A Utica Boyhood

[Dave]

Meanwhile, Stan Phillips and his wife Florence had left work on this first day of what promised to be a beautiful weekend. The couple worked as teachers at the Rome State School, where classes were held year round for the mentally disabled young residents, The staff was free to leave at noon on Fridays in the summer and the couple planned a picnic and swimming that day at Hinckley Reservoir with their 11 year old son, Gary, who was waiting for them to come home and pick him up. Gary had spent the morning with a neighbor in the tiny village of Hecla. After stopping for Gary, they drove east to Westmoreland where Stan bought charcoal at the local Agway store. From there he had a choice of routes and could either drive out Cider Street and through Oriskany or go out Stone Road through Walesville over to Marcy and then north to Hinckley.



Aloft in the F94 jet, the two young lieutenants sped south through the open sky toward Rome while they looked for a weather balloon resembling a silver bowl. Hank got a blip on his radar screen indicating a target below them about 30 degrees to starboard off their line of travel. Bill backed off on the throttle, nosed over and rolled off to the right to see if he could eyeball the object. It did indeed look like a silver bowl. He backed off the throttle more to drop down directly toward it for a better look.

The official Air Force account is sealed for unknown reasons, but the USAF Project Blue Book UFO Report (Case 19-B - Walesville) published in 1976 says the crew believed the object was a weather balloon at an altitude of 8,000 feet, but when they dropped down for a closer look, the cabin temperature abruptly shot up and the fire warning light lit on the instrument panel. UFO enthusiasts have maintained that the object fired a blast of heat at the F94. The pilot and navigator said simply they presumed a catastrophic engine fire had erupted and that it would soon engulf the plane. They testified they stayed with the plane as long as they safely could before Bill ordered Hank to eject. Bill then quickly followed his radar man out of the plane.

[Dave]

Without a pilot, the jet rolled over and headed to earth at Walesville. It came screaming in across the farm fields and the creek, missed the center of the intersection by about 100 feet and slammed into a huge old elm tree, ripping itself apart. The wings tore away and catapulted toward the road. The engine separated from the airframe and described a huge arc before hitting the ground, where it kept going. The fuselage, now a ball of fire, plunged through the roof of the newly renovated home. Doris had unfortunately re-entered the house. No one knows why. Hers was the last body found of those killed in the carnage that summer day.



Betty Lou saw her older siblings coming back from the creek as the sky screamed down at her and she ran from the patch of grass toward the boys and her older sister. She doesn’t remember the plane hitting to this day, but a piece of it, or maybe it was a piece of the house, tore a deep laceration up her leg from ankle to thigh. The man from the general store saw her tumble and fall. He ran over to the house as it burned furiously and carried her back to the safety of the store, unknowingly jumping over one of the air-to-ground rockets the Air Force would later find.

Stan and Florence and Gary were passing the elm tree in their Chevrolet just as the plane hit. A wing full of jet fuel shot from the plane and ignited into a fireball that seemed to chase the Chevy into the intersection, where it caught up and exploded, engulfing the car and rocketing it into the front of Mary Peck’s house. Mary, standing in her kitchen in the back of the house, staggered and fell backward in shock as her living room erupted and a wall of flame rushed down the hallway to her in the kitchen. Mary jumped to her feet and ran out the back door. Stan and Florence and their son Gary died in the fiery car wreck in what had been Mary’s living room.

[Dave]

Lieutenants Bill Atkins and Hank Coudon parachuted safely to earth, a few miles away.

Doris’ three older children, returning from the creek, survived along with Betty Lou. They saw the entire panorama of destruction as it unfolded. The plane hitting the tree, the debris destroying their house, the screams of their mother, their baby sister cut down, the Chevy erupting in a ball of flames and shooting into Mrs. Peck’s living room and the huge jet engine as it tore up the earth and plowed toward them and stopped just in time. They would never trust the sky again.



Floyd returned from work and stood all afternoon by the smoking pile of rubble that had been his
new home, waiting for the firemen to find his wife, which they did in the evening, just as a cool breeze began moving across the fields and the sun was going down. It was Doris’ favorite time of the day. Out beyond the creek and down low in the deepening blue sky hung a dim silver bowl.

