From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin-Out In The Be-Bop 1960's Night- The Salducci's Pizza Toss Bet

You all know Frankie, right? Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, map of Ireland, fierce Frankie when necessary, and usually kind Frankie by rough inclination when it suits his purposes. Yah, Frankie from the old North Adamsville neighborhood. Frankie to the tenement, the cold-water flat tenement, born. Frankie, no moola, no two coins to rub together except by wit or chicanery, poor as a church mouse if there ever was such a thing, a poor church mouse that is. Yes, that Frankie. And, as well, this writer, his faithful scribe chronicling his tales, his regal tales. Said scribe to the public housing flats, hot-water flats, but still flats, born. And poorer even than any old Frankie church mouse. More importantly though, more importantly for this story that I am about to tell you than our respective social class positions, is that Frankie is king, the 1960s king hell king of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, if not then North Adamsville’s finest still the place where we spent many a misbegotten hour, and truth to tell, just plain killed some time when we were down at our heels, or maybe down to our heels.

Sure you know about old Frankie’s royal heritage too. I clued you in before when I wrote about my lost in the struggle for power as I tried to overthrow the king when we entered North Adamsville High in 1960. By wit, chicanery, guile, bribes, threats, physical and mental, and every other form of madness he clawed his way to power after I forgot the first rule of trying to overthrow a king- you have to make sure he is dead. But mainly it was his "style,” his mad-hatter “beat” style, wherefore he attempted to learn, and to impress the girls (and maybe a few guys too), with his arcane knowledge of every oddball fact that anyone would listen to for two minutes. After my defeat we went back and forth about it. He said, reflecting his peculiar twist on his Augustinian-formed Roman Catholicism, it was his god-given right to be king of this particular earthy kingdom but foolish me I tried to justify his reign based on that old power theory (and discredited as least since the 17th century) of the divine right of kings. But enough of theory. Here’s why, when the deal went down, Frankie was king, warts and all.

All this talk about Frankie royal lineage kind of had me remembering a story, a Frankie pizza parlor story. Remind me to tell you about it sometime, about how we used to bet on pizza dough flying. What the heck I have a few minutes I think I will tell you now because it will also be a prime example, maybe better than the one I was originally thinking about, of Frankie’s treacheries that I mentioned before. Now that I think about it again my own temperature is starting to rise. If I see that bastard again I’m going to... Well, let me just tell the story and maybe your sympathetic temperature will rise a bit too.

One summer night, yah, it must have been a summer night because this was the time of year when we had plenty of time on our hands to get a little off-handedly off-hand. In any case it would have had to be between our junior and senior years at old North Adamsville High because we were talking a lot in those days about what we were going to do, or not do, after high school. And it would have had to have been on a Monday or Tuesday summer night at that as we were deflated from a hard weekend of this and that, mainly, Frankie trying to keep the lid on his relationship with his ever lovin’ sweetie, Joanne. Although come to think of it that was a full-time occupation and it could have been any of a hundred nights, summer nights or not.

I was also trying to keep a lid on my new sweetie, Lucinda, a sweetie who seemed to be drifting away, or at least in and out on me, mostly out, and mostly because of my legendary no dough status (that and no car, no sweet ride down the boulevard, the beach boulevard so she could impress HER friends, yah it was that kind of relationship). Anyway it's a summer night when we had time on our hands, idle time, devil’s time according to mothers’ wit, if you want to know the truth, because his lordship (although I never actually called him that), Frankie I, out of the blue made me the following proposition. Bet: how high will Tonio flip his pizza dough on his next pass through.

Now this Tonio, as you know already if you have read the story about how Frankie became king of the pizza parlor, and if you don’t you will hear more about him later, was nothing but an ace, numero uno, primo pizza flinger. Here’s a little outline of the contours of his art, although minus the tenderness, the care, the genetic dispositions, and who knows, the secret song or incantation that Tonio brought to the process. I don’t know much about the backroom work, the work of putting all the ingredients together to make the dough, letting the dough sit and rise and then cutting it up into pizza-size portions.

I only really know the front of the store part- the part where he takes that cut dough portion in front of him in the preparation area and does his magic. That part started with a gentle sprinkling of flour to take out some of the stickiness of the dough, then a rough and tumble kneading of the dough to take any kinks out, and while taking the kinks out the dough gets flattened, flattened enough to start taking average citizen-recognizable shape as a pizza pie. Sometimes, especially if Frankie put in an order, old Tonio would knead that dough to kingdom come. Now I am no culinary expert, and I wasn’t then, no way, but part of the magic of a good pizza is to knead that dough to kingdom come so if you see some geek doing a perfunctory couple of wimpy knead chops then move on, unless you are desperate or just ravenously hungry.

Beyond the extra knead though the key to the pizza is the thinness of the crust and hence the pizza tosses. And this is where Tonio was a Leonardo-like artist, no, that’s not right, this is where he went into some world, some place we would never know. I can still see, and if you happened to be from old North Adamsville, you probably can still see it too if you patronized the place or stood, waiting for that never-coming Eastern Mass. bus, in front of the big, double-plate glass pizza parlor windows watching in amazement while Tonio tossed that dough about a million times in the air. Artistry, pure and simple.

So you can see now, if you didn’t quite get it before that Frankie’s proposition was nothing but an old gag kind of bet, a bet on where Tonio will throw, high or low. Hey, it’s just a variation on a sports bet, like in football, make the first down or not, pass or rush, and so on, except its pizza tosses, okay. Of course, unlike sports, at least known sports, there are no standards in place so we have to set some rules, naturally. Since its Frankie’s proposition he gets to give the rules a go, and I can veto.

Frankie, though, and sometimes he could do things simple, although that was not his natural inclination; his natural inclination was to be arcane in all things, and not just with girls. Simply Frankie said in his Solomonic manner that passed for wisdom, above or below the sign in back of Tonio’s preparation area, the sign that told the types of pizza sold, their sizes, their cost and what else was offered for those who didn’t want pizza that night.

You know such signs, every pizza palace has them, and other fast eat places too, you have to go to “uptown” eateries for a tabled menu in front of your eyes, and only your eyes, but here’s a list of Tonio’s public offerings. On one side of the sign plain, ordinary, vanilla, no frills pizza, cheap, maybe four or five dollars for a large, small something less, although don’t hold me to the prices fifty years later for christ sakes, no fixings. Just right for “family night”, our family night later, growing up later, earlier in hot-water flats, public housing hot-water flats time, we had just enough money for Spam, not Internet spam, spam meat although that may be an oxymoron and had no father hard-worked cold cash for exotic things like pizza, not a whole one anyway, in our household. And from what Frankie told me his too.

Later , when we had a little more money and could “splurge” for an occasional take-out, no home delivery in those days, when Ma didn’t feel like cooking, or it was too hot, or something and to avoid civil wars, the bloody brother against brother kind, plain, ordinary vanilla pizza was like manna from heaven for mama, although nobody really wanted it and you just feel bloated after eating your share (and maybe the crust from someone who doesn’t like crust, or maybe you traded for it); or, plain, by the slice, out of the oven (or more likely oven-re-heated after open air sitting on some aluminum special pizza plate for who knows how long) the only way you could get it after school with a tonic (also known as soda for you old days non-New Englanders and progeny), usually a root beer, a Hires root beer to wash away the in-school blahs, especially the in-school cafeteria blahs.

Or how about plump Italian sausage, Tonio thickly-sliced, or spicy-side thinly-sliced pepperoni later when you had a couple of bucks handy to buy your own, and to share with your fellows (those fellows, hopefully, including girls, always hopefully, including girls) and finally got out from under family plain and, on those lucky occasions, and they were lucky like from heaven, when girl-dated you could show your stuff, your cool, manly stuff, and divide, divide, if you can believe that, the pizza half one, half the other fixing, glory be; onion or anchovies, oh no, the kiss of death, no way if you had the least hope for a decent night and worst, the nightmarish worst, when your date ordered her portion with either of these, although maybe, just maybe once or twice, it saved you from having to do more than a peck of a kiss when your date turned out not to be the dream vision you had hoped for; hams, green peppers, mushrooms, hamburg, and other oddball toppings I will not even discuss because such desecration of Tonio’s pizza, except, maybe extra cheese, such Americanized desecration , should have been declared illegal under some international law, no question; or, except, maybe again, if you had plenty of dough, had a had a few drinks, for your gourmet delight that one pig-pile hunger beyond hunger night when all the fixings went onto the thing. Whoa. Surely you would not find on Tonio’s blessed sign this modern thing, this Brussels sprouts, broccoli, alfalfa sprouts, wheat germ, whole wheat, soy, sea salt, himalaya salt, canola oil, whole food, pseudo-pizza not fit for manly (or womanly) consumption, no, not in those high cholesterol, high-blood pressure, eat today for tomorrow you may die days.

On the other side of the sign, although I will not rhapsodize about Tonio’s mastery of the submarine sandwich art (also known as heroes and about seventy-six other names depending on where you grew up, what neighborhood you grew up in, and who got there first, who, non-Puritan, got there first that is) are the descriptions of the various sandwich combinations (all come with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, the outlawed onions, various condiment spreads as desired along with a bag of potato chips so I won’t go into all that); cold cuts, basically bologna and cheese, maybe a little salami, no way, no way in hell am I putting dough up for what Ma prepared and I had for lunch whenever I couldn’t put two nickels together to get the school lunch, and the school lunch I already described as causing me to run to Tonio’s for a sweet reason portion of pizza by the slice just to kill the taste, no way is right; tuna fish, no way again for a different reason though, a Roman Catholic Friday holy, holy tuna fish reason besides grandma, high Roman Catholic saint grandma, had that tuna fish salad with a splash of mayo on oatmeal bread thing down to a science, yah, grandma no way I would betray you like that; roast beef, what are you kidding; meatballs (in that grand pizza sauce); sausage, with or without green peppers, steak and cheese and so on. The sign, in all it beatified Tonio misspelled glory.

“Okay,” I said, that sign part seemed reasonable under the circumstances (that’s how Frankie put it, I’m just repeating his rationalization), except that never having made such a bet before I asked to witness a few Tonio flips first. “Deal,” said Frankie. Now my idea here, and I hope you follow me on this because it is not every day that you get to know how my mind works, or how it works different from star king Frankie, but it is not every day that you hear about a proposition based on high or low pizza tosses and there may be something of an art to it that I, or you, were not aware of. See, I am thinking, as many times as I have watched old saintly Tonio, just like everybody else, flip that dough to the heavens I never really thought about where it was heading, except those rare occasions when one hit the ceiling and stuck there. So maybe there is some kind of regular pattern to the thing. Like I say, I had seen Tonio flip dough more than my fair share of teenage life pizzas but, you know, never really noticed anything about it, kind of like the weather. As it turned out there was apparently no rhyme or reason to Tonio’s tosses just the quantity of the tosses (that was the secret to that good pizza crust, not the height of the throw), so after a few minutes I said "Bet." And bet is, high or low, my call, for a quarter a call (I have visions of filling that old jukebox with my “winnings” because a new Dylan song just came in that I am crazy to play about a zillion times, Mr. Tambourine Man). We are off.

I admit that I did pretty well for while that night and maybe was up a buck, and some change, at the end of the night. Frankie paid up, as Frankie always paid up, and such pay up without a squawk was a point of honor between us (and not just Frankie and me either, every righteous guy was the same way, or else), cash left on the table. I was feeling pretty good ‘cause I just beat the king of the hill at something, and that something was his own game. I rested comfortable on my laurels. Rested comfortably that is until a couple of nights later when we, as usual, were sitting in the Frankie-reserved seats (reserved that is unless there were real paying customers who wanted to eat their pizza in-house and then we, more or less, were given the bum’s rush) when Frankie said “Bet.” And the minute he said that I knew, I knew for certain, that we are once again betting on pizza tosses because when it came right down to it I knew, and I knew for certain, that Frankie’s defeat a few nights before did not sit well with him.

Now here is where things got tricky, though. Tonio, good old good luck charm Tonio, was nowhere in sight. He didn’t work every night and he was probably with his honey, and for an older dame she was a honey, dark hair, good shape, great, dark laughing eyes, and a melting smile. I could see, even then, where her charms beat out, even for ace pizza flinger Tonio, tossing foolish old pizza dough in the air for some kids with time on their hands, no dough, teenage boys, Irish teenage boys to boot. However, Sammy, North Adamsville High Class of ’62 (maybe, at least that is when he was supposed to graduate, according to Frankie, one of whose older brothers graduated that year), and Tonio’s pizza protégé was on duty. Since we already knew the ropes on this thing I didn’t even bother to check and see if Sammy’s style was different from Tonio’s. Heck, it was all random, right?

