Category: Tom Lyford

THE STRANGE CASE OF CENTRAL HALL AND THE X-RAY SPECS…

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Every little town in America had its ‘hot spots,’ where the kids growing up there were concerned. For me, born and raised in the 50’s and 60’s in little Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, USA (population back then around 5000), my personal hotspots list includes the following: The Piscataquis River and its old Indian Cave; the kids’after-school hang-outs, Lanpher’s Drug Store and Peter’s Pharmacy; Center Theatre; The Bowling Alley, Rocket Lanes; Sebec Lake Roller Rink; the Milo Drive-in; the Sugar Shack; and the Rec Center at Central Hall. In fact, Central Hall itself.

Ah yes, Central Hall, now newly renovated and recently dubbed “The Commons.” Today the building’s two-storied floors are what, brand new? Immaculate? Stunning? Polished? Air-conditioned? Up to Code? A jewel in the town’s crown? Yes. All of the above, and then some. A dream come true. And everyone, including me, is delighted about it. However…

There is a little child still living inside of me. A child who remembers everything. A child who can, at will, rewind all the natural brain’s virtual reality “films” going back all the way to the 50’s and 60’s. All the way back to kindergarten (1954-55). But this “little child” (not the man I am today) prefers the old Central Hall. The venerable, shabby old building where the town’s four schools held their bi-monthly school assemblies during school day afternoons.

For the schools had no gymnasium back then, no place large enough to hold all the students. So our entire Pleasant Street School student body (tiny bodies) were lined up in twos and, shepherded by our teachers, we all snaked our way down over the tenth-of-a-mile of sidewalks to file into the upstairs “auditorium” section to be seated, right along with all the kids arriving from the other schools.

I remember those assemblies: we had one on hypnosis, one delivered by a man who had just returned from a recent sojourn up in the Arctic, a guy with an amazing photographic memory, and another man who brought wild birds with him, including an eagle and a huge owl that seemed to be able to rotate its head around a full 360o. I loved them all, and especially the getting out of school part.

The town’s churches put on their musicals at Central Hall, the schools presented their plays there; the annual town meetings packed the place to the rafters, as did the inter-school basketball games; and of course The Kiwanis Club put on their now-in-retrospect embarrassing “Minstrel Shows” there. We K-12 kids all had to perform in those minstrel shows so, yeah, I was in a number of them. Here are photos from two of  those, one with me as a little hobo and another of me as an elf.

I’m that little hobo on the far right, the cutest one…
And now I’m te cute little elf on the far left…

Yes, those minstrel shows were something else! But the most unforgettable show I ever watched there happened one evening in August, 1957, making me eleven years old at the time. As a fund raiser, the Methodist Church’s Three-M Club (think Mister, Mrs., and Miss) sponsored a famous hypnotist at Central Hall.

Since the above excerpt from The Piscataquis Observer is at least partially unreadable, here is the actual text…

PROFESSOR BARRON FEATURED HYPNOTIST AT COMING SHOW

When the show “Hypnotic Marvels” opens in Dover-Foxcroft on Tuesday Night, Aug. 21 [1957] at Central Hall, the star will be Professor K. Barron, an American who has traveled throughout the world making a study and application of therapeutic hypnosis in Egypt, Italy, and India.

His studies of Indian fakirs, Arabian mystics, and Holy Men have made him one of the world’s foremost hypnotists. He demonstrates pain control and post-hypnotic suggestion where a strong suggestion is placed in the subject’s mind, and after the subject is awakened the suggestion persists.

All proceeds from tickets will be donated to Three M [Club] to a local charity.

And as a publicity stunt the day before, the hypnotist drove his Cadillac convertible (top down) all the way up and down Main Street, blindfolded! And… (and this was the kicker for our conservative little God-fearing hamlet back then) he was accompanied by (GASP!) a blonde bombshell in a bathing suit sitting high up on the back-seat back-rest, just a-waving like some Miss America at the wolf-whistling, cat-calling throngs crowding the sidewalks on both sides of the street. It seems now, looking back, like something right out of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, something the King and The Duke might have pulled off.

The night of the actual show, the Hall went standing-room-only with the balcony packed to overflowing. My cousin and I had to worm and squirm our way up into that balcony, where we ended up watching the whole thing scrunched down on our knees, with our little torsos pressed up against, and half hanging over, the balustrade, and our gawking little faces hanging down almost directly over the stage. Best damn seats in town!

Surprisingly we got to witness a dozen high school seniors take the stage as volunteers. (I mean, wouldn’t you think school kids would need to get signed parental permission slips before participating in something as sketchy and adult as being used as guinea pigs for the pleasure and entertainment of the masses? Well, in the twenty-first century, yes, of course they would.  But back in 1957, nah, not at all. (So… welcome to the 50’s, ladies and gents.)

After weeding out the few volunteers who obviously couldn’t succumb to Professor Barron’s hypnotic ministrations, though they tried, he seated the kids (in their collective trance) in a horizontal line of chairs situated across the back of the stage. From there during the show, he would sometimes direct two or three individuals to stand and come forward for whatever particular demonstration he had in mind, leaving the rest of them just sitting and waiting there slack-jawed and with no affect whatsoever (and that just seemed so weird, seeing them all shut-down like that). But at other times he’d marshal the entire little zombie posse forward to participate.

As was the case for his first demonstration, in which he temporarily turned these seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds into “kindergartners” being treated to an afternoon at the “local movie theater” to watch a collection of “Disney cartoons”. And as those “five- and six-year-olds,” they were soon gigglng and tee-heeing delightedly at the hilarious “situations” on the “movie screen.” And keep in mind, this random group consisted of a variety of types, from an obvious wallflower to a couple of cheerleaders and one big and menacing-on-the-gridiron football hero, who was now up there tee-heeing on that stage like some little girl.

But suddenly, in the middle of one of the “Mickey Mouse adventures,” Professor Barron’s face took on a horrified expression! “Oh no!” he exclaimed. “Did you see that!? Mickey was just crossing the street when this big truck struck him!”

The mood-shift that this information sparked was immediate and palpable! All the “children” began crying. Even the entire audience was shocked at this turn of events. Shocked because it was so totally unexpected, but especially shocked because of the honest-to-God-real tears visibly glistening now down the cheeks of those horrified faces under the stage lights. I mean yes, even the big and burly hometown-hero, Gippy Thomas, was bawling. Actual tears. And honestly? I was shocked that Professor Barron would do that to them. We all were. Because in our minds, they were now innocent little kindergartners, weren’t they.

But then, almost immediately thereafter, we witnessed a boomerang mood-shift that set them all suddenly “rejoicing” as they were happily reassured, “Oh look! Mickey’s all right! He didn’t get hurt one bit! The truck actually missed him! Why, he was just playing a silly old joke on us all along! Isn’t that funny?!”  (Cheers and happy laughter!) And so, the show continued on.

Next we got to watch our “little children” on a “nature-walk field trip.” And all was well, all of them out in the “forest” picking “wild flowers” and happily collecting colorful, fallen “autumn leaves.” I mean, man, those guys and gals were scurrying all about that stage— grinning, bending over, and plucking up all their little found-treasures when…  suddenly… (here we go again…)

­“Oh my goodness!What’s that?! What is that rumbling noise up overhead?”

The “children”? They had no idea what it was, did they. So… all cautious and solemn, and one by one, they lifted their innocent faces to the “sky.” And gawked.

“Oh my, boys and girls! It’s one of those great big black airplanes! Don’t you just love airplanes?” And they all grinned, of course, but you couldn’t help but wonder if actually they… you know, weren’t entirely sure that they did like those big, black airplanes… “Whoa! And just look! Aren’t those… two big doors opening up on the belly of the plane up there? Yes! That’s what they are!” You could see, as well as feel, the rising level of their concern sweeping right across all of their faces. “And WHOA! Would you look at that! Something…  Something just fell right out of those two big open doors and, whatever it is, it’s falling right down toward us! Golly gee, I wonder what it is, what that might be…” By the fearful looks on their innocent little faces, I’m surprised that some of them didn’t suffer… you know, a little kid’s “accident.”

But then, just as quickly as he’d pulled that Mickey Mouse plot-twist earlier, he executed another old unexpected plot switcheroo: “Oh my goodness, boys and girls! Why that’s… money! Those are… dollar bills fluttering down all around us! Quick, kiddos! Better grab as many as you can!” And then didn’t the audience just roar to see those big high school kids running all around, leaping like deer, leaping up in the air, desperately plucking down the invisible “dollar bills,” and greedily stuffing away all that precious “long green” deep down into their “pockets!” It was quite a spectacle.

There were so many demonstrations that evening. For instance, after being given an in-trance, post-hypnotic suggestion, one boy tried to walk across the stage only to find his right foot seemingly “super-glued” to the floor. And no matter how hard he tried, the floor adamantly refused to release its claim on the foot. Now we, the audience, had been privy to the post-hypnotic suggestion when it was being applied: “The harder you try to pull your foot from the floor, the weaker and weaker your leg will become.” It got such a laugh when the kid finally threw in the towel, glared at Professor Barron, and yelled, “YOU did this! Come fix it!”

Another post-hypnotic-suggestion example was when a very popular girl, a cheer leader, was told, “After you wake up, whenever you hear the words, ‘Good night,’ you must look at me and say, ‘Shut up!’ And thereafter, each and every other time you hear those words again you will, once again, tell me to shut up, only with a growing and increasing anger each time. But, you will have no idea why on earth you were compelled to say that to me, or what it was you were so angry about.”

After those instructions, he woke her up and simply went on with the show as if nothing had happened. Of course then, after a while, he turned to us, the audience, and said something like, “Well ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been a marvelous audience. But all good things must come to an end. I’m afraid it’s time for us to say good night, and…”

(Shut up!)

Dead silence on the stage. The Professor looked confused. “I’m sorry. Did one of you just… say something…?” Everyone, including our girl remained perfectly quiet. It had been such a mousey little request, it had apparently slipped right under everybody’s radar. “OK, never mind. Apparently I’m just… hearing things. But anyway, be that as it may, it is in fact time to bid you all good night, SO…”

“Shut up!”

Our girl gasped! Her hands flew to her mouth. And now Professor Barron was looking at her directly, sizing her up. “I beg your pardon?”

“Ohmigod!”  she said, while shaking her head no, no NO! “Never in a million years would I ever say something… something like… so…”

“So what? Do you mean so something exactly like what you just said to me?” He was doing a great job at feigning peevishness. And also, all of her peers were now staring quite a bit awkwardly at her.

“Listen,” she pleaded with a shaky little voice, “oh, please believe me! I swear on a stack of Bibles I never…”

“So what is your problem? Is it just that you really hate the show? Or just me personally?”

“No! I mean no, no, no, of course not! Nothing like that! And, I’m so sorry!”

“So… do you like my show?”

“Oh yes. Yes! Very much!”

“Ok. So what is it then? That you like my show so much…” (great sarcasm here) “that you were angered when I said it’s time to stop, that it’s time to say good night and…”

“Shut UP!”

This time all of her surrounding classmates turned at once and focused their darkly shocked, jaw-dropped confusion on her.

“Now… oh wow! OK. That was just plain a tad rude, wouldn’t you say? I mean, just who do you think is running this show? You? I guess perhaps you’re thinking you should get to be the only one who gets to decide when to say, and when not to say, good night, eh? Is that…”

“SHUT…………. UP!”

Wow. While our hypnotist went on feigning  superior displeasure, you could see her classmates were obviously unnerved to the Nth degree! This inexplicable rising anger in her was now beginning to feel suddenly tinged with a frightening little extra bit of… something else. A little hint of  I’m-warning-you danger?…an Incredible Hulk-ish and you won’t like me when I’m angry? They (who knew her well) (or at least who thought they had known her well) had just glimpsed something dark in their heretofore bubbly, ray-of-sunshine Pollyanna. A Don’t-tread-on-ME mojo they were finding more than just a tiny bit unsettling.

But no one was ever more shocked at it than she herself!

(See, this is what I mean. Isn’t the human brain just a marvelously mysterious organ??? I can’t get over it.)

I will say this, at least. Each and every time he played some hypnotic dirty trick on his subjects, he was always considerate enough to bring his subjects out of their trances by instilling in them a post-hypnotic promise of calmness and peacefulness, instructing them that they would awake happy, well-rested, optimistic, and energized.

Thank God for that, eh?

Now I think it’s obvious that we both realize, you and I, that this was an evening program I witnessed a little over seventy-one years ago. And I was, of course, only an eleven year old at the time, to boot. So, I can only hope that my long-term memory has withstood enough of the ravages of time to be at least to the point where I’ve maintained a fair amount of accuracy here in my reporting.

