CHAPTER 1, Blog # 11

A parent’s greatest fear is losing a child and immediately after the war- World War II -- that was still a real possibility. Childhood diseases carried off many a youngster.

I remember at school nearly each year there was an announcement that one of the students had died. Leukemia was a big killer.

In one class we had two blind girls in one of the classes who sat in the front and were good students. They had Remington typewriters on their desks to take exams. Many of the questions were yes or no and wes would wait until we heard either two ticks for no or three for yes then all the heads would fall and we’d write our answer. It took Mister Dwyer about a month before he caught on. At the next exam he ask ed the girls to type longer answers. At the next test we heard fifteen and more ticks and we almost all failed. Mister Dwyer had a good laugh with us. “We had you for awhile,” we said. And he agreed.

I had measles, mumps, chicken pocks but somehow missed whooping cough. My father took a picture of me in my white jockey underpants covered in red spots. I was smiling. I remember they itched and I had a little fever but it discomfort was more than mitigated by three days of uninterrupted cartoon television. Efficient vaccinations had not been discovered. Yellow fever, small pocks. I’d get a yellow fever vaccination for my jungle trips, which was wise as Yellow Fever struck the grass plains of Colombia where I had a farm. I also lived through four malaria epidemics learning to tell the difference between the falcipram and vivax strains. Why I never contracted malaria I have no idea.

The diseases lumped into the ‘consumption’ group, tuberculosis, and other degenerative diseases were still active. And of course the one disease that was to have such an effect on my life MS -- Multiple Sclerosis.

Tuberculous was pervasive. TB hospitals were common. Braintree had one that after antibiotics were improved was quietly shut down for lack of patients. A blessing.

It was polio, the last of the great epidemics, that was to shape many of our young lives.

CHAPTER I, Blog # 10

After every meal the household garbage was put aside in a bowl, taken outside and thrown into a sunken bucket at the corner of the house. Twice a week the garbageman, usually a local pig farmer drive a smelly truck dripping foul liquids would stop at each house and empty the garbage. It was my job in the summer months to take out the garbage pail and wash out the maggots with Clorox and water.
Better minds have outlawed garbagemen, actually outlawed feeding pigs human refuge, they outlawed dump picking, the original and best recycling method and they outlawed burning of leaves and fields the killed, the Indians knew controlled the deer ticks that carry Lyme disease.
When I first saw a garbage disposal I thought, What a waste. I saw slices of ham and enriched composted earth flushing down the drain to be treated at great expense and then the supposedly clean water dumped into our rivers. Perhaps that was why some called it a waste-disposal. It is a waste.
Is there real proof that human garbage fed to pigs spreads diseases? Now the pigs we eat are fed antibiotics, hormones and chicken shit defecated by tourched birds crammed in together and fed more antibiotics and breath foul smelling filth, filled air.
You are what you eat.
Also, one day we’ll learn, you can not save everybody.
I admit, at heart, I’m a Luddite.
Milk was delivered in bottles to our back doors by the milkman. Now instead of one vehicle delivering hundreds of bottles of milk to your house we have hundreds of cars driving to the supermarket buying one bottle of milk.
It is amazing how much bad came from doing good? Who are these good dooers? Mostly city apartment or suburban dwelling weekend eco-warriors who have no understanding of the countryside and nature – though they think they do. They read though.
The most poignant example of bad coming from doing good is polio.

