The Old Codgers' thread

I remember 25 cent a gallon of  gas.

Also we never locked our house unless we were going away overnight.  Other wise the door was always open no matter if we were home or not.

Bob K

Gordon Barlow wrote:

Our mothers' menus at every mealtime were quintessentially simple – namely, what was on the plate. The choice was Hobson's Choice: eat it or don't eat it. Actually: eat it all or don't bother turning up for the next meal.[/i]

Dear Codgers,

In the 1954 film Hobson's Choice, Charles Laughton played Hobson, a tyrannical bootmaker and father of three young women.  Spoiler alert... by the end of the film, Hobson -- now ailing and besotted -- has a failing business, ruined through competition by his eldest and her husband, and is given the "choice" to take on a partner and give up running the business.  Hobson's choice means a single choice -- take it or not.

The choice I got in third grade from the witches then running McKinley School in Peekskill, New York, was this:  eat all the "Mexican baked beans" on your plate, or you don't get to go outside with the other kids at lunch.

Though I hated them, I usually salted the beans to death and forced them down.  Being imprisoned inside all day seemed worse.

Today I can't stand even having such beans -- here called frijoles (free-HOE-lace) -- on my plate, let alone consider ever eating them.

McKinley school was closed down permanently a few years later -- the school board had been just waiting for the senior witch, longtime principal Miss Waldren, to retire.

Hopefully, the folks running the schools in District 3 are more enlightened these days, and no kids are forced into a "choice" making them eat a food they can't stand.

cccmedia in Quito, Ecuador

Being born and bred in NZ I can remember when the first TV set was purchased by a family 4 doors down from us. TV then ran from 4 pm to 8 pm Monday to Friday and 2 pm to 10 pm on weekends. Black and White. Each family living in the street was allocated a time and day to watch TV at the house.

Milk was delivered by a guy with horse and cart. You left the billy can out at the gate with threepence it. Arrived at our place at 5.am religiously 7 days a week. 

Had an outhouse and the local council changed out the can once a week after 10 pm at night.

Meals were great as we killed our own sheep, lambs. steers for meat. Grew our own veggies and had a chook house for eggs and poultry.

Maori women used to bring around buckets of blackberries to sell so mum could make jam. Had apple and plum trees  and all fruit was preserved. Boxes of peaches, pears, nectarines and apricots were delivered by rail. Dad would pick them up and us kids had the task helping to preserve it all, make into jams etc. Vegetables were preserved, made into chutneys and pickles.

When the mushrooms came out we used to go around the farms picking them. Gave some to the farmers and the rest were cooked up and frozen down for future meals.

We often went fishing so all hands on deck to gut scale and fillet the catch for freezing down.

No need to lock doors in those days. Just told neighbors when you were going away and they would keep an eye on things. Shared everything with them in those days.

First telephone in our house was on a party line shared with 10 others in the street. 

They were definitely carefree days then.

I recall my somewhat horrible childhood.

We lived in an area where there were zero non white Yorkshire people, but plenty of uneducated fools, so all the stupidity of racism was bandied about as fact.
We talked about, "Blackies" and "Niggers" without the slightest thought as to what we saying - I was as stupid as the rest.
"Chinks" was added to my vocabulary in the late 1970s when a HK Chinese family opened a take away just down the road from me.
My awakening to my present line of thinking came when I went to the "Chinky" for a late supper. I was really pissed off with the idiots who called the lady on the counter names, and generally verbally abused her whilst telling the customers it was all made of cat, but ate it anyway.

Her face said it all, so I waited for a moment when the place was devoid of morons, and asked her how to say 'thank you' in Chinese (Yes, I know, but I'd made a start).
I think I must have been the first customer to actually be nice to her since the place opened.

I also remember my dad's first car, a Morris Oxford.
I recall watch Doctor Who in black and white, our first colour set, and the start of UK breakfast TV.
As a Yorkshire chap, I recall hard times ... but we were happy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k

stumpy wrote:

First telephone in our house was on a party line shared with 10 others in the street.

