The Three Sams

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by Robert Giles

About 1965 my friend started calling me “Sam”. I guess he got tired of “Bob”. Maybe he just liked making up names. He called his mother “Babe” and his father “Uncle Joe”.

I figured turnabout was fair play. We started calling one another “Sam” and almost forgot our true identities.

I first met Jean at the Baden Little League field on the bleachers sitting near the end - second row down from the top. She held a cherry Popsicle. Sam already knew her. His attentions were romantic.

She was watching her little brothers play for my old team. I think Jean’s Dad was the coach. Jean’s Dad had played semi-pro baseball in his youth. So had her uncle – he had almost made it to the big leagues.

I don’t know who won the game.

Jean was pretty. She had brunette hair worn in a popular style – cropped short at the back of the neck but with plenty of body up top, bangs in front and two sharp points swinging at you from the area of her ear lobes.

Jean had no trouble with conversation and always had something interesting to say. She noticed right away that my friend and I called each other “Sam”. We couldn’t satisfactorily explain why. She didn’t press the question – she just had one request.

“Why don’t you call me “Sam” too? That would be cool.”

It sounded cool to us too. That’s how we became the three Sams.

“Sam, what do you want to do tonight?”

“I don’t know, Sam, what do you want to do tonight?”

We frequently had the same problem as Ernie Borgnine and his friend in “Marty”. We didn’t know what we wanted to do.

“Let’s go up over the hill and see Sam.”

We headed up Dearborn Street and down Essex and through the Guttison Homes to the “projects”. That’s where Sam lived – in a neat concrete block house above the little league field.

If Sam was home, she would usually come out and the three of us would sit on the steps that led down to the sidewalk along Harmony Road. There was a railing made from metal pipe along one side of the steps. It was a short flight – maybe a half-dozen concrete steps.

We would sit there and talk until after it got dark.

“You know that song of Howling Wolf’s – ‘Smokestack Lightning’? Sam asked. “I wonder if he was singing about those flashing lights on top of the smokestacks.”

“Maybe. There’s a steel mill on the south side of Chicago near where Howling Wolf hangs out. I bet they have the same kind of smokestacks and lights at the South Side Works.”

The lights flashed back and forth in a zigzag fashion – “They sure do look like little lightning flashes”.

“They have to put those lights on smokestacks because they are so tall that airplanes might crash into them. Even in the daytime sometimes there is so much smoke a pilot might not see them.”

“I like the way he starts to howl in that song. Oh, wha hoo, hoo.” Sam tried in vain to sing like Howling Wolf.

“Well, I better go home. “Fang” doesn't like me sitting out here with boys even in the daytime. She says it “doesn't look nice”. “Fang” was Sam’s name for her mother.

Sam’s taste in music was a little different than ours. She really liked Jan & Dean and the whole California surf thing.

One time we went inside and she played a new album she had by a guy named Rod McKuen. Rod read or sang his poems in a flat voice reminiscent of Chet Baker, the jazz trumpet player and singer, himself a chilled-out Californian. The poems were accompanied by the recorded sounds of the Pacific Ocean. It wasn’t surf music, it was the surf itself.

Sam knew I liked poetry so she insisted I take the album home which I politely did. I found I would go right to sleep by the third cut in on either side. There was something about the squawk of seabirds that made me drowsy.

I did like one song of McKuen’s – I’m not sure if it was on Sam’s album – “Jean” – the theme song from the movie “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”.

Jean, Jean, you're young and alive
Come out of your half-dreamed dream
And run, if you will, to the top of the hill
Open your arms, bonnie Jean

I’m not sure how the lyrics related to Miss Brodie’s story, but that is true of a lot of movie theme songs. Maybe they don’t want to give away too much of the plot.

I liked the words to that song though – very romantic – maybe that is the link to Jean Brodie. But I don’t think she was so much a romantic as an eccentric – really daft in that understated British way that lulls you and keeps you guessing. All that stuff about her “prime” – she was over-the-hill and couldn’t see it - until her favorite young disciple betrayed her.

I started to date one of Sam’s classmates at Mount Galitzin Academy. The other Sam was going steady with a girl in our class at Ambridge High School. We still hung out with Sam as much as we could. We stayed friends.

