My father, Doom, had a couple of lines on the back of his neck that made what looked like the letter “X.” There was an indentation where the lines crossed. When we asked about it, he always said, “That’s where I got shot during the war.”

Until each one

Saying Doom

Years

Like a lot of World War II vets whose coming of age coincided with the war years, he did his duty and was thankful to come home. He didn’t bring the war home with him.

Doom had

But Doom

So he left

The job and

He stuck

Besides his

He liked

Over the

When Doom

Doom was a very strict, traditional dad of the 1950s. Dinner was served at 6:00. The phone was taken off the hook and not put back on until 7:00. The teaching of table manners continued until we grew up and left the house. There were instructions on how to hold our utensils, the size of a bite, how to pass food, and many, many more. Nothing was left to chance.

When we used the phone, we were to

Both Mom and Doom had college

Every grade below a B meant

The kids all had chores: setting and clearing the table, washing and drying and putting away the dishes. Mowing the lawn. Probably the hardest task of all was holding the light for Doom while he worked on the furnace or the electrical panel, keeping the family’s turn-of-the-century house in good repair. You didn’t dare daydream and let the beam of light wander because you would hear about it. Picture Ralphie and his dad changing the tire in A Christmas Story. Only without the swearing. Doom didn’t swear.

He

Mom and

I remember when Doom came home with a $300 Jacobsen lawn mower. In 1959. My mom had a fit. Usually, we never heard their arguments. So this had to be big if it broke into the public realm. I don’t know if I remember it because it was so big or if it was because my parents rarely argued in front of us. It was a lot of money in those days for a lawn mower, but in my dad’s defense, I mowed a lot of lawns with that mower. And it lasted more than 30 years.

My mom paid him back a few years

His purchase of the ping-pong table

We used it because Doom liked to play. Two or three nights a week, all winter long, after the dinner dishes were done, we’d all head down to the basement to play.

Doom was always up for fun. He

When we lived in upstate New York, he made an ice skating rink in the back yard every year. First, he would ring the back yard with 2X8s and then run the hose out of the basement and night after night lay a layer of water down until he had produced a skating rink 6 inches thick and as smooth as glass.

In the summer, when he wasn’t at the golf course, he was swimming. He was always in search of a new swimming hole, less crowded than the last. He discovered the Barkhamstead Reservoir before the crowds came. Then it was Stratton Brook. In later years, when there were no kids to go with, he enjoyed swimming his laps at Cornerstone and the Jewish Community Center.

With the house finally empty, Doom and Mom began ballroom dancing, often dancing several times a week and traveling up to Mass. or down to New York for a chance to get out on the floor. Even when visiting in Iowa, they made sure one night of their trip was reserved for their dancing addiction, either at the Col Ballroom or the Moline Elks Club.

And when I say addiction, it was

Doom was a gentleman with old-fashioned manners that may seem quaint today. But shouldn’t.  He always stood when a lady, or anyone, for that matter, entered a room. As I said, Doom didn’t swear. The closest he came, that I recall, was when a golfer on another fairway had been driving everyone around him crazy for several holes with his loud, obnoxious, drunken behavior.

“That man is an ass!” Doom sputtered. I was caddying for him that day and it was the strongest language I ever heard him use. And he used it only once.

He stopped smoking the day  the first surgeon general’s report on the dangers of smoking came out in the mid 50s. He didn’t drink except when it was almost compulsory during the 50s and 60s and then it was whiskey sours.

For the last 30 years of his life,

He wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty when the job called for it, but he cared about his appearance. He always watched his weight. He didn’t set fashion trends, but he did follow them. The worst advice he ever gave me was when he advised me to buy a leisure suit.

Doom was

By then, he had moved on to selling carpet at a retail store close to his home. He would walk the 5 blocks to work, carrying his lunch. He always brought a little extra so he had some to share with the young guys working there who didn’t plan ahead like Doom or didn’t have the money to plan ahead.

Even though there was no prestige

Guys like

I long ago

And I was

As much as

Next week: Chapter 10: My First Official Girl Friend

At first, Doom wasn’t going to pay me anything to mow the lawn. Then he settled on 35 cents. Thus began my life of work at the age of 9. The neighbors paid more: I earned 75 cents from the Herman’s family in the house to the north and a dollar from Mr. Waters in the house to the south.

I was most enthusiastic about mowing for the Englishes, the old couple that lived on the other side of the Waters even though they had a big side yard. They paid the most, $1.25. But that was only two or three times a summer, when their lawn guy showed up too drunk to handle power equipment.

So usually

Baseball cards.

As soon as I had 25 cents in my hand, I was on my bike, headed down to Perry’s Drug Store, overseen by a very dapper man in his late 40s. Mr. Perry wore a grey smock about the same color as his hair and his Don Ameche mustache, a pencil line just above his lip. He had a great collection of comic books that he’d let you look at for a couple of minutes.

But Mr. Perry had an internal timer that would go off if you lingered too long and from across the store he’d let you know – with a tilt of his head, a raised eyebrow or a quiet clearing of his throat – that it was time to buy or go.

After I hit my time limit with the comics, I would walk very slowly past the candy, which you were not allowed to touch unless you were going to buy. Then I would get to the box of baseball cards next to the register, which brought me as close as I wanted to be to Mr. Perry.

Mr. Perry wasn’t mean, but he was not an affable guy. He probably had something more profitable to do, like compound a prescription, rather than police customers who clutched their life savings in sticky little hands.

He rarely

I actually

I would buy

My parents were somewhat appalled that until I turned 12, I spent all that money on baseball cards. After that, I shifted my spending to records and girls.  … which they didn’t view as an improvement. But by that time, I had amassed thousands of cards. Since I kept them in pretty good condition, 40 years later I was able to sell a good portion of them at an auction house for $13,000, a nice return on the original investment.

I finally got regular work – a paper route – starting in 7th grade when I was 12. I was so proud. Being a working man and having a paper route and money – the ability to buy a snack after school that meant you got a stool at the counter at Vanderbilt Drugs. I could buy my hard rolls … and spend the extra nickel for butter.

The early hours of my route were no problem. I never overslept. Early on in life, I got in the habit of getting up very early. That’s because I inexplicably loved baseball so much.

Ever since I learned to read a box score, I treated every morning between April and October as if it were Christmas morning: I’d wake up before anyone else and tiptoe downstairs, my feet reaching for the far side of each step to avoid all the creaks of the old house.

I didn’t want to wake anyone. I wanted to be the first to get the morning newspaper and specifically, the sports section.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this education on knowing where all the creaks and squeaks on the stairs were would come in handy a few years later. Again, in the early morning … when I was sneaking back into the house … after curfew.

Most mornings, until I got my route, I would be downstairs by 5 a.m. sitting on the floor in the foyer with my back against the front door. I nodded in and out of sleep, as I waited for the hollow thud of the paper when it would land on the big wooden porch. Once I was a carrier, I’d get to Mrs. Carney’s darkened garage to pick up my papers before anyone else so I could be the first one to cut the twine on the first bundle and so I had a few minutes alone to check the scores.

Getting up in non-baseball season months was a bit harder. I’d set the alarm, sometimes two, and put them on different sides of the room. It worked. I was never late. Well. Yes, there were mornings when I had to burst out of the house and bike at top speed to make up for resetting my alarms too many times, but it didn’t happen often and it was never past the Courant’s accepted delivery deadline.

I saved my money and bought a very sturdy Raleigh bike that had a big basket on either side of the rear tire. If the weekday paper was a normal size – Thursdays with all its advertising was a killer – and the weather good, I could leave my house on the bike, get to Carney’s, count the papers, fold them in thirds, stuff them into the baskets and deliver them without getting off my bike and be back in bed within an hour.