But for this last, and final, anecdote, (and there were so many more) I have no worries whatsoever. Because I’m confident that this particular scenario was just so bizarre, so unique, and so unusually delicious, that the memory of it was burned indelibly into my cerebrum. So much so that I’d readily wager that anyone else who witnessed this last little stunt at Central Hall, and is still alive today, would tell the exact, same story in very much the same way I am about to. It was that unforgettable.

So, you know how when you go to a local Fourth of July fireworks extravaganza, they always nickel and dime you to death throughout the better part of a half hour with a single shot of this here, and another single shot of something else there? And sure, those are impressive and all. Some sizzle and crackle, some whistle, some blossom like gargantuan peonies against the sky before blowing away in the wind, and some gift you with that satisfying, window-rattling ka-BOOM!!! you’re always waiting for. Yes, each is pretty damn great in itself. But then, at the end of it all, comes what everybody’s been waiting on: the Grand Finale! All of them mixed in together and going off like popcorn for the last ten steady minutes or so.

Well, I’ve gotta say, that’s pretty much the way old Professor Barron ran his virtual wild west show of hypnosis. Turned out he’d saved us the best for last. At the very beginning he had teased the teen-agers with the hint that, if they behaved well enough throughout the show, he just might share with them something at the show’s end that would be so entirely and truly “magical,” something that hardly anybody else on the planet could even imagine. The only stipulation he made was that somebody in their group would have to remember on their own to ask him about it at the show’s end. If they forgot, well… then too bad, it would be their loss. And he warned them that it wouldn’t be all that easy to remember to ask, what with all the variety of experiences awaiting them throughout the evening. (Me though, for instance, still parked as I was on my by-now sore knees up there in the crowded balcony? I’d forgotten all about that a minute after he’d offered the challenge.)

So when the evening did finally find itself on the cusp of saying that final good night, one girl did remember to ask. And so there they were at the end, all seated in that horizontal line of old Central Hall chairs upstage center, waiting like trained seals for him to spill the beans, whatever the beans turned out to be.

And him? He paced back and forth, frowning as if trying to think of the best way to approach the subject. “OK,” he finally said. “I have, within the breast pocket of this jacket I wear, an object. An object I dare say unlike any object any of you has ever seen, imagined, or will ever see again. Ostensibly, the object appears to be only an ordinary pair of glasses, but… an ordinary pair of glasses it is decidedly not, as you will soon see for yourselves.

“Because yes, I am going to allow each of you the opportunity of gazing through these magic lenses for yourselves. But I must warn you that what you will witness as you gaze through the ancient crystals will undoubtedly be somewhat disturbing, although look through them you must. For if you do not, you will never believe what your colleagues here will tell you that they themselves have seen. You will suspect them liars, you will see them as delusional, and yet… you will always be left wondering how such good and reliable acquaintances could, or even would, fabricate such a story with which they will inveigle you. Yes, you will always be left wondering. So…”

And here he slowly slipped his right hand into the jacket’s breast pocket and produced… absolutely nothing! Oh but he appeared to be holding up something– something pinched between his thumb and fingers. And his volunteer subjects? They made no indication that they were seeing nothing as he passed closely before them, even holding out his hand that they might examine “the pair of glasses” up close and personal. No, quite the opposite, they were leaning right in, studying the phantom object, and mulling it over with great interest. Of course we, the audience, understood what was going on right from the first. This was one of those The Emperor wore no clothes things. Only…in real life! These kids were seeing something, even if no one else was. It was an amazing spectacle to watch!

(There. Again, you see? The human brain! Go figure.)

“For these ancient ‘spectacles’ allow our eyes to penetrate through right through solid objects. Well, namely fabrics of all kinds.”

Now, as we watched, we could see the entire row of faces suddenly go all-knitted-brows as they took that in, and began pondering… what exactly it was they had just heard…

“Wait a minute,” interrupted the football hero. “You talking about those… those X-Ray Specs things they advertise in the back of comic books? ‘Cause I can tell you right now: they don’t work! Believe me. I ordered me a pair of those once, and they don’t do nuthin’.”

“No, son,” Professor Barron responded condescendingly, “Let me assure you that in no way is that… toy what I’m talking about at all.”

“’Cause they’re a rip-off is all I’m sayin’. No, they really are,” he warned the others, looking left and right up and down the row of students lest they too might end up wasting their money as well. “I mean, jeez, you couldn’t see nuthin’. I’m serious.”

Someone else, a male of course, piped up, “Are you sayin’ what I think you’re sayin’?”

“Could be. So, what is it you think I’m saying?”

“That these glasses let you, what, look right through people’s clothes and all?”

“Well, I’m going to let you answer that one yourself, young man. Right after you’ve had an opportunity to gaze through them.”

“No way,” said the kid, obviously intrigued.

“Ohmigod!” cried a female voice.

“GROSS!” said another.

“Alright, everyone. Time to stand up and stretch your limbs. At this time, I want you all to form a line. We’ll do this taking turns. Going one at a time.”

“Ohmigod!” repeated the female voice.

As they arose and left their chairs behind, it became apparent that the group was demographically split: the girls were hesitant, and feeling very ambivalent, to say the least, about what apparently was about to go down; but the only word to characterize the boys on the other hand was… eager. So much so that, just as the required line had nearly gotten formed, our football hero came bulldozing his way to the front, saying, “I’m going first!” The audience tittered at that. And then, there he was, numero uno, pleased as punch with himself at being firmly ensconced at the head of the line as was his right! Because might makes right.

“Young man,” Professor Barron admonished, “that was nothing but rude and selfish of you. You should be ashamed. I’m afraid I must insist that you go back and line up at the rear of the line.”

“What? No! I mean… come ON! I just…”

“Son. I must insist. And if you refuse to do as I ask, these glasses will return immediately to my jacket pocket. And just think how popular you’ll be then. It’s your choice…”

“Aw JEEZ!” But then our spoiled little bad-boy, hands shoved down in pockets, begrudgingly shambled back to last place in line while the audience happily roared.

(And by the way, dear reader, I’m not making this up. I swear on a stack of Bibles that this is exactly what happened on that stage that night.)

The guy who was now at the head of the line looked to Professor Barron for some direction, who then went on to explain, “All of you in this line will be facing the audience. I alone will hold the glasses. I will place them before your eyes for five seconds, while you behold these people. Then you will return to your seat, allowing the next person to step forward to have his or her turn. Are we all clear on this?”

The subjects all nodded and muttered their combined Yes in unison.

“Very well, then.” Professor Barron studied the boy, and then held the “glasses” up just above the bridge of the boy’s nose. Me, I couldn’t look away. I was sorely wishing I were that kid, who blinked a couple of times, leaned into the ‘glasses’ a bit more as if adjusting for focus, and… “Oh. My. God!” he gasped. His eyes went sweeping like a search light from left to right over the audience. “I mean… are you shittin’ me!?” Such enthusiasm sent a nervous-horse-like ripple down through the line of those behind him. The “glasses” were snatched away.

“Boys and girls. You must… you need… to watch your language. I want you on your best, most formal, behavior. Remember that! Now, you? Back to your seat.”

The boy turned on his heel and began shuffling back to his chair, rather wildly shaking his head.

“NEXT!”

Next, it was a girl who stepped forward. She looked imploringly at the Professor. “Do I really hafta do this?”

“I really think you should,” he replied.

“But… But… Do you realize… my parents are out there?!”

(A lot of laughter from the audience)

“Well, if you know where they’re seated, you could just look elsewhere. But come on now, you’re holding up the line.”

Awkwardly she sort of tried to press her eyes into the “lenses,” then uttered a shaky “No, NO!” and batted the “invisible glasses” away from her face the way you’d brush away an angry horne! But something… something very noticeable was happening to her cheeks. They were flushing a bright, hot, rosy hue! And almost immediately, her entire face and neck were both red, like somebody had just flipped an ‘on’ switch inside her! Shame was written all over her face. And it had happened in mere seconds. I’d never seen anything like it! “I feel like I’m gonna be sick…” she said, hugging herself and shaking her head as well, as she retreated back to her seat.

“Next!”

An eager boy stepped up to the plate. With the glasses in position, he made it a point to gawk right straight down onto the front row of spectators. And such a noisy bustle of people crossing their legs and hugging themselves you could barely imagine. “Oh WOW!” He looked the crowd over. “Oh yeah! Oh YEAH! WOW!”

“Next!”

And so it went. One after the other. And I swear every single girl blushed as crazily as the first one had! As did one boy, by the way. And when our football hero arrived, he couldn’t have been happier with the whole experience. You’d have thought it was Christmas morning. (Or that he had just scored a winning touchdown!)

Up there in the balcony, I was still wishing so hard that I could’ve been one of them on that stage. But, alas, they’d never picked anyone as young as me…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So anyway, in my book? That night goes down as probably one of the top-ten memories of all time that I’ve got DVR’d into that hard drive I call my brain. It was really one of those extra-special “moments” in time, like the remembered “moments” I’ve been sort of dwelling on in my preceding blog entries. This one only lasted a little over an hour, but as a result of witnessing that evening, my life was honestly changed.

FroEver since that night, I’ve been seriously preoccupied with pondering how this blob of gray matter in my skull actually works. And long since then, I’ve had to come to grips with, and simply accept, the fact that I’ll never, ever know. It’s kind of like that song written and performed by folksinger and agnostic, Iris Dement: “Let the Mystery Be.”

Consequently, over a long lifetime, so far I have made it a point to attend no less than a couple dozen hypnotist presentations, some boring, some intriguing, but none ever as intriguing as the showman, Professor Barron, allowed us to experience in 1957 at Dover-Foxcroft’s Central Hall. And back even in the mid-70’s (as I’ve related in an earlier blog post titled “If You Could Read My Mind, Love”… just go to the following url):

( http://tomlyford.com/2023/12/14/if-you-could-read-my-mind-love/ ) 

I also once enjoyed a year-long friendship with a retired clinical hypnotherapist form New York, who worked in hospitals and in the justice system. Loved talking to that guy. And I get it: as long as I live, I’m never going to get over marveling about the wrinkled little organ upstairs that acts sort of as my Hitchikers’s Guide to the Universe…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In retrospect, I found what went on in this little recap almost a little more cruel than funny at times. I suppose this is because I’m can now examine it now from an adult, twenty-first-century morality lens. But in 1957 everyone, including little eleven year old me, found it hilarious. It’s all relative.

Anyway… I guess that makes me guilty of having been born in, and having lived through, the middle of the mid-nineteenth century. It’s all relative. Isn’t everything?

So sue me. It’s like what Bob Dylan once told me through my stereo system’s speakers:

The times, they have a-changed…

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THEY CAME FROM THE SKY!!

The Monsters Were Due on Pleasant Street

Another Lurid, But True, Tom Lyford Story!!

NOTE: BEFORE SCROLLING DOWN TO THE OPENING TEXT, PLEASE LISTEN TO THIS 10-SECOND SOUND BYTE, AND THEN PROCEED...

It finally dawned on me that I’d been listening to a noise, whatever it was, for quite some time. For too long. I opened my eyes. I was in bed.

I looked at the clock. 5:30-something. 5:30-something was not the agreed upon plan! Sleeping in till at least 9:30 was the plan. But just what was that God-awful noise? It sounded like, and I’m serious here, a frickin’ whale breathing through its blowhole. I’d been on a whale watch a few years back and, man, that’s pretty much what they sounded like, to me at least. It was certainly loud enough.

But come on, a whale? So what was it?

I turned half way over and checked on Phyllis. Yeah, still soundly sleeping. Probably wouldn’t be for long though, not with a whale on the roof. I rolled myself quietly out of bed, hauled on a pair of shorts, and tip-toed quietly downstairs.

Then I stepped out onto the porch to a near blinding blue summer sky, what I could see of it anyway. What with the freakin’ whale up there blocking the view. And (holy Moby, Batman!) he was BIG… and blowing loud!

OK, so the day before, Phyllis and I had spent most of the entire day up at the air strip exhausting ourselves standing way too long on our feet and packing away the old hotdogs, burgers, and fries during the big all-day, all-weekend balloon festival. And sure, those balloons looked really big when seen on a wide, flat, empty airfield with nothing but little cub airplanes beside them, but when you step out on your porch and discover one practically rubbing itself up against your roof (you, totally unsuspecting because you’d just woken up from the big sleep and forgotten all about yesterday), then those mothers look cartoonishly huge.

There were two of them up there floating above and around our property which felt a little ironic, considering Phyl and I had both totally agreed that we’d seen enough hot-air balloons yesterday to last the whole weekend. However… apparently the balloons hadn’t seen enough of us. They had hunted us down.