Our number (this was on the Darling Downs in Queensland, in the 1940s and '50s) was 2-S. The "2" was the exchange for us north of the railway, and the "S" was three short rings for "S" in Morse Code. If we were all out at a neighbour's, Mum or Dad would answer it. If it rang while we were on our way there, the neighbour would answer and tell the operator that we would soon be arriving, and could he or she take a message. Whenever we went on holidays, we would have to tell the operator, who would then tell the caller. We didn't have many secrets - and couldn't afford to have!

Back in the day, my first hobby was butterfly collecting.

In that era, kids could buy bottles of carbon tetrachloride over the counter in stores.  Applying it was the preferred method to kill butterflies quickly so they wouldn't damage their wings in their death throes.  I learned the method in a paperback book I had about butterflies.

There were countless Monarchs and other great butterflies in that era flitting in the fields and forested lands where I lived in northern Westchester County, New York.  I used this chemical mix on hundreds of them.  I won first prize at the McKinley School's science contest in third grade for samples from my collection mounted in a cigar box.

It was years later when I discovered that I had been handling a dangerous chemical substance, and that butterflies can be killed in less disturbing ways.  Not that I would ever want to kill a butterfly again.

The use of "carbon tet" was outlawed in the United States in the 1970s.

cccmedia

cccmedia wrote:

In that era, kids could buy bottles of carbon tetrachloride over the counter in stores.

Yikes! I've just Googled the stuff, and the US's EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has some very severe things to say about it. (The EPA's web-administrator can't spell "chloroform", so the Agency's public opinions might not be the most authoritative around...)

You did well to survive, ccc!

Gordon Barlow wrote:

cccmedia wrote:

In that era, kids could buy bottles of carbon tetrachloride over the counter in stores.

Yikes! I've just Googled the stuff, and the US's EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has some very severe things to say about it....

You did well to survive, ccc!

I certainly came out way ahead of my poor butterflies.

cccmedia

Growing up on a sheep farm in the '40s and '50s (on the Darling Downs of Queensland, Australia) we ate a whole lot of meat - all of it from scrawny old wethers Dad reckoned the butchers would reject. The mutton was grass-fed, with no added hormones or other additives. As an old codger, I am distressed by all the unnecessary additives in the food we buy today. Here's an extract from "Tough as old Boots", which I posted on my blog in December last year.

During our backpacking days in the Middle East in the ‘60s, not being able to understand the languages of the region, and travelling poor, Linda and I used to inspect the pots bubbling away in the slum restaurants' filthy kitchens. As a rule of thumb, and all else being equal, we would choose from the pot furthest away from the cockroaches and rat-droppings. Looking back now, we suspect that what we ate then was probably healthier than the food the agri-businesses palm off on the world today. What a sad judgment that is, on the modern way of life.

Gordon Barlow wrote:

Growing up on a sheep farm

Luxury.

I grew up in a nasty town near Rotherham in south Yorkshire at the time of the steel industry's best pollution.
l recall going on holiday to Cornwall, but my strongest memory is of the return and the disgusting smell in the air we simply didn't realise was normal for us.
I hate to think what the pollution did to my lungs over the years, but I'll bet it was like smoking 20 a day.

We were poor, but we were happy - not.

Anyway, my dad started to get promotions, so we went up in the world, and I even went to school.
It was really posh, a grammar school, so my life started on its wild roller-coaster of a journey that saw me transform from a reasonable person, to an unreasonable biker, gaining a 2nd dan black belt in Tae Kwon Do, getting engaged several times, running a business (including part time work as a party DJ - serious fun with serious cash for it), and doing many totally mad things.
Jumping out of an aeroplane  probably being the most fun, if you exclude the biker chicks and evening walks on sheep farms.

Fred wrote:

Jumping out of an aeroplane  probably being the most fun...

"If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you". Fred, was that one of your original insights?

Mr. Sherman was probably my most unusual high school teacher.

In ninth grade, he offered to give a candy bar to any student who could guess his score on the upcoming New York State Regents' algebra exam.

I guessed I would get a perfect score.  Everybody else in the class guessed something more reasonable as their own scores.

I used the challenge to motivate myself in studying.  I even found an old algebra book of my mother's, from circa the 1930's, and studied that.

On the day of the exam, I marked my test paper, then carefully went over my answers three times to make sure I hadn't casually missed finding my own mistakes.

When the tests came back, I got my desired score and was the only student to win a candy bar from Mr. Sherman.  That was some proud moment when he announced my score.

