THE FOOTNOTES

The first blog began in 2006--it still exists. Here's how I accessed it. Maybe you can find an easier way. It's sort of a history book

Boot up Footnotes--go to dashboard via the little orange icon in the blue bar--when dashboard comes up, scroll down to All Bog updates-click on it

--when you see the Blackledge 1987 article, you will see nooonskitheelder in blue ==click on it and you should be looking at the first blog--good luck

I dimly recall that I was discharged from the Navy on May 20, 1946. That would make it 64 years. I wonder if they are still using sails and oars.

Megan and husband, Patrick Ambrose became parents of a bouncing baby boy on May 15---which, coincidentally, is the same birthdate for Pat and Paul.

Named Tabor Griffen, the newborn weighed in at 7 pounds 8 ounces.

Megan and Tabor are doing fine.

My senior thesis film is shot! cheers! applause! Here are some set photography from the film.

Baba Yaga and the Thrice-Nine Kingdom is my own adaption of the Baba Yaga myth from Russian folklore. It tells the story of a young non-human girl on a quest to save her brother from the clutches of the vile Baba Yaga, the ancient witch of the woods who is known to capture and eat her victims. While being chased by one of the Baba Yaga's mysterious creatures, she runs into a human who has been in hiding for decades. With his reluctant help, they venture off into the wicked Baba Yaga's liar to find her brother.



After months of preparing, rewriting, and crew adjustments, the film is finally shot! The footage looks great, and I'm very happy with the performances I got. Thank you so much to everyone and their support, I couldn't of done it without you.









More photos will be on the extras part of the DVD, which is due to release this summer, 2010. (when I will be taking senior III)

Recently, I was lounging in the Theraputic Pool in Mansfield watching parents
playing in the water with infant children. One father remarked that he wanted his son to be unafraid of the water. Good idea! This experience took me back to my early childhood, and one of the unforgettable days I spent with my Grannie Noonan in New Rochelle, New York.
New Rochelle is on Long Island Sound, and has a public beach called Hudson Park. That’s where old Grannie took me that day for fun at the beach. I guess Grannie tired of waiting for me to qualify for the Olympic swim team, and knew I would never make it since I was deathly afraid of the water. She had to speed up the process, and demonstrate that my fear was not a problem for her. So, she asked a big kid nearby to throw me into the ocean, which he did. She had a way about her: neither tender, loving, nor understanding—I don’t think she was crazy about me.



THE STORY OF BOB’S LIFE
Despite what Old Bob has told you, he has made a few decisions which are questionable. One that stands out is the time Jimmy Carter was campaigning for the Presidency. Jimmy was slated to appear at the Colony in Vernon one afternoon, and Old Bob, as Chairman of the Tolland Democratic Town Committee was one of the local dignitaries invited to attend and make this peanut farmer from Georgia welcome. Not old Bob! Too busy with minutiae of his own jumbled life style, Old Bob delegated a couple of underlings to attend in his stead. Who ever figured Carter would get the nomination, never mind get elected President?

