Monthly Archives: October 2016

October 30, 2016 · 9:40 pm

“Go find, her, Mac.”

I am getting closer to publishing 1943. I was shooting for November, but it is looking more like December now. (I knew I shouldn’t have set a date…) Meanwhile, here is an excerpt to get you all excited about the book.

Our hero, Mac, has been searching for the two people mentioned earlier in the book (see a sample of that here). In the saddlebags of the old Harley-Davidson WLA motorcycle, he had found a photo of Betty and a V-Mail letter written by her fiance, Alvin, in Italy during WWII. His friend, Buster has badgered him into looking for more information on the two. At this point, he has discovered a lot about Betty, but the missing piece of information about her is where she is today, and is she even still alive over 70 years later? From clues in the photo and letter, he has deduced she once lived in New Orleans, but that is as much as he has been able to figure out.

To clear his head, he takes a ride on the old Harley on Rim of the World Drive in the San Bernardino Mountains in Southern California. (Been there and it is beautiful.) He stops and during the course of the stop, Mac has a conversation with his deceased wife, Jill—or at least that is what he thinks is happening. She seems to be speaking to him through her little dog, Pug. Here is the scene.

*****

Mac had always found riding a motorcycle therapeutic, and maybe it would work this time? If nothing else, a ride would allow him to get his mind off his failure to solve a case. Thirty minutes later, he and Pug were up on Rim of the World Drive and leaning into the curves and feeling the wind in his face. There, on the bike, he was in another world, one unencumbered with the cares of this world, but one that felt an awful lot like pure freedom. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.

But as he continued along, dragging the footboards in the tight turns and pushing the old Harley harder than he should in his attempt to forget—Betty came back to him. Giving into her, he pulled over on a lookout, the same place he had that long conversation with Jill only a few days before, and shut the bike down. With the kickstand down, he stepped off and away from the bike, pausing to look at it for a long moment. What had started out to be a fun project a few years before, that blasted bike and everything related to it had become a nagging obsession, one he could get no rest from. He loved it and hated it at the same time.

He slipped the backpack off his back and let Pug out to run free. The little dog promptly relieved himself on a nearby guardrail post. Mac turned away from the Harley and stepped over the guardrail and sat on the rail under the shade of a scrub pine. He looked out at the vast expanse of southern California spread out before him in the valley below, staring out into the distance, looking but seeing nothing. Pug went under the guardrail and took a seat beside him. The two sat there quietly, each in his own world.

“What am I going to do, Jill? I can’t find the answers I need. Betty remains hidden from me.”

“Then go find her,” she replied.

He came to his feet. Pug jumped up and stepped away, his eyes focused on Mac.

“Find her? How am I supposed to do that?” he said pacing and waving his hands in the air to give emphasis to his words.

A car passed, and the two kids in the back saw him doing that. They looked at each other, and the older girl made circular motions with her index finger beside her temple.

“You’re a detective, aren’t you?” Jill replied.

Mac threw up his hands in surrender. “What? I’m out of clues. I can’t find her.”

“Of course you can. You’re my husband, the same man who claimed to be the world’s greatest detective who can solve any mystery.”

“Jill, give me a break here. I have nothing to work with. I’m at a dead end,” he said as he continued his pacing and wild gesturing with his hands, once stopping to kick a rock over the edge of the lookout to express his frustration.

Pug backed away.

“You may not be able to find her here, but what about there?”

“There? New Orleans? Don’t you understand? I have nothing left to work with. Nothing.”

“Buster is right, you are a stubborn man—but that’s one thing I loved about you—you never gave up. Why are you quitting now?”

Mac sat heavily on a guardrail and put his head in his hands. “I’m lonely, Jill. I want you back.”

“You can have me but only in your heart. The time has come for you to go find someone else, someone who can give you the peace and happiness you need and deserve—and you can give her the peace and happiness she needs and deserves.”

He spun and looked at Pug. “Betty?” But Jill didn’t answer the question. Long moments of silence ticked by. “Jill,” he called out, but she didn’t answer. “Jill, are you there? Speak to me!”

“Go find her, Mac,” whispered the voice.

Mr. Frank

One of the joys of growing up in Kenner was being a boy during the best time in history in what was possibly the best place in the world to grow up, Kenner. At least that’s what my cousin, Bobby, thinks. I tend to agree. In post war and prosperous America, we lived a carefree life that simply can’t be recreated today.

For us kids back then, summers were our favorite time of the year for obvious reasons, mainly because the dress code was so minimal, and we didn’t have to go to school. It was a time when we roamed the streets in our neighborhood with no fear, wearing only shorts, no shoes and no shirts—maybe sometimes a baseball cap. It was also the time Mr. Frank would pay us daily visits.

Mr. Frank was our local, roving, ice cream man. He was an over-weight, somewhat elderly man with a fatherly appearance, and wore a worn straw fedora to protect his balding head from the sun. Mr. Frank roamed the neighborhoods of Kenner on his little three-wheeled Cushman motor scooter ringing a hand bell and shouting out, “Ice cream! Get your ice cream!” (As if the bell hadn’t done the sales job already.) He sat in the back of his little scooter over the motor, and in front over the two front wheels was his dry ice cooled icebox filled with a veritable cornucopia of frozen delights for kids.

He sold the usual ice cream cups that came with a little wooden device for scooping the ice cream from the cup. That “scooping device” was a “spoon” in name only, being only a thin flat piece of wood cut in the shaped of a stubby spoon. Splinters in the lip were not unheard of.

His cooler also contained frozen bars of ice cream on a stick dipped in chocolate, ice cream sandwiches, which were two rectangular chocolate cookie slabs with a block of vanilla ice cream in between, and Dreamsicles—those bars of vanilla ice cream on a stick with a frozen orange sherbet coating, and ice cream cones with a chocolate topping and peanuts wrapped in paper you had to peel back. And, of course, he had the ubiquitous Popsicle in a variety of flavors to satisfy the tastes of any kid.

