The Blog Brothers

We grew up in a US time when horses were still used to deliver milk and baked goods, and collect recyclables (generically called ‘rags’ back then)… It was a slow time, when summer days were a week long, and to get from Saturday lunch to the starting bars of the first Looney Tunes of the Saturday matinee with 25 cartoons and cowboy double-feature took about 3 days.

There was no tv then, so all we could do in the living room was live. That was mostly at night. During the day, if not at school daydreaming out the windows we were always out playing, up to many miles away, on foot or bicycle, often taking our lunch with us. The radio was in the kitchen, for listening to after dinner or while doing the drudgery of homework while Mom did the ironing.

The only apparatus in the living room was the big clunky iron telephone you had to dial, then wait for the dial to roll clickingly back till you could whirl in the next number but there were only 5 numbers in those days, since there were about 2 billion people in the world and only a tiny portion in Albany. My Brady/McTeague grandfather, an electrician for the phone company, had one of the standing phones with the earpiece on a side hook and the dial at the bottom, like in all the old black-and-white fast-paced newspaper movies. “Get me the desk!” Things began to change palpably when the phone numbers started getting longer. Where I live now my number is 10 digits long, 15 or more if you’re calling from another country.

We had no Victrola, as phonographs (itself a neoarchaism now!) were called back then; the only person in the family who had a Victrola was my Robinson/Kelly grandfather, a NYCRR conductor, who had a then merely quaint wind-up one in his basement, with a big morning glory megaphone where the sound came out. Next to the whizzing green felt turntable it had a little metal cupful of playing needles like headless finishing nails that lasted about an hour and were attached to the tone arm by vising them in place with a knurled knob.

The living room in those days was where guests sat and chatted or Dad read the newspaper in the big red easy chair under the standing lamp by the window after dinner. On really rainy days when we had friends over or went to their house, we played in the living room: checkers, cards (War was a favorite), chess, Monopoly, Clue, Go to the Head of the Class… but when the weather was even remotely tolerable (in winter there were no limits) and we didn’t have measles or mumps or whooping cough we would never in a million years have stayed inside, we’d be out somewhere exploring, playing, finding stuff to do all day long, even into dark in summer, home only to eat then out again, except for the detested but implacable Saturday night bath.

Each of those days was about a week long. The school year was about a decade in length, but seemed longer. I remember one time at the end of summer vacation realizing it would be 9 months till summer vacation, an impossible duration, as time-distant as the Civil War, which had ended only 80 years before, when great grandma was a teenager. Then at the start of summer vacation, school was almost 3 months away, in the heart an essentially unending length of time, though we knew better.

Comics were a new thing then too, this was only a few years after the first Batman, the only copy in existence now a crumbling million-dollar item. I used to own millions of dollars worth of comics at today’s prices, bought them for dimes I got doing odd jobs in the neighborhood, original Donald Ducks, Little Lulu, Mad, Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and all the many others, read ‘em and tossed ‘em in a pile, filled my wagon and went trading comics in the neighborhood.

It wasn’t a better world in many ways, there was more manifest prejudice, for example, and pollution was the norm– litter wasn’t even a full-blown concept yet (the word ‘litterbug’ was the winner of a contest to give the phenomenon a name), and though age and nostalgia likely play a big part in my perspective, it seems from here that many of the technoadvances we now enjoy have been achieved at the cost of time’s depth and richness. The journey is where the treasures are.

In a Tarzan movie I saw one long-gone Saturday afternoon, Tarzan is shown a movie on a screen set up in the big white hunter’s jungle camp; on the screen Tarzan sees a train rushing at him and panics. “That train in the picture can go from coast to coast in three days,” explains the civilized white guy. “What for?” asks Tarzan.

In so many ways, those were the days.

You’ve got me there, Bob (see previous post); but as I’ve been saying more and more frequently lately, it seems to be the names that go first. That means I’ve got a lot of nameless faces floating around in my head these days, but I’ve learned to cherish the memories, with or without the names. I do remember that face vividly, though, and also remember his parents - and that ‘50 Chevy - very well.

I also recall spending an afternoon fishing with him from a rowboat out on the still, cold waters of Brant Lake in the Adirondacks. He was a true character, full of piss and vinegar; and unless my mind is telling tall tales on his behalf, I believe he landed what looked to be a pretty good-sized smallmouth bass that day. Of course, I was far more excited about it than he was; perhaps it looked much smaller to him?

I have a much clearer memory, though, of the dart sticking out of the back of my hand at the Delaware Tavern than I do of the legendary “turkey” moment, for understandable reasons. Not only did it dampen my love for the world of darts (a tough blow for one raised in bars), but to this day I have mixed feelings about the memory itself.