Sam laughed when we told her about going to the North Park skating rink. A girl named Jane had invited the other Sam along on her skate date even though he had broken his ankle and was on crutches. Sam invited me in turn – he had to have some company sitting by the ice in his cast, didn’t he? What better company for someone lame than someone who didn’t know how to skate?

Imagine how surprised the guy was when Sam and I climbed into the back seat of his car? I don't think he spoke one word all the way out to North Park. I'm sure that was his last date with Jane.

Why she just didn’t say “no” to the guy in the first place I’ll never tell. She must have been afraid of him.

Sam was always developing sudden crushes on boys – it may be a pathology endemic among girls that attend convent schools. One night she asked us if we knew the good-looking guy who worked at the Isaly store in Byersdale.

“You mean the athletic-looking guy with the wavy dark-brown hair – a little bit shy?”

“That’s him – who is he?”

“That’s my brother.”

Sam asked my brother to the prom at Mount Galitzin. We double-dated. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. For one thing, it solved my transportation problem. My brother had his license.

My brother had started dating someone else and never reciprocated Sam’s attention by asking her out on another date. Just as suddenly she got moony over one of the basketball players on the Ambridge High Championship Basketball Team. He wasn’t a starter on the team.

“Why do you want to go out with a second-stringer?” we teased. Besides they weren't champions yet – they had quite a few games to go. “That guy may end up a nobody on a second-rate team.”

Sam was undeterred. Once she made up her mind, she was tenacious. She had to have her champion.

I think Sam and the second-stringer did wind up dating for a while. We weren’t jealous. We had girl friends of our own.

Another thing Sam could never let go of was her surfer-beach-Pacific Ocean dream. She loved the Beach Boys. Sam and I were R&B devotees. We tried to turn her and she did start to dig a little Stax and Motown, only to revert to form when something new blew in from the west, like “The Endless Summer”, a movie about a bunch of surfers who traveled the globe searching for the “perfect wave”.

Somehow Sam cajoled us into taking her to see the movie, which was more a “mockumentary” than a real movie. I have one thing to say about “The Endless Summer” – it did seem endless. Once you’ve seen one hotdogger hang ten all the way in to shore riding the crest of a gnarly wave, well, who wants to see that again? Paddle out, surf in, don’t wipe out and live to do it over again.

Besides, wasn’t that quest-for-perfection hook already used in “The Glenn Miller Story”.

Sam’s Dad lost his job in perhaps the first mill closure to hit contemporary Ambridge. She was studying to be a nurse. The other Sam and I had started college. I guess things were pretty shaky at Sam’s house until her Dad landed a new job.

We still managed to get together once every couple of months. Sam would be home on weekends. Sometimes we rode back to school with her on Sunday evenings, her mother at the wheel. It was a long time back and forth in the car.

We got to know “Fang” pretty well. She wasn’t so bad, really.

The next thing we knew Sam had a nursing job in Pittsburgh. The other Sam was in the Military Police, of all things – out in Fort Collins, Colorado. I was about to take a job in Baltimore.

We weren’t surprised a few years later when we heard that Sam had moved to Hawaii. She had made it real. When she seized on an idea, like I said, she was tenacious. I don’t know for sure if she ever climbed on a surf board, but I bet she did.

Me, I never go near the beach. All that water. It’s worse than a desert.

The Jewel Tea Man

by Robert Giles

“Let me show you my wares,” the Tea Man said to Grandma.  He laid out his catalog along the length of the kitchen table. The separate parts were foldered in shiny plastic like you might use to organize cards and photographs inside a billfold. Of course, The Jewel Tea Man’s catalog was too large for the average purse or back pocket.

He unzipped and unfolded it in a single graceful movement.  He did it as quietly as a professional deals a deck of cards.

The Tea Man sidled over in the direction of the refrigerator, turned about, and fixed his eyes on Grandma's.

“Do you see anything you like, dear?”

Grandma let out her breath as though she had never seen pictures of towels and curtains and bed linens before.

“Dora, is there anything you can use?” Grandma asked her daughter-in- law, as if trying to divert the Tea Man’s gaze.

“No, the first time Mr. Gardner was here, there was nothing that I needed or had the money for.”

“Please call me “George”? I like it much better than Mr. Gardner.”