THE ROACHES & KINDRED CREATURES

A tiny moth had been seen flying around the squeaky clean kitchen at 72 Sherry Circle a few months ago. Half-hearted swats, not really intended to injure had been made in a ritualistic manner, and it was more or less assumed that the creature
was no more. . That’s because he/she was no more in the public eye. We discovered in a routine inventory, that the thing had discovered the open packages on the shelves and had established a network, a real network of webs, or some kind of nesting material, and had ruined several packages of pasta, and cookies, or something. We had to discard the stuff, and move things into secure plastic containers. That was the end of that until I spotted the same moth, or one of its siblings flying around again. This time, I will show no mercy.
This was not the first time an insect(s) had interfered with my life. During WWII, in letters home, I had described life on a minesweeper in some detail, figuring that this deathless prose would constitute historic documentation of the experience.
When you wrote a letter on the minesweeper, it didn’t simply go to the post office. Everything you wrote was read by an officer, a censor, who cut out information concerning the location of the ship, or anything else that would be useful to the Japanese if they went to the home of your parents, confiscated and read the thoughts of an electrician who secretly served as advisor to General MacArthur. Believe me, if I knew about the Grand Plan, the Japanese knew
about it, too. So, once in a while, with no new, and interesting thoughts to send home, I would censor my own letter by beginning a sentence, and using a razor blade, cut out spaces here and there which the reader would presume was so secret that the censor had to remove it in the name of national security.
My parents saved my letters, and there were a lot of them. I’ll bet they would be interesting to read today. But, not to be.
At the end of the war, my parents, who had been separated for years, decided to make a home for Bobby to return to, and get together again. The housing shortage following WWII was severe, and my sister, Rita, was lucky to find a dumpy apartment at 241 Chestnut Street in New Britain,. a place which should have been condemned, and the Noonans moved in.
Storage space was limited, and the satchel full of letters from Bobby who was on the minesweeper were stored under the sink in a room you would have to see to believe. The bathtub was in that room. You don’t see a lot of bathtubs of that type anymore. In fact, I had never seen one like it before we moved in. It was made of galvanized sheet metal which had been soldered to make it hold water. You’ve heard of lead pipes? These really had lead pipes. And what made this bathtub one of a kind was the lid which covered it when not in use which was most of the time.
My brother, Jack, cautioned us to keep an eye on the tub with the lid because if the old man ever took a bath, and the lid fell on him, we would never think to look for him in the tub.
The room, I don’t know what else to call it, became infested with cockroaches.
And if you could have seen the apartment of the owner who lived downstairs, you might be willing to settle for the cockroaches. It was obvious the creatures commuted from there, overjoyed to see new tenants. The sink area was loaded. . . Ever tried to get rid of roaches? Maybe there is a way today so maybe it can be done, but it was tough then.
. We cleaned everything, and threw stuff out. In desperation we even threw out the satchel full of Bobby’s war-time letters. I like to think that the literary world suffered a great harm that day.
Cockroaches were a problem for a while on the ship. For a long time, the ship was very clean. No rats, no cockroaches until the ship went into a floating dry-dock which was a place where the bottom of the ship could be raised out of the water and cleaned of barnacles, and worm proofing material, for wooden ships, which
The minesweeper was, applied. Other ships using the dry-dock must have been crummy (crumby?} or maybe filthy, because we came out of one of the dry-docks with rats and cockroaches. Once in a while, we would close off the crew’s quarters,
and open a big bottle of some kind of mist which would bring out the roaches. They came out dazed. We swept them up in dustpans, and before we could get on deck to throw them over the side, the mass would be reviving, and beginning to move around on the dustpan. I guess that mist was the forerunner of today’s bug sprays.



MORE ANCECDOTES—NOONAN—MARCH, 2004

WORDS OF WISDOM FROM AN OLD PROFESSOR—NOT ME
In my first semester as a college student at Teachers College of Connecticut, TCC,
as it was called, in 1946, I had a professor , Doctor Wampler, who taught psychology, and always seemed to be laughing at jokes he was telling himself. It took me a long time to figure out that he was a very wise man, not a clown. I still quote him on occasion: ”People don’t die of overwork, they die from lack of appreciation.” Also—he used to talk about a famous pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals whose confidence was sometimes misinterpreted: Jerome, “Dizzy” Dean. . Dizzy had a brother, Paul, who was called Daffy. Daffy pitched for the Cardinals, too. Dizzy referred to them as “Me and Paul.” One year he stated that “Me and Paul “ would win so many games (I think it was forty) between them that season. People ridiculed Dizzy, until Dizzy and Daffy won the promised games. Doctor Wampler’s point was that “it ain’t bragging if you can do it.” Dizzy’s career ended when he was hit on the toe by a batted ball in an All-Star game. He went on to become a play-by-play announcer where he distinguished himself by his colorful hillbilly language: “the runner slud into second base.”
Doc also observed that you could always tell it was cold if the snow crackled under your feet. I always went by the temperature, but I sometimes think of what he said.


