CHAPTER I, Post # 6

Each time there was a news flash on the television we paid attention. Breaking news was just that, breaking news, I expected them to announce Russian missiles were on they’re way. We were urged to build bomb shelters in our backyards and stock them with water and imperishables. Those were paranoid times. And they wonder why I’m a paranoiac?

Farms and farmers still played a large role in the social fabric of eastern Massachusetts. A quarter mile up the street, at the top of the hill was Ryan’s Farm, the only working farm left directly on the lower half of Liberty Street. During harvest time old farmer Ryan sold fruits and vegetables out of a wood slat farm stand beside his house at the top of the hill. My mother would give me a quarter and say, “Bobby, go to Farmer Ryan’s and buy a half dozen apples.” I knew she was baking pies that afternoon. I’d trudge up the hill with a quarter and ask for a six apples.

“What kind?” He’d ask.

“The baking kind.” Visions of apple pies and apple butter danced in my head.

As he got older, if he didn’t have what we wanted stacked behind him in his small stand he send us to the orchards to pick our own. “Just the fruit on the ground. Don’t climb the trees,” he’d admonish. We’d picked our own apples and pears or what ever vegetable was in season, brought them back to the stand and he charged accordingly. He did not have a scale, all business was done by sight and in coins.
Around the bottom of each tree lied scores of fruit in various stages of decomposition. Flies and sweet bees swarmed aound the more decomposed fruit, the sweet smell of rotting fruit.. I wa careful not to step on any of the soggy apples and. Whne I thought farmer Ryan was not looking I’d climb into the trees. More than once, if I couldn’t find enough of the fruit I thought mom wanted, I’d climb up the lower branches. Farmer Ryan’d yell from the top of the hill. “Get down from the trees. You’ll break the branches”

Discarding apples that were too bruised or rotten or wormy, I gather us the best dozen apples available and trudged back to the stand. Pesticides were used sparingly. They were expensive. If Farmer Ryan was not pure eco-green, he was probably more so than many of today’s so-called green stores selling overpriced foods to people with too much money.

“Fifteen cents,” he’d say.

I handed him the quarter.

“Do you have a dime and a nickle?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t have any change. We’ll make it up the next time.” He took out a small pad of paper wet a pencil with the tip of his tongue and wrote the IOU. Then he handed me back my quarter and packed the apples in a paper bag. When I got back home, my mother not wanting to be beholding to anyone gave me the fifteen cents and sent me backup the hill to pay farmer Ryan.

CHAPTER 1 -- Post # 5

While the Fifties might have seem Paradise to a six year old, they were far from idyllic. The Cold War was raging. The two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, tested ever larger atomic bombs with reckless abound. Doomsday seemed to be marked in red on the calender. Fear of nuclear war was real. People were urged to build bomb shelters in their back yards and stock them with canned food and portable water against an nuclear bomb attack. At school we practiced air raid drills. Our teachers instructed us to go single file to the basement or if there was not time, dive under our desks at the first sound of the air raid horn; Duck and Tuck. In the basement we lined up and faced the whitewashed walls to avoid flying glass and blinding radiation from an atomic blast. We kids enjoyed these air raid practices, they broke the monotony of classes, yet they were a poignant reminder, the world was a dangerous place.

Television was new, they were expensive and to own one was a status symbol. My Dad love gadgets and as soon as he could afford it he bought a new RCA 14 inch screen black and white television which was set in the place of honor in the living room across from the sofa. Afraid of damaging the precious set we kids were not allowed to touch it. We had to wait until Dad got home and we had dinner before the family would gather around the television and watch the news and variety shows. My favorite after Disney World was Topper and later Sky King after whom I named my first dog, a toy Boston Terrier.

Like most families we only had one television and each summer we’d carefully wrap it in blankets, place it in the back of the Ford station wagon and take it with us to the bay front Cape Cod cottage in Pocasset. By the mid-fifties, as disposable income soared, a sea of TV antennas sprouted from every home like a month’s worth of old stubble. Even people with no televisions hitched up an antenna from their chimney roofs. Not to have one was a scarlet letter of poverty. It was the time of keeping up with the Joneses, of greener grass than your neighbor, and Detroit telling us that a two year old car was obsolete. Later they’d do everything in their power to make that true. Then the Japanese took over and the unnatural spectra of ‘planned obsolescence’ was finished. At least in cars.

Morning shows were restricted to Author Godfrey and other variety shows. I especially remembered Bob Emery beginning each of his shows strumming a ukelele and singing,

“The Grass is always greener in the other fellow’s yard,
Oh that mortgage we have to hold, oh boy that’s hard.
Now if we could all wear green glasses it wouldn’t be to hard
To see how green the grass was in our own back yard.”

Not exactly rap or hip-hop music.

But this was before the Japanese, and Cuba and Viet Nam. It was before the race riots, Watergate and dope and free sex. It was thirty years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. We owned the world, or at least the free part. The dollar was king and we had a television set.

Then there were the Russians. While we were distracted by growth and progress, they cooped the high ground of space by rocketing Sputnik, the first man made satellite, into orbit around the earth. We now had an enemy flying over our heads.