The Tea Man had turned his attention back to Grandma. In Grandma, he perhaps saw someone of more refinement - someone who could appreciate and afford “nice’ things.

For a moment he admired Grandma’s silver hair and the economical way it was arranged atop her head. The tortoise-shell combs above her ears betrayed a normal dose of human vanity.

“I have some lovely cotton print aprons you might like.”

“Why yes, I believe I could use a new apron, George.” Grandma didn’t sound one-hundred percent comfortable pronouncing the Tea Man’s first name.

 “I hope you haven’t noticed how shabby this one’s gotten. I do all the readying up after dinner and I help Dora with the dishes. I try to keep the kitchen looking just like my own did up at Summit.”

“Summit Township, isn’t that up around Saxonburg? I used to have some customers out that way.”

Grandma and George were still talking about places and people they both knew in Butler County when I got up and left the kitchen.

The Tea Man sold three aprons and a can of air freshener on that first visit. Of course, he didn’t have the aprons in his truck. He had to put those on order. He promised to bring them on his next visit, in one week.

The Tea Man looked a little scary to a small boy. He had a heavy black beard which he shaved as close as he could, leaving a mere shadow. He probably kept a razor in his truck and freshened up in the afternoons. His suit was like the ones you see on the men in the church choir, slightly rumpled by his days on the road. He had a flashy wide neck tie.

His hair was combed straight back but was fluffy and buoyant. There were streaks of grey at his temples. He had a widow’s peak, like the old guy on “The Munsters”.

His fingernails were brushed and shiny. He smelled nice. He was light on his feet and moved like a dancer. He had a dancer’s body.

Who was it that played the older detective on “Law and Order” – Jerry something or other? I understand that women found him irresistible. I’ll have to take that on faith. Anyhow, a picture is worth a thousand words – the Tea Man looked like Jerry (the actor).

A wee bit sleazy. Too smooth in a bumbling sort of way.

When he brought Grandma the aprons, he laid it on thickly.

“My, you ladies sure have this kitchen looking spic and span. Why, it’s cleaner than a whale’s backbone. It smells so fresh as well – isn’t that air freshener nice?”

He didn’t stop for Mom or Grandma to answer; he just charged ahead. Mom leaned on her broom. Grandma sat transfixed.

“These aprons are just your color. You’re so attractive – I hope you don’t mind my saying that. When I meet a pretty lady, I just have to blurt it out. I hope you take it the way I intend – I just want to let you know you are the most beautiful person on earth – next to my own dear wife of course.”

On that second visit the Tea Man sold Grandma a small set of dresser drawers. She already had a nice dresser but I guess it’s true that she needed one, as she explained, just for her support hose and girdles and all that other stuff she hid down deep.

I heard Dad asking Mom what Grandma needed with a new dresser – that’s why I knew how Grandma had explained her sudden need for one. I would have never been bold enough to ask her directly.

Grandma seemed a lot more pleasant after the Tea Man started visiting. When I played checkers with her, she no longer hated losing. She didn’t accidentally on purpose upset the board just because I had her cornered. Sometimes she hummed along with a song on the radio while waiting for me to move my piece.

She did look nice in her new aprons, and wearing the earrings she hadn’t had on since Uncle Gene and Aunt Ada’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. Uncle Hal had told her on the way out of church that they made her look like a gypsy – right in front of everyone.

It was a cruel thing to tease Grandma. I knew she hated it even though she would never give anyone the satisfaction of seeing her vulnerable.

I didn’t mean to tease her when I asked her one morning – “Grandma, what are you all dressed up for? Is the Tea Man coming?”

She looked stricken – right away I knew I had said something childish.

“Bobby, why must you always nose around in other people’s business? Go on, get out of here. Run off.”

Week after week she seemed to have a sudden need for things she had done without all her life. The Tea Man kept calling.

And then one day maybe Grandma heeded the voice that repeated in her ear –

“Don't you know little fool, you'll never win.  Why not use your mentality, come on step up to reality.”*

That’s what I would like to think – that Grandma realized her flirtation with the Tea Man was that and nothing more. She didn’t flinch. She stepped up to reality. Like we all do.

Dad always said that Grandma pinched a penny so hard she could make Abe Lincoln recite the Gettysburg Address backward. Maybe she just didn’t want to part with any more money. Or maybe her bedroom had reached its limit of junk.