This night we flipped for first call. Frankie won the coin toss. Not a good sign, maybe. I, however, like the previous time, started out quickly with a good run and began to believe that, like at Skeet ball (some call it Skee-ball but they are both the same–roll balls up a targeted area to win Kewpie dolls, feathery things, or a goof key chain for your sweetie) down at the amusement park, I had a knack for this. Anyway I was ahead about a buck or so. All of a sudden my “luck” went south. Without boring you with the epic pizza toss details I could not hit one right for the rest of the night. The long and short of it was that I was down about four dollars, cash on the table. Now Frankie’s cash on the table. No question. At that moment I was feeling about three feet tall and about eight feet under because nowadays cheap, no meaning four dollars, then was date money, Lucinda, fading Lucinda, date money. This was probably fatal, although strictly speaking that is another story and I will not get into the Lucinda details, because when I think about it now that was just a passing thing with her, and you know about passing things- what about it.

What is part of the story though, and the now still temperature-rising part of the story, is how Frankie, Frankie, king of the pizza parlor night, Frankie of a bunch of kindnesses, and of a bunch of treacheries, here treachery, zonked me on this betting scandal. What I didn’t know then was that I was set up, set up hard and fast, with no remorse by one Francis Xavier Riley, to the tenements, the cold-water flat tenements, born and his cohort Sammy. It seems that Sammy owed Frankie for something, something never fully disclosed by either party, and the pay-off by Sammy to make him well was to “fix” the pizza tosses that night I just told you about, the night of the golden fleecing. Every time I said "high" Sammy, taking his coded signal from Frankie, went low and so forth. Can you believe a “king”, even a king of a backwater pizza parlor, would stoop so low?

Here is the really heinous part though, and keep my previous reference to fading Lucinda in mind when you read this. Frankie, sore-loser Frankie, not only didn’t like to lose but was also low on dough (a constant problem for both of us, and which consumed far more than enough of our time and energy than was necessary in a just, Frankie-friendly world) for his big Saturday night drive-in movie-car borrowed from his older brother, big-man-around- town date with one of his side sweeties (Joanne, his regular sweetie was out of town with her parents on vacation). That part, that unfaithful to Joanne part I didn’t care about because, once again truth to tell, old ever lovin’ sweetie Joanne and I did not get along for more reasons than you have to know. The part that burned me, and still burns me, is that I was naturally the fall-guy for some frail (girl in pizza parlor parlance time) caper he was off on. Now I have mentioned that when we totaled up the score the Frankie kindnesses were way ahead of the Frankie treacheries, no question, which was why we were friends. Still, right this minute, right this 2010 minute, I’m ready to go up to his swanky downtown law office (where the men’s bathroom is larger than his whole youth time old cold- water flat tenement) and demand that four dollars back, plus interest. You know I am right on this one.

Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- The Teen Queens’ “Eddie My Love” (1956) - A 55th Anniversary, Of Sorts- Billie's 1956 View

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Teen Queens performing the classic Eddie My Love.

Markin comment:

This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of my interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hardworking, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn my attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived, and what we listened to back in the day.


EDDIE MY LOVE
(Aaron Collins / Maxwell Davis / Sam Ling)
The Teen Queens - 1956
The Fontane Sisters - 1956
The Chordettes - 1956
Dee Dee Sharp - 1962

Also recorded by:
Lillian Briggs; Jo Ann Campbell; The Sweethearts.

Eddie, my love, I love you so
How I wanted for you, you'll never know
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait to long

Eddie, please write me one line
Tell me your love is still only mine
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long

You left me last September
To return to me before long
But all I do is cry myself to sleep
Eddie, since you've been gone

Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast
The very next day might be my last
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long

You left me last September
To return to me before long
But all I do is cry myself to sleep
Eddie, since you've been gone

Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast
The very next day might be my last
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long

Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long

(Transcribed from the Teen Queens
recording by Mel Priddle - May 2006)

**********
Billie here, William James Bradley, if you don’t know already. To “the projects” born but you don’t need, or at least you don’t absolutely need to know that to get the drift of what I have to say here. I am here to give my take on this latest song, Eddie My Love, that just came out and that the girls are going weepy over, and the guys are saying “that a boy, Eddie.” At least that’s what the wiser guys I hang around with say when they hear the record played on the radio. Except, of course, sappy Markin, Peter Paul Markin if you don’t know, my best friend at Adamsville Elementary School (or maybe best friend, he has never told me one way or the other what it was with us from his end, but sappy as he may be at times, he is my best friend from my end) who thinks Eddie should be righteous and return to his forlorn girl. What is he kidding? Eddie keep moving wherever you are, and keep moving fast. And please, please don’t go within a mile of a post office.

Why do I hold such an opinion and what gives me the “authority”, some authority like the pope of rock and roll, or something to speak this way? Well, first off, unlike Markin, I take my rock and roll, my rock and roll lyrics seriously, hell, I have written some myself. Also I have some talent in this field and have won vocal competitions (and dance ones too), although there have been a few more I should have won. Yah, should have won but the fix was in, the fix was in big time, against project kids getting a break, a chance to make something out of the jailbreak music we are hearing. I’ll tell you about those bad breaks some time but now I am hot to straighten everybody out, even Markin, on this one. Markin pays attention to, too much attention to, the “social” end of the question, looking for some kind of teenage justice in this wicked old world when there ain’t none. Get it, Peter Paul.

Look, I can read between the lines of this story just like anybody else, any pre-teenage or teenage anybody else. Parents, my parents, Markin’s parents, Ozzie and Harriet, whoever, couldn’t get it if you gave them that Rosetta Stone they discovered to help them with old time Egyptian writing and that we read about in Mr. Barry’s class. No way. But Billie, William James Bradley, who will not let any grass grow beneath his feet, is wise, very wise to the scene. Hey, it’s not rocket science stuff; it’s simply the age old summer fling thing. Eddie, handsome, money in his pocket, super-charged car under his feet, gas in the tank, and an attitude that he is king of the known world, the known teenage world, sees this cutie, makes his play, they have some fun, some teenage version of adult fun for any not wise kids, school days come and he is off to his next cutie. Yah, he said he would write and, personally, I think that was a mistake. A quick “I'll be in touch,” and kiss on the cheek would have been smarter.

See Eddie, love ‘em and leave ‘em Eddie, is really a hero. What did this teen queen think was going to happen when Eddie blew into town? Love, marriage and here comes the teen queen with a baby carriage. Please. Eddie, Eddie your love ain’t got no time for that. And that old threatening to do herself in or whatever she means by “my next day might be my last,” is the oldest trick in the book, the oldest snare a guy trick that is. Yah, maybe someday when things are better, and guys don’t have that itch, that itch to move on, and maybe can settle down in one place and have plenty of dough, plenty of ambition, and the old wicked world starts taking care of its own better. Whoa… wait a minute, I’m starting to sound like Markin. Jesus, no. Eddie just keep moving, okay. Billie’s pulling for you.

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin -From The “Brothers Under The Bridge” Series-“ Buddy’s War”

Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:

As I mentioned in the first installment of this series, provided courtesy of my old yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, who seemed to think I still had a few things to say about this wicked old world, recently, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod I came across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (California, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”

These sketches have been done on an ad hoc basis, although the format of this story here follows those of the “Brothers Under The Bridge” series previously posted .The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to heard, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this series, have reconstructed this story here as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger.
Most were, yes, in one way or another but some, and the one I am recalling in this 1978 sketch had no real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted to get something off their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed. I have presented enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his mind. Some wanted to give a blow by blow description of every firefight (and every hut torched), others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times, and as here some, many actually, wanted to mourn some comrade lost in the fog of memory. This is Rick Atwood’s story, or actually, Gerald (Jerry) Jenkins’ story. We know that it ends in some black marble tear-filled inscription down in Washington, D.C. but it didn’t start that way. I like to finish up these introductions by placing these sketches under a particular sign; no question Jerry Jenkins’ sign was that of the “buddy’s war”:

Jerry and I had grown up in Steubenville, that’s in Ohio right along the Ohio River, okay. We lived over in the Five Points neighborhood near the river, not a bad place to grow up with plenty of stuff to do on the river where we went whenever we had a chance. We built rafts and stuff in summer and dreamed of going to the ocean one time except we got caught on a river bend snag and never did get all that far. Yes, Jerry and I were thick as thieves (including an occasional clip of stuff from Ben Franklin’s, the big store in town that had plenty of stuff we needed). From about third grade on at Anderson Elementary all the way through to high school at Baron Von Steuben High we were together. Guys we hung out with in front Of Molly’s Variety, our local corner hang out, used to kind of fag-bait us, nothing serious like with real fags but still it bothered us. People were surprised when we showed up at our high school prom with two the hottest honeys in our class, the class of 1966.

Neither Jerry nor I were really students so we figured we would go to work right out of high school over at London’s Tool and Die, the biggest employer around, make some money and head out west, or somewhere not Steubenville. We weren’t political or anything like that, hippies, but just wanted to get the dust of Steubenville off us. We really didn’t pay too much attention to what was going on in the world. Yah, we knew there was a war on in Vietnam, Christ who didn’t with it blasting the airwaves every night but it was like not something we thought about that much. Until Jerry got his draft notice in early1967. Then panic set in. Not about going or not going into the service but about what that would do to our plans for going west.

So here is how crazy we were. I figured being just slightly younger than Jerry that my draft notice would come pretty soon so we called up the lady at the draft board and asked if we could go in the Army together. She solemnly told us that this situation was the luck of the draw and that if we wanted to
insure that we could join together we would have to enlist and take part in the “buddy system” being offered by the Army as an inducement for enlistments. Of course, as you know, the draft meant two years but enlisting meant three. We talked it over for days and finally after figuring out that we could learn a skill, go to school later maybe on the G.I. Bill, and that anyway that war was likely to be over soon we decided to enlist. And so in early March 1967 we went the recruiting station and signed up.

Now I am not saying that the Army misled us, although they did, but we had signed up for mechanic’s school and that is what we thought we were going to be doing after we finished basic training at Fort Gordon (that’s in Georgia near Augusta where they have the Masters’ golf tournament every year). But see 1967 instead of the war being over was just heating up to a new level and the war was churning up guys and materials at a fast rate so we wound up as 11 Bravos, infantrymen, cannon fodder, training down in Fort McClellan in sweaty Alabama (near Anniston). So it will come as no surprise to anyone that once we finished that training and with a little time at home before we left we were heading for ‘Nam in October 1967.

Let me tell you, Jerry and I, I don’t know if it was liked being soldiers, but we were good at it. Jerry especially. We aced all the training stuff. We marched like crazy in all weathers laughing (although I hated the heat in Alabama and ‘Nam too) and were made training company platoon guides. They wanted Jerry to go to Office Candidate School (OCS) but he nixed that because I hadn’t passed the exam as well. What we also knew after seeing some of the lamos, misfits, court-enforced enlistees, and the like that we were very glad that we had joined up together. We knew we had each other’s back if anything happened.

And it did. We were assigned to a unit of the 25th Division in the Mekong Delta after we arrived in country in mid-October. This was just before, and maybe if my history is right, could have been part of the build-up to Tet, the famous offensive that the North Vietnamese and their South Vietnamese supporters put together in early 1968. Hell, all I know is that we had our hands full just trying to keep that supply line from the north, the Ho Chi Minh trail, bottled up.

One day, after a few weeks in the field, we were crossing a river, hell they called it a river on the map but compared to real rivers it was maybe a brook or creek, when we took some heavy fire. We started crossing like crazy to get out of the line of fire. Just as we reached the embankment Jerry took one, more than one I later found out, near the heart. He slumped down as I rushed over to him crying out like a mad man for a medic to help him. I could see thought that he was fading, fading fast. Before he passed though he whispered to me that somehow being near a river like when we were kids made things easier. Then he started to mention the raft…

[Rick, according to my notes, could not continue on with his story as he welled up with tears. A little later he mentioned to me that he was sorry that he could not complete the story, that it was still several years later too hard to fathom. He did say that was the last time he saw Jerry as the company had to move out in pursuit and the job of taking care of the dead and wounded fell to the medics left behind. He also told me that he only went home to Steubenville after his time was up once to throw a flower in the Ohio River for his old comrade and then left. Like he said it was just too hard. Sometime in late 1985 I was passing through Steubenville on my way to some conference down south and stopped at the city hall. Not far away was the inevitable memorial to those from Steubenville who had served in Vietnam all polished and pretty. There I saw the name Gerald F. Jenkins-1948-1967 and thought of Rick and that flower he tossed into the nearby Ohio River to his buddy.-JLB]

Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night-Jody Reynolds' “Endless Sleep”

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Jody Reynolds performing the classic Endless Sleep.

