Gene’s Yard

                                                

Bill

Gene was my first real friend in Hyde Park. If there are summer romances, this was a summer friendship. It only lasted a few years, a few summers.  I didn’t  play with Gene as much during the rest of the year.  His father was strict.  Lots of rules to follow at his house.  And he wouldn’t break any of them.  Gene went to a sister (parochial) school which meant getting home late in the afternoon with an evening of homework ahead. Summers for Gene likely meant as much to him as they did for me.

From that first summer in 1953 right through to the end of summer 1955, when Gene moved to Milton, he and I played, hung out, just quietly enjoyed being together on a hot summer’s afternoon.  He lived in a large house just a short walk up Prospect Street.  Gene’s house was the kind of sizable home you’d find in neighboring Milton. Three stories with porches and dormers, corners where the various roof angles met, windows everywhere.  I would not want to paint it.

I knew the house only from the outside.  I never went inside beyond a large playroom just off a back door where I would sometimes wait while Gene finished breakfast before he could come out to play.  His father was a dominating figure; you listened to him and did what he said.  End of story.  I didn’t want to put up with kids running around his grand mansion.  Gene’s mother always had his smaller siblings to deal with.  Every time I saw her she had a baby in her arms and another hanging on to her skirt. I didn’t know a lot about Catholic church doctrine relating to large families but whatever it was Gene’s parents espoused it. Looking back it’s more likely Gene’s father embraced it more than the mother.  She struck me as overburdened much of the time.

For me, then, going up to play at Gene’s house was all about his yard.  When my mother would ask where I was going, it was always, “Up to Gene’s yard.” Never, “Up to Gene’s house.”   Gene didn’t have a front yard in the usual sense. Mine was a few square feet of grass to fill in the space between the front stairs and the street.  Gene's house featured a front lawn which seemed the size of a football field. Years later when his house had been torn down after a fire and the lot sold to a developer, four or five medium sized houses were built in the space where Gene and I used to play.

It was great having that much room.  Most of it was grass save for a driveway leading up to the house from Prospect Street. On the lawn proper there were some large ornamental trees, spaced as if in a formal landscape, randomly but within sight of each other, blue spruce I recall, each about 50 to 75 feet tall.  These were not climbing trees; the inch long blue-green tightly packed needles precluded that.  It was bad enough that whenever I picked up one of the pine cones that would fall off I’d get that sticky resin all over my hands. Still the trees were great for shade, for hiding behind, to give character and dimension to the large yard.

Gene’s yard sloped down from the front of his house to the same woods that were in the back of my house. On the side of his house away from the street were more extensive woods replete with large climbable trees and a vast area of tall grass.  I called these Boyle’s woods named for the family that lived in a large house off Brush Hill Road.  While the woods behind my house were a safe place to play, Boyle’s woods were not.   The Boyle family had Dobermans, attack dogs really. While playing in his yard adjacent to those woods,  Gene and I would occasionally spot the pair of dogs walking in the woods, side by side, not as much as giving us a glance.  But if you were to step even a foot onto Boyle’s property they would come after you.  It happened to me a few times in the years after Gene moved.  I’d hear them before I could see them giving me just enough time to climb up a tree where I would wait until they were gone.  

We really didn’t need Boyle’s woods.  Gene’s expansive yard was more than enough space to make of it any world we wanted.  It was a fort in the middle of the desert, the wild west, a war zone, a jungle, the surface of another planet, anything our imaginations could conjure up. Gene’s yard is where we’d run from the Creature from the Black Lagoon or the giant ants from Them.  It’s where gun fights broke out. “I got you!”  “No, you missed.”  Down close to the woods was a large rock, a rock we would cling to for dear life when it became an overturned life boat in a storm-driven sea, or the cockpit of an airplane we had to fly low as we ran out of gas.  I did love that rock.  It was the only large rock in the whole neighborhood, rounded, a bit square on top, easy to climb onto but large enough so several of us could sit there.  I wonder where it came from? A glacial erratic? I wonder where it went to? Buried during the housing construction? Broken up? Carted away in some dump truck?  Maybe today it’s a decoration in someone else’s yard.

Although we spent much of our time playing on Gene’s wide expanse of front lawn, there were other spots around his house that contributed to our sense of imagination.  There was a narrow yard between Prospect Street and his house which was scattered with shrubs and bushes along with a few white pines. This area offered additional opportunities for diversion. The tangled branches of several Forsythia bushes were great to hide in, rest in, play in.  No one paid too much attention to this side yard so the bushes in particular were overgrown.  Better for us. Forsythia was great for forts, the inside of submarines, or just a place to crawl into to get out of the sun.

The forsythia flowered dramatically early in the spring, bright yellow blossoms to smell. They also attracted wasps and bees.  I hated bee stings and went to foolish lengths if I even saw a bee near me, running and screaming like an idiot.  “Is it on me? Get it off!  Get it off!” My parents would always say, “If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.”  I tried everything not to bother them, really, but every summer one of them would get me.  And, as usual, the actual sting was less painful than you ever imagined it would be.

One bush in particular, the biggest one, easiest to get into, offered Gene and me a respite from the sunny expanse of the front lawn.  This was a place we could go to when we were hot, when the glare of the sun was too much, when we were tired of being cowboys or soldiers or gangsters. Inside, the branches woven around us like the interior of a giant basket, the dirt floor edgy with a pattern of shadows and flashes of sunlight, we’d just sit, talk, or not. The occasional bee dithered through looking for blossoms.  I was too relaxed to care.  It was summer.  I was with my friend. Anything of consequence seemed a long way off.

A day up to Gene’s yard would begin midmorning on a warm summer day with me coming out of my kitchen door, down the several back stairs, along our dirt driveway, up Prospect all the way to Gene’s back driveway. I’d either stand outside his back door and yell, “Hi Yo Gene.” or “Can Gene come out to play?” but as time went on, more and more I’d simply knock on his back door and wait. Sometimes his little brother, Brian, would open the door and stare at me, or his mother would appear holding a baby and give me a status report.  “Gene is having breakfast.” or “Gene has chores. He’ll be out later.”  Most of the time Gene would only be a few minutes. Sometimes I’d wait on his porch, become impatient, tell myself I’ll just wait another minute but usually ended up waiting until Gene was done with his chores or his breakfast.  I was anxious to play, to begin the day with my friend.

We loved role playing, characters we knew from TV or the movies, but often more generic approximations, soldiers, private detectives, cowboys.  But after a while I began to try for something more complex.  I went to the movies a lot, down to the Fairmount Theatre in Cleary Square. Saturday afternoon kids’ matinees. The westerns, the cartoons, Disney, most of it pretty bland.  But there were darker aspects as well.  The horror films, the creature films, the crime films.  These were the stories I wanted to emulate with Gene and the gang of kids we would gather to act out what I would call “my plays.” Not that you could add much depth to a play about a dinosaur loose in a city.  But we tried.

Gene and I were the producers.  We came up with a company name, Bast/Hick Pictures, which we would write inside a diamond shape with the Bast/Hick going down and Pictures going across, each sharing the middle T.  The name comprised the first several letters of our last names.  Our motto was, “Play a Play like a Play should be Played.” The implication being we ran a tight ship.  If you wanted to be in one of our movies, or plays, the names were interchangeable,  you had to do what we said, play the roles we gave you and say what we told you to say.  To a certain extent most of the kids involved went along with it.  The “studio” where the movies unfolded was Gene’s front lawn which we renamed Gene’s Studio Palace.  Apparently we were drunk with power.

