sex drugs and rock and roll I

Sex

In the 1966'67 school year, sex was pretty important in the life of a Springfield College co-ed. The majority proudly claimed virginity . Some proudly claimed that they were having sex with boyfriends.

I knew of one who had sex without having a boyfriend. She was a transfer student and her presence was something of an anomaly. Lynn was something of an earth mother and way ahead of her time. Once she was visited by a man who was living in his car as he traveled. I believe she told me he was poet Gary Snyder, who I had never heard of at the time, but who I would love to meet now. He was single at that time, and did participate in a demonstration in New York City. And in her case, it is plausible. Years later her brother became famous in a movie for destroying the tower of a nuclear power plant in construction.


I wasn't having sex with anybody, but I wasn't proud of it. I had sexual feelings, but I just couldn't seem to cross the hurdle of actually doing it. I did a lot of necking but both the boys and I were too awkward to progress any further. Kassy and Jennifer answered my questions, but there was no answer for where and when one should lose virginity. My friend Jim B. thought I was hung up, so one night during a study session without warning he took off his clothes clothes. But he was wearing a bathing suit (speedo-type)! Which completely baffled me and caused him much chagrin even years later. He had a townie friend who thought I was sexy and Jim was pleading his case to me. Jim S., the townie, came to our dances and there was no doubt he turned me on, but I was just baffled at the logistics. Jim S., in pleading his own case, told me he liked the way I sat down. That a girl of my size would not be expected to sit so lightly. Somehow that failed to get me into bed.

Drugs

Drugs were an issue with only a small group of students. So small a group that when I started smoking pot with Kassy and Jennifer in their dorm room, nobody had any suspicion of what was going on. We were amused to hear there was a rumor that we were gay. "Why else would they close the door, burn incense, play music and laugh a lot?"*

We tried to find legal highs. Donovan's Mellow Yellow was popular at the time, and the word was that it was about smoking banana peels. We tried it (no success). Bill the Instigator suggested we try spider webs. We weren't willing to look for those. Bill the Instigator suggested we try parmesan cheese. It melted in the pipe. Bill the Instigator suggested we try sage. We decided Bill was having fun with us.

We stocked up on Heavenly Blue Morning Glory seeds. We ate them like cereal with chocolate milk. It gave us a weird feeling, but it also made us throw up. (Don't try Morning Glory at home, kids. They treat the seeds now to make you really sick.)

Along with drugs came a language. I can remember Jennifer telling me the new meanings of "connection", "joint", and "turn on". I approached the drug culture like an anthropologist. I don't remember what we were talking about, or why we were even talking, but I remember a popular sociology professor suggesting I might like a book about the Beatniks (I'm still looking for the name) that I borrowed and read like a text book.

Rock and Roll

When I went to college, Rock was good. Sometimes a little sappy - Tish, my clean roommate, said that "Cherish" was their song. But the Beatles, the Stones, and Simon and Garfunkle were firmly established. At college I got turned on to Motown. Boy, you could dance to Motown! There was the Skate, the African Twist, and a group dance some called the Continental which was the grandfather of today's Electric Slide. We went to dances and we had fun.

The Byrds were singing psychedelic music on the radio. AM radio was still my main source of music.




*It didn't help that my sister and I used to walk through Greenwich Village hand in hand ("to fit in") and ran into a Springfield college student.

I took a day off

I've been holed up writing and little else. Probably mourning Stuart's illness and death. But today was a day to get out, and I did. Back to writing tomorrow morning.

The Track part 2

On the first dinner hour at the college dining hall, I knew nobody, so I struck up a conversation a student in the line and asked if I could sit with him. When I sat down I saw I was the only female, but felt undaunted. The guys were using slang I'd never heard before, like "get on the stick" and "psyche". Z. was saying something about his sister and I tried to joke along and suddenly his face became very grave and he said "my sister died last year". I was mortified and embarrassed. Everybody looked at me with scorn. Then Z. started laughing and everyone else laughed at me as well. Psyche. I never ate with those people again. I chose to sit alone and let people come to me.

And I liked the people who sat with me. There was Bill E. an exotically handsome sophomore who seemed to be a snob, but it turns out was very nearsighted but too vain to wear glasses. He simply couldn't see anybody. Over time, he showed himself to be a creative instigator. He thought of rebellious things for his friends to do, but he actually did little himself and thus avoided trouble. He and I started the first food fight in the school. He threw an olive at me, I threw jello back at him and seconds later we were sitting under the table as the whole dining hall erupted. It only lasted a few seconds and then everyone was stunned at what happened.

There was Jennifer, a sophomore who had a freshman roommate. That roommate, Kass, had managed to avoid the freshman pack. She made it clear that she did not value virginity or abstinence of any kind for that matter. She had a little ditty of foul words that she could chant and I was enchanted. I remember when I first was visiting their dorm room, she was brushing her hair in the mirror and wearing only panties. She put her large breasts on the bureau to simply rest while she was doing her hair. I was in awe of how casual she was.

Jennifer was raised a Quaker, a member of the Society of Friends, like Doc Brainerd the biology teacher. She was descended from the first Quakers, (It seems she said George Fox, but I don't know if he had children). She also said that she was related to someone important in the Guggenheim art museum (Peggy Guggenheim?) Unusually tall and thin, she was interested in dance notation. Sometimes she and I would get together at the only piano on campus and she would dance while I was working on learning to play an arrangement of Gershwin's Rhapsodie in Blue. She had a boyfriend on campus who claimed to be the first drummer for the Lovin' Spoonful. As I write this, there seems to be a lot of name dropping connected with Jennifer.

After the Freshman orientation banquet I became good friends with Jim. Jim set out to relieve me of any straight laced ways I may have had. He pointed out that nobody would notice if we didn't wear a beany and if we walked on Senior Walk. For me that turned out to be true. He was noticed however. Like all our friends he smoked cigarettes. There was another college "tradition" that students were not to be seen smoking by visitors, so there was no smoking outdoors. (Yes, that's OUTdoors) So Jim and his friends smoked outdoors on the hill on the lakeside of the dining hall. One night Jim was awakened in the middle of the night, stripped naked and Ben-Gay was applied to his testicles and he was deposited in a women's dorm. He was tied up and a pack full of cigarettes was shoved in his mouth. The next day he wore his baby blue suit to all his classes and meals. He was extremely depressed and that was his way of getting out of it.