I noticed they were barely moving at all however (no breeze) other than settling downward and then lifting back aloft whenever the pilots fired their hot blasts of flame from the propane burners up into the balloons’ envelopes. And that was pretty much the only thing that was keeping them from thumping right down on our roof. Those deep blasts, of course, explained the unsettling, whale-lung-breathing rasps that had awakened me!

Hmmm. Felt to me like an unexpected ‘adventure’ might be in the offing. I mean, it was just so weird, finding a couple of those big-as-clouds floaters grazing down at tree level right on the street where you live.

I weighed the pros and cons of getting Phyllis out of bed, which sometimes could be like poking a hungry bear with a stick. I know we’d agreed to sleep in, but neither of us could have imagined they’d be coming over to Pleasant Street for an up-close-and-personal play-date. The thing was, I just didn’t want to end up having some kind of unimaginable Bill and Ted’s Great Adventure, only to then get told, “What? Why didn’t you wake me? Oh sure, keep all the fun for yourself, why don’tcha!”

So there I was once again, stuck between a rock and a hard place in Cliché Land, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea not knowing whether to fish or cut bait. But I decided I’d do it.

As I reluctantly headed back up the stairs, I was working at putting together just the right diplomatic words that could serve me as my metaphoric anti-bear spray. So… with my right hand on her shoulder which I squeezed lightly, I watched her eyes slit open and lock onto my desperate, shit-eating grin, and let the whispered words just tumble out: “Hey look, Phyl, I know you wanted to sleep in this morning and yes, you can do that if you want, you can go right back to sleep, that’s up to you, and then I’ll get right back out of here and leave you alone, but I thought you should at least know that something’s going on, the balloons have come here, unexpectedly, and yeah, they’re right over the roof right this very moment, you can hear them, and honestly, they’re practically landing on the roof right now actually, and, well, they’re just amazing, so I just thought, you know, maybe I should just… at least let you know, you know (?) just in case you might wanna get up and see them because it’s so unusual and all, and, whoa, did you just hear that (?)(‘cause yeah, that was one of them!) so anyway I just wanted you to know that, me(?), I’m going back out there to watch’em some more right now , so… but you go right back to sleep, if that’s what you want, and me, I’ll… I’ll just head out now, so, you know, you’ll know that’s where I am should you do decide to… OK, yeah…”

It’s always so hard to concentrate when she’s just been awakened and remains lying there, silently contemplating you with those jaundiced, komodo-dragon eyes like that, so I simply ended with, “OK, sleep tight then. I’m outta here. But don’t worry: I’ll take pictures. You just go on back to sleep now, OK? …See ya…”

And so I tip-toed the light fantastic back down over the stairs and popped out the door. Wow. Were those babies ever huge up there, or what?! And close? So close I could easily hear the balloonists’ chatter from one balloon to the other.

And meanwhile too, off in different directions in the sky, near and far, I could make out a couple more balloons of varying colors and designs playing peek-a-boo overhead and between the trees. But in the meantime there was just no way I could pry my eyes off the two close-ups that the slight breeze had wafted over my house and then (fortunately for me) just stranded them there!

They weren’t moving much, just a little, but they obviously weren’t going anywhere soon.

Our home in 2013, Pleasant Street, Dover-Foxcroft, Maine
Phyllis in white bathrobe in the above photo

I find it difficult to explain just how exciting all this was feeling for me. I mean, I was over the moon! It all just felt so crazily freakin’ WIZARD OF OZ-ish! I couldn’t believe it was actually happening! Fun to the max! And after watching them for five minutes or so, I did observe the passenger basket of one balloon actually drag itself slowly across the peak of my roof. It was creepily reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, with spooky shades of its character, the Dust Witch.

The other one drifted right into the upper branches of one of our maples. But each time unwanted contact, or the threat of unwanted contact, became an issue for either of them, the propane ‘flame throwers’ would roar on again, lifting the balloon out of harm’s way. And that’s pretty much all these balloons seemed capable of doing right at the moment: rising up, sinking down, and rising up in place again. It didn’t feel like they’d be going anywhere horizontally, at least anytime soon.

I heard one of the guys in the closest balloon shout down, “This is Oz, right?”

So… FYI, our house was situated on a big acre-and-a-half lot at the corner of Pleasant and Grove Streets. And at first I was recording all the goings-on while standing right in the middle of Grove Street, looking east, and facing our old gray house and the balloons above it. Actually though, the balloons were hovering over the expansive, well-trimmed lawn in back of the house. And as I zeroed my camera in on the pilot of the nearest one, I caught him pointing downward at our lawn as if contemplating a possible touch-down. And I was thinking, Yes! DO it. Please!

Suddenly I heard a familiar female voice cry out, “Tom! Damnit!” And that was when I caught a fleeting glimpse of Phyllis. She was up and standing ghost-like in her white bathrobe, hiding in the shadows on this, the west side, of our long wrap-around porch.

I yelled, “Phyllis!” but then one of the balloonist called down, “Good morning!” in my direction. And by the time I yelled back at him, “Good morning! Watch out for our house! How ya doin’?” Phyllis had vanished.

I stopped recording temporarily and headed around the house to the lawn out back, where it appeared a touch-down could possibly be imminent.

Turning the corner, all I could think to myself was, Holy crap, they’re so damn BIG! The nearest one was dwarfing my big barn! Nothing like this could ever have been expected and… I’ve got say it was exhilarating. Thrilling even. And when I heard one of them call down, “Got room? Can we land here?” all I could do was blurt out, “Oh yes! Oh yes!” So: it was happening! They were granting my wish. But what was I getting myself into?

Oh, and there she was again. Phyllis. On the east side of the porch now, hiding behind one of the pillars, going for incognito, but watching. Poor thing. Talk about being “stuck between a rock and a hard place,”  her desperately wanting to be a part of the scene but not being properly “attired.” And knowing that if she were, right then, to fly upstairs, throw some clothes on, and battle with a comb at her hair… then, by the time she’d get herself back down there, the whole damn shooting match could very well be over and done with, and she’d have missed it all. So yeah, poor thing. One of those drawbacks of womanhood that makes me glad that, phew(!) I’m not a woman.

But what a wonderful thing this all was, this balloon festival, for a town our size. But especially what a wonderful thing it was to be happening right in our own back yard! Such a happy, crazy morning!

And omigod! One had already landed! And there it was, towering above a handful of people way out on the back lawn, actually on my neighbor’s property, but our lawns were adjacent, with nothing to mark a boundary. But hey, this one? This balloon? Hovering right above my back door, practically? Un-freakin’-believable! Wow. What a sight! What a Sunday this was turning out to be!

Somebody called for some help, and I went jogging over to the basket hanging in the air just above the lawn. “I’m your guy!“I cried. And then, “Who would’ve thought! We thought we were gonna miss the balloon festival today! Welcome to earth! And we just wanna thank you for choosing our property to land on!” What a treat!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

For the next two to three hours, it was like our whole neighborhood had somehow gotten sucked in through some wormhole and had popped out on the other side in an alternate universe of Rod Serling’s old Twilight Zone. A glitch in the matrix, some might say. For years, Phyllis and I had been living this very predictable, mundane life. You know– every day like every other day. Eating, working, watching television, reading books, doing the laundry and dishes, yadda yadda yadda. Very few surprises. And then…? Bang! Our boring back yard just morphed into an unannounced, flash-mob block party! And everyone came!

Pleasant Street

See meanwhile, a dozen or more balloons were drifting all over everywhere, a couple nearly straying off into a neighboring town. And what that meant was that each balloon had attracted its own little posse of cars and pick-ups which were dogging it along the way as best they could. The town had been affected with balloon mania, you see. It was like a combination of an humongous Easter egg hunt and scavenger hunt. On wheels. The day before, Phyl and I had been out there in our car chasing the balloons. It was all the rage.

So now, with two of those big bruisers planted in our back yard, standing so tall you could see them towering over the roof top, they’d become a calling card for the neighbors, neighbors who began trickling in onto our lawn in ones and twos at first. And these neighbors all had their cell phones of course. And what do you do with cell phones? You take pictures, don’t you. And what do you do with the pictures? Oh, you know what you do: you immediately post them right to Facebook.

So word was spreading fast about “the place.’The place where not one, but two hot air balloons were now tethered. “Where’s this place?”somebody frantically posted on Facebook. “Where’s this official landing site everyone’s talking about? I’ve been driving all over and I can’t find it!”

But so many did find it. Thus, the impromptu block party, a party with no music, no food. But so much better than music and food, they had their own balloons at ‘the place.‘ Two of’em! So come one, come all! And so… we heard the sounds of cars rolling in and parking along the roadside, the slamming of car doors, and the excited voices of kids from age five to sixty-five clmbing up the steep grassy banking from the road.

And meanwhile, our back yard population… ballooned.

It was amazing. I welcomed it. Everyone was having a festive time of it. It was shaping up to be a morning to remember.

It was fun, invigorating, talking to a pilot about his ballooning world. Where he’d traveled, how long he’d been pursuing the hobby, etc. Meanwhile, I kept glancing over my shoulder every now and then and there’d be Phyllis, my little, white-bath-robed wallflower, obviously really enjoying the fun but, alas, from afar.

But then, this pilot did something that totally surprised me. He went back to his balloon, leaned in over the side of the basket, rummaged around inside it, and pulled out… a bottle of champagne. (Well, actually it was non-alcoholic “champagne”).

And then he began telling me all about The Balloon Pilots’ Tradition, which goes like this:

Whenever an airborne balloon pilot yells down and asks permission to land on somebody’s property, and that permission is gracefully granted, it is incumbent upon said pilot to present the landowner with a bottle of champagne.  

Huh! I’d never heard of such a thing. Of course, you could probably publish a set of encyclopedias about the things I’ve never heard of. Having been a one-horse-town redneck all my life.

By the way, on the Monday after the festival for instance, word got around about an incident that occurred at a farm three miles out of town. A balloon touched down there after the pilot received landing permission from the owner. The pilot and crew climbed out for a friendly meet and greet. But then, wow, the aeronauts actually pulled a tiny card table and four small collapsible chairs from their basket. Next, out came a little red and white checkered table cloth. Then came the champagne bottle, along with the half dozen, plastic, stemware champagne glasses! And they celebrated. What fun!

But OK, getting back to my pilot, he soon made me understand that he was not about to just unceremoniously hand over the champagne to me. No. The presentation of the balloonist’s gift to the landowner required just a tad more pomp and circumstance than that. I realized he was talking about a formal presentation. A speech. And, as it turned out, not just any old impromptu speech either. He had a piece of paper in his pocket with the speech all typed out on it!

I said, “Hold your horses for a minute there, sir. I think we need to get the other land owner out here to help accept this gift.”

“Well sure. Of course. So, where is this other land owner?”

“That’s her,” I said, pointing toward the porch. “The one in the white bathrobe, acting shy. The last thing in the world she wants is to get caught outside dressed like that. But as you can see, at the same time she’s fascinated by what’s going on, and I know she’s wishing she were out here.”

Fuzzy little snapshot of Phyllis hiding on porch with cell phone camera…

“Well then. So, what’s this other land owner’s name?”

“Phyllis. Phyllis Lyford.”

“All right. Good.” Then he cleared his throat importantly, took a deep breath, and bellowed, “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! EVERYBODY! QUIET DOWN FOR JUST A MOMENT! PLEASE!  I HAVE AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT TO MAKE!”

And amazingly the crowd mostly did quiet down, and practically everyone turned to face the Man with the Message…

“At this time, ladies and gentlemen, I would ask Phyllis Lyford to please step down from the porch and join us here in the center of the lawn.”

Man, I wished right then and wish right now that I’d had my camera ready to go so I could’ve captured the look on Phyllis’ surprised face. Consternation? Chagrin? Chagrin mixed with shock? She was like, WHAT!?

And this was just so Phyllis: “No. Thank you. But no, I’m good. Really.”

But then, with a little encouragement from the pilot, the crowd took up the chant: “Phyllis! Phyllis!”and “Oh, come on down, Phyllis!” etc. It was a silly, grand, and marvelous moment. I found it hard to believe that Phyl, instead of fleeing straight back into the safety and comfort of the house, actually succumbed to the peer pressure… and down she came over the porch steps wearing her Badge of Shame and Impropriety: that white bathrobe that had never seen the light of day! I mean, right out there in front of God, the mob, me, and everybody! And though she was obviously embarrassed, she bravely swallowed her pride and, side-by-side with me, listened to the incredible presentation that began, “And now, to express our gratitude not for only the generosity and hospitality shown to us by this charitable couple who…”

I loved it. Phyllis loved it. And from that day forth, her little white bathrobe became officially known among family and friends as “Phyllis’s Famous White Bathrobe.”So if you know Phyllis, or get to befriend her in the future, feel free to ask her all about it (heh heh).