The Tea Man had a love that was as large as his sales territory. It was a big love but it was a conditional love. When Grandma stopped buying, he stopped selling. It takes two to tango.
_____

* From the song “I've Got You Under My Skin” by Cole Porter.

Byersdale Tough

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by Robert Giles

I don’t know if this story is about “Harper” or “Mutzie”. In my head, I’ve got the two of them mixed up. They were older boys, born before The War.

Anyway, I don’t want to confuse you so let’s pretend it’s about Mutzie. If I’m wrong, correct me. (This is how I do things – I just give it my best guess and let the chips fly.)

In the fifties, people worried a lot about “juvenile delinquency”. There wasn’t much else to worry about. Mutzie wasn’t actually a juvenile delinquent; he just looked the part.

He was big and strong and always wore a tee shirt and had a pack of Winston’s rolled up in his sleeve. He had long, straight brown hair combed back in a ducktail. When he wasn’t smoking a cigarette, he was chewing on a toothpick.

He had a way of looking mean and tough – not like some crybaby from the movies – I mean Byersdale tough.

He had a nice car with white wall tires and skirts. It was robin’s egg blue and cream. He always kept it immaculately clean and polished. It had everything but a good muffler. He liked it that way. We always knew when Mutzie was coming down the hill.

One day my brother and his friend Steve let us in on a secret – someone had put sugar in Mutzie’s gas tank, causing the engine to seize. (They were quick to add they hadn’t done it.)

My sister and her friend Marlene asked me if I wanted to take a walk up over the hill to the playground. Sure, I loved to play on the see-saws. I was about seven years old.

Way up on top of Anthony Wayne Drive the three of us ran into Mutzie. He was working on his car. The engine was on the sidewalk in about fifty pieces. There was grease on his white tee shirt. His shiny brown hair was mussed.

All of a sudden he crossed the street and came toward us menacingly. He pointed his finger at me. “You’re the little bastard that sugared my tank, aren’t you?”

Marlene placed herself between Mutzie and me.

“That little boy is seven years old. What kind of an idiot are you? Have you any idea what you’re saying?”

Marlene proceeded to give Mutzie her lip. I forget most of what she said but that’s OK. I couldn’t print it here anyway.

Mutzie backed off. We continued our walk. I was still shaky. I think I was scared for three days afterward.

I think Marlene was the one who was “Byersdale tough”.


The Crib

The crib was put away in the attic after my little brother outgrew it and moved into the bed in the hall. It didn’t come out again until eight years later. It looked like any other crib – it was painted white.

The mattress was just thick enough and the springs were just strong enough. One side was adjustable – you could lower it to change a diaper and then raise it back up so the toddler wouldn’t fall out onto the floor.

I think it had two strings of wooden beads impaled on steel rods on the adjustable side. A child could find delight spinning them and moving them up and down. They may have been painted with bright primary colors but I don’t think they were – I just remember the shiny white paint (or was it a maple varnish).

My earliest memory ever is of being exiled from my parents’ bedside when my new brother came home from the hospital. It was time to move out of the crib and into a hostile world.

For my brother and me, it was the beginning of a rivalry.


The Sea of Legs

We were inside the big tent erected on top of the softball diamond in Byers’ Field. It was lit with strings of bare incandescent light bulbs. There were tables here and there with things to buy. Was this part of a carnival, or was it a flea market or rummage sale? I think it was part of a carnival. There were at least fifty people inside the tent, maybe even a hundred. It was a big tent.

I was about three years old. I held my mother’s hand as she guided me through a sea of legs, mostly the female kind.

My mother let go of me to look at something on one of the tables. I had to keep moving or I would be trampled.

Panic set in. Where was Mom?

I saw a pair of navy blue slacks. I felt relieved. I reached out and tugged on the slacks.

I looked up. It was a complete stranger.

Those first furry mammals that looked up into the face of a tyrannosaurus rex must have had a similar scare.

Freak show! That settles it - it must have been a carnival.

The Clover Farm Store

There was a neighborhood grocery where the Laundromat now stands across Dearborn at the north end of Watson Street. It was once the AM Byers’ company store but that was before I was born. I remember it as the Clover Farm Store.