CHAPTER I, Blog # 9

The Sierra Nevada de Cocuy has a reputation as a dangerous mountain range. Pressed up against the humid rainforest of the Orinoco River basin, it is usually fogged in, covered with clouds. As we laboriously traced our steps back to our base camp the clouds we had looked down upon rose and silently engulfed us in a blanket of stilled whiteness. We were in a white-out, a dangerous phenomena where everything, the snow, the sky, the cliffs, the crevasses, the surroundings are white robbing climbers of their sense of horizon and direction. Most climbers are lost to snow field white-outs, I‘ve been told. But I’m getting ahead of my tale.
While descending the fire escape steps was a personal purgatory, going up the stairs as a class was a view into an exciting still unexplored world. We’d line up two by two in rows and with the girls – ladies first, it was a time when manners mattered – in front we’d climb the stairs. As my name began with a C, I always got in the first row usually with Tommy Aires on my right and follow the girls up the stairs I would take a double step slowing the boys line allowing the girls to forge ahead one more step. Then we’d start. This angle gave us a view up the last rows of girl dresses much to our delight. A couple of the girls knew what we were doing and just let us look while a few would gather their dresses in modesty around them. During recesses, one girl, Peggy Morgan, would for a dime take a boy out by the stone wall that separate the play ground from the forest she’d lift up her dress and let us boys stare at her panties.
Pre-adolescent sexuality was strong, the boys masturbated from an early age on mostly in secret, staining our bed sheets much to the chagrin of our parents. “Playing with yourself will drive you insane or you will go blind,” was a common parental refrain.
I was to know a few crazies that masturbated but I never met a blind one.

Post # 8

Our principle was Mrs Bell. She might as well have been the Dragon Lady of Terry and the Pirates. Mrs Bell booked no nonsense from us kids. She had small eyes and a tight mouth with narrow lips and a large body. She loomed like a fire-breathing Godzilla over us first graders but by the sixth grade some had lost their fear enough to cut up in her class but only a few.

It was at Jonas Perkins Elementary School that I first learned real fear.
I was afraid of heights. The three story wood building had its auditorium stretched across the entire third floor. We’d have fire drills and I dreaded them if we were in the auditorium. As the alarm went off we ‘d line up and file down the grated iron fire escape. If I looked down I saw three floors straight down and my knees would buckle. I was always the last down the fire escape clinging to the railing feeling step by step with my eyes closed.

I finally over came my fear of heights in 1976 on top of the eighteen thousand foot Rita Cumba Blanca mountain in Colombia, standing on the edge of an ice lip on the narrow peak staring down the shear seven thousand foot cliff to the Ratoncito Valley. I looked straight down the face then to the valley floor and off to the glaciers on the other side of the valley. It was as if I was staring out of a jet plane window. Depth perception and its fear had melted away leaving awe. I could feel myself floating along like one of the clouds bunching up below us. My concentration was abruptly interrupted by my two companions yelling, “Watch out. You’re too close to the edge.” I was amused, not alarmed. They were experienced climbers and were visibly afraid as we huddled on the narrow peak. I felt not fear. On the contrary, I was exhilarated staring straight down the cliff. It was another world, a realized fantasy. I was in a dream. We were above the clouds, like in an airliner. I wanted to say a prayer and thank God for the experience but was over ruled. We began our descent immediately.

Post # 7

They were simpler times. We were never bored, we always had something to do, mostly made up things like building forts or tree houses out of discarded lumber. Searching for salamanders or snakes. Riding our bicycles to the end of the street.

The best year of my life I realized later, was when I was ten. I knew right from wrong but was too young in adult eyes to be seriously blamed for dong mischievous things. ‘He’s just a kid.” Loved those words. That all changed at twelve as the grownups tried to prepare us for adolescence instilling a sense of responsibility. The first was right from wrong. Good from bad and evil. It was a black and white time, the nebulous grey area that destroys families, societies and countries was kept in check. Information and knowledge was definitive and the path to strength and power. Neither had yet become internet spongy.

My knowledge was culled from a triad of sources; my family, my woods and my elementary school. Jonas Perkins Elementary loomed proud and yellow at the foot of Liberty and Commercial Streets in East Braintree. It was a three story, bright yellow wooden structure square and imposing. Just the place for learning. The wood floors in the hallways creaked and echoed with the glee of kids and racket of passage between classes. Mrs Bell, a massive woman squinted from behind tiny granny glasses a grass snake at us pseudo -delinquents. It was in the fifth grade that I had my first male teacher, Mister Harris.

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.