I’LL TRADE YOU A TV SET FOR A DRYER!

You think life is tough today? If you were trying to bring up a bunch of kids, four of whom were in diapers at the same time, you would think life today is a piece of cake.
Soiled diapers were stored in a diaper pail after being rinsed in the toilet, and were stored in a covered diaper pail, which was invented for the purpose, until they went into the washing machine. There were no disposable diapers. They had to be washed and dried and reused. Some people subscribed to a diaper service, but we
opted for paying the rent instead of that frivolity.
The washing part was not too bad. The drying was another matter. The diapers had to be hung up or out depending on the weather, but they had to be dried right away. Hanging wet diapers on a clothesline in winter required a resolve seldom seen in the Western World. As you reached out the porch window to pin one on the line, the diaper would immediatedly freeze stiff as a board, and you almost had to break off a corner to fold it over the line to be pinned. Your arms would be frozen to the arm pits. In rainy weather, the diapers had to be hung someplace, either the cellar, or where ever you could string an indoor line. We didn’t have a clothes dryer at that time, and I’m not sure that anybody we knew did, either. But we did have a TV which I would have traded without regret.

UNRELATED---LIKE THE NOONANS
A BUNCH OF ANECDOTES
FEBRUARY 2004

. I had my first job on my 16th birthday, delivering Western Union telegrams by bicycle all over New Britain and sometimes as far as Berlin or Plainville—A
and in all kinds of weather—and for 25 cents an hour. This is how I sneak up on a topic I intended to talk about all along.
“I’ve Got A Secret” was the name of a television show where a panel of celebrities would guess a contestant’s secret. One guy’s secret was that he had had 40 part time jobs in his life. Big deal! I would have been a more worthy candidate because by the time I saw that show I had just as many part-time jobs, or at least it seemed like it. I was also more personable, intelligent, articulate and modest.
One memorable part-time job I had as a college student was at the American Paper Goods Company in Kensington This was a firm which manufactured paper cups (the company is now defunct, but not my fault—I did point out to management wherein the company was headed for collapse).
After WWII, veterans who went to college got stipends of 65 dollars a month from the government.. It was necessary to supplement that pittance, especially if one had an old ’36 Ford with no windows in the front, no heater and a promising social life. My friend, John Ryan, and I applied for part-time jobs at American Paper Goods in Kensington. We applied and waited for a call. One noontime, the phone rang and a voice asked, “Is this Mr. Robert Noonan?” Thinking it was my friend John, I replied, “This is Mr. Robert J. Noonan.” The voice then said, “Oh, this is Mr. Bomba at American Paper Goods.” It turned out Mr. Bomba had a sense of humor and hired both of us.
One of my jobs there was to haul huge carts of cup blanks, or forms ,which had been cut out by one kind of machine to another room where the forms were transformed into paper cups. From there, the newly created cups had to be hauled to a room where hot wax was applied to make the cups waterproof.
. The carts were enormous, and held thousands of paper cups/or forms, depending on what had to be done. Sometimes the trips to the waxing room became adventures, like the times I accidentally spilled a few thousand cups and had to pick them up.
. The people tending the waxing machines, all older women, seemed tense all the time because the hot wax being applied was highly flammable. I think the ladies feared they were destined to be incinerated, and for low wages on top of it. So they were nervous. The floor of that room was polished hard wood which was perfect for generating static electricity, and that is important to this story. Quick to recognize the possibilities, I would, upon entering the room , keep my feet flat on the floor knees close together and make rapid shuffling steps, which when combined with my corduroy pants which were rubbing together generated static electricity which was strong enough to leap from my fingertips. I would single out one of the unsuspecting women machine tenders, stealthily sneak up on her and reach for her arm. What a response! YEEOWW! I guess she thought her worst fears had been realized and the end had come, the machine had blown up, and now that I think of it, I was lucky it didn’t
Always wanting to leave a situation better than I found it, I submitted a four page suggestion to the management detailing what had to be done to prevent the waste of cup forms which seemed to be in excess of what got shipped out. My suggestion was ignored, and as I pointed out, above, American Paper Goods finally went out of business. It wasn’t my fault!
I didn’t make a lot of money, but I got a good lesson in time management. While working, which was from around 5 P.M. until 10 P.M., I carried class notes around in my pockets, and I studied whenever I had a slow time. That semester was one of the few times I got on the Dean’s List. When I had too much time off, I often found things I would rather do than study.


