Death is Breaking Up that Old Gang of Mine

I got a shock in the mail yesterday. The booklet for the most recent reunion of my high school class arrived. I didn't attend the reunion and haven't for a while now. I told my wife maybe I'll go to the 100th. But I'm thinking I may go to the next.

It wasn't getting this booklet that shocked me, but what was listed on the first page inside -- In Remembrance. The last booklet I received there weren't many to be remembered, now I see almost 22% of my classmates have died.

It doesn't seem possible, if I was 83 maybe, but not 73. Even more shocking were those on the list who'd been my closest friends in those years. You see the picture on the left? Everyone in it is deceased.

I always thought I should have been in this photo, the Class Clowns. This was my group. Perhaps given the circumstance that each clown has died it is good I wasn't included.

It is as if my high school years have been swept away, at least my companions. The people in the photo from bottom to top, are Nancy Bright, Betsy Fillman, Ray Ayres and Richard Miller. Richard and Ray were my best friends in OJR High.

Here are my companeros lost.

 Richard Allen Wilson was the first friend I made after I moved from Downingtown to Bucktown. I was 14 at the time and out back of the house pitching a rubber baseball against the wall you see behind Richard. Suddenly, this guy came around the side yard and stood looking at me. He was my height, but heavier.

"Hey," he said, "wanna have a catch." He became one of my best friends from that day until I got married and moved away.

He served as an usher at my wedding (pictured left).

Life sent us in different directions as adults. I thought of getting in touch with him at times, but you know how that goes, we intend, but never quite get around to doing it.

Too late now, of course, Rich died around 1993-94 about 53 years old. He had a heart attack. This is
the last photo I have of him taken in 1993 by my parents. He left behind a two or three year old daughter. He was the inspiration for characters in several of my stories: "In Snow and Sand", "Moon Was Cloudy", "Ya-Ha-Whoey!" (a play) and "Come Monday" (a novel) among them.

I also wrote a novel called "Forty-Dollar Car", which was relatively autobiographical and told the adventures we had with a broken down 1949 Plymouth he bought and got working again. Cars were his passion and he dreamed of building hot rods and of designing cars in Detroit. His desires never came to be and I think he spent most of his life driving a truck, just like his father before him.

Despite Richard dying relatively young, he wasn't the first of my close high school chums to go. That fate goes to another Richard, Richard Ray Miller.

Richard Ray was one of those I spend most my time with at high school. He was in the same academic section as I in those years and one of those I ate lunch with and hung with sometimes outside of school.

He also was part of The Trio, him, me and Ray Ayres. Yeah, it can get confusing. My three best friends in high school were Richard, Richard Ray and Ray. We wrote and performed together as well. For instance a short comic play called, "Barber and the Boy" that we wrote and starred in. I played the Barber and Ray Ayres was the Boy, and Richard Ray was a weird customer in the shop.

The last time I spent any time with Richard Ray was in September 1959. He called and asked me to ride the train to Philadelphia with him. He was going to a job interview with AT&T, but he had never been to the "big city" alone. He knew I had attended classes at IBM school that summer and felt I was the expert on the city. He and I rode the rails from Royersford to Reading Terminal in Philly and walked to the AT&T office.

He was taking tests to apply as a Linesman, something he was very excited about becoming. When we arrived at the reception desk I said I was an applicant. I had no desire to be a Linesman, given I was afraid of heights, but figured it looked better for Ray to tell them that than to look like his babysitter for the trip.

I did very well on the electrical aptitude, but not so hot on the mechanical. It didn't matter to me, but Ray failed both tests and he was despondent on the ride home.  Perhaps that is how his life after high school went. I don't know his circumstances beyond what I heard here and there from others. I heard at the end he was living along and was alcoholic. Whether this was totally the case I can't swear, but I think it was the case. He died in his thirties.

If possible, even closer to me was the other Ray of us three, Ray Ayres.

Ray Ayres probably saved me a lot of grief in my new school. I was this geeky, weird guy just moved from Downingtown. I didn't have great social skills and I had reasons to be cautious around others. We had a gym class and I didn't do so well in whatever we did that day. Ray came over to me in the locker room and began giving me some advice on how to do better at whatever it was. For some reason we became fast friends the rest of my high school career.

Bullies and such didn't fool around with Ray and as his friend, they left me alone too.

It didn't make sense, because big men on campus don't usually attach themselves to skinny, awkward nerds like I was then. He was everything I wasn't, I guess, except tall. He was short, about five foot six, but tall in every other way. He was that rarity, a good scholar and excellent athlete. He was also considered cute and so popular with the girls. Despite these gifts he was humble, had a strong moral compass and a great sense of humor. We had a great bond between us.

Besides writing those little plays, we also became a DJ duo hosting some school dances as "Gravely & Hearse".  Ray talked me into joining the YMCA and working out with him in the weight room and later joining the OJR Track Team. We also snuck off to a room behind the school auditorium and listened to Tom Lehrer records when we should have been in study hall.

In our senior year he wanted to stop cursing. He asked me to smack him upside the head any time I heard him cuss, which I obliged, even when it drew some questioning looks from our teachers.

To me, he was a guy who had it made, had it together, but somehow he seemed to struggle after high school. He disappeared from view for a number of years. A few years ago I heard he was back and living in Reading. I considered looking him up, but just like with Richard Wilson I never found the time. Yesterday I found out he died two years ago in Tremont, Pennsylvania in a Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. He died about one week after my mother passed away. He left behind his companion, two daughters, three sisters and a grandson, and a lot of memories.