It took practice, but eventually, I could reach back into a basket, grab a paper and toss it on the porches as I rode by. It was pretty slick. I timed myself every morning, trying to beat my “world” record. I hated it when I’d miss my target and I’d have to get off the bike and put the paper where it was supposed to go: to the left side of the door if the door opened from the left and to the right of the door if it opened from the right.

If you put it directly in front of the door, when the customer opened the door, it pushed the paper away. Then the customer has to step out onto the porch to get their paper.   

On Sundays, the paper was too thick and heavy so not all my papers could fit in the baskets of my bike. At first, I had to make several trips back to Mrs. Carney’s and that was not efficient. When delivering papers, you don’t want to back track. No records were set.

So my mom bought an old-fashioned baby buggy for me at a flea market. The papers stacked up nicely in it and when it rained, the hood could cover at least half of the papers. It had a spring suspension so it was easy to push and turn and a brake that allowed me to park it anywhere, even on a hill.

The other

The best Sundays were when Doom would get up and drive me. We’d put the tailgate of the station wagon down and I’d sit in back with the papers, hopping off and running to several houses as Doom drove slowly down the street. When I was out of papers, I’d race back to the car for more.

A lot of parents probably wouldn’t

Doom

In those days, most towns had at least two newspapers. We got two at home: the Courant in the morning and the Times in the afternoon. Page had a Times route for a couple of years, before he got his morning route.

Since my route was in the morning, I’d sometimes go with Page on his route. I never wanted an afternoon route because your afternoon playtime was shortened drastically. And if you were involved in sports, you usually had to get a sub because you wouldn’t be home in time for the delivery.

Afternoon carriers often got their

The worst part of the job was collecting. About half the people paid the office and that was just fine with me, although Doom said it was better if I had to collect from the people as they were more likely to tip me.

Customers paying the office got a

But I didn’t really care at the time because I dreaded collecting so much. Everyone seemed surprised to see me when I appeared at their door, despite the fact that I usually did it every week on the same day at the same time … as we were instructed to. I do admit to sometimes putting it off for a week or two, until Doom pushed me out the door.

Some people would hide and refuse

Still, I liked the route so much because it was mine. And I was out of the house, alone, doing a job without supervision. The early morning quiet made you feel as if you were the only person alive in the world. Yes, there were the milkmen, stopping intermittently on each block and running to the houses with their wire baskets of clinking bottles full of milk and cream and rushing back to the truck with the empties. But they were in a bigger hurry than I was and were soon gone.

I felt as if I were in charge of my corner of the world, my paper route on Whiting Lane and Plymouth and Forest Roads.

Sometimes,

I was pretty good at the job, getting the paper there even earlier than the people expected it and putting it exactly where they wanted it. In fact, when Mr. Peterson at 115 Whiting Lane stopped the paper for his two-week vacation one summer, he told the route manager what a great job I was doing. When I got the stop order the next day on a thin, pink, 3 X 5 inch sheet of carbon paper, it read, “Boy is best in 40 years.”

My mother framed it. It hangs on the wall of my office today. My first success in the business of journalism.          

Most customers were indifferent and didn’t realize they were being served by one of the greatest carriers the American newspaper industry had ever known. But some were nice and would ask me about school when I came collecting or they gave me a cookie. There was the retired teacher who took such a shine to me she hired me to do odd jobs around her house on weekends and during the summer.

In warm weather, as I approached the house near the end of Whiting Lane on the high side of the street, I could hear the rhythmic, mechanical wheezing of an iron lung machine. The lady who lived there had contracted polio years earlier. Then in her 30s, she still lived with her parents and in the days before central air conditioning was commonplace, they would move the machine to the front room with all the windows open during the summer so she could catch a breeze. I couldn’t wait for the sound to fade as I quickly moved on to the next house.

And there was the dentist who committed suicide. They discovered his body while I was on my route. I didn’t know what was going on at the time, but there was a crowd of neighbors gawking and a lot of people running in and out of the house. Nobody noticed me as I snuck up to the porch, tossed the paper to the side so no one would trip over it and ran on to the next house.

My mom saw his obit in the paper

I loved that house on Plymouth Road, the last house on my route, where, when I leaned onto the porch to drop the paper in the right spot, I had to pass through an arbor that was overgrown with the intoxicating smell of lilacs. If I were early enough and I was sure that no one was up and I wouldn’t be seen, I’d grab a sprig to inhale on my way home. It overpowered the smell of the newsprint, which by that point of the day, I was sick of.  It had blackened my hands, my clothes and my face when I wiped my brow.

Toward the

Next Week:

After Doom

Doom, for

My parents began their married life living with her parents in Brooklyn, but soon moved into a brand new house on Long Island in the brand new development of Levittown, N.Y. They lived there for 5 years and that’s where Carol, Page and then I were born, roughly 2 years apart. Liz came along a good 6 years after me. By then we had moved upstate, near Albany.

There was still a strong anti-Italian sentiment in the country when Mom was growing up, but she was proud of her Italian heritage. And that pride increased the older and more confident she got.

As a teen, however, she was too embarrassed to bring friends home from school when the grapes were harvested. Cosmo would be in the basement, happily pressing the grapes and the smell, as it drifted up and enveloped the entire house, could be overpowering to those who didn’t make their own wine in the basement.

My mom

She was an

Men in

There were

If you went

Coming from

There were

The number

Her pizza

I would

The smell

Her lasagna was another favorite. Pans of it traveled the country packed in dry ice, brought or sent to family members and friends. And her layer cakes were meticulously decorated works of art. Very early on in life we learned to be quiet and NO JUMPING when she was baking a cake. No one wanted to be the one who made the cake fall.

When we did sit down to dinner, whether it was just family or there were guests, conversation also had to be accurate and precise. My mom loved words, grammar and facts. She didn’t want to let a teachable moment pass no matter who was at the table. Always within arm’s reach of the dinner table sat a stack of books featuring a dictionary, a grammar book, a thesaurus, an almanac (always about 5 years old because she bought them at tag sales) and several bird books. Sometimes just the act of reaching for a book was enough to make someone with a shaky argument crumble.

She

She made

She could

One year,

Mom taught

She was

Oh, it

And as hard

It wasn’t

My mom learned

Page and I,

 Mom loved babies and small children and she

Mom was

She was an

When she

Next week: Chapter 8: A Working Man

 I had said I wasn’t going to be Page’s bagman ever again. But about a year after the Hard Roll Heist, there was one other escapade that he managed to entangle me in. The two of us were hanging out talking and playing records on the third floor one Sunday after the obligatory hour and a half of church.

If I had been thinking and not simply enjoying myself, I would have known that what we were doing was not exciting enough and that could only spell trouble eventually. Since we weren’t doing anything special, at least nothing that was giving Page an adrenaline rush, he suggested we go up to the Center.

Page wasn’t a guy to hang around the Center and socialize, whereas, that was my main thing in junior high days. You went to the Center and walked around and ran into other groups of guys and girls who were at the Center walking around. You always hoped the girl you liked was there at the same time, walking with her friends. And you hoped she had the same number of friends as you did so you could pair up for a bit, and maybe grab an ice cream at the Farm Shop or Lincoln Dairy or go to the record store and look at the albums. A date before you were old enough to date.

Still, I agreed with Page’s suggestion because even though it was Sunday and there was always the volatility of Page to consider and none of the stores would be open, the ice cream shops would be and there was a chance, however small, that we would see somebody we knew.