I had another friend who didn't associate with the crowd where I found refuge. Our parents had been friends when we were young. We also liked singing. Standing next to her in chorus was an education. She took singing lessons, and I modeled my voice after hers. I got rid of my breathy kids voice and developed a head tone. I had a very large range and could sing as low as any tenor. Singing in the college barbershop group probably contributed to saving my life years later because of a trip our chorus took to York Pennyslyvania. I stayed with a rural family who had values I plugged into later.

I went to see the Antonioni movie "Blow Out" several times. It had a clear message that if you examine something closely, it loses its distinct form. It had consciously hip actors, style, sex, nudity, and mime.

My clean-conscious roommate got fed up with me. I'd gotten to the point of taping leaves to the wall for decoration and not doing my laundry. The leaves curled up and wrinkled and the laundry piled up in my closet. She proposed that we do some roommate swapping and I moved in with Claudia, a sophomore who was something of a social outcast. She was a social outcast because she had a "reputation". Unlike Kass who didn't care about her reputation, Claudia insisted on her virginity. Claudia was sweet and friendly and a great roommate. Except for when male friends wanted me to talk to her about her skin (which was evidently too rough for their taste) or they would get drunk and horny and call for her through the window.

The Track part 1

I had a choice of music school to become a music teacher, or Springfield College to become a YMCA director like my Dad. My Dad was much less neurotic than all the music teachers I knew, so I picked Springfield. Also Jerry S. was going there. Springfield told me I had to lose about 30 pounds and suggested I read Camus's The Stranger. The diet pills I started taking were my entry into the drug world. Camus was the entry into existentialism, which I never understood but I enjoyed it and it made me feel intellectually important. When I arrived at Springfield I was pretty disappointed that few had read The Stranger. I was also somewhat stunned about the hazing of freshman. My parents had taught me that such things were denigrating and I couldn't see what it had to do with academic growth. My Dad had gotten his masters at Springfield a few years earlier and I had studied his term papers. I'd only seen the academic side.
I wore a beanie without complaint and stayed off of "senior walk". I got a job in the cafeteria to help pay for my books. I enjoyed my first class when "Doc" Brainerd stood on the chair and yelled "Biology is the science of life!" and then got off and calmly asked "Did you put that in your notes?" It turns out that Doc Brainerd was the only faculty member who ever referred to Camus during that year.
During the first orientation week, the "girls" under our resident assistant lined up by height to meet her RA boyfriend's students, who were also lined up by height, and we walked to the gym where there was a banquet to welcome us to the college. My partner didn't seem too pleased to meet me and I thought he looked rather spoiled in his baby blue suit ... although I was wearing a baby blue suit too. We seemed resigned to put up with each other until someone in front of us started talking about skiing and then Jim and I discovered a mutual passion. We talked about skiing until we sat down. Across from us was a Japanese-American named Billy K. Billy was an immediate education. His let us know that his parents were civil rights activitists who knew Stokely Charmichael, that his parents had been interred in U.S. camps during WWII (I had never heard about internment camps in school history classes), and that he had smoked pot. Jim and I immediately asked if he could get us some pot and he said it might be arranged.
While I was getting tight with Jim and Billy, I was becoming increasinglly alienated from those in the college mainstream. My roommate took several showers a day, and if we had a fire drill, she'd take a shower after that. I showered less and less. We had an "initiation" where we were blindfolded and ridiculed and made to eat dogfood and such. This was and is known as "tradition". Springfield frowned on fraternities or sororities, but it was known that the Varsity students formed a fraternity and had a house off campus. I visited it when I was invited, out of the blue, on a date with someone I had never met. When I got there, I was pretty much ignored by my date and I chatted with the girls. One of them told me that she also had to lose weight to attend the school. Years later I saw the movie "Dogfight" and tearfully realized that I had been invited as part of a fraternity contest to see who brought the worst "dog" to the party.

That's it for the first draft

I have some things to add, but they are part of the appendix of things written by other people. I'll include my Cousin Edith's letter describing when the Kennedy's used their rest room after the end of a white water race on the Hudson. And then there are things my Dad put to paper about relatives and about his WWII experience. So I've come to the less pleasant part of writing: looking at the thing as a whole, and working on the second draft. The way I'll work on the second draft will be to revise these blog entries ... so I don't think that will show up on facebook posts.

Meanwhile, I think my writing activities will be divided between this and a first draft of something else. I'm thinking a description of the hippy years. In a way, it's sort of embarrassing, but it also may be of interest. Some people will find it boring compared to what they imagined, but others may react differently.

And what a job it will be to write about! I have to keep my modern judgments out as much as I can. Also want to keep out the bragging "dope story" aspect. I don't know if I can do either.

Today I'm thinking about the old friend who died last winter, and I only just learned about it yesterday. This was an old friend I was happy to let go of, but I also had the thought that I'd see him again some day. I don't have an image of heaven as an old time reunion place, so I don't have that expectation. So I'm mourning him and thinking about what I can write about him. I cared about him a lot and had a lot of important experiences through him, but also didn't like him much. He was an amazing conversationalist and could play chords on the guitar and hold his harmony well. He was uncomfortable around me, probably because he knew what I knew about him and knew I didn't much like things about him. He told me a lot of his shortcomings and withheld some that were so huge, I only speculated about them. (I do the same myself - I'll tell you 80% of who I am so you won't find out about the 20%.) We were very intimate, but touched rarely - rather like Robert E. Howard and schoolteacher Novalyne Price Ellis in the movie the Whole Wide World. No wonder I wasn't in contact with him when he died.

running into strangers

Grammar off day. This stuff is going to take a lot of revision!

sad story from dad
the little indian boy in Little Falls

Dad loved transportation. His idea of an entertaining time was to take the family to the airport to watch planes or a train ride. (He died while on a cruise to see the Panama Canal.) When we lived along the Mohawk River, he liked to take us down to the Erie barge canal. On one of our walks, Dad told us stories of a little Iroquois Indian boy who played on the cliffs before the town of Little Falls was built. I don't remember the stories, except perhaps that the boy collected the "Herkimer diamond" quartz crystals. But the little boy became very real to us. One day I asked Dad what happened to the boy and his Indian family, and Dad told me that our ancestors had driven the Indians away. I still remember being very upset about this.

