With all due respect to John Lennon and Paul McCartney!
Birthdays are a great day to sit/lie back and reflect. I was lying in bed this morning, thinking I should get up so that my back would not hurt and I could hit the men’s room and then look for my glasses. All of these things are minor inconveniences in the overall scheme of life — as we get older…
A lot of my memories are refreshed by family photographs which I am so grateful that we have. As I started writing this I realized that either I am way too wordy (most probable) or there are just a lot of things I wanted to write down. This will probably be a multiple post blog. Here we go…
I remember when I was three or so when my cousin Steve and I tied ourselves up so securely with a rope we sat on the lawn at the house on Leslie Road waiting for rescue. I remember Uncle Ben’s black Cadillac (probably a 1958 model) sitting in front of the roadhouse in Balmville. Then there was the family fun of watching me as a 4 year old retrieving eggs from the hen cages – still in therapy over that. I remember lying on the radiator in the study in Hazleton watching the Flintstones in black and white. Dad Hagar was commuting to NYC and would come back to Hazleton on weekends on the bus and I remember now and then going to the bus depot with Mom to pick him up. He would often bring me wooden 3-D puzzles as gifts; there was a round one in particular that I remember. I think that it was during this period, that Grandma and Grandpa Casucci moved to 478 Liberty Street in Newburgh. I remember riding in the blue Ford from Hazleton to Newburgh to visit them, while lying on the back seat or on the backseat deck above the trunk during the trip up US 209. Looking back on it, I wonder what I would have thought if there was a panic stop or wreck as I flew from the trunk deck across the front seats causing severe head injuries to my parents before crashing through the windshield.
I went to Locust Street School for kindergarten – very traumatic. I did not develop shoe tying abilities early which was a prerequisite for K back then. I remember hitting my cousin Joe in the head with a piece of wood in our small swimming pool and Uncle George coming up into the front bedroom at 887 James St and raising holy hell with me (I was 5 or so). Then there were the holidays and get togethers. Hide and seek at 887 James and at Uncle Mike and Aunt Edna’s with all of the family. I remember thinking “why are they calling that woman Aunt Dedna”. Trips to Price’s Dairy with the Gaydosciks, and the milk being delivered with a horse drawn cart. Mr. Rabitz (sp) the local junk man (we call them waste haulers or Good Will today), tonsillectomy, John getting clonked in the head with an icicle falling from the roof, putting a new roof on the James Street house, going to watch Mike play basketball and a dance party in the living room that I found out later had an admission charge. There were four of us that were younger, Joe Gaydoscik, Joe Grula, John Yourishin and me. Sometimes Davey Smulligan joined in. Sometimes Walt would join in but he was in the cusp of being older. Pretty much the “rat pack” of five to nine year old hooligans terrorizing James Street. Playing in the old clinker dumps, going to Angela Park which for us was our Six Flags and stealing fruit off of neighbors trees.
There was a summer on Roxbury Pond in Maine. Dad Hagar was working on the Andover Earth Station (sounds so SciFi) one of the Telstar I receiving stations. What a spot for a 6 year old. The place we lived in was on the lake, there was a canoe, swimming, wood stoves, forts built in wood piles, hikes in the woods and rumor has it that I even got my picture in Life Magazine as they were inflating the Earth Station dome. It was like summer vacation for poor people. Mom Hagar and I left early because the school system was such that I would have had to repeat kindergarten because I missed the first grade birthday cut off date. Mom Hagar stood up and in her polite, quiet way informed them that they were idiots and that her son was not. By God he could tie his own darn shoes and did not have to go through another year of learning that. For those of you that have been to Maine.. well lets just say that they were unmoved by her impassioned plea.
Time marched on and we entered our sight seeing phase when we moved to Idaho. It began with the trip from Pennsylvania to Idaho in the dead of Winter. We had a company car – a 1960 Chrysler station wagon with push button hydromatic automatic transmission. Not a lot of interstate highways were completed so it was a slow scenic route. I do remember the Pennsylvania Turnpike and also the Illinois toll road which had the restaurants built as bridges over the highway. Pretty darn cool when you are like 7 years old. I also remember that we only stayed at Holiday Inns or Best Western Inns.
As the thaw struck, we were off to Craters of the Moon, Yellowstone, Grand Teton Park, the Snake River Gorge and Sun Valley which were all within driving distance. Mom Hagar would whip up a batch of chicken and potato salad, drop it all into the old metal Coleman cooler and then into the trunk of the car, Dad would grab the cameras and we were off. Finished second grade in Idaho Falls, fell in love with the little girl down the street and had my first border collie who it turned out could not ride in a car. She ended up on Ardell Balls sheep ranch where I am positive that she was happier.
Next up – July-August and Winter, the North Dakota Years and Tom and Becky had nothin’ on us, the Wisconsin years.