So we began walking the mile to the Center. We were almost there when he said we should check out the cars at Grody Chevrolet. It was just a block off Farmington Avenue and one block short of the Center, so we walked over there and were looking at the cars. Then Page revealed his real purpose for hanging out with me that day.

“Let’s take one of these cars for a test drive.”

“What?”

Page had discovered that the guys who ran the used car lot left the keys in the cars. Rather than have them in the building and run back and forth trying to grab the right key for the customer, they just left them in the car under the driver’s side floor mat. This was 1964, but even then I remember thinking that it was a pretty dumb place to put the keys. Page found a car he liked, jumped in and started it.

“Get in,” he shouted.

“Are you

“Get in,

 Reluctantly, I did and we took off.

We didn’t go far.

“I told you we were going to the Center,” Page laughed, as we drove through the center of town.

I was too nervous to enjoy the ride while Page was having a great time, a wide grin plastered on his face. I don’t know if it was the thrill of taking the car or the panic he saw in me. We went around the Center enough times to realize nobody was there and probably wouldn’t be. The thrill of taking the car and terrorizing me began to wear off so he headed back to the dealership. As Page maneuvered to get the car back into the tight spot that he had taken it from, we weren’t paying attention to our surroundings.

Now another great reason for not taking cars from that particular lot – besides the obvious one – is that the police station was right next door. When we got out of the car and began walking away, we spied a cop across the lot. He had just come out of the station house and begun walking his beat. We couldn’t tell if he’d seen us pull in.

“Act real casual,” Page said out of the side of his mouth. He wasn’t looking at me. “Let’s slowly make our way toward the Center.”

The two of us should have been able to out maneuver a single cop in a big parking lot, but he played us like a chess master playing Central Park amateurs.  We couldn’t run and reveal our guilt, and somehow he kept getting closer and closer to us until he was just on the other side of the car we were pretending to look at.

“That your car?” he asked, pointing back to the car we had just parked.

“Yeah,” Page replied.         

We began

“Wait a

Page put on

Which was a

“You should

“Nah, “ Page stalled. “We’re going to come back and look at more cars.”

They went back and forth until Page’s declarations got more absurd and the cop, while enjoying the queen vs. pawn game he was playing, finally let us know he knew the car wasn’t ours.

He asked

They separated the two of us. I figured it was so we wouldn’t try to get our story straight. But there was no story to get straight.

Page had

Mom and Doom were pretty disappointed in me. It was hard enough on them to have Page break every rule. They didn’t need two of us breaking rules. I don’t remember getting punished but I do remember them telling me not to hang around with Page.

Most

The next summer, he was nabbed for stealing a car down at the beach. By this time, he was 16. Before, it had been childish pranks that could be punished by being hauled down to the station and placed in front of the big clock for hours. Now, he was getting older and the problems and escapades were escalating. This particular time, he was dating a 14-year-old girl he would wax poetic about. He painted a picture of a teen-age Marilyn Monroe in my mind. I never saw a picture of her until many years later, going through a box of his stuff.

She looked like a gawky, non-descript 14-year-old. And I am not being unkind. I wouldn’t have picked her out of a crowd of two. She had long, straight, dirty blond hair that appeared to be her main feature. Bangs hide most of her face. Her lips are pursed and she is squinting slightly in the sun. Her face is plain and she almost appears surprised to be in the arms of this big, older man-child. Even though they are at the beach and she is in shorts, Page has jeans and a jean jacket on. He always wore the jacket when he went out “just in case,” he explained, “I spill any battery acid on myself.”

Her living at the beach made it a challenge for Page. Since he had been in trouble, he hadn’t gotten his license when he turned 16 and had no car. He thought it perfectly acceptable to hitchhike down there to see her, but once he got there, he felt he needed to drive her around. So he’d steal a car. But this particular time, he stole a car that needed gas. Conveniently for him, there was a set of very nice golf clubs in the trunk. So Page sold the clubs – a set worth $300 in 1966 – for 10 bucks and they went joy riding.

Page got caught because he often didn’t think very far in advance. He stole the car from a neighbor of the girl and they nabbed them went he tried to sneak the car back. Mom and Doom got the charges dropped because they agreed to make restitution. That arrest made the papers and it must have killed my father to pay for golf clubs that he couldn’t use or afford.

And it was that type of crime that got Page sent to reform school. By now the cops were well aware of him. It’s not like he was robbing banks or doing anything too violent other than those fights at the dances. But he was not adjusting his behavior.

Around Christmas that same year, he went to visit a girl he liked who was baby-sitting. Apparently, she didn’t want to do what he wanted to do and she pretended to fall asleep after she had put the kids to bed. Page figured that if he wasn’t going to get what he came for, he might as well get something. So he grabbed a bunch of stuff and cash from the house and took off. Yes, he robbed the house his girl friend was babysitting at. His test scores and aptitudes tests always showed he was very smart. But he could really be stupid.

At the time, I didn’t know any of this. All I knew, he suddenly had money and a bunch of new toys, such as a cool portable reel to reel tape recorder, with which we had a great time recording ourselves. In those days, we just didn’t have as much and you noted every new thing a kid had. Yeah, I wondered about the tape recorder, but Page was always “finding” things so I didn’t question it too deeply. I didn’t want to. Later I realized that Page was “finding” things in people’s cars, houses, lockers, etc. such as the cordless shaver he had given me two months after my birthday.

We played with the tape recorder for a few days, performing plays with funny voices and laughing ourselves silly. That laughter would soon end.

A few

I went to

They were West Hartford detectives and they had a report that some items had been stolen from a house and the baby sitter had said Page had been there. They had a list of the stolen items, one of them being a tape recorder. I could hear the cops, Doom and Page talking in his room and Page was saying he didn’t know what they were talking about. Well, they found the tape recorder in short order and Page denied that he had ever seen that before.

He was acting childishly, denying evidence that was in plain sight, but he was still a few months shy of his 17th birthday. Then they pushed the button to play the tape and you could hear Page and me on the tape. That was all the cops needed. They took Page away that night and he didn’t come back for nearly a year.

He was sentenced to a year in juvenile detention. Mom and Doom used to drive down to Cheshire Reformatory to see him but Liz and I couldn’t go. He was allowed to have a radio, but it couldn’t have speakers so they took a nice Emerson table radio that we used to listen to Yankee games on to a repair shop and removed the speaker and attached headphones so Page could listen without disturbing the other inmates.

Mom and Doom drove there religiously every week, even during golfing season. Usually it was for an hour visit, sometimes longer if it was allowed. It must have killed them. But Page’s punishment was really needed. He had been totally out of control. He had grown into an adult body, even if he had an immature brain.

Doom had

I remember

The wooden

We seemed

After that, when Doom tried to confine him to keep the damage he did to society to a minimum, Page would sneak out of the house. He would go out the window on the third floor, drop down to the roof of the back porch on the second floor and then drop to the ground.

One night he was about to drop down and Doom, who was hiding in the back yard, turned a spotlight on him. Doom thought Page would realize he’d been caught and scramble back into the house. But when Page made up his mind to do something, he couldn’t be stopped. So he climbed up over the roof of the house – this was a full 3-story house – and dropped down on the front porch, then to the ground and beat it before Doom could get around the house.

Years

Going away really did Page some good. Doom thought so too, noticing a change in his behavior while he was gone. So Doom went to court to ask a judge if Page could get out early to be at school when it started in September with the stipulation that he play football. Doom thought the team spirit and discipline would do him good.

But the judge said no and Page didn’t come home until mid-October. He got a job at Lincoln Dairy – a sandwich and ice cream parlor, went to school most days and wasn’t completely out of control. Yes, he was still pretty wild, still getting high – although not as often – and still was getting in fights.