Mr. Frank rang his hand bell as he slowly motored through the neighborhoods of Kenner. Of course, with our super-tuned kid hearing, we heard that bell approaching when he was still five miles away. With a Pavlov’s dog-like response, we dropped everything we were doing and began an immediate and urgent assault on our parent’s pocket books.

“Can I have some money for ice cream, please, please?

Our parents were notorious foot-draggers when it came to such wild and extravagant expenditures of their hard-earned cash. (A Popsicle cost every bit of 5¢.) As Mr. Frank’s siren song and that clanging bell drew nearer, the pleading increased in tempo designed to break down even the most penny-pinching parent. “Please, hurry! I’m going to miss him!”

As Mr. Frank reached our street, our foot dragging parents finally gave in to our pleading and coughed up some cash. I’m convinced it was a conspiracy among them, because they all paid off at the same time. From every door on Sixth Street, frantic kids clutching nickels and dimes in their sweaty hands burst forth screaming “Mr. Frank! Mr. Frank, wait!

Not one to miss the big sales, Mr. Frank was, by then, exercising his favorite marketing ploy. He had slowed his scooter to a mere idling crawl, slow enough that it threatened to kill the sputtering motor on his scooter, and his bell ringing had gotten even more frantic.

And we assaulted him.

Then came decision time. “Do I want a popsicle or a Dreamsicle today? No. Um. Maybe an ice cream sandwich? I donno…?

And Mr. Frank smiled and waited patiently, knowing he was about to rake in the big bucks from all the kids gathered around his little scooter. When one of us finally made up our mind, Mr. Frank opened the hatch on the top of that cooler box. And the rest of us stared mystified at the dark yawning opening that was spilling out this mystical cloud of “smoke” from the dry ice. And it was just cloudy enough that we couldn’t see into that dark interior. But Mr. Frank could, either that or he had the location of the contents memorized, because he would reach in, his arm disappearing into that black, smoking hole, and always come up with the correct item. And BAM, with a puff of magic smoke, that door slammed shut again over that mysterious hole until someone else finally made up his mind.

The sales made, Mr. Frank pocketed his new-found wealth, mounted his Cushman, and motored down the street ringing his bell and shouting, “Ice cream! Ice cream! Get your ice cream!”

And we kids sought a place in the shade to enjoy our frozen treats and plan our next summer adventure.

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons

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Filed under Family History, Growing Up, Kenner

Tagged as Growing Up, ice cream man, Kenner

October 11, 2016 · 4:41 pm

Earthworms

I often see posts on Facebook about things we did in our childhood that are considered “very dangerous” today. We ran around barefoot, played with firecrackers (and some of those were potent enough to take off a finger or two), rode in the bed of pickups, played on gym sets that would be the targets for litigation today, got spanked (child abuse today), played with fire, drank from the hose, had pet red ear turtles, rode go-carts in the street, roller skated behind said go-carts, and was made to sit on the front porch in one’s grandmother’s dress while reading the Bible because one used profanity—and got caught. (Yes, that really happened to someone—not me. Another clear case of child abuse!)

After this long list of things we did as kids, the FB post usually ends with “and we survived.” And we did. My, how times have changed.

One of the members of our little rat pack of kids, who barely survived the fifties and sixties, was a couple of years younger and smaller than the rest of us. Though smaller, he was wiry and strong, and very hard to catch and hold on to and bring down when he was carrying the football. (Yes, add tackle football without any protection to that list above.) As a result, he picked up a nickname, “Grease-ball” shortened to just “Grease.

Grease went on to become a successful “rock star” (he even played at Hard Rock Café one night) and eventually developed some modicum of respectability as an attorney, father, and grandfather, thus the need to protect his identity.

Grease, being younger and wanting to fit in, was susceptible to dares from us older boys, especially the impossible-to-refuse-ultimate-throw-down “double-dog-dare.” As pointed out so well in the great, classic movie A Christmas Story the double-dog-dare was never taken lightly, and its use called for a series of gradually escalating dares that culminated in the double-dog-dare.

Poor Grease was often the victim of abuse by us older boys, especially after our failure to tackle him in a football game. One form of such abuse, and I have no idea who started it (Grease may remember), but we double-dog-dared him to eat an earthworm—a live worm—and swallow it—on more than one occasion.

I can see one such time in my mind as I write this. It took place in the vacant lot across Sixth Street (now Toledano Street) from my grandmother’s house on the corner with Minor Street. This same empty lot was our favorite playing field, just the right size for a football game or even baseball until we got big enough to hit the ball across the field into one of the Giammalva’s windows, or a fun game of shoot the arrow up in the air and see where it lands. (Add that one to the list, too.) At the end near Sixth Street were two trees, a sidewalk, and the ubiquitous open ditch (but that’s another story).

On this occasion, we stood under those two trees and dangled a wiggling earthworm in front of Grease’s face while we hit him with the double-dog-dare. He looked scared, though he tried to hide it and look defiant instead. But with me, Manard, Kibby, and Joey standing there and repeating, “we double-dog-dare-you,” Grease had no choice but to eat the worm. It was that or be compelled to live forever in the shame of refusing a double-dog-dare, never finding acceptance with the older boys and forever wondering aimlessly in the wilderness of social peer rejection. That was NOT going to happen as far as Grease was concerned.

I think his lower lip trembled involuntarily for just a second before he snatched the worm from Manard’s hand and dropped it into his open mouth in such a way that it was clear to the rest of us that he was indeed eating that worm.

Monthly Archives: October 2016

“Go find, her, Mac.”

Mr. Frank

Earthworms

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