Some of my earliest memories include...

• Seeing my mother wash the outside of the windows in our third-floor apartment at 61 Larch St. in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, by sitting in the window sills. It scared me to death (not literally, of course, but almost)
• Travelling to Revere Beach in Boston, Massachusetts, which was very stony as I recall, not sandy at all
• Going to see Plymouth Rock where the pilgrims disembarked from the good ship Lollipop Mayflower in 1620
• Getting on an ocean-going vessel (possibly a ferry) and going on a blustery day from Point Judith to Block Island with my parents and my dad's friend Jock or maybe it was Jacques
• Attending Pawtucket Day Nursery between the ages of three and five where my teachers were Miss Irma Chisholm and Mrs. Yvonne Schack.
• Sitting in Mrs. Mullins's kindergarten class at Hancock Street Elementary School in Pawtucket for all of four days before being moved to the first grade class of Miss Edith Wildgoose

It occurs to me that I have tried to do something like this before, so I searched the blog archives and found a post from October 2013 entitled "Remembrance of things past (part the first)". The rest of this post is that post. Everything in it is still true except that I am now 83 instead of 72.

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Remembrance of things past (part the first)

It occurs to me that I keep showing you odd bits of stuff like that film of San Francisco in 1906 but never tell you much about myself.

Today I will tell you a whole lot a little about myself.

Of average height and average weight, I am a 72-year-old man who spent the last week in September in a hospital where a great deal of poking and prodding and sticking with needles and photographing of my innards and receiving a couple of pints of blood and a few other things too horrible to think about took place. And that was just at the admissions desk.

I was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, (it’s the smallest state in the union, and it’s in New England) because I wanted to be near my mother, and she happened to be there at the time.

We lived in a third-floor apartment of a house at 61 Larch Street and my pediatrician was a Dr. Kachichian. I attended the Pawtucket Day Nursery while my mother, who had received a teaching certificate from West Chester State College in Pennsylvania, worked at the Coats & Clark Thread Factory. My teachers were Miss Irma Chisholm and Mrs. Yvonne Schack. A Portuguese woman in the neighborhood would sometimes take care of me as well and give me apple pie and pastrami for breakfast.

One day at recess, while two children were playing on a seesaw, one jumped off and the other, a black boy named Peter, fell and hurt himself. His arm was bleeding, and I noticed that his blood was red just like mine. I decided on the spot that people are alike on the inside and it is only on the outside that we are different.

When I was about four or five, a man wearing a white sailor uniform began visiting my mother occasionally. My mother called him “Ted” and so did I. Eventually he moved in permanently and my mother told me to call him “Daddy” from then on.

I went to Hancock Street Elementary School to Mrs. Mullins’s kindergarten class, but after four days she took me to first grade. Apparently Pawtucket Day Nursery had done its job well, because I was answering all the questions and telling all the other children the answers. My teacher in first grade was Miss Edith Wildegoose.

(Here I am in the spring of 1947 as a student in Miss Edith Wildegoose’s first grade class. I was six.)







In August 1947 we moved from Rhode Island to Fort Worth, Texas, on a train. It took three days. We arrived on one of the hottest days in the history of Fort Worth, Texas, and walked several blocks from the Texas & Pacific Railroad Station to the Majestic Hotel, which was inaptly named, carrying our luggage. One day, while leaving the hotel to get something to eat, I saw a hotel employee whose skin was so black it was almost blue, who had the whitest teeth and the whitest jacket I had ever seen, sweeping little black things off the sidewalk into little piles in the gutter and setting them on fire. The little black things turned out to be live crickets, and the smell was beyond awful. I was scarred for life in that instant.

A few days later we moved to a boarding house in the Arlington Heights section of Fort Worth. Mrs. Cash, who owned the boarding house, spent her days telling everyone who would listen that her close relative, actress Faye Emerson, was married to Elliott Roosevelt, the son of the President. The phrase “six degrees of separation” had not yet been invented, and actor Kevin Bacon was not born until 1958, but Mrs. Cash was eager for all to know that she was associated with the rich and famous.

