Open Writing

37 - A Well-Packaged Teenage Girl

Pittsburgh (1939-41) holds a special place in my heart. It was there that I completed kindergarten and began actual school at the Julia Ward Howe School in Mount Lebanon. It was there also, the reader may recall, that Mom baked the cupcakes that would provide her cross¬eyed boy with a peer recognition that launched my formal education in fine style. I don't know if the kids liked me or not, but they sure as hell were crazy about my Mom. I rather think her cupcakes might have been the topic of evening conversation in the home of every student there on that particular day. It was an auspicious beginning by any yardstick imaginable, and I was king of the mountain for the first (and what for years threatened to be the last) time in my life.

My main memory of Pittsburgh involves two things: Auntie Beal and her family, and the large floor radio that stood in the far left corner of the medium-sized living room, perhaps ten feet across from the front door.

Auntie Beal was a Scottish woman who became a friend for life to my Mom. Her accent was thicker than late afternoon concrete, and she was, plainly speaking, as sweet a thing as ever graced this earth. She had a son, Bob, who was always away at school somewhere. Her daughter Sue was still at home, though, and was the sort of well-packaged teenaged girl young boys like to think about at bedtime. Sue must have been about sixteen at the time, and barely knew that I existed. I would have been flattered at the time if she'd merely mentioned to someone that I was cross-eyed! It would have meant that she'd noticed something about me! Ah well.

And the radio! Funny, isn't it, how a radio might be the biggest single memory of all from a boy's childhood? But that's the way it was. Notice that I said a radio. Most folks I remember had one radio, as did we, a tall, boxy wooden thing that stood square on the wooden floor, and always in a corner. Most radios I recall we're downstairs, not in upstairs bedrooms and-or bathrooms. Artists and cartoonists of the day would portray families sitting around a radio, listening, probably to a mystery or comedy or a plain old drama, with the intensity of the permanently and sublimely hooked. Supper dishes waited in the kitchen sink. At least one in the attentive family group would be fidgety from an ever-burgeoning pee requirement. Indeed, a welcome commercial for Ipana Toothpaste, Lucky Strikes, or Wrigley's Gum often provided cause for a sudden, room-clearing out-flux, with the parties scurrying, often with considerable urgency, to the beckoning porcelain of a family's single bathroom. Generally, all would be back in place and seated by the end of the cigarette or toothpaste or chewing gum intermission.

There were no clock radios to speak of, no real "portables," and certainly no boom boxes of the type a family would take into the woods for a picnic! (Nor, incidentally, could you sit in your fuchsia outhouse and, holding something smaller than a cigarette pack, make a phone call to, say, Guam, Guatemala, Goofistan, or the White House! On the farm, at least, you cranked — IF the party line was free — like everyone else! The only things in the world portable at the time were YOU and yours!).

Yes, with television not even in its "infancy" yet, radio was pretty much the extent of a family's day to day entertainment, at least on the home scene. Commercials weren't the same then, either. Most commercials, daytime at least, were for cereal or soap, which I still take to mean that American kids during those years, if nothing else, were clean, nice-smelling, and regular in their fiber-regulated bowel habits.

I know I was (excepting maybe for the "clean" and "nice-smelling" parts).

Gordie, 14-months younger, smelled okay, I guess, but was not all that radio-involved yet. But I was a Radio Fan, First Class. I listened to the usual kid stuff, of course - Jack Armstrong, Dick Tracy, The Lone Ranger. And, I had all of the luminous belts, secret decoders, whistles, six-shooters, and death-ray guns that a quarter and a box-top could buy. The strange thing, however, was that I loved the adult stuff, too. I doted on the life and times of Stella Dallas, and wouldn't have missed for anything the nighttime mysteries, boxing matches, baseball games, and popular comedy shows of the day. Fibber McGee was a biggie, along with Amos and Andy, Duffy's Tavern, The Great Gildersleeve, and Can You Top This? (Later, in Mansfield, on the night Joe Louis fought Billy Conn, the Red Baron could have done barrel rolls through the dining room and not disturbed me in the least ... although on a couple of occasions, the Baron might have heard my voice above his engine roar!). And — oh my, yes — even as a youngster, I would've happily walked barefoot through nasty smelling squishy stuff to hear Kate Smith sing God Bless America.

(I do remember one day after school, when I heard the announcer tell me to stay tuned for upcoming news on the new term for the Supreme Court. I wondered what the heck they were gonna call it now! Frankly, I'd thought all along that "Supreme Court" had been a fine term. And a quick word also about the secret decoders referred to above: By the time a kid's decoder arrived at the family manse, say, six weeks after it'd been ordered, a kid already was out a full twenty-five cents, plus whatever expense he had occurred in obtaining the prized box-top in the first place. For his considerable sacrifices, the same kid now had a gizmo and its magical reference list, which told him that "A" equaled "3," say, while "d" and ""n" were five and nine, respectively, etc. Thusly equipped, the boy might look over his shoulders a time or two before sneaking into a coat closet, where minutes later, having "decoded" the one message included in his packet, he would be surreptitiously instructed to, "Be a good boy and mind your parents." I don't know about others, but / considered the messages SO secret that I never even told my parents! Wow ... and, believe it or not, SOME of the assorted, periodic prizes were even better than that!).