One night a

The house

It was at a party just before Christmas – Page had been home about two months – when I heard a scuffle in the kitchen. That was nothing new as we had a lot of high schoolers getting drunk for the first time. Fights often were part of the party. But the voices kept getting louder and louder and then they quickly faded as they must have moved outside.

I was curious, but I was in a dark corner of the living room with a girl and I was trying to decide whether to make out with her. I liked her, but not in a way that would last beyond that night. Just for the fun of making out. I was weighing the penalties: I would have to be her boy friend for a few weeks, call her on the phone a few nights a week and make small talk for a few hours. Then I would start to ignore her or just avoid her altogether and then there would be a scene and I would have to tell her it’s not you, it’s me. And there would be crying.

I never for a moment considered that she might be on the same wavelength as me and just want to have fun that night. Because it didn’t usually work that way in those days. A kiss came with lots of attachments. I didn’t want to even think about going further than a kiss. That could mean years or a lifetime of commitment.

All this

“What’s going on?”

“Page stabbed Jonny B!”

“Stabbed him?”

“Get outta here before the cops get here!”

Oh, no, I thought. Now he is going back to Cheshire. Or worse. I was about 3 miles from home and in the middle of a party and the middle of a debate about the merits of a make out session. But I just took off running for home. I made it up to the third floor and waited and worried.

About an hour later Page showed up. He had headed for home right after the fight, too, but he had snuck between houses and hid from cars the whole way. He kept seeing cop cars, sure they were after him. We stayed up all night and waited for the knock on the door. Page kept talking and I kept worrying. Finally we fell asleep. Sunday came and went and no cops.

Monday we went to school and there, coming down the hall was Jonny B. He was fine. Apparently, the knife Page was using was an ordinary kid’s pocket knife, which can do a lot of damage if you don’t handle it right. But apparently jabbing it at a guy wearing a boiled wool duffle coat didn’t have much effect other than some small holes in the coat.

Jonny was

The rest of that year, Page stayed away from my friends. He met some new ones from the other side of town who went to another high school. I never met them but my parents kept telling me to stay away from them. They were bad news, encouraging Page’s worse impulses. Mainly what he was doing was drinking. Even though the drinking age was 21 in Connecticut, it wasn’t hard to get someone – we called them balkies – to buy booze for you. But it was much easier to buy in New York where the drinking age was 18 and Page had just turned 18.

It was a

When he wasn’t navigating his way to New York and back, he had the job at Lincoln Dairy in the Center that he really liked. And the manager liked him and quickly made him assistant night manager. Not a big job or a fancy title, but it meant a lot to Page. He wasn’t doing that great in school – probably too dull for him – and he picked up a lot of hours at the Dairy.

He had

We had a great time, the summer of 1967. But it did not last.

My mom’s parents came to America on a boat. Not the boat that stopped at Ellis Island, my grandmother was quick to point out. Those were the peasants, she said. Our people paid full fare on their boat and had their own cabins and job prospects when they arrived in America.

That’s because her dad, my great grandfather, Benedetto Sica, had come to this country several years before to seek his fortune as a tailor.

The story was a familiar one: Benedetto would make his success in America and then send for his family when he was financially stable. He worked and saved and started a shop that specialized in making wraps for women. They were very high fashion for the time, made of mink and fox.

When it came time for Benedetto to send home for his family, his wife, Alfonsina, balked at the ocean voyage and refused to leave her home in Colliano, Italy, in the hills west of Salerno. Instead, his 15-year-old daughter, my grandmother Angelina, came to take care of the household in New York.

Then her younger brother, Alfonso, came over. He was to be taken care of, too. The business was a success, enough to support the family comfortably, but still, the matriarch, Alfonsina, remained in Italy. Finally, Benedetto decided he needed to be with his wife, even if that meant giving up his business and moving back to Italy.

He arranged

Happily

Italians were not treated well when they arrived in this country in the early 20th century. Not even those who had the means to bypass the indignities of Ellis Island.

But to hear my grandmother tell it, our family was royalty. And she sometimes acted like it when discussing other immigrants – like the Irish, Blacks and Germans – who she deemed not quite as grand as we, in slightly coarser language.

And back in

My grandmother was such a snob about our social ranking even among Italians that when we were younger and pizza had caught on in America, she dismissed pizza as peasant food.

We were aghast, but she explained that poor people would beg for the scraps of dough from the town’s bakeries or from the families such as ours who could afford their own ovens. Then they would roll it out as far a they could, put whatever food scraps they could find on it and voila, pizza.

“We,” she

Later, when

She and Cosmo made a life for themselves in America and for her little brother, Alfonso. Alfonso lived with them as he grew up, went to Columbia University, became a pharmacist and eventually bought a building for his drug store in Greenwich Village.

My grandmother took her familial duties to care for her little brother so seriously that, on some days, even though he was a grown man with his own store and she was a married woman with her own children, she’d make his lunch and get on the train near their home in Flatbush and take it all the way to the store in the Village. Even during the off hours, it took at least an hour each way. Maybe she just needed to get out of the house.

When my aunt Aggie and then my mom were born, they shared the room at the end of the hall because their uncle Alfonso had his own room. He stayed through the girls growing up, their college years and after they left for their marriages. He stayed after Cosmo died of a heart attack in 1953.

He finally moved out – although his room was preserved for his annual visits – when he retired to the family home in Colliano in the 1970s, when he was in his 70s.

Alfonso had

My grandmother didn’t realize how much money he’d been sending to Italy until very late in life and she finally had reached a point where she saw the unfairness of their relationship. She was mad that he gave all this money and attention to a family he barely knew and saw for only a couple of weeks a year while he almost ignored my aunt and mother, with whom he had lived for decades. And certainly gave no financial assistance to.

His response to my grandmother was typical of the men on that side of the family. He dismissed her with a wave of the backside of his hand and a shrug of the shoulders.

“They

What he

Although, to be fair, a good part of my grandmother’s heart remained forever in Italy. She would occasionally be caught up in bragging about the Italian side of the family that she barely knew anymore, too.

Growing up, I wasn’t threatened with the omniscient Santa Claus or even Jesus to keep my behavior in line. It was being held up to Pietro’s impossibly wonderful son, also named Benedetto, her nephew in Italy, who was about my age. That was supposed to do the trick.

I didn’t

I imagined

Once in a while, my mother would get sick of those stories and call my grandmother on her exaggeration. Oh boy. Then their voices would rise, my mother sternly telling her mother in English that something she said was impossible and my grandmother defending herself in Italian with a voice that got louder, higher and faster, the weaker the case she had.

Before Alfonso died, he gave his nieces their inheritance: $10,000. This was a guy who owned his own building in Greenwich Village. And a gorgeous house on the Amalfi coast. My parents used the money to pave our driveway which desperately needed it. I was happy. When I dribbled the basketball, it finally came back up straight.

I must say, that court got a lot of use but not by my mother. She made the only shot she ever took when Doom first hung the hoop on the garage. She never took another, despite nearly 50 years of our urgings. She said she didn’t want to spoil her record.

When we were teens and just starting to wonder how people find their life partners, we asked our grandmother how she met Cosmo. Up until then, we had seen her as this stern, old lady – she was in her mid 60s – who often wore black dresses that widows from small European towns wear in widowhood with black, lace-up shoes with thick 2-inch heels. She wore the same style shoe every day – every day – for the last 40 years of her life.