This blog is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of my interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hard working under sweating suns or noisy dust-filled factory floors, hard drinking Saturday into Sunday morning just before church blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off, the generation of ’68 from earlier generations has drawn my attention. Mostly this retro look has been by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.
*********
JODY REYNOLDS
"Endless Sleep"
(Jody Reynolds and Dolores Nance)

The night was black, rain fallin' down
Looked for my baby, she's nowhere around
Traced her footsteps down to the shore
‘fraid she's gone forever more
I looked at the sea and it seemed to say
“I took your baby from you away.
I heard a voice cryin' in the deep
“Come join me, baby, in my endless sleep.


Why did we quarrel, why did we fight?
Why did I leave her alone tonight?
That's why her footsteps ran into the sea
That's why my baby has gone from me.
I looked at the sea and it seemed to say
“I took your baby from you away.
I heard a voice cryin' in the deep
“Come join me, baby, in my endless sleep.


Ran in the water, heart full of fear
There in the breakers I saw her near
Reached for my darlin', held her to me
Stole her away from the angry sea
I looked at the sea and it seemed to say
“You took your baby from me away.
My heart cried out “she's mine to keep
I saved my baby from an endless sleep.


[Fade]
Endless sleep, endless sleep
**********
I want the iPhone number and e-mail address of the person who wrote this one. Whoever that person is (or they are, as the case may be) should be made to run the gauntlet, or put on a lonely desert isle, or, and this would be real justice in this case, made to follow Socrates, who also corrupted the morals of the youth of his time. Why all the hubbub? Well, read the heart-breaking teen angst lyrics above on Endless Sleep.

Old Linc Davis (let’s call him that, although as in most cases with these 1950s teen lyrics, frustratingly, the parties are not named except things like teen angel, earth angel, johnnie angel, handy man, etc.) and his honey, Laura Pratt (again name made up to give some personality to this sketch, although it could have been Joanne, Dee-Dee, Claudette, Baby Blue, Donna, or a thousand other now quaint names) had a spat, a big one from Laura’s reaction, and then she flipped out and, as teenagers often will in a moment of overreaction to some slight, and had gone down to the seaside to end it all. Linc in desperation, once he heard what she had done, frantically tried to find her out in the deep, dark, wave-splashed night. All the while the “sea” was calling out for him to join her. (Linc, by the way, heard about Laura’s stunt from some unnamed third party according to reliable sources, some corner boy guy who it turned out later tried to take one Laura Pratt away from one Linc Davis by showing up at her door one night in his ’56 cherry Chevy revved up and she went for a ride with him. That is a story for another time though.)

And that last part, the sea-calling part that practically begs for a joint teen suicide pact is where every right thinking person, and not just enraged parents either, should, or should have put his or her foot down and gone after the lyricist’s scalp, to speak nothing of the singer of such woe begotten lines. Yah, I know old Linc saved his honey from the endless sleep but still we cannot have this stuff filling the ears of impressionable teen-agers even now. Right?

Of course, from what I heard third-hand, this quarrel that old Linc spoke of, and that Laura went ballistic over, was about whether they were going to go bowling with Linc’s guy friends (including that unnamed third party “thief” I mentioned earlier) and their girls down the old Bowl-a-drome on Saturday night or to the drive-in theater for the latest Elvis movie.

Linc, usually a mild-mannered kid, reared up at that thought of going to another bogus Elvis film featuring him, the king, riding around in a big old car, having plenty of dough in his pocket and plenty of luscious young girls ready and waiting to help him spent that dough. Of such disputes however the battle of the sexes abound, and occasionally other battles, war battles as well. However, after hearing that take on the dispute I think old Linc had much the best of it. After all after Jailhouse Rock once you have seen one totally forgettable Elvis film you have seen them all. Around our town, Elvis movies at the drive-in theater on Saturday night were strictly background for “making out” (you can figure out what that is on your own). Also off of that same take on the dispute I am not altogether sure I would have been all that frantic to go down to the seaside looking for dear, sweet Laura. Just kidding.

But that brings something up, something that I am not kidding about. Now I love the sea more than a little. But I also know about the power of the sea, about old Uncle Neptune’s capacity to do some very bad things to anyone or anything that gets in his way. From old double-high storm-tossed seawalls that crumble at the charging sea’s touch to rain-soaked, mast-toppled boats lost down under in the briny deep whose only sin was to stir up the waves. And Laura should have known that too if she lived in beach town, or nearby. So I am really ticked off, yes, ticked off, that Laura should have tempted the fates, and Linc’s fate, by pulling a bone-head water's edge stunt like that.

It reminds me, although in sharp contrast to silly Laura’s conduct, of the time that old flame, old hitchhike road searching for the blue-pink great American West night flame Angelica, old Indiana-bred, Mid-American naïve Angelica, who got so excited the first time she saw the Pacific Ocean, never having seen an ocean before, leaped right in and was almost carried away by a sudden riptide. It took all I had to pull her out. That Angelica error however was out of sheer ignorance. Laura had no excuse. When you look at it that way, and as much as I personally do no care a fig about bowling, would it really have been that bad to go bowl a couple of strings. Such are the ways of teen angst.

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin-Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- A Breathe Of Fresh Air Hits The Radio Airwaves – When Elvis Was Young And Hungry And Billie Was A Madman

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Elvis performing Good Rockin’ Tonight.

“I hate Elvis, I love Elvis,” I can still hear the echo of my old “the projects” boy, the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments for those who are sticklers for exact titles but the projects for the less timid and socially realistic, William James Bradley. William James Bradley , also known as Billie, not Billy, by the way, not some common billy-goat name as he made us painfully aware if we didn’t get it right. Not if you did not want to be on the wrong side of an argument if you made the mistake of calling him Billy and after a while no one did. No kid at least. Period.

Yes, Billie from the hills, a mad demon of a kid and my best friend from about second to sixth grade down in that projects elementary school, Adamsville South. We grew apart after a while, and I will tell you why sometime, but for a long time, a long kid time long, Billie, Billie of a hundred dreams, hell maybe a thousand dreams but who kept count after a while. Billie of fifty (at least but still with no exact count) screw-ups made me laugh and made my day on many days when things were tough, like they almost always were, at my beat down broke down family house (ah, apartment). But this is not about me, my family, or that beat down family apartment so I won’t belabor the issue. This is about Billie, and the mad jail break-out craziness that Elvis created just by, well in the end, just by being Elvis.

You know though fifty some odd years later Billie was right. We hated Elvis, especially at that time when all the girls, the young girls got weak-kneed over him and he made the older girls (and women, some mothers even) sweat and throw their underwear at him and left no room, no room at all, for ordinary mortal boys, “the projects boys” most of all, on their “dream” card. And most especially, hard as we tried, for brown-haired or tow-headed, blue-eyed ten, eleven and twelve year old boys, us, who didn’t know how to dance, or sneer. We both got pissed off at my brother, my older brother by a year, James Michael, because, he looked very much like Elvis and although he had no manners, no sneer, and no time for girls, they were all following him. Christ there really is no justice in this wicked old world.

And we loved Elvis for giving us, at least as far as we knew then, our own music, our own "jump' and our own jail-break from the tired old stuff we heard on the parent-controlled radio and television but did not ‘”speak” to us. And for the songs that he left behind. Not the goofy, Tin Pan Alley or somewhere like that, inspired “happy” music that went along with his mostly maligned, and rightly so, films but the stuff from the Sun Records days, the stuff from when he was from hunger. That, as we also from hunger, was like a siren call to break-out from cheap street and then we caught his act on television and that was that. I probably walk “funny,” knees and hips out of whack, today from trying way back then to pour a third-rate imitation of his moves into my misbegotten body to impress the girls. No regrets though.

But enough of Elvis’ place in the pre-teen and teen rock pantheon this is after all about Billie, and Elvis’ twisted spell on the poor boy. Now you already know Billie, or you should, from another story, a story about how he wanted to “channel” Bo Diddley. See he was crazy for that Afro-Carib Bo beat too (much more so than I then) and wanted to, as a change of pace break from the Elvis rut that he claimed every other young boy was into in order to attract girls, create his own “style.” That was Billie, Billie to a tee, a Billie dream and of course a Billie screw-up.

Billie (and not just Billie but me and a lot of guys then) our ears screwed to the radio didn’t know that Bo was black. Hell, we thought, if we thought about it at all, everybody was white on the radio it all sounded like everybody was bouncing to the non-parent approved same beat. (It was only when we madly dashed home after school to watch American Bandstand that we started to become race conscious.) Well, in hard, hard post-World War II Northern white "the projects" filled to the brim with mainly unspoken racial animosity (and not directly observable since there were not blacks there, and maybe not in the whole town) learned the hard way. Poor unknowing Billie one church dance night when he started singing the crazy beat song Who Do You Love? For a crowd of girls got blasted away by one of the older, more knowing boys about wanting to emulate a n----r for his troubles.

That sent Billie, Billie from the hills, back to Elvis pronto. See, Billie was desperate to impress the girls way before I was aware of them, or their charms. Half, on some days, three-quarters of our conversations (I won’t say monologues because I did get a word in edgewise every once in a while when Billie got on one of his rants) revolved around doing this or that, something legal something not, to impress the girls. And that is where the “hate” part mentioned above comes in again. Billie believed, and he may still believe it today wherever he is, that if only he could approximate Elvis’s looks, look, stance, and substance that all the girls would be flocking to him.

Needless to say, such an endeavor required, requires money, dough, kale, cash, moola whatever you want to call it. And what twelve year old project boys (that’s the age time of this story, about late 1957, early 1958) didn’t have, and didn’t have in abundance was any of that do-re-mi. And no way to get it from missing parents, messed up parents, or just flat out poor parents. Billie’s and mine were the later, poor as church mice. No that‘s not right because church mice (in the way that I am using it, and as we used it back then to signify the respectable poor who “touted” their Catholic pious poorness as a badge of honor in this weary old world) would not do, would not think about, would not even breathe the same air of what we were about to embark on. A life of crime, kid stuff crime but I'll leave that to the reader’s judgment.

See, on one of Billie’s rants he got the idea in his head, and, maybe, it got planted there by something that he read about Elvis (Christ, he read more about that guy that he did about anybody else once he became an acolyte), that if he had a bunch of rings on all his fingers the girls would give him a tumble (a tumble in those days being a hard kiss on the lips for about twelve seconds or “copping” a little feel, and if I have to explain that last expression in more detail then you had better just move on).

But also see Billie’s idea was that if he has all those rings, especially for a projects boy then it would make his story that has set to tell easier. And that story was none other than he wrote to Elvis (possible) and spoke man to man about his situation (improbable) and Elvis, Elvis the king, Elvis from nowhere Mississippi like we were from the nowhere projects, Elvis bleeding heart, had sent him these rings to give him a start in life (outrageously impossible.) Christ, I don’t believe old Billie came up with that story even now when I am a million years world-weary.

But first you needed the rings and as the late honorable bank robber, Willie Sutton, said about robbing banks-that’s where the money is-old Billie, blessed, beatified Billie, figured out, and figured out all by himself, that if you wanted to be a ring stealer that you better go to the jewelry store because that is where the rings are. Now the reader, and rightly so, now, might ask where was his best buddy during this time and why was he not offering wise counsel about the pitfalls of crime and the virtues of honesty and incorruptibility. Well, when Billie got off on his rant you just waited to see what played out. The real reason though was, hell, maybe I could get a ring for my ring-less fingers and be on my way to impress the girls too. I think they call it, or could call it, aiding and abetting.

But enough of that superficial moralizing. Let’s get to the jewelry store, the best one in the downtown of the working class town we were appendaged to (literally so because the projects were located on a one road in and out peninsula). We walked a couple of miles to get there, plotting all the way. Bingo the Acme Jewelry Store (or some name like that) jumped up at us. Billie’s was as nervous as a colt and I was not far behind, although on this caper I was just the “stooge”, if that. I was to wait outside to see if John Law comes by. Okay, Billie, good luck. And strangely enough his luck was good that day, and many days after, although those days after were not ring days. That day his haul was five rings. Five shaky rings, shaky hands Billie, as we walked, then started running, away from the down town area.

When we got close to home we stopped near the beach where we lived to see up close what the rings looked like. Billie yelled, “Damn.” And why did he yell that word. Well, apparently in his terror (his word to me) at getting caught he just grabbed what was at hand. And what was at hand were five women’s rings. Now, how are you going to impress girls, ten, eleven or twelve year old girls, even if they were as naïve as us, and maybe more so, that Elvis is you bosom buddy and you are practically his only life-line adviser with five women’s rings? Damn, damn was right.

