Knots in My Yo-Yo String (5 page)

At age 6 (1947): a Good Boy in the making.

So if you want an interesting Hartranft Elementary School autobiography from those days, go see Leonard Wilfong. As for me, I have already mentioned the fifty-yard dash and my spur-song serenade. Only four other interesting things happened to me in grade school:

1. Second grade. This did not happen directly to me but to a calf. Mrs. Care, our teacher, lived on a farm. One spring day she took the whole class there for a visit. While jumping into the hay in the barn, Roger Adelman landed on a pitchfork and had to go to the
hospital. Ordinarily, that would have been the highlight of the day, but out in the barnyard something even more interesting was happening.

A mother cow and her calf were hanging around just inside the fence, close enough for some of us to reach out and touch. Then, as we watched in amazement, the mother—who, you must understand, was a lot taller than her offspring—backed up to the calf and pooped on its head. Until Mrs. Care finally wiped it off, the plop just stayed there, like a brown beret. Was it my imagination, or did the calf really have an expression on its face, as if to say, “Hey, Ma—wha’d I do?”

2. Second grade. We had a student teacher from West Chester University. Though she was careful not to give me preferential treatment, I remember feeling proud and special. Why? She was my cousin, Dolly.

3. Third grade. I got sick with a kidney ailment. I was in the hospital for ten days and out of school for two months. My mother tells me that in the hospital I put on a brave front. She says that whenever she and my father visited me, I chatted away happily with them. Then, the second they left the room, I started to cry. My mother found this out from the nurses. Personally, I don’t remember. My mother also says they gave me so many needles in the hospital that my rear end looked like a pincushion. I don’t remember that either. As a reward for all the needles each night, a smiling nurse in a candy-striped uniform brought me a milkshake. That I remember.

4. Sixth grade. In early spring of that year the two sixth grades were brought together for a series of spelling bees. Since I won more of them than anyone else, I was declared spelling champion of Hartranft Elementary. That honor earned me the chance to compete in the Montgomery County spelling bee, the winner of which would go to Washington, D.C., for the national bee.

As a sixth grader among contestants ranging up to eighth grade, I was one of the youngest on the stage at Norristown High School that night in April 1953. I don’t think it ever occurred to me to try to win. My goal was to survive until at least the fourth round, since I had been told that no one from Hartranft had ever gotten that far.

Ninety-six school champions sat in long curved rows of folding chairs. Hanging on a string from everyone’s neck was a square of white cardboard with a large black number. Mine was thirteen. Before the competition began, the master of ceremonies announced to the auditorium that we were honored to have last year’s county champion with us—Nancy Ann Hammerschmidt of North Wales. He then turned from the audience to the stage and asked Nancy Ann to stand and take a bow, and who should stand up but number twelve, the pretty blond older girl sitting next to me.

The competition got under way. The opening words were easy, and most of us made it through the first two
rounds. Then we started dropping like flies. When somebody misspelled a word—
bong!
—the judge hammered a big brassy bell and the kid was gone. No arguing, no whining—wham, bam, next, please.

Meanwhile back in the seats Nancy Ann Hammerschmidt and I were chatting away. Actually, Nancy Ann did most of the chatting. I mostly nodded and smiled in wonder that the famous, glamorous fourteen-year-old champion would be so familiar with the likes of me. When we returned to our seats after nailing our third-round words, Nancy Ann took out her wallet and showed me a picture of her boyfriend.

When in the fourth round Nancy Ann spelled “ecstasy” with a second
c
instead of an
s
, I was sure no bong would dare banish her from the stage. But it did, and off she marched. And so did I a few seconds later, having spelled lacquer “l-a-c-q-u-o-r.” Considering how smitten I was with Nancy Ann, I’m surprised I even bothered to take my last turn at the mike before following her off the stage. She must have made a quick exit, though, for she was not among the growing crowd of misspellers behind the curtain, nor did I ever see her again. I guess neither Nancy Ann Hammerschmidt nor the spelling bee bonger cared that I was a Good Boy.

Baseball is still baseball, and school is school, but George Street is no more. Oh, sure, if you travel to Norristown today and go west on Elm, you’ll come to a street sign that says
GEORGE
. Don’t believe it.

