My parents wanted to give us everything that they could so that we would grow up to be quality human beings. Yeah, that second part makes me laugh too. My two brothers and me were dead set against anything that we'd have to take a bath for but the will of our parents usually prevailed.
Saturday night was bath night and we usually had baths more often than that but one really couldn't tell. Where there was dirt, there we were in the midst. If there was a water hose, there was mud and again we were in the midst of it. I think I remember people calling us pigs but that may be a false memory. It's not like we hadn't earned it though.
Saturday night is here and we are cleaned up and ready for some quality TV. What's next? Polishing our shoes and mom making sure that our church clothes were laid out neatly pressed and ready to go for the following morning. No TV for the piggies. We wanted to stay up as late as possible so that it would take a long time for church services to come but that was not our parents plans at all. They dropped dead asleep once we were in bed so they were looking for as much sleep as possible. Being a parent and grandparent now, I can see their wisdom if not their fatigue.
Sunday morning came and we woke up bright and early to the smell of bacon and pancakes! It was going to be a grand day after all! My mothers youngest sister came over every Sunday to take us to Sunday school at a fire and brimstone Pentecostal church. My parents would come to services later in the day but Aunt Lucille made the rounds gathering up all sorts of kids from all over the north side of Chicago to attend Sunday school.
We were dressed in our blue colored blazers with the little gold shield crest on the breast pocket with the fake hankie, white shirts and red bow ties and shoes so highly polished that we could almost see up girls skirts. Not that we actually did that....! We were styling back then! We had the obligatory crew cuts as was befitting the style for little boys back then. I think that is was so mom and dad could check for cooties but then again, maybe not. It was definitely easier to wash us though.
Aunt Lu-Lu and her fiancee (later her husband) would park their VW micro bus in front of the house and come get us. It was like pulling teeth for us to go but we went anyway. I was about about 5 years old so I did what I was told to do-sometimes. Anyway, we'd walk to the bus and see all of the other kids there and then off to church.
This had been going on for a number of weeks and months and possibly years and Aunt Lu-Lu was getting tired of the tussle every Sunday so she hit upon what I could only say is a brilliantly imaginative if not shortsighted idea. She stopped at the penny candy counter and bought candy for all us! Besides me and my brothers, there were some friends of my aunt and some of her neighbors so all in all there were about 3-9 kids in the bus on any given Sunday and once in a great while there were more.
So we're all loaded in and I'm in the middle seat nearest the front and Uncle Ernie starts driving. Aunt Lu-Lu turned around and gave me the bag of candy and told me to pass them out. Big mistake since my ears shut off at "Rich, have some candy!" She bought the candy that had 4 differently colored dots across and went the length of the paper. I looked at this with amazement of my good fortune and proceeded to eat the candy. I put the candied paper in my mouth and hooked the first row with my upper front teeth. Then I put my finger onto the paper forcing it into my mouth and pulled up and out removing every piece of candy on the paper on one shot. There had to be hundreds if not millions of dots! In about 2 seconds the candy was gone. The paper looked to be about 6 feet long or so but my mouth was full of candy goodness!
My mouth is so full and cheeks so packed that I looked like a chipmunk just before winter was about to set in. My nose had every color of the candy wiped right across unbeknownst to me. Now about this time the other kids started bellyaching that they weren't getting anything. Aunt Lu-Lu turned around and looked at me. I had multicolored drool coming out of my mouth and it looked like I was having trouble breathing and my nice white shirt looked like a Jackson Pollack painting. She asked, "Richie, did you pass out the candy like I asked you too?" What was I to say? I mumbled "no" and shook my head sideways. About that time my mouth exploded and all of my hard won candy was all over the place in a most disgusting manner. Uncle Ernie was very upset because he had to clean out the mess before it set into the carpeting. We were just about at church and Aunt Lu-Lu was just flabbergasted about my behavior and the other kids were crying that they didn't get any candy and the uproar was deafening as we offloaded from the bus.
And then the sugar kicked in...
Monday, March 31, 2014
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Grandma Edna and Meister Brau
I started out as a child on the north side of Chicago in the shadows of Wrigley Field in 1958. It was the early 60's when we moved into a new house and the neighborhood wasn't all that bad then. It would be far worse in the latter half of that decade.
Air conditioning was not something that we knew of personally although we had heard rumors that such a thing existed. My two brothers and I were always outside digging in the dirt, playing with the water hose, annoying the neighbors dog and in general, being what some little boys always seemed to be-pigs. And we enjoyed it too. We never really thought about air conditioning let alone soap and water. Shampoo? Forget it!
Mom was bound and determined to make us clean so on Saturday night, we would line up and take a bath. Mom always swore that she needed Linco Bleach just to have an even chance of seeing clean kids. Then we would go off to church with my mother's younger sister to a fire and brimstone Pentecostal church. It didn't take.