Out In The Be-Bop Night-Scenes From Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-Neola Blues

Christ, this is something out of a Woody Guthrie ballad, maybe Pastures Of Plenty where he talks about all the crops that migrant farm laborers pull out of the earth’s soil as they proceed through the harvest season cycle, I thought to myself as I helped Angelica bring her things down from the farm-fresh cab of that farm-fresh truck that I just jumped down from, as we started heading to our new "home." In this case a small, simple, solidly built and well-maintained white-painted cabin on a huge corn stalk-waved, yellow-sunned Neola, Iowa farm where I was to sweat it out for a few days (and maybe more) doing farm labor until I could get enough money for us to move on. Hell, we were down to our last pennies, pennies that we thought would last us until Denver where I had some friends who we could stay with and who had jobs for us but that dream petered away well before Neola, Iowa.

Now we are at the mercy of Farmer Brown. I swear that was his name and that was how he wanted to be addressed by me out in the fields, probably some old Protestant remnant Mennonite, Hutterite heretic custom that got carried along because nobody thought to change it with the change of centuries. When he picked us up many miles back he must have had some ESP sense that we needed dough, and that he had some "wetback", Okie-Arkie-like-we-were-back-in-the-Great-Depression-1930s help at hand if he played his cards right.

On top of that to say things were strained, strained in comparison to idyllic Steubenville cottage nights, Prestonsburg mad mountain hi-jinx and Lexington great American night thrills, between Angelica and I since we had our Moline meltdown would be an understatement. If you don’t know that story, that Moline story, you had really better go back and read that one, if you want to understand how the road, even the voluntarily taken good night hitchhike road can twist things around. This strain between us was not, as you might think, the way that I have presented things, mainly because I had not been a good "hubby" provider. Rather because now that we were hard into September, had been on the road a couple of months, and all around us school and life were starting back up in their usual annual build-up season Angelica, I believe, sensed that the road, the real road, was not for her, at least not until she had gotten a better grasp of what her dreams were all about. Frankly, most of this had been unspoken on both our parts, more glances and sighs as things got tougher, but I couldn’t help but think that I had spooked her a little bit with that Captain Cob story in Moline, the so-called "real" story of the quest for the blue-pink great American West night. That’s another good reason to read that scene.

Let's get it straight though. Straight as the Iowa corn rows which are now stretched out to infinity before me as I look over at the fields directly across from our new cabin home. As I have told this on-going tale you could see the build-up of some tension between Angelica and me as we drove on, especially since we left Lexington, Kentucky. And that seemed the right way to tell you about it. I haven't spent much time filling you in until now about the things that round out the story and bring us to the current seeming impasse. Or about things that were going on in Big Earth time, like the Woodstock breakout gathering of youth nation back East, guys, guys from NASA nation, walking on the moon in the great Earth breakout, guys and gals in the great Stonewall gay breakout in New York City or the Days of Rage white lumpen breakout in Chicago while we were hell bend west and earth-bound. That Big Earth stuff you know, or can look up. Let me tell about the personal stuff though and then you can see why I used that word impasse.

Let me tell you, for example, about the tearful telephone calls home (collect calls, okay) that Angelica had periodically made back to Muncie and her parents. Tearful not because she was on the road against her will but tearful because her parents were raising holy hell that she was out on the road; that she was out of the road with no car; that she was out on the road with a "hippie", Bolshevik, dragon, beast, you can fill in the rest; and, that she was out on the road with a guy who, unquestionably, was up to some kind of nefarious scheme to corrupt their daughter's virtue. Angelica was good though, she defended her "gentleman hippie." But, of late, I had noticed that when she finished on the phone (usually a pay phone out on some desolation highway or in some noisy Main Street store) when she gave me an instant replay on the conversation she seemed to defense her "old man" of the road less and less fervently as she has gotten more road-weary.

Of course I had been running my own "battles" with the phone as I had, occasionally, been calling back to Boston to check in with my friends, and once or twice with the, in my new mind's eye view of things increasingly delightful, Joyell. Hey, I'd told Angelica about Joyell in the beginning (what hadn't we talked about, at least superficially, since we had spent so many hours on the road) and about my runaways so she knew the score (as I did on a special guy that she mentioned from back in Muncie). See, like I said before when I didn't tell Angelica about the blue-pink great American West quest until my back was to the wall in Moline, it was never clear where we were heading except we liked each other, liked each other’s company and wanted to be together for a time. The problem right that minute was that I wanted to be on the road and I had this sneaking feeling that Angelica had some little white house and picket fence ideas, or what passed for those ideas out of 1960s Muncie.

And, of course, I haven't told you about the various running battles we had over this and that on the road because frankly this is a story about a quest and not about the kind of stuff that happens in everyday life to everybody and their brother (or sister). Not sexy enough, okay? You know what I mean though little stuff like having her thumb to get quick rides when she was feeling blue, or stopping or not stopping soon enough so she didn’t get too tired. Or real life stuff like having to get to a motel, cheapjack motel or not, so she could wash her hair the right way, etc. and feel human for a few minutes. Sound familiar, sure it does. But the big thing was that the road was a lot harder than she expected, a lot harder than she wanted, and a lot harder than she was willing to put up with. Especially when, like just before we hit dear old Neola, we had no dough, and no prospects to anchor us. Still Angelica was an old pioneer trouper when the deal went down, a Midwest pioneer trouper and that ain’t no lie. I had had no better road companion before or since. She just didn’t want to do it endlessly. But never forget, because I surely don’t, that it was only those times, those mad breakout times, that allowed us to even hook up at all.

I guess I should tell you about the money deal now because that tells a lot about why we were at odds with each other, although like I said before it was more a feeling than anything she had said, at least said since the Moline meltdown. After Moline our luck went from bad to worse as the weather just plain got balky after a few days of clear skies. That meant more cheapjack motels, and more unexpected cash outlay to take us off course, and then our rides started to dry up. About half way through Iowa we were hitching on this state Route 44 that takes you across to Route 191 and then to Neola (and Omaha, Nebraska further on). This farm-fresh guy (Farmer Brown) offered us a ride in his big old hay truck (okay I won't use farm-fresh anymore you get the drift but I swear I had never seen so much flat, cultivated, green and yellow scenery before. I thought I died and went to Grant Wood heaven.). Right away, like I said, he sized us up as from hunger and offered us jobs (or at least me) working to bring in the now ready crop. A ride west, a job of sorts, a place to stay, and a place to rest up and sort things out just hit both of us at the same time as right. We said sure thing. And that is why we were then unloading Angelica's backpack on the ground in front of this tiny lean-to of a cabin on old Farmer Brown's farm.

But here is the kicker, for now. No sooner had we got settled into our new "home" (which actually turned out to be cozy in a primitive way) old Farmer Brown called us out and asked Angelica whether she wanted to work at Aunt Betty's diner in town. Be still my heart. Of course, old hand at serving them off the arm Angelica (about six weeks’ worth) to do her part in jump-starting our future said sure. So off we went in Farmer Brown's Cadillac (that should tell you something) to downtown Neola. In those days (and maybe now too for all I know) this Neola was nothing but a huge grain storage place for all the wheat and corn farmers in western Iowa, a couple of stores and, of course, Aunt Betty's, which seemed to be the hub of the universe here, at least until they rolled up the streets at dusk.

Aunt Betty's, and Aunt Betty herself, however, were something else again.
Think about your grandmother, think about your grandmother's cooking, think about your grandmother's wisdom, think about your grandmother not being your hardball mother that was Aunt Betty, and Aunt Betty's. See that was why these old time farmers hung around there. Hell that was why I hung around there for the time we were there. This was no highway truck stop feed the buggers whatever calories you want because they are moving on anyway and they are so benny-high that they will not notice but some kind of slice of Norman Rockwell America. This was a place of stews, of chicken pot pies, of pot roasts, of Indian puddings, a place to get corn-fed mid-American-sized not emaciated Eastern-dieted. You could practically smell the old-fashioned values in the place, you could feel as you sat in the hand-woven cushioned chairs and tucked in your monogrammed linen, yes, your monogrammed linen napkin, that you were in some other time, a place worthy of the blue-pink night if only it was further west, like California west, but if it was there then it would not be a real Aunt Betty's.

But enough of nostalgia. The main thing is that Aunt Betty immediately took to Angelica, a fellow Midwestern pioneer woman, even if from different generations. I think, or I like to think, that what Aunt Betty kind of instinctively saw in Angelica was what I saw that first night in Steubenville -what you see is what you get. And what you saw and got was just fine. Toward me she granted a certain scornful tolerance because of Angelica, and her "silly" whim for an eastern hippie boy. Yah, Aunt Betty was, maybe, the last of that breed of Iowa women that filled a man’s stomach but also took no guff from friend or foe, alike. At least the last time I spent any time in Iowa a few years ago I didn’t see any Aunt Bettys, all huge corporate farms and peon stoop labor now and no time for slow simmering stews and homemade pot pies.

So Angelica, who was the talk of the diner for days as the old geezers finally had something nice to look at while they were downing their pot roast and, despite all high Protestant caution, lazily lingering over that refilled cup of coffee (coffee pot brewed, naturally). And the nice tips to accompany those looks didn’t hurt either. What I didn’t know though, is that through all of this time Aunt Betty was killing my time (meaning putting the bug in Angelica’s ear about getting off the road). Then I was kind of mad about it, especially when as we overstayed the time when we thought we would have to leave (to avoid the October Denver-bound squalls) old Aunt Betty mentioned it in my presence. Now I can see that it was nothing against me but just an old grandma watching out for her granddaughter. Fair enough, wise Aunt Betty wherever you are.

And how was my work going back on Maggie’s, I mean, Farmer Brown’s farm. Well, I have done all kinds of odd jobs, and worked a fair number of excessive hours but life on a farm, a big prosperous farm, come harvest time was really beyond me, although old Brown never complained about my work and getting to know him a little better he surely would have if he had cause for complain. But after about ten days I was ready to move on, and get the cow shavings and corn shucks out of my system.

Needless to say, at night, each night it seemed the longer we stayed, Angelica and me, tried to put the best face on it but I have not built up this story in just this way to now avoid a parting of the ways. Between road-weariness, Aunt Betty urgings, parental moanings, a few road bumps and bruises, her own highly developed Midwestern practical sense, and her own worthy dreams Angelica put it straight one night when I was getting antsy about making tracks before bad weather set in the rockymountainwest. She was going home, going back to school to see how that worked out and she would meet me out in Los Angeles in January during school break to see where we stood. Fair enough, although that is just a little too easy way to put it. I saw the sense of it though, and was thrilled that she would come west later. That night we started to pack up after I told Farmer Brown we were moving on.

Next day old Aunt Betty showed up at the cabin in her vintage 1930s pickup truck, something out of The Grapes of Wrath except this beauty was well-kept up. She already knew about Angelica’s decision and came to offer us a ride to Omaha where Angelica could catch a bus back to Muncie and I could pick up Interstate 80 West. We drove to the bus station in Omaha in some silence, only speaking about various addresses where we could be reached at in Denver, Los Angeles and Muncie and other trivia. Finally we got to the Greyhound station; Aunt Betty let us off, and went off to wait to give me a ride to Interstate 80. With mixed emotions Angelica and I made our farewells. I felt strange, and maybe Angelica did too, to part in a bus station.

Bus stations to me always meant paper-strewn bench sleeps, tepid coffees and starched foods, noisy, smelly, sweat-filled men’s rooms that spoke to infrequent cleanings and paper bag luggage poverties. But there we were. I put her on the bus, waited for it to pull out, and then headed to Aunt Betty’s pickup truck. As she drove the short distance to the entrance to Interstate 80 Aunt Betty said in her Aunt Betty way that she thought I was probably the best thing that ever happened to Angelica, and Angelica thought so too. We came to the highway entrance too soon for me to pick up on that idea. All I had was the blue-pink west road and that thought to keep me warm as I got out of the truck.

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin- Joshua Lawrence Breslin’s Father’s Day

Peter Paul Markin comment:

My old friend from the merry prankster yellow brick road 1960s day Josh Breslin, Olde Saco High School Class of 1967, having a few years ago transcribed some stories that his late father told him and his sister Lissette on April 16th 1983 while he recovering from a heart attack, had as a result some things, some Father’s Day things that he wanted to get off his chest. (See Prescott Breslin’s Stardust Memories War. Josh was, frankly having a hard time doing the task (as had I several years before) so he asked me to help him write this belated tribute to his late father, Prescott Lee Breslin. The words may have been jointly written and edited but, believe me, the sentiments and emotions expressed are strictly those of Joshua Lawrence Breslin. I do know that it took a lot of work, sweat and tears for him to transfer them into written form.
******
In honor of Prescott Lee Breslin, 1917-1985, Lance Corporal, United States Marine Corps, World War II, Pacific Theater , and perhaps, other Olde Saco fathers too.