Another friend in our little entourage was Phil Hahn.  Phil was a rather large fellow, perhaps a little taller than myself and a darn sight heavier.

I beat Phil in a wrestling tournament we had my senior year, giving me a perfect record. He had weight on his side, but I had stubbornness.

At some point in the match, during flipping and floppy about, he caught me square in the nose with his elbow. After I pinned him and bounded up for the gym teacher, Mr. Buckhalter, to declare my win all I heard from him was, "Who got blood all over my clean mats."

Phil was one of my old OJR classmates that I had some social contact with years after high school. On the left is Phil and his wife visiting us at our apartment at Ski Mountain, New Jersey in 1974.

Phil passed away a couple years ago and I had known that before yesterday.

In high school, I had put him in our acts. On the right he is performing in a play I wrote for an assembly called, "Wild Bill Shakespeare and the Theatre." The girl (The Poetess was her role) he is pulling off stage is Margaret Whitely, known as Peggy.

Peggy was the first girl I went steady with. I began dating her in Eleventh Grade, asking her to go to the Junior Prom with me. We ended up going together through the next summer right into our senior year. I pinned her, in fact, meaning nothing more than I gave her my senior pin, a little do-dad she wore around her neck on a chain.

Peggy was a tall blond. Her passion was horseback riding and we went to some horse shows during our time together, as well as many dances. I enjoyed being with Peggy, but honestly there was never that real spark for me.

I guess it jumped the shark at Exton Drive-in when she bit my thumb. We had double-dated with Richard Wilson and his girl of the moment. Rich and his girl had disappeared from view in the back seat. I put my arm around Peggy and she bit my thumb. I had no intensions beyond holding her against me and after all the time we had been dating it did not seem an out of line maneuver. Shaking away the pain in my thumb made me wonder if this relationship was worth continuing.

It ended rather badly some weeks after that on another double-date, this time with my Downingtown friend Ronald Tipton and a beautiful brunette name Carmella, who thought she was my date. It was a breakup I always carried some guilt about. My short story, "A Goodbye For Maggie" is based on that instance in my life.

Still it came as a real shock when I discovered yesterday that Peggy too had died.

As if seeing a former girlfriend had died wasn't bad enough, it was doubled up when I saw a girl I dated after Peggy was also dead.

I dated Susan Cannell during my senior year. She had been a steady of another classmate, Jon Harris, but something must have gone a rye between them and for a while I was taking her out. She was very adventurous and even though a teenager already had a pilot license. We used to go flying on the weekend. On one of those excursions she stalled the plane, a Cessna I believe, making too tight a turn. We were quickly heading down into a forest, but the co-pilot got the engine started again and we survived.

I liked Suzy a lot, she was cute and funny, but I was dating another girl at the same time, Pamela Wilson. There was a crisis of decision when the Senior Prom came around. Both girls wanted to go with me. I officially took Pamela, but in reality I talked my friend

Ronald into taking Suzy. I did not know in those days that Ronald was gay, of course, that had no part in this. I simply wanted my friend along and I wanted to take both my girls.

It was humorous to watch Ronald and Suzy dance together, she being five foot eleven and he being six foot three. As he put it, we were dancing cheek to belly button.  (Ronald and Susan are on the left and Pamela and I on the right.)

Suzy and Jon went back together sometimes after the Prom and were voted Cutest Couple in the Yearbook. Pamela and I dated off and on for a couple more years, although I had other girlfriends during that time. I do not know where Pamela is today. She was Richard Wilson's cousin, by the way.

Suzy continued to be adventurous and some years after high school was badly injured in a motorcycle accident. (I used a number of these events of our dating period in a story, "Pour Out Your Life at the Old German Tavern".) She and Jon did not marry. She married Gary Mahr and she survived him and her two sons.  She died in August 2014 at the Pottstown Memorial Medical Center. Her obituary states: "Susan was a member of Berean Bible Church, Christian Motorcycle Association, and was a notary and pilot."

Hey, probably adventurous to the end and would have fitted right in at my church.

It is eerie to think so many have gone, especially all those who were my closest friends in high school. As I said at the beginning, if I was 83…

Oddly, my two best friends from Downingtown where I went to elementary school and junior high all still remain, are in touch and still best friends. As I look back on the memories of those who have left me, I am grateful to still be in the living group of Stuart and Ronald. Long life to us all!

Horrors! I'm a Horror Writer. (Not Horrible -- Horror, Horror!)

The grouping on the left was sold on eBay a few years back for $1,800, meaning each issue was $100. That is a pretty good markup for magazines that had a newsstand price of $.75 when originally published in the 1970s. It was listed as "The Stephen King Collection", because it contained some of Stephen King's earlier stories. Mr. King had exactly twice as many stories within these volumes as yours truly. I wonder if it would have added value as the "Stephen King and Larry Eugene Meredith Collection"?

Probably not.

I seem to be garnering fame on the coattails of more famous authors, Stephen King, Agatha Christie, Robert Block, Nero Wolfe and Clark Ashton Smith. My name has more recently been popping up on its own. For instance the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, where I am an entry along with 70,966 other writers of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. Plus my short story "Conjured" ("Startling Mystery Stories", March 1971) was mentioned in a book examining the horror comics and pulps of the 1960s and 1970s, World of Eerie Publications (2010, Feral House) by Mike Howlett.


