Wednesday, May 12, 2010
ANECDOTES
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!
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!
# posted by Noonski @ 1:35 PM 