Residents of Byersdale could run a tab there until payday. We kids went there for soda pop or penny candy or for a loaf of bread and lunch meat. The store was turned into a laundry after the Isaly store opened just down the street and ran it out of business.

We didn’t appreciate it at the time, of course, but that was probably our first brush with “the creative destruction of capitalism”.

There was a lady there called “Binger”. There also was a Mrs. Overholt. I don’t know if “Binger” was a last name or a nickname.

Anyway, Binger was nice to us kids, especially my brother, who was cute and had curly hair. One day at the dinner table my brother stunned everyone by announcing, “When I grow up I want to be a store lady like Binger.”

Ouch! He should have phrased that a little differently. The teasing and ridicule began and has not let up to this day. At our family reunions, someone will always ask him if he has become a store lady yet.

He has learned to deal with it – “No, I haven’t grown up yet.”

Good retort, bro. I haven’t grown up yet either.

Trains

Once or twice in the evening each summer, Mom would take us for walks down across Duss Avenue to the road in Byers’ Field where all the sixteen-year-olds practiced their driving. That road leads into another road and pretty soon we came to the AM Byers Company railroad siding. At that time of day there was never a train idling on the siding to block us.

Once we crossed the siding, we could see the Ohio River. We stood at the top of a high bluff that loomed over the Pennsy tracks and the ruins of Old Lock Number 4.

Once in a while there were coal barges tied up along the lock wall. They were interesting but not half as interesting as the trains. We had come to see the trains.

There was a wooden staircase that the carpenters at the Byers plant had built so that workers could go down to service the pump house that stood on the river bank with its foot in the water. (Maybe the water was cold and it didn’t want to plunge all the way in.)

We sat on top of the steps and took in the view. After a bit a train would come along. Sometimes there were two at once, one headed north and the other headed toward Pittsburgh.

Watching the trains was like a geography class. All those place names written on the sides of the boxcars. Even a small boy realized what a big country it was.

“What’s that train way across on the other side of the river?”

“That’s the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie. The ones in the steel plant are the Aliquippa and Southern. The four tracks on this side of the river are the Pennsylvania.”

“The Pennsylvania is the best, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Bobby, it’s the best of all.”

Wheels

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by Robert Giles

The Schwartzes had a bicycle shop on an alley at the edge of Byersdale.

Byers Alley ran one-half block east of Duss Avenue north across Dearborn Street between Nick’s produce stand and Vicki’s Tavern. There was a trailer sales lot on the left. The bike shop was across the gravel from the trailers just before you got to Club 88. It was a white stucco building with a clapboard frame second floor.

I haven’t seen it in twenty-five years. It may look completely different now. Then again, some things don’t change.

The bicycle shop closed in the late 60s or the early 70s. Right about then, people stopped riding bikes until interest returned in the 80s.

Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz lived in the flat above the shop. Mr. had a full-time job in a factory and only worked at the shop evenings and weekends. Nine times out of ten it was Mrs. Schwartz who answered the bell and opened the door, slightly out of breath from hustling down stairs.

Mrs. Schwartz was a large woman with frizzy red hair and a face to match. You have to give her credit - she was patient with her customers, most of them kids. Whether you were a kid or not didn’t matter to “Schwartzie”. She treated everyone about the same.

If you needed a new tire or inner tube for your bike, she was the person to see. She and her husband carried a full line of bicycle accessories. They also sold bicycles, mostly used ones that Mr. Schwartz had refurbished.

The modern equivalent of taking your bike to Mr. Schwartz would be taking your automobile to the dealer’s repair shop. Too expensive. If you needed to repair your bike, you did it yourself or asked an older brother or another neighborhood kid to help. Mr. Schwartz did repair somebodies' bikes - we saw him working in his shop or outside on the walk. Maybe up on the heights there were kids who could afford Mr. Schwartz’s prices (or was it their parents who footed the bill?).

Mostly we knew enough about bikes to trust to our own wits. We didn’t have English racers with caliper brakes and three-speed gears. We had plain American bikes. Model Ts. Coaster brakes. Bendix. About the only thing I couldn’t fix on an American bike by age twelve was a rim that had gone out of line. That was something that you would only make worse if you tried to do it on the cheap.