###


We didn't stay long at the crash scene. I think it was more awful than my father had anticipated, and he soon ushered us back to our car and on the way home. We had to go through the intersection as we left Walesville. Through the back seat window I again saw the burned out Chevy … I’ll never forget it. Lying near the car by the side of the road was a woman’s skirt. It was grey and prim, like a teacher would wear. It was fresh and not damaged, so I suppose it couldn’t have been from the woman in the car. I don’t know how it got there, I just remember it.

[Dave]

Despite often surviving it, kids don't do stress very well. Moving out of town and then back in three months while I was in the fourth grade must have stressed me out, because when I look back, I was quite a worry wart at the time. That's a sign of stress in children, I now realize.


Fire Call


On a crisp fall day just before Halloween, we sat in school on the edge of our seats, watching the clock. The Utica firemen were due to arrive at 10:00 a.m. for their annual visit. Sister Majestyeria worked her way down my aisle, asking questions from the Baltimore Catechism, the answers to which I was supposed to have memorized the evening before. If Sparky the Fire Dog and the men and from the Engine Company Number 4 didn’t arrive soon to save my sorry little ass, I'd have to fake an answer to question number 374, "Why must we take more care of our soul than of our body?"



Just two seats in front of me, Mary Ellen McMeany parroted a perfect answer to question number 372. In her deadly serious ten year old voice, she intoned, “The sixth commandment forbids all unchaste freedom with another’s wife or husband.” I couldn’t imagine what my Mom would do with another lady’s husband, but this thought was interrupted when outside our second floor window a sixty decibel siren blast rattled the window panes and sent 52 highly strung fifth graders right off the top of the excitement scale. Blown out of our seats, we practically mowed down the screeching nun as she futilely attempted to restore order. She now had to get us down the stairs and out the door without injury into the arms of Sister Saint Buonfiglio of Monaldo, known to us as Sister Bunny. The old Italian nun would perform the minor miracle of ensuring we behaved like little scholars instead of howling chimpanzees.

[Dave]

As the firemen set up the truck and microphone and speaker, the entire student body somehow became arranged on the grass strip between the school building and the parking lot. Nuns moved among us like Chain Gang deputies, but without the whips and shotguns.



Soon we were ready for the two smartest kids in eighth grade to deliver their “Fire Safety” talks. The thirteen year olds were cousins, a girl and boy from a family that had been saddled with high IQ’s ever since their great grandparents began a dynasty of wizards in the last century. Each of the family’s generations played a role in the great affairs of our fair city. Ronald and Margaret would in the coming years continue their family tradition by running for office and becoming our rulers, judging our legal transgressions and prosecuting the worst of us. These kids were so eloquent, they’d been on the speaking circuit since third grade. Neither had many friends. Ronald had begun to read Kafka and was a rather cold young man. Margaret evinced warmth and compassion, but she was rather needy and could be quite adamant. When her mother didn’t produce the requested baby sister, the girl asked for a dog and named it Cindy.

Ronald’s speech, “Fire Safety in the Home, School, Church and Beyond,” treated the specter of accidental fires breaking out in your kitchen, in the school’s lunch room, and on our church’s candle-lit altar. This last possibility jarred me, frankly. I had never considered the inherent danger of attending Mass, especially a high mass, when candle lighting shifted into high gear. I made a mental note to spend some time thinking about balancing the need for liturgy and the sin of putting myself in the way of mortal jeopardy. I reasoned it was an apt topic for consideration. Too bad it wasn’t spring, when I always began a list of interesting topics to ponder while imprisoned at The Stations Of The Cross after school each Friday afternoon during Lent. The year before, I spent Friday afternoons between stanzas of Stabat Mater trying to recall every line in the film, “The Glenn Miller Story.” By Good Friday, I was two thirds of the way through the script. I saw the movie four times. I was in love with June Allyson.

[Dave]

Margaret’s talk began on a light note, with babies and young children playing and laughing, tumbling down the hills in the back yards of cute little white houses on tree-lined streets, populated with the homes of attorneys and senior level bank officials. In one such house dwelled Billy and Mary Magdelen and Mom and Dad. The little family lived an exemplary life and prayed the rosary each evening, before watching the News with John Cameron Swayze. But Dad forgot to have the furnace maintained one year and the house blew up.



“Ka-BOOM!!” shouted Margaret into the microphone, as she stood on a makeshift pulpit just aft of the fire truck’s cab. The Lieutenant, leaning against the fire engine’s intake valve, jumped when the girl bellowed. She was a hefty young lady and had a prodigious voice that would have eventually served her well as a fifth grade teacher, had she not become the District Attorney. The girl followed her exploding sound effects with the whooshing noises of debris flying through the air. Some of the younger children in the crowd began to look frightened.