I got a complete two-page synopsis review of my short story, "The Last letter of Norman Underwood" in Brien J. Frost's, Essential Guide to

Werewolf Literature (2004, University of Wisconsin Press). It is nice to be elevated to the level of "Literature".

This variation on the werewolf tale of mine originally appeared in "Magazine of Horror" in January 1969, nearly 11 years after I had written it at age 16 and it was the first horror story I sold, unless one considers my anti-Vietnam War "Poem to the Boys on the Flat" a horror story as well, which was published in "Psychedelphia Period" in 1968. "The Last letter of Norman Underwood" was also published in a Spanish anthology in 1968, La Chica de Marte y Otros Relatos (The Mars Girl and Other Stories, Gemini, 1968) with the title "La ultimo carta de Norman underwood".

A story I sold to "Magazine of Horror" in 1969 (published January 1970), "The Writings of Elwin Adams", also showed up in an European anthology a few years after publication in the United States. In this case the book was published in France, 13 Histoires  D'Objets Malefique (Marabout, 1975, Andre Gerard - Editor).

Now as a matter of fact, horror stories make up a small portion of all my writing, both published or unpublished. Even among my fiction they are less than a quarter. So how did I get branded as a horror writer?

Well, duh, for bringing it up so much myself, like in the first half of this essay. Honestly as a teenager it was all I aspired to. Yes, my highest ambition was to be a hack pulp writer, which I suppose I accomplished. It is easy to step over a bar set low enough, but the real challenge in life is to set a bar you have to reach up for and pull yourself over.

I didn't write strictly terror tales then either, but most were and the others tended to be about juvenile delinquents or guys with hot rods. But still, how did this innocent, Christian lad get hooked on this darker fiction in the first place?

Partly it was a story we read in our fourth grade class at East Ward Elementary School. It was Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart". That is the first story I can remember really gripping and intriguing me. It drove me to the library looking for more Poe, but I failed in my effort for I was restricted to the Children's Room and Poe was considered too adult, too upsetting for a nine-year-old.

Somewhere about that same time I saw a dramatized version of Poe's "The Gold Bug" on TV and this

whet my appetite even more, although "The Gold Bug" isn't a horror story per se. I did manage to get a paperback of some of Poe's stories and when I got a bit older I badgered my family for more. My grandmother found me a ten volume set, The Richmond Edition, The Woks of Edgar Allen Poe, published in 1904. Volume six was missing. I still have them, so they are now 110 years old. It appears volume eight has also went missing. Volume Ten's cover has really faded and that was a favored volume. It contained all of Poe's verse, which turned me on to poetry.

My friend, Stuart Meisel gave me a paperback that he assured would scare me. It was The Lurking Fear, a collection of short stories by H. P. Lovecraft, and it did scare me, but it also inspired me.

But I think there was more to my choice of content then just Poe and Lovecraft, plus the Universal monster movies recycling through our local theater at the time. I think much had to do with the monsters lurking in my own life, the bullying and abuse I faced most days at school, the fear of my father and the times of loneliness. I suffered from nightmares nightly.

Creating supernatural menace put me in charge of the demons and allowed me a world I controlled. Perhaps the demons within, those desiring vengeance on my tormentors, had an outlet not in some violence against anyone real, but in a bizarre world where vampire and werewolves and other outer-worldly creatures recked havoc on fictitious surrogates for my enemies.

Either become a writer or a serial killer; I think I made the right choice.

Only trouble with Having Old Friends is that Old Part

I saw this ad come across the TV the other night. The sponsor was making a point of their longevity in the practice of their services. They put up a big old icon on the screen. It said, "Founded 1970". "Founded 1970," which is 43 years ago. I guess that's a long time now. This is a problem in my life these days, time slips away so quick every decade seems closer than it is.

If "Founded 1970" is a proof of longevity, what is a friendship founded in 1950? That's a total of 63 years if I still remember how to count. So is it longevity or antiquity?

And it isn't just a friendship, it's two. There are actually a couple others. I've been friends with a lady named Iva forever, I mean we go back to the state of consciousness, let's say 70 years.

But she's a girl. I'm talking about male bonding here, three guys who met in third grade and got kind of joined at the hip. There we are on the left back in 1957, when we all had a lot of thick, dark hair. Ain't we a handsome bunch?

We were so alike in many ways. That's what cements you to other people over so many decades. We were very alike and yet very different in other ways.  I was pretty geeky, I guess, this hick from a swamp, shy and ignorant of so much that the other kids knew. Maybe we were all geeky in a way. We got a lot of guff from others in that small town.

Life moved us apart physically, and for some periods in mind and spirit as well. Oddly many events in our lives paralleled even when we didn't know it.  We seemed to move into the same areas or work for banks here and there. And in the end we all drifted back together, even if mostly over the Internet. There we are on the right when we had a little reunion in 2011. We were percolating rather well at the time.

Stuart is down in Florida, but we managed to write several plays together on the Web. Ronald is living
in the slower-lower southern part of this state of Delaware, while I live up at the top. To me we still are much alike. Our differences might seem big to some people. I'm a vocal Christian and 52 years married to the same woman. Stuart's Jewish and he's married, too. Ronald is pretty much non-religious in a definable way. He has his spiritual moments. He isn't married because he can't be. He's Gay. He has a partner of 48 years. I'm pretty Conservative; Ronald's pretty Liberal. I'm not sure about Stuart, maybe he falls somewhere between us.