I am so grateful that someone did have a camera ready this time, and was able to capture and share this photo with me, so that I now may share it with posterity.

And so? That day in May? A Sunday in 2013?

A wonderful time! An unforgettable morning! And forever one of the fondest of all the other million ‘moments’ that lie coded and catalogued somewhere in that little rat’s nest of brain cells I call My Memories.

It was just… all so Emerald City and The Yellow Brick Road. You know?

Home

JUST SAY NO TO STREAKING

 “MOMENTS”

“When other nights and other days…May find us gone our separate ways…We will have these moments to remember.”

—“Moments to Remember” sung by The Four Lads, 1955

Let me begin with something about career public school teachers that you’ve probably never thought about.

Once you’ve spent the better part of your life manning the desk at the front of a public classroom with all that entails— i.e., (and just to scratch the surface here, mind you) lunch duty, hall duty, lobby duty, bus duty, detention duty, prom duty, bullying duty, graduation duty, bomb scare duty, steaking duty, school dance chaperoning, winter carnival chaperoning, study hall monitoring, being a class advisor, being a student club and activity advisor, being a  coach of what-have-you, being a vandalism detective, not to mention the breaker-upper of the fights and the smoking in the boys’/girls’ room, or a warrior of the war on drugs in general… believe me, you’ve got some intriguing ‘war stories’ to share.

Me?  I’ve got hundreds. And one of the things we teachers, retired or otherwise, love doing among ourselves once in a while is rehashing/sharing some of the crazy on-the-job shit we’ve been blessed to have witnessed over the semesters and years. Often it takes the form of a big I‘ve-Got-That-Beat Contest.

These ‘war stories’ are now just fleeting moments floating around like loose flotsam in our memories and in retrospect, I wish now I had titled this blog simply MOMENTS, because that’s basically all I’ve got going on in this blog.

But for instance, I’ll start off with this sample moment told to me by a sweet lady teacher: she shared this one with a bunch of us Ichabod Cranes about being on recess duty in a middle school one time back in the 1970s.

It was in the winter and the snowbanks encircling the playground were really high. Some of the kids were attempting a quick snowman or two here or there, and some were throwing snowballs at each other, while many just tended to stand around in klatches like a waddle of penguins on a frozen shore. Which was the norm.

What wasn’t so normal however was the big kid, a boy half-again larger than most of his peers. He was the loner out there, not at all interested in spending his recess time socializing.

Rather he seemed to be on a mission, a mission that for some reason had him walking the perimeter of the tall, dirty-white walls of snow and, yeah, inspecting them for something. Eventually he stopped. Whatever it was he was searching for, apparently he’d found it.

And then he went right to work, beginning to drill a sizeable hole straight into the wall with his mittened paws. But not on his hands and knees, mind you— if his little “project” had been the typical kid’s snow-tunnel, he’d likely have started his excavation down at ground level, the better for crawling into and back out of. Instead, he was busy hollowing out this wide, waist-high hole straight into the snow bank. He kept right at it for a while, too.  

It didn’t take long though before his head, arms, and upper torso had all but disappeared into the wall. Only his butt and two legs were protruding, like laundry hanging on a clothesline. And all those hard-dug, scooped-out-mittenfuls of push-away snow had ceased being disgorged. Then his buttocks and legs suddenly went visibly relaxed. Went limp even. No more movement. The kid was just… parked there now, half in and half out. Just a pair of limp, seemingly lifeless jeans hanging out of the hole in the wall like some laundry.

Our storyteller says she then she experienced a sudden sharp uptick in her level of concern . Why had the legs stopped moving like that all at once? Had the boy managed to get himself accidentally wedged in there somehow? Stuck? Might there have been… a cave-in? Had he run out of oxygen? Did he need help? So she marched across the playground to him in a hurry.

When she’d gotten to him, she began poking him in the hip and calling out his name. And just as she was about to try to haul him out of the hole by his belt, she realized that she was hearing some muffled muttering from down inside the plugged cavity. Then the half-buried body began to squirm!  And thrash! The kid was now worming his own way out. So he was pretty  conscious, after all.

And then, finally, out he tumbled onto the snow-packed ground. Breach-baby style.

So she had to ask him, “What were you thinking!? Whatever were you trying to DO in there?” But before he could answer, she could smell it.

“All right, alright already!” he snapped. “Whattaya think I was doin’?! I was smokin’ me a damn cigarette, damnit!”

Yeah. Not what you might expect for a middle school playground story, is it but… it was one of her many moments.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK, I bragged that I have hundreds of teacher ‘war stories,’ and I do.

For instance, I could tell you about my very first professional field trip, that time I (as the lone chaperon) had to take a high school English class to Bowdoin College to watch an evening production of Romeo and Juliet. And being a green first-year teacher, I was terrified under the weight of such a momentous responsibility, being solely responsible for the busing of the thirty high school sophomore souls there, and the getting them back home again.

My kids had decided to spread out all over the theater to watch the play. But me, I was sitting way up in a balcony by myself, sweating it out, wondering what I’d do if, say, the head count ended up being one or two heads short when the time came to return home.

Suddenly I felt one of my “boy-heads” easing down into the seat beside me. He sat there silently for a long minute, watching the play I presumed. But then he whispered something into my ear.

“What was that?!” I whispered back.

“I said, ‘We have a problem.’”

“A problem!?” I was totally baffled. “We do…? Like… as in… us? You and me?”

He shook his head no.  “It’s Frankie…” he said.

“Frankie?”

“Yeah, See, he’s having a really bad acid trip right now?”

A what?! Acid trip? “WHAT?”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Or… I could tell you about the time that big crazy Korean kid drove his fist into the superintendent’s gut. Just about laid him out, too. (Was kinda wishing he had.)

Or how about that time all the kids in one of my English classes began surreptitiously inching their seats closer and closer to me whenever my back was turned, me too busy writing on the chalk board to notice. Until I finally turned around to discover I was… box-canyoned up against the wall!

Or the time an actual horse began chomping on the left shoulder of my sports jacket while I was trying to read a poem to my students in the school’s outdoor sanctuary…

OK. See, here’s the thing: some of my “war stories” are kinda cute, but some are kinda devastating. Experience swings both ways. And I’m positive that it’s the same with all career teachers everywhere. “We will have these ‘moments’ to remember…”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OF CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

OK. So… here goes one of my special memorable ‘moments’:

It was very late in May, closing in on Graduation day. Late afternoon. The crushing  temperature and humidity suffocating both me and my students.

I was keeping my classroom door and the windows wide-open for the air, for all the good that was doing. I was reviewing, or trying to review, Adjectives and Adverbs for the final exam. (Yee-HAH!) So yeah, you can just imagine.

All my kids were really thinking about, those who were still awake, was (1) summer vacation and (2) when were the frickin’ yearbooks finally gonna get passed out? And despite my valiant histrionics to keep their attention focused on me…? Yeah, most if not all of them were lost in that mental purgatory somewhere between awake and asleep. I could have sworn the clock on the wall had slowed down. The period seemed to be going on and on like The Never Ending Story.

Other than my own voice, it was dead quiet up there in the English and Social Studies wing. A desert wasteland. So quiet, you’d be able to hear literally anything that moved, or was going on, up or down the entire hallway outside. Which is why I had just suddenly realized that I was half aware of some faint, far off footfalls coming up the hall from the direction of the main office. Most of my mind was like, So what.

But another part of my mind had registered something unusual about those footfalls. There was a hard clop clop clop quality about them. But t my brain was pretty much languishing in the same purgatory that was anesthetizing the brains of my students. So it was way too easy to dismiss such a trivial distraction. Which is what I did. At first.

But the clop clop clops were drawing closer. You could tell that, thanks to the rising Doppler effect. But even then, I was still feeling… Yeah? So what.

Anyway, I went back to chalking up the chalkboard. But my eyes did stray somewhat lazily over to the open door. (All I was really waiting for though, quite honestly, was for that frickin’ final bell to finally ring.) And then, the Doppler thing reached its climax. And the second it did, over my shoulder and pretty much out the corner of my eye, I saw two guys go jogging past the open door.

Ho hum. Chalk in hand, I turned back to the board and continued to…

“MR. LYFORD!”

Now what? I thought to myself.

“MR. LYFORD!”

This time it was a different voice. A girl’s voice. And as I turned around, I was thinking, Can we please just finish this damned… Holy shit! I was stunned right to the core to find every single damned student was gawking straight at me, all gaping and bug-eyed!

“What!?”

“Didn’t you see!? They was NAKED!”

I’d never heard anything so unexpected and ridiculous in my life! “What? No, they weren’t! That’s…”

The voices let loose at me! “They were TOO!” “Didn’t you SEE them?!” “QUICK! Go the door and just LOOK!” “What’re you, BLIND?!”

“Aw, come on! That’s… That’s just stupid!” I countered as I walked the six or seven steps to my open door and belligerently looked out, up the hall, feeling like an idiot, knowing that this was just some idiotic prank they’d… all…

“Oh MY!”

A ‘flashcube’ flashed from behind my eyes and the little two-man tableau down at the end of the hall, down by the exit, was mentally ‘photographed’ and indelibly etched into my memory! For all my eternity, I’d be able to slide that image out of my head like some old family album Polaroid and re-examine it at will. And just as everyone my age can tell you exactly what they were doing when JFK was assassinated, whenever anybody asks me, “What were you doing when the streakers struck?” I’ll remember this image and say, “I was teaching ADVERBS!”

“THERE! You SEE!?” “They naked or WHAT!?”

I couldn’t believe my eyes! How could I have noticed them pass by and… not noticed…? Well, I guess I’d been distracted. But what I was watching then seemed like a scene playing out in slow motion. The rectangular dimensions of the hallway diminishing into the perspective of distance… the pastel sunshine diffusing its gauze of fire through the safety glass of the exit doors to silhouette these two foreground figures. Only ski masks, side-by-side, and the two pairs of white running shoes clothed these twin athletic gods, David and Adonis— lithe, animated, museum statuary now departing the confines of the fine arts museum in a leisurely jog.

Put some pants on, you guys!

Their Olympian tans glowing bronze in the light… only their un-sunned buttocks retaining the white marble of the sculptor. The exit doors swung wide upon contact, opening directly onto a lush green, freshly manicured lawn sloping down before them and away under an idyllic blue summer sky…

And of course there was a phys ed class in full swing down at the bottom of that slope and, yeah, you could hear the chorus of rowdy cheers going up just before the two doors swung shut on the scene.

My addled gaze lingered a few moments more on the closed hallway doors. Then, when I eventually craned my neck around and glanced back down the hall, I observed a teacher’s smirking face hanging out of every single classroom door, left and right all the way down the hall. Not only teachers’ faces, but also a lot of students’ as well!

And what a mood change had just swept over the wing! Everything was now all smirks, grins, and leers.

But… the second thing I observed was even more mood-altering. Up our hall came marching our grave principal, accompanied by his even graver assistant principal, both of them marching to an entirely different drum. Nazis on parade they were, marching to a silent military cadence on their very grave search and destroy mission! And as they passed each open classroom door, the teacher of that room was given the gravest hairy eyeball possible, along with a thundercloud, eye-to-eye, ‘NO!’-twin-shakes-of-the-heads. Of course all teachers immediately turtle-shelled themselves right back inside and out of sight behind their hastily closed doors, one by one as they were passed by.

But the silent message given us by their formal, grave, I-mean-business glares was oh so clear:

THIS IS OFFICIALLY NOT FUNNY! LOOK AT US, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! I SAID, ‘LOOK AT US!’ THIS IS THE OFFICIAL FACIAL EXPRESSION OF THE DAY! MEMORIZE IT. ASSUME IT. AND WEAR IT! NOW! THIS IS NOT A CLOTHING-OPTIONAL INSTITUTION!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes one of the most vivid and special moments stored in my lifetime of memories…

Now, of course what eventually happened over the next couple of days, is the administration rounded up a lot of easy-to-break kids, sweated them under the old lightbulb, and went good cop/bad cop on’em until some of them finally cracked, named names, and ratted out our daring David and Adonis. Both of whom were soon rounded up and brought in as persons of interest for questioning.

Long story short? They were suspended and forbidden to participate in graduation exercises. And lo, it was let to be known, then that the staff’s official, obligatory, from-now-on-reaction to their heinous crime must forever be SHAME. ON. THEM!

