CHAPTER 112: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE HAVE A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS 1966

 CHAPTER 112.  HAVE A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS.   1966

 

Yes, that is me in my black cowboy hat shoveling the walk in front of the house on Cobbs Street. Look out now, life matters began to pile up faster than the flakes outside. So yippee, let’s ride.

 Snow storms hit at Christmas time in 1966. The white stuff pretty
much socked us in. Winter kept hitting us and next thing I knew I couldn’t move my car.

We were snowbound. A few days before, when it wasn’t yet a blizzard, I had come home in the dark of evening and walked up from the bus stop on the street parallel to us. It was a slight upgrade and a bit slippery and halfway up I went face down. I lay looking straight at the ice and snow below me and then in the white I saw some green. I found some twenty dollar bills half buried. What a fortunate fall. I went the rest of the way with a smile on my face.

 

But everything about that white Christmas wasn’t worth dreaming about. Mr. Bing Crosby will you shut up about it for a while?   

 We did not live in the preferred sections of Drexel Hill with its large, stone Tudor homes. We lived in the blue-collar, just-making-it-by worker’s house; twin homes and narrow streets. With the snows came certain inconveniences for everyone, but the Township did plow out those fancier streets and those people’s trash and garbage did get picked up. Not so much along our more modest patch. Somehow the plows couldn’t meander down our way and because the streets weren’t plowed, neither could the garbage trucks meander our way either. Soon me were buried in snow and trash.

To get to anywhere we had to hike down to one of the main thoroughfares and catch a bus to 69^th Street where the stores were or where an El Train could be taken into the city. My wife  was setting off for some last minute Christmas shopping in 69^th Street. She had not stepped far from our house, only a couple of lot lengths, when flop, she fell down. It was an ordinance of the township that a homeowner clear the pavements before his domicile within 24 hours of the end of any snow fall. This was the only house on our block that shoveling did not occur, not only not within 24 hours, but ever. My wife was walking nearly a week after that particular storm when she skidded on the now packed down ice the un-shoveled snow had become. It was not a matter of ignorance of township rules on the part of the homeowner. He happened to be Republican Committeeman for our Ward in that very solidly (at the time) Republican district.

 This was the beginning of the radicalization of myself, my swing to all things left and the baby steps into the dark side.

I was angry about this uncleaned sidewalk. If I had fallen, no big deal, maybe I’d have found more money, but this was my wife who fell. This was the women who announced near the end of October that she was pregnant for a fourth time. This was a woman with a history of problems with preggers, mainly losing the baby halfway through the term. A fall could not be taken lightly.

Still I may have let it go if not for the Christmas incident. During Christmas week the high temperatures stalled out in the low 20s. It began snowing again at 2 AM on Christmas Eve and wouldn’t stop. We had a white on white Christmas and were snowed in. I could not dig the car out, besides the roads were in terrible shape.  My mother considered it a blue Christmas because Lois and I couldn’t make it to Bucktown this year. Christmas was delayed a day.

On the 26^th my father came down, professional driver that he was, and picked us up. We headed around the block. At that time traffic flowed in the opposite direction on Cobbs than it does today.  The unplowed streets made driving tricky. Dad turned up Bond Ave toward Penn. A week earlier the stop sign on Bond at Penn had been knocked over and was still not replaced. My dad did not know there was a stop on Bond, so he continued straight into the intersection and we almost collided with a car coming down Penn. 

 It was the combination of these things that led to the
confrontation. The missing stop sign, the unplowed streets, the piling up garbage, and my wife’s fall on the Republican Committeeman’s sidewalk. Our neighbors, Lois’s relative, several of whom also lived on Cobbs were also incensed by the township governments ignoring the needs in our neighborhood all the time in favor of the more money endowed a few blocks south. Her cousin Margie (On right died 2020)  began rallying the street and she suggested we all write letters to the township counsel and tell them what we thought of them.

Big talk and after the promises to do this, nobody did, except one person.

Me.

Yeah, I wrote my letter and I took to task that township government for their failures, their neglect of our streets and public safety, of the garbage haul favoritism, and not least of all the Committeeman who didn’t shovel his walk in compliance with township regulations him and his cronies help make. I’d hoped the weight of several similar letters would have some positive effect because I still believed government was run fairly.

There were no similar letters. My friends and neighbors and relatives had chickened out on writing their complaints and I was left standing alone.

One night there was a knock on our front door. It was the Republican Committeeman from up the street. He burst angrily into our living room and waggled his finger at me. “Who do you think you are?” he said. He then threatened to punch me in the nose. Ah, my letter must have had some effect!

“I shoveled my walk,” he yelled.

“No, no you didn’t and my wife fell on it. I mean, my wife is a high risk pregnancy and she could have miscarriage because you failed to shovel.”

“You…” he blustered, “you don’t even know where I live.”

“Yes, I do. Come on.”

I led him outside and up the street to his house. I stopped in the middle of his now ice-packed sidewalk and pointed to his porch. 

He said nothing. His face seemed about to explode and then he stomped up his front steps, entered his house and slammed the door behind.  I went back home.

I immediately wrote another letter to the Township Powers-what-be complaining about the confrontation and the threat to my nose. I expected some kind of action and sure enough I got it, if somewhat indirectly. 

 Lois’ aunt, who lived up the street and whose estranged husband worked for the sanitation department on a patronage job, called. She called because her husband had contacted her and said her nephew-in-law (meaning yours truly) better not write any more letters or the Township was going to fire him and then he wouldn’t have the money to pay her the support money. Well, hey yeah, I was going to write a letter of complain about this blackmail, I was ready to go to the public press, but the whole family was begging me to write no more. So, I acquiesced and sent no more letters.

 My turn to the left and beyond had begun and this would not be my last disillusionment with the government.

But the snows of December and Christmas were not the only things that befell me in 1966. After my breakdown I was bounced about a bit in Atlantic’s mailroom, eventually being given my old job back in Addressograph almost exactly a year (June 1965) from when I first thought I had escaped it. That was back in July of 1965. Dave Claypoole left Atlantic in the fall and returned to school full time. Ed left at year end for the same reason, beginning college full time that January, I believe to La Salle. I was left behind having this nightmare that I would forever cut plates and stamp envelopes. It was beginning to look as if those dolts from the Pennsylvania Labor Bureau who came to our school in my senior year might have been correct. I was destined to be a machine operator.

To replace Ed, we hired a young fellow named Bob Kane and he and I proved to be pretty compatible. He became my new confidant. He was working his way through evening college,  just as I was and
he had ambitions to be a writer someday, just as I did. But Bob wasn’t working all day and then plopping down at a typewriter to create stories and adding to a growing collection of rejection letters, as I was. He was actually involved in the craft. He was Editor of the Philadelphia Community College newspaper, called (how imaginative) “The Communicator”.

In April, Atlantic finally came through on their promise of giving me a true Level 6 job. I was moved up several floors to Accounts Receivable as a Ledger Clerk. Bob Kane got the Group Leader position in Addressograph. (He held the position through the summer, then he too left Atlantic to become a full time student.)

My time with Bob proved very opportune for me. It was to be the key to my own ambitions as a scrivener. It was to lead to a whole new group of friends and to further radicalization.