But never mind the differences. We like each other as people and friends. You don't always have to agree to like someone. You have to look at a person's heart, not the labels they or others have hung about their necks. I've actually known some people in life who seem to agree on everything, but can't stand each other...so life's a mystery sometimes.

These are old friends, my oldest friends, and that OLD is getting old. Age is catching up to our bodies, if not our minds. Ron got news the past year that he has prostate cancer. Bummer, he is going for a nuclear seeding in May.

We just heard from Stuart that his knees are gone, bone on bone. He's into leg braces and pain and

most likely knee replacements down the road he limps along.

I thought I was the sturdy one, boppin' along without a care. Well, I knew that wasn't completely true. I mean I had a terrible time 15 years ago and lost my thyroid. Then I developed gout and Psoriatic Arthritis in more recent times. Boy, is that a pain!

But last week was the kicker right in the...well fill in the blank. I had a bit of pain about my waist and felt very tired. I figured that Ms Flu had returned. It would pass, I figured because it always did. But last Sunday after church I was really weary and woozy and didn't have the energy to walk across the living room.

Monday morning when I awoke I had to dash to the bathroom and I think it was trying for the Guinness World Record. I've occasionally had someone tell me I was full of it. Monday morning seemed to be an attempt to prove them right. I certainly wasn't full of much of anything after that.

But I figured maybe this gets the poison out and Ms Flu will fly 'way, except I was seeing something black that said it may not be Ms Flu. It's more like Captain Blood.

Well, for once I called my Doctor and saw her last Thursday. She is of the opinion I got me a bleeding ulcer. She sent me off to the Lab for blood work. The paper said STAT at the top. She said she'd have the results by 3:00 and if my hemoglobin was too low she was going to put me right into the hospital. Then she got me an emergency colonoscopy appointment for next Thursday. Oh, joy, oh joy!

But my Lab results showed my hemoglobin was down, but not dangerously low so I escaped hospitalization. I am also going to escape all the foods I don't want to escape. No spicy food, no tomatoes, no fries, no alcohol, no coffee, no tea, no soda and no chocolate. I can have tofu. Uuh!

Anyway, I went out this afternoon and bought almost all my treats for the party next Wednesday evening. I got a packet of Dulcolax Tablets, an 8.3 oz bottle of Miralax and a 10 oz. bottle of magnesium citrate, yum! I didn't get the Crystal Light to mix in the 64 ounce bottle of water with the Miralax yet.  I will have to drink eight ounces of this cocktail until the whole jugs gone, the instructions say.

It's a good thing I don't live in New York. I wouldn't be able to prep for the procedure. Mayor Bloomberg doesn't allow these super-sized drinks.

Sports And Me

Boys and sports are supposed to go together. What is a more nostalgic picture than a father and son playing catch? But my father wasn't around much in my childhood. I can't recall he and I ever having a catch with baseball or football. My grandfather was about, but tossing balls wasn't in his repertoire either. His sport was fox hunting, but there wasn't much opportunity to go out in the backyard and toss a fox around.

When I was five my grandfather did give me a bunch of sports paraphernalia, a baseball uniform, glove, bat and catcher's mask. That is me squatted down in the photo, rather out of position for a catcher. (The other two boys are Tim Mahan with the bat and Billy Smith. They were my best friends in those days.) The bat my grandfather gave me was an Official Stan Musial Signature Louisville Slugger. It weighted 36 ounces and was about that length in inches. I don't know if that is the bat Timmy's holding or not. It was really too big for a child my age, but it was what I learned to hit with and I used that bat forever. I mean, I still have that bat, although it is pockmarked and Stan's signature long ago wore off and there is a crack down one side held closed with duct tape now.

In those early years of my life, boys really only engaged in three sports, baseball, football and basketball. (Hockey was strictly a girl's game in those years. I recall somewhere at some school a boy went out for the field hockey team, but they made him wear one of those little plaid skirts. ) Because of circumstances beyond my control, I was isolated from other children for some of my first grade school years. Halfway through third grade we moved into Downingtown and I found myself an outsider, often teased and not very knowledgable about team sports. In grade school others didn't want me on their team when sides were chosen. Although I was not usually the last player picked, I was often sort of ignored during the game.

Yet I really wasn't too bad when I began to learn the sports, especially in baseball and football. I even had a football uniform, with shoulder pads and helmet. I think my grandmother gave me that outfit. I liked the rough and tumble of football and usually played running back, because I was fast and hard to catch. The only thing I didn't like was being piled upon by a bevy of boys. I sort of panicked if I was buried beneath a half-dozen other kids with my face smashed into the ground. Once I got kicked in the throat while squashed beneath such a scrum and thought I was going to die, but nonetheless, the older I got the more I enjoyed the violence of the sport. When I was in high school we used to play our pickup games in a graveyard with a couple of tombstones as the goal line.

I would never go out for the teams at school, though. I had such a fear of being made fun of in those days I wouldn't have chanced failing at anything in front of others. I was content to play in pick-up games with friends and acquaintances.

Whenever there was a chance to play baseball I took it. Despite owning that catcher's mask, I wanted to pitch...at first...and for a brief awhile. In grade school I use to pitch in these playground games until one day I caught a line drive in the solar plexus and crumbled to the ground in a pile of pain. After that I preferred the outfield. The further away from batter and ball the better.