Gene and I would keep lists of the names of the movies we would make.  Some we actually played through; many were in name only.  I still have some of these lists.  A representative sample: Bombs Away, Dinosaurs in the 20th Century, The Dalton Gang, Deadman’s Valley, The Frame Up, Cops in Action, Brats, Killer Cat.

I have the outlines Gene and I worked on for a couple of these titles.  Killer Cat is the story of a panther in Africa that has been killing all the birds.  (Birds!  Are they a source of food for big cats?)  We wrote that “the natives were getting together and were going to kill the panther.”  Some lucky neighborhood kids got some juicy roles as “natives” in this one. We added to the list of characters a young hunter and his wife who “came to the jungle to capture animals.” They met up with the panther-hunting natives where this conversation ensued.

Hunter: “What is going on?”

Native: “We are going to kill the panther that is killing all the birds.”

Hunter: “I’ll go too.”

Wife: “No, you must stay home. He will kill you.”

Hunter: “I must go.”

That’s as far as we got with the dialogue.  With Gene’s vast lawn representing a tropical forest we probably spent the rest of the play, hide and seek-style,  tracking down the panther.  Many probably died, fell down, got up again, were again clawed and bitten to death until the panther met his fate.  At least the birds were saved. 

There were a lot of monster movies produced up at the Studio Palace: The Mountain Monster, Monster in the Streets, The Space Monster, The Sea Monster, Greenland Monster.  I usually played the monster, very generically, chasing the other kids with my arms outstretched, screeching and roaring as best as an eight year-old kid turned monster could. 

We loved dinosaurs so they played important roles in many of our plays.  In fact they could pop up unexpectedly in the oddest situations. During a western shoot-out an allosaurus or even a diplodocus might appear out of the blue to eat someone.  It was all fun and games until someone was swallowed whole by a dinosaur. 

For our play, Dinosaurs in the 20th Century, we wrote a long outline in four scenes.  “Way down in Florida,” it begins, “where the jungle swamp is thick, one hundred and six eggs broke and allosauruses come out of them.”  (Why exactly 106?  Film scholars will be debating that for years.) The outline goes on to explain that sixteen years after the eggs cracked, the dinosaurs, now fully grown, “walked into  a banana plantation.”  It’s evident our geographical knowledge was a bit shaky but bananas in Florida was not the point.  Dino destruction was.  And this is long before Jurassic Park.  

There is a rush of dialogue as workers spot the pack of beasts.

First man: “Henry, look! What are they?”

Second man: “I…I…I don’t know.”

All that stuttering required some skilled acting by someone.  As I recall Gene actually did have the occasional stuttering problem.

The action heightened.

First man: “Look out!”

Sound: Crash. Tinkle.  (Tinkle!?  I have no idea.)

Help Arrives.

Third man: “What happened.”

First man: “Monsters came in here and one went through the banana house.  The wall fell on Henry.”

That may explain the tinkling.  The “banana house” must have been made of glass.

Then a pivotal bit of dialogue by the first man.

First man: “I just thought of something.  Miami is just five miles away.  That’s where they were headed.”

Third man: “I better warn them.”

First man: “You can use my car.”

What, all the telephones eaten by the dinosaurs?

Scene two begins with “The Dinosaurs headed for Miami.” That doesn’t sound good.

This from a cop who spots the “monsters.”

“Holy smoke! Monsters are coming.  They come from Mars. Help!”

A man approaches.

“What’s the matter?

Cop: “Look!  Get the atomic bomb.”

My old standby from my civil defense drills in Jamaica Plain.

The cop follows through by calling the army.  With them comes a character I called Professor Trilling.  We thought of the professor as the voice of reason, someone who could explain to everyone what was going on.  That was the idea even if his dialogue sounded as minimalist as everyone else’s. 

Professor Trilling: “Those beasts are dinosaurs.  One is smashing my house.”

“Get the guns!” commands a corporal from the army.  (A corporal?  Did I mean colonel?)

More sound effects.  Gunfire. Screams.  Roars. Tinkles. One dinosaur down.  The others escape. 

It gets worse.  Scene four is set in New York City, the dinosaurs “wrecking cities on their way.”  Not just a few show up, all 105.  The sound effects guy is very busy.  Lots of destruction. Lots of screaming. But, fortunately, “the Marines are waiting.” A dinosaur, “hit in the brain, goes through the R.C.A building.” Also known as the rock in Gene’s yard. 

There is a thrilling climax as the dinosaurs, the 19 that are left according to the script, are “rushed out of the city. Then a blinding flash struck the dinosaurs.  An A bomb struck.”   The End.  A Bast/Hick picture.

Whew.  That was close.

It’s likely our movie was based on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms which had come out a year or two before and which some of us had seen at the Fairmount Theatre. To be fair, that movie was no less silly than mine. But I wanted more than running around and shooting, even though there was a lot of that. 

I’d try to tell kids how a civilian might react as opposed to a soldier when a dinosaur was spotted walking down the street.  My directions would be along the lines of, “Gene, you start shooting with your machine gun; Mary Ellen, you run and hide.” The response from Mary Ellen would likely be something like, “How come I have to hide.  I want a machine gun too.”

There were times when Gene and I had a whole gang of kids in his yard.  There were three kids living on one side of me and three on the other.  Those kids, all girls except for one, and whoever else we could rope into the production, would gather down by the rock on Gene’s lawn. Sexism prevailed.  I’d play the dinosaurs, Gene a main character, the girls would be the ones who were chased, any boys would play the cops and the army guys. They were the ones with the guns.  All the girls could do was run.  Their speaking roles were usually relegated to, “Help, he’s after me.” After a short time the girls would become bored and tired after dashing around the yard with me charging after them, my arms outstretched.  I’d also be “directing.” Telling them where to run, how loud to scream, when to die.  

It wasn’t long before there were “creative differences.” The other kids would run out of energy, get sick of being chased, demand they be the dinosaurs or the soldiers.  

“I’m going home.” “I’m bored.” “Can we play jump rope?”  When it worked it was great, but mostly it was organized chaos.  

I have to admit though, my portrayal of a monster got better and better as time went on.  My favorite was as The Creature from the Black Lagoon, another movie of the time.  I put a lot into it. There were scenes from the movie where the creature would run along the deck of a boat and then dive off into the water.  Gene and I would practice running up on the rock and then jumping off into the “water” of his lawn.  When we acted it out as a play it was hard to tell if the screams of the girls I was chasing were pretend or real.  Everyone really got into it for a time.  We even had dialogue scenes on the “boat” discussing what to do if the creature showed up.  Then the boredom would set in, or mothers would start calling their kids to come home.  Gene and I would end up on his side porch to talk about the play, what went right, what we liked, how to make it better, more real.  We were sweaty and tired and happy too.

There were times when it was just Gene and me doing a play.  We’d bring a few chairs off his porch, set them up in the shade of a tree to make an office where we would sit as private detectives or I’d be a cop and Gene the robbery suspect I was trying to get a confession out of.  Many of those moments came straight out of Dragnet.  It was all new to Gene; his father didn’t let him watch TV.