Marian and the eyeball
Dad invested in a movie camera and used it to record family. (I had some of those films converted to video. Now I need to convert the videos to DVDs.) When he and his second wife visited his more distant relatives, he interviewed them on film. One film of a highly accomplished and aged second cousin had understandable sound of her playing the piano, but the picture was strange. Dad enjoyed showing this film of something fuzzy but aparently alive. At one point, Dad shouts out, "Here comes the blink!" and, sure enough, the object moves. It is an eyeball. Marian had filmed the whole scene holding the camera backwards.

One time Dad had driven south to visit me in Maryland. We were to meet Marian at the airport because she was arriving from a conference in New Orleans. When we were at BWI near Baltimore, Dad went to the counter to ask where to find the flight and when he took out his notes, he saw that he was at the wrong airport. We were supposed to be at the National Airport near Washington DC. As we were thinking about the logistics of finding our car, driving to Washington, and being very late to pick up Marian, we were amazed to see her walking down the BWI hall towards us!! It turns out that there was some problem with landing her plane and they were rerouted to BWI. Just a few moments later and we would have been heading to DC only to have to drive back.

It seems that people in my family frequently run into people we know. I think this could be true for everyone if they kept their ears and eyes open.

Dad in Annapolis
Dad was visiting Annapolis Maryland from upstate New York. He was at the downtown docks looking at skipjacks and other sailing vessels. Passengers were disembarking from a small tourist ship and Dad found himself face to face with a man who was on the board of directors from his last job in Poughkeepsie, NY. This man had a lot to do with Dad's decision to retire, so it was not someone Dad was fond of. "What are you doing down here?" the man asked. Dad pointed across the river "See that yacht over there ... ?"

Dad was in the ski lodge at Gore Mountain. Someone sitting nearby was looking at an ad in a local newspaper and telling his companion,"See that guy in this real estate ad? I think that's the Bob Morse who was in my third grade downstate in Ardsley." And Marian, who overheard, said, "That's my husband."

A friend of mine, Jamie, and I drove from Annapolis to .... Virginia to join in a Messiah sing. I kept looking around the singers to see if there was anybody I might know. Jamie said, "I half expect you to stand up here and shout,'Anybody from Potsdam, NY?' After the singing, there was coffee and cookies in the church basement and we were approached by a young man who evidently was attracted to Jamie. During the conversation, we learned he had gone to music school at Potsdam State at the same time I was there.

Anne at Governor's Academy
One summer, I was in a special short residential program for math and science teachers around Maryland. There was a special banquet to start things off. I got into some good conversation with people at the table and was very pleased to learn that one woman had gone to the same upstate NY high school that I had. She was four years old than I, so I had never met her. But I was astounded to learn that she was in the Hi-Y club where my dad was Y director. That club had no more than 10 kids in it at one time. Still more remarkable was that my dad, when asked, could describe her. After over thirty years.

Seth in New York
My grandson tells the story of making a trip to New York City. He said to his Mom, "I feel like I'm going to see someone famous, right here in this street." Shortly, a man near Seth asked him about the Japanese Manga (graphic novel) that he was carrying. (***.... get details from Seth)

sad stories from Mom

Mom told us that she was 13 when her mother went to the hospital and never came home. She had most of her teeth pulled and, as a result, developed leukemia. (I suspect that it was really sepsis, but this is the story my mother's family tells) Mom told us that she regretted saying mean things to her mother before she died and that the hospital would not allow her to visit because she was under age for visitors.

Mom was never a good swimmer. She says that her mother taught her to swim by calling her to wade into water that was over her head. This was one of the few persistent memories she had of her mother. She describes her parents as so in love with each other that they gave their children little attention.

After her mother died her father was overwhelmed with taking care of three girls. He did hire a Mexican girl to help. Mom told us about living in a tent and having squirrel meat for Christmas. Of course that story was also her way of letting us know how ungrateful we kids were for the good fortune we had, just as I disapprove of how spoiled today's kids are.

Another story Mom shared was of being reprimanded in school for chewing Dentyne gum. Dentyne had been advertised as being good for your teeth. Mom did not think of it as chewing gum, but as doing something healthy, so she was highly offended at being told to stop.

She also fascinated us with stories of wearing a horned toad as jewelry. She avoided trouble in school until one day a teacher saw it move.

That reminds me of a story about some relative who had a pet frog that lived decades intil it got stepped on on the stairway. I can't remember the source of that one.

Patty passes on this story.
The turkey incident was in New Mexico when they were living in a tent and Mom was sleeping in a food locker. Grandpa was so good with a twenty-two, he could hit a squirrel between the eyes to save the meat. I don’t know what they were going to have for Thanksgiving, but it wasn’t going to be turkey. They woke up in the morning and there was a flock of turkeys in the yard that they had never seen before. Of course Grandpa shot one for dinner and they never saw the flock again. And that was the story. Turkeys around here are pretty common, I guess they just hadn’t seen any.

lp's and Christmas

Here are the LP albums that entertained my family:

Sing along with Mitch - Mitch Miller was on tv in the fifties and sixties, leading a chorus of cheerful singers ("Bob" McGRath of Sesame Street was one of them) in old turn of the century standards such as "My Wild Irish Rose" and "Sidewalks of New York".

Tom Lehrer was a piano playing satirist (and a college level math teacher). His repertoire was just shy of naughty and skimmed the surface of above ground.






Stan Freberg The United States of America - The voice of adman Freberg was well known on the radio. His recordings of Broadway musical style numbers about United States history, still make me laugh. My parents and friends loved to sing "Take an Indian to Lunch" around Thanksgiving time.








West Side Story - Leonard Bernstein music and Stephen Sondheim lyrics. A huge part of my growing up







Frank Warner - Dad knew folk song collector Frank Warner because he was a fellow YMCA professional. That gave Dad some credentials with the local folk song crowd at Cafe Lena, which was pretty well respected in the folk song world in general. The Jolly Tinker became a part of my own guitar and singing repetoire. Our whole family liked to sing "Fod!" and "Away Idaho". I have a few LP's of his still, and one is signed.





Christmas traditions

Generally, my family had a New England protestant heritage. Christmas was celebrated with a tree and snow. After 1957, the tree, ideally a balsam fir, came from our own property.

We put up a nativity scene. I have looked without success for a replica of the creche that was destroyed in a fire in 1973. It was cardboard and the figures resembled the grave-faced figures I have seen in Tiffany stained glass windows. (the window that we would gaze on from the choir loft of the Congregational Church was Tiffany)(Why did only the choir get to gaze on it?)