I tried out for one team while I lived in Downingtown. There was not in those days a Little League team in town, but there was Babe Ruth Baseball for boys over 13 and up. My friend Stuart (pictured left) and I tried out for Babe Ruth when I was 14, but my family moved out of town before the rosters were announced, so I never got to play. I don't really know if Stuart made the team or not.

When I started at my new school after the move, I was approached by a coach about playing basketball.  The only qualification I had was being tall. I am six foot. Back in 1956 that height was well above average. Now, I was good at volleyball, bad mitten, ping pong and tennis. It seemed I excelled at games with a net, but not basketball. Oh, no, I could throw the ball through the hoop and in games of PIG and HORSE could certainly hold my own, but on the basketball court I was completely lost. I was constantly confused by the fouls. I didn't know what the heck they were talking about. Traveling, of course I'm traveling cause I'm trying to get down there where the net is. Everybody around me is traveling too. Double dribble? What are you talking about? I don't have anything running down my chin. All that chaos going on put me in a trance. If someone said, "Toss me the ball," I would, it didn't matter if it was a guy on the other team or not.  As I  noted, I could throw the ball through the hoop, but chances were I'd do this through the one on the wrong side of the court and score two points for the opposition.

In my senior year at high school they had tournaments for wrestling and boxing. I went undefeated in both. In my final wrestling bout Phil Hahn was my opponent. He out weighted me by fifty pounds, but I prevailed. At some point he whacked me hard on the nose with his elbow. When the bout was over all I heard was the gym teacher yelling, "Who got blood on my new mats?" That would be me. Blood was streaming out of my nose.

I was best at boxing. I don't know how good my technique was, but I could take a punch. You might knock me down, but I always got up and I would just keep going like the Energizer Bunny.

I might as well mention I also won the sit-up competition.

Perhaps the success I had in boxing and wrestling, and sit-ups,  gave me some confidence. I finally went out for an actual team in my senior year. I joined the track team. That is the team on the left, so where's Waldo? We were not a great team. We lost every one of our meets, but one. We beat Phoenixville in our final meet and it was the one I came closest to winning my event. (If you are looking for Waldo, he isn't there, but I am. I'm the guy in the dark sweatshirt and glasses near the right side three rows up.)

Now here is the thing about me and track. In the beginning there were tryouts in all the events. I stood out in the mile run. I had the fastest time, just over 5 minutes. It was, in fact, a very good time for a teenager who had never ran a mile before. The record at that time was something like 4 minutes 12 seconds for a high schooler. The coach wanted me to be a long distance guy. He figured with some training I could press that 4 minute 12 second mark.

I didn't see it that way.

I hated running and I knew the milers ran all the time. That was all they did, run, run and run some more. I decided to shot the put and fling the discus instead. The shot putters and discus throwers were called weight men. Most of the kids who did these events were big and heavy. I was not. I was tall, but slender and I had never been know for my upper body strength. However, weight guys ran the least, so that was for me. Of course, I didn't stand much chance against some of the behemoths the other schools rolled out to the throwing circles. I was like a popgun in the middle of a cannonade.

I was a bit better with the discus. It was a lighter missile, kind of a frisbee on steroids. Throwing these things goes back to antiquity, but at least the school allowed us to wear a uniform.

If I remember rightly, and at my age that is not guaranteed, one began standing at a slight crouch with one's back to the field inside a circle. Some places had actual wooden circles, but most had circles drawn in lime. On my one brief moment of glory, the circle was wood. The tosser would then spin about inside this circle and as one approached the front edge would release the discus into the air with a mighty fling of the arm.

You got three flings.

On this particular day, our last meet of the year in Phoenixville, I was the last competitor in the discus and had come to my third and final fling. I crouched, I spun, I released and gloryoski that discus was arcing far out over the football field and when it came slashing down it was further than any fling by any flinger before me. I teetered there on one foot watching victory and then I bounced again the wooden frame and tapped my other foot down and outside the circle.

I had fouled. I was disqualified. I was disgraced. My team went on to win the meet, our only win of the year, which is supposed to be of consequence since it is a team and that is the object, but it was little solace to loser me.

I've played my share of sports since those boyhood days, bowling, tennis and golf mostly. I was on a church league softball team in the 1970s and I was the best hitter with an average somewhere over .800. We played softball a lot in Junior High Gym and I could never seem to catch the softball when it was hit my way. My way was right field, because that is where they put guys who couldn't catch. I could catch hard balls just fine, so I blamed this inability on not having a glove. But when I played in the church league we wore softball gloves, but I was back in right field because I still couldn't catch a softball. I wonder why? I mean, the thing is big so you have to see it coming at you like some huge white meteorite from outer space that is going to crash into you hand, glove or not, and take your arm off up to the elbow...but I digress.

At any rate, my sports playing days are pretty much over, I guess, unless walking counts.

Streets

I sit here this morning about to enter a new street, and not so far away, and yet very distant another long ago friend has come to the dead end of a one way avenue.

His name is Gary Kinzey, and although he died the other day (October 15) and his life became a "was", I like to think his name remains an "is".

It is in my thoughts, it is in my faded memories and it is in various records somewhere. His name and he will always be part of me until I also travel that last avenue.