THE YARD GANG

I guess I had a knack for putting my employers out of business, if not always right away. I had two different part-time jobs at two different times at New Britain Machine Company which was a large manufacturing plant (also now defunct—sort of the way I am) The first job was as a member of the Yard Gang.
The Machine Shop, as it was known locally, produced hardware items, such as wrenches which were sold at Sears, I think. Now and then the New Britain Police would arrest some employee who was pocketing the wrenches. The cops caught one guy who had a garage-full of wrenches he had stolen from his work place.
The company also produced huge machines which could perform multiple operations on metal stock which rotated from one cutter to the next until the completed piece dropped into a waiting receptacle.. These machines were known as automatic chucking machines. . If you have ever seen a picture of an early machine gun, the Gatling Gun, you will have a good idea of how it looked. The Gatling Gun had multiple gun barrels which rotated after each shot to put another bullet into firing position. This is what the chucking machine did to the parts it was producing— the machine performing an operation, rotating the piece to perform another operation, and so forth. Anyway, New Britain Machine was a major factor in the metal working industry.
The company had lots of employees and a very competitive fast pitch softball league. Our department had a team, and the boss, or foreman, of the macho Yard Gang, was not planning to lose to a bunch of cream puffs from the office or some other less virile department, so he sought out athletes to hire for the summer to work in the Yard Gang. This gang did all the dirty work around the factory and its grounds. I was hired to catch for the department team. In my most memorable game, the other team had the bases loaded with nobody out. I picked a guy off first base for the first out. We then walked the next guy to re-fill the bases, and I picked him off, too. We got the third out on a fly ball and they didn’t score.—Pretty good, I would have to admit.. Our boss didn’t hire us to get beat, and he took a dim view when we did.. Sometimes he would fire whoever he thought lost it for the department. Upon contemplation, however, he would later hire the guy back.
This was a group of young guys—most were teachers or college students—they were sharp and funny. But sometimes there just wasn’t enough work to do so the boss would hide the crew in a small building down in the back lots. We would
pretend to be chipping tar off the wooden blocks which were used to make the floors of the factory. We would be all cooped up there on some days playing 20 questions and looking out for our bosses’ boss who knew we weren’t doing anything, but never could catch us doing it. Our lookout would spot him—he was sort of conspicuous in a white shirt and tie.
One of my favorite assignments was to strip old wax off the floor in the office, reapply new wax and put a shine on it. We really put a shine on it—so much that a Vice President fell down. We then had to remove the shine.
The office had a very large room with dozens of desks. There was always somebody to distract from his work, and it was entertaining. Sometimes these people would become involved in our 20 questions game which we also played in the office. When you can hear people playing 20 questions, it is pretty difficult to stay out it, particularly if you are supposed to be carrying out some function for the company.
Part of our job was cleaning up the telephone operators’ room. We had a circus in there. It was a small room and a good place to hide out and tell jokes all day. People working in the building would tell us that sometimes they could hear laughter in the background when an operator was paging somebody. One of the operators was Terri Piazza who later lived on Old Stafford Road in Tolland—some of you might have known her kids. Marie Richardson, the daughter of my mother’s friend was the other.
There was one old guy who often appeared to be asleep at his desk in the office while everybody else was busy. One day I asked somebody why the old guy was allowed to sleep, the the reply was, “because when he wakes up, he makes money for us.” I have often wondered why companies don’t allow for a mid-day nap for employees—It certainly revives me and I can accomplish more as a result.
The office building was a modern two storied building of good size. It was unusual in that both ends of the building were sinking, and the building had literally cracked in half. I wonder it has sunk completely by now.
A favorite memory, one which I have often mentioned over the years, involved one of the Yard Gang college students and his father who was a dignitary at the factory. (See, there was some nepotism.) One day the old man was berating his son, telling him he considered the kid to be a stupid incompetent. The kid listened respectfully, and asked,” Do you attribute that to heredity or environment?” --I told you these guys were smart.
Among the athletes was Tom Driscoll, an outstanding basketball player, a big guy, and among the nicest. One day Tom asked me if I would mind giving him a ride to work the next day. I told him I would be glad to do it. I was at work the next day when Tom came straggling in about 9 o’clock. I had forgotten to pick him up. I apologized and promised to pick him up the next day. The next day, , I was at work again when he straggled in about 9 o’clock just like the day efore. I had forgotten him again. Tom was disgusted with me, and I was remorseful, so I bought him lunch that day. Lucky I did’t get killed.

