THE FOOTNOTES

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.