There had even been a multiple-choice question on the test whose formula I had learned from Mom's pre-World War II algebra book and which we hadn't covered in my class.

cccmedia in Ecuador

I recall a few of my teachers - the best and the worst in the world.

Mister Barham (Maths) made numbers come alive.
He had this way to make the most sleep sending maths problem into something fun. He was the only teacher ever to have kids asking for extra homework.
A very close second was Mister Bowen (Maths). A genius with a great ability to keep his subject interesting.
Staying with maths, my worst teacher was Miss A******* (Self moderated as I'm going to say really bad things).
That evil, ginger haired midget was the worst teacher in the history of anything. She has a temper Genghis Kahn would envy, and absolutely no clue how to teach. Her personality was somewhere, but no one knew where, and was about as popular as someone who has a poo in the swimming pool.

My various science teachers (except chemistry) were amazing.
I found a great interest in Biology, especially one of the younger teacher's mammary glands.
The teachers' methods kept us excited and interested in the subject, and we all did really well.
The physics teachers were ball bouncingly great.
I was inspired by every word they ever spoke, even when they said, "Fred, stop picking your nose".
The first (I forget his name), wrote in my report, "Fred has a flair for science", words I will remember for ever, and words that reinforced my love of messing about with wires.
My second was an amazing inspiration, Mr Billington was somewhere just past amazing, keeping us hanging on every word of the text book, encouraging us to experiment and imagine 'what if?'

I stayed in touch with Mr B for many years, but was most upset when I last called some few months ago, the day of his funeral. I had no idea he'd shuffled off the mortal coil, so I spent a moment telling his wife what a fantastic man he was, and how so many of his students kept him alive in their hearts.

stumpy wrote:

Being born and bred in NZ...
Had an outhouse and the local council changed out the can once a week after 10 pm at night.
Meals were great as we killed our own sheep, lambs. steers for meat.

Stumpy. I mentioned the home-killing of sheep (by my dad, with a knife) on my blog in "The Man from Snowy River" in October 2013. It will bring back some memories for you, I'm sure. I'll bet you only ever ate the toughest old wethers, too! I have a younger brother who crusades on Facebook for the banning of the halal/kosher method of slaughtering these days, which is exactly what our father did. He doesn't want to know.

And in February 2014 in "Inside the Rabbit-proof Fence" I reminisced about the shooting of a bullock on a cattle station in central Queensland. That incident shocked me much more than I expected. I was about ten at the time.

As a matter of interest: why didn't you have a pit-dunny instead of a can?]

@Gordon Barlow

Even though our house was outside the borough limits it always had the can toilet. When the limits were moved dad put in a septic tank and flush toilet. Then turned the old outhouse into the coal shed.

After a few years the council stopped us from killing our meat as it was against council laws. Then ran stock on friends farms and had a guy kill for us and we would then breakdown the carcass.

All meat was first class no tough old wethers for us. Had 2 pigs killed each year at a piggery, one for pork and one for bacon. Both pigs were allowed to roam free in an orchard for a month before killing so they ate peaches, nectarines and any fruit on the ground.

Some great short stories and remembrances here. A lot of them remind me of similar things in my own childhood.

One thing that comes out is that most of you seem to have fond memories of your childhood experiences, although they were tough times compared to today.
I'll have to chew the cud a little and see if I can resurrect something of interest out of my old memory box. 

El_Jost wrote:

One thing that comes out is that most of you seem to have fond memories of your childhood experiences, although they were tough times compared to today.
I'll have to chew the cud a little and see if I can resurrect something of interest out of my old memory box.

I don't think of my memories as particularly "fond", El - just factual, and fair examples of my life at the time. My first primary school, for instance: twenty children*** aged from five up to seven, with a teacher aged 18 and straight out of teachers' training college. Before the school opened our mothers had taught us from lessons mailed out by the distance-learning section of the State Education Department. And here's an interesting factoid: the boy who sat next to me was in later life elected to the Federal Parliament by a majority of the 100,000 voters of an electorate whose area was - this is true - slightly bigger than France, and even than Texas.
*** The State required a guarantee of 20 before they would send a teacher. But as soon as the teacher was there, the enrollment dropped to 12. I think the 8 drop-outs must have been the children of itinerant shearers!

