Clams

The other night I dreamt about clams. My father and a few of the men were in the basement of the Mills house gorging themselves on raw clams. Outside in the backyard the more refined people were eating steamed clams. Clams must have been lots cheaper in 1962 than they are today. I seem to remember my father and Mr. Mills going to a seafood place in Maywood and buying twenty gallons of clams.

The occasion for all this clam ingestion was the annual Labor Day party, peopled mostly by members of the local Democratic club. I remember there were lots of kids. We played horseshoes, played on the swings, and ate clams. The adults talked politics and drank beer, whiskey, Martini's and ate clams. Perhaps the clam thing was tied to the Kennedy's and their Hyannis Port vacations where they presumably ate shellfish. 

My father actually invented a clam knife with a wooden holder where the unfortunate live clam was placed before being shucked. He never patented it but it came in quite handy. Hot sauce went along with the clams on a half shell. 

The family's first stereo

As a tot I remember playing a record player in the basement. I bought mainly singles but occasionally an album got played.Then suddenly my father decided to get a real stereo. I don't know if my father got a raise, my big brother got a scholarship, or the old man was ashamed when he realized his friends and neighbors had real stereos and color tv's. He went for quality too.  He had me go through the Consumer Reports and we picked out a Dual turntable, a Fisher amplifier and speakers. He bought them all in New York at a discount stereo store he had discovered. For the first six months the turntable was in the living room. Then it was moved to the basement. Apparently Mother did not want me sitting on her good furniture playing records.

The old man strung wires throughout the house, connecting the living room (the amplifier-tuner), a speaker in the kitchen, and the phonograph in the basement. He bought a second set of speakers for the basement (of lower quality than the ones in the living room), but not bad. When I wanted to play records I had to turn on the Fisher in the living room and then go dowstairs to the basement. If Mother was cooking in the kitchen she could flip off her switch so she didn't hear my rock and roll records. Later when I was finished, the radio went on (usually on WPAT-FM) and the switch in the kitchen was pulled.

In other words, my father was okay with buying one amplifier but wasn't about to spring for two. I guess he was an early progenitor of what is called networking.

One of the things about surviving your relatives is that stuff from your childhood comes back into your life. The turntable has returned to my life and will sit next to that ugly green tree lamp in my living room. It is of pretty good quality and you can fine tune the speed and play 78's. After a few beers the lamp sways to the music, just like when I was visiting home from school.

Editor's note: The turntable played singles and monophonic records well but after awhile I noticed the mixing on stereo recordings was off. I think it needs a new cartridge, since the plugs are lose. I also noticed that it skipped every time I walked by. Sad to say, the Technics is now back where it was and the Dual is now disconnected, another project I'll get to one day. Sometimes it's better to leave well enough alone.

the Monkees

Davy Jones has died and now we are getting all the programs commemorating the Monkees  music and television show. It was one of the moss successful attempts  at cross platform marketing to the teen market. There was the hit tv show plus the albums. 

I grew up in a different age when the parents controlled the tv set and what activities a young person participated in. I never saw the Monkees show until well into the seventies when they were in re runs. Monday night I went to Monday School, or the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. When I was home on Monday nights Mother dictated that we would watch CBS not NBC.  It wasn't until this week that I realized that I missed out on one of the essential elements of growing up in the sixties. The phenomenon of the Monkees. I missed the whole thing. 

Editor's note: A follower of this blog may wonder why I was able to watch Shindig and not the Monkees. It was because Wednesday nights my parents went to Democrat meetings, leaving their son alone in the house with the tv. Cuando el gato esta,  los ratanos hacen una fiesta.

Jean Luc Goddard

This tale stretches into the seventies but you might enjoy it too.

Where's your tie

Recently a friend was telling me how cute it was when her older son was showing his little brother how to make a tie for a job interview. It made me think of when I was a kid and my older brother showed me how to tie a tie so I wouldn't get beat up on the first day of junior high school. All summer the rumors intensified. The terrible things that happened to new seventh graders on the first day of school not wearing a tie. Kids who were found dead in the Hackensack River. Kids who had to wear crutches until Christmas. Like most entering seventh graders, I didn't believe the most grisly stories, but was of the prudence is the better part of valor disposition.

On the big day I trudged through the depressing halls of the junior high school and the even more depressing home room classroom. In it there was a loudspeaker with the Principal's voice saying that no hazing was permitted in this school and no special articles of clothing (he didn't say ties) are to be worn to school by any students. All the male students, save one, wore ties that day. It was the best dressed group of students the teacher had seen since the previous September.

Coming home from school, three kids chased after me shouting, "Where's your tie?" Seeing my tie they all shook my hand and wished me the best of luck in my educational experience. It was a quite moving moment and in it I knew I was no longer a boy but had become a man. A man wearing a tie.

Brigitte Bardot

In the early sixties, our family subscribed to The Advocate, a weekly publication of the Newark Archdiocese. A Catholic publication, it always included a column that ended "yours in Christ". The major feature of the paper, however, was the Catholic church's weekly movie ratings. It was this column I would rush to every week. Preceding the film industry motion picture ratings by decades, it listed movies currently showing and informed the laity of the appropriateness of the films for them and their families.

The best part of the list, at least for all the Catholic boys in New Jersey, was the listing of movies that were "condemned". Anything French, for example, was always condemned. Even relatively innocent films like Irma La Deuce, which had a French name, was condemned. Never on Sunday was condemned, perhaps for suggesting the presence of other attractions for that day besides mass, baked goods and dinner.

Needless to say, any film starring Brigitte Bardot was condemned. Perhaps because of this, among the boys in my fifth grade class, there was constant conversation about the French actress. Surprising in a way, since none of us had ever seen any of her movies. For that matter, I doubt if any of them were shown outside of art houses east of the Hudson River.

It was probably the name. Brigitte Bardot sounded so forbidden, so much more alluring than Jayne Mansfield or Marilyn Monroe. These American actresses could never compete with the mystique of le Brigitte.

Today, thanks to Netflix, I am seeing some of her movies for the first time. So far, except for the frontal nudity, the movies are rather dull. They are almost like a Jack Lemmon type movie, but with subtitles and lots more smoking. Oh yes, and of course Ms. Bardot.

Marching band

The first day of high school is one of those times when you feel you are gaining entry to the larger world. Confirming this fact was my class schedule.There, at the last period of the day was band. I would march at football games. I was in the band.

I had been warned that there was this scary man with a glass eye who ran the thing and he took no guff from anybody, especially the new students. Within ten minutes I was told to put that flute away and he handed me a trombone. I had met the bandleader, Mr. McGrath. For the next three falls I would attempt to play the trombone in marching band. And witness one of the more colorful figures at Hackensack High.

Junior year I decided to audition for the school play, Carousel, and who was the director but Mr. McGrath. I was given the role of Mr. Bascombe, the wealthy amusement park owner. In the script, I (125 pounds) was to be the victim of an attempted robbery by Jiggs (250 pounds and a linebacker in the football team). I was to overpower him physically and escape from the situation. My attempt drew guffaws from everyone there that day. Mr. McGrath had the wherewithal to change the script, giving me a gun. Now the script would be believable.

I was also there when he introduced the humanities class to Joe Smith of Smith and Dale. Mr. McGrath died a few weeks ago.