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Table of Contents - New Posts come after Table of Contents

Sometimes when I think of something to write about, I later realize I've already mentioned it. To make it easier, I thought I would include a Table of Contents, ordered oldest to newest, here at the beginning. I plan to make it an annotated one later. I'd love to hear suggestions, comments, complaints that can help shape the blog. I do have plans to go in some new directions. Once you identify an entry of interest in the Table of Contents, check the date mm.dd.yyyy, and use it to find the entry through the "blog archive" buttons on the right of this page.

Table of Contents

03.04.2011 Hello World
03.04.2011 Introduction to St. Pius X
03.23.2011 Getting Around
03.27.2011 Doctor Borschlein
04.13.2011 What do they mean "Don't want for anything"?
04.15.2011 The Grange
04.29.2011 Out in the Boondocks
05.12.2011 Roadside Ice Cream Stores
05.18.2011 Streetcorners
05.28.2011 SPX II - Where have all the classmates gone?
07.06.2011 Summer School
07.11.2011 Jobs
08.14.2011 New School Year
08.14.2011 Maps of Chili and Rochester
08.24.2011 Supermarkets
09.08.2011 An Apology and Dancing Lessons
01.24.2012 Music
08.21.2012 Recent Visit - Summer 2012
01.20.2013 Sports teams and Play
06.24.2013 Oslo
07.01.2013 Paper Route: Democrat & Chronicle
11.21.2013 JFK 50 years ago
03.05.2014 50th Anniversary of SPX Class of 1964
04.30.2014 Chili Center 8
05.27.2014 Learning Spanish
06.18.2014 RIP Tom Perkins
10.28.2014 Chestnut Heights
04.14.2015 A poem to share
04.17.2015 New Blog - Oriole Science Guy
06.12.2015 RIP Sister Walter Anne
06.12.2015 Two more poems
07.29.2015 When did SPX school open?
08.28.2015 Breaking-Up
01.11.2016 Laughter and Tears
01.11.2016 Past and Present
07.17.2016 Prime Rib
09.26.2016 Record cold September 25, 1963
02.14.2017 Snow and Light
05.01.2017 How Little We Knew Each Other
05.04.2017 The Bungalow and Pop Stand on Chestnut Ridge Rd near Fenton
05.26.2017 School Days (Interactive: Reader can add "School Day" memories)
05.26.2017 Spring/Summer 1967
07.28.2019 SPX Cemetery
08.17.2019 50 Years - Summer of 1969
03.25.2020 No "Middle School" at SPX
06.20.2020 Abbey Road, 1970

Abbey Road, 1970

I listened to the Abbey Road album recently, and it brought me right back to 1970; the people, the feelings, the times. I worked at what then was the Kodak plant on Elmgrove Road from July to August that summer, most of the time riding my bike to work the 6-2:30 shift if I remember correctly. The job was packaging Instamatic camera packs (camera, flash cube, wrist cord) as they rolled down the assembly line. (Dull job, relatively good pay.) We took the same positions each day on the line and therefore got to spend a lot of hours, for better or worse, with those beside and across from us. The first and most adamantly conveyed lesson I learned was not to work too fast, not to be more productive than the "regulars" who would be there when we went back to school and didn't want their quotas increased. The second lesson was not to retrieve usable stuff from the trash because the guards at the exits will take you for a thief.

The Beatles run had come to an end and their final album was unlike any other. They were no longer singing the kinds of songs they sang in the earlier days. They seemed to be in a very different place than they had been in the mid-60's. Listening to it 50 years later, it is still stunningly moving.

It so happens that around the time I started working at Kodak, soon after the 4th of July, I was rocked hard by what Dylan might call "a phone call most foul". Of all the things I've experienced in my life, that call probably is up there with the most profoundly hurtful events I've known. It changed me for awhile making me feel a bit afraid that the world could change in an instant from what it was to what it is to be going forward. It changed my inner sense of what was reliable, or for that matter, even what was known. It was a tough call that took years to absorb and process. I think, in the end, what took the edge off it was time and experience enough to realize that such shocking changes are just part of life and something we learn to absorb.

So the songs of Abbey Road, as memorable and inspiring as they are, have an association that is hard to revisit, but at the same time, now, as then, they help me work through and past that call.


And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

No "Middle School" at SPX

If someone in the early 1960s peeked into any classroom of the SPX  grammar school, they would see perfect rows of desks filled with uniformed kids, any one class differing from any other only in the difference of a few inches in the average height of the students. For those eight years, we were pretty much subject to the same rules and expectations as we grew from age six to age thirteen or fourteen. The bigger world was presented to us through a dense filter which seemed to be based on the theory that if something is not discussed it does not exist.