MY OTHER JOB AT NEW BRITAIN MACHINE, NOT AT THE SAME TIME

New Britain Machine was a very busy place at that time. They ran two shifts and maybe a third, but I’m not sure of that. Guys working the second shift had to eat, and so the company cafeteria operated a food wagon which I pulled all over the shop and sold soup, sandwiches, coffeee, etc. I loved that job. I started work at 5 P.M. but went in early because I could eat all I wanted of whatever I wanted. So I had my supper there all the time I worked there. I always topped off a nice supper with several cups of coffee and a large sundae. I would load up the cart and start on my rounds. I enjoyed joking around with the guys in the shop, and the time went fast. Sometimes I would meet my uncle, Jim Maher, whom I rarely saw other wise. Jim was a member of the industrial aristocracy, a tool and die maker, which is what I aspired to be when I got out of the service, but everybody else who lived in New Britain wanted to be apprenticed as a tool maker, too, so by the time I got home, the factories were all booked up. In desperation, I went to college, instead.
But I do digress. Back to my job. There was one guy who always ordered a bowl of soup. He invariably specified that he wanted only the broth, and not the chicken, vegetables, or what ever was in the soup. I thought he was nuts until I realized in recent years that I prefer to drink, not chew soup, so I go heavy on the broth, too.
New Britain Machine is no more. I think it was merged or sold since I left, and it too has left.

HOLD THE NOODLES

Somewhere in my Junior High or early high school time, my mother no longer lived with us. We kids had some discretion as to meals. My sister, Rita, seemed to have a specialty which was to boil up some noodles and throw a can of tomatoes on top of them. I still have a strong aversion to noodles, particularly if served with canned tomatoes. On the occasion of one of my protests to her at the kitchen table, she broke a plate over my head which might account for any eccentricities I might exhibit today.
We had a charge account at the grocery store next door which enabled us to get food without having any money. Our purchase was simply written into a booklet—and the grocer hoped to get paid for it sometime. I want to digress again: This writing it in the book practice went way back. My first recollection of it was when we lived on Smith Street—I was around 5 years old—I thought that no money was needed, only a book to write in. That was in the early thirties (1930’s). I know it continued at least into the mid fifties when I was a salesman. On one occasion, one of my dealers— a grocery store owner—not a druggie—in telling me why he had no money to buy from me, pulled open a drawer under the counter which was filled with books similar to the ones I remembered way back then. He pointed to the books and said,” The Books of Bastards.” There was a store on Oak Street near our house on Wilcox where the owner didn’t horse around with people who failed to pay up. If you owed him money, he would write, in big letters on a paper bag, , “so and so—(real name)-owes me ten bucks. He would post the bag over the counter for all the world to see—I think this expedited the collection process. This is a little off the subject, but here’s a good joke. A guy went into a restaurant and had a good meal. When it came time to pay, he announced that he had no money. The restaurant owner said the deadbeat should simply write his name on the wall under a coat hook. The deadbeat protested saying he didn’t want everybody to see his name on the wall. The owner told him nobody would see it because the guy’s overcoat would be hanging over it until he paid up.
Back to the salt mines: My brother had a special dish, too. He would get a pint of ice cream and a Frisbie Pie and put it on the cuff, I believe was the expression-- (the Frisbie Toy developed from The Frisbie Pie plate.) He also would charge a pint of ice cream to go with it.
. The pie was ten cents. If only the two of us were “dining” at that time, he would divide the pie in half, and the ice cream, too. Trouble was he had no understanding of fractions, and his half of the pie was about two thirds, as I recall.
This all started when I said :”No noodles for me!”
A MISTAKE? WHO, ME?