So: as usual, Blind Justice had won out in the end. And the school of course was a much better place thereafter for it, what with the egregious example that showed the student body (pun intended) that showing the student body is a vile, criminal act punishable by the most punishable punishment that the administration could imagine itself punishing anybody with.

So there!

Thus endeth the retelling of one of my Story-Moments…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So yeah, this is only one of the many I have locked up in the Educational Career vault of my brain. And I do harbor oh so many more. Some of which I will be sharing with you in the future…

And now, if you wish, just sit back and enjoy the music and lyrics of:

THE STREAK written and performed by Rat Stevens

Hello, everyone, this is your action news reporter
With all the news that is news across the nation
On the scene at the supermarket
There seems to have been some disturbance here
Pardon me, sir, did you see what happened?

Yeah, I did
I’s standin’ over there by the tomatoes
And here he come
Running through the pole beans
Through the fruits and vegetables
Naked as a jay bird
And I hollered over t’ Ethel
I said, “Don’t look, Ethel!”
But it’s too late
She’d already been incensed

Boogity, boogity
(There he goes)
Boogity, boogity
(And he ain’t wearin’ no clothes)

Oh yes, they call him the Streak
(Boogity, boogity)
Fastest thing on two feet
(Boogity, boogity)
He’s just as proud as he can be
Of his anatomy
And he gon’ give us a peek

Oh yes, they call him the Streak
(Boogity, boogity)
He likes to show off his physique
(Boogity, boogity)
If there’s an audience to be found
He’ll be streakin’ around
Invitin’ public critique

This is your action news reporter once again
And we’re here at the gas station
Pardon me, sir, did you see what happened?

Yeah, I did
I’s just in here gettin’ my tires checked
An’ he just appeared out of the traffic
He come streakin’ around the grease rack there
Didn’t have nothin’ on but a smile
I looked in there, and Ethel was gettin’ her a cold drink
I hollered, “Don’t look, Ethel!”
But it was too late
She’d already been mooned
Flashed her right there in front of the shock absorbers

Boogity, boogity
(He ain’t lewd)
Boogity, boogity
(He’s just in the mood to run in the nude)

Oh yes, they call him the Streak
(Boogity, boogity)
He likes to turn the other cheek
(Boogity, boogity)
He’s always makin’ the news
Wearin’ just his tennis shoes
Guess you could call him unique

Once again, your action news reporter
In the booth at the gym
Covering the disturbance at the basketball playoff
Pardon me, sir, did you see what happened?

Yeah, I did
Half time, I’s just goin’ down thar to get Ethel a snow cone
And here he come, right out of the cheap seats, dribbling
Right down the middle of the court
Didn’t have on nothing but his PF’s
Made a hook shot and got out through the concessions stands
I hollered up at Ethel
I said, “Don’t look, Ethel!”
But it was too late, she’d already got a free shot
Grandstandin’, right there in front of the home team

Oh yes, they call him the Streak
Here he comes again
(Boogity, boogity)
Who’s that with him? (The fastest thing on two feet)
Ethel? Is that you, Ethel? (Boogity, boogity)
(He’s just as proud as he can be)
What do you think you’re doin’? (Of his anatomy)
(And he gon’ give us a peek)
You get your clothes on!

Oh, yes, they call him the Streak
Ethel! Where you goin’? (Boogity, boogity)
He likes to show off his physique
Ethel, you shameless hussy! (Boogity, boogity)
If there’s an audience to be found
He’ll be streakin’ around
Invitin’ public critique
Say it isn’t so, Ethel!

Oh, yes, they call him the Streak
Ethel! (Boogity, boogity)

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POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST?  PART III

WHAT HAPPENS IN BELFAST STAYS (not) IN BELFAST

Somewhere back in the 90’s, I had a teacher friend whose hobby was wood carving. He’d discovered I was dealing with practically terminal boredom, and suggested I take up “whittling” as a hobby. I decided to take him up on it. To me, it seemed perhaps he’d just tossed me a lifeline. His motif of choice was Christmas ornaments. Me, I was a little too dark right then for something quite as Jingle Bells as Christmas ornaments, but what should I whittle? Here I had this block of wood in front of me that could end up being… anything. I spent a long time just staring at it, very much I’m sure like Michelangelo stared at his block of marble before giving the world his David.

To me, it had to be something useful. I’m just not a doo-dads kind of guy. But what could I create that would be useful in any way? And to whom? Wait. How about something… psychologically useful. Yeah, how about something psychologically useful to… me? And then I did get an idea, albeit (like most of my ideas) one that was dark and complicated. But so me.

And here’s my finished product, my little own David though I like to call it myown little Tommy. And it’s been sitting on my shelf in the den ever since the 90s. Yeah.

This objet d’art (ha ha) commemorates a sad little childhood memory. Me, approximately age five, I’m guessing. My cousins, four or five years older than me. Meanies. Bullies. They owned two sets of boxing gloves. Too large for me, but they didn’t care. They’d just poke my hands down into them and cinch them on my wrists with twine.

And then there was the other little cousin, about the same age and size as me. They’d do the same to him. Then they’d gather round us and push us together as if we were a couple of bantam roosters in the cock-fighting arena and cheer, “There’s the bell! OK! Let’s go! Start punchin’, guys!  Go for the faces! Go for the tummy!”

And this other little kid, who, I guess was a ringer? I’m pretty sure they’d given him some training. Because he knew what to do. Me? Not so much. I mean, basically I was just standing there with a big fat target on my nose, when WHANG!

And when my eyesight sort of slowly segued back into operation, I was on my back and blinking up at the too bright sky. And oh, all those mean and cruel cackles, hoots, and the catcalls.

So yeah, I guess you could say I’ve had a little experience in ‘the ring,’ metaphorically speaking. A sad experience. A humiliating one. But perhaps one that was instrumental in unconsciously encouraging me to make one of those altering-the-vector-of-your-life’s-path decisions I discussed earlier:

I became a lover, not a fighter.

I’ll give you the example, and then we’ll move on to what happened in Belfast…

OK. So I’m out in the hallway of my college dorm. A bunch of us boys (it was a mens’ dorm after all, no girls allowed ever) were horsing around, playing hall hockey. It was midnight, or a little thereafter. But there was this one kid I didn’t like so much who was seriously bugging me. He’d been rubbing me the wrong way ever since I’d first met him in the fall. (If you’ve ever read The Catcher in the Rye, think Ackley. Enough said?)

A couple of times already, just as ‘dI got the “puck” (think rolled-up-and-taped-ball-of-paper) lined up for a slap-shot with my broom (think “hockey stick”), he’d jab his finger into my rib cage to throw me off. And both times he’d done it so far, he’d giggled, which was super annoying. The first time I’d said, “Knock it off!” He giggled. The second time I’d said, “Cut it OUT!” and he’d practically giggled his head off.

The third time I simply stopped, turned slowly around, laid the hairy eyeball on him for a good fifteen seconds before explaining it to him in a slow, Clint Eastwood-like voice (OK, true, nobody’d ever really heard of Clint Eastwood back in 1966), “I wouldn’t wanna be you if you’re stupid enough to do that one more time. You dig?” So I turned to resume the game and guess what.

Yeah. He did it again. Sounding like some gaggle of flighty eighth-grade girls giggling it up big time at a sleep-over party. I threw the broom down, and turned on him. “What did I just tell you… Bob?” He was unable to answer, the due to the hysterical giggling shaking his bowl-of-Jello sides. I looked him over. Yeah, he was bigger than me. But all of the bad guys in Shane were bigger than Alan Ladd, so…

Now, keep in mind, yes, I was very aware of the fact that I had never even once in my life ever hit anyone, had never even swung on anybody. All the fights I’d gotten into in grade school were like grunting little wrestling matches, so yeah, I was nervous. But so what, I told myself, there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there. So I studied his head, looking for the best spot to land my knuckle sandwich. The jaw. Yeah. He looked to me like the type of guy that probably might have what they called a ‘glass jaw.’ I’d hafta swing up though, since he was taller.

I doubled up my right fist. Whipped it in an arc back down behind my butt, from whence I would launch the powerful haymaker swing of all swings that would drop him on his giggling ass. Why was I hesitating? C’mon Tom, you can do this thing! OK, count down time: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0!

 I swung for the fences!

And totally missed…

The momentum my haymaker swing had accrued actually hurled me into the cinderblock wall where, like Wile E. Coyote, I slowly slid down onto the hall floor. I was dazed and confused. Bob too was a little dazed and confused. But at least he’d stopped that insane giggling. Duly embarrassed, I pretty much closeted myself in my dorm room for a week or so after that.

That was the first and last time I ever took a swing at anybody.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK, my first ever teaching position ever: Belfast Area High School. On the coast of Maine.

I was terrified. All my life I’d been suffering from stage fright and, now, suddenly having to face classes of thirty human beings six times a day (too many of whom looked a lot more adult than I did) just sitting there staring at me? Waiting for me to begin doing whatever it was I was getting (omigod!) professionally paid to do? Human beings all suddenly required to address me as none other than “Mister Lyford”? I mean… hell, I was no “Mister Lyford,” not the last time I looked!

On top of that, they’d given me classes for which there weren’t enough books! They’d forced me to take the dramatics Coach job when I’d never even been in a play in my LIFE! They’d dumped most of the worst classes on me (a common dirty trick, I discovered, to play on the new hires). And one of my two Speech classes was filled with “students,” not a single one of which was willing to even stand up and tell me his/her name! Please forgive me for so often making comparisons to literary characters, but at that time in my nervous, incipient-ulcer life, I was Catch-22’s Major Major Major Major! In my first week, I was sure I’d made the mistake of a lifetime, allowing myself to ride the collegiate merry-go-round only to get dumped off at the end of the four-year-ride as an “educator.” I was a wreck. I used to walk the streets at night with the superintendent’s phone number in my pocket (I swear this is true), look longingly at each phone booth I passed, and try to get up the courage to call in sick for the rest of my life. OK, reality check: that wasn’t happening all year long, no. Mostly just in the first few weeks of the culture shock I was going through.

But then something happened. The Phys. Ed. department purchased and installed a speed bag in a corner of the gymnasium. And if anyone needed an outlet that involved hitting something, I was that guy. Of course a couple of things got in the way. (A) I was still The Stage-Fright Kid. If I were going to use said speed bag, it would have to be after school when no one was around to see me. Isn’t that sad? Me, The Performance Anxiety Poster Boy.  Plus (B) some Neanderthal Moron straight out of one of Gary Larson’s future Far Side cartoons took a single, brainless, Paul Bunyan swing and obliterated the bagand me along with it like a pair of flattened tires!

So, during the long, two-week wait for a new bag to be shipped, I asked the Phys Ed Department to please “educate” (if that were conceivably possible) their “students” (using the term charitably here) on the differences between a speed bag and a heavy bag. Which they graciously did. And at last, there it was. The shiny new speed bag hanging there, my own little bottle of tranquilizer tablets. It had been a long wait. But every week night from then on, after all the little Neanderthals had walked or ridden their school buses home to their caves, I would materialize there before it The Bag and then… right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right fist-bam bam bam… only at the speed of light, because I was that good. And oh! The relief!

Oh, of course custodians would show up to sweep the gym floor, and kids who were in after-school programs would pass through the gym on their way somewhere or other (and yeah, I could sort of feel some of them stopping behind me to watch for a bit, but that was OK since once I got in my groove, it was like I was cocooned in my own little bubble and the world outside no longer existed).

Ah! Mental health! It’s not overrated you know.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So, a week or so later, me ensconced in my desk before a very large study hall, my classroom door swung open. In the doorway stood the high school principal. My inner reaction was Oh shit! What now? Because I wasn’t quite ready yet for my English class coming up next period; no, I was striving desperately to flesh out some last-minute Hail Mary in that regard. Plus, I really had to wonder (worry-wart-me), had I possibly done something wrong to merit this visit? As a Major Major Major Major, I was always worried about that.

“Excuse me, Mr. Lyford,” he began, “but there are some students down in the gymnasium who were wondering if you’d be so kind as to go down there and give them a little demonstration on the new, err, punching bag.”

“What? Who, me? Um. No, I can’t right now. I have this study hall, you see.”

“Oh, not a problem, Mr. Lyford. I’m happy to sit in here to cover for you for the rest of this period. So…”

A fist had just clamped onto my Poster Boy heart and was giving it a crushing squeeze! “Well, I…”

“It’s a Phys Ed class. The teacher told me that a number of the kids have reported seeing you working out on it, and, well, they’d like it very much if you could give them a few pointers, you know.”