As we got

“My father

“Did you

“Love?” she

Carol

“That’s

We were fascinated and horrified at the same time. As teens, we had begun to realize how hard it was to find your soul mate, and we had plenty of evidence to suggest the struggle would continue for many years – at least that’s what the lyrics of the pop music we listened to told us. But we also could sense the excitement of finding someone. However, it also seemed, after listening to my grandmother, not beyond the realm of impossibility that someone could just pick a boy or a girl out for you and all those struggles would be over. You could just learn to love them.

Next week: Chapter 6: Stolen Cars and a Stabbing.

The first time I heard about the “free” hard rolls, I was in the back yard with a bunch of friends. Doom had put up a monkey swing in the big elm. He tied a thick rope to a branch high up in the tree and at the bottom, he threaded the rope through the seat, a one-foot by eight-inch board and knotted it.

We would climb up about 10 to 12 feet to a crotch in the tree, someone would swing the rope up while you balanced with one hand and tried to grab the rope with the other. Then you leaped into the abyss. You could either sit or stand on the board.

It was a great ride and a popular neighborhood attraction for several summers in the mid 1960s. Doom was clever that way. We were in those awkward, junior high, pre-driver’s license days of our lives. The long hot days of summer could get boring and a bit of boredom could quickly lead to trouble if we weren’t kept busy.

What our generation has done to keep kids busy is buy big TVs and gaming systems. Doom didn’t have those options. When we lived in upstate New York, he built a skating rink in the back yard and a baseball diamond in the field beyond that. In Connecticut, the climate was that much warmer and couldn’t sustain a rink. Nor was there space for a ball diamond. So in addition to a full array of bikes, sleds and a basketball and tether ball court, Doom came up with the monkey swing.

One mid-summer day, a couple of my friends and I had been swinging on the swing for a couple of hours, when Page showed up, casually munching on a hard roll. This got our attention. A hard roll was a treat. If you had an extra 25 cents after school, you could go over to Vanderbilt Drug Store, sit at the counter and have a buttered hard roll and vanilla coke. The drinks came in cone-shaped paper cups with metal bottoms, with a squirt of vanilla and cola syrup then mixed with soda water. Page was offering us this freshly baked treat for a mere 5 cents. He didn’t have any butter or soda, but it was still a pretty good deal. When we agreed to his price, he brought out a box of a dozen rolls and we ate until we couldn’t eat any more rolls.

A couple of days later, Page showed up with more rolls and a bonus: two dozen donuts. This is great, we thought. Swinging out of a tree and eating donuts. Summer couldn’t get any better for 7th graders. But I was suspicious. Later that night, after some badgering, Page told me where he was getting them.

“I find

“You what?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, trying to reassure me. “They leave big boxes of the rolls and donuts out there every day. Compared to what they leave, I don’t take much.  They’re not going to miss anything. ”

We both had morning paper routes at the time. My pick-up point was right near the drug store. Page’s was farther down Farmington Avenue, past the store. One morning, he told me, as he was pedaling to get his papers, he saw a delivery truck dropping off the baked goods for the store. So he stopped as the truck drove off and just watched the box.

No one came.

And it would be an hour before the store opened. Page began timing his trip to his paper route with the delivery of the baked goods. He’d take a donut or hard roll for his ride. This went on for a month. Then he got the bright idea that he could take larger quantities of the rolls and sell them.

“I won’t

For a guy

Page was wrong about the owners of the drug store not noticing. He didn’t steal much at first, but when whole boxes of baked goods were missing from the morning delivery, the folks at Vanderbilt Drug Store noticed. One morning I went in to get the newspapers for my route at Mrs. Carney’s garage and she wanted to know if I knew anything about things getting stolen at Vanderbilt’s. She lived about 6 houses down a side street from the drug store and had about a dozen teen-age boys picking up their papers at her garage, so I am sure it seemed an obvious spot to find a suspect. The cops had stopped by and asked her to question us.

I didn’t usually see Mrs. Carney. At least, I tried not to. She had a stereotypical 1960s Catholic family with enough children for a full scrimmage basketball game and this job of having the bundled papers dropped off at her house and her counting out the papers for all the carriers probably was a nice little bit of extra money to keep the household going. But nobody looks good at 5 a.m. and when you were as tired as Mrs. Carney was and as stern as she had to be controlling all those kids, you looked positively frightening to a teenager.

I told her adamantly that I knew nothing about whatever she was talking about, like teenagers do when they most certainly do know what you are talking about. When I got home, I told Page that people were getting suspicious and he’d better knock it off. He did, for a few days. But he could never completely control himself.

The next

Not only

I kept

He didn’t. He convinced my overnight guest, Rich Yulio, to go along with him on his paper route the next morning. I knew that meant a stop at the drug store. Yulio and all my other friends were afraid of Page – and fascinated by him. He was their Errol Flynn, their Edward G. Robinson. The swashbuckler. The gangster. And they wanted to be as cool or as teen-age tough as he was. And he knew it.

So while my friends came to visit the safe Sivell, they wanted to hang around with the dangerous Sivell. And if he were bored, he would permit that, all the while devising ways to get us in trouble – like jumping the fence at the cloistered monastery, racing across the large open field to the front door to bang on it and then trying to make it back to the 10 foot tall, wrought iron, spiked fence and over it before the sisters could summon any spirits to catch us.

When we would get in trouble – try getting over a spiked fence unharmed with nuns whacking you with brooms – he stood back and laughed.

So the three of us left the house early that morning and headed up to Farmington Avenue, took a left and pedaled the two blocks to Whiting Lane. We stopped for a few minutes while I begged them not to do anything. I wanted Rich to come with me but Rich was kind of a soft kid who desperately needed a harder reputation. He wanted to be seen as a bad ass. He was thrilled to be hanging out with my brother and to him, it seemed as if my brother liked him. But I had seen this all before with other kids and even with myself in that role.

Page just needed a bag man. Somebody to roll with and he didn’t care who it was. Whoever was around at the time was whom he would choose. So Rich stayed with my brother and supposedly they were heading off to deliver his papers. One last time I asked Page to leave the hard rolls and donuts alone.

“OK, you

“You’re

“I am going

I noticed

I quickly counted my papers and headed up the half block toward Farmington Ave. It’s the main thoroughfare through town and was usually dimly lit and quiet at that hour, but this morning it looked like Las Vegas: red lights spinning, search lights blazing. As I pedaled closer, I could see three cruisers and about 10 cops milling about the parking lot of Vanderbilt Drug. I stopped my bike in the shadows and watched.

I could see

Then I

By this time I had moved out of the shadows and inched closer to gawk. But the cops didn’t care about me. They had solved the case of the hard roll thieves.

I don’t remember what Page’s punishment was. But I was glad I resisted his entreaties to the crime of the year in our neighborhood. I decided I was no longer going to allow him to talk me into doing things. Because the fact was, even though he may have gotten away with a lot, he got caught a lot. And it was only going to be a matter of time before it added up to some significant punishment.

I know my parents hoped he would outgrow this and begin to behave the way their other kids did and the way he was taught. But he wasn’t going in the right direction.

Next week: The Italian Influence

Mickey Mantle should have been my dad. Then I could have been hanging around the New York Yankee clubhouse in 1961, the Yankees’ greatest season. At least, that’s what I thought when I was 10.

My dad, about age 3. His mother used to enter him in “cute baby” contests which were popular store promotions in the 20s.

If my dad wasn’t going to be the New York center fielder, at least he could have had a career I could brag about at school. Other kids’ dads were doctors, lawyers, builders and realtors. Even working as an insurance man, lining up with dozens and dozens of other dads on Farmington Avenue every weekday at 8 a.m., taking the bus to downtown Hartford would have been better for a kid to brag about than the job my dad had. He was a ceiling tile salesman.

