Baseball, Big Macs and gas explosions
I’m thinking of writing my childhood memoirs. So what if my childhood and adolescence were largely uneventful. What follows are possible chapter titles and synopses. With a few tweaks, maybe a movie treatment is next. I hope so. I need the money.
This is your new home. Oops! – The idea here is that on the verge of moving into the new family residence atop Brown Street in Laurel Terrace, the house blew up. I was 2 years old, so I have no personal recollection of the explosion. (Gas was the culprit.) My brother was there with my dad and uncle, and he says my dad threw him in the car and off they went, out of harm’s way. But let’s say I was there.
Quite a scene-setter, for the movie, that is.
Paralyzed by fear, i got shoT – No, no, I wasn’t shot shot. I’m talking about being inoculated against polio. It took place at North Union High School. A long line had formed by the time we got there. Jonas Salk, the guy who developed the vaccine, was all the rage then. Sorry to say, he wasn’t in attendance, but if Hollywood wants, he could have been. My gosh, I think he was there! I remember him bending over my small, white arm and saying, “Now, son, this won’t hurt.” I think I cried.
Saturday at the movies, or how i learned to hate abbott costello – If you played baseball at Bailey Park, you occasionally went as a group to the State Theater on a Saturday morning to see some kids’ movies.
I hated it. Even as a discombobulated youth I knew it wasn’t any fun being squeezed into a screen-lit auditorium with hundreds of 8- and 9-year-old boys. The pandemonium! The noise! It was intense.
Those early excursions to the State nearly ruined me. I don’t think I had a really good time at the movies until I saw Ann-Margaret in “Bye, Bye, Birdie.” I was a young teenager by then. Do you realize what Ann-Margaret could do to an adolescent male’s heart rate?
The Roar From Down Below. Bucs Win, I Lose (Out) – October 1960. The last inning of that year’s World Series between the Yanks and Pirates and I’m stuck in English class while a floor below us a television set was tuned to the game. Suddenly, we heard wild cheering. Something good had happened, but what? It took a little while to learn the Bucs had won on the Mazeroski homer.
I wish I could say I was at Forbes Field that day. Hey, wait a minute, I think I was. Yea, that’s right, in the celebration that followed the home run, I grabbed Dick Groat’s hat off his bald head! It happened around home plate! I’m in all the photos!
Kiss and do tell -Kissing games were the rage at junior high parties, and a lot of the guys wanted to kiss the girls who “French” kissed. There were usually two or three. But not me. The idea of a foreign object massaging my tonsils was fraught. Anyway, playing Spin The Bottle meant you ended up most of the time with girls who didn’t French kiss, though you might say otherwise, telling the guys, “Yea, sure did.”
Early Bell Today, The World Is Coming To An End – You hear people say how scary it was in the early 1960s to grew up with the threat of nuclear war hanging over our heads. I must say I was never scared.
Not when we were instructed, in a kind of Kafkasque experiment, to practice walking home from school, apparently testing time against distance and potential radiation outlays, all because the buses wouldn’t be running in the event of nuclear war. I wasn’t even scared when the Ruskies put their missiles into Cuber in 1962. Girls may have frightened me, nuclear annihilation not so much.
My first big mac was the first big mac – This will be a kind of side chapter built around how American obesity first raised its ugly head at the Uniontown Shopping Center, where McDonald’s created and tested the world-changing, gut-enhancing Big Mac. Happy day! Call Ronnie Howard. He can direct.
So build the mall. Downtown will do just fine – Another “life and times” chapter. Downtown Uniontown, still robust in the mid-’60s, was soon in decline. Some people thought Main Street was indestructible. They were wrong. I once put the “downtown will do fine” line in the mouth of city councilman and basketball coach Harold (Horse) Taylor, who was being roasted. It wasn’t necessarily true, though I suppose it sounded true. It got a laugh.
You Should Have Told Me You Were Going To Have A Bad Day – One high school baseball game I made three errors. In the dugout, between innings, Coach Pete uttered the immortal words that appear here.
I must say I was only momentarily flummoxed. Coach could be obscure, at best, and honest, I didn’t set out to have a “bad day.” Then again, I had a lot of bad days on the old diamond. Like the time, wild with anticipation and delight, I was picked off third after taking a humongous lead following a double and a stolen base. It ended the game and the season. My dad was in disbelief, my brother chuckled. I was humiliated but unbowed. Shades of Bad News Bears.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.