Grandma's Been There

Nowadays, when most businesses are open on Sundays and we can shop on line twenty-four hours a day, it must be impossible for younger people to understand what it was like for nearly every single business in the neighborhood to be closed for an entire day. But kids of my generation couldn’t imagine Sunday any other way.

How’d you like to visit your childhood home only to find out your old address no longer exists?

Lots of things have changed since I was a kid, but there’s one question American kids have been asking every day since the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. “What are we having for supper?”

I became a podcaster because I love podcasts. They’re entertaining, educational and sometimes even inspirational. This week, I’d like to tell you about a handful of my favorites in case you’re looking for something new to listen to. 

By the time we were sixth graders, we were used to our teachers’ theatrics. The antiquated flowery language, trite worn out proverbs and dumb expressions meant to showcase their superior intelligence while illustrating our stupidity. They had a million of them. Is this what our parents were paying tuition for?

In the mid-1960s, our teachers warned us we would someday suffer from something called “future shock.” Our world would change so drastically and so rapidly that we wouldn’t be able to keep up with it all.  It would cause distress, anxiety, even disorientation and confusion. Maybe for the older generation, but not for us. We kids couldn’t wait to be bombarded by the future. We were ready. Bring it on.

The first few weeks of a new school year were always a rather frenetic period of readjustment and settling in. Get used to a new teacher. Get the right notebooks. Cover all those textbooks. For me personally, the hardest thing to adjust to every September was being back in school while the weather was still summer-like. It felt wrong, unnatural—like we’d been kidnapped.

In the late 1960s, you didn’t have to be fully aligned with the counterculture to enjoy a visit to a psychedelic shop. You just had to be open to new ideas and have a willingness to recapture some of that childhood sense of wonder, whether you were an adult or a kid.

Mary Quant, the fashion designer whose creations defined the 1960s “mod” era said she spent her thirteenth birthday crying because in her words, “old age had struck.” All she had to look forward to now were below the knee-length dresses, high heeled shoes, corsets, nylons and garter belts, stiff beehive hairdos, artificial nails…  I totally understood. Before I became a teenager, I had been dreading being sentenced to a lifetime of that as well.

When we were little kids, just about everything was chosen for us, but the candy store was a place where we got to pick what we wanted.

Everything I need to know about life, I learned from Rod Serling. Well, maybe not everything, but lots of important stuff. By the time I was thirteen, I’d seen every single “Twilight Zone” episode more than once.

A richer, fuller more joyful life? Relaxation, discipline and more will power? Increased physical, mental and spiritual control? Who wouldn’t want all that?

Nowadays, they call it “me time.”  A time to shut out work, world and worries and just concentrate on wellbeing and recharging the physical and spiritual batteries. When I was a kid, we called it summer. Just like the old rhyme said, “No more pencils, no more books. No more teachers’ dirty looks.” I heard that! Except that chant should have been modified to say, “no more textbooks.”

The summer of 1967, so frivolously referred to as the summer of love was a turning point, an ending and a beginning. Somewhere around the middle of July, the counterculture gained a number. I jumped in head first, and never looked back. It was the moment I’d been waiting for for thirteen years.

Summer days were long, lazy and dreamy. We were content to spend most of our school vacation outside eating ice cream, drinking sodas and playing with friends on the avenue, going no further than the corner store or the playground on the next block. But on a Saturday or Sunday, or during those two short weeks our fathers were on vacation from their jobs in July or August, we stepped out. All we wanted to know when we got up in the morning was, “Where are we going today?”

In January 1968, my favorite band, The Byrds released an album called The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Life-long fans like me referred to it as “the Notorious album.” One of the tracks on the album was “Draft Morning,” a song about a young man, a draftee who was in no hurry to be shipped off to Viet Nam and commanded to kill people, a command that came from faces unknown to him. 

When we were kids, it was common for us to ask each other, “What are you?” What we were actually asking was, “What nationality are you? Where’s your family from?”

Even as a child, I was in love with the seasons, their unique personalities and the different things they did to get our attention. But if you asked me what my favorite season was, I didn’t even have to think about it. “Summer!” I said, just like every other kid I knew. Why would you even have to ask?

The reason I have so many stories about my father from my own childhood and from the stories he told me about his years as a kid is because of my exceptional memory—the one I’m always bragging about in these episodes, the one I inherited from him.

I’m a June baby, one of Cancer’s moon children born right after the longest day of the year. In other words, I’m lucky enough to be able to celebrate my birthday right as the summer begins. 

Before I even became a teenager, there were plenty of banned rock and roll records out there. Many of them were in my own record cabinet. 