It seems that initially the crowd of revelers greeted my childish mistake - foolishly reaching for darts on the board while someone sober enough to stand but too drunk to see, was about to launch his shoulder-fired missile - with a roar of laughter. Time and the blessed imagination of the Irish, however, have given me a better ending.

As I stood there staring at my impaled hand - Christ-like, virtually nailed to the board - I calmly reached up and drew out the offending projectile, jammed it into the bullseye, and walked slowly back to my seat, droplets of blood tracing my footsteps to the table.

The silence in the room was palpable; but its vacuum was suddenly replaced by a deafening roar of cheering, clapping and the stamping of feet, quickly erasing any vestiges of shame left in my heart. Clutching my bloodied hand with the other, and lifting my head to the onlooking crowd, I whispered hoarsely, ‘Don’t worry, my friends; it’s only a flesh wound.’

How do you remember it? Did I leave anything out?

Author’s note, added the following day: I was lying in bed last night, about to drift off to dreamland, when suddenly the ceiling above my bed opened up to reveal a vast midnight sky filled to overflowing with glittering stars. From deep within a bank of silvery clouds came a voice, saying “Bobby! Bobby! Bobby Van Buren!” Then I fell into a deep and restful sleep until the room was once again full of sunlight. Morpheus always seems to do his best work in that twilight zone between wakefulness and the semicoma of deep sleep.

room one:

It was not that I was a bad child, but it was clear early on that I seemed to have a gift for mischief. Consider, for instance, the quiet summer morning in 1944, a day when my father was probably busy taking out machine gun positions in the forests of Germany, while my mother was attempting to hold down the front lines at home. I had just been sent to bed for disturbing the peace. We all had to pitch in and do our part.

Only two and still in diapers, I had been incarcerated for over-reacting to an injustice perpetrated on me by my older brother: he had thrown my stuffed monkey off the front porch. Outraged that insult had been added to injury, I chose this moment to escape from my crib and climb out the bedroom window to rescue my little comrade, still lying, broken, on the sidewalk below.

Hanging only by my fingertips, I seemed to have no fear I’d come tumbling down, apparently lacking a grip on the gravity of the situation. Once out the window, I couldn’t quite figure out how to get down; but I wasn’t about to let that stop me: rock-a-bye baby be damned, I was going to retrieve that monkey.

Fortunately for me, though, my mother had grown suspicious when the bedroom suddenly grew silent, and after discovering the empty crib she spied my tiny fingers digging into the second-story windowsill and reeled me in. It would prove to be the beginning of a lifelong pattern.

room two:

I must have been staring at that page for a good ten minutes. It was as blank as my mind, except for name, date, subject, school, up there at the top. Nothing else to add. Or subtract. Or multiply. An algebra test may work for others, but it sure didn’t work for me. I walked up and handed the empty page to Sister Ann Marie, walked out into the hallways of Cardinal McCloskey High, and who do I bump into but the Principal, Father Turner, on his way to mail some letters.

“What are you doing out here, son? Class just started ten minutes ago.”

“Well, Father, I finished my algebra test early.”

“Come with me,” he said. “I’m going out to mail some letters.” Father Turner, a man given to few words, was utterly silent as we walked all the way down the hill to the mailbox. We then walked back up the hill in the deepening silence, and as we approached the school steps, he turned to me and said, “Go empty your locker, and don’t come back again.”, an eerie echo of Jesus’ words to the adulterous woman, “Go, and sin no more.”, except for the complete absence of Christ’s love. It would be my last day as a Roman Catholic.

room three:

Bag in hand, all earthly possessions but my Gretsch drums and Zildjian cymbals inside, I kiss my mother goodbye and, in what would prove to be my final (and least convincing) James Dean walk, head down the filthy housing project hallway to the stairs. Just before descending into the inferno, I turn to see my mother crying in the doorway, now reduced to a sagging silhouette.

Both boys now in the Air Force, off to God knows where. It was a near-fatal blow for her, I knew; all the men in her life were now gone. No one left at home now but my thirteen-year old sister, Suzi, and her. I was leaving on a silver plane.

When Dad and his buds took me to my first Albany Senators baseball game not long after he came back from the war I must have been about 5, and still couldn’t crack open a peanut by myself, so I and my paper bag of peanuts probably drove Dad and his buds crazy helping me open them just as their guy hit a double or something. I remember there was one player on the Senators who had only his right arm; the other he had lost in the war. He could still hit the ball a good distance, though.