Dad would read "A night before Christmas" and we would attend Christmas Eve service.
In the sixties we would listen to a recording of Dylan Thomas reading "Child's Christmas in Wales" and we would chime in during favorite parts.

Mom liked to put up a sugar plum tree which was a plastic tree which held gum drops.

Dad put up stockings which were found Christmas morning to contain tangerines, hard candy, nuts in the shell and often a can of black olives (so Dad wouldn't have to share his).

Grandma always recycled wrapping paper, so we opened our presents carefully. Each recipient was the center of attention as a gift was unwrapped. That person would make a guess at what they would do with the present. If Dad said "I'm going to wear it." and it turned out to be swiss cheese, we would all enjoy that.

The ornaments were diverse and were added to over time. The idea of a monocolor or theme tree was completely alien to our family. We had many kinds of ornaments, lights, maybe a chain of popcorn, "ice" always placed one at a time by my sister who was the only person with patience to do it, and a star ornament at the top. Two special ornaments that were destroyed in the fire have stories. One was a hollow alligator that was about four inches long that came from my father's childhood. Actually the story is that there was no story. It didn't look like a Christmas sort of ornament and there was no explaination. The other was a plastic angel that originated as a Cracker Jacks prize. My sister was given it by a kid in the park, in exchange for the chewing gum out of her mouth. That story was repeated every year when we hung it.

Miscellaney

Today I'm a little off schedule and feel lucky to find any time at all to write. Under that kind of pressure, narrative suffers. But on my original list, the items in order for today are not narrative at all.

Mom's cooking

Every now and then we'd have "pioneer stew" for supper. I really hated it. But when I grew up I made it myself, frequently. Only I was careful never to call it "pioneer stew". It was simply leftovers. I wonder when I crossed the line from loathing it to loving it. Mom would pronounce it "pioneer" with such passion that it evoked a mental image of my mother growing up in the SouthWest with her cowboy parents.

macaroni and cheese

"Mac and Cheese" is considered a vegetable in Maryland's Eastern Shore. When and where I grew up in upstate New York, it was a main course, the core of a meatless meal. Mom's was made with cheddar cheese that we shredded ourselves and it was baked in a glass bowl or pan that over time and my sister's and my sloppy dishwashing habits, would be marked at the top with the outlines of baked on macaroni. That marking indicated the location of the best part of the dish. The part where the cheese would concentrate and was very chewy.

meat loaf and turkey stuffing

Once when Mom was in the hospital my Dad made a meatloaf. It was a chunk of ground beef with tomato sauce on top. Mom's meatloaf was made with bread, ground beef, sausage, onions, and an egg to hold it together.

Turkey stuffing HAD to have sausage, the rest was whatever might be found around the house.

tomato aspic

Mom came from the jello mold generation. We always enjoyed the ring shaped aspic. Mom was very creative and did many things with that jello mold. Sometimes the tomato aspic would have spanish olives. And then there was a period of our eating history with apple jello with shredded lettuce and celery in it.

My sister has my mother's recipe for minestroni. I have never found a minestroni as good as my mother's.

baked beans

Like the macaroni and cheese, the baked beans were best around the edges where the well soaked beans would evolve like old people back to infancy and become crunchy. Mom was never stingy with the molasses.

Mom's domestic skills were gained, not by role models, but by virtue of her great intelligence. My mother, whose job it was to maintain the house cleaning, had no set routine, much to my father's great consternation. But when she set herself to the task, the house cleaning was thorough. I realize, as I write this, that her cooking required quite a bit of time and planning. One of the first skills my mother tried to pass on to her daughters was to have all of the parts of a meal show up at the table at the same time.



Grandma Morse was not known for her cooking
shepherd's pie
stewed tomatoes with bread

books on the table top
the family of man













pay the two dollars

cartoon book about having a baby

Elmer West

In the years before my brother was born. our family went tenting. We had two canvas tents, the green umbrella type that originated from my Dad's childhood and a larger saffron colored wall tent. We had fun meeting new people at the camp sites. I can remember Dad once took neighbor's steaks out of their cooler and left a note saying "We were here. signed, the raccoons"

But one day we went to visit Dad's cousin Edith who lived on dirt road north of North Creek and in the shadow of Moxham Mountain. She and her husband Dave lived in a low-ceilinged cottage and kept a flower greenhouse. Down the road from Cousin Edith there was a place for sale that had a log cabin, a small frame house, a sturdy log barn and 80 acres of land. In lieu of tenting our family took up fixing up "The Ranch" (as in, "meanwhile, back at the ranch ....")

The glaciers that had been through this area left large boulders everywhere. There were piles of garnet studded stones left in fields and lichen covered stone fences everywhere. A great place for kids to play. We constructed houses. We put on variety acts, singing and dancing on top of one boulder across the road from the cabin. Once my sister got so enthusiastic with her performance that she danced right off the boulder. My sister remembers that my mother, who had been the audience across the road and up the hill, was there instantly to check for concussions and broken bones, but there was no injury. Meanwhile, I was back at the cabin, cracking up with laughter.

Out in the middle of the pasture in front of the cabin, was a lone boulder the size of a house.

We befriended Elmer West, who was in his seventies. He earned income from the county by mowing the grass next to the road with his scythe. The dirt road was called "West Lane"(*now called Cobble Creek Road) and up the road about two miles at the end of West Lane were the houses and outbuildings that Elmer had built for his family and 12 children. He told us that the large boulder used to be a small stone that had been in his pocket and he threw it in the field where "it growed".

For us, Elmer was like the Indians that befriended the Pilgrims. He helped us raise our log cabin up on jacks and replace the rotten bottom logs with new wood. He also helped us build a large screened in porch (from where we watched Patty's variety show). The porch had a cement floor and had slices of elm wood imbedded in the cement. Elmer called the wood "ellem" and in turn we called him "Ellemer". He helped raise the porch beam by holding it up on top of his head, so we always enjoyed saying that Elmer used his head to make our porch.

In addition to his mowing the tall roadside grass, Elmer was an Adirondack guide. He took tourists hunting and fishing in the wilderness around his house. He served us bullhead and venison often and year round. I don't think he worried much about seasons or hunting limits, and nobody else worried about his catching in fish in traps either. Apart from the game he caught for food, his groceries were cigarettes, beer, buisquick, corn meal and bacon.