On his porch we’d sit and write a little journal we called Film News.  One entry reads: “A two-million dollar picture is being released from Bast/Hick called Two Notches More. A picture of tornado winds, blazing guns and pretty women. A scene was so dangerous in the picture that we almost lost a cameraman.  The scene was of an exploding saloon and the camera got way too close.  Well, that’s all. See you.”

In another I mention that “Gene’s new play, Back in Time, is ready to be played.  The only thing is we don’t have the scenery.”  Also in the same issue, “Maryellen and Billy are shooting up the place in Bast/Hick’s new picture, Lovely Killers.”

I enjoyed the plays, gathering everyone together, putting on this elaborate spectacle, writing about it, trying to make it as real as possible, using Gene’s yard as our stage.  It was a wonderful way to spend summer days.

Odd things would happen.  Several times one of the girls, exhausted from being chased or just putting too much imagination into her role, would burst out crying.  Sobbing.  We’d gather around her. “What’s the matter? Did you hurt yourself?” More sobs.  Someone would get some water.  Usually there was some nearby as we’d use it for booze in a saloon scene. After we’d promise she could be another character the girl would calm down and we’d get back to the scene.

I wanted to go, go, go.  I hated stopping.  I was very much into it.  But lunch time would roll around and everyone would go home.  It wasn’t quite the same after.  Some kids wouldn’t come back or if they did they just wanted to lie on the grass, their mothers having told them about getting cramps if they ran around so soon after eating.  I’d try to do quieter stuff but the urge for action was always present.  “No, I don’t want to run to that tree. I just ate.” It was frustrating. 

Joey Boyle, one of the Boyle kids, about my age, would sometimes come out of the woods from his house into Gene’s yard.  Without his scary dogs.  He’d join in for a while then get bored.  Once he decided to liven things up with his own show.  He had us sit on the grass in Gene’s yard by the woods on Joey's property.  Joey came from behind a tree, started dancing, jumping around. Then he announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s time for the Naked Star.” No one knew exactly what this meant or what to expect next.  Joey had disappeared behind another tree.  All we heard were some rustling sounds.  A few moments later, Joey appeared, well, naked.  Not a stitch on.  He was only nine at the time so this was hardly provocative but still it wasn’t something any of the rest of us would do.  

Joey danced around some more, sang some songs, took a bow and then disappeared back into the woods.  I’m not sure what the other kids thought, the girls in particular, but I do remember we all clapped when it was over.  Just another hot afternoon’s entertainment at the Studio Palace.

Occasionally someone would get hurt when our playing would get too reckless. During our fights we liked to throw cardboard boxes at each other, pretending they were furniture during a saloon brawl.  Every once in a while a corner of one of the boxes would hit someone in the face.  “You okay?  Sorry, I was aiming for your legs.”  After a few minutes the tears would stop and we’d get back to whatever scene we were involved with.  

It was rough and tumble but never intentional.  One afternoon I got a taste of what intentional meant.  It was just Gene and me in his yard.  He had mentioned some of his cousins were coming later.  I didn’t think much about it until a car pulled up and several wild kids poured out.  They were bigger than I was, a bit older, and definitely crazier. The first thing one of them did was tackle me.  What!  I flopped on the ground with this bigger kid on top of me pining my arms.  That was the trend of the next few hours they spent rough housing.

Gene and I liked to run around in character.  His cousins wanted to play football or soccer, or a combination, I’m not sure what.  Several red balls suddenly appeared.  They started running with them.  I was supposed to chase them but all they did was turn around and fire the ball at me, or tackle me, or push me down, and once or twice take a swing at me.  

His cousins didn’t seem to have any boundaries.  “Gene, I gotta get home,” I told him trying to come up with an excuse after another hard landing on the ground.  Gene didn’t particularly like what was going on either but implored me to stay. Trying to stay away from his crazy cousins as much as I could, I avoided some of their mayhem.  Eventually, their parents, or trainers maybe, came out of Gene’s house, gathered them all up and they were gone. Worse for wear, Gene and I were glad to have his yard to ourselves again. 

Gene put up with his cousins in ways I didn’t.  He didn’t like their behavior but dealt with it, trying to get me to go along too.  “They’re just playing,” he’d say as a ball came flying at my head.  I was alternately scared of them and angry at them.  Gene was more accepting, more conciliatory in some ways. There were definite differences in our personalities.  He’d rarely get as frustrated as I would during some of our plays.  I’d want everything to be perfect. I loved being in “the zone” when I played, a place of absolute involvement in what I was doing.  Gene had a milder temperament.  I was the worldly one of the two of us.  Hard to believe.  It was likely because I was a little older impressing Gene with my flawed knowledge of the world picked up mostly through television, movies and comic books, things heavily restricted in Gene’s life.

Gene did have an odd quirk.  He was afraid of worms. How about terrified! If someone dangled a worm in front of him he would panic, scream, run as fast as he could in the opposite direction.  When word got around there was this kid on the street who was afraid of worms, a couple of the older kids would go out of their way to taunt Gene by holding up a worm in front of him.  Gene did not disappoint them, displaying instant panic mode.  That made things worse.  Some bully would toss a worm at him or threaten to make him eat it.  I tried to help but  “Leave my friend alone,” was often the best I could do.    

  

Summers in Boston could be cloudy, occasionally cool, rainy, great weather for all the worms.  Then there were the heat waves usually showing  up from late July to August, the dog days. During that time in the summer many of the kids in the neighborhood were away on vacation. I remember some of them telling me they spent a week at  White Horse Beach in Plymouth.  I liked the name.  There were times when it was just Gene and me, his huge yard all to ourselves.  During one particularly hot day Gene’s mother told us it was important we stay out of the sun. Something about heat stroke. “Keep to the shade,” she told us.  We took her seriously, and literally.  I’m not sure what we thought might happen if we stayed in the sun too long, burst into flames maybe, so we decided any sun was the enemy, not a ray of it would touch our skin.  After a little while we also realized this meant we were trapped on the porch.

“What if we run as fast as we can to the shade of the tree down by the rock,” one of us suggested.  It was decided.  By running, we would spend less time in the sun than if we casually walked over to the tree.

Bolting off the porch we charged over to the shade of one of the spruces. Lying in the shadow of the tree we caught our breath before one of us exclaimed, ”What if this tree catches on fire.  We’ve got to get to the one across the yard.”  So for the next hour or so we ran from patches of shade to patches of shade becoming hot and sweaty and overheated.  The ridiculous thing is we were convinced we were heeding Gene’s mother’s advice to stay out of the sun.

Parents at the time had more more worries for their kids’ safety than heat and humidity.  Every summer there was a new polio scare. There had been more than two hundred thousand cases of the crippling and often fatal disease since the end of the war.  A cure was being tested during the mid-fifties but with another fifty-eight thousand new cases in 1953, the year I moved to Hyde Park, “polio hysteria” manifested itself.

Polio struck kids more than any one else.  To see a healthy active kid wind up in a wheelchair, or worse, an iron lung, would understandably put people in panic mode.  Just how a kid contracted the disease was unclear underscoring the uncertainty and fear.  (Now it’s regarded that a virus in feces was the cause of most infections among typically unhygienic kids.) Guidelines included keeping kids well-bathed, well-rested, well-fed and away from crowds.   One common instruction was not to drink from a public bubbler.  Even swimming pools were closed.  As it turned out none of these precautions were effective.  All you really had to do was wash your hands a few times during the day.  Like most kids, I never did.