“Oh gosh… I dunno. I doubt I’m good enough to give anyone a demonstration…”

“Oh, sure  you are. They say you’re very good. And it’ll be good for the kids.”

“Oh. Sure. Well, then.” With Irritable Bowel Syndrome threatening to come on, I took off my suit jacket and hesitantly draped it over the back of my chair. It was a very long walk (in my mind) down the halls, down the stairs, and out to the gymnasium on the other end of the building. When I pushed through the double doors and stepped into the gym, I was immediately mortified. My principal had said “some kids.” But my God, there had to be four Phys Ed classes waiting for me out there, if not more, all standing around the speed bag in a semi-circle. I nearly fainted. Phobias are powerful things, aren’t they. The human Red Sea parted, allowing me a slim corridor through which to pass. It really felt like most of my inner systems were shutting down. Sweat? I guess to hell I was sweating!

I have no memory of what I might have said to the kids and coaches. I stumbled through some kind of introduction I guess, but it probably didn’t make a lot of sense. I do know that I owned up to my nervousness. Whatever I said, eventually it was time came to face the bag. I know that my timing was way off, due to nerves, and I remember botching my routine on my first two or three tries which was so embarrassing, especially when I just missed getting slapped in the nose again by a rebound, as I had on day-one. “OK, I’m really nervous,” I confessed. “No shit!” somebody muttered in the crowd behind me. Yeah. Hecklers. All I needed.

But then my brain kicked in, telling  myself I needed to begin slowly, as slowly as I had when I had my first lesson. So, that’s what I did. Slow-motion… right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right fist-bam bam bam, which I’m sure was disappointingly boring to the mob. But… as I gradually increased the speed, I began to feel my muscle memory kicking back in.And as I no longer was facing all those faces in the crowd, only the bag itself, I could concentrate better and with that, I could feel my protective bubble-cocoon forming around me…

And then, I was AOK! Houston, we no longer have a problem! Man, I started loosening up, and then really letting loose! I watched the bag disappear into the blur right before my very eyes! And then, before I knew it, my elbows came into play. And then my forehead was getting its licks in, taking turns with my fists at batting that bag back! Right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right elbow-bam bam bam, left elbow-bam bam bam, forehead-bam bam bam… I mean, what a show-off! You know, sometimes when you discover you’re performing well, you can feel the mood change in your audience, and I was suddenly more confident that all was well behind me.

And then the class bell was ringing, although I barely noticed it. But the kids were heading off to other classes. But there! It was done! Over! Ended! I could breathe.

Well, not quite ended exactly. Because after that day, after… the word got out, a couple or more things began to happen…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Something I need to tell you about Belfast in 1968. It was one tough little town.

For instance there was a movie theater downtown. And there were a couple of levels in that theater, so that it was possible to be showing a movie on one level while having some entirely different type of event happening on the other.

So one of the other types of events was local amateur boxing. Now that would have struck me as perfectly fine. But their definition of amateur boxing seemed to mean NO TRAINING NEEDED. So it was come one, come all. Come as you are. Walk-ins off the street were fine.

Now the way that showed up in the high school scene is that on many a Monday morning (or sometimes even by a Wednesday morning, depending on just how laid up or crippled the “amateur” had become) I’d commonly see boys coming back to school with a black eye, one or two teeth knocked out, a bandaged fist, or an arm in a sling. Seemed pretty sketchy to me, but that’s how it was.

How that showed up in my  high school teacher’s life is that suddenly I started getting shadowed by these big, 200-pound bruiser-types would stop me in the hall, or show up in my classroom after school, to invite me to come on down! They thought it’s be just great to get to spar a few rounds with me, a faculty member. Of course I had zero interest to become one of their outside-of school “friends” or their sparring partner. That was a pretty uncomfortable feeling. I would assure them over and over that I was not a boxer. They’d laugh that off because to them it was so obvious that that’s exactly what I was, and everybody in school knew it.

For a lot of them, they felt they didn’t need any special training because they had their muscled arms, their scarred fists, and their pea-sized brains. What else could they need or want? They didn’t “get” the speed bag concept. They had no clue how to work that speedbag because… We don’ neeed no steenkin’ speed or timing. We just knock your block off. They were the infamous one-punch speed bag mutilators.

After assuring them over and that I was just an English teacher and nothing else, they’d ask, “Well, why don’t you come down to the theater and be my trainer then?” They were utterly confused when I’d tell them, “No, you know what? I’ll be content just staying home, rocking in my old rocking chair on the porch during the evenings, just reading a good book. But I could see it in their eyes. They were imagining, This guy’s a professional, that’s what. He just thinks he’s too good to bother himself with our amateur stuff.

Anyway, the invitations kept coming and coming, pretty much throughout the year that I lived there. Honestly, I found it a little scary.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK, I’m going to bring this post to an end with an odd-duck little Belfast anecdote. There are so many of them. This one happened in one of my two Speech classes, the one where nobody was ever willing to make a speech, even a small one.

There was one kid there, Peter by name, who took that refusal to the ultimate level. He just refused to talk in my class at all. You would never even catch him whispering to one of his classmates. It was as if he had taken a monk’s vow of silence. Sometimes I wondered if he was honestly able to speak, if maybe there was something wrong with his vocal chords. But then, I’d see him talking to people outside of class. Imagine my frustration.

I been at my wit’s end trying to think up some really easy assignment that even the shyest, most obstinate kid could get behind. And what I’d come up with was basically a somewhat disguised version of Show and Tell. I asked them to pick some object, nearly any object that was in some way important to them (an object that would help us learn a little bit about the speaker) and then say just a few sentences about it. That’s all. Maybe tell why it’s important. Maybe tell how, or even where, they’d got it. A memento of some vacation trip they’d taken, perhaps. A picture of a friend. Anything!

And here was the kicker: Anybody who did this, anybody who could actually get up in front of the class, show the class an object,and then blurt out three or more sentences about the object will receive a guaranteed automatic A+ . (I was willing to do anything to get the ball rolling in those strange souls. Sometime you just had to prime the pump.)

It worked somewhat well. Some kids did stand at the front of the room. Some kids did manage to mutter something or other. Hey, I was really getting somewhere! I was on a roll. And those students did receive their automatic A+ as promised.

All except Peter.

At first I thought he was actually going to participate. I’d said, “Pete? OK. It looks like your turn. You’re up. Whattya say?” He grinned. He was good at grinning. Grinned big time whenever I acknowledged him, actually. Not so hot at eye contact though. Never once looked me directly in the eye, did Pete. Didn’t look anbody in the eye as far as I knew. But after I called on him, and after honestly a two-minute period of grinning hesitation, he bent over and started rifling through his large duffle bag on the floor  for… something. It was a good sign.

At last he pulled out his object. A portable radio.

“A radio,” I said. “That’s great Pete. I’m guessing most of us can identify with that choice. Good. So, go on up to the front, and then we’ll listen to your presentation, alright?”

It was obvious, despite the big Cheshire cat grin, that he didn’t want to do that. It took quite a bit of coaxing, but (yay!) he did finally walk himself up there to the front. I was pretty excited about the progress.  “Alright, Pete. Go ahead now. We’re all ready.”

It was so weird, the way he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, look at anybody. His eyes would dart left, then right, up, then down, but never a hint of eye contact. It was sad. Easy to imagine something very negative had happened in his life. And here I was, a totally inexperienced “teacher,” flying by the seat of my pants with all of this.

“Pete?”

No response. Nothing.  He was just standing there, holding the radio. “We’re ready, Pete. You can do this. Just a few comments now, and the A+ is yours.”

By now I pretty much knew he wasn’t going to speak, and that added to the sadness. sad. “Peter? This is your last chance. C’mon. We’re waiting…”

Suddenly Pete lifted the little radio up chest high, examined it for a moment, plucked the little antenna up out of its socket, and turned the it on. Suddenly we could all hear ome disc jockey’s voice, talking it up to his fans. I allowed myself to listen for half a minute, and then said, “Pete? It’s time to say a few words…”

And what did Pete do? He responded by turning up the volume. “Well, OK. Guess that’s just about it, Pete. Last chance. Either you say something, or I‘m gonna have to ask you sit back down. OK?”

Grinning a chilling Jack-o-Lantern’s grin, now he cranked the volume all the way up. I mean really cranked it! That little radio put out a lot more oomph than I’d ever have guessed. And there he simply  stood, a boy with radio in hand.

“OK. That’s it Pete. Have a seat please.”

Nothing

“Sit down, Pete. I mean it.”But he didn’t, he wouldn’t. “Rightnow” Either sit down, or you’ll have to go to the office.” I realized I might as well have been talking to the wall. He wouldn’t budge. I was sitting at the back of the room for this assignment, and at this point I stood up. “OK, you know where the door is.”

As I started walking down the aisle toward the front, Pete sidled off to his right. As I moved to follow him, he started moving up an aisle two aisles over. I strolled over to his current aisle and started moving up it, causing him to execute a long u-turn at the back of the classroom and occupy another one three aisles over.

“Aw, c’mon, Pete. That’s enough, now. Let’s not make it any worse. Out you go on your own, or I’ll hafta call the assistant principal!” That ultimate threat obviously carried no weight whatsoever that I could see. It had now become a surreal game of Catch as Catch Can. With chess moves, him always keeping approximately two aisles away from me! They certainly hadn’t prepared me for anything even close to this in our Classroom Management seminars and classes What was I expected to do?

Enough was enough. My teaching career was only days old and I had never anticipated, or even really imagined (until this moment) having to lay my hands on anyone, but… the other kids thought this was the most entertaining joke ever, and were beginning to cheer and egg him on. It had to end.

I decided to take a short cut. There was an empty desk in the row between Pete and myself, so I muckled onto it and began pushing, to bulldoze it sideways out of the line of desks! Like all of them in that room, it was an ancient wooden thing so old that Abraham Lincoln might have sat in it prior to the Civil War. Pete, still clutching the loud radio, saw what I was up to and frantically started glancing forward and aft for the best possible escape route! Now, just as someone comically yelled, “Look out, Pete, he’s a boxer!” one of the front legs of my desk got hung up on something, sending it toppling forward to crash onto the floor with practically thunderclap!  Pete whirled back around to face me! Then we both found ourselves gawking down at the thing between lying there between us.

Like him, I was shocked at seeing the old desk lying there in two main pieces, split right down the middle from the concussion! But unlike him, I actually knew what had really just happened. Pete on the other hand, with “Look out, Pete, he’s a boxer!” still echoing in his ears, did not. For all he knew, I might have busted the desk in half in a rage with a single, mighty blow from my Heavyweight Champion of the World FIST OF FURY!

The only good thing about that was that I didn’t have to ask Pete anymore to leave my classroom. He just went scampering out that door like a rabbit with its tail on fire.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So now you understand why a lady from Belfast I’d never met looked at me across the teachers’ lounge table and surprised me, surprised all  of us really, with, “So… you’re the boxer.”

It’s as I told you near the beginning of Part II: “It so amazes me how one little decision you make can bend the vector of your life in future ways you’d never imagine. Just as a beam of light bends when it passes through a clear glass of water. And once you make that decision, and then go forward with it, you‘re living in an imperceptibly altered universe.

“I made a little decision back in 1966. I was a college junior at the time…”

And from that insignificant decision, simply to take up learning how to increase my timing via the use of something called a speed bag (a hobby basically no more momentous than, say, taking up baton twirling or coin collecting), I have been remembered through the decades by a high school faculty and student body, as the boxing English teacher.

“It’s a strange life, no matter how you shake it, it’s a strange life…” – Dave Mallett

Thanks for reading.

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POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST?  PART II

“POET … PEACENIK… PUGILIST? PART I” ended with the following:

“Omigod! A memory suddenly clicks on in your mind! Oh SHIT! I know what this is about!”

Everybody leans forward.  The gorilla football coach, sizing you up with a crocodile grin says, “So how ‘bout you and me, we have us a little sparring session out in the gym this afternoon? You could, you know, give me some pointers.”

With a futile shake of the head, you mutter, “For crying out loud, I can’t believe this is happening all over again!”

But it is.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

A JOURNEY OF 1000 MILES BEGINS WITH…

“It’s a strange life, no matter how you shake it, it’s a strange life…” – Dave Mallett

Please know that I can’t write fiction to save my life. Believe me, I’ve tried. So whatever it is I end up writing, it always comes directly from real experiences. The above little round-table dialogue happened just as I’ve described it, if not word for exact word. And the conversation left me feeling that our good ol’, typical, every day teachers’ luncheon had (whoosh!) just suddenly deep-sixed itself straight down Alice’s Wonderland rabbit hole! 