Dot Wilson was the secretary in the Guidance Office at Ellington High. One day I said,”Hey, Dot. I made a mistake. Remember I made one once before?”
Dot, who was very sharp replied, “ No, I wasn’t here then.”
Last year when I was in Rockville Hospital for my first operation, I encountered a woman
who was a volunteer at the hospital. She was from Ellington, and I knew she was a friend of Dot’s. I asked the woman to give my regards to Dot, and the lady told me that because of privacy regulations, she was forbidden to tell anybody about who was in the hospital. So I told her to tell Dot that she had met a patient who made a mistake once. Dot showed up to visit the next day.

THE GAS STOVE CAPER
We had a gas stove at ole 558 Church Street. We also had a gas hot water heater. The gas which fueled these things came to the stove from a meter in the pantry through which the gas from the gas main outside had to pass to get to the gas stove, or the water heater.
. The meter meted out 25 cents worth of gas at a time. To activate the machine, you had to insert a quarter, sort of like a vending machine. . If you ran out of gas, and quarters, you out of gas. So, we always seemed to have planned to have a quarter available. I guess a gas man came around to collect the quarters now and then, but I don’t recall that. What I do recall was that there was always the fear that leaking gas could blow up, and once in while in New Britain it happened. So we were conscious of the possibility. So when my father sent me to the drug store one Sunday morning to buy him a cigar, the possibility of exploding gas became part of the story.. In addition to the cigar, I bought a package of cigar “loaders” which were small, pointed pieces of wood to which a small amount of something had been applied. The load was not visible when inserted into the end of the cigar which would be lighted. When the flame reached the “load” it would cause it to explode, like a small firecracker. By some coincidence, when I got home with the cigar, my father was cooking something in the oven. Whatever he was cooking required basting, so in order to baste it, you would have to have your head in or almost in the oven. He was basting when the cigar exploded. He thought the stove had exploded, and could have had a heart attack, like the ladies I mentioned at the waxing machines.. Lucky for me, he saw the humor, but I never did that again, at least to him.

HOW OLD BOB GOT OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL
World War II was a popular war. Everybody wanted to take part, and those who didn’t took part anyway by being drafted for service. The net result was that there was a shortage of people to do the work of the community. The answer lay in hiring high school students. I was all for doing my part, and making money, and when I got my chance, I took a part-time job at General Laundry Service. I have written about that elsewhere. My school day ended at 11:30 A.M. and I would walk down South Main Street to get to work On the way there was a Bar and Grill which had great lunches—no drinking by me, a minor. But, I got to like my new life better than studying, and when I heard that anybody who was going into the service would get a diploma regardless of school performance, that was the end of overstudying.
Good thing I got into the Navy. My teachers didn’t feel that a diploma was for nothing, and a favorite English teacher flunked me at half year. This meant that I had to pick up another English class, which really was a double-English deal, to make up for the flunk, and pass the second half. In addition, I was required to take a General Biology class which was for low achievers. The biology turned out to be the most favorite thing I did in high school. Every fun kid in the place was in that class, and nothing very much was required to pass. A high point for me was when the teacher got to the point where we had to dissect frogs, I could tell he found it distasteful, so when he dished out my frog, I was compelled to tell him that I wanted an order of fries with that. He failed to see the humor.
It was ironic that my approach to academics was to simply get by, even in college. This blew up in my face when I was a new teacher. I was a finalist for a teaching fellowship at Columbia which included a free Master’s Degree. Because the other guy had better grades, he got the assignment, and I went on to teach school for the next 35 years. I might have missed out on all this!