Many kids had the polio virus without being aware of it. The great majority may have had the ubiquitous “flu-like symptoms” for a few days but because of a healthy immune system the disease wasn’t strong enough to inflame the spinal cord which could lead to paralysis. Most kids eventually became naturally immune. Still enough kids were seriously affected that when news came of a vaccine the relief was palpable.

During the summer of 1955, the last summer before the disease was contained, I had been made aware of polio and its consequences by my parents.  One thing they told me was not to get overheated. How could I be a dinosaur and still stay cool?  So I’d run a little bit, find some shade, switch personas to Professor Trilling for a while, then run around some more.  As it turned out the only person I ever heard of that had polio was President Roosevelt. By the next summer we all had our polio shots.  Thank you Drs. Salk and Sabin.

The continuing heatwave began to sap the energy required to play our plays, so one afternoon Gene and I decided to go down to our local branch library to see if they had any books on dinosaurs. The Hyde Park library was a small building, classically styled, with a formal reading room in one wing and the kids section in the other. The children’s room with its high ceilings, walls full of books, and large tables proved to be an inviting place for Gene and me to learn as much as we could about the creatures we so inaccurately portrayed in our movies.

Maybe it was the heat or we didn’t have library cards but instead of taking books home with us we found several that had lots of pictures and, propping ourselves up at one of the tables, copied out some of the illustrations using thin tracing paper.  When we got back to Gene’s house, using the tracing paper as a guide, we’d transfer the pictures of dinosaurs, their eggs, early mammals, even fossils and dinosaurs tracks, onto the pages of a couple of small notebooks which we titled the First Dinosaur Book and The Second Dinosaur Book.  

Saber-toothed tigers shared pages with triceratops and pterodactyls.  One drawing I was particularly proud of showed a T-rex taking a large bite out of a brontosaurus.  I colored the brontosaurus brown, the rex greenish, using lots of red crayon to show the blood streaming down the brontosaurus’  back.  Gruesome and scientific at the same time.

I began an essay about dinosaurs of which I still have the first page. The penmanship is childish but I got a few things right. “Dinosaur means ‘terrible lizard.’”  Also, “When the caveman came many people believe they saw real dinosaurs.  No. Man has never seen a dinosaur face to face and no man will I don’t think.”  There were some theories expressed.  “How the dinosaurs died is an interesting story too. The dinosaurs died because the water dried up.  One dinosaur took to the sea.  That dinosaur is the whale.” 

I also started a little notebook on geology which I titled simply and elegantly, “Meet the Earth.” It was full of artfully colored pictures of rocks and minerals.

Another project we worked on for a few weeks in July of ’55 was a neighborhood newspaper.  I suppose Gene and I were sitting in the shade of one of his trees one afternoon when one of us said to the other, “We lead such interesting lives we should put the details in a newspaper that we could then sell to people.”  It sounds reasonable.  The headline in the first two page issue screamed, “Billy finds baby bird.” It continued, “Boston. July 6. Billy B found a baby bird which was found today under a tree in Gene’s yard.  Lucky (A neighborhood dog ), that mutt, was killing the bird when Billy saw it. Gene’s grandmother told him to let it go.  He did.”

I remember finding a number of birds which I would cradle in my hands for a while before putting them up on the limb of a tree.  Gene and I would search for their nests but were never successful in finding one.  Poor birds. (Better than being eaten by a killer panther though.)

I did the news on the first page while Gene worked on the features page.  Sample. “Hollywood. A new play was made today named Volcano starring Gene and Billy.”  I guess that is all you needed to know.  Another issue reported how Gene’s brother Brian, playing alone in the family car, released the parking brake  causing the vehicle to roll down the driveway hitting a tree.  The headline, quite in the tabloid style we were aiming for, stated, “Boy releases brake. Kills tree.”  Simple and succinct.

The paper only lasted a few weeks.  We’d write it inside one of the Forsythia bushes, our newsroom, make two or three copies which we would then hand out to other kids.  Since we only had a few copies we’d stand around until they read it and then give the copy to someone else.  Each copy had 5 cents printed on it but we never charged; literally we didn’t make a nickel on this project.

But it was exciting, something to look forward to.  Finding news, writing about it, having someone else read it. “Our paper came out today,” we’d say to each other, a bit proud of our effort.  Having projects like doing the newspaper gave us a sense of community living on top of the hill. 

We weren’t writing a newspaper in 1954 when Hurricane Carol swept into Boston. What a headline that would have made.  “Crazy Winds Destroy Gene’s Yard.” Gene’s yard did take a hit.  Going up there after the storm, I could see several of the blue spruces had been toppled over.  In the sunshine, the storm danger over, it was fun to walk around one of the trees, to touch their top branches, to gather up fallen pine cones that we then threw at one another.  Lots of sticky hands that day.

One morning I heard a loud noise coming from the direction of Gene’s house.  Running up there I watched as Gene’s father, shirtless, wielding a chain saw, lobbed off branches to one of the downed trees like he was Paul Bunyan. I rarely saw him at all so seeing him like this was odd. 

I did miss the trees as time went on. The stumps wept sap for a while before drying up. The next summer there was just a couple of circles in the yard where years of dropped needles had burnt out the grass.

During the best of times, Gene’s yard was idyllic. Because of its size and seclusion, it struck me as picturesque, like parts of Franklin Park, a lovely sylvan space.  It was a place where my imagination had all that room in which to expand.  We ran and played, yelled and laughed.  During quieter times we liked just to walk around in the yard, along the edges where the grass ended and the woods started.  Sometimes we’d sneak onto the Boyle’s property to climb a tree. Or we would walk down Gene's driveway to the granite posts on Prospect Street, sit on them, watch cars go by. Each day was different yet my idealized view of Gene’s yard ensured me that it would also be the same. More than anything else, that sense of his yard as our special place, never changing, always there for us, gave me a wonderful sense of contentment.

It wasn’t just the yard. It was also my friendship with Gene that made those summers special.  I had something to look forward to every morning when I woke up, a sense of purpose, whether it was putting on the plays, writing about dinosaurs, or just going up to Gene’s yard and lolling around in the shade of a tree. I liked Gene.  He was my best friend.  I looked forward to being with him. Then one day in early August of 1955 he told me he was moving.

I didn’t deal with it well.  It came as such a surprise.  Gene said he had just been told that day as well. His father had bought a house over in the adjacent town of Milton. Gene’s new house was just a few miles away as the crow flew. But I had no means to visit him there.  I didn’t have a bike yet, wouldn’t for a year or so.  Even if I did have a bike, as a young kid it’s unlikely I would have been allowed to cross the several busy highways between my house and Gene’s new one. He might as well have been moving to California.

My reaction to all of this was careless detachment. I’m in the middle of this great friendship and abruptly it’s in jeopardy  The day he moved I avoided him.  I didn’t go up to his house to say goodbye. Was I angry about him moving?  Did I have a glimpse of how my life would change? I’m sure he and I talked about the move, how we would miss each other, how somehow I could visit him at his new house, but for one reason or another I did not want to be there the day he left.