My mother was a "boy" mom. She knew how to handle us pigs and we accepted that if she was mad, that we may have had something to do with it. She was a shorter woman but she had the strength of voice that could have a car park itself out of fear for her. Her step-mother raised her from the age of 11 so her Aunt Edna became our Grandma Edna. Grandma Edna was strict with my mother and her twin brother when they were growing up but the grand kids could do no wrong to my mothers dismay.
One fine, sunny and very hot day, Grandma Edna and Grandpa Joe came by for a visit. Mom and Grandma got into the car and we three pigs got into the back seat and went along to do some errands. Now, Grandma Edna loved her Meister Brau beer. These were the days when you needed a church key to open a can. So we're driving north on Sheffield Ave. and Grandma pulls a cold beer from her purse and pops it open. Now that was funny to us boys because we knew that mom ordinarily would have passed scratching and clawing kittens but this was her mother so she just asked that no one would get arrested that day.
Grandma was chugging the beer and laughing at mom, mom was driving a little fast to get home before Grandma pulled another beer out or the police pulled us over and we were about to pee ourselves from laughing from Grandma's entertainment.
Grandma finished her beer and told mom to pull over so she could dump the can. Before mom could make a decision, Grandma told her to "hit the damn gas now JoAnn! What the hell is wrong with you?" Without thinking, mom did and Grandma leaned way outside of the passenger door window to the point of almost falling out and made a perfect underhand throw-into the back of a newspaper truck as we sped by! The back doors were open and the drivers were not around or so we thought. As we sped by, the can bounced off of the inside of the trucks windshield and landed in the startled drivers lap. It was a perfect throw and we saw the whole thing.
Grandma is laughing, we're in the back seat laughing, stinking and peeing and mom is just beside herself with disgust for all of us. There was nothing else to do so mom turned down our block hoping that the nightmare was over at last. Grandma noted that we had forgotten to make one special errand so we went right back onto Sheffield Ave. towards the newspaper truck. Yes it was a rouse because Grandma thought that is so much fun.
Quick as a wink, Grandma opened another can of Meister Brau, chugged it dry and attempted to repeat the same feat. The driver saw it coming and closed his doors so the can bounced off to who knows where. There was a lot of cussing as we sped away and some of it came from my mother.
Air conditioning was not something that we knew of personally although we had heard rumors that such a thing existed. My two brothers and I were always outside digging in the dirt, playing with the water hose, annoying the neighbors dog and in general, being what some little boys always seemed to be-pigs. And we enjoyed it too. We never really thought about air conditioning let alone soap and water. Shampoo? Forget it!
Mom was bound and determined to make us clean so on Saturday night, we would line up and take a bath. Mom always swore that she needed Linco Bleach just to have an even chance of seeing clean kids. Then we would go off to church with my mother's younger sister to a fire and brimstone Pentecostal church. It didn't take.
My mother was a "boy" mom. She knew how to handle us pigs and we accepted that if she was mad, that we may have had something to do with it. She was a shorter woman but she had the strength of voice that could have a car park itself out of fear for her. Her step-mother raised her from the age of 11 so her Aunt Edna became our Grandma Edna. Grandma Edna was strict with my mother and her twin brother when they were growing up but the grand kids could do no wrong to my mothers dismay.
One fine, sunny and very hot day, Grandma Edna and Grandpa Joe came by for a visit. Mom and Grandma got into the car and we three pigs got into the back seat and went along to do some errands. Now, Grandma Edna loved her Meister Brau beer. These were the days when you needed a church key to open a can. So we're driving north on Sheffield Ave. and Grandma pulls a cold beer from her purse and pops it open. Now that was funny to us boys because we knew that mom ordinarily would have passed scratching and clawing kittens but this was her mother so she just asked that no one would get arrested that day.
Grandma was chugging the beer and laughing at mom, mom was driving a little fast to get home before Grandma pulled another beer out or the police pulled us over and we were about to pee ourselves from laughing from Grandma's entertainment.
Grandma finished her beer and told mom to pull over so she could dump the can. Before mom could make a decision, Grandma told her to "hit the damn gas now JoAnn! What the hell is wrong with you?" Without thinking, mom did and Grandma leaned way outside of the passenger door window to the point of almost falling out and made a perfect underhand throw-into the back of a newspaper truck as we sped by! The back doors were open and the drivers were not around or so we thought. As we sped by, the can bounced off of the inside of the trucks windshield and landed in the startled drivers lap. It was a perfect throw and we saw the whole thing.
Grandma is laughing, we're in the back seat laughing, stinking and peeing and mom is just beside herself with disgust for all of us. There was nothing else to do so mom turned down our block hoping that the nightmare was over at last. Grandma noted that we had forgotten to make one special errand so we went right back onto Sheffield Ave. towards the newspaper truck. Yes it was a rouse because Grandma thought that is so much fun.
Quick as a wink, Grandma opened another can of Meister Brau, chugged it dry and attempted to repeat the same feat. The driver saw it coming and closed his doors so the can bounced off to who knows where. There was a lot of cussing as we sped away and some of it came from my mother.
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