This is the only photo I have of him as a boy, in the time I knew him as a friend. Film was costly then, to buy and to get developed. For that reason I didn't take as many pictures as I may have wished. It was taken in front of another friend's home, Stuart Meisel, looking toward Lancaster Avenue. The date I have on this is 1952, when Gary would have been 11.

There is a story about the bike. It will seem an odd one to the children of today with their tricked up little X-games stunt bikes, but that bike was too small. Things were larger then; cars were larger, bikes were larger. The bike may not look that small, but for it's day it was. Notice how the seat is pulled high up on the shaft. The diameter of the wheels on his bike were 24 inches; the rest of us had bikes with 26 inch wheels. Two inches may not seem much, but in those days when it came to wheels, size mattered.

And yes, Gary was sensitive about his smaller bike.

We often feel different in life over insignificant and unimportant things.

When I say he died "not so far away" it is because he lived on a street not so far from me and died at home. But I only knew he lived there and only saw him at a high school reunion a couple years ago. My friendship with him was from that now distant time of childhood, when we were sometimes close friends and sometimes not.  So now after nearly sixty years much of those days has blurred and faded.

I know I met Gary when we were very young, somehow, somewhere. He lived in apartments a couple blocks east of me and then, I believe, in a small house near where the Farmers' Market stood just outside of town. He seems to have flickered in and out of my boyhood because he moved and I moved and sometimes we were near and sometimes not.

He played the saxophone and I the trumpet.

What we had the biggest in common was trains, electric trains. We both indulged in building elaborate (at least it seems so) layouts. We had different emphasis, however. I was into building realistic landscapes, with papier-mâché mountains full of tunnels, with elevated tracks over felt-green meadows and little towns with rows of stores and bedroom communities. He was much more taken with the electrical mechanics of it all, building a master control of dials and switches where he controlled his world, of light displays and working gizmos here and there.

My room was full of comic books; his had stacks of Popular Electronics.

I thought him an electronics genius. In Junior High he came to class with a fountain pen in his pocket; except, it wasn't a fountain pen at all. It was a radio he had built inside a pen's shell.

His nickname was Sparky.

One of my last memories of Gary was also in Junior High. We were walking side-by-side between classes and for whatever reason, he began to punch me on the upper arm. Every so many steps down the corridor, wham, a punch to my arm. He ignored my pleas to stop and finally I turned and popped him back, at which point Mr. Caskey grabbed me by the shoulder and hauled me to the principal's office. One of the few times I ever got in trouble in school.

Strange the things we recall.

After school, like many other old friends and acquaintances, Gary and I went our separate lives. None the less, we once were friends and 70 is far too young to die.


(Left - Gary in 2002 at Downingtown High School class picnic at Dave Fidler's. Photo taken by Ronald Tipton.)

A History of Work

There I am, off to the office in 1953, age 12. No not really. The suit and tie jobs were still in the distant future, although I traded in that bow tie for Windsor Knots. This must have been my "Sunday-go-to-meeting" outfit.

How about the hat? This was the de rigeuer style back then.

I don't remember my first paid "job".

There was a small store on Chestnut Street, just around the corner from where I lived. (The photo on the right is how that building looks today, no longer a store.) It was a mom and pop operation, very akin to what we might call a convenience store today. It sold a variety of foodstuff and other things people regularly needed or often ran short of. It wasn't a place anyone did their weekly grocery shopping, just a place to fill in the daily needs. Early on in my boyhood, neighbor's might call me over and ask if I would run to that store and get them bread or milk or some such item. They would give me a couple pennies or even a nickel for my trouble. Pennies could actually buy things in those days, they had real worth, even if sometimes I blew it on wax lips.

So I suppose you could call that my first job.

I had a number of chores at home I was expected to do, wash the car, mow the lawn, help weed the garden when we had one and keep my room clean and neat. I hated those first three and was a dismal failure at the fourth. I had one chore I loved, taking out the trash.

Things were not like today with all our many restrictions and fears. There was less waste and there was a kind of a priori recycling. You didn't throw anything away until it was beyond recognition, let alone use. Clothes were patched and socks were darned. When you found yourself patching patches, then the item became a dust cloth and beyond that use it was a rag for the Ragman. Yeah, there was a Ragman who came about the neighborhood and took old rags.

We lived in a town bursting at the seams with paper mills (almost all gone now) and our used foolscap and magazines went to paper drives and back into the hoppers of these plants. Soda bottles and such were collected by we kids and returned to the store for a couple cents deposit. Garbage, real garbage, potato peels and apple cores and table scraps went to the curb in iron pails. The Garbage man took the contents. You knew when he was coming since you smelled him two blocks away, maybe even across town on a hot summer day if the rotting pulp from the paper mills didn't overwhelm all other scents. He drove an open bin truck. The refuge from our plates went to the slop troughs of the pig farms.

Ah, but there were some things not gathered or collected by others and this was the trash, mostly odd papers and boxes. This was the trash I had responsibility to depose of and how I enjoyed it. You see, it was burnt in large steel 55-gallon drums. Just about everyone on the street had their drum and from it regularly waifed a thin white smoke of burning trash. What made it attractive to me was I got to play with fire.

Here I am (back to the camera and wearing my motorcycle hat) with friends finding other uses for those 55-gallon trash barrels.