My parents eventually rented a small post-war bungalow on a horseshoe-shaped street (2332 Chandler Drive East, on the other end of the horseshoe from Chandler Drive West) and I was enrolled into Mrs. Wolfe’s second-grade class at Oakhurst Elementary School.

I was not to experience urban life for long. In the spring of 1948, we moved again to a three-acre plot two miles from a little town that boasted a one-block-long business district with a traffic signal at both ends. I was to live there for the next ten years.

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(End of archived post)

I would just like to reiterate that there is nothing on earth quite like the smell of crickets dying. Driving past a turkey farm with fields full of turkey poop is a close second.

If you are very good I will show you "Remembrance of things past (part the second)" next.

Remembrance of things past (part the first)

It occurs to me that I keep showing you odd bits of stuff like that film of San Francisco in 1906 but never tell you much about myself.

Today I will tell you a whole lot a little about myself.

Of average height and average weight, I am a 72-year-old man who spent the last week in September in a hospital where a great deal of poking and prodding and sticking with needles and photographing of my innards and receiving a couple of pints of blood and a few other things too horrible to think about took place. And that was just at the admissions desk.

I was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, (it’s the smallest state in the union, and it’s in New England) because I wanted to be near my mother, and she happened to be there at the time.

We lived in a third-floor apartment of a house at 61 Larch Street and my pediatrician was a Dr. Kachichian. I attended the Pawtucket Day Nursery while my mother, who had received a teaching certificate from West Chester State College in Pennsylvania, worked at the Coats & Clark Thread Factory. My teachers were Miss Irma Chisholm and Mrs. Yvonne Schack. A Portuguese woman in the neighborhood would sometimes take care of me as well and give me apple pie and pastrami for breakfast.

One day at recess, while two children were playing on a seesaw, one jumped off and the other, a black boy named Peter, fell and hurt himself. His arm was bleeding, and I noticed that his blood was red just like mine. I decided on the spot that people are alike on the inside and it is only on the outside that we are different.

When I was about four or five, a man wearing a white sailor uniform began visiting my mother occasionally. My mother called him “Ted” and so did I. Eventually he moved in permanently and my mother told me to call him “Daddy” from then on.

I went to Hancock Street Elementary School to Mrs. Mullins’s kindergarten class, but after four days she took me to first grade. Apparently Pawtucket Day Nursery had done its job well, because I was answering all the questions and telling all the other children the answers. My teacher in first grade was Miss Edith Wildegoose.

(Here I am in the spring of 1947 as a student in Miss Edith Wildegoose’s first grade class. I was six.)







In August 1947 we moved from Rhode Island to Fort Worth, Texas,
on a train. It took three days. We arrived on one of the hottest days in the history of Fort Worth, Texas, and walked several blocks from the Texas & Pacific Railroad Station to the Majestic Hotel, which was inaptly named, carrying our luggage. One day, while leaving the hotel to get something to eat, I saw a hotel employee whose skin was so black it was almost blue, who had the whitest teeth and the whitest jacket I had ever seen, sweeping little black things off the sidewalk into little piles in the gutter and setting them on fire. The little black things turned out to be live crickets, and the smell was beyond awful. I was scarred for life in that instant.

A few days later we moved to a boarding house in the Arlington Heights section of Fort Worth. Mrs. Cash, who owned the boarding house, spent her days telling everyone who would listen that her close relative, actress Faye Emerson, was married to Elliott Roosevelt, the son of the President. The phrase “six degrees of separation” had not yet been invented, and actor Kevin Bacon was not born until 1958, but Mrs. Cash was eager for all to know that she was associated with the rich and famous.

My parents eventually rented a small post-war bungalow on a horseshoe-shaped street (2332 Chandler Drive East, on the other end of the horseshoe from Chandler Drive West) and I was enrolled into Mrs. Wolfe’s second-grade class at Oakhurst Elementary School.

I was not to experience urban life for long. In the spring of 1948, we moved again to a three-acre plot two miles from a little town that boasted a one-block-long business district with a traffic signal at both ends. I was to live there for the next ten years.

Humpty Dumpty, Babe Ruth, and six degrees of separation

The drawing on the left is an illustration made by John Tenniel in 1871 for the original edition of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. Here are a few lines from Chapter 6:


“There’s glory for you!” [said Humpty Dumpty].

