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.

School Days

   I thought it would be fun to capture some details of life at SPX in the 60's. I will try to get things started but I am sure there are folks out there who could add all kinds of interesting things to my list. So, if anyone sees this and has memories to add, please feel free.
 
   We never wore sneakers to school. Always leather shoes with our uniforms.

   On the first day of school each year the floors were waxed and everything looked like new.

   Sometimes we would be called out of class to serve (as altar boys) at a funeral mass.

   There was always a flip chart at the front of the room with religious pictures.

   Boys and girls seemed to exist in different orbits.

   We had exams in January and June that came from the diocese (Catholic school standardized exams)

   Some kids actually went home for lunch, the rest of us ate at our desks.

  Everyone had the same lessons every day.....no matter how you were doing in school.

   The class sizes were pretty big, ours was about 40 but others were as large as 50+.

   We sat at the same desk all day every day for the whole school year.

If you have a memory to add please enter year of graduation and your submission

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The Bungalow and Pop Stand on Chestnut Ridge Rd near Fenton

In the 50's and 60's Chestnut Ridge Rd merged into Chili Avenue just past Fenton. Just before that merge, heading east from SPX, one passed The Bungalow just before Fenton and the Pop Stand at Fenton. Each had an impact on our lives. The Bungalow's site is now a modern day convenience store, the Pop Stand is no more and Chestnut Ridge no longer merges into Chili Ave.in the same way. So this will just serve as a reminder of how things used to be.

The Bungalow was the one and only commercial place we could go sans parents as elementary school kids. Either walking home from school or out cruising with friends it was a place to buy a candy bar or baseball cards or a popsicle with the nickels or dimes or even quarters we might have on us from allowance, paper routes, odd jobs or whatever means we might have come upon some change. The great thing was the feeling of independence it gave us ... to walk in and pick out something we wanted and get it without any questions asked. The store was smaller than the modern day store and it faced Chestnut Ridge with its small entrance door. We didn't know the grownups who ran it but I'm sure in retrospect they knew us well. Maybe they put up with our shenanigans because they knew we would be future customers of greater monetary worth.

I don't remember a lot about the Pop Stand. It was a large wooden structure, like a large garage, or barn, with a sloping floor (?) in the main pop crate storage area and a little checkout area next to the storage area. As I recall it, the pop was sort of generic, and maybe it was meant for mostly bulk purchases. I'm kind of fuzzy on the specifics of the place (even though we passed by it a million times), but I do remember one eventful day at the Pop Stand. One of our Class of '64 members had an older brother who was working there (it's possible his family had some interest in the place). One Saturday, I'm guessing we were in 6th or maybe even 7th grade, we were roaming around in one of our street-walking bands and we ended up sitting around on the crates in the storage area while this older brother was waiting for business. It was a slow day and boys were just being boys. What I've never forgotten was how surprised I was by what his older brother told us that day.... the whole story of the birds and the bees straight from this teenager - the expert of Chili. Who knows what he told us and who knows if others were as naive as I was but I do remember hearing things I never imagined before were part of this world. After that our buddy had new status as the source for all such information.

At some point, probably related to the increased traffic volume from the new Bright Oaks neighborhood and the new houses being constructed off Chestnut Ridge Rd., the merge was changed and Chestnut Ridge was re-routed to Chili Ave through the current convenience store lot. Chili was growing fast in the 50's and 60's, as was all of Rochester and its surrounding towns. The days before the big increases in development were days that had some charm in their simplicity.

How Little We Knew Each Other

I have written before about how separate the boys and girls were in our elementary school classes but I thought I'd add a further note about that. The amazing thing about SPX school was how constant the group of students in a class was from year to year. Even as Chili went through the great post-war growth period (population of Chili: 1830 - 2010, 1940 - 3392, 1950 - 5283, 1960 - 11237, 1970 - 19609, 2010 - 28,625) our class of '64 seemed to change only by a couple of kids per year. So, we were pretty much a group of 40 or so kids who spent 180 days a year together for eight straight years. The thing that seems so strange and amazing to me now is that there are kids in that group I may never have said one word to in all that time. How could it have been that we didn't all become friends? Sure there were lots of kids who were friends with each other, but how is it that we might have been around the some kids so much and never been put in situations where we worked with them or played with them? It's true that it was a time before the "interactive classroom" and there just wasn't room for us to engage in any activities which required leaving our desks (except maybe individuals at the blackboard) but still, it says something about the philosophy of education at SPX, it was not about social interaction.

Maybe it was just me. Maybe the more extroverted kids knew and interacted with everyone more than I did. It is true that I was quiet and not very social myself so maybe I'm not remembering the way things really were. And it is true that in 7th and 8th grade there was more interaction (for me anyway) than before. But the bottom line is, I can think of several girls and a few boys from my SPX class with whom I may have never had a conversation in all the approximately (8 years x 180 days/year x 7 hours/day =) 10080 hours we spent together in the same classroom.

For me, this screams out for a class reunion, to make up for this crazy reality and maybe to say "Hi!" to people we were too young or too shy or just too goofy to appreciate at the time. On the other hand, I am not a reunion sort of guy. So maybe it's best to just say "Hi!" from this blog to ALL of you SPX 64 classmates along with a wish that we might just run into each other somewhere around town at some point.