I mean, put yourself in my shoes—someone you’d just met, somebody to whom you had spoken only those three, maybe four sentences (in your life), just suddenly willy-nilly turns the conversation inside out and upside down just like that! By outing you as a boxer. I mean, If I’d been as a matador, would that be any more bizarre? I was looking her eye to eye across the table thinking, OK, so who’s the dweeb that let the escaped inmatein here?

Meanwhile, it was a little excruciating, the way everybody just keptsitting there, silently gawking. Things had gotten creepy fast. I was like, C’mon people! Say something! Can’t somebody at least say, “Well. This is a little awkward, isn’t it!” I was all knotted up in frustration.

And then, like I said, it hit me.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

You know, it so amazes me how one little decision you make can bend the vector of your life in future ways you’d never imagine. Just as a beam of light bends when it passes through a clear glass of water. And once you make that decision, and then go forward with it, you‘re living in an imperceptibly altered universe.

I made a little decision back in 1966. I was a college junior at the time.

I’d started hanging out in the gymnasium, basically because my roommate and I had taken up playing handball two or three times a week. I was experiencing a lot of stress from some of my classes that year (especially chemistry), and it helped me relax, and burn off some of my nervous energy. Plus, at the same time it was getting me into excellent shape. I’d been jumping rope there, doing pull-ups, push-ups, crunches, etc. almost every week day. And the feeling I was getting from the workouts was so satisfying, so incredibly therapeutic.

But anyway, I started noticing this young guy who was also showing up daily at the gym. A loner, it seemed, just about my height and weight, and short like me. Anyway, he was sticking to a regimen similar to mine, but with one big exception. There was a punching bag hanging down, over in one corner of the room. Not the big bag (no, not one of those Rocky Balboa’s frozen-hanging-steer-carcass-punching-bags in the slaughter house meat freezer), but the small one known commonly as the speed bag or peanut bag. About the size of a football.  

And man, when he went to work on that thing, I couldn’t take my eyes off his “magic.” Yeah, I just called it magic, even though it wasn’t anything you can’s see in the movies from time to time. In fact, most serious athletes training for the ring could probably match this guy’s speed and timing on it. Because those guys all learn to do that, don’t they.

But here’s the thing: (1) I’d never personally witnessed someone doing the routine up close and personal, and never right there in the same room as I, and (2) it turned out that there was a kind of crude beauty to it. This guy’s fists made the little bag “disappear” in a blur! And even watching him up close, I could not see how he was possibly pulling that off.

He’d start off with a probing little punch or two at first, and then more taps, but once he’d let his fists go and got that little blur of a bag purring like a twelve-horse Yamaha outboard motor, his arms would seemingly no longer be moving. And surprisingly his fists didn’t seem to be all that busy either, although of course they were doing what they had to do. I mean, his mitts were just casually rolling, not that fast either, round and round about each other in the air like a large pair of twiddling thumbs. Or, so it seemed, almost like some little old lady’s’ hands when she’s crocheting.

But… man, he’d ply that bag into a frickin’ leather tuning fork! So from my inexperienced point of view, it looked amazing. I mean I saw his two arms, attached to that rackety blur, as a pair of biological jumper cables keeping that noisy little motor running. It just looked so cool.

I definitely knew I would like to try my hand at it.

But I was shy, so I  waited till he’d left. Then I tiptoed over to the bag and gingerly gave it a couple of friendly, nothing-burger, taps. Of course the bag didn’t do anything more notable than swing back and forth a couple of times and then (not being at all impressed with my assault) fell right back sleep again. Just hanging there, practically taunting me with its superior, leathery That all ya got? Punk?

So I followed that up with a serious, sharp punch with my lightning right!

Before my left got a chance to fly up there into the fray to back me up, that rebounding bag of cement whapped my nose one hell of a nasty blow that raced shockwaves of excruciating pain right through my eyeballs and on back to my unsuspecting brain! I was wobbled, nearly dropped right there in a one-punch knockout loss! My eyes, immediately blinded behind a welled-up flood of tears; my wasp-stung schnozz oozing, but not with blood! I mean… hey. Baby, that HURT!

I staggered away like a drunk, desperate to get myself safely out of range before another attack of the damned thing! I mean, bite me once, shame on you! Bite me twice, shame on me!

The pain took only a little while to fade. But the black and blue bruises all over my ego would hang in there for days. I have to admit it: I’m a snowflake. I have a fragile ego. And this… it just felt so… unfair. Blindsiding me with Newton’s Third law like that. I never saw it coming.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I saw the guy again a couple of days later, approached him, and humbled myself. “How the hell do you do this?” I asked. “Not that I’m necessarily planning on trying it, mind you.” And yes, there I actually was. Momentarily lowering my self-esteem by allowing myself by playing the old See, I’m just asking for a friend card. “I mean, you make it look so easy.”

This young man was a true gentleman. He generously took me under his wing and walked me through the ABC’s of it. Who knows? Maybe he took one look at me and saw a potential future heavyweight champion of the world.

“First and foremost, this is not a punching bag,” he began. “It’s a speed bag. Idiots come in here, take one powerful haymaker swing at it, to show how tough they are, and bust the thing. Then, guess what. We don’t have a bag for another a couple of weeks. So. This bag is not about power or strength. It is about speed and timing only. OK?”

“OK!” In my mind, I checked off No punching the punching bag. “Got it.”

“So then…” And he began walking me through the exercise in slow motion. It was like stop-motion photography. “It’s a one-two-three count rhythm you’re after. Like in music. So, think of yourself playing an instrument. A percussion instrument. With your hands.

“So first of course you make fists, right? Only then… instead of striking the bag knuckles-first, you bat it away with the side of your fist. Picture yourself driving a nail into a plank of wood, bare-handed. You wouldn’t use your knuckles for that, would you. No. You’d bang it like your fist was a hammer. Or… think of knocking on somebody’s door.  Normally, you’d tap with your knuckles. But if you were a cop serving a warrant, say, you’d hammer the door with the side of your fist: bam bam bam! It’s the police, OPEN UP!”

“Side of your fist… got it!”

“OK. Now for the rhythm part. Here’s the bag, just hanging there, right? OK. Watch what happens when I tap it with the side of my fist.”

He does that: the bag flies backward, strikes the rear of the overhead horizontal backboard Bang! to which the bag’s swivel is attached. It flies back (just as it did when it nearly coldcocked me the other day) and, in rebound, slams the backboard in the front: Bang! Rebounds back again, once again striking the rear of the backboard. Bang!

“See? Bam bam bam. One two three. That’s your percussion instrument rhythm.”

I was perplexed. “Uhmm… Wait. I counted four. The bag came back again and hit the board for a fourth bam.”

“Oh, right! But like I said, we only want three. So what you do is… you don’t allow the fourth one to happen.”

“Uhm… I don’t?”

“No. You stop the swings after the three-count. And you do that with the next strike of your fist, catching it in motion. Which starts the count all over again. See?” He demonstrates with the bag, very much in slow motion. “Fist! One two three. Fist! Bam bam bam. Fist! One two three. Fist! Bam bam bam. Fist! “And so on and so forth.

“So no, as you see, there’s no fourth bam allowed. And, as you also saw, I was only doing this one-handed. Which is the best way for you, a beginner, to get your timing down. OK, first do it for a while with your right; then switch over and do it for a while with just your left. Then when you get tired of that, you’ll alternate using both: right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right fist-bam bam bam…and so on.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Oops! We’ll stop here.

OK, a little voice inside my head just whispered all private to me, “You’re getting boring, Tommy.”

So… suffice it for me to quickly say that (A) I managed to get so I could do this using both fists… still in slow motion. Then, (B) with both fists fairly fast. Pretty soon, you could say I was getting pretty fast indeed. Soon after that, if you saw me standing there working that speed bag, you could easily surmise, “Wow, check him out. Now that guy’s a boxer, if ever I saw one.”

But wait! It gets better! My gymnasium friend started teaching me little tricks, like getting my elbows and forehead involved in the fray. Without bragging, I have to say (again, without bragging now) that as a Speed Bagger… I… was… MAGNIFICENT!  I had graduated Maga Cum Laude from Speed Bagging University. I should have had my own float in the Rose Bowl Parade!

It’s a shame they didn’t have Speed Bagger competitions back then. Just sayin’.

OK, OK, OK. Let’s just let it stand that I was… ahem… in my own opinion, pretty darned good at it, alright? (Not to blow my own horn, of course.)

SO, THANKS FOR READING, AND THANKS FOR SUBSCRIBING. AND KEEP YOUR EYE PEELED FOR THE FINALE: “POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST? PART III COMING SOON!

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POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST?

PROLOGUE

I present for your consideration a strange and very unlikely (but true) scenario. (Perhaps you might want to imagine me as Rod Serling, introducing the upcoming episode of The Twilight Zone.)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It’s lunchtime, and you’re seated at a long table in the teachers’ lounge, surrounded by a handful of your colleagues. You’ve been employed as a high school English teacher for twenty years or so now, but have only been teaching at the Academy for the last twelve.

You’ve come to know your co-workers well, as they have gotten to know you. Well, with one exception that is, being this newcomer seated directly across the table from you.

She’s been here for two weeks, but you two haven’t crossed paths yet. So one of your colleagues takes it upon himself to introduce you to this new face in the crowd.

You learn her name; she learns yours. Turns out she’s a temporary ed tech who lives in, and commutes from, Belfast. OK, fine. But you’ve noticed that her eyes have remained fixed on you for a bit longer than feels necessary. She’s  studying  your face.  

“Your name is Tom Lyford,” she says finally.

“Yeah. That’s right. Pleased to meet you.”

She says, “And didn’t you used to work at Belfast Area High School, some twenty years ago?”

You say, “Guilty as charged. Worked there only for a year though. Why, have we met before?”

“No, but my boyfriend worked with you down there.  Back then.”

“Oh. Really? OK. And what’s his name?”

So she tells you and, yes, you do recognize the name. You remember him, if only vaguely. But she continues to creepily appraise you a moment or two longer. Then… “So,” she says, “you’re the boxer.”

Everyone stops talking among themselves, and puts their forks down. This is probably one of the most absurd statements you, or anyone in that room, could’ve imagined. All eyes are on her, then on you, then back on her, and then back to you again as, after you do your double take, you laugh an uncomfortable laugh and ask, “The what?”

She says, “The boxer.”

“That’s what I thought you said. But… what? Boy, have you ever got the wrong guy. A boxer! Me? Hah! That’s a laugh and a half. I mean, I can’t believe you even said that. ‘Cause I was never…”

Jeez, the way your fellow teachers have their eyes locked on you now, it’s… embarrassing. All eyes roll back to her when she says, “Yes,” with conviction. “The name’s right. You both worked there twenty years ago.  And the two of you remember each other, so… gotta be you. And he clearly stated you were a fighter.”

“No! Now, let’s put on the brakes for just a minute here, OK? This is a joke, right? ‘Cause… it is funny. Ridiculous but funny! OK so… somebody put you up to this, right? One of these jerks?”

She shakes her head, looking a little bruised. “Uh-UH. I’m serious. Look. I heard them say your name at morning assembly last week… when you made that presentation. And for some reason or other… I dunno…  it just sounded kinda familiar. And when I went home last weekend, my boyfriend, Steve, wanted to know all about how my first week went, and among other things I told him, I happened to mention your name. And he said, ‘Tom Lyford? Hey, I knew him!’

And then eventually he got his hands on the right old yearbook, and there you were. Looking a little different back then, without the beard, but it was obviously you. ‘An English teacher,’ he told me. ‘And he was a boxer.’”

“Well, that’s crazy. I was NEVER…!” But man, the way everybody’s silently keeping their eyes locked on you like you’re some TV star in a live sitcom or something, it’s become so unsettling you’re a little at a loss for words.  

And then one of the Phys. Ed. teachers/coaches leans forward and says to you with a twinkle in his eye, “So. You been holding out on us, eh, Tommy boy?” Which, jeez, puts an awful thought in your head: Gawd, are they all starting to wonder who the ACTUAL nut-job is here? The new stranger in town, or their self-proclaimed pacifist/poet/drama coach who, for all they know, might’ve been living among them all this time while secretly hiding out in the Witness Protection Program?

You remind myself to just say no to paranoia.

“Well, obviously, when you found me in that yearbook, it never said anything about me as a boxer, did it. No! It said English and speech, plus I was the drama coach, OK? C’mon now. it never said word-one about me being…”

Tom Lyford, Belfast Area High School Dramatics Coach, front row, far right–, NOT a boxer…

Omigod! A memory suddenly clicks on in your mind! “Oh SHIT! I know what this is about!”

