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Mom, 40 years ago: taking care from far away

This is the fourth anniversary of my mom’s death today.

After my sister Leslie and I left my grandmother in Charlotte, NC with my parents and my sister Marcia in January 1975, I went back to Binghamton, NY, and stayed in my grandmother’s house. She had a coal stove, and I had SEEN her operate for years. But seeing and doing were two different things, and soon, the fire went out, and the pipes froze.

I was pretty depressed after the breakup of my marriage to the Okie, so I mostly watched television. I mean hours at a time. My grandma’s set got only one station, WNBF-TV, the CBS affiliate. So I watched the soap operas As the World Turns, The Edge of Night, Guiding Light, and Search for Tomorrow. Don’t remember watching any game shows except Match Game. Viewed the bulk of the CBS nighttime schedule, except perhaps the movies. And, heaven help me, I watched Hee Haw, which by that point was in first-run syndication. I told you I was depressed.

Usually on Thursday evenings, and occasionally other nights, I’d visit my friend Carol (not to be confused with my wife Carol), washed up, watched TV at HER house (The Waltons). The then-current travails of her life probably kept me sane.

Occasionally, I’d walk downtown to the library, if it wasn’t too cold. Don’t remember reading books, though I did read the newspaper. I DO remember listening to the LPs on the record player. One time I was playing the first side of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, and I cranked up the volume louder and louder. The song I Want You (She’s So Heavy) ends abruptly, which I knew from plenty of previous plays; at that moment, however, I thought briefly that I had died.

The electricity at my grandma’s house was spotty. I had a space heater that I could not run with the refrigerator, lest I blow the circuit. Didn’t matter; the house was so cold, I didn’t NEED the refrigerator. I DID need the space heater, though, and the colorful quilt that kept me from freezing.

One night in February, I woke up with a start. The quilt had caught fire, having fallen on the space heater. It generated an acrid stretch, which might have killed me, if the fire, which I was somehow able to smother, hadn’t.

A day or two later, I called my mom in North Carolina and told her this story. And she told me that she knew this had happened. She woke up from a dream, or a vision, and called me mentally to wake up, and I did. This is NOT the type of tale my mother generally told, so I believed her, believe her still.

This being the fourth anniversary of her death today, I want to say, “Thanks, Mom. I love you, too.”

Binghamton, Albany: looking back at the places I’ve lived

Maurice Ravel played at at Vincentian Institute in Albany in 1928!

I have said before that I’m not much for nostalgia. Yet, this year, I have joined two Facebook groups that are looking back at people and places from the cities’ past.

One group is I AM FROM BINGHAMTON, NY. The group was created in 2008.

This picture is of McLean’s department store in downtown Binghamton, one of two stores – the other was Fowler’s – that anchored downtown Binghamton for decades. McLean’s was located on Court Street at the corner of Chenango Street, across from City Hall.

My mother worked at McLean’s, first as an elevator operator, then as a bookkeeper for many years. My sisters and would go downtown, often walking from home, to visit her, or to walk up Chenango Street to eat at some restaurant called the Olympia (?) Tea Room, or to see a movie at the Strand or the Riviera.

Later, my mom worked at Columbia Gas as a bookkeeper, also on that first block on Chenango. Most of the place mentioned are long gone. There’s a Boscov’s where Fowler’s was, but it is possibly the rattiest looking store in the chain. How can I have forgotten that the CVS drug store, was once Hamlin’s before it got bought out?

Closer to my home, we went to the G&H Diner frequently because my mother had neither the time, the inclination, or the talent to cook; how did I forget that place on the corner of Front and Franklin Streets? On the other hand, I never knew about Binghamton’s Buried Stream of the First Ward, MY old neighborhood.

Ross Park Zoo is still around, and still with a carousel. But I had forgotten that it used to have a train to ride around.

I WAS able to add to the discussion. As a Cub Scout, I discovered, on a tour of Crowley’s, the dairy producer. that one building was linked to the building across Conklin Avenue underneath the road. When I was eight, this was exceedingly cool.

When I was a kid, I appeared a couple local daily TV shows in Binghamton on WNBF-TV, Channel 12, maybe TV RANCH CLUB or OFFICER BILL. Or possibly, both. Here’s a LINK to an INTERVIEW with BILL PARKER, the host of those two shows and much more. My buddy John notes that his “VOICE still resonates the same after all these years!” (November 7th 2014, 46 minutes).

This is WAY cool: an amazing historical view of downtown Binghamton from 1950 that itemizes all of the business on a street map of the center of the city. Incidentally, there are two rivers in Binghamton, the Chenango, running north/south, and the Susquehanna, running east/west. The house numbers start from the river they are perpendicular to.

Of course, there is sometimes a tendency to idealize the past. This is a picture of a Ku Klux Klan rally from the mid-1920s, in front of Binghamton City Hall, which is right across from McLean’s. From one participant’s information, they tried to re-market themselves as a “service organization” to attract new members and downplayed their racial motives. They were still anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant as well as anti-black, and tried to form a boycott of Endicott Johnson shoe manufacturers if George F Johnson didn’t fire his immigrant work force; George F ignored them.