He played the fiddle, the country way on his chest rather than under his chin, and I can only remember him playing "Red River Valley". His house was papered with Vargas girls. His bedroom had no door. You got to it by climbing through a front window onto the porch. I think maybe the bed was there as he built it.

William Augustus Brady III

Will Brady, my ex-husband, grew up as a "Bill". I'm the person who gave him the name "Will" because I liked it better. There were no plans to name anyone William Augustus Brady the fourth, but the William name was passed to his grandson Seth William Brady.
When Will's son Gareth was born, he had red hair. I had dyed my own hair red and we were mighty surprised that Gareth had red hair. Eventually we learned that the first William Augustus Brady had red hair. After a few weeks, all of Gareth's hair changed to an almost transparent blonde and has stayed pretty much blonde all his life. The W.A. Bradys all had ears that stuck out- they were Mighty Mouse ears. Neither Gareth nor Seth W. do.

William A. Jr. and Peg Brady showered Gareth with Christmas presents. We had told them that we had no intention of telling Gareth there was such a real person as Santa Claus. They seemed devastated by this idea and filled up their car trunk every year to make up for Gareth's deprived religious training. Either that or they were just being grandparents. Gareth received every present that was on the market. Sometimes more than once. One year Gareth received a set of "cowboys and indians", tiny plastic figures with which a young child could simulate the aggressive take over of the western North American continent. As soon as the grandparents left town, Will took out a pair of scissors and proceeded to put an end to this genocidal war. He cut off rifles, six shooters, bows and arrows. Four year old Gareth cried, "What are they going to do?" Will answered firmly "FARM!"

Years later, when Gareth was thirteen, he told a family therapist that he was still upset about that emasculating of his toys. But six years after that, he bragged about it.

When Gareth was little, my parents lived on the other side of the Adirondack mountains from us. To visit them, we took a beautiful three hour drive of two lane roads. Will has always been a dreamy sort. Once we were re-entering the road after a rest stop and he got distracted by the geology of an interesting cliff across the way and sort of forgot that he was at the wheel of the car. As our car drifted across the road, an on-coming car ran into the cliff to avoid us. No one was hurt, but they were pretty angry about it.

Making the same trip another time, we had a flat tire. As we were trying to change it, the lug nut simply broke off. We stopped at a service station, but they didn't have the bolts we needed. So we inflated the tire and continued on the remaining five bolts. There was a service station about every eleven miles where we would re-inflate the tire. So we proceeded, stopping at Long Lake, Blue Mountain Lake, Indian Lake, and North River, to North Creek where my Dad met us with his tire changing equipment. He didn't think very highly of our tire changing aptitude. But after working on it himself, he found that ALL of our bolts were broken. As the last lug nut fell down to the ground my Dad proclaimed to Will, "My faith in you has been restored." The lug nuts of the tire had been placed with a machine that had turned them too tight and had cracked every one. We were fortunate they had not fallen off while we were driving.

more stories

Finding people on the internet

Since I was a teenager, my dad had often mentioned Anne Franke. She was the girl my dad had wanted to visit for a weekend when he was seventeen. His parents had vetoed that visit and I don't think he ever forgave them. They thought that he "might get into mischief." And he admits they were probably right. Anne Franke was quite something, evidently. My dad kept her letters and I got to see them about a year before he died. After reading them, it's my impression that she really strung him along. They corresponded through world war II and even after she married.

I was telling Dad about how I was able to find old friends on the internet. Right away, he asked if I could find Anne Franke. This was going to be quite tough since he didn't know her married name. He knew three details: her sister's married name, that her father had become Secretary of the Navy under Eisenhower, and that he had retired to Vermont. These turned out to be enough.

I found her by looking for the sister in obituaries in the New York Times. I figured that her father's distinction as Naval Secretary might rate his daughter a mention. What astonishes me, is that she died only a month previous to my search and was listed. In the obituary I found Ms. Franke's married name and home state in the list of survivors. She had been one of the originators of the state's Nature Conservancy and her telephone number was listed. I called and spoke to her son and told him that my Dad would be happy to hear from her. She was away from home, tending to her sister's affairs. She did respond once to email from my Dad but not again after that. Thanks to the internet, she broke his heart again.

Another remarkable internet find was a childhood friend on the internet. Patty had been my best friend from the time my family moved to Porter Corners when I was 11 until I was about 17 when we moved to Eastern Queens. We had been on the same telephone party line and had a lot of fun confusing a boy we had both dated. He'd call one of us and we'd call the other and say "Stanley's going to call you. I'm going to listen in." and after had made the second call, we'd listen in and then chime in when the conversation was well underway. We got into mischief in ways that baffled our parents because apart we were remarkably well-behaved. When we were fifteen, she and I shoved a curtain rod through a wall of my parent's summer place when there were boys on the other side. It seemed to make perfect sense at the time. One of the boys on the other side of the wall tugged on the curtain rod and needed stitches as a result.

I was living in Maryland when I started this internet search. I had forgotten her married name. So I thought I'd look for her older sister, Ellen. As a girl in highschool, Ellen had been mysteriously very skinny. I remember hearing that she had been hospitalized and had been fed milkshakes. Years later, I had the impression that she was anorexic. I figured there was a good chance that she had not married. I typed in Ellen's maiden name and couldn't believe my eyes. There was a listing by her name in the very Maryland town I was living! This is 402 miles from Porter Corners. Sure enough, I found Ellen living exactly 30 minutes away from were I live. Besides counting Ellen as a friend these days, I've had a chance to visit with Patty a few times. Ellen did marry, but retained her maiden name. To add to this string of coincidence, Patty's husband grew up in the community where I lived when I first moved to Maryland, 138 miles from where I live now.



Singing with dad's dementia - refer to story I wrote a few years ago.

One class of stories is the "dope story." Which what you would expect it to be. I have a few stories of my own, but I'll save that for my recollections of my "hippy days". Here's a dope story. It's not my own, but a good one told by and about a friend of mine.

The Disney movie Fantasia was making the rounds to "a theater near you" in the early 1970's. Fantasia is still circulating. It's a movie of wonderful Disney animation from 1940 which is set to classical music. It is famous for dancing hippos and Micky Mouse as the sorcerer's apprentice.
College-aged Mark B. got stoned before going into the theater. About half-way through the picture, he had a revelation, the kind that only stoners can get. He stood up on the chair in that small-town theater and cried out "It's all in time to the music!!"

facts of life

It seems that in my family, kids are most cute when they are around three. And cute kids make the best stories.