[Dave]

Margaret continued her parable. The young boy and girl arrived home from school on that cold and snowy winter afternoon to find pieces of their life all over the neighborhood. As brother and sister made their way along the familiar streets, they first spied Mary Magdalen doll up in a tree on Bonnie Brae Place, and then the twisted remains of Billy’s bicycle over on Ferris Avenue. Dad was still at work. Mom had been in the basement doing the laundry, but now pieces of her were arriving steadily in heaven. The children sat down in a snow bank (this was Utica, after all) and cried their little eyes out, knowing Dad would be angry when he finally arrived to find a 30 foot crater where his home once stood. All this grief was the consequence of not keeping a list of home maintenance reminders. “And by the way,” Margaret said as she slapped her forehead a little too forcefully, “where would they eat supper tonight? How terribly, terribly sad,” she said.



Sparky, the Dalmatian, was apparently quite touched by Margaret’s tale. He began wailing and whimpering and snuffling until the Lieutenant lovingly took hold of the dog’s collar. It could have been my imagination, but the man seemed to twist the choker rather tightly. Sparky’s crying stopped abruptly, but he soon got loose and jumped off the truck into the crowd of children. Our cries of surprise and delight quickly turned to disgust and laughter when Sparky lifted his leg against the black skirts of Sister Bunny. You really couldn’t blame the dog. The nun indeed resembled a street lamp, with her jet black attire and the bursting white “flying nun” hat on top.

Billy and Mary Magdalen were taken off to an orphanage that definitely did not serve desserts. At that point in her talk, Margaret smiled broadly, looked around the crowd and said, “Thank you all very much for coming to see me. I am extremely grateful to have been chosen from among hundreds of children (true, if you counted everyone all the way down to kindergarten) to deliver The Distinguished Annual Fire Safety Lecture at this prestigious institution.” (That would be our elementary school.) With that, she jumped from the truck, alarming the Lieutenant, who was now holding on to Sparky for dear life.

[Dave]

The students began to grow restless as their minds turned to warm baloney sandwiches and government subsidized milk in tiny bottles … 2 cents for white, 3 cents for chocolate. Even the nuns looked tired. The firemen reminded us once more not to play with matches. They revved up the siren one last time as we all held our hands over our ears. Another successful visit from the Utica Fire Department came to a close.



My mind turned from the fire trucks to other topics. Question No. 372 had begun to bother me a little and I wondered why Mom seemed so pleasant to that man in Woolworth’s last week. She told me he was a friend of Dad’s. Ah well, it was my favorite time of year and I tried not to ruminate so much in good weather. Later that morning, I wrote a note about the Woolworth’s incident on a candy wrapper and stuck it in between the pages toward the back of my catechism. We wouldn’t get there until March, and that was an eternity of time, far away into the future. Who could guess? By then, anything might happen. The church could go up in smoke, Mom could run off with the milkman and Sparky could get accidentally strangled.

[Dave]

An abiding image from my childhood was a 2 day stay in the hospital. I was about ten or eleven, so it's no surprise the event was memorable. I had nothing serious wrong with me. All summer I managed the normal childhood activities with a Planter's Wart on my heel. We tried everything and finally the doctor said he would remove it in the hospital. Today I'd be lucky to be offered a chair to sit in for such a simple procedure, but in the 1950's they really knew how to do sickness. Wow! Two overnights, operating room, knocking me out and pretty nurses, too. The only downer was being placed in a pediatrics ward. The beds were like large cribs. The bed to my right held a toddler who didn't do much but sleep and cry. Across from me was a kid I later heard didn't make it. He was probably the first child I knew who died. Afterward, when I heard of the "faithful departed" in school, I would think of Charlie's death and get scared. The memory has stayed with me and a few years ago I decided to write about it. I tried different approaches and what finally worked was a first person piece. Of course, I can't know what went through the boy's mind, but I found imagining it to be more meaningful to me. None of it is autobiographical.

Charlie's condition worsened after I left the hospital, but he was quite lively when we were ward mates. He was a constant talker. For a 12 year old his vocabulary was very advanced and he loved classical music, unusual for his age. Charlie was in love with the night nurse, a woman who for some reason wasn't there the two nights I spent in Pediatrics. He said her name was Nurse Pepper. I've given her the name Sally.