Does anybody else remember the slates in use back then, with graphite pencils? And desks with ink-wells?

I miss the Era of Good music, All we have now is bubble gum and all that bitch, hoe making up the lyrics
Am a lover of music, My father had huge boxes of cassettes, music from e 70s to e 90s. ABBA? BoneyM, carpenter, Diana ross, Kenny Rodgers and so many legends.

Then the good rnb grom the 90s . That was the best era.  Whitney, Boys to men,Luther vandros, Mariah  carey

We had a very short maths teacher in high school.several nicknames ( short put, shortcake, Fullstop). He had a very sofr voice, very boring and strict. Omg this guy would give you a terrible pinch for failing the calculations.

God, his topics were Three dimensional figures,  Bearing and Matrices.
Screaming, cuboids, parallelograms allover.I hated his classes

in 70s, I grew up in a very remote village where my Dad was the Principle of that High School and we lived in the quarters that next to a thick jungle. Wild animals used to roam in school grounds and serpents were everywhere. No electricity those days in those area but in cities. Big well behind house was only for drinking, cooking and washing. It was a deep well so difficult to get water for bath so had to go to nearby lake every morning.

Dad used to go hunting and we small 5 were always after him. Other days we used to buy meat of wild-bore, deer or rabbits for cheap money. My Dad's monthly salary was $4 and we lived comfortably. We owned cows for milking and hens for eggs. Most of the vege came from yard. Rice bought directly from farmers. We never used to go out for eating and Mom was a very good cook. My Dad had a box camera that was occasionally used but when we need a picture, a cameraman was called at home. We didn't have refrigerators or televisions or any expensive home appliances except a big radio in a glass and wooden case.

Most people lived there, were very poor and some kind of people who made clay pots as a business at home came to sell or exchange for some used cloths. Buses and trains were working between cities but in village areas their main transportation was bull carts. Many people used to walk hours to go to a city and kids to schools.

Young people in that village used to elope and get married in early ages. It was so common some young people to get suicide by drinking or eating poisonous things in their unsuccessful love affairs.

Environment was not polluted. People were not corrupted. Life was very relaxing with big family bonds.

Dear Codgers,

I thought the baked-beans requirement at McKinley School was bad.

But things got worse when I was transferred for fourth grade from McKinley School, to Frank G. Lindsey Elementary School in Montrose, New York.

The problem was three boys in my class who took advantage of me as the new kid who had left his friends behind and could be taunted.

Their one-trick arsenal involved one of them getting down on all fours during the playground recess period after lunch.  Then the second boy would say and do stuff to distract me so I lost track of #1's whereabouts.  Then the third one would push me hard, so that I tripped backwards across #1's back and fell to the hard concrete playground.

Naturally, the trio was not shy about expressing their total enjoyment of my plight.

Due to lack of supervision by adults and my own lack of coping skills, this school yard bullying persisted over a period of weeks or months.  I was aware enough to know that 'tattling' on the three abusadores would probably produce even more problems due to the unwritten no-tattling code of that era.  So I did not consider going to the principal's office to try to end the madness.

I never experienced any organized hazing of this type before or since.  I probably was lucky to get through that period without having my head cracked on the playground pavement.

In 2015, Frank G. Lindsey School's stated mission is "to ensure that all children develop self-confidence, upstanding character, compassion and a desire to learn (in) a nurturing and supportive environment...."

Hopefully, that means that a teacher or two is stationed outside during recess to keep an eye on any kids -- or groups of kids -- who have bullying tendencies.

cccmedia

cccmedia wrote:

Dear Codgers,

I thought the baked-beans requirement at McKinley School was bad.
cccmedia

OMG - That flung an old memory back into my deranged mind.

My sixth form was a bit of a non-event for the most part, mostly because it was seriously boring, and the school was quite strict, not allowing any fun.
A friend, a chess mate, was more than a lot wild, and managed to get kicked out of school for stirring the beans in the sixth form/staff dining room.
We all knew of the stirring, but the staff were in the dark, so many ate the now less than appetising orange legumes.
Perhaps he should have used a spoon.