My dad sold stuff that improved the acoustics and look of grocery store ceilings. He drove around southern New England and upstate New York in the company car – usually a canary yellow Plymouth station wagon that was the family’s only vehicle – selling tile and the company’s original product, wall insulation made out of wood fibers, to contractors putting up shopping centers and schools.

I had no issues with my mom. She was the prettiest mom in the neighborhood and of all the moms of the kids in my elementary school. She made the best pizza and the best lasagna, and her cakes were works of art.

One of my mother’s musically correct works of art.

But growing up in the 1950s, your dad – along with his job – was the person who defined you before you began to define yourself. And an ordinary dad was a status killer. At least mine didn’t have an ordinary name. As far back as I can remember, he was Doom.

Some might have figured he got the name because he played college football and was big for his time: 6 feet 2 inches tall and usually about 210 pounds. And he didn’t have the demeanor of a Dad who made suggestions. When he told you to do something, you did it. He only had to say, “Don’t buck me” to me once. So I didn’t.

But that’s not why we called him Doom.

He got that name when we were renting the right half of a large Victorian house in the bucolic, upstate New York village of Altamont, twenty miles outside of Albany. Four two-story pillars defined the front porch, and inside our front door, a grand, three-level staircase took twenty-four steps and two turns to reach the second story. We had moved there from Levittown, N.Y., where first Carol, then Page and finally, I was born. Liz showed up in Altamont. That was a bit of a shock to me, no longer being the baby. But I got over it – when I was about 25.

We rented the right half of this house in Altamont, N.Y., 1952-57.

The staircase was so wide and tall, there was room for a closet underneath, a closet big enough for three kids hiding from a parent on the warpath to find refuge. So there we were, with our dad charging down the stairs above, searching for us. I don’t remember what we had done, but odds are pretty good that Page was behind the mischief.

“Doombala, doombala, doombala,” Page whispered, in exact rhythm to our dad’s footsteps as he raced down the old stairs. We tried to hold back our laughter, which would give away our position, but he couldn’t resist repeating: “Doombala, doombala, doombala.”

We laughed so hard, we rolled out of the closet, gasping for air.

Our dad found us, but he couldn’t stay mad at three laughing children. When we told him what was so funny, he laughed, too. Page began calling him Doombala, which we liked, but it was too long for everyday use. It was soon shortened to Doom, a name he came to regard with pride. After that, we never called him anything else.

Doom’s family was English, which was about as exciting to us as his being a ceiling tile salesman. In the Northeast, ethnicity mattered. And though we grew up in a waspy suburb, we wanted some ethnic identity. When everyone else is claiming Jewish, Irish, German (though not so popular in the ’50s), or Polish heritage, English was boring and useless, especially when you needed your heritage to bond – or fight – with others. Not a lot of English tough guys at school or on the block.

Our mom was 100 percent Italian, so we used that. It made me tougher, at least I hoped so, in the eyes of others. Not that I was, or that the Italians had acquitted themselves so well in the war, but at least I could pretend to have a connection to the Italian gangster stereotype, then popular in the movies.

The Italian relatives (my mom’s parents and her uncle) on a Sunday visit to our first house, Levittown, N.Y., 1949.

Years later we learned that the English side of the family had a pretty good back story, but Doom’s parents were long dead by the time any of us were born, and anyway, it still wasn’t nearly enough to keep from getting beaten up. His brother, Hugh, was nine years older than he and lived in Pennsylvania. We visited a bit when we were all really young but rarely saw that side of the family as we grew up.

There were fairly regular visits, though, from Doom’s great aunt Daisy and her brother, Harry, Brits who lived in New York City. They spoke with strong accents, but I didn’t realize how tight their tie was to the mother country. Until … one Christmas, when I’d gotten a Herman’s Hermits record featuring “I’m Henry the VIII, I am.”

Uncle Harry, as always lounging around the house in his tweed sport coat and bow tie, knew the tune and started singing along.

“We used to sing it in the foxholes during World War I,” he answered my astonished look.

I reacted badly. I was 14, and this was my music. Or so I thought. I stopped playing the record until the holidays were over and Uncle Harry was gone. It was only much later that I wished I had picked up the needle, turned off the record player and asked Unk about the war rather than stalking off to my room.

Doom’s mom, Lela Page, was Canadian. In 1907, she was 29, at home, and single without prospects; the only exciting thing in her life was following the exploits of her sister, Verna, and her brother-in-law, Ernest Gamble, as they performed internationally as the Ernest Gamble Concert Party.

The cover of the group’s promotional material at the start of their tour in 1907.

Newspaper writers across the globe praised their talents and noted Verna’s violin playing and beauty, though they seemed to lavish almost as much praise on her violin as on her playing. They were home in Canada, rehearsing for an engagement at the Panama Canal, where they would be entertaining the guys who were building it, and invited Lela to come along.

Lela could play the piano a bit – not at her sister’s talent level, but enough to warm up the crowd – so she joined them. And that’s where she met Hugh Sivell, an Englishman in his early 20s, working at the commissary. He had taken the job for the adventure and good pay. After a brief courtship, Lela and Hugh married and moved to the States, settling in Milford, Connecticut. Hugh Jr. came along fairly quickly, followed by John – Doom – nine years later.

The family did fine during the ’20s, but things got a bit tougher with the Depression. Doom was entering his teens when his older brother left for college. A few years later, his father, Hugh Sr. got cancer and died at age 49.

Despite going to school with just lettuce sandwiches – that was Doom’s big depression story, along with brown sugar bread for desert – Doom eventually filled out that 6 foot 2 inch frame. He became quite a good swimmer and worked as a lifeguard and swim teacher.

And though he hadn’t played much football in high school, he managed to convince the coaches at Hampden-Sydney College to offer him a scholarship, sight unseen. They were rewarded with four years of hard work and play, and Doom was a league all-star and team captain in his senior year.

He also worked hard to keep his grades up – double majoring in Spanish and chemistry. The war was on, and he needed the good grades so he could, as he said, enlist as an officer and give orders rather than go in as a grunt and take them. In 1943 he graduated and was sent to the Naval training school at Columbia University in New York where the government created 9,000 of the “90 day wonders” a year that were needed to man the ships in the Pacific theater.

Doom spent three months at the U.S Naval Reserve Midshipmen School at Columbia University in 1943 before shipping out.

After he completed his training, he was bound for the Pacific to serve on a supply ship as a lieutenant. But trying to get a train to the west coast and his ship, Doom had a ticketing problem at New York’s Penn Station. One of the ticket agents, a young Italian woman from Brooklyn, was both helpful and attractive.

While his buddy talked to her about how the problem could be solved, Doom snuck around behind the desk and checked out her legs (he approved, but the fact that he didn’t add that detail until I was 40, married, and with kids of my own tells you what a proper gentleman he was). Anyway. It was going to be several hours before their train would depart, so Doom asked the ticket agent for a date.

Good thing for him – and me   … and Carol and Page and Liz – she said yes.

Next week: Page finds trouble.

I still miss my brother.

It’s been so long now – more 50 years – that initially it’s hard to remember anything but the great adventures we shared. He pushed me to do things I was too afraid to do on my own initiative. Without him, I probably wouldn’t know what it was like to sit in the principal’s office or a police station, watching the big clock move at half the speed of time in the outside world.

Page, at age 4, was the portrait of innocence in his favorite Hawaiian shirt.

Still, it doesn’t take long to recall him beating me up 3-5 times a week. He marked every conquest on an old, heavy-duty, cardboard wardrobe box from the Greyhound Moving Company. It stood at the end of the hall, filled with my father’s Navy dress uniforms, my mom’s wool clothes from the 40s and the scent of mothballs.