In case these didn't get into the old Newsletter:

If you are poor, and you need a car because you live in the sticks, like Tolland, and can’t walk to anywhere, and you have to get to work because you have eight kids to support, you sometimes have to compromise on model, color, mechanical conditon or special features of the cars you acquire. Sometimes. One has to forego one’s esthetic preferences and opt for whatever is running, and costs 25 dollars or less.
This came to mind recently when the tab for dinner in a modest restaurant was more than the price of many cars which have graced the formerly eroded driveway at 72 Sherry Circle.
Several relics come immediately to mind. The one with no reverse gear was challenging. Not just any parking place would do. You had to drive out frontwards, or find some guys to push you to where you proceed normally. On one occasion, the only way out of the driveway was to drive around the house through the back yard to reach the street all the time trying not to run over the septic tank —sort of a circular driveway, and try to make it appear that was what you intended all along. There was another junk whose window opening electronics had failed. It was tough to pay at the toll booths. You had to look as though you had dropped your dime, and had to get out of the car to recover it. But that wasn’t as bad as the one with the driver side door which wouldn’t open. This situation continued until my retirement when my former boss, Don Chace said he considered giving me a gift certificate to a junk yard. Some nerve!
The old ’68 Volvo would be a candidate for worst car since a front wheel broke off coming down a hill in Vernon, sending me out of control across some guy’s lawn. The other wheel broke off coming around the corner of the old Courthouse in Tolland.
I could have made a fortune marketing bumper stickers which would state: “This is My Other Car”, because I wasn’t the only guy doing the best he could.
Old cars are like old people, they are hard to start on cold mornings. This called for creative management strategies such as covering the hood of the car with blankets on cold nights, leaving an electric light burning under the hood all night, which I was too proud to do, going out and starting the car late at night in hopes that you could stay ahead of the cold. My favorite solution to the weak battery problem was to remove the battery from the car and bring it into the house overnight. This meant you had to reinstall it in the morning. Well, one very cold morning, I came out of the house at first light carrying the toasty warm battery and confident that the clunker would start this day. I placed the battery on the fender, opened the hood, and I must have nudged the battery because it fell off he hood and broke like an egg.
Jumper cables were standard equipment in my automotive inventory.
Retreaded tires were the norm. When one of those treads began to become unstuck from the body of the tire, it would thump, thump, thump until it finally fell off. The good old days weren’t always that good, now that I think about it.

****************************

NO TICKEE, NO WASHEE
Working as a driver of the laundry truck while in high school was fun. When I wasn’t cruising around Hartford hauling my unemployed friends with me while I delivered and picked up laundry at two hotels, sometimes I had to deliver wet wash to the four Chinese Laundries in New Britain. They didn’t wash the laundry that people dropped off, they sent it to General Laundry Services, the same as our other customers, to get the heavy work done. What they did with it besides ironing the shirts when I returned it was a mystery to me.
. In any event, one day I delivered the load to one of the Chinese places and found an outraged proprietor shouting at me in some foreign language, presumably Chinese. He was holding up what appeared to be a doll sweater, and I couldn’t figure out what there was to be mad about when a young woman who worked there explained that it was not a doll sweater, but a full sized woolen sweater which had been washed in water too hot and had shrunk.
Then I started to laugh, and realizing that I was placing my life in danger. I retired in an orderly fashion from the scene.
The moral of the story is simply, if the sweater is wool, wash it in cool water.
Just to be safe, wash it yourself!


