Category: Uncategorized

Or, ‘I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass’ Starting in fifth grade, we changed from collecting candy to collecting candy and raiding. Raiding, suburb-style consisted of: throwing hard corn and/or cobs at windows and (especially) metal awnings, soaping cars (with or without profanities), and, if you were hard core, eggs. Corn was easily obtained ,… Continue reading Halloween, The Politics of Raiding

The Quiet Joys of Nature A minor 60’s fad was buying a picnic table and benches. All these post-WWII families in suburbia had to buy a set so they could dine outside. Well, as you’ve seen, battling the charcoal usually meant daddy lost. So, we hauled food outside when mom cooked it. This was doomed… Continue reading Bird Watching

A bitter Harvest…. His last hurrah was when we had our roof re-done. The nails flew. of course, and he must have gone out at night in his bare feet looking for nails. So how did I know? In the morning there would 1-6 roofing nails neatly piled on our back porch. Like some twisted… Continue reading Psycho Neighbor–the Epilogue

“Hate me, or HATE Me’ It was strange to grow up next to a wacko. Kids would talk about nice neighbors and I was ‘Huh??’ The idiot next door (we’ll call him Mr. D) was the only person on the block more hated than my father. He thrived on hate. He and his frail, stern… Continue reading The Psycho Neighbor

The mega-hype, mega hit. Impossible to miss in the sixties. There were some excellent ploys marketing of this film. Coming on the heels of Goldfinger, which was a bona fide smash. Connery was now a huge mega-star–women adored him and every man wanted to have a beer with him. First, the theme from Thunderball was… Continue reading Thunderball

Watch our childhood Fly…. With Fifth grade came the recognition that two kids I knew from the bullshit kids’ football charade also lived up the block. Dan was the heavier of the two, with dark hair and a musical curiosity that fit with mine. His neighbor, Bob, had been in Catholic school but now joined… Continue reading New Grade, New Friends

Taking the pace I’m going through…. There is a very clear delineation of the beginning of the transformation of my neighborhood and my life –the summer following fourth grade. Like the turning of the tide, eventually all that was unique and wild about our neighborhood evaporated. A gift to our generation, wiped away by the… Continue reading A Change is Gonna Come

‘That Car Was the One I would be remiss without mentioning 60’s cars. Daddy saw cars as a way to show people how successful he was–classic ‘my dick is bigger than yours.’ He flipped cars every 3-4 years, just ’cause he could. When he still had friends on the block, he’d park the shiny vehicle… Continue reading Let’s talk about cars

Six Finger and Vac-U-Form, etc It’s crazy the useless stuff we made parents buy!! I remember a cardboard ‘city’ that had cars you drove around on it. The cars had a magnet under them and you moved them by using a wand with a magnet under the board. See the problem? The board had to… Continue reading Toys 3: Useless crap

Listen to the children of the night, how sweet is their music When we last left our hero, he was naked and sweltering in his upstairs room, occasionally sleeping half naked on sofa pillows in the living room, near a monstrous air conditioner. Earlier, I alluded to our female neighbor, Mrs. Overstreet. One summer evening,… Continue reading Neighbor enlists Nature for Revenge, Film at 11