Instead, on the Saturday Gene moved, I went  down to the Fairmount Theatre to see Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, a compilation of the episodes that had been shown on the Disneyland TV show the previous several months  On TV the episodes had been broadcast in black and white.  On the big screen they were in color.  It was like watching an entirely different series.  Maybe it took my mind off things. Coming home I walked down Prospect Street past Gene’s. The moving truck was gone.  There was no one around.  Gene’s yard was empty.  

A number of people lived in Gene’s old house after he moved, none of them with kids. As the years passed the house began to deteriorate.  It became a sort of rooming house for a while until it eventually stood empty. One night someone reported smoke.  Gene’s yard was full of fire apparatus. The demolition of the house followed.  The yard where we played our plays, sat in the shade of his great trees and lived our summer lives as only kids can, was now rutted and scarred from the tires of the huge trucks hauling away the walls and ceilings and floors of my friend’s childhood home. 

As it came to pass, from the day he moved, I never played in Gene’s yard again.

Books

                                       

Gin

The story of my family is thick with books.  Because of books, my parents met. Books were a way I bonded with my mother and father.  Books became part of my family’s connection with the Unitarian Church in Pittsfield.  Attitudes towards books helped me see the differences between my family and the families of my friends.  I didn’t just fill up my time with books.  For me reading was all encompassing.

School Books

I’ve always loved books.  All books. The excitement of a new school year included a new set of books for that grade level.   Sometimes they were actually new.  As you opened them, the binding made a lovely crackling noise.  The pages had that fresh new book smell. Is that a thing? Your name would be the first name in the school-stamped book plate on the inside front cover.  If the book wasn’t new, you looked to see if you recognized any of the names of kids from previous years.

I was part of the Dick and Jane generation for early readers in first and second grade. Bill wrote about his experience with Dick and Jane in the blog entry, School Days.  I recall several of the stories he mentioned including the time their pet cat Puff walked through flour and amid whispers of  “A ghost must be up here,”  the children followed the white prints up the stairs, peeked under the bed and discovered their kitty, not a ghost.  Several grades later we were reading books with topical names, like Friends and Neighbors or City and Country.  

City and Country included tales of living in these two different environments.  I learned about threshing day in great detail.  It seemed like so much fun.  All the men were riding high up on big machines.  They were always pictured laughing as they wiped the sweat from their faces.  The children were running along side the big machine, laughing and waving.  The women were seen cooking food, then setting up an enormous table right in the middle of the field.  The pictures in the book showed bowls of mashed potatoes, plates of fried chicken, baskets of biscuits; every plate piled high and every bowl overflowing. I don’t know if I really believed country life was so idyllic, but I did know it wasn’t much like my daily life.  Same with the city stories. They described children who lived in apartment buildings.  Imagine taking an elevator to see if a friend could come out to play?  I don’t think I learned much about how real kids lived from these books.

My favorite reading was in fourth grade when we read Tall Tales.  Paul Bunyan and his Mighty Blue Ox, Babe.  Johnny Appleseed.  John Henry.

The fantastical nature of these tales appealed to me.   Clearly not quite true but not exactly fiction either, more like whimsical exaggerations of reality.  I did think of these figures as historical. Sometimes these characters seemed more real to me than the presidents and explorers whose names and deeds I was expected to memorize. How could you not  be impressed by a person like Paul Bunyan who ate 25 flapjacks in one forkful?

All my school books made a neat pile when stacked up on my desk.  Except for one, my spelling book.  The spelling books were of a different shape from the others. They were the usual height of ten or eleven inches, but only about five or six inches across.  They were also thin, maybe fifty pages.  Charming as their shape may have been, they were still about spelling.  The lessons they contained were structured based on a Monday through Friday routine.

On Monday we read the list of words for that week and copied out their definitions. Homework Monday was to write each word ten times.  On Tuesday we looked up synonyms and antonyms for each word.  I thought it comical to learn a word by learning the opposite of that word.  On Wednesday, we wrote sentences using the word. There were rules.  You couldn’t write, “One of my spelling words is thief.”  The sentence was supposed to be an example of how this word would be used in some reasonable context.  “The thief was arrested for taking the golden vase,” was acceptable; “Thief means someone who steals,” was not.  On Thursday we were told to “study” the words so we would be ready for a spelling test on Friday.  None of us really knew what “study” meant, but I do recall staring at the words for a while and then asking my mother to test me as a way to practice.

Every week new words. Every week the same pattern.  Sometimes I’d get bored printing the words ten times, so I’d experiment with different ways to do it.    One time I’d write all the first letters first, then all the second letters, and so on.  Even more challenging, I’d write the words diagonally.  First letter of the first word, second letter of the second, third letter of the third, leaving space to fill in the missing letters.  Of course approaching the task with this playful attitude completely spoiled the purpose of the homework which was to remember the letters in the proper order, the very definition of spelling!  

Once junior and senior high came along, my appreciation for schoolbooks lessened. For one thing, you needed to cover them.  I wasn’t very good at that.  Teachers hassled us to have our books covered. This was a big deal.  Sometimes points were added to or deducted from your grade, sometimes detention was threatened, all because your book wasn’t covered.  It seems the month of September was devoted to book covering rather than learning what was inside.   By winter the covers were tattered, dirty, and falling apart.  You’d think there would be another round of book covering, but by then the teachers’ zeal to monitor whose books were covered was spent.

I had friends who came to school with great covers folded from grocery store brown paper bags, decorated with their own writing:  book titles printed neatly all on a line in one color, their names in another color, the year and the school clearly marked.  I was not good at this.  I rarely was able to fold the paper bags the proper way, my handwriting was not neat and regularly sized, and my coloring was childish.    Innovations such as plastic coated book covers with ruled insides that helped you fit the cover to the book became common by the time I was in high school.  I was happy for these.  Even though they were covered with ads for some insurance company, they were so much better than those brown paper bag covers.  Today kids can simply buy stretchy book covers with nice graphics.  They don’t know what they are missing.  I do wonder what kind of book covers they could make from the plastic bags now used in stores.

One thing I became aware of as I worked from my schoolbooks was the consistency I first noticed in the spelling book assignments was evident in many of my textbooks.  Obviously finding a format and sticking to it was a big selling point in school texts.  Sometimes this regularity resulted in what I would now call foolish decisions.  For instance, the assignments in my eighth grade general science book always had the same structure, the first five questions were calculations, the next 20 were multiple choice and the final five were short answer. 

Each chapter in the science book was devoted to a certain topic.  One topic I recall was the five simple machines.  The lever, the inclined plane, the pulley.  Ok, to be honest, that is as far as I got without consulting Wikipedia.  Turns out there are six simple machines.  The other three are wheel and axle, wedge, and screw.   How is a wedge different from an inclined plane?  I don’t know. Maybe the 1950s innovation was to drop the wedge from the list.  That’s why I recall just five simple machines.

Another chapter was devoted to categories for natural life forms explaining the system for naming flora and fauna.  Lots of Latin references in that one with charts showing the ways different animals and plants were linked.  My science book struck me as the science you might have studied in the 1800s.  No mention of atoms, magnets, radiation, or electronics.  All very classical.