Yes, it's a true story. The same lad disappeared a couple of years later. There was some problem at the bookies he worked at, and he just went.
Some thought he's had his fingers deep in the till, so he decided to do a runner, others were of the opinion the same had happened, and was given a dirt nap, the body as yet undiscovered.
As of the time I ran away from England, no one was any the wiser.

Here's a real old-codgerish grumble, which may strike a chord with others who were brought up in a middle-class world in which a severe double-standard prevailed, in respect of socially acceptable language for men and women. My brothers and I were never allowed to use coarse swear-words in the presence of females of any age. Damn was as rough as we could venture; bloody was taboo, as was shit, and other words that would probably be censored in this forum.

Even today, I flinch on hearing f*** and its derivatives used in mixed company, and am privately outraged when women speak them. Is anybody else here old enough to feel uncomfortable in those circumstances?

Dear Codgers,

Here's what I remembered after reading OP Gordon's latest report on cussin' ...

My first full-time, year-round job after graduation was as a newscaster and reporter for the CBS Radio affiliate in Keene, in southern New Hampshire.

The news director and I routinely tape-recorded phone interviews we conducted with city officials and other small-town newsmakers, some of whom did not get along with each other.

One time, Mayor Massielo was so upset with Police Chief Ficke (FICK-ee) during an interview that the mayor said he was "pissed off" at the chief. 

As usual, I edited soundbites from the interview, including that one, and put a couple on the air at 1:05 p.m.

As I finished my newscast several minutes later, a local minister had already called into the station to protest this 'harsh language.'

Later that week I was called into the office of the station owner, Hal Close (rhymes with dose), and told to bring along my audio recording of the full interview with the mayor.

The first thing Close wanted to know was whether I had told the mayor at the outset that I was recording the interview.

I played the tape for Close and the audio clearly demonstrated that I had so advised the mayor about the recording.

Close had his answer to that question, but put me on "probation" nonetheless.  What that meant was never explained, but I remained on probation for the rest of my time at WKNE-AM and FM.  That time was another 4-6 months, during which I did my regular work with no suspension and no docked pay.

I was basically frozen out by Mayor Massielo from any further interviews.

cccmedia in Ecuador

Gordon Barlow wrote:

Here's a real old-codgerish grumble, which may strike a chord with others who were brought up in a middle-class world in which a severe double-standard prevailed,

Yes.
We were dragged up in a very similar way, including opening doors for a lady.
Everyone is amazed when I do that here.

cccmedia wrote:

One time, Mayor Massielo was so upset with Police Chief Ficke (FICK-ee) during an interview that the mayor said he was "pissed off" at the chief.

Audio editing is something you have to be extremely careful with.
I can easily see how you mixed up the expression of annoyance and the police chief's name, earning you a trip to the boss's office.

Fred wrote:

cccmedia wrote:

One time, Mayor Massielo was so upset with Police Chief Ficke (FICK-ee) during an interview that the mayor said he was "pissed off" at the chief.

Audio editing is something you have to be extremely careful with.
I can easily see how you mixed up the expression of annoyance and the police chief's name, earning you a trip to the boss's office.

There was no mix-up and the police chief had already bolted to an undisclosed new job in Florida, which is what provoked the Keene mayor's ire.

The mayor pulled a major boner by agreeing to a recorded interview ... using a term in that interview that he should have known was unacceptable in the community ... and assuming that a 22-year-old reporter would not use that portion on the air.

I had not developed the awareness of community standards and failed to ask a senior staff member for guidance.

I have heard this term "pissed off" used many times on U.S. radio and TV in subsequent years.  In the current era when the F word is common on HBO programs, saying that someone is p-o'd on-air is not the outrage it was in small-town New England back in the day.

cccmedia in Ecuador

cccmedia wrote:

There was no mix-up and the police chief had already bolted to an undisclosed new job in Florida, which is what provoked the Keene mayor's ire.cccmedia in Ecuador

Sorry, I thought you mixed up the editing to say the mayor was %$^*ed off at police chief Pee.

Fred wrote:

We were dragged up in a very similar way, including opening doors for a lady.
Everyone is amazed when I do that here.

Many women seem to be embarrassed when I stand up until they are seated - younger women, anyway; ones in my general age-group take it in their stride!

Dear Codgers,

When I was about 12 years old, Jackie Gleason moved to my street -- Furnace Dock Road, outside Peekskill, New York.