A street sign does not make a street. A time makes a street, and a people of that time. The sign will tell you nothing, nor will the people who live there today. Go ahead, ask them. Ask them whose front steps they better not sit on. Challenge them to a game of chew-the-peg. (Flip penknife from shoulder. If it doesn’t stick in ground, pull out planted peg with teeth.) Or just stand there on the sidewalk outside 802 and close your eyes and listen for the avalanche of coal. Listen for days. You won’t hear it. George Street is as gone as 1950.

I heard it. I heard it on coal day. Nearly every house on the block had a coal-burning furnace. In a front corner of the cellar, beneath the living room, was a plank-walled bin. It held a ton of coal. When the coal truck came, my job was to run to the cellar and open the window above the bin. The truck turned sideways in the street and backed up to the curb. From under the truck bed the coal man pulled the chute, which looked like a
sliding board, and fed it through the open cellar window and into our bin. He lifted the hatch and the coal started coming, avalanching down the chute with such a racket that I had to clamp my hands over my ears. I had to tie a hanky around my nose, too, because of the coal dust that made a black, choking blizzard. I would crouch down under the washtub, fold my arms about my head, and wait out the bombardment from the enemy battleship and its sixteen-inch guns. Or if I wasn’t pretending that day, I simply ran outside.

Softer sounds came from the Victrola. The Victrola was an early phonograph, a record player. Ours was portable, like a small boxy suitcase. Whenever I lifted the hinged cover I was treated to a special scent, a sweet dustiness that suggested slumbering songs, music’s bunkhouse. To get the thing to work I had to crank it, like an old Model T Ford. The crank was a stepped metal rod with a black wooden egg-shaped handle. I placed a record on the turntable, then inserted the rod into a hole in the side of the player and cranked away. I flipped a switch, and the record began to spin. Breathlessly I lowered the needle to the smooth black edge of the disc. The needle slipped into the first groove, and “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral”… Bing Crosby was crooning.

The main sound machine, of course, was the radio. Unlike many people my age, I cannot give a long list of the programs I listened to. What I do recall are three motifs: the Lone Ranger theme song, otherwise known
as the
William Tell
Overture, footsteps walking down hallways, and doors creaking open. Beyond that I simply remember listening. And picturing.

For radio was a partnership. The radio furnished the sounds, and the listener supplied the pictures. TV and movie screens have shaded us from the evocative power of sound. Our eyes enslave us. “Seeing is believing.” In contrast to TV, which asks us merely to turn it on and become a passive dartboard, radio asked us to meet it halfway, to co-create the moment. The resulting pictures in our heads had a depth of reality possible only when the camera is the person.

Despite my love of radio, I soon gave in to the lure of television.

The first TV set in my corner of the West End belonged to the Beswicks up on Kohn Street, a block west of George. Butchie Beswick’s popularity zoomed. Day after day a mob of kids sat on the Beswick living room rug after school, goggle-eyed and gaping like so many guppies at
Willie the Worm
on the ten-inch black and white screen. Mrs. Beswick must have been a saint. Over time the mob diminished, one cross-legged floor-sitter at a time, as new families acquired television sets.

Our family got one in 1950—a twelve-inch Magnavox—when I was in third grade and home with my kidney illness. Doctor’s orders confined me to my bed, but I made such a fuss that I was finally allowed to be carried
downstairs and plopped in a chair to watch TV for one hour, not a minute more.

Television and I grew up together; meanwhile movies seduced me with Technicolor and 3-D and CinemaScope. By the time I got my driver’s license, the only radio in my life was in the family car.

On July 20, 1969,
Apollo 11
astronauts rode the lunar module
Eagle
to the surface of the moon. Like much of the world, I was in front of a TV set watching fuzzy images of the event:
Eagle
launching from the mother spacecraft,
Eagle
orbiting the moon,
Eagle
coming in lower, lower, skimming lunar hills and craters, seeking a spot to land. I strained my eyes watching, and still I wasn’t seeing, not well enough … 
the pictures in my head.
I rushed outside to my car, I turned on the radio, and that’s where I experienced the landing on the moon. I had rediscovered what I knew back on George Street:
listening
is believing.