Josh turned red, turned bluster, fluster, embarrassed, internal red, red with shame, red as he always did this time of the year, this Father’s Day time of the year, when he thought about his own father, the late Prescott Lee Breslin. And through those shades of red he thought, sometimes hard, sometimes just a flicker thought passing, too close, too red close to continue on, he thought about the things that he never said to his father, about what never could be said to him, and above all, because when it came right down to it because they might have been on different planets, what could not be comprehended said. But although death now separated them by over twenty years he still turned red, more internal red these days, when he thought about the slivers of talk that could have been said, usefully said. And he would go to his own grave having that hang over his own Father’s Day thoughts.

But just that minute, just that pre-Father’s Day minute, Joshua Lawrence Breslin, Joshua Lawrence, for those Olde Saco brethren who insisted on calling him Joshua Lawrence when he preferred plain old Josh in those old-time 1960s high school days, wanted to call a truce to his red-faced shame, internal or otherwise, and pay public tribute, pay belated public tribute to Prescott Breslin, and maybe it would rub off on others too. And just maybe cut the pain of the thought of having those unsaid things hang over him until the grave.

See, here’s the funny part, the funny part now, about speaking, publicly or privately, about his father, at least when Josh thought about the millions of children around who were, warm-heartedly, preparing to put some little gift together for the “greatest dad in the world.” And of other millions, who were preparing, or better, fortifying themselves in preparation for that same task for dear old dad, although with their teeth grinding. Josh could not remember, or refused to remember, a time for eons when he, warm-heartedly or grinding his teeth, prepared anything for his father’s Father’s Day, except occasional grief that might have coincided with that day’s celebration. No preparation was necessary for that. That was all in a Josh’s day’s work, his hellish corner boy day’s work or, rather, night’s work, the sneak thief in the night work, later turned into more serious criminal enterprises. But the really funny part, ironic maybe, is grief-giving, hellish corner boy sneak thief, or not, one Prescott Breslin , deserved honor, no, required honor that day because by some mysterious process, by some mysterious transference Josh, in the end, was deeply formed, formed for the better by that man.

And you see, and it will perhaps come as no surprise that Josh, hell everybody called him Joshua Lawrence in the old days so just so nobody will be confused we will use that name here, was estranged from his family for many years, many teenage to adult years and so that his father’s influence, the “better angel of his nature,” influence had to have come very early on. Joshua Lawrence , even now, maybe especially now, since he had climbed a few mountains of pain, of hard-wall time served, and addictions to get here, did not want to go into the details of that fact, just call them ugly, as this memorial was not about his trials and tribulations in the world, but Prescott’s.

Here is what needs to be told though because something in that mix, that Breslin gene mix, is where the earth’s salts mingled to spine Joshua Lawrence against his own follies when things turned ugly later in his life. Prescott Lee Breslin, that middle name almost declaring that here was a southern man, as Joshua Lawrence name was a declaration that he was a son of a southern man, came out of the foothills of Kentucky, Appalachian Kentucky. The hills and hollows of Hazard, Kentucky to be exact, in the next county over from famed, bloody coal wars, class struggle, which-side-are-you-on Harlan County, but all still hard-scrabble coal-mining country famous in story and song- the poorest of the poor of white Appalachia-the “hillbillies.”

And the poorest of the poor there, or very close to it, was Prescott Breslin’s family, his seven brothers and four sisters, his elderly father and his too young step-mother. Needless to say, but needing to be said anyway, Prescott went to the mines early, after a couple of break-out years as a singer, had little formal schooling and was slated, like generations of Breslins before him, to live a short, brutish, and nasty life, scrabbling hard, hard for the coal, hard for the table food, hard for the roof over his head, hard to keep the black lung away, and harder still to keep the company wolves away from his shack door. And then the Great Depression came full force and thing got harder still, harder than younger ears could understand today, or need to hear just now.

At the start of World War II Prescott jumped, jumped with both feet running once he landed, at the opportunity to join the Marines in the wake of Pearl Harbor, fought his fair share of battles in the Pacific Theater, including Guadalcanal, although he, like many men of his generation, was extremely reticent to talk about his war experiences. By the vagaries of fate in those up-ending times Prescott eventually was stationed at the huge Portsmouth Naval Depot before being discharged, a busy base about thirty miles from Olde Saco.

[Joshua Lawrence , interrupted his train of thought as chuckled to himself when he thought about his father’s military service, thought about one of the few times when he and Prescott had had a laugh together. Prescott often recounted that things were so tough in Hazard, in the mines of Hazard, in the slag heap existence of Hazard, that in a “choice” between continuing in the mines and daily facing death at Japanese hands he picked the latter, gladly, and never looked back. Part of that never looking back, of course, was the attraction of Delores LeBlanc (Olde Saco High School Class of 1937), Joshua Lawrence’s mother whom Prescott met while stationed at Portsmouth where she worked in the civilian section of the base of an insurance company based in Olde Saco. They married shortly thereafter, had three sons, his late oldest brother, Larry , killed many years ago while engaged in an attempted armed robbery, Danny who just kind of wandered off one day and had not been heard from since, and Joshua Lawrence, ex-sneak thief, ex-merry prankster, ex-dope-dealer, ex-addict, ex-, well, enough of ex’s, and a younger sister, Lissette, now in a private mental health facility after years of alcohol and drug abuse, and the rest is history. Well, not quite, whatever Prescott might have later thought about his decision to leave the hellhole of the Appalachian hills. He was also a man, as that just mentioned family resume hints at, who never drew a break, not at work, not through his sons and daughter (although it was the sons that counted, mainly), not in anything.]

Joshua Lawrence , not quite sure how to put it in words that were anything but spilled ashes since it would be put differently, much differently in 2011 than in, let’s say, 1971, or 1961 thought of it this way:

“My father was a good man, he was a hard- working man when he had work, and he was a devoted family man. But go back to that paragraph about where he was from. He was also an uneducated man with no skills for the changing Olde Saco labor market. There was no call for a coal miner's skills in Olde Saco after World War II so he was reduced to unskilled, last hired, first fired jobs. This was, and is, not a pretty fate for a man with hungry mouths to feed. And stuck in the damn Olde Saco Housing Authority apartments, come on now let’s call a thing by its real name, real recognizable name, “the projects,” the place for the poorest of the poor, Olde Saco version, to boot.

To get out from under a little and to share in the dream, the high heaven dream, working poor post-World War II dream, of a little house, no matter how little, of one’s own if only to keep the neighbor’s loud business from one’s door Delores, proud, stiffly French-Canadian 1930s Depression stable working class proud Delores, worked. Delores worked mother’s night shifts at one of the Jimmy Jack’s Homemade Diners filling up coffee cups and fixings for hungry travelers and tourists in order to scrap a few pennies together to buy an old, small, rundown house, on the wrong side of the tracks, on Maple Street for those from Olde Saco who remember that locale, literally right next to the old Bay Lines railroad tracks. So the circle turned and the Breslin family returned back to the Atlantic section of town of Maude’s youth.”

Joshua Lawrence grew pensive when he thought, or rather re-thought, about the toll that the inability to be the sole breadwinner (no big deal now with an almost mandatory two working-parents existence- but important for a man of his generation) took on the man's pride. A wife filling damn coffee cups, jesus.

He continued:

“And it never really got better for Prescott from there as his three boys grew to manhood (Lissette’s troubles began much later, much later), got into more trouble, got involved with more shady deals, acquired more addictions, and showered more shame on the Prescott Breslin name than needs to be detailed here. Let’s just say it had to have caused him more than his fair share of heartache. He never said much about it though, in the days when Joshua Lawrence and he were still in touch. Never much about why three boys who had more food, more shelter, more education, more prospects, more everything that a Hazard po’ boy couldn’t see straight if their lives depended on it, who led the corner boy life for all it was worth and in the end had nothing but ashes, and a father’s broken heart to show for it. No, he never said much, and Joshua Lawrence hadn’t heard from other sources that he ever said much (Delores was a different story, but this is Prescott’s story so enough of that). Why? Damn, they were his boys and although they broke his heart they were his boys. That is all that mattered to him and so that, in the end, is how Joshua Lawrence, whatever he would carry to his own grave, that Prescott must have forgiven him.”

Joshua Lawrence, getting internal red again, decided that it was time to close this tribute. To go on in this vein would be rather maudlin. The old man was a Marine, and he was closer to the old Marine Corps slogan than Joshua Lawrence could ever understand - Semper Fi- "always faithful." Yes, Joshua Lawrence thought, as if some historic justice had finally been done, that is a good way to end this. Except to say something that should have been shouted from the Olde Saco rooftops long ago- “Thanks Dad, you did the best you could.”

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin- Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Frankie Out In The Adventure Car Hop Night

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Dubs performing the classic Could This Be Magic? to set the mood for this piece.

Okay, you know the routine by now, or at least the drift of these 1950s days of classic rock and roll sketches, those king hell king corner boy-in chief Frankie Riley-induced sketches that I have been forced to do, forced by pressed memory to do if you are asking for a reason. Or maybe, as a reason anyway, just to unwind after raging against the awry-struck world we live in, or the coming big sleep night. And if you don’t know the routine here is a quick primer. Start out with a tip of the hat to the fact that each generation, each teenage generation that is, makes its own tribal customs, mores and language. Then move on to the part that is befuddled (my befuddled) by today’s teenage-hood and its tribal customs, mores, and language. And then I go, presto, scampering back to my own “safe” teenage-hood, the teenage coming of age of the generation of ‘68 that came of age in the early 1960s and start on some cultural “nugget” from that seemingly pre-historic period. Well this sketch is no different from the established pattern, except, today we decipher the 1950s golden age of the drive-in restaurant, although really it is the car hops (waitresses), the essential ingredient in that scene, that drive this one.

See, this sketch is driven , almost subconsciously driven, by the Edward Hopper Nighthawk-like illustrations on the The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era CDs that I have been checking out lately in search of that 1950s good night. In this case it is the drive-in restaurant of blessed teenage memory that caught my eye. For the younger set, or those oldsters who “forgot,” that was a restaurant idea driven by car culture, especially the car culture from the golden era of teenage car-dom, the 1950s. Put together cars, cars all flash-painted and fully-chromed, “boss” cars we called them in my working class neighborhood, young restless males, food, and a little off-hand sex, or rather the promise or mist of a promise of it, and you have the real backdrop to the drive-in restaurant. If one really thought about it why else would somebody, anybody who was assumed to be functioning, sit in their cars eating food, and at best ugly food at that, off a tray strapped to the door while seated in their cherry, “boss," 1959 Chevy.

Beside the food, of course, there was the off-hand girl watching (in the other cars with trays hanging off their doors), the car hop ogling (and propositioning, if you had the nerve, and if your intelligence was good and there was not some 250 pound fullback back-breaker waiting to take her home a few cars over), and above all there was the steady sound of music, rock music, natch, coming from those boomerang speakers in those, need I say it, “boss” automobiles. And that is where this entire sketch gets mixed together.

Of course, just like another time when I was discussing teenage soda fountain life, the mere mention, no, the mere thought of the term “car hop” made me think of a Frankie story. Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, Frankie from the old hell-fire shipbuilding sunk and gone and it-ain’t-coming-back-again seen better days working class neighborhood where we grew up, or tried to. Frankie who I have already told you I have a thousand stories about, or hope I do. Frankie the most treacherous little bastard that you could ever meet on one day, and the kindest man (better man/child), and not just cheap jack, dime store kindness either, alive the next day. Ya, that Frankie, my best middle school and high school friend Frankie.

Did I tell you about Joanne, Frankie’s “divine” (his term, without quotation marks) Joanne because she entered, she always in the end entered into these things? Yes, I see, looking back at my notes that I did back when I was telling you about her little Roy “The Boy” Orbison trick. The one where she kept playing Roy’s Running Scared endlessly to get Frankie’s dander up. But see while Frankie had really no serious other eyes for the dames except his “divine” Joanne (I insist on putting that divine in quotation marks when telling of Joanne, at least for the first few times I mention her name, even now. Needless to say I questioned, and questioned hard, that designation on more than one occasion to no avail) he was nothing but a high blood-pressured, high-strung shirt-chaser, first class. And the girls liked him, although not so much for his looks as they were just kind of Steve McQueen okay. What made them they go for him was his line of patter, first class. Patter, arcane, obscure patter that made me, most of the time, think of fingernails scratching on a blackboard (except when I was hot on his trail trying to imitate him) and his faux “beat” pose , midnight sunglasses, flannel shirt, black chinos, and funky work boots (ditto on the imitation here as well). And it was not just “beat’ girls that liked to be around him either as you will find out.