It was rumored he paid $100,000 for his octagonal house, which could not be seen from the street.  That was real money in those days.

The place was gated, but we kids had a good excuse each October to go through the gate, up the hill and right up to his front door.  It was Hallowe'en -- trick 'r treating.

"The Great One" himself never came out to greet us.  It was always his manservant.  Jackie always had some candy treats for us, although nothing remarkable.

He was quite visible every Saturday night in those days on The Jackie Gleason Show. If you ever see one of those old shows from the 60s, you may notice that Peekskill Productions is listed in the closing credits.

cccmedia in Quito

Just across the street from Jackie Gleason's place, the less famous Mel Morris and his wife were raising four kids -- all sons.

My friend Abbott Morris, six months older than me, was the greatest athlete on Furnace Dock Road.  We kids used to play touch football and softball in Pine Lake Park most days after school.

One time I was playing first base.  We picked Abbott off first and I was sure I was going to tag him out.  I was a few feet off the bag and he was about 15 feet away.   But he was so quick and so agile, the play wasn't even close.  He was safe.

Another time, someone challenged Abbott to see if he could hit a ball over the tall stone wall in the park's right field.  I was standing in deep right to catch it if Abbott hit something short of the wall.

On the first pitch, Abbott hit one a mile in the air.  It not only cleared the fence, it cleared the tall trees on the level above the fence.  Challenge over, mission completed.

After our school years, I heard a rumor that Abbott had been given a try-out with the Pittsburgh Pirates.  But he didn't make the cut.

cccmedia

Mel Morris owned a clothing factory in New York City, and the Morrises were probably the wealthiest family on Furnace Dock Road -- except for Jackie Gleason, of course.

They were the only family with kids that had its own full-time servants.

Mel bought Abbott his own pony.  It was stabled by a rodeo-style running pit right there on the property.

Mrs. Morris didn't want her boys' friends roaming around the big house.  But one time Abbott had me up to the kitchen and the maid prepared tuna fish sandwiches for us.

Another time I sold Abbott my whole comic book collection.  About 200 comic books.  Superman, Batman, Adventure Comics, the Green Lantern, the Flash, Archie comics.

New comics sold for just 12 cents each back then, more for the fancy "annual" editions.  I charged Abbott double the cover price.  I figured he could afford it.

"Don't tell my father what I paid," said Abbott.

cccmedia

The Morris family moved down-county when Abbott and I were 16.  It probably cut Mel's daily train commute into the city by half.

I only talked to Abbott once after that -- on the phone years later, when we were both approaching 30.

He wanted to dispute a rumor that he was losing his hair.  Someone had told me the rumor and it had gotten back to Abbott, who felt compelled to call me about it.

A few years later I was saddened to hear the news that Abbott had died.  Nobody I knew seemed to know the cause of death.

My old friend, the great athlete, had died young.  Abbott Morris was 35.

cccmedia

Hello again, Codgers ...

"Seventy-Seven-Double-Yew-A-B-C !"

That was the radio jingle heard at night all over the Northeastern United States back in the day.

Programming legend Rick Sklar had transformed American radio with a Top-40 format broadcast on 50,000-watt WABC-AM in New York City.  "Cousin Brucie" aka Bruce Morrow and a team of round-the-clock disc jockeys were non-stop energy as they pumped extra life into the New York metro area by day plus hundreds of cities from Maine to the Midwest at night.

My father, one of the original "mad men" of mid-century Madison Avenue, knew Sklar from his work and the connection landed the teen-aged me a job as the summer-relief desk assistant at WABC one year.

I was slicing ham and serving up cole slaw at an A-and-P supermarket deli when the job came through late that June.  I gave up the slicing machine ASAP and was gone from the A-and-P the next day.

Now I was ripping wire copy for WABC's newscasters and personally delivering weather reports to the glamorous DJ's that my friends only knew by voice -- the bigtime voices of Cousin Brucie, Dan Ingraham, Ron Lundy, Charlie Greer and Les "More Music With Les Marshak" Marshak.

The whole bunch of them were friendly to the teenage assistant, adding to the excitement of being at such an entertainment hub.

Eventually, I figured out what Cousin Brucie's meaning was when he asked on-air for his engineer to "give me a little more juice."