He’d squeeze my head or neck with controlled viciousness until snot was coming out my nose and I was croaking “Uncle” in a hoarse whisper because I had no air or sense left in my body.

Our bedrooms were on the third floor of a well-built, turn-of-the-century house, too far away for my parents to determine whether my airless cries were for help or were of joy. There were hundreds of marks of conquest for Page on the wardrobe box. And just three for me. Mine all involved surprise attacks.

I would jump out of the darkened bathroom and get him in a chokehold. A real one, like I was going to choke the life out of him. Because I had to or I was going to see another mark on his side of the wardrobe.

Most of the time the surprise attacks failed. But three times over the course of the eight years we lived together in that house, I made him say uncle. It means nothing to anyone else, but I’m still proud of it.

Page was a tough guy. He didn’t just rule the 3rdfloor of the house on Beverly Road. He was known throughout town. When we got to high school, he worked for and earned a reputation as the one guy you didn’t want to fight. As more and more kids began avoiding him and his fists, he went looking for them. He would stand outside the town dances and either beat up people before they went in to the dance or if they came outside for a cigarette. If either of those failed, he’d knock a couple of kids out after the dance.

He rarely went inside himself, which, to me, was nuts. He was tall, good-looking and girls swarmed him. Well, not the good girls. He was too dangerous. In our white-bread suburb, he was a hood. The popular girls wished he were a bit less crazed and slightly more predictable because he was very smart and could be charming.

They went out with the football players and jocks that were a bit easier to control. Page would ask them to do things they didn’t want to do. Like have sex, of course, but also riding around town with him in whatever car he happened to steal that day.

The girls he did attract were needy and not very sure of themselves. They gave themselves to Page to keep him around. They liked his decisiveness. Unlike other boys their age, he had an idea of what he wanted and went after it. Even if it was often illegal.

One of the few times he did go into a dance brought trouble. I had my first steady girlfriend and she, Page and I were talking between sets of the band when some guy about 2/3 Page’s size walks up and starts mouthing off.

“Hey, tough guy,” the squirt began.

Page didn’t look at the kid, but his eyes flickered a bit, like they do when you think a fruit fly has crossed your vision.

The kid got closer, violating our personal space.

“Hey, tough guy,” the squirt tried again. “I hear you’re not so tough. I hear you only fight pussies.”

Page slowly turned toward the kid and stared.

“Keep it up, pipsqueak,” he snarled. “In about five seconds you are going to be flat on your back.”

The little guy attempted an exaggerated laugh, full of bravado. “I hear you’re nowhere near as tough…”

Wham!

Page didn’t wait the full five seconds. He swung a left hook to the side of the intruder’s head and the kid dropped like a sack of flour.

But it was a setup. As the kid hit the ground, all the hoodlums from the other side of town seemed to descend like the endless hordes of Roman soldiers in Ben-Hur. They came from everywhere, some of them seemingly dropping from the ceiling. Page was at the bottom of the pile in an instant. He got a couple of punches in, but he got the worst of it, with bruises all over his face and body and a permanent ban from town dances. Yeah, he was known around town – by the kids, the adults and the police.

I don’t know when his troubles started, but when we moved to West Hartford, Connecticut in 1959, it seemed that Liz, who was only 2, and I, then 8, did just fine. None of us had wanted to move. We had lived in a great neighborhood in Elsmere, New York with loads of kids and places to play. We resisted West Hartford and hoped our parents might change their minds and take us back. No such luck.

Once I got to school and had a chance to meet some of the new kids at recess or on bathroom breaks, I learned that kids are kids everywhere. I realized these Connecticut kids were reacting to me the same way my friends in Elsmere had. It was just a different cast of characters. It might take some time, but I would eventually rebuild my social life.

Page and Carol had a more difficult time. Carol, who was 12, because she was entering a new junior high school and neighborhood at a socially awkward time of her life. Page because he was Page and because at our new school, he drew a very short straw as far as teachers go.

Mr. Klienman may not have been the worst teacher for everyone, but he was the worst for Page. The guy was very strict. Even stricter than our parents, who were mighty strict. This guy believed in the three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic) but he added his own, fourth R: rules.

Page chafed so much under those rules that even before it was commonly done, my mom went to the class to “help out.” At least that’s what she told us but we later learned it was to keep an eye on Mr. Klienman at least as much as it was to keep an eye on Page. Her conclusion was that Mr. Klienman was right near the edge of sanity and Page was doing his best to push him over it.

And several times, he nearly succeeded. In Page’s mind, that was great fun, and he kept pushing authority for the rest of his life.

Page and mom in Levittown, N.Y., a few months after he was born, 1949.

There were lots of times Page tried to get me to rebel. The first time was when we were about 5 and 7, on a warm summer night after we got home from the county fair. We were piling out of the car when Page got it in his head that we should just run around the yard and avoid going into the house as we’d been instructed. With the sun down, the heat of the day was gone and it was almost cool. We ran around the yard chasing fireflies. Nobody called for us, but we knew the rules. When we got home and were told to go in the house, we were supposed to go in the house.

We knew there would be a price to pay. And that price, if the infraction were serious enough, was the belt. Our dad was in the “belt” stage of discipline.

Now, as I look back as an adult, I realize it’s a parent at the end of his rope, unable to think of another way to control a life that is spinning out of control with kids and work issues. He had 4 kids under the age of 10 and he was used to an orderly life, especially during the day when he was at work. But life at home with 4 young kids isn’t always orderly. Oh, we learned pretty quickly to be well behaved, but every once in a while we broke the rules. And this night, with the excitement of the fair and our bodies rushing through the cool country air was not a night for rules.

Eventually, I knew, we had to go in. Page wanted to keep running. He figured we were already in trouble; it couldn’t get any worse for us. That reasoning would not help him in future escapades. I finally decided to give myself up. But I was afraid of the belt. Page started to give me advice, as if he were a prisoner who had been serving hard time all his life, talking to a new inmate in the system. Mind you, he was 7 and I was 5.

He told me about the time he put a magazine in his pants for padding. However, we were outside and didn’t have any magazines with us. Besides, he said once Doom – we called our dad Doom and I’ll explain in the next chapter – once Doom realized he had a magazine, he got another couple of whacks. We looked for some other stuffing for our pants, but couldn’t find anything in the dark. Then Page started psyching me up for being able to handle the punishment and not having it hurt too much.

We marched in and Doom was standing there with the belt. I got it first – 2 whacks with the belt – and it didn’t hurt. Doom’s heart wasn’t in it – it was more of a symbolic gesture. And I laughed and gleefully hopped away and turned back to watch Page. Because Doom realized he had gone a bit light on me – for a long time, the baby in the family – Page got it a bit harder. But he just kept looking at me as if to say, “No big deal.”

When I say my dad was in the belt stage, it’s a bit of an exaggeration. My dad would move as if he were reaching for his belt. But I don’t really remember him ever using it other than this time.

This picture says a lot about Page’s and my relationship. Altamont, N.Y. 1954

The next act of rebellion came when we were moving the next year. The moving van was in the front yard and Page dared me to run under it. We had been told to stay out of the movers’ way and stay away from the truck. Page ran under it and looked back at me and called me chicken. So naturally, I ran under it. Several times. It was quite a thrill. Again, it wasn’t my idea. It was Page, my influential big brother, who got me to do it. And to this day, whenever I see a semi, I think about running under it.