Well, the long and short of it was that Frankie, late 1963 Frankie, and the... (Oh, forget the divine, quotation marks or not) Joanne had had their 207th (that number, or close, since 8th grade lovebirds) break-up and Frankie was a "free” man. To celebrate this freedom Frankie, Frankie, who was almost as poor as I was but who has a father with a car that he was not too cheap or crazy about to not let Frankie use on occasion, had wheels. Okay, Studebaker wheels but wheels anyway. And he was going to treat me to a drive-in meal as we went cruising the night, the Saturday night, the Saturday be-bop night looking for some frails (read: girls, Frankie had about seven thousand names for them)

Tired (or bored) from cruising the Saturday be-bop night away (meaning girl-less) we hit the local drive-in hot spot, Arnie’s Adventure Car Hop for one last, desperate attempt at happiness (Yah, things were put, Frank and me put anyway, just that melodramatically for every little thing). What I didn’t know was that Frankie, king hell skirt-chaser, had his off-hand eye on one of the car hops, Sandy, and as it turned out she was one of those girls who was enamored of his patter (or so I heard later). So he pulled into her station and started to chat her up as we ordered the haute cuisine. And here was the funny thing, now that I saw her up close I could see that she was nothing but a fox (read: “hot” girl) and Frankie once again had hit pay dirt. The not so funny thing was that she was so enamored of Frankie’s patter that he was going to take her home after work. No problem you say. No way, big problem. I was to be left there to catch a ride home anyway I could while they set sail into that good night. Thanks, Frankie.

Well, I was pretty burned up about it for a while but as always with “charma” Frankie we hooked up again a few days later. And here is where I got a little sweet revenge (although don’t tell him that).

Frankie sat me down at the old town pizza parlor and told me the whole story and even now, as I recount it, I can’t believe it. Sandy was a fox, no question, but a married fox, a very married fox, who said when Frankie first met her that she was about twenty-two and had a kid. Her husband was in the service and she was “lonely” and succumbed to Frankie’s charms. Fair enough, it is a lonely world at times. But wait a minute, I bet you thought that Frankie’s getting mixed up with a married honey with a probably killer husband was the big deal. No way, no way at all. You know, or you can figure out, old Frankie spent the night with Sandy. Again, it's a lonely world sometimes.

The real problem, the real Frankie problem, was once they started to compare biographies and who they knew around town, and didn’t know, it turned out that Sandy, old fox, old married fox with brute husband, old Arnie’s car hop Sandy was some kind of cousin to Joanne, a second cousin maybe. And she was no cradle-robber twenty-two (as if you could rob the cradle with Frankie) but nineteen, almost twenty and had lied about her age because she had been embarrassed about having a baby in high school and having to go to her "aunt's" to have the child. (More “aunts” than you would have suspected got unexpected visits from errant nieces than you could shake a stick at in those days when bastardry had a greater social stigma.)

Moreover, somewhere along the line Sandy and her cousin Joanne had had a parting of the ways, a nasty parting of the ways. So sweet as a honey bun Arnie's car hop Sandy, sweet teen-age mother Sandy, had been looking for a way to take revenge on Joanne and Frankie, old king of the night Frankie, was the meat. She had him sized up pretty well, as he admitted to me. An ironic slight smile, a little response to some off-hand patter, and maybe a little sway and he fell, fell easy. So for a long time Frankie was sweating this one out like crazy, and swearing everyone within a hundred miles who might have seen him with Sandy to secrecy.

Here is the best part though. One night I was walking into Skip’s Record Shop looking for some new record as Sandy was walking out. She stopped me to inquire about whether Frankie and Joanne were back together. I answered yes with a shrug. Then she told me her version of that Saturday night saga I have just related. It matched up pretty well with what Frankie had told me so I asked her whether she was going to do anything to break up our lovebirds. She laughed and told me (in confidence) that she had no intention in the world of doing anything about that. She had, after all that brute of a husband, who might take out Frankie, and her. Besides and here is where women, married or single, are something else. All she really wanted out of Frankie was the knowledge that she could take him away from Joanne any time she wanted to. And, added in, to make Frankie sweat about Joanne finding out. I’m telling you this one in strictest confidence even now. Don’t tell Joanne or Frankie. Ever.

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Prescott Breslin’s Stardust Memories War

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Hoagy Carmichael performing Stardust.


He was scared, Prescott Breslin was scared. Scared more than he had ever been at any time in his life over the last forty years, at any time since that 1942 night his 1st Marine Division unit, his Bravo company, stationed out in just being built Camp Pendleton, California had gotten orders to move out west the next day, west to the Jap dotted island of the World War II hard fighting west. And while that scare was prospective his current scare was real, life-threatening real. Several days before he had had pains, heart pains so severe he thought, and his wife Delores thought too, that was the end right then and there. Somehow she had gotten help, gotten help that had gotten him to Portland General Hospital, and gotten him there in time for some heart surgery to work him back to life, for now.

And that for now, and that scared about the end had driven a very private Prescott Breslin to call in his kindred (his old time Appalachia word for his family and others), his available kindred to come and, well, he might not have put it this way, comfort him (and Delores). Thus on the morning of April 16th 1983 I, Josh Breslin, his youngest son, and his only daughter, Lissette, were sitting by his home-side bed up in Olde Saco, Maine listening to him tell some stuff about his life, stuff that neither of us had ever heard much about from this hither-to-fore distant father figure.

While he was having his say he asked to have his favorite music, the music of his generation, the one that had survived (just barely) the Great Depression of the 1930s and had fought (or like Delores had anxiously awaited behind) the hard island and continent battles of World War II playing on the record player in the background.



I, mistakenly, thumbing through the dusty pile of LP records had put on Rosemary Clooney’s Come On To My House, a song I had heard wafting through the house on the radio on the now long gone WMEX, his station of choice out of Portland in those days. He yelled, or what passed for yelling in his condition, that he did not want to hear that rock and roll stuff from the1950s and made it very clear (as he always did on the not many occasions when he made a big deal out of his wants) that 1950, maybe 1952, was the cutoff date for the background music that he wanted played. This told me already that two things were going to happen.

One, that we were not to be entertained by any stories of his life, or of our family life after that time and, two, that he was going to continue to mourn, now apparently to the grave, that his two older sons, Lawrence James (named after his father) and Daniel Francis (named after my mother’s father) were not there at his bedside then. And the reason that those two sons, my brothers whom I too missed, were not available was that Larry was just at that moment serving yet another five to ten stretch for an armed robbery in Bar Harbor (a cheap jack gas station of all places, jesus) up at Shawshank Prison. And Danny had left home heading west (what west, and how far, he did not tell me when he left) in 1966 and had not been seen, or heard of, by the family since despite some serious efforts by Dad to find him.

See, as will become apparent as Prescott Breslin tells his story, or the parts that he wanted told, told by me his son who had made a fair living out of writing up such stories over the previous ten years or so, he was a simple man, with simple values, simple wants, and a simple code. Therefore a most complex man in our go-go times. Larry, Danny and I were his children, his kin, so right or wrong, good or bad, that was it (and Lissette too, but as he told me once many years before when we were in one of our more talkative phases, he never really did understood women, except Delores, and so by the age of puberty Lissette had kind of been a blur to him. She, on the other hand, as was evident that morning between the tears and laughter, worshipped the ground he walked on and, and while I had had my tiffs with him, who was to say she was wrong).

That they (and I) caused him more heartbreak than any simple man should have to endure did not matter, we were his kids, his boys okay, and that was that. So if you sense that Larry and Danny were in the room that April morning and if you sense that the old man just wanted to remember ahead to the early 1950s and no further before the whole thing went awry for him (and Delores) for that reason then that is just about right. And if you hear Lena Horne’ soulful, wistful long gone times past voice singing Stormy Weather to beat away the 1940s blues night that is just about right too. Prescott Breslin expressed himself satisfied when I finally found that gem and placed it on the turntable.

I, by the way, must have eaten up about half of his record collection that day even with many replays of his very most favorite tunes (and some jointly connected with Delores youth favorites). Certainly Lena’s Stormy Weather got several plays as did Tangerine, a mother favorite, Sentimental Journey, a slew of Inkspots stuff, I’ll Get By, If I Didn’t Care, I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire, I’ll Get By, and Whispering Trees, The Mills Brothers, especially Paper Dolls, another mother favorite. A couple of Andrews Sisters things for laughs and, of course their song of songs (or one of them) done by Hoagy Carmichael, I think it was his version, Stardust.

Here though is what he had to say that morning (and after some rest, and lunch, that afternoon) as best I could take it down in my teared-up notebook:

He, at first, kept coming back coming back a few times, to his current frail heart condition and how that brush with death had triggered thoughts about the last time he knew, knew for sure, that he was scared, hard scared. In his in his laconic way he just kept saying he remembered that he was scared, scared silly, and he didn’t care who knew about it. Rugged hills and hollows born, Appalachia mountain Kentucky hard-scrabble farm born, fear hid under the rug, or somewhere else born he was still scared. He, Prescott Breslin, just weeks, maybe a couple of months if he counted it up, out of those hills and hollows, was scared because his unit, his semper fi 1st Marine Corps Division unit had just received orders to head out in the morning, head out west.

He remembered that he was sitting by himself that night before in the make-shift Quonset hut PX at a picnic table munching coffee and cakes and thinking west could only mean the Pacific islands that dotted the way to Japan. Some units had already gone out, gone out quickly all through early 1942 and as 1943 approached all hell was breaking loose with men and material heading west; just like in the old time pioneer west if he had thought about it that way then.

[Prescott Breslin, even forty years later, in relating this story to us would not give the precise day that his unit left California just in case some Nips or Chinks (Prescott’s terms) might be lurking around and could use the information in the future. He was certainly a man of his Great Depression/World War II times. JLB]

Sitting with that cup of black coffee (hell, he said, nobody back home ever had it any other way besides who had extra milk or cream left over for such fixings, and black was fine anyway) and cruller donut (he had grown to love this donut business after a lifetime of his Ma’s old patched-up bread pudding and sunken baking soda-laden cakes) he was not thinking about pioneer west stuff, or even, after he bit into the cruller, scared thoughts so much but about how life was funny. Not funny to have a laugh over but just the way the cards were dealt funny. It might have been the sugar, or it might have been the caffeine but his started to think about all the stuff that he hadn’t done, and some stuff he had done, to keep the thoughts of the days ahead in check.

First off though was his pride in being one of the best troopers in his training unit down at Parris Island, and then his assigned unit at Pendleton. It wasn’t so much that it came natural to him, although coming from the hard rock country didn’t hurt when they went out into the “boonies” on those twenty mile full-pack hikes or when he busted out number one on the rifle range with that silly M-I pop gun. It was more that, at first, guys, yankee city guys from Boston and New York, or northern farm boys anyway, laughed at him about his back mountain drawl, about his not knowing about donuts, about not knowing about how to handle a folk and spoon right and all kinds of yankee stuff that didn’t make sense to him, or them when he asked them to explain what they meant and why.

After a while, after a ton of callouses and blisters, after a ton of KP, after half a ton of pranks, and after about eight weeks of showing guys, yankee guys and farm boys, that he could be depended on if something happened to them they were practically competing to have him as their “buddy.” More than one guy said, said straight out, when they got the news of the move out that as long as Prescott Breslin was going along with them he wasn’t quite so scared. Here was the kicker though, the one that made him beam. A couple of days before they got orders they had all chipped in to by him drinks at the enlisted men’s club to show their appreciation AND a dozen donuts, assorted, the next morning. Still sitting at that piney table Prescott Breslin was scared.

While he was thinking an odd-scared thought or two somebody, a guy he didn’t recognize sitting with a nice- looking tanned Oceanside girl, at another table had gotten up to put some nickels in the jukebox and he, still thinking about life’s ups and downs, could hear the strains of I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire and that song got him kind of choked up at first. He then laughed, not a funny laugh, as he listened to the lyrics and thought that he sure didn’t want to, and hadn’t, set the world on fire. He sure hadn’t.