He wanted more volume in his earphones so he could be totally engrossed in the Top-40 music experience that was sweeping North America.

cccmedia

The legendary TV sportscaster Howard Cosell was doing daily radio work as well on WABC-AM that summer.

The married Howard was often seen schmoozing up the pretty secretaries in the outer offices on my floor in the tall 6th Avenue building.  But Howard had an on-air talent I could only have guessed at before working around him.

I had done a little radio-news work at a college station, carefully writing and re-writing and practicing my one-minute scripts before going on-air to minimize mistakes.

Anyway, one time at WABC, I took in a Howard Cosell report from New York Jets summer training camp.

Midway through the first sentence of Howard's report, the engineer told me the recording equipment had started late, so I said, "Sorry, we've got a technical problem, Howard.  You'll have to start reading over again."

"Young man," Howard informed me in his famous staccato voice, "I don't read....I...ad...lib!"

Whereupon he delivered a flawless report on what was going on with the Jets.

Howard never wrote stuff down, he always improvised -- usually live on-air -- and his reports and sportscasts were never off by even one second.

cccmedia

Greetings, All Codgers...

My father -- as a U.S. Army weather-forecaster in Europe during World War II -- helped achieve peace in his time.  His decision at war's end to bring his army-issued parachute back to New York, however, didn't work out as well.

Our extended family had this 42-acre wooded property in upstate New York where I grew up, and long after the war a private helicopter was to fly in one weekend to do some surveying work.

My father had the idea to spread out the old parachute on the field in front of our house, to mark the general area where the helicopter should land.

The weather didn't cooperate.  Oh, it was dry enough.  But when the chopper came down, a wind gust and the activity of the blades combined to send the parachute into the blades ... and the chopper crash-landed.

When we kids got home from Sunday school that day, the pilot was long gone .. and the chopper was a splintered mess right where second-base used to be when we played ball on that field.

Eventually, the chopper fragments were hauled away, and the field seemed none the worse for wear.  If the pilot was injured, I never heard about it.

My father's decision to seek a new use for that artefact from his heroic WWII days was obviously not his most proud and brilliant moment.  At least in my presence, he never spoke of the chopper incident again.

cccmedia

Another old codgers' memory (for me) is writing letters with an ink pen. The only letters I've written since my mother died in 1999 have been letters of condolence***** - and sometimes even condolence letters have been emails instead of the real thing. When I travelled overseas in my 20s, in the mid-1960s, I used to carry a Parker pen and a small bottle of ink. (I don't actually remember carting any ink around, but Mum kept all my letters home to her, and they're all in ink - so I guess I must have done!)

When I met up with Linda in Greece in '64 and we backpacked through the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I wrote home every week. The letters were (in effect) my travel-diary. When I was settled and in jobs, the letters constituted my daily journal. Mum saved every one of them, and I have them to this day, though I've never bothered to read them again.

***** No, I've just remembered... When I phoned Linda from Canada in '66 and asked her to marry me, her response was: "Put it in writing". Which I did, with pen and ink. I think I had to send the airfare, too. Sheesh! [I had refused to commit myself for so long that she (prudently, and sensibly) didn't believe me. Also, she probably guessed I'd been drinking a bit, for courage. Well, fair enough...]

Memories become so selective, in old age! On my website I have recorded quite a lot of episodes of our life together since 1964 - Linda's and mine - and even some before it. Earlier this week I hoped to write something memorable and entertaining about our year in Perth (Australia) in 1971, between the years in Bahamas**and New Hebrides*** (now Vanuatu). I wanted to begin with where we had stayed when we first arrived in Perth, off the train from Melbourne, but there was nothing in my mind. Linda said impatiently, "with Tony and Maree in their house in Applecross; surely you remember that." But I didn't, and had no idea where Applecross is or was. I remember Tony picking us up in his boss's old Rolls Royce, though I've always believed that he met us at the airport, not the train station. Where did the rest of the memory go? Days later, I still can't bring to mind an image of their damn house, or even Applecross!
** "Rum and Coca Cola" - August 2015
*** "Zorba the Greek" - January 2012, and subsequent others

Could some other old codger please, please, comfort me with a similar story of a hole in the fabric of memory? I'd be truly grateful.