The topics in my science book drew from biology, physics, and chemistry, subjects I would later study individually. However, sticking to the format won out over common sense when it came to the way homework was assigned. After reading the chapter, we were to answer the study questions. It didn’t matter if the chapter was primarily narrative in nature, like the flora and fauna chapter,  or contained many formulas that would lend themselves to arithmetic problems, like the simple machines chapter. There were always 5 calculations, 20 multiple-choice questions, and 5 short answer questions to turn in for grading.

In ninth grade, I took biology.  That book was thick and more modern, the three authors’ names prominent on the spine.  Obviously someone had a sense of humor because the book was printed with Moon Mann Otto stacked on the binding.   We pointed to the names, likely thinking we were the first to notice this as funny. Sometimes my friends and I would draw pictures of what Moon Man Otto might look like. We were unaware that some adults must have been complicit in this joke.  After all, if the book had listed its authors as Otto, Mann and Moon we would have had nothing to laugh about. 

The main feature of this book was a special section in the middle.  It contained a set of colored film pages illustrating what you would see if you dissected a frog.   Parts of these pages were transparent, so aligned as to fit over each other. In this way by overlaying the various pages, you could see the frog intact, or its muscles, or its internal organs.  It was fascinating.

My memories of my schoolbooks are enhanced by an odd coincidence.  I happen to have the book I used in ninth grade history.  Not a copy of the book.  The actual book.  It has my name in my small cramped handwriting and the date I first used it.   I happened upon this book many years after it was assigned to me.  Bill and I, now married and with children, were traveling from our home to spend a day with my parents in Pittsfield.  On the way, we stopped at a local tag sale at a church in Dalton, a town just east of Pittsfield.  While I was perusing the books, I recognized a history book as the one I had in ninth grade.  When I picked it up, I was surprised, a bit shaken actually, to see my name in it.  Calling over to Bill, I said, “Look. This is the history book I used in ninth grade.”  He replied, “Mmm, that’s interesting.  It will be fun to see how history was explained to us back then.”  “No,” I insisted, “You don’t get what I mean.  This is the book I used in ninth grade.  It has my name in it.”  

Surprised, Bill came over. I opened the book to the inside cover.  The Pittsfield Public Schools’ book stamp was clearly visible. The first name was mine.  The date was January 9, 1959.  There were seven other names written as the book condition changed from new, my entry, to poor in what must have been the mid 60s.   Looking at the book I recalled how unusual it was to get a new book in the middle of the school year. I also remember sitting at my kitchen table on Sunday nights writing out answers to the questions at the end of the chapters.  Yeah, I know. More study questions. I bought the book for a quarter.  It is interesting to see how American History was presented to teenagers in the late fifties. I remember the book stated we didn't get off on the right foot with our neighbors to the north. What they were actually referring to was our invasion of Canada in 1775.

One day in senior high English, Miss Hendrickson excitedly announced that something new and unusual was happening. She made a big deal out of it.   “For the first time we will use a paperback book.  It’s going to change the way we teach English.  This is just the beginning.  The book will be yours to keep forever.” She clearly thought this was going to revolutionize English class.  I didn’t see the excitement reflected on the faces of my senior English classmates. Owning a paperback book, especially a title your English teacher picked out, just didn’t seem all that amazing to most of them. I liked the idea. I liked to read.  The book would be easy to carry.  Also because it was ours, we didn’t need to cover it!

The book she passed out was Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.  She cheerfully announced our first assignment, happy to adapt her teaching strategies to this new media.  “Read the first chapter for Monday.  Underline the descriptive phrases you notice as you read.“ She paused.  “Because the book is yours to keep, you can write in it.  So for each chapter we will have some aspect of the writing to discuss.” 

Well, while this may have been an innovation for Miss Hendrickson, it spoiled the whole enterprise of reading for me.  First, I don’t like writing in books.  All through college I never used a highlighter or underlined.  It never felt right to mark up a book.  Second, instead of getting into the characters and living the story, I would be distracted by scanning the text for descriptive words to underline.  As we read chapter two, in reaction to her next assignment, I underlined examples of foreshadowing.  As far as I was concerned, this took all the fun out of reading.

At one point, I told my mother I didn’t like the book. She was surprised.  “This was one of my favorites.  What don’t you like about it?”   It was my turn to be surprised.  My mother and I often talked about the books I was reading.  We usually agreed.  I realized my focus on noting the specifics of how the book was written had taken away the pleasure of simply reading first before dissecting the writing.  I was looking at the trees and missing the forest.

Personal Reading

Since my parents did not keep most books once they had read them, and because hard cover books were expensive, the library was the main source of books for my family. Sometimes a special hard cover book would show up as a birthday or Christmas gift. I might receive a Nancy Drew mystery book this way, but in general we went to the library to stock up on reading material.

In the main Pittsfield library, the children’s room was upstairs. When I was in elementary school, I sought out titles like Aesop’s Fables and the Mary Poppins stories. Maybe my mother recommended those books to me. Other books I just stumbled upon as I looked at whatever was on the shelves.  For some reason a collection of stories with characters named Flicka, Ricka and Dicka are strong in my memory as I write this.  I was drawn to these books by the unusual names.  They were girl triplets who lived in Sweden.  These stories were slight, each one based on some everyday adventure, like baking a birthday cake for their mom or babysitting a relative’s pet cat only to have it hide and reappear with a litter of three kittens. There was a similar set of stories about boy triplets, Snip, Snap and Snurr written by the same author.  Perhaps these were Sweden’s answer to Dick and Jane. 

I loved the idea of a collection.  Unlike a single book which once you finished it you were done, with a collection as soon as you finished one book you could get another in the series and re-enter that world.  I found the idea appealing.  Sometimes it was a series.  Sometimes it was searching out books by an author I liked.  The tales of Oz, stories by Hans Christen Anderson and the books about Heidi are all ones I enjoyed.

As I grew older, I was disappointed the library didn’t carry the Bobbsey Twins or the Nancy Drew stories.  Those were only available through stores. I was unaware that librarians at the time didn’t consider them “literary enough” to be library material.  I would get one or two a year as gifts.  Once I had read them, I’d trade with friends who had other titles.

I mentioned in the blog entry “Teachers” that I began reading my personal books in seventh grade during school time. This continued all through high school. I always had a book in hand.  As soon as I was done with an assignment, I would just open a book and read until the class was over. I didn’t read during the times the teacher was talking, partly because I didn’t want to get yelled at but also because I really couldn’t get immersed in the reading with the distraction of the teacher’s voice.  Even though I limited my reading to times the class was quiet, my classmates working problems or reading their texts, there was always time for me to read every day.  It was worth carrying my current book with me to every class.

One day, arriving at physics class, my current book, On the Beach, under my arm, we found we had a substitute teacher. Written on the board: “Read chapter five and answer questions 1 through15 at the end.”  That was physics class for the day.  I was nearly done reading my book so before opening up the physics book, I figured I’d finish On the Beach.  After all this was a substitute. The usual rules didn’t apply. On the Beach is about a group of people in Australia awaiting the approach of a radiation cloud that has devastated the rest of the world.  Each character has his or her own way to face the end of their lives.

The ending was romantic, a bit sad and it brought tears to my eyes.  Putting the book away, I slowly opened my physics book.  The effort of focusing on the text made a few tears run down my face.  The substitute looked at me quizzically.  He seemed to be wondering, “Are you okay?”   As I looked up to meet his gaze, I answered his unspoken thought. “They just smashed this little atom,” I said trying to be funny. Staring back at me, he pointed to the assignment on the board and turned away.  I returned to my physics assignment vowing not to try to make jokes with teachers.