Getting into the heart of the song, the lonely guy misery part, he hadn’t a girl left behind to think of him while he was away blasting Pacific islands to smithereens. Out there, out there in sunny California, he had had not too much luck finding a girl, not much luck at all really. The girls seemed too fast for him, to ready to dismiss his back mountain drawl and write him down as a damn hillbilly. One time at the Surfside Grille in Oceanside where all the guys went when they had passes he met a girl, a pretty girl who liked his looks she said, liked his black hair, and brown eyes. She nevertheless told him flat out once she found out where he was from that she would pass him by. Why? Well, she, herself was from some podunk okie town and now that she was a California girl she was thinking of becoming a blonde and had definitely shaken the dust off her of okie kind of boys. She wanted, and she said this flat out too, a movie star soldier boy like Robert Taylor. Jesus, women, California women.

[We all laughed at that one. I because two of my three wives had come from there although neither were blonde and neither had been from Podunk but had been born and bred California women. I too though could shout to the high heavens about the perfidies of California women, transplants or born and bred. Lissette’s first husband had been from there as well and he had run back there when things got tough between them and married his high school sweetheart on the rebound. So change the gender and that explained Lissette’s laugh. Dad laughed at his own story but I think I could detect just the slightest anguish as he was probably thinking about whether Danny had perhaps married a California woman and maybe had some things to say about that.]

Sure, back home, he had had a few nibbles, a couple of girls from Prestonsburg and Hazard, girls with nice looks and manners and who couldn’t complain of his drawl. But nothing serious happened, nothing serious because from about age fourteen all the girls where he came from, even Prestonsburg girls, got all moony over being married and, in order to get from under being embedded in their own large families, start families of their own. He had wanted no part of that, not at twenty, no way. But he got just a little melancholy, taking another sip of that sweet black coffee, when he thought that he might never have a chance to get married. Never have a family of his own to take care of him in his old age, if he had an old age.

[He welled up a little as he mentioned that last thought. He was probably thinking that Larry would never be a comfort to him or Delores now that he had spent a good part of his adult life behind bars and hadn’t learned to keep out of jail. And that Danny would probably never come back after all this time and that I, who had my own fair share of estrangements and non-talkative period with him (and Delores), was at best a fifty-fifty proposition. Whether he factored Lissette into his thoughts that day was another matter but probably not, she was still probably that long ago blur, that blur who worshipped him.]

Mainly though he thought that night about the things he did had done over the previous few years before he had enlisted and wished that he had had more time to do some more of them. Hell, it wasn’t nothing big, nothing to set the world on fire, but it was his life. His life, six or seven years before, once he knew the score, knew the hard-scrabble Kentuck farm score, and that if he didn’t want nothing but hard calloused hands and looking eighty at forty (like his pa and grandpa) he had better hit the highway. Since there were twelve kids at home, and only enough to feed about eight right nobody (except Ma, he later, much too much later, found out) missed him when he set out for Lexington one dark night. He got a ride from Colonel Eddie (not really a colonel but everybody with two bucks for a genuine certificate called himself that) the local long-haul driver who was always looking for company on his runs west, and knew how to keep quiet when a guy asked him to about stuff like where he was going, and why.

And he also thought about how once he got to Lexington, after a few crop-picking and dish-washing jobs to keep him alive in the city, he met up with a couple of guys, Doc and Hank, at Lucy’s Diner who wanted form a band and make some money playing what they called the coal-dust circuit. He played a fair guitar for a kid, had a decent voice that had become deeper and more tuneful as he aged, and best of all he knew all the old-timey songs that the hills and hollows folks wanted to hear. Boy, did he know them all. Stuff like Tom Doulas, Ommie Wise, and Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies.

[With some Inkspot tune playing softly in the background he nevertheless started to sing Hank Williams’ Cold, Cold Heart and sounded pretty damn good for a guy in his condition. You could see, see just for a moment, that Kentuck Sheik boy who had all the young girls, the young Prestonsburg and Hazard girls ordering dresses through some mail order catalogue just to be pretty on Saturday night barn dance time. And, hell, easily see how my own mother could have fallen for him, fallen hard for him, when they first met at Old Orchard’s Starlight Ballroom back in 1943 or 44.]

A couple of weeks later with some practice, a small stake, and lots of dreams, they hit the back road Saturday night places where the locals held their weekly barn dances (complete with plenty of moonshine to liven things up). Sometimes they, now known as the Kentuck Sheiks (that sheik name had been made popular a few years before and you just added your state name in front and you had a genuine band name), passed the hat, sometimes when there was no dough they just took a couple of days room and board for their troubles.

He remembered too the time that through some white lightning connections, some Moonshine Johnnie, the king of the illegal local whiskey ring, or whatever the liquid was by the time it got boiled down, packaged, and run through the hills and hollows just in front of the revenue agents, the Sheiks got to play before a crowd in his hometown of Hazard. And they were billed on flyers, handbills, and posters as the Kentuck Sheiks featuring Prescott Breslin. Moonshine Johnnie’s idea was that he would throw a free Saturday barn dance down at Farmer Ben’s, a place where locals had been having their weekly dances since, well, since there was a Hazard as far as anybody knew. Johnnie wanted to introduce those who didn’t know to his product, or who knew and had a thirst. In short to move product, be an outstanding citizen, and listen to the mountain-etched music just like any other hillbilly.

The Sheiks were to pass the hat like they had done at a hundred such gatherings and with a hometown boy on the stage they expected a little extra haul. Additionally, Johnnie, just in case the cash haul was short, threw in five jugs of his premium liquor for the boys. That addition proved to be my father’s undoing. The art of drinking hard liquor, hard still-made liquor takes some cultivation, some time to get used to it. Young men need to grow into it with age like drinking wine is for some Europeans. The night of the barn dance, that Saturday afternoon really, he had started drinking a steady stream out of the jug so that by show time his was in good form (as were Doc and Hank partners), and as far as the show went they were a great success. As far as the show part went.

But this was just flat-out the wrong night to develop his whiskey skills. Just before the dance, while the band was setting up and checking things out, Becky Price, an old Hazard sweetheart came up and started to rekindle some flame. Becky sure did look fine that night he thought with a pretty, frilly store-bought dress (really Montgomery Ward catalogue bought he found out later) and her hair done up in ribbons. She had heard he was playing that night and had gotten herself all pretty for him. They talked some then and some at intermission and agreed to meet after the dance at Lance’s Diner over on Route 5 when he was finished packing up after the show.

But that is where the liquor proved to be a demon. After the show, things packed up, he decided to take a little curse off the liquor in his system by having a couple more hits at the jug. After the second swallow he just keeled over dead drunk. When he woke up the next morning the boys were up front in their sedan, Doc driving, while he laid across the back seat as they headed for a show in Steubenville, Ohio. Poor Becky, he hoped she didn’t wait long that night.

[We laughed again although I noticed that his sweet Delores, my mother, didn’t laugh quite so heartily on this story. She had, if asked, her own stories to tell about fending off a couple of Olde Saco girlfriends who were also taken by his black hair, brown eyes and fine uniform look and who, unlike her, were willing “to do” it, if necessary to win his favor. This information only came to me much later when she was ready for me to tell her story.]

That band job lasted for about a year or so, maybe a little bit more, but then times got so bad about 1937 or 38 that three guys just couldn’t make it on bread and butter, literally. So he got off the road, headed back home, and started to work in Mr. Peabody’s coal mines (not every mine was owned by the Peabody Coal Company as he was at pains to inform his fellow platoon members when they had asked what he did in the “real world” but that is what everybody called it around home when a guy went into the mines).

Now even a hills and hollows boy who grew up in that hard –scrabble country but who grew up on a farm needed to adjust to the hard times in the mines. The early hours, the wash up time that was unpaid for adding to the long day, the damn coal dust, the noise, the deafening noise, from the machines drilling against god’s ancient rock, and the sweat, the infernal sweat even on cold days once you got down in the pits. After a couple of months he adjusted to the routine, got to know real coal-miners who were the third or fourth generation going down there, and got some respect when he told the boys that they were not getting paid nearly enough for the tough work they did for the damn Johnson Coal Company. The boys listened, and knowing Kentucky coalfields traditions, hell Harlan, bloody Harlan, was just down the road they prepared to strike one time. Somehow the company got wind of it and offered a small raise and paid wash-up time just to keep the production moving. That was enough, enough then with plenty of guys out of work, and plenty of guys, scabs, guys from the outside, with hungry mouths to feed, but still scabs, ready to cross the lines if anything happened.

There he was though stuck in the mines, the damn black-lung mines (his mother cried every time he came home at night looking, well, looking like a damn nigra, and coughing the dust out half the night) when the news of the Japs hitting Pearl came over the radio and guys, guys like him, all over the country, were lined up three, maybe more, deep, to enlist. Funny though he could, having worked his way up a little in the mines, have gotten a vital industries draft deferral and been sitting right then in the Prestonsburg hotel with some pretty town girl drinking real store-bought liquor and working up his courage to ask her up into his room. But no, on December 9, 1941 he had gone to Prestonsburg and enlisted in the Marines right on the dotted line. And he never looked back.

Scared, scared to death, or not, sitting at that wooden table having a second cruller and a third cup of mud Private First Class Prescott Breslin thought it over for a minute. He then said to himself, hell, between shoveling coal for Mr. Peabody forever and fighting the damn Japs I’ll take the Japs. And that made him just a little less scared as someone walked up and put another nickel in the jukebox to play If I Didn’t Care.

[After relating that last pearl of wisdom, which my father had actually imparted to me a long time ago when I was about seventeen or eighteen after I had asked him about his uniform that was hanging in a back closet, he expressed a wish for a little rest before lunch. The following is what he had to say in the afternoon after lunch. Of course he was still tired, a little groggy and disoriented from the mix of medications and so he rambled more, at times a lot more, in the afternoon and went back and forth on subjects. He still though adamantly refused somewhere in that deep Breslin reservoir of hurt to go much beyond the early 1950s. And of course he, as he had done in the morning, kept asking me to put his beloved 1940s songs on the record player. I had just put Benny Goodman’s Sing, Sing, Sing on and that triggered a story that my mother had told him when they first met at the Starlight Ballroom in Old Orchard. Like I said the afternoon just rambled on but this one will tell anybody a lot about my mother and father, their love, and why they had endured in Olde Saco, foreign territory for him, through thick and thin.]

Your mother had had just enough of Elizabeth LaCroix, Aunt Betty, and her tangled love life with your mother’s brother, Jean. [Always called in proper F-C speak, Jeanbon.] Every other week, it seemed, Betty was breaking up with him over one question. Let me give you a hint it starts with an s and ends with an x. [Lissette and my mother blushed but he just plowed ahead and after noticing their discomfort he said that he was well past having to be polite about thing now that he was facing the grim reaper (his words) one on one.]

See Betty and your mother were seniors at Olde Saco High School in 1937. Let me add that they were, and the yearbook photos don’t lie, were both dark-haired French-Canadian [F-C remember?] American beauties, dewy roses like only those with forbears from the north up in Quebec can be. So sex was naturally in the equation, in the eternal boy-girl, Betty-Jean, equation. And for your mother too, since about fourteen when she learned that she could, with just a little effort, get the guys stirring, stirring over thoughts about dewy roses and other material matters. But this is strictly, well almost strictly, a Betty-Jean story so we will leave the Delores-smitten guys to stew. [He laughed a victor’s laugh at that one.]

The friction between your mother and Betty, or rather her momentary wrath at Betty, was centered on the hard fact that in a few months the girls would be having their senior prom, always a highlight in the Olde Saco calendar year, for those who graduated and those who, for one reason or another didn’t. And, graduation or not, the next step was marriage. That was just, as I well know, the established working class and religious ethos of the town, the F-C-inspired culture, and the times. Get out of your parents’ overburdened house and into your own small cold-water flat, maybe over on Fourteenth Street by the river, and dream of your own small white picket fence future house, maybe on Atlantic Avenue toward the ocean. And that cycle, as I also found out although I could never do much about it, had been established for a long while.

It seemed that although Betty and Jean had been an “item” for only a few months that Betty had this Saturday night I am talking about had her fifteenth, no sixteenth, and never make-up with dear Jean fight. And like I said whether the year was 1037, 1537, or 1937 the issue, to put it straight now that I’ve already said it, was sex, or rather to use the latest craze saying then “doing it.” Really though, the real crux of the matter, was that she wanted to wait until that cold- water flat marriage, and not before, no way before, to give in to your uncle, one Jean Claude LeBlanc.