[Dave]

I'm in love with Sally Pepper. She is always here when I wake up. She's my nurse and the prettiest girl I’ve ever met. I usually don't care for girls much older than me. She's a young woman in her twenties. I’m twelve and a half years old.

I've been here in the Children's Ward of Our Lady of All Angels Hospital for 3 weeks and the mass is growing bigger. Mom and Dad and everyone are all smiles, but as time goes on I can tell they’re faking it. I know Mom doesn’t think I’ll make it this time. I’ve heard her whispering to Dad when they thought I was asleep. She says I’m being shortchanged and I’ll never have a life like her and Dad. But I’ve had a good life and twelve years is a long time.

Something is in my chest and it presses down more every day. Breathing gets to be an effort. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and I’m afraid and I wish Sally Pepper would hurry up and come on duty. I want her to smile at me and ask about school and say I’m handsome and all that silly stuff she tells me as she brushes the hair out of my eyes and rubs my chest where it hurts.

When Sally leaves, old Sister Hymentuum comes in to give me the bed bath, a cleansing of the face and pits. Sister Hy says any work below the belt is my duty. Thank God. One day the medicine knocked me out and I woke up to find the old nun busy down there, knocking things around in a hurried effort to get the job done. I was sore the rest of the day.

[Dave]

Sister Hy says she has never heard of Sally Pepper. She’s a little forgetful, I guess. Maybe it’s a nun thing to not remember the prettiest nurse in the hospital.

I get needles in the rump all the time and it makes me wonder if Sally Pepper ever has a shot in the buttocks. It’s hard to imagine such a mundane act violating the sacred. How profane to think of the doctor saying, “Sally, pull down your pants and give me a cheek." If I were giving her a shot, I’d light a candle, put on Mahler’s 9th Symphony and reveal only the tiniest piece of skin necessary. Probably.

I sense that Sally Pepper has always been with me, since the day I was born. I can’t explain how or why that could be. I’ve seen her only these past few weeks and so I wonder how I’ve overlooked her.

I guess I’m sleeping most of the day now. I dreamt of learning to sew. I cut out the white fabric and stitched a beautiful fitted gown to embrace Sally Pepper, lovingly forming every fold of the fabric to fit each curve of her body.

It’s getting harder to breathe now. I take long, slow pulls through my nose and each time the pain is worse. I’ve lost track of everything around me. My whole world is my breathing and the pain. It always seems like late afternoon. It’s cold and I haven’t seen the sun since forever.

I dreamt that Sally Pepper and I had children. I was proud of them and of myself. I came home from work wearing a shirt and a tie and Sally Pepper was cooking supper and feeding the baby in a chair. Our little boy played under the kitchen table. He looked like me.

It’s very dark now. The pain isn’t gone, but it feels like it belongs to someone else. I haven’t taken a breath in a while. I tried and tried and then I just gave up. It’s very quiet, except for the breeze.

Sally Pepper is beside me, dressed in the most stunning gown I’ve ever seen. She is absolutely beautiful and I’ve never seen her so happy. We are walking hand in hand and she brings me to the top of a hill. Down the green slope of the other side is a valley. I can see a river down there. I can feel the wind and the warm sun on my face. I am laughing. I am crying. I can breathe.

[Dave]

Click image once or twice to make large enough to read.

[Dave]

Newsprint


I have this theory about newspapers. If the only paper in town disappeared overnight, few people under 50 would notice. And that’s been true since I was a kid, a very long time ago. While it's true I have a theory on just about everything, I base my opinion on a short but successful career in the news business. No, I wasn’t a publisher or editor or reporter. Compared to these positions, mine was much more intellectually stimulating and educational, situated where the theoretical met the practical, where the rubber met the road. I was a newspaper boy.

In the 1950’s, I trudged the sidewalks and back hallways of Cornhill, witnessing what my customers read and discussed. The dish Mrs. Baldino was cooking for supper and whether young Mrs. Feffer often had a male visitor in the middle of the afternoon were of less interest to me than who was a good tipper. But I was also intrigued by my customers’ lack of interest in the column after column of news copy carried in each issue. It seemed odd they would purchase the paper each day and read so little of it. Most of the readers in my part of the city perused the ads and the TV pages and little else. Had I listed the Ten Most Important People In The News, as my customers saw them, Jackie Gleason would have been at the top and President Eisenhower at the bottom. The local mayor and the Common Council would be right down there with Ike, if a customer even cared about local politics.