Even as this regimentation and censorship defined our outer world,  our inner worlds were teeming with the natural disorder we encountered as we grew older and inevitably experienced outside the rigidity of the classroom.

Our “middle school years” were not defined inside the school, but outside the school our activities reflected our new interests and curiosities. One thing we needed - which church youth clubs did not provide - was a place to go where we could hang out and socialize unwatched by those who had power over us. A budding wish for privacy and independence. Such places were hard to come by.

I have mentioned in previous entries how we would hang out on street corners or in houses under construction. Certainly there was a lot of time spent playing basketball or just walking around. The  unique thing about those years was that our world was still small, it was still defined mostly by the confines of the parish, so in a way we were very much under the eyes of parents and church authority. But we were wrestling with that urge to have some independence.

One opportunity opened up in the Fall of 1963 when we started gathering after school at what was an oddity in those days, a house where the Mom went to work and therefore wasn’t home for those all-important 3:30-5:00 hours. The house was on one of those streets off the south side of Chili Avenue between Chestnut Dr and Marshall Rd. I don’t remember many details of the afternoons we spent around that house, perhaps there weren’t even that many, but the idea of having somewhere to go where we could just hang around and socialize was very important at the time. The thing that stands out to me now was that it was a place where we could talk to girls.

Soon after we were thrown out into the much bigger and more diverse world of high school. Looking back, we might have been much better prepared for such a change had we been given more of a transition time, more of a middle school experience.

50 Years - Summer of 1969

Woodstock at 50 is in the news as this week marks the 50th anniversary of "the concert I didn't attend".

I was washing dishes in the kitchen of Brooklea CC while some of my Chili buddies headed off to the concert. In truth, I don't remember regretting not being able to go. There was a scene surrounding the festival that seemed ominous to me. Many felt it out to some degree, but it was scary how it seemed to grab hold of some.

It was quite a summer. Having returned home after an enjoyable 1st year of college, it started off with an ill-fated prom at Mercy; definitely NOT the fault of my prom partner, it was just an awkward time. I tried to apologize about it once but there was no recovering from that one. The awkwardness had to do with transitions that were inevitably happening as our worlds were changing. In retrospect, my biggest regret about such transitions is that they were made in such a definitive way. If only we had had the wisdom to make them a little softer, it might have been less awkward to revisit those friends later on. If we could have just known how natural it was for our friends, like ourselves, to grow and change, or for differences to arise which might preclude certain ways of being but not others, or even just to have given them the benefit of the doubt in whatever arose, we might have been able to look back on a more continuous path than one littered with discontinuities.

I got a summer job with a construction company building the Child St bridge of 490. They said I'd be helping the "engineers" but in fact I was a pure gopher and when I brought it up they just chuckled. I was foolishly indignant and foolishly quit which explains why I was washing dishes at Brooklea for the rest of the summer.

In July everyone gathered around the TV to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. I wish I could recall who exactly was sitting around our TV that night, but I do remember many of us were sitting on the floor. It seemed like a positive highlight about the times we were living in and a welcome respite from so much more troubling news of the day.

It's kind of amazing to think that the moon landing and Woodstock happened a month apart. Like I said I was not that interested in attending Woodstock at the time, but that is not to discount how great the music was. We would listen to that music for years to come...some of the great rock performances of all time. Maybe the whole festival would have seemed more positive if only it hadn't rained so incessantly.

Summers seemed longer then. They were sort of endless. By the time the school year began it was always like a new beginning. We would return to school a little older and a little different for all our summer experiences.

SPX Cemetery

Last week I took a ride out to see the old (1854) St. Feehan's grounds. I knew that the church itself had been moved to the Genesee Country Museum site, but I was still expecting something to remain of the rest of the complex.

Well, I was wrong. There is only the cemetery and some remembrances from the new new church that burned a few years ago. And the cemetery is smaller than I remembered it in my probably near 60 years since memory. The cemetery is situated around a looped drive off Chestnut Ridge Rd and it is surrounded on two sides by homes and in the back by trees behind which are more homes. Indeed, it is a modest area poised in the middle of a developed housing area; not what I had expected.