The baseball game was interesting, I guess, but the stadium was even moreso; I’d never seen anything like it, and wandered around, looking. I didn’t know much about baseball in those days, since I’d been living with Mom and aunts for the duration of the war (which at that point had been half my life), so there was no baseball or talk of baseball. The men were all off in the war or working overtime, so my wartime neighborhood was mostly populated by little kids and moms, grandmas and aunts with their hands way full.

But the postwar stadium on that sweltering summer day was filled with guys, most of them not long back from the slaughter, savoring survival and yearning for a real down-home ballgame, drinking beer out of paper cups and yelling for the Albany Senators. Not knowing a Senator from a congressman, I took my peanuts and wandered down to the infield screen for a closer look, stared at the action awhile, trying to figure out exactly what was so exciting as to cause all these grown men to yell like that and curse the umpires so bitterly. (I learned most of my impressive battery of umpire curses that day.)

Finally I gave up trying to figure it all out right then and there, turned from the screen and found myself face to face with a strange man sitting there in a front row seat right behind the plate, wearing a suit and tie in that heat, with a high forehead, an unusual hair arrangement at the top of it and an unbecoming mustache, all in a combination I’d never seen before, so I stared kind of hard at him.

He smiled in reply, revealing a slightly gap-toothed situation there, reached out a hand and patted me on the head. Everyone for some distance around chuckled with appreciation. All very odd. I ran back to Dad and his buds. Why is everybody laughing, I asked. That was Governor Dewey just patted you on the head. Governor? Dewey? Neither meant anything at all to me, and no grownup explanation seemed to help. All I could do was put that in my wonder basket, along with baseball games and peanut shells.

Then one day, by the time I could crack open peanuts and was playing baseball, I saw Grandpa Brady wearing a Dewey button in his lapel, must’ve been just before the Truman-Dewey election of 1948. Dewey was a shoo-in everyone said, and carried New York, but famously lost the election, though he did beat Thurmond. Still, Dewey did do one thing memorable to me, aside from patting me on the head at the ball game (thereby augmenting his portion of the heavily Democratic Albany vote): he pushed through the legislation that some years later enabled us kids to enjoy Pipe City for just one summer day. Of which more later, when it gets written.

Mick’s icy post brings back other memories, like the one I’m about to relate. This was back before the wimpy things they call winters today, this was in the time of diamond winters, when the Albany streets were always icyslick unless the snow was up to here. As if that weren’t enough, the wind tunnel of the upper Hudson Valley rendered the Capital City close kin to Siberia, with a wind chill factor that shot the temp down to only 50 below or so when it was warm, in which atmosphere we’d stand at night on Elm Street corners being supercool in our thin nylon jackets, no hats, no gloves, being wind chill cool. “All you have to do is relax your shoulders.”

We thought of it as hardening ourselves against the elements. Which attitude served pretty well in the city, and even the country, specifically the country along historic country road 9J, the two-lane highway that will forever run south from Rensselaer along the east shore of the Hudson River. I call the 9J historic not only because it is, but also because of all the personal history it holds for Mick and I, as anyone who has read these sketchy chronicles can attest, with much more to come.

To get to the story. We were good in both city and country winters, as long as we stayed there and didn’t tempt fate. But tempting fate was part of our natures it seems, as I look back now from the promontory of all those winters. At the heart of one of the Hope-diamond winters of the mid-1950s, I and my cousins Jackie and Teddy, and a fourth guy who might have been Mick, with frost on our eyebrows were hitchhiking north on 9J back to my cousins’ house – we hitched everywhere in those days; all the regular drivers along the route (especially the Staat’s Express truck drivers) would pick us up - this time, though, it was a dairy farmer and helpers in his pickup, delivering milk to the dairy plant upriver. There was no room for us in the cab and the back was full of milk cans, but it was a ride and we were hard as diamonds; we all clambered up and sat atop the cans.

Then the dairyman took off on business doing about 60mph, and as our asses began to freeze to the icing milk cans our torsos stuck right up there in the hyperArctic wind, where there was nothing between us and absolute zero but our outer surfaces. When we were dropped off about 15 minutes later as icemen, it was hard to break free of the milk cans and then to get get down to the ground; when we tried to walk, we crackled; we had much to say but couldn’t talk, our jaws were frozen shut; our ears went “ting” if you struck them with an icy finger. Clanking against each other, we staggered through the warm snow up to the house and inside where it was really hot and we could melt and let the pain begin to roll us around in puddles on the floor.

We all subsequently managed to father children, though, so maybe it wasn’t as bad as I remember.