But those were household chores, not paying jobs, unless you count my quarter allowance. Oddly, as much as I hated doing most those at home, I jumped at the opportunities to do these things for others. I would mow a lawn, wash a car, even hoe a garden for a fee. I would solicit from a neighbor those things I tried to duck out from at home. So I guess they were my first employments.

I was in elementary school when I did those.  I was also in elementary school when I became a professional writer writing, publishing and selling a newspaper ("The Daily Star," although it came out weekly) with my buddy, Stuart Meisel. We charged a penny a copy. We did make money. We were very successful.

Newspapers were to be important in my early "careers". When I moved from Grade School to Junior High I also moved to more regular employment, Paperboy being one. That occupation came a bit later and lasted only a short period, although I loved doing it and thought it the greatest job in the world. I kinda still think it was. I guess I'm a strange fish, but one of the things I enjoyed about the job was doing it in harsh weather, pushing on through the snow and battling the rain to keep my wares dry. I could imagine myself some kind of adventurer attempting to get supplies to an isolated outpost in some godforsaken part of the world, such fun.

I didn't like the breezy days or that blowhard Old Man March, no not at all. I could cover up my product from the downpours and hail stones if need be, but if an ill wind got under my pouch papers would do what Charles Brown's kite wouldn't. They would fly, here, there and everywhere.

I took over the route from my friend, Ron Tipton, known today as "Retired in Delaware". He moved on to bigger and better things, I hope, and turned over his customers to me. I had about 100 clients for the daily and perhaps a third less for the big Sunday edition. This was the Philadelphia Bulletin, then the premier Philly rag, now defunct. I was earning between 18 and 20 dollars a week, a lot of money for a thirteen-year-old kid in the early 1950s. That would have been around $148 to $165 today. Dailies cost a nickel and the Sunday paper was $25. I had to split that four ways, a portion for me, a portion for my Supervisor, some for the delivery truck driver and the rest to the owner of the newsstand where I picked up my allotment. I got a penny-and-a-half for the dailies and five cents for the Sunday.

And it only took me an hour a day to deliver. Wow, wouldn't you like to make a $165 an hour today?

I said this bonanza was short lived.  Ron held onto his route until after Christmas the year he quit. He wanted to garner those extra-bonus Christmas tips from his cliental. I took over for the New Year, but then my parents moved out of town and in June I was living in the country and could no longer do that route.

I had held other positions in my Junior High days. I had spent a time being caretaker for my friend Stuart's family, cutting grass, watching the place and so forth.

The Meisel's had a large stone house on a good sized lot in the historic part of town. Here is a photo of the front of the home. Sadly, despite attempts by my friend to have the place preserved, it was torn down and apartments built upon the site.

In those times, too, some us walked just east of town and got jobs at the Farmer's Market. The Market was only open on weekends. A lot of Mennonites and some Amish from Lancaster County came down and had produce or meat stalls there. The place was something of a bizarre, selling a little of much, books and boots, clothes and clothes lines, hunting gear and records. It had a penny arcade of pinball machines. The place was our hangout on weekend nights, feeding nickels into those contraptions or making little records in recording booths. I and a friend got jobs one year with a greengrocer. I was not happy. My friend got to wait on customers. I stood in the back behind a tub of water washing celery.  I wasn't long for that job.

When we moved from town upcountry, there wasn't a lot of opportunities for a teen. It was still real country then and there wasn't much around. In the summers I got employed on some farms in the area as a picker. I picked tomatoes and I picked strawberries. It was sweaty, uncomfortable work. It isn't called stoop labor for nothing. You either spent the day bend over or waddling up the rows like a duck. You came home sticky, covered with dust, thirsty, stiff and tired.

I plucked plants for the two summers between ninth and tenth, and between tenth and eleventh. On the third summer of High School  I moved up and out, getting a job loading 18-wheelers at the farms in Lancaster County. Those Amish boys would gee their horse wagons up along side and I would offload their harvest onto the flatbeds, bushel baskets of tomatoes heading to the ketchup factories in the Western end of the state. The baskets got stacked to just above my head all down the trailer. You have any idea how many bushels of tomato you can stack six high down thirty feet of truck?

I think I got paid ten bucks a load.

That was summertime, when the livin' is easy. The winters were harsh and sparse. I got an occasional gig shoveling snow, mostly the parking lot of a restaurant called Flowing Springs Inn in Kirkwood, about four miles from my home. That was a hit or miss proposition. I only made money when a snow storm hit, otherwise I missed out on earning anything.

That's the Flowing Springs Inn as it looks today, under the name Titus Inn. That enclosed porch was open back then, so I had to shovel it and its steps off as well.

I guess I started those childhood chores for hire when I was 8. I might have done some earlier, but I was living isolated from the world in a swamp for a couple years. So all those little scraping jobs covered about a decade, from the third grade until I graduated high school.

They were the beginning of a history of work. Much more was to come and still is.

Remembering Little Things

Left to right (1957 to 2011):
Larry, Stuart and Ronald.

Memories, like ghosts, float about to haunt our senior nights. Sometimes they come unbidden; sometimes through incantations uttered wispily we call them forth. There are bad recollections, of course. The ones we conjure up and embrace are the good reminisces, which we occasionally wish we could relive.

"Let's form a band." I don't recall who had the idea. It seemed a good one at the time. Rock 'n' Roll was blossoming with people like The Mike Pedicin Quartet, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, Bill Haley and the Comets and some wiggle worm named Elvis. We all played instruments, why not get in on the action.