Mr. Schwarz had a good eye for knowing which spokes to tighten and which to loosen.  He had one of those special wrenches that you placed over a spoke just where it exited the rim. I forget how many spokes there were on a bicycle wheel – too many. Each one had to be tightened to the right tension to bring a rim into alignment.

Mr. Schwartz had the stump of a pipe mounted vertically on his bench. He put an errant wheel on his "axle" and gave it a spin. Then he tightened and loosened spokes and spun the wheel until he got rid of the wobble. He made a chunk of change tightening spokes – his personal wheel of fortune.

Repairing a flat tire was simple. Most riders today prefer tubeless tires. Back then they had inner tubes.

First you had to turn the bike over on its seat and handlebars and remove the wheel.  Then you had to pry the tire part way off the rim so you could remove the tube.  Step three was to inflate the tube so you could identify the source of the leak. If the leak was “quick” you could feel it with your palm. If slow, you had to immerse the tube in water. The bubbles told the tale. 

Schwartzie sold tube repair kits. You had to roughen the surface of the tube before it would take a patch. There was a silver thingy with raised sharp bumps on it for abrading the rubber. When ready you applied the glue and the patch, the patch cut big to cover the hole with a half-inch to spare all around.  Time to borrow your Dad’s No. 142 - 2 inch C-clamp to hold the patch until the glue dried (maybe twenty minutes to be safe.)

Once the glue dried you deflated the tube completely so you could fit it back under the tire, making sure you inserted the valve stem cleanly through the hole in the rim of the wheel. Then you mounted the tire on the rim and inflated the tube with a hand pump.

Time to put the wheel back on, tighten the nuts and right the bike. Good as new. I fixed a flat tire many times.

Once you patched a tube too often, you had to break down and buy a new one - big expense for a kid self-financing his own repairs. No wonder I delivered newspapers.

About the worst thing that could happen to your bike was a bent fork. If it was bent too badly, the front tire would rub against the frame. Obviously, that made it difficult to ride and had to be fixed. There was a temporary workaround – you could ride with the wheel turned around and the handlebars facing out.

A “quick-and-dirty” fix was to run into a tree or wall with the wheel reversed and bend it back the other way. My brother Chuck had a professional solution. He took the fork off the bike and heated it red hot over the kitchen stove. Then he straightened it by whacking it with a hammer.

Before you try blacksmithing on your Mom’s kitchen stove, I have a suggestion – take as much of the paint off the fork as you can. It smells to high heaven when it melts in the fire.

Schwartz’s Bike Shop was the place to go if you wanted to add doodads to make your bike look spiffy. Handle bar grips were mandatory. I kind of liked those streamer things that you inserted so that they came out of the vents in the grips, but doodads were for other kids. I preferred the stripped-down look, no fenders, baskets, lights, bells or whistles.

I ought to explain how I came by my bike in the first place. Dad brought home five or six bikes in pieces – it may be that he found them in the Ambridge dump. Maybe he had answered a classified ad in the Times. Dumpster-diving didn’t come into vogue until the 70s so he didn’t get them that way.

We boys took them apart completely and washed down all the internal brake parts and ball bearings and gears. We soaked the chains in kerosene. We picked out the best tires and wheels and threw out the others.

We removed the seats and handlebars and the sprockets and pedals. We rubbed down the frames with steel wool and hung them from the joists in the garage. We painted them with cans of spray paint from the Baden Hardware.

When the paint dried, we re-assembled the bikes, using Vaseline to lubricate the ball bearings and other moving parts. The fenders were bent and rusty and beyond saving so we threw them away too.

In a couple of days, we had three good-looking serviceable bicycles. Dad had laid them at our doorstep. We had done the rest. 

Wheels. Time to ride.

My Father Wore a Hat

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by Robert Giles

Most of the time, Dad wore a fedora – the one I remember best was black and grey herringbone tweed. There was a tiny blue feather in the hat band. 

It sounds dressy and it may have started out that way. But hats have a way of getting more comfortable after two or three years. I think that particular hat served Dad at least eleven years.  Near its end, it looked extremely comfortable.

Dad wore the fedora to church or when he went to the bank or when we visited relatives. When he went to work in the mill, he wore a grey cloth cap like a baseball cap, only with lighter material and a wider visor. It had tiny metal grommets that circled the crown. At the apex was a small round metal button.