I am told I have made some serious factual errors in the following story, but I think it's more fun than the "factual" version.*
My grandson who is extraordinarily cute and unusually well behaved has a story told about him during a rare time he misbehaved. He had a lock put on the outside of his door when he was a toddler. He never required spanking or even a verbal dressing down, but when he was in trouble he was told to take a "time out". One day his father brought him into his room for a time out and a little talking to. Suddenly, three year old Seth jumped up, ran out into the hall and locked his father in his room. "Now YOU take a time out!" he told his father. His father had to climb out Seth's bedroom window.

Long before Seth was conceived, I was taking my precocious three-year old brother to his first church service. John was cute, not so well behaved, but very verbal. I was eleven and had prepared him as well as I could for the church experience. As we were sitting there waiting for the service to begin. My brother whispered "Where's God?" I said "You can't see God. God is invisible." Then the organ stopped and the pastor stood up from behind the lecturn. My brother shouted out "I see God!!"

As I've mentioned my brother was precocious. He talked and read at an early age, and had a large vocabulary. When I was seventeen and he was nine, we were watching a movie on television. Tuesday Weld was looking pretty sorrowful in "A Summer Place."
"What's wrong with her?" my brother asked.
"She's pregnant" I answered.
"But she's not married." he argued.
"You don't have to be married."
In my family, the mom told the facts of life to the girls and the dad told the facts of life to the boy. I realized that this was my chance to find out the dad's version.
"Didn't Dad tell you where babies come from?"
(in a tentative voice)"Yes"
We watched TV a few moments more, and then I asked "What did Dad tell you?"
John recited,"A man places sperm in the woman and it fertilizes the egg and then the baby grows in the mother's womb."
A few more minutes passed, and then I asked "How does the man place the sperm in the woman?"
"He didn't say."
Minutes.
"How?" John asked me.
I used the Socratic teaching method at even this young age.
"Well, John. What does a man have that a woman doesn't have?"
He thinks. Then slowly his eyes grow big in astonishment.
"I didn't know they were detachable!!"

My own son learned the facts of life when he was much younger. He was about six and it was the seventies when Free to Be You and Me and Our Bodies Ourselves were popular books. The minute the poor kid asked a question, I was armed with books and photographs. After reading with Gareth the cute picture book Where Did I Come From?**, I proceeded to The First Nine Months of Life, a book that I'd often consulted when I was pregnant. I explained that the photographs of sperm and embryonic babies were enlarged under microscope. I was proud of my son as he listened with interest. Then he beamed and exclaimed."I'm so glad I'm a spermer!!! When I get married I'm going to get a microscope and show my wife my sperm!" Later that week a neighbor told me that she overheard a conversation between Gareth and Andy, her son who was two.
Gareth: And look at these pictures! These are sperm.
Andy: Yeah
Gareth: and you and I are boys and we have SPERM!
Andy: Yeah
Gareth: Aren't you glad that we are spermers?!
Andy: Yeah


* My son points out,"I had put the lock on the outside of the door only for the purpose of time-outs and bed time. Seth was four years old and refused to stay in his room at those times. Never would I lock the door at night in fear of emergency situations such as a house fire or even less drastic instances such as if he felt sick and needed to let us know."

"The books I had read around that time suggested never to leave a child in time out for more then 10 or 15 minutes so I never locked his door for longer than that and always remained close to the door when it was locked so that I could listen out for sounds that would give me concern for his safety. After 10 or 15 minutes he would most often stop crying and that is when I would enter his room and ask him if he understood why he was on time out. On that particular night he just got up and shut the door behind him. At first I told him he had better open the door. I looked around the room and found that I had done too good a job at child proofing it. There was nothing small enough to pick the lock. All I could think about was how his mother would come home and find him roaming around the house with me locked in the room. Jumping out the window would have not worked out since that would only mean I would be locked outside the entire house instead of only in a room. I didn't want to destroy the door either. Finally I realized that the best way to get him to open the door would be to let him know that he would not be in trouble if he opened the door within the next few minutes."


**Here's how a review described Where Did I Come From? at Amazon.com:

....Mayle and Robins are disarmingly natural about the naming of parts ("Now, if you put your mother and your father in the bath together you'd notice something interesting. . ."), probably as detailed as kids' interest allows about fetal development (incidentally, it's a girl), and bolder than any children's book yet about the "tickling feeling" of "making love": "The man pushes his penis up and down inside the woman's vagina, so that both the tickly parts are being rubbed against each other. It's like scratching an itch, but it's a lot nicer". . . and it ends in "a tremendous big lovely shiver" that is a little like a good sneeze. You can't deny Mayle's talent for translating adult experience into child-level concepts, and we found Robins' irreverent cartoonlike illustrations (the pudgy nude figures are anything but erotic) a welcome break from the breathless wonderment that has recently prevailed. .... (Kirkus Reviews)

Dad's expressions and more food stories

Part of being a part of my family was hearing certain expressions that my Dad used.
When he wanted to reprimand a child he would say "Pasta fazool!!" which is, simply, pasta with beans, but the child didn't know that. We acted as if it were a magical incantation to make us behave. We'd be bickering with each other, Dad would say "Pasta fazool!!" and we'd stop. We would be dallying and Dad would say "Pasta fazool!!" and we'd hustle. My sister says it was Dad's version of "You better straighten out and fly right!" It worked so well on my own son, that he refuses to say it with his own son because he thinks it is abusive.

We ate dinner as a family at a round dining room table. Usually some child would be balking about eating something. Dad would threaten,"no pie for you!". As we got older, we learned to ask "IS there any pie?" and Dad would say "No, but there's no pie for you!"

Whenever we got into the car ready for an excursion, Dad would say, as he turned the key in the ignition, "We're off! Like a dirty shirt!" For some reason, that still cracks me up.

Dad's favorite nicknames for my sister and I were "Sad Sack" and
"Sunshine". He called us both by both names and usually Sunshine for the one who was being grumpy at the time.

When my brother was born we lived in the upstairs of a two family house. Many many times we were told not to bother the family downstairs:"Don't disturb the Rostheizers." Even after we moved away, the phrase echoed in our ears whenever we started to get noisy.