When we were kids, the adults in our lives wanted to be sure we understood that honesty was always the best policy. But how was that concept supposed to sink in when they were constantly lying to us?

When I was a year old, I still hadn’t grown any hair. My mother Scotch taped a bow to the top of my bald head so I would look less like a little boy in girls’ clothing. As a teenager in high school, I loved my waist-length hair and couldn’t understand why my teachers hated it and wanted me to cut it off.

In March of 1968, Bill Graham opened The Fillmore East. Though it only lasted three years, it would be hailed by both musicians and concert goers  as the most unforgettable and  greatest rock venue of all time. This month marks the 58th anniversary of the first of countless visits I made to The Fillmore East. I was so incredibly lucky to experience that place, so this week I want to tell you a bit about the man who made it all happen and gave me some of the best memories of my young life. 

Brooklyn mothers like mine always found a way to make it all happen for their families. These women that grew up in the Great Depression and came of age during a world war were filled with resilience and ingenuity. The iconic “We can do it!” attitude of Rosie the Riveter endured in our mothers long after the war was over.

As a thirteen-year-old, I prayed for one Greenwich Village folksinger or one barefoot East Village poet to stray across the Manhattan Bridge and start an artistic community in my neighborhood. Everything worth seeing and hearing was in Manhattan. What was wrong with Brooklyn?

When I was a kid, there was one sure way to get under another kid’s skin. All you had to do was look at them and taunt, “I know something you don’t know.” It never failed. At first, they  tried to pretend they didn’t care, but they couldn’t keep it up for long. In two minutes or less, they’d spin around and snap, “So whadda you know??” As somebody born in the 1950s, I know things plenty of younger people don’t. Do you wanna know what they are?

On Christmas morning in 1967, I was kinda disappointed when the record I got wasn’t the one I had asked for. I didn’t think I wanted that album. Fortunately for me, my mother knew better.

In 1961, when someone from my school newspaper asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer turned a few heads. I was seven and it was the height of the baby boom. The world was bursting with opportunities.

One of my favorite ways to recharge is to just sit outside and watch the seasons do what they do best. Each season has a unique personality, but there is one thing they all have in common. They don’t wait around for us to appreciate them. They come and go pretty fast, especially the spring.

When you watch the same movie at various stages of your life, you see the story from very different perspectives. I recently watched “Citizen Kane” again for the first time since I was seventeen. It brought back a lot of memories. It also brought up some questions that would never have entered my mind when I was a teenager.

The road to heaven was paved with suffering. Getting slapped by the bishop during our Confirmation ceremony was a reminder of just how hard it was to be a Christian. Only the baptized could go to heaven, and if communist soldiers invaded our country and demanded that we give up our religion or die, God wanted us to choose death. As young children in the early 1960s, we learned that being a member of the one true church wasn’t for the faint-hearted.

New books, new records, the latest clothes and shoes, new movies… Guess what city they all hit first?  New York, of which Brooklyn is a part. Thanks to your location, you’re more worldly and savvy than any small town kid. There’s nothing you can’t get here and you never have to worry about having someone to play with because you know kids in just about every apartment building on your block. Your country cousins would give anything to trade places with you. Forget about chasing rainbows. Baby, you’re a rich man.

By the time I became a fourth grader, I knew my way around the culture and the campus of my school. I wasn’t “new” anymore. My condolences went to the latest class of first graders. I’d survived, and with a little luck, so would they.

The mornings always felt two times longer than the afternoons, and Mondays always felt twice as long as Fridays. But lunchtime recess? Well, that flew by faster than we could rip open a candy bar wrapper. That was how our school days went.

In the 1950s and early ‘60s, there was a laundry list of what were referred to as “childhood illnesses” that every single one of us were going to get at some point. Viruses that all came with pink rashes, red rashes, blisters or lesions. The first nine years of my life are one big blotchy, itchy blur.

As pre-teen rock and roll fans in the mid 1960s, we were passionate followers and defenders of our musical idols. Laugh if you want, but we were totally sincere. With the kind of joy these young musicians and their music brought us, we owed them our allegiance and we were glad to give it.

Since we just passed the 67th anniversary of the date that's come to be known as "the day the music died," I thought I'd spend a few minutes talking about my earliest memories of rock and roll and my first exposure to Buddy Holly's timeless music.

The television shows made during the 1950s and '60s helped shape the way we felt about Brooklyn. Those shows presented an image of family life in American towns that were totally unrecognizable to city kids like me.

Winter is a season of multiple personalities. When we were kids, we loved some of its personalities, but hated others. Its long cold days were depressing. Just the length of the season tried our patience. But when it gave us snow, the winter was our best friend and it could stay as long as it liked.