Was there a badge with a number on it pinned above the brim? I think there was, at least during the early days. It must have identified him as an employee of the Bridge Company.

Sometimes he pinned his fishing license to his hat and forgot it was there. Mom would remind him that he wasn’t out on a stream bank and hinted that he could unpin it. 

Mom was the family barber and gave Dad a haircut every six weeks. He never ever went to a barber after he married Mom.

Mom wasn't always a steady hand with the clippers – I can show you photographs to prove it. Dad didn’t mind. Why spend good money on a fussy haircut when you’re going to cover it up with a hat anyway?

Dad sure had a big round head. I remember trying on his hat when I was nine or ten. It came down over my eyes. If I bent forward even slightly, the hat fell on the floor.

In winter he wore a red and black plaid hunting cap. It had ear flaps that you could leave tucked up underneath if you were vain about appearance or didn't mind the cold. Dad wore his flaps down from November through March.

I’m pretty sure he took his hat off when he went to bed. Mom made sure he took it off in church - it was customary for a man to remove his hat in a public building. 

The hat creased his hair and flesh in a circle where it rested on his head. It left an imprint like the one you might see on the head of a king who had doffed his crown. No one would mistake it for a halo.

Dad always wore boxer shorts, and thin sleeveless undershirts. Over these he wore long-sleeve shirts, winter and summer. The shirts always had matching breast pockets – the pocket on the left contained a complimentary “pocket protector” from the hardware store and a mixed row of pens and pencils.

He bought work suits at J. C. Penny’s – dark blue-green pants and shirts – cotton twill. He would buy several sets and wear them six days a week for several years, then replace them, alternately buying gray or olive ones.

Dad favored a monochrome look although once in a while a plaid flannel shirt would work its way to the top of his bureau drawer.

His socks matched his pants and shirt - a paler shade of the same color. He wore ankle-high ocher leather boots with heavy treaded soles and waterproofing. He held up his pants with a wide leather belt.

A Stanley tape measure was hooked to his belt. He carried a pen knife in his pants pocket. Sometimes he had sawdust on his sleeves.

He was five foot eight, and weighed 200 pounds for most of his adult life. Dad called it “husky”. He was low and thin in the hips but big through the chest and arms. His shoes were triple EEE wide.

He wore glasses – the kind with frames that are dark on top and clear on the bottom. Dad was always about 20 years behind – not that he knew it or cared. He wore loud, wide neckties from the forties through the 50s and 60s. His ties came back in style in the 70s.

When he went to work,  Dad carried a Thermos and a brown shopping bag with sandwiches, oatmeal cookies, a banana, magazines and two or three paperback novels (“pulp” he admitted freely). He liked anything by Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey. He always read the Saturday Evening Post, and Outdoor Life or Field and Stream.

He was a craneman and read through his breaks since he didn't want to bother returning to earth.

Dad considered the rainbow trout to be the world’s finest expression of beauty, but on a road trip, he would pull onto an overlook and order everyone out of the car to appreciate the sun going down over the mountains.

Dad lived to be ninety-five. He looked like a stranger lying there in his casket among the flowers, in a dark suit, motionless, thin and without his hat.

A Royal Visit

Wiki Images

by Robert Giles

So you read about this lion had killed a man with his paws
But Samson got his hand in the lion's jaws
He rid that beast until he killed him dead
And the bees made honey in the lion's head

From the song “Samson and Delilah (If I Had My Way)”
Reverend Gary Davis

Turkey Bowl Weapon

Microsoft Word Illustration

by Robert Giles

I remember the day Roy Schwartz moved into our neighborhood. He smiled at us from the back window of his dad’s car, his nose pressed against the glass. His face was red and freckled.

That first afternoon, we invited Roy to play German ball. We gave him the honor of the first at bat. Roy hit a wicked liner so hard it knocked down one of the overhead wires that crossed the street. We scattered in all directions but in fact, there was no danger of electrocution. It was a telephone wire.

Mrs. Sedakis borrowed her neighbor's phone to call the police. A patrolman arrived and put up a road block. In the meantime, someone with more sense called Bell Telephone. A truck arrived and a lineman reattached the wire to the house where it had been knocked loose.