And so is remembering, remembering George Street:

Cooling myself with a Popsicle stick fan  …  playing chew-the-peg … “smoking” punk  …  digging up the grass between the front-walk bricks (my most hated chore after taking out the garbage) … Mr. Freilich’s long-handled grocery grippers, allowing him to reach to the highest shelf and pull down a box of cereal  …  purple ribbons on a door, meaning someone had died in that house  …  pouring Morton salt on the fat summer slugs
that left silver trails across the bricks  …  Quaker Oats  …  bathtub-shaped Hudson cars  …  the bug truck spraying everything, including me, with mosquito poison  …  cat’s-eye marbles in the dirt  …  Bono’s fruit and vegetable bus  …  on a winter morning, a slow white plug of cream pushing up the cap of the milk bottle on our front step  …  the bread man  …  the rag man  …  the rag man’s horse, itself slow and drooping as a sack of rags, as if every
clop
upon the street would be its last  …  the rag man’s mournful warbling bleat: “Raaaaaaags!”… the sad, slow syncopation passing George, heading for Kohn, Noble, Buttonwood, westward … “Raaaaaaags!”
clop-clop,
“Raaaaaags!”
clop-clop
.…

More than a Victrola crank handle or the blizzard of coal dust, George Street was its people. It is something I understand better now than I did then. I can find old marbles and baseball cards in antique shops and rummage sales. I wish I could find the people there, too. I have so much to ask them.

I have questions for the Freilich family, who operated the grocery store next to us, on the corner of George and Elm. The Freilichs were, I believe, the only Jews on the block, and to live next to them was on some days like living next to another country.

Nothing but a thin wire fence separated our backyards. On most days the Freilichs’ backyard was just like ours: trash barrel and garbage can, a flower bed or two, a clothesline, a walkway down the middle to the back gate. But on certain Sundays in summer there suddenly appeared in the Freilichs’ backyard people such as I had never seen. The men especially were distinctive, for they dressed all in black and wore black hats and long shaggy beards. Afraid to stare openly at them, I ran upstairs to my bedroom window and stared until my eyeballs ached.

Next day on the way to school I usually saw Nancy Freilich. Nancy was the older of two sisters. She was thin and had long red hair and walked pigeon-toed in her black and white saddle shoes. She was very bright and friendly, and she would have made a terrific friend, but she was a year older and a grade ahead of me, and fifth-grade boys did not mix much with sixth-grade girls, even if they were next-door neighbors. So I did not ask Nancy Freilich about the black-suited shaggy-bearded people in her backyard the day before. And instead of becoming terrific friends, we simply smiled and waved and said hi to each other.

Nancy’s older brother Morton was seldom seen on George Street. Unlike most of us, who seemed to have sprouted like grass from the cracks between the sidewalk bricks, Morton Freilich occupied a higher plane. He was brilliant. He became a doctor. He made people well. But he could not make himself well. Morton had always had a bad case of asthma. Sometimes it was hard for him to breathe.

So he moved himself and his medical practice to Arizona. I pictured him arriving in that faraway state, smiling to see the palm trees and desert sands and adobe-style houses. I pictured him looking up at the cloudless sky and throwing out his arms and going “Ahhh!” and for the first time in his life taking a long, deep clean breath of air. And maybe he did, but within several years the asthma had tracked him down and
killed him, Morton Freilich in Arizona, only in his thirties, brilliant, the grocer’s son.

Nancy’s little sister was Sharon. From the day she was born, some kids on the street, I don’t remember who, seemed to have it in for her. They were always saying unkind things about her. I remember thinking, Why? What did she do? I could understand people getting mad at someone who was always bugging them, but Sharon Freilich had just been
born.
She hadn’t had time to bug anyone. I wondered if there was a secret that I had missed.

I began to study little Sharon Freilich as she toddled about the grocery store and the brick sidewalk outside. I tried to detect what it was in her that offended others. I saw her sitting one day on the front step of the store. Her knees were smudged, and I thought, Is
that
it? Dirty knees?

She wasn’t just sitting there, she was crying. I looked around to see if someone had said something mean to her, but the block was deserted, and I did not understand that an ugly word, once spoken, once heard, remains in the ear forever. Seeing her cry, alone and dirty-kneed on the front step, as alone as I’ve ever seen anybody in my life, I tried not to feel bad, because I knew so many others who would not have felt bad, who would have laughed. But I failed.