At the end of ninth grade, our English teacher passed out a list entitled, “One Hundred Books You Should Read Before Going to College.”  That was all a compulsive person like me needed.  Since this was 1959, it was a collection of English language classics mainly written well before I was born. The Grapes of Wrath, Quo Vadis, Main Street, Wuthering Heights, The Old Man and the Sea, and so on.  Nothing really modern like 1984 or Catcher in the Rye.  Those were considered too daring for teenagers to read in the context of a school approved list.  In any case, for a while I took this list very seriously.  Each time I went to the library that summer, I would get a couple of books on the list and, whether I liked them or not, read them.  Mostly this felt like a chore although every now and then one of the books would captivate me.  I particularly liked the Poe stories, The Tell Tale Heart and The Pit and Pendulum. I would wonder how they got to be on this list. They were so interesting when most of the other books from the list were not. I doubt I actually read all hundred books.

Looking back I realize no teacher gave much guidance as to book reports, letting us choose our own books.   I could have used some help junior year in making reasonable decisions.  My history teacher gave us a list of books to choose for a book report.  From its description, I chose The Forsyte Saga.  At the same time I was reading a book for a report in English class.  I had chosen Hawaii.   Both books were long and involved. They each followed several generations of a family, one in England and one, obviously, in Hawaii. While not quite as hefty as a phone book, each one was a sizable tome that I carried around for a few weeks.  In both of them it was difficult to keep track of the characters as the names recurred with sons, grandsons and great grandsons sharing minor variations.  I worried about finishing both books as the reports were due within days of each other. Still I enjoyed the complexity of these tales and the sense they gave me of living in different times and places.

Another source of books were the ones at home.  Twenty-thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Count of Monte Crisco, and The Three Musketeers. Likely these were books  intended for my older brother. My mother also particularly enjoyed these adventure stories. Other titles I recall were From the Terrace by John O’Hara, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and From Here to Eternity by James Jones. These were kept in my parents’ bedroom.  As a teenager I did not read these books.  Once I saw a paper book edition of Dr. No in our kitchen. I picked it up, began to leaf through it, thinking I would read it when my mother was done. She took it away from me, saying it was too adult.  I was 14.  I eventually read all the James Bond books. I never felt my parents censored what I read, but they did offer guidance.

My father had eclectic tastes including science fiction.  On occasion he would bring home a Galaxy or Astounding Tales.  These were small, five by eight inch, paperback magazines with short stories and sometimes a novella.  The covers were usually colorful drawings of planets with two stars or rings and a shapely partly-dressed woman.  The cover art rarely had anything to do with the contents of the stories. 

My son recently gave me a set of these older magazines dated from the late 50s and early 60s.  It is fun to read the stories, the editorial comments, and the letters from fans.  It is clear the fan base, while small, felt connected to the editors of the magazines, offering them feedback and suggestions for future issues. Though long before social media, there’s a fan website feel as you read the comments.

Science fiction became a passion for me as a teenager.  I moved from the magazines to the collections the library had to offer.  It was my way to make sense of the world.  I found science fiction stories helped me develop a world view.  When I read stories about future space explorers encountering alien races, it solidified my sense of how we should treat people who are different from ourselves.  When I read stories about interplanetary wars, it made me reexamine the validity of war on our planet.  When I read stories about our future selves encountering  primitive cultures only to find out the so-called primitive cultures had mental abilities well beyond our own, it made me want to avoid judgments about what made a society advanced.

I never liked what is called space opera or fantasy.  My sense of realism or credulity would be stretched too thin.  I preferred the short stories.  An author could create a world or a situation in a few pages.  The impact of the story would be over before my reasoning brain objected to the set up.  Many of the best stories had an ironic twist at the end making you rethink who was the hero and who was the villain or what was real and unreal. 

A great example is a story by Arthur C. Clarke, the Nine Billion Names of God.  In this story two modern engineers are hired by Tibetan monks to create a machine to write out all the names of God.  The monks believed once all the names were written, the universe would come to an end.  As the engineers worked together they mocked the monk’s beliefs as a way to express their own superiority.  As they were unsure how the monks would behave once the machine completed the task and the world did not end, the engineers had decided to leave the monastery just before the final name would be written  We are with the two engineers at the end of the story.  Away from the monastery, they stop to rest for the  night. As they lay on their backs looking up into the sky they are shocked to discover the monks were right.  In the final words of the story, “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”  This kind of story gave me goose-bumps.  It also opened up my mind to consider new possibilities.   

My mother introduced me to a different genre of reading, mysteries.  She loved the English classics, the kind of book that became popular through Public Television’s Mystery series.  Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers were among her favorites.  Usually set in England, these mystery stories were individualized by the different personalities of the detectives.  Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Whimsey, Roderick Alleyn among them.  The character of the detective was an important component of the story.  The murders were rarely gruesome, frequently taking place off stage as it were, merely an excuse to set the plot into action.

These plots were usually about some upper class family with skeletons in the closet.  In the course of the investigation, these came to light with disastrous implications for those holding onto the secrets.   While often rowdy and a bit uncouth, the villagers, the lower classes, always seemed more honest and real than the upper-class folks.  To a teenaged American, it seemed like being upper class in Britain was synonymous with cheating, lying, boasting, and murder!

These British mysteries led me to Sherlock Holmes.  What fun those were, especially reading them that first time. I could imagine what he looked like for myself without any interfering images of Sherlock that movies or TV would bring later.  The mysteries were delicious, even if a bit convoluted.  If you didn’t have a knowledge of the varieties of cigarette ash or the other arcane facts that Holmes had, it was unlikely you could predict who the killer was or how he did it.  It was so much fun being completely puzzled by one of Holmes’ many-sentenced descriptions of someone he had just met.  How does he know all this? Then to keep reading to see how obvious the description fit because of Holmes’ astounding skills as an observer of minute detail.  “Didn’t you notice the green-ish ink-stained crease on the right thumb?  It’s obvious he had been a printer in East London but retired five years ago.”  Yeah, right!

Family and Books

There was another source of books my father took advantage of, the lending library at England Brothers’ department store.  In the 1950s I remember it as a small section of the first floor book store.  Unlike the library where current books were few and far between, at England Brothers you could borrow the newest books for a daily fee. In a 1943 newspaper ad for England Brothers, the rate was 3 cents a day.  I imagine by the late 1950s it was 10 or 15 cents a day.  Still, cheaper than buying the book. 

Each weekend, my parents read the book section of the Sunday Herald Tribune and the Saturday Review of Literature.  In this way they kept up to date on books and book news.  The lending library was a way to read the most current books.  I wonder now if my father brought books to work, to read at odd times as I did at school?  He disliked wasting money.  If he was paying by the day, it’s likely he would have found a way to read during work.

Book stores and lending libraries were familiar to my parents.  The love of books had brought them together.  Before he married and moved to Pittsfield, my father owned a book store/lending library on Summer Street in North Adams.  (The spot is now part of the  parking lot for a discount store.)  How he ended up a bookseller is a bit of a mystery to me.  He never talked much about the store and I never asked him about it.   After graduating high school, my father held a variety of jobs, including reporting for a local paper and surveying for town projects.