HOLY (HOLEY) SHOE!
A guy named Adlai Stevenson, a Democrat, ran for President a number of years ago, and was soundly defeated, I think by Eisenhower, but that is not germane to this story. A picture of Stevenson was published showing that he had worn a hole in the bottom of one of his shoes He must have grown up in New Britain! He didn’t, but holes in shoes in New Britain were the norm.
First of all, my new shoes, when I got them never fit. Seemed like nobody had well-fitted shoes. New shoes always hurt until you wore them long enough to break them in. . Everybody seemed to have corns on their toes from ill-fitting shoes. In fact, I never had a pair of shoes that fit until I got into the navy.
. But in any event, the shoes were worn until holes appeared in the bottoms. You could look inside your own shoes, the hard way, from the sole. We couldn’t have holes in shoes, and being creative, we often cut out pieces of cardboard and fitted them into the shoes - sometimes a double thickness of cardboard to be comfy.
. Sometimes, we would go to Kresge’s, or Woolworths, or Grants ( I think Grants was in business then) and buy black rubber soles to glue on your holy (holey) shoes. I think they cost ten cents, and had a package of glue, and a scraper to rough up the sole before applying the glue. This would extend the usefulness of the shoes that much longer.
The soles left black marks all over the halls in the schools, because the Noonans weren’t the only ones wearing them. The custodians went mad trying to keep the floors clean.

BRITISH NAVY BLANKETS
When WWII ended, servicemen were discharged from the service according to a formula hich I don’t recall.. Everybody didn’t get to go home at the same time. As a result, the navy assigned us to bases of our choosing to await discharge. This was like a buffet. What base to choose? I decided that Boston would be a good place for me and I went there from San Diego. In Boston, I ran into a kid from our neighborhood, William Walsh, who was a Yoeman, sort of a clerical job, as I recall. He had some control of our papers, and so he could arrange for us to transferred, and he did me a favor. He advised me to take a transfer to the Brooklyn Navy yard where I might get out earlier, so I got myself transferred to Brooklyn. I lived aboard an LST—Landing Ship Tank—which was used in hauling stuff to invasions. The ship was built in such a way, it could be driven right up on the beach where tanks, trucks, soldiers, whatever could go ashore. The ship was like a dormitory. Its cargo area was so large, we had a basketball court in part of it.
A corrupt Petty Officer was in charge of us. For a couple of bucks, he would give you your liberty card,and you were free for a weekend, or whatever. We would go into New York to a USO --United Service Organization- which catered to servicemen, and get free tickets to Broadway shows, radio shows, ball games, or whatever.
We had very little to do, while awaiting discharge, and I was assigned to be a shipkeeper, I think they called it. The job consisted of standing guard on decommissioned ships which were tied up in the navy yard. The ships were empty, and an empty ship is very spooky. The ships I was assigned to guard were
alled LCI’s, which meant Landing Craft Infantry which were used by the British Navy and returned to us after the war.
. A number of them were tied to each other, and the group tied to the dock. One day, I was idling away the time when a Warrant Officer, which is the top rate an enlisted man can attain, came riding onto the dock on something like a golf cart, and he was all upset with me.
His office was in an office building a half mile away, and he could see what I couldn’t see even though I was right on the dock. The outside LCI had slipped a mooring—a line had come undone, and the ship was almost ready to take off across the harbor with no crew aboard. I was supposed to prevent that from happening. Anyway, between us, we managed to secure the line, and LCI didn’t get away. If it had, I’d probably would have been court martialed. I’d be getting out of federal prison about now.
While rummaging around the LCI’s I found that the British Navy had left loads of beautiful, heavy blankets on board. There was no point in leaving these things to workmen who would eventually find them, so I discarded most of my clothing (a SeaBag full) and loaded a few blankets in the seabag instead. I took them home when I was discharged.

BOB GETS STRAIGHTENED OUT

There was a barbershop on Hartford Avenue in New Britain where I went now and then. The barber told me: “Come in every six months or so and I will straighten out your hair!” What a psychologist!

Moe had a very nice day on Mothers Day. Bob, Gail,Paul, Peggy and Rita were here for dinner----Moe made her best spaghetti sauce ever---then a couple of sessions of
Trivial Pursuit followed. Then today, it was off to a Pool Parlor in Manchester where Moe displayed her newly developed shot making skills. She has been practicing at thr Tolland Senior Center. In spite my advice, she is progressing nicely.