There were a few real news fans, of course, but they often failed to appreciate that while a free press may be basic to democracy, it is always owned by someone else. Down at the corner on James Street, a group of old men congregated in Pete's barber shop, none of them with enough hair to be very good customers. They were the equivalent of today's Internet Forum. Knowledgeably arguing the issues of the day and complaining about the "goddammed newspaper," they assumed everyone in the entire city was tuned in and debating all of the issues they believed the newspaper buried or portrayed in an unfair light. They appeared unaware that hardly anyone cared but themselves.

[Dave]

But elsewhere there was someone who worried about that lack of a wider public discourse, and one could often see the disappointment written on his face. Ed Wentworth, editor of The Herald at the time, was a realistic middle aged man. He knew his opinion of journalism as a guarantor of a free society was flimsy. But he believed in its importance and he reported the issues, took time to think out his positions, argued them through the newspaper's chain of command when necessary and generally did a yeoman's job of news reporting and comment.



He was aware, as was the paper's business manger, that most of the readers were more interested in Ralph Cramden and The Honeymooners than in so-called hard news. Outside of Ed's office, the entire Herald organization … whether they knew it or not … was aimed at making a profit for the newspaper’s owners. From the guys who hustled the 4 foot rolls of newsprint into the cellar below the presses, to the kids hired cheaply out of Journalism School to write what they thought were hard hitting stories about animal shelter funding and traffic stops, the bottom line would be stated in profits earned and dollars saved, not freedoms saved.

Part of Ed’s job as editor was to deal with readers like the gentlemen who hung out at Pete’s, which Ed thought of as the only barbershop in America with its own foreign policy. Letters to the Editor expressing outrage and implying thousands of angry readers always brought a smile to Ed’s face. He knew the real number would be less than a hundred. Charges of being on the side of the enemy in any controversy would cause Ed to stop and wonder which side indeed was the enemy, or even if an enemy existed. The Herald seldom saw enemies or fellow travelers, pinkos, cohorts, deadheads, liberals or conservatives ... only customers. Just folks who handed over a dime for the newspaper.

Ed and his staff liked being newspapermen and women. He realized that to continue to be such, the paper first and foremost had to sell advertising to businesses who wanted to peddle their products to the readers. One look at the ads would tell you everything about the Herald’s audience. Few of them were under 50, unless the town had an unusually high number of young people interested dry cleaning and rupture support appliances.

When he thought of it in his low moments, Ed reasoned that while a newspaper was a wonderful dream of democracy, in reality it was also the cheapest entertainment in town. And it didn’t take much brains or money to become a valued customer.


David Griffin copyright 2010

[Dave]

I’ve been reading lately about the plight of orphan boys in the 19th century. Many sold newspapers on the street to keep from starving, and they were often at the center of mischief.

There were so many orphan newspaper sellers at the time, some of the homes for indigent boys actually had the term Newsboy in their names, such as the St. Vincent's Newsboys’ Lodging, opened in 1870 on Warren Street in Manhattan, and the Newsboys’ Home in Brooklyn. “Industrial Schools” for young males sprung up in the 1870’s and 80’s. These were run by Irish Catholic orders of men … usually the Christian Brothers. Their purpose was to house and feed the boys, but also to teach them the Three R’s and basic industrial skills, so they would have a trade to support themselves in a manufacturing society. But the Brothers had another, higher purpose. They were part of an national effort to prevent young Irish Catholics from falling into the hands of Protestant orphanages and Protestant orthodoxy.

St. Vincent St. in Utica, north of Blessed Sacrament Church in Cornhill, takes its name from the St. Vincent Industrial School which at one time sat on a large piece of property between South and Rutger Streets and fronted on St. Vincent.



We did a thread on St. Vincents on Clipper's Busy Corner, here:

clipper220.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=musingsandchildhoodmemories&action=display&thread=2761&page=1


Today, many of us laugh or roll our eyes at the ill will that existed among religions in 19th century America, seeing only small differences between men’s souls, and overlooking what was really a vast divide between the social and political classes.

And frankly, the remnants of this division existed into my generation of children, born in the 1940s. Working fathers and mothers, barely able to afford much more than food on the table, sacrificed money and time to build private schools in the name of their religious affiliation, whether Catholic or Protestant. These were people who held their own faith sacred and mistrusted that of others.