Eventually he came to own the bookstore/lending library which was called, somewhat unimaginatively, The Corner Lending Library and Bookstore. I still have a couple of photos of him in front of the store. It’s interesting how he met my mother. I can picture it. One afternoon he is sitting in his store when a young woman comes in to inquire about some Russian novel. It may have been War and Peace. Somewhat patronizingly he tells her,  “Well, a sweet young thing like you wouldn’t want that.  Here, try this.”  He hands her Anne of Green Gables. Recognizing the book, my mother says, “I read that years ago. I saw a piece in the paper about this Russian novel. That’s what I want.”

My parents were smitten.  It was her love of books that created the opportunity for them to meet.  When they got married, my father closed the bookstore for a more reliable job, one at the General Electric Company in Pittsfield.

Years later, my father used his knowledge of and interest in book selling to set up a book table during the social hour held every week following the service at the Unitarian Church.  Each week, based on his own knowledge and from reading reviews in newspapers and magazines, he chose books he thought would appeal to his fellow churchgoers. He would make a list with a brief summary of various books so that people could order the books they wanted.  Each week he would also order a couple of copies of books he thought people might like, displaying them for purchase. 

During the social hour, the adults would mill about, much like a cocktail party, except instead of drinks they had coffee.  Even though the idea was to provide time for people to talk about the ideas in the sermon, mostly people chatted about their lives. Many gathered around the table my father had set up, leafing through the books on display or making suggestions about what they would like him to order next.  This wasn’t a money making proposition, just a service he did for the church.  It must have been satisfying for him to share his interest in books with others.

The idea of a social hour with coffee and books after church services was not the way most of the kids in our neighborhood viewed church.  Maybe that’s why there was confusion when my younger brother, six or seven, told his friends, “My father is the book man at our church.”  Somehow this got back to my mother.  She was embarrassed fearing some of her neighbors might think her husband was a bookie, placing bets for his church friends.  This might be a funny story now, but not to my mother back then. 

In our working class neighborhood, my parents’ love of books was not common. While not exactly a book snob, it would rile my father when a neighbor kid would call a magazine a book.  “A magazine is nothing like a book,” he would say.  Even worse in his lexicon were comic books.  “They’re not books at all!”  The comic books I did read all belonged to friends of mine. I knew enough not to bring any home!

While most of the books we read came from libraries, we did have a small bookcase with a variety of different genres of books. There could’ve been a few books leftover from my father’s store.  I still have the first edition copy of From Here to Eternity that I remember from that bookcase  The books in the bookcase were rather random. There was a book of Portuguese poetry (in English).  I can only guess this was an anniversary gift at some point, as it did not reflect any particular interest of my parents that I knew about. There was a slim book with the provocative title, Not For Children.  One day when I was alone in the house, I opened it, only to find it was a collection of short verses that made little sense to me. The title was meant to indicate that while it looked like a children’s book. It wasn’t.  Not because it contained so-called “adult” material, but because it wouldn’t be of interest to children. They were right. 

Considering my father’s taste in books it was surprising there were a couple of Readers’ Digest condensed books there as well.  Each had three complete novels shortened to fit in one novel-sized book. Many people read condensations to get a sense of the story. Given his respect for the written word and the effort that goes into any good book, editing someone’s else work to make it shorter must have offended my father’s sensibilities.  It’s likely these books were given to my parents as gifts by someone who knew they liked to read but who didn’t fully understand what that meant to them.

There were a couple of books based on TV shows.  One contained mostly photographs about a late night show, Broadway Open House, a precursor to the Tonight show.  It featured host Jerry Lester along with Dagmar, just the one name, a busty blonde who played dumb. Her role was just to sit presumably to attract the attention of male viewers.  The photographs captured a bunch of people in silly poses wearing funny hats, being comical. I never saw the show but the book made me wish I had been old enough to stay up to watch it.

Another was a paperback book containing several scripts from the Sergeant Bilko show which starred Phil Silvers as a smooth talking con artist in charge of the motor pool at a military base in Kansas.  Every plot centered on Bilko scheming his way to make fast money and put one over on his superiors. Again, a show I never saw but I thought the scripts were quite funny.

Other books from this bookcase came in handy one winter in eighth grade when I was home sick. I was well enough to read and wanting to get ahead on assigned book reports, I searched through the bookcase deciding upon two science fiction books.  One was called The Long Tomorrow about two teenagers in a post apocalyptic America.  The other was Baby Is Three in which six extraordinary individuals, including a three year-old baby, merge their mental powers creating a gestalt more powerful than any normal human. I recently had the chance to reread both of these books so the details of what they were about are now rich and clear for me.  However, as a thirteen year-old, some of the themes were over my head. Still the books fascinated me.  Clearly they connected on some level.  

What has stayed with me was overhearing my parents talking about these stories, discussing the ideas the books generated. This was long before I heard about book clubs and reading groups.  I realized my parents did not read passively.  They talked about the deeper meaning imbedded in these stories.  They showed me books weren’t just about plot and characters; they were about ways of thinking.  Mostly I came away with the realization of the value of sharing your ideas with others.

Another category of books I remember were those about jazz, another of my parents’ shared interests. There were several non-fiction books, one by Leonard Feathers which covered the history of jazz, a biography of Louis Armstrong, and several other titles.  It’s likely these were books my parents bought for each other. They loved jazz from the the 20s right through the 50s.  Some swing, some blues and a lot of Dixieland.

This collection was a lifesaver one winter’s weekend when I had been assigned to write a report for my ninth grade music class.  It was bitterly cold out and the thought of a day at the library to work from reference books for my report was so unappealing.  I realized if I wrote about jazz, I had available right in my own warm house six or seven books I could reference without having to make the cold trek to the library.

Even though the music class featured classical music, I knew my teacher would be open to this topic as he, himself, was a jazz musician.  In the summers he had a group that played regularly at a south country club, Jug End Barn. I rarely recall writing school reports with any pleasure.  However this one conjures up an image of me sitting on the floor in the dining room with all my parents’ books on jazz spread out around me.

The fifties was the era of home encyclopedia salesmen.  Many of my friends watched their collections of Britannica or World grow from Aardvark to Arithmetic, Arizona to Bolivia, and so on until the final volume  showed up, something like Watermark to Zeitgeist.  My family didn’t have a multi-volume encyclopedia collection.  We had the Columbia Encyclopedia, a single volume about fifteen inches thick.  I used it many times for papers and reports.  Italy.  The Nile River.  The Dead Sea Scrolls. It was well-thumbed.  Sometimes it served double duty as a booster seat for my younger brother. One more book I associate with growing up in my family.

Books may be paper and ink, or nowadays even digital images, but they are about worlds.  Worlds you can visit, imagine, or get lost in.  My mother used to tell a story about her own growing up years.  One day she was tending to a pudding on the stove, keeping it smooth so it would cook evenly, her mother out of the kitchen.  My mother stood, stirring aimlessly with one hand while her mind was in the book she held in the other.  My grandmother returned to the kitchen only to find the pudding boiling over, my mother oblivious to the near disaster,  her book more engaging than reality. I love this story.  My mother could get enthralled in a book and lose track of where she was the same way I did. What a gift my mother and father gave me, their love of reading.