad in a photo for the company in-house newsletter, I refused. I didn’t want to be seen in public with my father in his coveralls and printers cap. I had said only, “I can’t,” and Dad had laughed it off, but I could see he was hurt.

[Dave]

That night when we got home I ate the food he provided and went out in the evening wearing a new jacket he had bought me with the money he earned working in his coveralls.

The next day I sat in math class up the street in an old brick high school building with roots down to the sub strata of rock. My soles could just feel the vibration of the presses start up for the Valley Edition at 10:30 in the morning. I felt exactly like the person Al told me I wasn’t, a bum.

“God dammit, Davey,” I heard Al shout in my ear. “The counters are off again! What the hell’s the matter with you this morning?”

I mumbled something.



“Here,” he said. “Get over here and take the glue pot and make up this order of pads. You’re not good for anything else this morning!”

I did as I was told.

“What’s buggin’ you, huh?” Al asked, and he seemed to mean it.

“My father and I had a fight,” I said. I told him about my refusal to be in the photo, hoping he would take my side, although I knew no one would agree with me.

“So you’re not proud of your old man?” Al asked.

“I just didn’t want to be in the photo,” I said.

“How come you’re not too proud to work here with me in this shit hole garage?” he asked.

I’d never thought of that.

“I know what your problem is,” he said. “You don’t know how to apologize.”

“Sure I do!” I said.

“Not to your father. Have you ever done that?” he asked.

“Well, I’ve never had any reason to,” I replied.

Al glanced across the work table at me. He looked stunned and I remembered he was a father. Then he leaned back and laughed. And he kept laughing. All morning. Every ten minutes or so he’d look over at me and start laughing again. Eventually he got me laughing and told me all the dumb things his kids did when they were teens. He told me he loved them more than the air he breathed.

That night I went home and apologized to my father. He nodded. And then he said, “You’re a good son.”

I have doubted the truth of that utterance but treasured his love for the last fifty years. What amazes me is I did nothing to earn it.


copyright 2011, David Griffin