We were proud that we had a family whistle which was handed down from my father's family. If our parents wanted us to come running they would whistle: sol mi, sol mi, do re mi, sol mi
Up until I heard another family use it, I thought my family had invented it.

Dad instilled a few food traditions.

Corn on the cob was a treat and was available only for a short season. It was considered the main course and eaten at an outdoor picnic table. The hamburgers were only a side dish. It was best served freshly shucked from the garden and boiled in a big pot. The little corn shaped holders that stuck in either end were essential. We would roll the ear in the margarine on our plate and sprinkle on salt. And then, before we bit in, there was an almost ceremonial shake of the cob. Dad ate his corn with this little shake, so we all did.

Once Dad was at a YMCA conference and he and his friends went to a restaurant. The restaurant had many conference participants as customers. There was a sign on the wall that said "Baked macaroni with rich cheddar cheese". So when it came to order Dad said "I'll have the baked macaroni with the rich cheddar cheese!" Then the next person ordering said "I'll have the BAKED macarOni with the RICH CHEDdar CHEESE!" and the next person said, while slapping the table in rhythm, "I'll have the BAKED macarOni with the RICH CHEDdar CHEESE!" Pretty soon everyone in the restaurant was chanting,""I'll have the BAKED macarOni with the RICH CHEDdar CHEESE!" Back at home, Mom made excellent macaroni and cheese and it was a frequent main course for supper. Whenever we ate it, we would do the macaroni and cheese chant.

Other food traditions were having spaghetti at Christmas because it was easy and well-liked.

At Thanksgiving we upstate New Yorkers practiced the Baltimore Maryland tradition of having sauerkraut because our family friend from Maryland, Eileen, liked it. While my grandmother was alive we always ate turnips, as well. After she died, because nobody else liked them, we missed the smell of turnips on Thanksgiving.

Mom’s cooking

Mom’s best dishes were split pea soup, minestrone, chili con carne, and tomato aspic. Grandma made a good roast with cloves, and a “shepherd’s pie” which was baking powder dumplings floating on a beef stew. Grandma was also fond of stewed tomatoes with bread. She presented it to us grandchildren like it was a treat. I never told her that I didn’t like it.

food stories

Nana and the ice cream

One very warm day, when she was in her eighties and living with us she walked down to the village of Ardsley while we were all gone and purchased a quart of ice cream. She really liked ice cream. She took a taxi back up the hill and when she went to open the door of the the house she found that she had left the key inside. The ice cream was starting to melt. She had no spoon. A walk around the house showed that a small cellar window was open. Without a bit of hesitation, she climbed up, in the window, down on to the washtubs and into the cellar. She really liked ice cream.

Dad and the liver

Dad lived as a choirboy in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine choir school when he was around ten years old. The boys led a pretty formal life. He told us children about how, like me, he didn't like liver as a boy. He would "finish" his liver by putting it in his pocket and throwing it away later. Once, however, he forgot to throw it away and was discovered when the jacket in his closet began to smell.

John and the broccoli

My brother John had thought he'd found a way to dispose of unwanted dinner until a very thorough house cleaner found petrefied broccoli stuffed in the pedestal of the dining room table.

Rick and the animal crackers

During a family gathering at Grandma's, Cousin Rick did not ingratiate himself with the family when he threw his box of animal crackers into Great Aunt Sophie's soup. He's been in disgrace ever since.

Eileen and the cheese

A close family friend came to visit one evening and started to walk around the house with a funny look on her face. "What are you doing, Eileen?" "I think I smell a dead mouse and I'm trying to locate it." "That's not a mouse, Eileen. It's the cheese you gave us for Christmas!"

Dad and the milk

The kids in my family really liked milk, but we could never get as much as we liked. Dad would say "Milk is a food, not a beverage." Sometimes on the lucky days we would have pie, Dad would give us all pie with a glass of milk. We would usually finish the milk before we finished the pie, and Dad would not let us have any more, saying "Milk is a food, not a beverage." With nothing to wash it down, the last forkfull of pie was unpleasant. Meanwhile Dad's milk glass remained full until his own pie was finished. Then he would pick up his glass and drain it, saying "AAAAAAAHHH". Thus we had a lesson in delayed gratification.

At Christmas (more on Christmas later) we would have a big bowl of shrimp to be dipped in shrimp coctail sauce. To be sure that the kids wouldn't be fighting over who got the most shrimp, Dad would count it out. "Everyone may take three shrimp!" and we would. Then "Everyone may take three more shrimp!" and we would. And on and on until the shrimp was gone. Of course we would gobble it as we got it. But when the shrimp was gone, Dad's plate was full of his own share of the shrimp. Thus we had another lesson in delayed gratification. Every year.

I understand that children who are able to delay gratification grow up to be greater successes in life than those who don't. This has been tested by leaving children alone with marshmallows. I don't know how kids develop this skill. Neither my brother, sister nor I have it.

stories on race relations

My sister's memories are quite different than mine, and in some cases more detailed. I guess getting a black eye from a green apple when I wouldn't defend her would create a lasting impression. Perhaps she is getting some satisfaction in reminding me what a villain I am in HER family stories.

Like those in other White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American families, members of my family have travelled a long road when it comes to racial understanding. Each generation has rid itself of a little more prejudice than the last. Some of our family stories reflect the prejudices that continue.

Grandma tells the story of taking young Bob to the movies to see The Ten Commandments. (Dad was two when the 1923 Cecil B. DeMill movie was made.) When the movie was over, they were walking on a busy street. Bob saw a Jewish man with a long and impressive beard. "Look Mother! There's Moses!"



When I was roughly two or three, Dad invited a colleague for dinner. Men usually wore fedoras as daily wear - the way men now wear sports caps. There was a lot of laughter from the guest when I asked, "Mister, why are you the same color as your hat?"





This story my Dad told to show off his mastery of the Irish brogue. He left a memoir of his grandmother in writing, so I will reprint his version here:
William Moulton (Sr. ) liked to be up to date and soon after Model T Fords became available, he purchased one and took the whole family for a ride -- over the Brooklyn bridge and into Manhattan. They were doing fine until they got to Broadway and 42nd st. where a policeman directing the traffic stopped the cars, including the Moulton's headed East on 42nd. The car stalled so Grandfather jumped out and cranked it to get it going and when he got in to go, the policeman had stopped the East bound traffic again. It stalled again and the procedure was repeated. By this time , the traffic was backed up all the way to 8th street. The policeman was angry, Grandmother was mortified and the rest of the family huddled down as far as they could in the meager seats. Finally, the policeman in complete desperation held up all the traffic and walked over to grandfather saying with a real Irish Brogue --- "Ef yer ever get that tin lizzy goin again, take it back to the ferm and keep it there". My grandmother was a proud woman. ( I really would have liked to have seen that.)