There were four of us and we got together a few times and gave it a shot. Or was it someone tried to shoot us? There was Stuart on his baritone, a kind of undernourished tuba, Teddy on slide trombone and me on trumpet, all trying to produce some kind of harmony to the rhythmic beats of Bill on his snare drum.

We were a long way from the aforementioned pioneers of Rock. We were more a pathetic echo of a very bad Salvation Army Band. All we lacked was Ron on the Sousaphone, but this was a few years before he took up that instrument.

We were making our caterwauling in a room at Stuarts.This shows the graciousness of his lovely mother that she didn't attack us with a broom and sweep us out the door.

There were three of us who stuck fast through those days, Stuart and Ronald and I. Other friends flitted in and out of our world, but it was always we three who danced to the same drummer, although we were  different in many ways. I remember evenings of gathering before early TV to watch frontier Playhouse, old westerns cut down to fit the screen, which seemed new to us. Or the more scary or imaginative stuff we shared an appetite for. Stuart and I sharing some horror on "Shock Theater", laughing along with the cadaverous host, Roland (pictured on left). Or Ronald and I at his place taking in the latest episode of "Twilight Zone".

We were fans of horror. Stuart introduced me to the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and the three of would sit in the sticky-floor dark of Roosevelt Theater watching those Universal Monsters terrorize the foggy British countryside. One winter we took in the afternoon matinee of "Wolfman". At one of the transformation scenes, I turned my fur-lined gloves inside out and grabbed Stuart's neck. He slid off his seat with a scream.

(The former Roosevelt Theater, formerly Downingtown Opera House, as it appears now is on the right.)

But time and the river flow on and life took us away from each other. If the highways of life parted us, the web of the internet brought us back. After I lost my bank job ten years ago, Ronald contacted me and we picked up by email our old friendship. Not long after he found Stuart in Florida and I began to co-author plays with Stu, just as we use to create songs together fifty-plus years ago.

Still, it was a long distance relationship. Oh, Ron moved down to Southern Delaware and I did get to visit with him a handful of times, it was forty or more years since either of us breathed the same air as Stuart. Then just before Stuart and I approached our 70 birthdays at the end of June, along came Leslie.
Leslie is the charming and talented daughter of Stuart (and how could she not be talented with a father such as he?) She began arranging a reunion between us, a get together in the vicinity of Philadelphia and so, on July 10, we came together once again in Mrs. Marty's Deli in Broomall.

It was as if time had never been. The comfort was there, the ease, the banner and the talk.

I hope we can meet again this way before another forty years or so rolls down the highway. My knees aren't so good now. I fear they may give out altogether when I am over 110.

Below is a video record of the day, pieced together by your's truly from film taken by Ronald and myself. Leslie took her own and hopefully we'll see us from her lens viewer one of these fine days.

Now, if I could only reunite with my hair!

 Three Desperadoes Ride Again

 Desperadoes at Lunch

 Desperadoes for Dessert

 Desperadoes in the Afternoon

Desperadoes

Over Christmas of 1949 my family moved from the isolation of a swamp into a town. After the Christmas-New Years vacation ended, I resumed third grade in a new old school. I put it that way because I had statred in that school in First Grade, but we had moved away half through that year, so it was an old school for me, but by now also a new one. I was starting over again and was very much the oddball, the hick, the country bumpkin as far as most of the other students were concerned. That is my Third Grade picture on the left, but I am not certain in which school it was taken.

I did make a few friends in my new situation. One of the first (I did have a continuing friendship with a girl I had known since whenever we can actually know others) was a tall, gangly fellow named Ronald. That is his Third Grade Photo on the right.

Our friendship started as just an exercise in trading comic books, but quickly grew to best friend status. Ron was someone I felt very comfortable around, more so than probably anyone I have ever known. After 61 years, differences and distances, we remain close friends and I insist we do until one of us is a pallbearer for the other.

There really was a third member of this life-long friendship, another boy I counted as a best friend and who also remains so to this day. I met him around the same time as Ron, so we three desperatoes have been a group for a long time. This other guy was Stuart. All three of us were probably something of outsiders in our little town.

That is Stuart in a Third Grade group photo, the boy standing on the right in a striped shirt. Ron is standing directly behind and half hidden by him in this picture.

We hung together through Grade School and pretty much high school, although I moved from town to country in 1956 and it was as often we could get together.

On the right are we standing behind the carriage house behind Stuart's home in 1957. That is your's truly slouching on the left and Ron on the right; both of us using Stuart as a leaning post between us.

Both Stuart and my birthdays were this week, three days apart, so Ron remains very much our junior, since he will not turn 70 until November.

Stuart is the furtherest flung since he lives in Florida. Ron and I both dwell in the wonderful state of Delaware, me at the top and he at the bottom. Right now we are making plans to all get together in Philadelphia next month. This should be wonderful.

I supposed the years have made some changes to our appearance, but not to our love of each other.

Last week, Ron invited me down to his place and a visit to Rehoboth Beach. It was his birthday present to me, much appreciated too. We went to the Olde Tyme Photo Shoppe (not certain they actually spell it this way) and had our picture taken as the cowboys we really are at heart. Here is the result:

Don't we look like we rode with John Wayne?

Here is video of our day. (I suggest you turn off my music player by scrolling to the bottom of my blog and then turning up your speakers.)