Epistle 18 – Halloween

Autumn in Brewster’s Mill was my favorite time of year. As a lad I could still block out the season that came next and enjoy the brilliant colors, the sparkling sunshine, crunching through the falling leaves, and that special spicy scent in the air—the smell of death. In the good ol’ days, you could burn all those leaves you raked to the curb, and the curling columns of smoke on every street were a cozy end to the green season.

Of course, you can’t burn leaves anymore—to protect the environment, I guess, not to mention all the lawns that caught fire. Maybe burning dead leaves also produced hallucinogens that made young Boomers goofy, sort of a giant, outdoor pot party. Anyway, instead of burning the leaves, today a truck comes along and some guy sucks them up in a big hose. The town leaf sucker.

Of course, the crowning event of autumn is Halloween, the one night when your natural weird habits are encouraged. My first memory of Halloween festivities was the neighborhood Kornstalk Karnival for which my mother dressed me as a really scary . . . Chinaman. There I was, a 5 or 6-year old, tow-headed kid wrapped in an orange oilcloth sheet that came down to my ankles, a Fu Man Chu mustache painted on my face, and a cardboard wok tied on my head.

Terrifying, huh? I can’t imagine where the inspiration for the costume came from since there were no Asians in Brewster’s Mill. Maybe it was that Chinese restaurant we went to on vacation in Milwaukee. Whatever. Anyway, while my brother was honestly earning his treats by ringing door bells, soaping windows and putting fire crackers in mail boxes, I wandered around the Kornstalk Karnival in my Chinese suit, wheedling the adults in charge into tossing candy into my shopping bag. It’s a shame nobody thought to take my picture. I could have been the first Bruce Lee.

Now, the cute little trick-or-treaters are out with their parents and an armed guard on alert for any candy not in a sterilized, vacuum-sealed package. Then, the treats are carefully doled out in exact proportions designed to prevent sugar overload and other assorted dietary maladies. Can you imagine these kids bobbing for apples in a washtub with a bunch of other kids with runny noses? How will they ever build their immune systems?

Of course, thanks to really cool special effects, today’s tykes can get the bejeezes scared out of them by psychos with chainsaws and other instruments of torture.
We had to make do with a stiff Boris Karloff as Frankenstein, a hairy Lon Chaney, Jr. as the wolfman, and James Arness as an arctic carrot, old friends that I’d love to see again but I have to go now. I have an interview for the leaf sucker job.

We Will Win

Epistle 13 – The Hula Hoop Craze

George Carlin believed man was created so he (or she) could create plastic. George was almost right. Man was created so he could create plastic so somebody could make a long tube so somebody else could stick two ends together in a 4-foot circle. And make a bloody fortune. It was called a Hula Hoop and every kid could make it go around his waste by wiggling her (or his) hips like a Hula dancer but without the grass skirt.

Except me. Some kids could even make them go around their arms and necks and knees. A few wiggles of my hips and the damn thing just lay stupidly around my ankles. That wouldn’t have been so bad except Hula Hoops were neon pink and everyone knew you didn’t just walk into the middle of it by mistake. Maybe I couldn’t do it because I didn’t have hips. Or a backside either. Actually, I was a stick figure with hair. But even so, once again I was not part of the mainstream, as my childhood chums went blithely down the sidewalk with a 4-foot plastic ring whirling about various parts of their anatomy.

So what’s my point, you ask? Where’s the emotional scarring in that? The Hula Hoop craze couldn’t have been that big a deal, could it?

Well, no, it wasn’t. But it was the first of many social trends from which I was cruelly excluded. Take the sexual revolution, for instance. Now there’s one trend a person could really get excited about, so to speak. Free love and all that. Women boldly inviting themselves to “your place or mine”. Where was I during all that? It must have been your place because it sure as hell wasn’t mine.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, there was the great economic boom when everybody got filthy rich. Except me. Why was I left out of that one? I’m just as greedy as the next guy. In fact, greed and lust were my strong points. How could I be a true Boomer and miss so much of the fabric of our generation?

What cosmic force shaped your destiny? Wealth? Lineage? An SAT score?

Mine was the Hula Hoop.

We Will Win

Epistle 12 – The Coonskin Cap

One of the most overlooked heroes of the 20^th century was Fess Parker. “Who the hell was Fess Parker?” you children may ask. Well, I’ll tell you. He was Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Both.

Ol’ Fess was Davy Crockett first, and Ol’ Davy was not really a frontier congressman from Tennessee who valiantly lost his life defending the Alamo with John Wayne. No, sir, he was bigger than that. He was invented by Walt Disney and had a song written about him that annoys Boomers to this day. I still get nuts when it pops into my head and won’t leave no matter how much gin I drink. “Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier . . .” See what I mean?

And Davy had a coonskin cap, which he apparently needed to kill “bars” (Tennesseeese for “bears”) or hangout in neighborhood bars, whatever. Anyway, every red-blooded American youth had to have a coonskin cap. That was back before every red-blooded American youth had to have a cell phone and a gun. My coonskin cap had a snap-on tail so I could remove it if I wanted to look like I had a fur pot on my head.