Given all that, I decided to walk through the cemetery expecting to some more familiar names than I actually did. Along the main loop there is a large stone cross close next to which is the gravesite of Fr. Murphy and two other priests. There is a new area on the far side of the loop which has some room for the future. Although there were not as many familiar names as I expected, there were many I did recognize. Mostly the parents of kids we knew from those schooldays at St. Pius X. The thing that struck me the most was how many veterans of World War II were buried there. It was such a telling reminder of just how much that war impacted the lives of that generation. If you were not directly involved yourself, people you knew were. Fr. Murphy himself was a chaplain and no doubt his experiences shaped him and indirectly all he later pastored over. For those of us born after that war, there has never been such a grand scale calling to arms and so it is hard to fully appreciate what our parents lived through before bring us into the world.

It sure would have been nice to have talked more to them about their pre-us lives.

Spring/Summer 1967

So in the "I Like Ike" 50's it was Guys and Dolls and West Side Story and Elvis and those teen angst songs on the AM radio. Then the 60's rolled in with JFK and the Viet Nam and maybe the biggest thing for emerging teens - the British Invasion and the West Coast music infusion. There was a feeling that the times were changing as the baby boomers got their first tastes of freedom.
No matter what the hype about those days, I have the feeling that most of what we all experienced in terms of our social interactions - tensions with adults, trials and errors with dating, finding stuff to do with the guys that was acceptable and novel, etc. - wasn't so much different than generations before or since, even if the particulars were different.

As May rolled around this year I was taken back to Spring 1967, fifty short years ago, when a few things happened that made lasting impressions on me. I thought I'd share a couple of them in the spirit of sharing a flavor of the times - at least my times, which were probably pretty typical.

We were finishing up our third year of high school. I was working after school delivering notions by handcart to the major downtown department stores (Sibley's, McCurdy's, Edward's) for a little tightly cramped hole-in-the-wall shop on Clinton Avenue. This gave me a little spending money during the school year and it felt good to have that little bit of independence. With school and work there wasn't much time for much else.

One evening, out of the absolute blue, I got a phone call invitation to an upcoming dance at St. Agnes. This girl was someone I had never spoken to but somehow she must have heard that I had admired her from afar. So now I was going to meet her at this dance in a couple of weeks. How to wake up a 16 year old boy!! But it never happened. It doesn't really matter why, but I had to call and cancel...and I never did talk to that girl - nor did I ever forget how excited I had been when she called. This was the kind of experience that just has to shape us in whatever mysterious way such things do.

Around that same time there was a prom being planned at my school but I had no intention of attending. There just wasn't anyone for whom I felt inclined to shell out the prom bucks. Instead, I went to the Grange that night and lo and behold met this cool girl who lived in the city and attended Monroe HS. (What was she doing at the Grange?) We hung out and had fun and that was that. But she needed a ride home and when my older brother came to pick me up he said he'd drive her home. So we did and while doing so made plans to get together the next day. I picked her up at home and we just drove around for a few hours in the afternoon. It was a great day. I think we went to Ellison Park. We hit it off, talked easily, really nice. But that was that. We never spoke again. Can't remember why. Just remember the day. Another interaction that must have shaped me somehow.

That summer I started working at Sky Chef preparing food for on-board flights. I worked the breakfast and lunch shift so I had to get there at 6:00 am everyday and work until 2:30. Again, not much time left for fun and adventure. It was kind of a lost summer. We went to the Grange on Friday or Saturday nights, played pool at friends' houses or Olympic Park, and otherwise not much. In those days, every airline meal was served with a mini-pack of four Winston cigarettes. I had resisted the temptation to start smoking through three years of high school, but these free cigarettes were smoked by everyone who worked there on their breaks. After a while the less than exciting work led to my dabbling. Soon I was cruising around with a box of free cigs on the console for all to share. Yeah, RJ Reynolds knew what they were doing with those freebies!!

We ended up the summer with a trip to NYC. I had a free ticket as a bonus for working the summer. Originally it was just me and two friends going. Unbeknownst to us, word got out and another group of four or five guys made a separate trip at the same time. We all met up in NYC where we got two rooms at a fleabag hotel near Greenwich Village (which was, after all, the hot spot in the news those days). We were so young and such hicks, maybe if we had never gone we wouldn't have learned it so hard. I've got to hand it to my mother for allowing me to go and quench my wanderlust a little, but what a disaster. We wrote postcards the day we got there and beat them home!

Lots of things shape us. When I think back about all these things we did I realize that no one thing overwhelms our development. Instead, it seems like we go along and make decisions day by day based on the things happening around us and in the end we have a life. If, in our day to day decisions we help, or at least not hurt others, that life is okay.