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t -- till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master -- that’s all.”

(End of quotation)


This famous literary conversation came to mind recently when I happened to google “Babe Ruth.” I know what you’re thinking, and you're wrong.

Steeee-rike one.

I wasn’t looking for Babe Ruth, the baseball player:

According to Wikipedia, George Herman Ruth, Jr. (February 6, 1895 – August 16, 1948), also popularly known as “Babe”, “The Bambino”, and “The Sultan of Swat”, was an American Major League baseball player from 1914–1935. He is one of the greatest sports heroes of American culture and has been named the greatest baseball player in history in various surveys and rankings. His home run hitting prowess and charismatic personality made him a larger than life figure in the “Roaring Twenties”. He was the first player to hit 60 home runs in one season (1927), a record which stood for 34 years until broken by Roger Maris in 1961. Ruth’s lifetime total of 714 home runs at his retirement in 1935 was a record for 39 years, until broken by Hank Aaron in 1974.

You’ll need to guess again.

You’re still wrong. Steee-rike two.

I wasn’t looking for Baby Ruth, the candy bar either:

Baby Ruth is a candy bar made of chocolate-covered peanuts, caramel, and nougat, though the nougat found in it is more like fudge than is found in many other American candy bars. The bar was a staple of the Chicago-based Curtiss Candy Company for some seven decades. Curtiss was later purchased by Nabisco, and after a series of mergers and acquisitions, the candy bar is currently produced by Nestlé. The creators of Baby Ruth, the candy bar, claim it was named for the daughter of President Grover Cleveland, not for Babe Ruth, the baseball player. But the creators launched their candy bar in 1921, at the height of the popularity of Babe Ruth, the baseball player, twenty-five years after Grover Cleveland stopped being president, and many years after his daughter had died. In the original flavor, U.S. edition, the ingredients listed by weight in decreasing order were sugar, roasted peanuts, corn syrup, partially hydrogenated palm kernel and coconut oil, nonfat milk, cocoa, High-fructose corn syrup and less than 1% of glycerin, whey (from milk), dextrose, salt, monoglycerides, soy lecithin, soybean oil, natural and artificial flavors, carrageenan, TBHQ and citric acid (to preserve freshness), caramel color.


No, I was looking for something else. What I was looking for -- and this may come as a shock to some of you (do I hear Steee-rike three?) -- was Babe Ruth, the British rock band from the seventies:

Here’s how Babe Ruth, the British rock band, looked in 1975. The members, from left to right, were Alan Shacklock, Dave Hewitt, Jenny Haan, Ed Spevock, and Steve Gurl.

Babe Ruth, the British rock band, hasn’t even existed for a couple of decades, but back when it did, one of their albums went gold in Canada. They were more successful in the U.S. and Canada than in the U.K., and I’m wondering whether any of you readers in Canada or the U.K. or even here in the States remember this band. (I must admit that I had never heard of them, but then rock music was never my thing.)

Here comes a second shock: Alan Shacklock and Dave Hewitt are both friends of mine.

At some point the Shacklocks and the Hewitts moved to Atlanta. Alan and his wife, Lee, joined our church in the early nineties and so did Dave and his wife, Mary. Mary sang soprano in the choir.

Here’s shock number three: Alan, who once produced an album for Meat Loaf, directed our church choir for more than a year. I will wait while you pick yourself up off the floor.

He didn’t look anything at all like he did in 1975. For one thing, he didn’t have any hair. None at all. His head was shaved. Dave Hewitt looked more like his 1975 self, except that he was older and his hair was quite a bit shorter. Dave played bass guitar. Alan played one of those electronic keyboard synthesizer thingies. Alan even had a title while he was at our church: Director of the Celebrative Arts. A few years later he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he now divides his time between producing recordings once again and teaching guitar in the music department at Belmont College.

Alice was wrong and Humpty Dumpty was right. You can make words mean different things. The proof is Babe Ruth.

Now if I could just find a connection between Meat Loaf and Kevin Bacon, I might decide there’s something to that “six degrees of separation” nonsense after all.