Latest (First) Book: The Final FIGMO
(Click on the title to learn more and read excerpts from the book)
A humorous trek through the bureaucracy of the U.S. Air Force seen though the eyes of a young junior officer who found himself in an environment where humor was the best weapon to survive.
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Coming Events
Jersey Tomatoes to California Oranges is on the way and will soon be available. I have included an excerpt below to give you a flavor for what is in store for you. The book traces a life journey from a relatively “protected” life in a small suburb of New Jersey to the wide open and exciting life in Southern California in the early 60’s and how a very naïve lad of 19 learns what life is really about while learning that not everyone is a white Christian.
This excerpt from Chapter 2 recounts making new friends after we moved to North Plainfield (NJ) from Arbor/Middlesex. I had fond memories of “Billy” before he too moved away.
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One of the first things I did after moving was to meet my new best friend, Billy. Billy Grandin lived two houses up from us on Wilson Avenue. He had two sisters, one older and one younger, neither of whom would have anything to do with their brother or his friends - after all, we were boys and probably had cooties, too. Billy’s father worked in New York and took the Jersey Central Rail to work every day. I had no idea what he did for a living, but 10-year-olds are not big into commerce. His mother always looked like she just finished cleaning the house and the house won. Frankly, I think the kids, especially Billy, wore her out. They had a beautiful Irish Setter named Ginger, who if nothing else, was a total, unadulterated bundle of energy. Ginger didn’t walk, she bounded. She was always up for a day of hunting on the high-school lawn which was conveniently located since we lived across the street the school.
Billy didn’t go to public school but went to St. Joseph’s (AKA St. Joes) Catholic School. I was never happy that we didn’t go to Stony Brook School together, and later Somerset School, but in retrospect, maybe that was a good thing. Having both of us in the same class might have been a dangerous combination for the teacher and us. Of course, I was gratefully planted in public school by now, and had no desire to think about attending St. Joes.
It is hard for me to imagine how Billy would get along with nuns at St. Joes given his boundless energy. I remember him telling me about one scenario in his 5th grade class which involved the class Christmas tree. Each student was asked to bring some decorations from home to decorate the tree. Of course, Billy brought some Christmas tree-colored balls from their collection as his contribution. When the Christmas season had passed, Sister Lucy told her students that it was time to remove their ornaments and bring them back home. Of course, Bill procrastinated until the only ornaments left on the tree were his contributions. Finally, Sister Lucy in a moment of impatience looked at Billy, and blurted out,
“Billy, this is the last time I am going to tell you to get your balls off the tree.”
Of course, all the boys in the class roared while the girls politely tittered, and Sister Lucy was left puzzled by the reaction to her command. Billy finally did get his balls off the tree, much to Sister Lucy’s gratitude.
In addition to going to St. Joe’s, Billy was also an altar boy at St. Joe’s church. Another “retrospect moment” is trying to get my head around that notion. Thinking about Billy as an altar boy is like thinking of Shakespeare as a baseball shortstop. It just didn’t seem like the best fit in the world. However, I think he was pretty good at it, since I remember a few times, one of the nuns drafting Billy to be an emergency fill-in at mass when the scheduled altar boy failed to show for whatever reason. I was impressed how quickly he responded and went from being a “civilian” to showing up at the altar dressed in his white altar boy regalia.
Billy was always getting into things, mainly I think he was just being curious, not malicious. Unfortunately, I was often an “accessory after the fact.” I remember one day he and I were talking about driving cars and he casually surmised that he could drive. It was no big deal. As we were talking, I noticed that he was eyeing his mother’s black Plymouth De Luxe parked in the driveway. He speculated that he could drive it easily. In a flash he went into the backdoor and quietly snitched the keys from his mother’s purse. The car was usually parked in the driveway during the day since his father took the train to NY, and his mother only took the car to the store or school occasionally. Anyway, Billy and I got into the car and he got behind the wheel. The truth is Billy didn’t have a clue about how a car worked. This car had a manual transmission which his mother or father left in gear so it wouldn’t roll down the driveway which was slightly slanted downward toward the garage.
Billy put the key in the ignition and turned it. Of course, the car lurched forward since it was in gear. He had no idea what a clutch was nor would he likely have been able to reach it anyway. Billy saw the lurch as progress and continued to turn the key as the car continued to keep lurching forward, but not starting, which was probably a good thing. It didn’t take too long before we ran out of driveway and headed toward the garage. Unfortunately, the car was at a slight angle and was too close to the door frame separating the two sides of the two-car garage. The car ever so slightly rubbed against the beam and put a scratch down the passenger door. Billy probably realized at this point that his driving skills weren’t as developed as he thought. However, he couldn’t do anything about the car. He didn’t know how to back it up and he couldn’t keep lurching forward. So, he did what any normal 10-year-old would do. He took the keys out of the ignition and left the car leaning against the garage door frame. He took the keys back in the house and quietly put them back in his mother’s purse as we moved on to something else. I’m sure he was grateful that parents didn’t have fingerprint kits to investigate evidence in commission of crimes. It would have been interesting listening to him explain how his fingerprints were all over the keys since he doesn’t drive. Fortunately, we were off the hook on that count
To this day, I think his father thought that his wife (or vice versa) had forgotten to put the car in gear or engage the parking brake sufficiently, and the car rolled down the driveway until it was stopped by the door frame. There wasn’t a lot of damage to the Plymouth, so it didn’t start WW III. Billy just kept his mouth shut and skated on this one.
Another day while we were playing war with little plastic/rubber army men in their basement on the concrete floor, Billy wondered what would happen if the “soldiers” got into a real fire fight. He looked around the basement and found a can of turpentine and squirted it all over the “enemy” and, of course, the floor. He ran upstairs and got some matches and ignited the miniature army. Oops, he miscalculated how much turpentine he really needed for a fire fight. The whole mess burst into flames and started to fill the basement with smoke. Of course, we had no contingency plans, so we scrambled to find whatever rags and such that we could to put out the conflagration. By this time, it was starting to reach the wood ceiling which was the upstairs floor of their house. Fortunately, we were able to put out the blaze in the nick of time with only minor scarring of the ceiling. He was hoping nobody would notice the black charring in that corner of the basement. It took us about 30 minutes of frantic fanning with the windows and doors open to vacate the basement of smoke before it permeated upstairs and aroused suspicions of something not being quite right. We were also hoping that some neighbor wouldn’t notice smoke pouring from the basement door and call the fire department.
Billy and I had many adventures in the woods around the area as he tried to earn badges from his boy scout troop. It was a never-ending saga of two boys growing-up and learning about life, a time that I would never trade. Unfortunately, after a couple of years playing together, his parents announced they bought a new home on a big plot of land near New Brunswick and they would be moving away. I was devastated to lose my best friend, but such are the changes to which we must learn to adapt. I’m sure my friends in Arbor felt the same way when we moved to North Plainfield.
I had the chance to visit Billy a year or so after he moved, but it wasn’t the same. Our friendship was born out of doing things together and getting into things. A few hours visit just seemed to be too structured to regain the chemistry of our time together in North Plainfield. It was great to see him and see his new life, but that stage of growing-up was gone into the history books.