In our new home in Connecticut, Page and I were each assigned a bedroom on the 3rdfloor. In those days, the reasoning was to put the boys farther away and keep the girls close. The girls needed more protection, I guess. That … and they were neater. I was thrilled. I loved that room and returned to it for solace until the day we sold the house 50 years later.

Page and I got along for the most part, even when he was squeezing the life out of me on the 3rdfloor. We were just different characters. He had more of a scientific mind than I did and needed to be constantly stimulated while I was more of a reader and didn’t mind being alone for long stretches at a time.

I admired the way he could take things apart and put them back together … although Doom didn’t much like coming home to find parts of his favorite radio spread all over the kitchen table. Page thought I was pretty funny and I worked that humor to keep him in a good mood. My comments, though, would often spill out before I had a chance to think. Or to be more truthful, they would spill out because I was more interested in getting a laugh or a result rather than worrying about that inevitable punch in the nose. If I had a good line, I just couldn’t resist letting it out.

Page got into fights with his fists, I got into them with my mouth.

One of our last minor, unpunished adventures happened when I was in 5thgrade. Page said we needed to ride our bikes up to the school. That seemed odd, as it was on a Sunday and deep in the New England fall, November, almost winter and well past bike riding season. Still, I went along even though I had no idea why. Page could be persistent when he wanted company.

Then Page wanted to know what I thought if he found a hand warmer or a lighter. Did I think it would be a good idea if we lit it? Of course. It was cold. But what were the odds of finding a random hand warmer and matches?

We rode up behind the old greenhouses next to the school – the greenhouses where everyone met after school to fight it out – and the next thing I know, Page has found some matches and some cigarettes. Well, he says, these aren’t a hand warmer, but maybe they’ll keep us warm. So we sat behind the greenhouses and smoked.

It didn’t take me long, just about a year or so, to figure out that he stashed the cigs there in the first place and the whole trip to the old greenhouses to mess around was his ruse to go up there and smoke. They didn’t make much of an impression on me because I didn’t pick up the habit for real for another 6 years. But it was just another instance where hanging out with Page put me closer to trouble than I wanted to be.

It would not be the last.

My neighbor (Stephen Folker of Giraffe Photography) was experimenting with his new camera and grabbed this shot. I’d make it the cover of my latest album … if I could sing. Or if I could play something other than a record player. But what about using it for a book cover?  I’ve written a bit in the last 50 years. Here’s the intro. For those who would rather listen than read, you can click on the audio at the top of this post.     [email protected]

When Mr. DeSalvo broke the news to me about my brother, all I could do was stare at the 5 or 6 hairs growing on the bridge of his nose. A bald man would have been proud to have that much hair on the top of his head, I thought. Then and there, I made a solemn vow to always care about my appearance.

After all these years, I still remember that moment on that hot, sticky August morning, deep in the Connecticut woods. Mr. DeSalvo was a kind and caring teacher, a guy with real life experiences: He had been shot down over Germany and held in a prisoner of war camp. And he was speaking to me at one of the most gut-wrenching, pivotal points in my life. And my main memory? Those hairs on his nose.

If you figure that there’s at least one pivotal moment in the life of every American baby boomer, there are at least 74 million moments like this, many deserving a fuller explanation and examination.

I’m writing down my moment and a few others because if I don’t, the only earthly notice of my middle-class, middle-American existence might be a feature story in a nursing home’s newsletter when I reach 110: “Last Surviving Woodstock Attendee: ‘It was a hot, muddy mess.’” And a few years later (if it’s a slow news day), a brief in the local newspaper: “Last Woodstock Festival-goer, 113, Dies.”

And I’m writing it because I am sick of the inaccurate portrayals of Baby Boomers. We aren’t all alike any more than members of any other generation. We’ve been stereotyped with a catchy name and described with generalities as accurate as a daily horoscope. We’ve been targeted by advertisers and politicians alike, and, as a whole, have responded as if we were members of Aldous Huxley’s pleasure-seeking, consumer population of Brave New World.

Our parents’ generation, The Greatest, had a superlative name, in addition to monumental events to frame their lives: the Great Depression, WW II, and the Red Scare. They experienced a harsh life ripe for the printed page. Though we had quickly tired of hearing about their hardships when we were kids, as adults, we couldn’t get enough of their stories and turned their memoirs into bestsellers.

Our lives have been framed by big events, too – notably the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, the moon landing, and the assassinations of our most charismatic leaders. But unlike the generational-wide experiences of the Greatest that they faced first hand, many Boomers watched life unfold second hand, in two dimensions on TV, as if we were the characters in Plato’s cave.

Some events, though, were experienced in real life, as with polio and the dawning of the nuclear age. We couldn’t swim in water that was too cold and practiced diving under desks at school. But once polio was cured and we eventually integrated nuclear annihilation with our other, less spectacular fears, we Boomers were able to live out our relatively carefree, insulated existences playing ball and tag in empty lots and schoolyards, many of which have now been covered over with strip malls, fast food restaurants and, increasingly, storage lockers.

In those days, when milk came in glass bottles without pictures of missing children, I felt free enough to bicycle all over Altamont, New York, sometimes wandering so far that I missed dinner because I didn’t always make it home before dark. The TV menu then was not the buffet it is today, with only three stations available. Still our parents limited even those limited choices and worried about the effects of the new medium.

On hot summer evenings, when only the doctor’s family on the next block had air conditioning, we cooled off on the front porches as the disappearing sun gave way to the only relief of the day. The sounds of baseball announcers ricocheted around the neighborhood as Vin Scully, Mel Allen and Red Barber described the games so vividly you felt as if you were sitting next to them at the game (“The lights in Yankee Stadium are so bright, you could read a newspaper at midnight in centerfield,” my dad told me.).

And late at night, tucked in bed with our most prized possession, our connection to the world – a made-in-Japan transistor radio powered by a 9-volt battery – we discovered a love of radio and rock and roll.

We dated at the drive-in movies, the only place we could escape the watchful eyes of our parents and where, while Godzilla was destroying major American cities, we groped each other until the car windows were so steamed you couldn’t see out to see the screen.

During these years, I worked mind-numbing jobs, scooping thousands of ice cream cones and installing panels of ceiling tiles in cubicled insurance offices as big as football fields, plotted imaginary, but very vague futures and generally endured the twists and turns of life that troubles every kid in every generation.

I trudged through the muggy, muddy fields of Woodstock and the frigid, empty D.C. streets at Nixon’s inauguration to his second, doomed term. I marched in peace protests (and apparently, in the revisionist history of today, was the only protester in America not to spit on a soldier). And before I became fully committed to the cause, I lost a six-pack of beer to Boston’s riot police at my first.

I didn’t dodge the draft but did try for every deferment available short of getting married and having a kid, and then prayed for a high number when the other methods didn’t work. Those prayers, if things really work that way, were answered.

I spent five years wandering the country in my ’69 VW convertible, always on the lookout for an open gas station, an odd job and the meaning of my life. I put up power poles in Wyoming, groomed a golf course in Connecticut, and made ski boots and spun records in Sun Valley, Idaho.

After chasing the sirens of fame and then, as a reporter, the sirens of authorities, I found myself married with kids and locked into a job. Life suddenly slowed down and I settled into a life of normality – a teacher at a small Catholic university on the banks of the Mississippi River.

When Mr. DeSalvo delivered the news about my brother, my sobs should have been heard on the far side of the universe. But all I could do was stare, fascinated, at the hairs growing on the top of his nose. I hadn’t known that was possible.

Now that I’m well past the halfway point in life, I’ve bitterly learned that as we age, hair sprouts from the most unlikely places. Sometimes overnight. And as adults, we don’t have a teen’s limitless mirror time to hunt for and purge our imperfections. But I keep trying.