When I was growing up, my dad worked
at Sears and Roebuck. He didn’t have any
stock, but he had a lot of stock sayings.
He especially liked to blurt “money doesn’t grow on trees.” He blurted “money doesn’t grow on trees” so
much I suspected he was hiding something.
I like to attribute my father’s
frugalness to being a child of the Great Depression, as were most of the
parents of my generation—the Baby Boomers.
By the way we lived it up back then, you would have thought the Great
Depression ended with the landing on the moon.
Only rich people had color
television sets back in our day. The
average family had one console tv, a monstrous rectangle of wood and plastic
that could have been a recycled coffin.
These black-and-white monsters squatted upon the living room floor and
received black-and-white transmissions from the lightning -rod antennas snugged
to the chimneys, the tines on the antennas with spans as long as the Market
Street Bridge. On a good day, they could
pick up fuzzy transmissions clear to western Pittsburgh, depending, of course,
upon on how high your house stood on a T-town hill.
Often, when some neighbor was operating
a power tool, the broadcast emitted on your coffin emitted enough static and
white squiggly thingies to make your standard RCA casket look like a snow globe. Other times, the vertical control went
bonkers, resulting with a never-ending black-and-white image steadily dripping
from top to bottom, a visual torment as excruciating as the infamous Chinese
water torture.
Whenever the vertical took the
eternal horizontal, you brought into the living room the little shoe box
portable your mom watched game shows and soap operas on and mounted it upon the
lifeless snow globe. Every night, you
participated in the family squint fest watching the only channel the rabbit ears
would pick up—good, old Channel 9. The television
remote back then consisted of the youngest son, who had to physically hike from
the couch to the microscopic tv to turn by hand the volume and blasted vertical
control. Often, he had to hold one of
the aerials so that the reception improved.
No one had private swimming pools or jacuzzies in our day, if they did their name was Clampett. The closet thing that came to a private swimming pool was if you lived within the proximity of a creek and it was dammed and had lazy spills and pools. We swung into the cool flowing waters of the creeks from monkey vines and had chicken fights and other challenges with our friends while our pop chilled within the shallows of the creek.
None of us lived in air-conditioned
homes back then. In the Petras manor, we
had one condition—“Either stay inside or out,” another stock saying of my
dad. We had screen windows on the house
and one fan that was about the size of the box that package the television, the one the
size of box the Keds came in. Whenever a
hole developed in one of the window screens, my mom would darn it with a needle
and thread.
Our family cars provided little relief
from the summer sun. On the hottest
days, we rolled the windows completely down manually with hand cranks as
stubborn as tow truck winches. For extra
BTUs, you would accelerate the MPHs. Additional
climate control could be maintained by moving these little triangle panels of glass
in front of the passenger and driver’s windows.
It was only when I was taking Driver’s Ed that I learned these little glass
jibs were called “vents,” not “cigarette disposal ports.”
In a Baby Boomer’s booming day,
self-propelled and self-motivated usually resulted from a gentle nudge toward
the lawn from a father’s steel-toed work boot.
Steel rule usually awarded lawn care duties to the designated television
remote, or so titled at 1017 Biltmore Avenue the “aerial- holding specialist.”
We indeed had one of those push
mowers you sometimes see in a museum.
Our so-called push mower was more like a mush mower because it required
to budge it a smidgen the lean and the leg
power of an Iditarod sled dog. The mower
paddlewheeled glass clippings, dandelions and dust while chirruping like a Bill
Mazeroski baseball card in the spokes of a bicycle.
After zigzagging swathes of lawn
that resembled a cornfield maze, you rewarded yourself with a cool drink from
your outside drinking fountain, more commonly known as the garden hose.
There must have been something
rejuvenating about the taste of rubber-flavored water. We always had plenty of energy remaining for
a game of sandlot baseball. In our day, we
didn’t have composite-alloy bats. “Graphite”
we called “lead,” and it was inside our standard number 2 Ticonderoga pencils, and the wood of the pencil was probably the same wood our bats were made from. If you swung the 28-ounce Ticonderoga bat and
connected the hardball smack dab on the trademark, the bat handle would crack
and need some repair because we didn’t have extra bats. We would mummify the bat handle with black
electrical tape that we would borrow from some father’s toolbox and use the bat
over and over until it was reduced to a mere tent peg.
The leather from the hardballs would
also peel off as would the compressed yarn comprising the ball’s guts. Again, we would repair it with a generous raveling
of borrowed electrical tape.
On the Baby Boomer sandlot, we did
not have batting gloves to reduce the sting of contact with the hardball. Believe me, hitting a taped-up Spalding with a
tape-reinforced 15-inch Louisville Slugger emitted an aftershock you felt
clear up to your ears. To reduce the
sting to a mere 5.5 on the Richter scale, we would spit into our palms and rub a
generous helping of dirt into them. Come
to think of it, we didn’t do much handshaking after games.
I like to think I have come a long
way from those booming Boomer days. Now,
after a few hours of mowing grass on my John Deere X330, I like to hang out at
my pool with a glass of Cabernet. My
wife Debbie says that my wine would best pair with a brown paper bag. My taste buds have progressed, as well. I can detect traces of black cherry, chocolate,
tobacco, with a very big finish of garden hose.