After ol’ Davy bit the dust, as they say back in Hollywood, ol’ Fess became Dan’l Boone, which was interesting because Boone preceded Crockett in history. In fact, there probably wouldn’t even be a Tennessee for Crockett to kill “bars” in if it wasn’t for Daniel Boone. But maybe it made sense because by then ol’ Fess was looking pretty weathered anyway.

One of ol’ Dan’l’s sidekicks was a Jewish singer named Ed Ames who deserted his singing brothers so he could achieve stardom as a fake Indian named Mingo. Actually, Ed got the job because he could say Dan’l. At least Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto (Spanish for “fool”) was a real, live Indian, for God’s sake.

Anyway, Fess Parker made an entire career out of playing a tall, lanky frontiersman with a really long gun and a really long drawl. He always wore the same buckskins, which made Disney’s wardrobe expense really cheap to boot. And a coonskin cap. Mine had a snap-on tail.

We Will Win

Epistle 10 – The Family Car Trip

Before jetting off to Monte Carlo, Cancun or a Carnival cruise ship, boomer families used to pile into the family Ford or Chevy and creep along beastly hot, two-lane roads in quest of some exotic Ray and Ruby’s Cabin Court motel that let you park right in front of the door to your room.

Talk about convenience. If you wanted to spend the night in your car, which might have been more comfortable than Ray and Ruby’s room, you could completely block the door for safety, except that nobody cared about safety back then and didn’t lock the doors to their houses or their cars.

They didn’t use seat belts either, which gave birth to the annual mid-summer statistics about the slaughter of thousands on the highways, probably in the family sedan, and certainly gave inspiration to the lovely, lyrical:

Around the curve,

Lickety split.

Beautiful car,

Wasn’t it?

Burma Shave

I’ll bet somebody actually got paid to write that.

Anyway, back to the family car trip, which was mostly spent in the oppressively hot back seat with the hot air from the open windows (1950’s air conditioning) blowing the smoke from my father’s cigarette in my face. Although I valiantly tried to improve my mind by reading my comic books, and vicariously improve my body by watching Charles Atlas kick sand in some bully’s face after he had turned a pale, scrawny body like mine into a stack of rippling muscles, there were just too many distractions.

My brother always wanted to play Hangman or Battleship–with paper and pencil for God’s sake, not even a game board. As soon as he cheated me out of my rightful victory by quoting some new rule that always seemed to favor his situation, it was time to ask for the twelfth time if we were there yet, and start whining about some place to eat, invariably a contest between a cozy tavern where my father could get a frosty mug of Schlitz and a drive-in where we could get a frosty mug of A&W root beer.

Because the driver could keep going and torture our bladders into submission, the tavern generally won the day, but at least we got a burger, potato chips, a Pepsi, and ten minutes to slide steel discs down the shuffleboard, all in all, not a bad consolation prize, considering we could have been forced to eat real food.

Of course, you can’t make a long, torturous car trip to somewhere without making another one back, which was even worse. There’s no sense of eager anticipation of the pleasures of Ray and Ruby’s Cabin Court motel; the comic books have all been read, and my body is covered with pink calamine lotion to ease the itch of poison ivy, contracted in search of frogs in the dark with a flashlight. Was the calamine lotion bright pink to match my sun-browned skin? I looked like I had been dipped in liquid bubble gum.

At least my misery got me an A&W root beer.

We Will Win

Epistle 7 – Sputnik

I recently learned the remarkable fact that Sputnik, the Russian missile that was the first to orbit the earth, was launched on the same day as Leave It To Beaver. Surely that couldn’t be a coincidence. It must have been all part of the diabolical scheme by the Evil Empire, to “bury us”, as Nikita Khrushchev so delicately put it when he wasn’t pounding his shoe on a poor, unsuspecting UN table. What a classy guy.

Anyway, as the Russians were rocketing into space while we launched several mighty missiles into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida–or worse yet, just had them tip over without ever making it to the beach–the Boomers of America were taught that every other family except theirs behaved like the Cleavers or the Andersons in Father Knows Best. Ward Cleaver’s casual Friday attire was a sweater and a tie.

He smoked a pipe and gave sage advice on everything to his sons, Wally and the Beaver, while June Cleaver toiled away in the kitchen with a flouncy dress, high heels and a lacy apron that never got stained. Wally and the Beaver had neat rooms and actually communicated with each other despite their age difference. They even talked about life with their parents, for God’s sake! If that wasn’t a subversive Russian plot to destroy the fabric of the American family, I don’t know what is.

Well, none of that nonsense in my family, no sir. Children were meant to be seen and not heard, and the seeing part was kept to a bare minimum. If my mother had a flouncy dress, which I doubt, it was carefully stored away for Easter and Christmas, and my father smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes.

My brother was not put on this earth to help guide me through life like Wally did for the Beaver. He was put on this earth to torment me beyond human endurance. For the first several years, my brother and I slept in bunk beds, him on top and me on the bottom so he could accidentally step on me as he climbed up.

I suppose there are still doubters who fail to accept that our idyllic version of the American family was a worthy target for Communist propaganda. Okay, maybe the Beaver wasn’t a Cold War pawn. Maybe every other family really did live like that. Ozzie and Harriett and David and Ricky were the normal ones.

It’s a shame Khrushchev didn’t have more shoes.

We Will Win