Mother learning Spanish

Mom's mother died when she was thirteen. The family lived in the SouthWest in Arizona or New Mexico and Elsie-Beth went to school with several Mexican friends. They gave her lessons on several phrases she might find useful. However, she didn't know they were off-color remarks.
My sister tells me that was around the time the three girls were sent to live with cousins in the northern states.


My family took pride in being in the vanguard of racial tolerance. My grandmother was in a sorority that included Jewish women. My mother's father famously challenged a fellow Baptist over his acceptance of colored people. And my father and his boss were proud to have allowed colored kids into the Tarrytown YMCA. Even though there is plenty of racism in my family and in me, my family has never considered racism as politically correct.

I'll get this out of the way first

If I'm going to talk about my family in a book that is read anyone who comes upon it, it will agitate some of my relatives. They will disagree with things. They will not like my own point of view made public. I'll clear things up right away and stress that this is a book of stories, not facts. Chronology, science and majority opinion may run counter to the things I tell, but I am only passing on stories. As in any history, the true facts may never be known. I have invited others to make comments and add recollections. I may or may not use them. True or not, it depends on whether or not they create better stories.

The stories I wish to tell are those that were told more than once. Such stories take on a rehearsed tone and seem to be simply waiting for a cue. Often the story is more fun to tell than to hear.

My mother told me several times about the time she came upon a surprising scene in the bedroom that my infant sister and I were sharing in New Hartford. I was playing on the floor and my sister was in the crib. My sister had reached out and had pulled out all of my hair. There was hair all over the floor. I had very blonde and very fine hair. It grew in rather slowly and, when I was close to one, my father labeled a sled box I rode in "Cathy Express" so that people would know I was a girl. So my folks were probably concerned that all that hard earned hair was gone. (picture of Cathy express)
This story may have stretched over the years, or I have misremembered it, because 1) I have no pictures of me being bald after two and 2) I was a real crybaby and mother would have heard me yelling. This is an example of a favorite family stories - how true or accurate it is will always be debatable. I also have come to distrust the stories of our family, mine own included. But I will do my best to be faithful in recording the lies I am fond of remembering so that they may be passed down through the family line.
(picture of me combing patty's hair) This is the first family picture of my sister. She wasn't born at this size. Like many second children, her babyhood was taken for granted. That table with a chair in the middle was fabulous and it was used 8 years later by my brother. For a short time, it prevented my sister and I from killing each other. But I digress.

Another favorite story of my mother's was when she asked a neighborhood child "Where did you put your turtle?" and the child said "I gave it to Patty". That got my mother busy looking for Patty. She knew that Patty put everything in her mouth. When she found Patty, sure enough, the little tiny turtle legs were sticking out of her mouth.

While Patty was still under four, Mom took her to the Child Guidance Clinic, where they explored why she did things like kick Sunday school teachers, bite other children, and eat turtles.
After a few initial sessions of Mom telling them that her sister Cathy would never do such things, they decided that Cathy was the child they were supposed to be seeing. So they took me to the Child Guidance Clinic. I can remember play therapy where I built bridges with blocks and played with toy people. I've been told that they were anatomically correct people, but I have no memory of that. My father often said, with sadness, that in the good old days before I was five, I was "so well behaved". I guess they cured me. I guess that is more a story about me than about Patty.

Patty tells a story about her difficulties learning to read. She had a great deal of difficulty in primary school.* She says that in grade 3 she could understand whole paragraphs, but her decoding skills were non-existent. Evidently she was a context clues kind of kid, on whom phonics were useless. She says that something "popped" in her head and suddenly she could read. She still loves to read, but her spelling is a source of great amusement for others.

When I was eight and my brother was born, Patty and I once again shared a bedroom. Patty was considered a messier housekeeper than me. My toys lasted years, hers lasted moments. One night I dreamed that we had worked hard with our parents to clean our bedroom. By the end of the dream, the room was neat as a pin. Then I woke up. There was the room in its usual messy state. I tend to get my dreams mixed up with reality, so I could only assume that Patty had gotten up and messed the room up again and gone back to sleep. So I went over to her bed and started beating her up before she had woken up. Patty had a hard childhood and I don't think getting beat up before breakfast was any help.

Patty would have had a different, easier life if it weren't for her sister getting others to gang up on her every chance she got. Once I overheard her telling a bully in the park "I'm going to get my sister and she'll beat you up." and I stepped out from behind a corner and said "I will not". My sister says she got her only black eye from that kid. The nastiest thing I did was when we moved to a new place, I would tell the new kids all the bad nicknames ("witchie", "cooties") she had from where we lived before.

One thing my parents will deny was that they used the expression "son of a bitch" and other words often enough for it to become part of our regular vocabulary. One year, our rural school got a first year teacher who taught grades 6, 7, and 8 and who served as principal as well. At first he was really easy going. He had read Summerhill. He listened to Joan Baez. He drove a VW beetle. He was great friends with our parents. He took my mother and I to see Andre Segovia. But as the year went on he got much more rigid with his students.** One day he announced that students using foul language would have their mouths washed out with soap .. liquid green soap. The first student caught cussing was my sister, who said "damn" having no idea that it was bad language. Mr. Montgomery was quite distressed at having to punish the child of his friends and, to provide an out, asked her to spell "dam" in hopes that she'd provide the homonym. That might have worked but "somebody" called out "Oh Mr. Montgomery. You know Patty can't spell anything." Later, my parents said "we never use that sort of language". Well, they didn't after that.


* Unlike her sister who brought home so many A's that she was thrilled when she got a C in handwriting - hoping in vain that her parents might fuss as they did over Patty. Instead I was greatly disappointed when Dad said "I, too, had bad handwriting when I was your age."

** Once he caught me slapping a student and I had to write "I will not create a disturbance without asking the teacher's permission." 5000 times. That's when I learned that if a teacher is going to make students write sentences they should at least contain something worth remembering. Like: "A fraction is in its simplest form when the greatest common factor of the numerator and the denominator is one."