Everybody leans forward.  The gorilla football coach, sizing you up with a crocodile grin says, “So how ‘bout you and me, we have us a little sparring session out in the gym this afternoon? You could, you know, give me some pointers.”

With a futile shake of the head, you mutter, “For crying out loud, I can’t believe this is happening all over again!”

But it is.

So, PLEASE keep a sharp eye out for the second installment of POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST?? coming out SOON!…

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“If you could read my mind, Love…” Part 2

“If You Could Read My Mind, Love…” Part 1 ended with…

“At long last, he launches right into it. And all of us, the vast, entire WGUY radio listening audience everywhere, is finally given the lowdown.

“And the lowdown is… kind of incredible.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Yes, I’m here to tell you that the “lowdown” (note the quotation marks here) was indeed a tad incredible. And I remind you that you were warned in Part 1 that the story, though true, was a rather silly story as well. So there’s that.

But OK. The voice that came on the air came across as dark, authoritative, and rather harrumphing, leaving all of us 17 year old “adults” and younger (we, the demographic majority of WGUY’S listenership) suspecting that the man might be the President or CEO of WGUY, if not of the American Broadcasting Association itself. And in the following not-verbatim-nutshell, here is what he “regretted having to impart”:

  • (stock photo– not Jack Dalton)
  • It had long been no secret that our DJ, Mr.  Jack Dalton, considers himself a champion of Democracy, and had long been feeling seriously distressed about the indefensible state of affairs in East and West Germany— namely the Berlin Wall.
  • Mr. Dalton, who was obviously feeling the frustration of his utter sense of powerlessness that many lone individuals feel in the face of his inability to take effective action when needed, decided to take it upon himself to perpetrate a one-man protest.
  • Consequently, and unfortunately, he arbitrarily chose our WGUY broadcast radio station to be the platform to rally the largest population possible into action.
  • In so doing, he impulsively locked himself inside the station’s sound studio, and refused to come out.
  • He then began the playing and replaying of that dreadful song that had become his personal anthem.
  • And finally, our listeners must rest assured in the confidence that any other such event such would never be allowed to re-occur at WGUY. Mr. Dalton had just had been summarily fired.  End of story.

Now, I think a lot of us 17 year old and younger “adults”felt that firing the poor man was excessively harsh. We were used to seeing our own age group getting summarily punished, for our own little crimes and misdemeanors, all the time, but never an adult. Especially not an adult that we looked up to and who, in our callow opinion, had done little wrong.

First of all, the incident had given us something that was mysteriously fun to speculate on throughout the day. Something that wasn’t boring for a change. Secondly, we all pretty much loved our Jack the DJ Dalton. His was the disembodied radio voice that woke us up practically every morning, that spoke to us every day— an adult who actually seemed to ‘get’ us, you know? Plus, our daily entertainer; he’d come out with the wildest and craziest funny things sometimes. It was easy to feel he was one of the few adults who seemed… on our side. In a way, he seemed one of us.

But more importantly, he was the bringer of our MUSIC, which was our daily bread.

And then, there was something else to consider. Just what, exactly, was his “crime?” Standing up for something he believed in? Being against the Berlin Wall? I mean, who wasn’t? What, were we kids the only ones willing to look at this and see The Big Picture? I mean, the boys in my circle were starting to take the man’s firing personally. It was an injury, an injustice that had been perpetrated on them, damnit! And for them, this was a cause worth fighting for. The hornets’ nest had been stirred up. Oh, my pals were talking it up, big time. Like something needed to be done.

Honestly? I felt somewhat that way myself, onlynot nearly so strongly. In my home and upbringing, the parents laid down the law, and the parents administered the justice, so to speak. The rules were (well, mostly) common sense rules and you just had to go with them, didn’t you. I mean even to me, the little delinquent of the family, that seemed fair. Hey, I was a real little sneak when it came to breaking some of the rules, but every time I got caught at it, like it or not (and oh, I never liked it), it always turned out it to have been my own stupid damn fault.

So I guess what I’m saying is, I‘d grown up feeling that in the long run you just had to accept the status quo. Didn’t seem to me like there was that much of a choice anyway. So… when this WGUY flap went down, I felt bad for the guy, sure. And yeah, I felt some of the emotional turmoil too. But in the long run like I said, I was like, he got fired, that’s too bad. Yeah, I liked his show and everything, but… oh well then. What can you do?  

Little did I know that an onslaught of angry phone calls were being made from all over the place. WGUY’s office phone was reportedly ringing off the hook. People didn’t like their DJ getting summarily fired, did they. They were angry. And they were busy making it clear to the fire-ers that they wanted their fire-ee summarily reinstated.  But me? I was out of the loop. I’d just gone home, watched a little TV, and then to bed. I never found out until the following afternoon when I went back in to work and got the new “lowdown” from some of my friends who popped into the garage to tell me the “great news.”

Huey Cole’s Esso, 20 years before I worked there…

What great news? The radio station had been amazingly overwhelmed with the hundreds of protests and the owners had finally caved in to the demands!

Wow. I was shocked. Now my pals (who, like me, lived thirty-five miles away from the GUY studios) had found all this out through the grapevine, second-hand. They themselves personally had nothing whatsoever to do with the outcome. Yet, by the way they were strutting around and claiming victory, you’d think they’d stormed the Bastille and chopped off Marie Antoinette’s head.

Teen-agers. You gotta love’em.

But anyway, it was all over. It had been a bloodless coup. Jack Dalton was right back on the air that evening and right back on the old payroll, like nothing whatsoever had ever happened. The proletariat had won the day over their capitalist oppressors. The world that was WGUYville was still a democracy. So. There would be Jack Dalton’s music. And all was well in the land.

And sure, I was happy for our DJ.

But… SPOILER ALERT: everything I’ve told you… you’ve gotten from the point of view of my 17 year old self. A kid’s point of view. A kid’s version of “the lowdown.” But as always, there were other points of view. More about this soon.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The brain is a frickin’ file cabinet, isn’t it. And this one little pretty-much-forgotten event has been occupying one or more of my brain cells for almost sixty years. And in all those sixty years, I can recall only one other time that this incident conjured itself right up out of my subconscious memory. That happened ten or twelve years ago at the library where I work.

Four or five of us on the staff were, for whatever reason, chatting about some of our favorite novelty songs. Doctor Demento’s name had come up, bringing along with it such crazy titles such as Steve Martin’s “King Tut,”  Tom T-Bone Stankus’ “Existential Blues,” Napoleon XIV’s  “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha”, and “Junk Food Junkie” by Larry Gross, to name a few. And suddenly, bing!, the “West of the Wall” thing had popped up unbidden in my mind, seemingly out of the blue since the song is not a novelty tune in and of itself.

“Do any of you remember a particular song called ‘West of the Wall?” I asked.

The question got me blank stares and the shaking of heads.

So OK, I launched into the strange saga of WGUY’s for-me–memorable episode when, suddenly, one of our library clerks, Jeannie Tabor, joyfully interrupted saying, “Oh my god! I DO remember that happening! It was so… weird, wasn’t it!”

Actual X-ray of my brain…

So there were a pair of us then! Two of us each with a brain cell that had been harboring this identical data (no doubt in the form of ones and zeros), data that had been lying dormant all these years like a little time capsule waiting to be opened! So then, excitedly, we both went on, telling the story together, as each of us remembered it. What fun!

But it didn’t take long after that for our little time capsule excitement to subside, the fun little memory curling up again in our respective brain cells and going right back to sleep. In my case, never again to be awakened from its little vampire crypt until… one month ago, it just popped back up in my head (who knows why) and got me thinking of the incident as a possible topic for this blog. And the rest, as they say, is history.

But wait, there’s more! As I began to compose this post, I remembered how ridiculously surprised I’d been when Jeannie had confirmed my little story. And I started to wonder… who else, if anyone, might also remember it.

So what did I do? I fired up my laptop and did the standard twenty-first century thing. I went to Google. I figured there must be more people out there who remember it.

Well, even with Google, finding info on such obscure little happening wasn’t easy. For half a day, I worked my butt off like a private eye. And finally… I did manage to find a few conversational traces of a thread in the Facebook archives.

The following four quotations from old Facebook messages (once posted by a few now-disembodied texters) are all I was able to dig up from the some six decades of the digital graveyard:

  • “Kent Taylor Smith Hi Kent. Yup, I was listening that day and heard it. It was about the same time that I went into radio. BTW: Are you still with THE WAVE?”
  • “On August 13, 1961, East Berlin closed its border with West Berlin and erected a wall to stem the flow of Easterners to the West. This brought to mind a song, sung my Toni Fisher, titled “West of the Wall” which was released the following year, around June ’62. Well, one thought led to another and Bangor’s dawn to dusk radio station, WGUY, came to mind. They played all the “good stuff,” including “West of the Wall.” So, now I’m thinking did they really play “West of the Wall,” continuously, one day as a kind of protest, or is this just the confused memory of a 12 year-old adolescent? I don’t recall the names of the ‘jocks’ at WGUY who might be able to answer this torturous question. Is there anyone out there to help relieve this pressure? Perhaps the guys from Bangor, Maine – Radio & TV?”
  • “The event happened, it was so long ago nobody remembers it other than it happened. I first started working for WGUY in 2000 at the 102.1 incarnation. Nobody involved with the station then, or since, was involved. I even asked Bob Mooney about it once and he could barely remember it.”
  • “Your memory is very good, John. I remember that incident. Yes, a DJ on WGUY named Jack Dalton played “West Of the Wall” continuously for several hours. I don’t recall it being a “protest”, but rather a publicity stunt to draw attention to the station. My memory is a bit fuzzy on the aftermath, but if my memory is somewhat close, he was “fired” and then “rehired.” Someone else might have a clearer memory on that part. BTW, publicity stunts were quite common at that time. A DJ would “lock themselves” in the studio and play the same song multiple times, get “fired” and get “rehired” after listeners protested the firing. Side note: studio doors don’t have locks on them.”

So: there were some little data packets of the same ones and zeros lodged in the brains of these guys, just like they’re still lodged in Jeannie’s and my own. Cool.

 I’m always finding it very fascinating to be reminded that each of us has one of these biological, state-of-the-art, digital recorders installed right behind our eye sockets and that they’re on all the time,  picking up any and all of the vibrations of our five (known) senses and forever cataloging, collating, and cataloging them. I mean, jeez, who knows what all else is stored away in these things? Could be anything. Could be everything. Put’em all together and what’ve you got? Maybe only the entire history of the earth. One soul at a time.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So now, allow me to stop here and make this little shout-out to any of you (out there) who have happened by chance to stumble onto this particular post, right now… who were living here in the WGUY World greater area back in ’64, and who also have some first-hand knowledge of this event. If so, could you, would you (please, please, please) leave a comment or two about it in the comment field at the end of the post? Like, you know, what you were doing at the time, what you remember thinking about it at the time, etc. Who knows, maybe there’s a lot of us. Maybe we could start a club. Or a support group, lol.

But no, seriously, all kidding aside, I’d really appreciate you checking in if that’s the case.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Alright, I’m going to close here by swapping my 17 year old’s hat for my 77 year old’s one, and focusing us on the last few sentences of the fourth quotation from the Facebook thread I’d unearthed with Google’s help. This is what the gentleman said:

“My memory is a bit fuzzy on the aftermath, but if my memory is somewhat close, he was “fired” and then “rehired.” Someone else might have a clearer memory on that part. BTW, publicity stunts were quite common at that time. A DJ would “lock themselves” in the studio and play the same song multiple times, get “fired” and get “rehired” after listeners protested the firing. Side note: studio doors don’t have locks on them.”

Notice the use of all the quotation marks, where he says “fired” and “rehired”? That’s not the same thing as simply saying fired or rehired, is it. He has also called it what it actually was: a “publicity stunt.” And if you were an adult back then, you would have seen it for what it was too. But on the other hand, if you were a 17 year old or younger, all full of piss and vinegar, you’d probably see it as a call to arms, as many did.

It’s like the station put on a little play. And why?  To generate more interest in WGUY… that’s why To do something that would increase the numbers of their young listeners, something their sponsors would appreciate. And of course, that’s what it did. It worked. The adults back then did know. Of course they did. And it’s easy to imagine them rolling their eyes and getting quite a kick out of it. It’s easy to imagine them sighing, shaking their heads, and saying something like, “These crazy teen-agers. They’ll believe anything.”

But it’s the guy’s last sentence, his “Side note” that’s making me smile today.

“Studio doors don’t have locks on them.”

That’s right.

They don’t.

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