Needless to say All-American boy, really all All-American French-Canadian boy and former star of the Olde Saco High football team, the one that beat Auburn for the state in 1935, Jean, was all for “doing the do” right then as a test run for marriage, or so that is how he presented it to Betty that Saturday (and many a previous Saturday night) down in the dunes of Olde Saco Beach. And Jean had almost made the sale, except by the time Betty decided yes, she was so anxious and the hour was so late that she wasn’t in the mood any longer. Jesus. [More womanly blushes]

You don’t get my drift. Okay, let me go by the numbers. Boy (really man since Jean has already graduated from Olde Saco and been working as a high-grade machine mechanic at the MacAdams Textile Mill over on Main Street for a while then. That defined man in these parts) meets girl. Boy (man) takes girl here and there in his new, well fairly new, Studebaker and they cap the night off watching the fishes swim down at the close-by beach (at the secluded far end, the Squaw Rock end, known by one and all as, well just known for being secluded, okay). Girl successfully holds off boy (man). Got it. [Jesus Dad we all know about Squaw Rock and that stuff although nothing was said while he was speaking.]

But how do you think our boy Jean, champion football mover but a little bashful in the sex department when he came right down to it, tried to get one Betty La Croix in the mood. Take one guess. Backing up the ocean swells and moonlight in the mood department is one Benny Goodman and his gang on that car radio, providing that heavenly deep beat-pacing clarinet that sets those drums a rolling, those trumpets blowing to Gabriel’s heaven, and sets those sexy saxes on fire to blow the walls of Jericho down that I mentioned before. A little Buddha Swings at the right moment will go a long way. So Benny did his part.

[After a little break to take his afternoon medication my father moved on to tell this one. I thought it sounded kind of familiar some of the details anyway. And it was, partially because it was his version of a story my mother had told to me about their courting days when she was in one of her expansive non-blaspheming Josh Breslin to hell and say seven novenas moods. The story had something, actually little, to do with my oldest brother Larry and so my father told it in such a way that even with Larry now serving his third (or was it fourth ) stretch in Shawshank you could tell that he was still the old man’s favorite. It was okay with me by then, and had been for a long time. That was just the old man and his hard and fast loyalties, likes and prejudices.]

“Lawrence Breslin get your dirty hands off that wall this minute,” yelled your mother, Mother Breslin to you then if I recall. I think you kids called her that then over some scheme you Josh had devised to show contemptuous respect or something, and it included the yelled at Larry. She was always honey to me as I never bought into that Mother thing you kept pestering me about, that sounded too much like some Ste. Brigitte’s nun thing to me. I though was only the mother-supporting father to the boy being yelled at just that minute. Just as, hell, let’s call her Delores, was getting ready for cascade rant number two aimed in Larry’s direction wafting through the air, the radio WMEX air, came the melodious voice of Bing Crosby singing in that sweet, nuanced voice of his, Far Away Places. Our song, or one of them. Our forever memory song.

As a result, the proposed rant was halted, momentarily halted, as Delores flashed back and began to speak of the night in 1943 over at the Stardust Ballroom on East Grand in Old Orchard Beach when she, then a typist for the State Insurance Company right here in Olde Saco (and making good money for a single, no high maintenance girl) and one Marine PFC Prescott Breslin, me, stationed after serious service in the Pacific wars (Guadalcanal, etc.) at the Portsmouth Naval Base met while they were playing that song on the jukebox between sets. Sets being performed by the Be-Bop Sextet, a hot, well, be-bop band that was making a national tour to boost civilian morale while our boys were off fighting. We hit it off right away, made Far Away Places our song, and prepared for a future, a joint future, once the war was over, and we could get our dream, shared dream, little white house, with or without picket fence, maybe a dog, and definitely kids, a few although we never specified a number. [My mother silently nodded in agreement with some kind of smile on her face.] The perfect dream to chase the old Great Depression no dough blues and World War II fighting dust away, far away. And to be able to breath a decent breathe, a not from hunger breathe.

As Bing finished up your mother snapped back into the reality of the Larry hands on the wall moment, the two by four reality, of our make due, temporary veterans’ housing set up by the Olde Saco Housing Authority (at the request of and funded by the War Department) to house housing-hungry returning vets and give us a leg up that we had lived in way too long. Add on the further reality that my job at the Macadam’s Textile Mill was none too sure as there were rumors circulating around town that the mill-owners were thinking of relocating to North Carolina. And the biggest reality of all: well, Larry, Danny, Joshua, and most recently still in the cradle Lissette. And four is enough, more than enough thank you.

But as that terrific tenor of Dick Haymes started singing Little White Lies right after Bing she fell back again to thinking about that now old dream of the little white house, with or without picket fence, a dog and a few (exactly three, thank you) that was coming just around the next corner when we first started out together . And just as I saw she was winding up to blast young Larry , his forever dirty hands, and that wall, maybe a little less furiously that she intended to before, I sensed that her thoughts had returned to her Prince Charming, me, the Starlight Ballroom1943, and our song. Our forever memory song. She then said, “We’ll get by.” Yes, we would get by. [Plenty of sniffles and Kleenex all around.]

[I could tell my father was getting tired, he started looking a little gray around the eyes and had a drowsy look, a look of the medications wearing off. I, we, offered to leave and let him rest, and he agreed after this one last story he felt he needed to get straight on. The story about his military uniform in that old back closet that I had asked about when I was a kid getting ready for college and how he had basically dismissed me out of hand ]

Josh was a curious kid even when he was little. Not curious about everything in the world just that minute, although more than one teacher had noted on his early childhood reports cards that little characteristic, but curious about my military uniform, my faded, drab, slightly moth-eaten army dress uniform, World War II version, of course. That curiousness came not from, like the usual, some Josh daydream curiosity but the result, the this minute result, of having come across my suit in an attic closet as he was preparing to store his own not used, not much used, or merely out-of-fashion, excess clothing against time. And that time was the time of his imminent departure for State University and his first extended time away from home.

Funny Josh knew that I had been in World War II, had gotten some medals for my service as was apparent from the fruit salad on the uniform, and that I had spent a little time, he was not exactly sure on the time but his mother had told him 1950 when he asked, in the Veterans Hospital for an undisclosed ailment. But he had not heard anything beyond those bare facts from me. Never. And his mother had insistently shh-ed him away whenever he tried to bring it up.

Oh sure Josh had been sick unto death back in the 1950s when the kitchen radio, tuned into WMEX exclusively to old-time World War II parent music. I can remember the battles like they were yesterday. To the exclusion of any serious rock music of his like Elvis, Chuck, Little Richard and Jerry Lee, but that was parents just being parents and kicking up old torches. Especially when Frank Sinatra sang I’ll Be Seeing You, or his mother would laugh whimsically when The Andrew Sisters performed Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy or The Mills Brothers would croon Till Then. But we never discussed that war, nor was it discussed when my cronies, and fellow veterans, came over to play our weekly card games until dawn.


I guess after having spied the uniform Josh decided it was time to ask those questions, those curiosity questions. Later, he said, it would be too late, he would be too busy raising a family of his own, or he would be doing his own military service, although he hoped not on that count. It just didn’t figure into his plans, and that was that. So with a deep breathe one evening, one Friday evening after dinner, when I would not be distracted by thoughts of next day work, or Saturday night card games, his asked the big question. And I answered- “I did what a lot of guys did, not more not less, I did it the best way I could, I saw some things, some tough things, I survived and that’s all that there is to say.” And I said it in such a way that there was no torture too severe, no hole too deep, and no hell too hot to get more than that out of me.

Later that evening, still shell-shocked I guess at my response, as he prepared to go out with his boys for one last Olde Saco fling before heading to State, he could hear his mother softy sobbing while we listened on the living room phonograph to Martha Tilton warble I’ll Walk Alone, The Ink Spots heavenly harmonize on I’ll Get By, Doris Day songbird Sentimental Journey, Vaughn Monroe sentimentally stir When The Lights Go on Again, and Harry James orchestrate through It’s Been A Long, Long Time. I hope Josh understood, understood as well as an eighteen year old boy could understand such things, that it was those songs that had gotten his mother and me through the war, and its aftermath. And that was all he had to know about the damn war. [And I did although not that night, or not for many nights after.]

[After that last one instead of calling it a day my father got a little morose after thinking about those songs and maybe when he thought about how he never did provide my mother with that white picket fence future house on Atlantic Avenue, never did partake of the great golden age that he had promised and could not make good on in a world that he too had no say in. He then blurted this out of the blue.]

Jesus, it had been three months since the mill closed on the first day of our lord, January 1954, as the huge black and red sign in front of the dead-ass silent mill kept screaming at us (and also to not trespass under penalty of arrest, christ,) and I still hadn’t been able to get steady work, steady work anywhere, what with every other guy looking for work too, and I didn’t even have a high school diploma to do anything but some logging work up North when they needed extra crews. I remember talking about my plight to Jack Amber, a fellow out-of-worker sitting on the counter-stool next to his from the same MacAdams Mill that had been in Olde Saco since, well, since forever. This conversation and ones like it in previous weeks between us, and between many guys on those same stools, took place, of course, at Millie’s Diner right across the street from that damn closed, dead-ass mill the place where every guy (and an occasion wife, or girlfriend waiting to pick up her guy) who worked there went for his coffee and, and whatever else got him through another mill week.

Just then I stopped talking and started just staring into space, a silence that had been recurring more frequently lately as I thought of the reality of dead-end Maine prospects and rekindled a thought that first came creeping through my brain when Jack MacAdams, the owner’s son, told me the plant was shutting down and moving south to North Carolina not far, not far at all, from my eastern Kentucky roots. Hearing the announcement there was just a second of self-doubt but now sitting on this unemployed stool thoughts started ringing incessantly in my brain.

Why the hell had I fallen for, and married, a Northern mill-town girl [my mother, the sweet, reliable Delores, nee LeBlanc, met at the Starlight Ballroom over in Old Orchard Beach when he had been Marine Corps short-time stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base down in New Hampshire just before heading back to the Pacific Japan death battles], stayed up North after the war when I knew the mills were only a shade bit better that the mines that I had worked in my youth, faced every kind of insult for being southern from the insular Mainiacs and had had three growing, incredibly fast growing, boys with Delores and a couple of years before his sweet daughter , Lissette . Then he was able to shrug it off but not now.

[We actually call ourselves Mainiacs with pride, we hicks, and it wasn’t really because my father was from the south that he was insulted although that made him an easy target but because he was not born in Maine and could never be a Mainiac even if he lived there one hundred years.]

The only thing that could break the cursed thoughts was some old home music that Millie, good mother Millie, the diner’s owner (and a third generation Millie and Mainiac) made sure the jukebox man inserted for “her” country boys while they had their coffee and. I reached, suddenly, into my pocket, found a stray nickel, put it in the counter-side jukebox, and playedWill The Circle Be Unbroken, a song that my late, long-gone mother sang to me on her knee when I was just a ragamuffin young boy.

That got me to thinking about home, the Harlan hell home of worked-out mines, of labor struggles that were just this side of fighting the Japanese in their intensity and possibilities of getting killed, or worst grievously injured and a burden on some woe-begotten family, of barren land eroded by the deforested hills and hollows that looked, in places, like the face of the moon on a bad night. And of not enough to eat when twelve kids, a mostly absence father and a fading, fading mother needed vast quantities of food that were not on table and turnips and watery broth had to do, of not enough heat when cruel winter ran down the ravines and struck at your very bones, and of not enough dough, never enough dough to have anything but hand-me-down, and then again hand-me-downs clothes, sometimes sister girls stuff just to keep from being bare-assed.

Then I thought about the Saturday night barn dances where I cut quite a figure with the girls when I was in my teens and had gleefully graduated to only having to wear hand-me-downs. I was particularly lively (and amorous) after swilling (there is no other way to put it) some of Moonshine Johnnie’s just-brewed “white lightening.” And I heard, just like then on the jukebox, the long, lonesome fiddle playing behind some fresh-faced country girl in her best dress swaying through Will The Circle Be Unbroken that closed most Saturday barn dances. As Millie asked me for the third time, “More coffee?” I came out of his trance. After saying no to Millie, I said no to myself with that same kind of December 1941 resolve. A peep-break Saturday night dance didn’t mean squat against that other stuff. And once again I let out my breathe and said to myself one more time- Yes, times are tough, times will still be tough, jesus, but Delores, the three boys, and I would eke it out somehow. There was no going back, no way.

Just then through the door Jim LaCroix yelled, “Hey, Prescott, the Great Northern Lumber Company just called and they want to know if you want two months’ work clearing some land up north for them. I’m going, that’s for sure.” And, hell, I was going too.

[A couple of years after that, maybe three, Larry got picked by the cops stealing some onyx rings at Sid Smith’s Jewelry Store in downtown Olde Saco. Shortly after that Danny started to wander off for days at a time with no explanation. After, well, after that the Breslin kids madness just took over.]
*********
In honor of Prescott Lee Breslin, 1917-1985, Lance Corporal, United States Marine Corps, World War II, Pacific Theater , and perhaps, other Olde Saco fathers too.