Mrs. Sedakis wanted to put us in Allencrest for knocking her phone out of service, but the police chief ruled it an accident and assured her that she wouldn't get a bill. The lineman concurred. I guess Bell Telephone had so much money it couldn't be bothered.

We reconvened in the Schwartz’s backyard. Roy's mom made us a pitcher of Kool-Aid. We raised a cup to our new friend.

Roy Schwartz was a large boy for his age. He was not only big; he was mature in other ways too. Roy started shaving when he was thirteen and began to develop male pattern baldness at sixteen. I wish I could say that he was a well-rounded person, but Roy had difficulty in school.

What an addition to the neighborhood he was - someone big and strong, yet pliant and eager to please.

We realized right away that Roy gave us a powerful weapon against the “top of the hill” in the annual Thanksgiving Turkey Bowl.

Roy had inherited one of those old-fashioned leather football helmets that fit snug to the head. Unlike the fiberglass ones that made heads appear larger, it seemed to make Roy's head shrink.
Still, Roy cut an impressive figure on the gridiron - heavy shoes, cotton pants, and sleeveless shirt, a giant's body and a small head. 

He reminded us of those rams the medieval armies employed to batter down the castle gates.

Roy was not a fast runner but once he got going, he was relentless. The only way our opponents could stop him was to gang tackle him at the line of scrimmage.

That first year we trounced the “top of the hill” team so badly that the next year they recruited a quarterback from the second-team at Geneva College. The outcome of that game is still under protest.

We weren't creative enough to nickname Roy “The Bus”. We settled on “The Horse”.

He tolerated the nickname as long as it was pronounced with the right inflection. If he detected so much as a hint of ridicule, you were “in for it”. One day Roy grabbed a baseball bat and chased Jimmy Dinnerlein all over Byers' Field. It was a good thing for Jimmy that he was fleet-footed. He could never manage to convey the proper respect when he addressed Roy as “Horse”.

One day Roy bet my brother that he could drink two gallons of water in one sitting. 

Later we found out that drinking too much water too quickly can upset the body’s electrolyte balance and lead to death. We had no knowledge of this when Roy offered his wager. We thought the worst that could happen was that Roy would get a stomach ache and possibly throw up. 

We had two one-gallon jugs from Isaly’s. We kept one in reserve until Roy drained the first, then we handed him the second one.

Roy swallowed the second gallon and won the bet. Roy didn’t get sick or throw up or go into a coma and die. He belched loudly once and had to make a lengthy visit to the bathroom.

Another time we went over to Roy’s house after school to watch television. Roy reached in his pants pocket and couldn’t find his key. His mom was visiting out-of-town. Roy’s dad worked at Westinghouse and didn’t get home until later.

We were locked out. What to do? Roy had a good idea. Why not break in?

Roy pointed to his bedroom window. He could pry it open with his pocket knife, but first we had to boost him onto one of the shutters alongside the lower level window. From there he could clamber onto the roof and jimmy the window. Once he got the window open, it would be a simple matter to climb inside and unlock the door.

We boosted with all our might. Roy was a heavy lift. Finally, he gained a toehold on top of the shutter and grasped the rain gutter for support.

Roy straightened up and put his full weight on the shutter. He reached toward the roof, pocket knife in hand. Suddenly the shutter pulled away beneath him. He grabbed the gutter with his free hand but that gave way too.

Everything crashed onto the porch, the shutter, Roy, the rain gutter, and the break-in tool. All in that order.

The front door of the Schwartz house swung wide. Minutes before, Mr. Schwartz had pulled into the back drive, entered through the garage door, and hurried to investigate the commotion on the front porch. 

Roy’s dad looked like one of those Viking warriors who go berserk. He took Roy by the ear and pulled him into the house. We decided to quietly leave.

For a couple of days, we didn’t see Roy at all. Then we learned through the grapevine that he wasn't allowed to pal with us any more. We were “bad influences”.

Wasn't it Roy's idea to break into the house? Why couldn't Mr. Schwartz use the front door instead of sneaking through the back? Why did they put the blame on us?

It was a good thing that parents never remember anything for longer than a week.Time would heal this breach. 

We laid low. On the eighth day, the heat was off. Roy “The Horse” Schwartz was loose again.