This is a piece of local history I had heard about, second-hand. But to actually SEE it on streets I have walked was astonishing. The fiction that the Klan existed/exists only in the southern US. From the Wikipedia: “At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization claimed to include about 15% of the nation’s eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men.” Reportedly, from 1923 to 1928, Binghamton was the NYS headquarters for the KKK.

(Unfortunately, the KKK thread, which was quite civilized, was removed from the page by the administrator, presumably as too controversial.)

Also, in 1948, Binghamton had a comic books burning.

I got the picture below from my friend Carol of the remains of the school I attended from K-9, 1958-1968, Daniel Dickinson, taken May of 1973, when I was away at college at New Paltz. I was unaware this was about to take place until long after it was razed, and it broke my heart. The area is now apartments.

By contrast, the Facebook page Albany… the way it was, run by Al Quaglieri, whose byline I remember from Metroland, the arts weekly, involves discoveries of things I never knew. Maurice Ravel played at at Vincentian Institute in 1928! Even Albany before dozens of homes were razed, and the Empire State Plaza was built was new to me, since I didn’t move here until 1979.

I was able to participate in one recent conversation. Al doesn’t always remember some of the places that have come and gone. But I remember, fondly, the Shades of Green vegetarian restaurant on Lark Street, around the corner from Washington Avenue. I went there a lot when I worked at FantaCo in the 1980s.

You should check out the Albany group archive, a “gigantic photo library – over 10,000 images that you can search.”

So these pages provide me an interesting convergence of history and memory, and, yes, perhaps nostalgia.

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Pronounce This: Upstate New York

Time passages

I’ve read old journals/diaries of mine from the 1970s and 1980s, and much of it is cringeworthy.

I read this book last year, Thinking in Numbers, by Daniel Tammet, and discovered that I had something in common with American philosopher William James, who noted that “the same space of time seems shorter as we grow older.” He cites a mathematical explanation by contemporary French mathematician Paul Janet, who noted:

our experience of time is proportional to our age. For a ten-year-old child, one year represents one-tenth of his existence, whereas for a man of fifty, the same year equates only to one-fiftieth (2 percent). The older man’s year will thus seem to elapse five times faster than the child’s…

I came to that same conclusion at least thirty years ago; it’s all math.

Someone on Facebook noted that the TV series The Twilight Zone – Season 1, Episode 1 – “Where Is Everybody?” was presented 55 years ago this month, October 2, 1959. Another commented, “I can hardly believe it.” This response seemed strange. Things that happened 50 years ago (Beatles, ML King, Vietnam) feel like a long time ago to me.

Whereas, when the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the TV show Friends made Jaquandor feel old, that seems more understandable to me. (Not that he’s old, but that he feels so.) Because looking back 20 years doesn’t feel like twenty years when you’re over 40; it’s all math.

Friends isn’t that chronological linchpin for me, as I watched it only about half the time. But the band Nirvana is; the band, with Dave Grohl as its final drummer, just before stardom, got together 24 years ago. Now THAT makes ME feel old.

Looking back can be kind of uncomfortably yucky. Ken Levine listened to tapes of radio programs he DJed in the 1970s and cringes a bit. The Coverville is celebrating its 10th anniversary this fall, but host Brian Ibbott said on that program, “Don’t listen to the first year,” when he was figuring out the format. I know that feeling.

For some obscure reason, I’ve read old journals/diaries of mine from the 1970s and 1980s, and much of it is cringeworthy. The only reasons I keep them are these: 1) I could use some of it to cull out family and FantaCo history; 2) all the terrible stuff I could throw together as a roman a clef.

Remembering Francis Bellamy

“I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

From the Wikipedia:

The Pledge of Allegiance was written in August 1892 by Francis Bellamy (1855–1931), who was a Baptist minister, a Christian socialist, and the cousin of socialist utopian novelist Edward Bellamy (1850–1898). The original “Pledge of Allegiance” was published in the September 8 issue of the popular children’s magazine The Youth’s Companion as part of the National Public-School Celebration of Columbus Day, a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas.

Initially, it went like this: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

The Pledge was supposed to be quick and to the point. Bellamy designed it to be recited in 15 seconds. As a socialist, he had initially also considered using the words equality and fraternity but decided against it – knowing that the state superintendents of education on his committee were against equality for women and African Americans…
In 1923, the National Flag Conference called for the words “my Flag” to be changed to “the Flag of the United States”, so that new immigrants would not confuse loyalties between their birth countries and the United States. The words “of America” were added a year later.

This addition does seem to make sense, as it specifies the oath. Unfortunately, as Now I Know notes, Bellamy was also responsible for the Bellamy Salute, which was…

…very similar to the traditional Roman one, which Benito Mussolini and then Adolf Hitler adopted for their own supporters. By the early 1940s, the symbolism of such a salute was not longer one of allegiance to the American flag, but rather to Nazi Germany. On December 22, 1942, the United States Congress adopted the Flag Code, dropping the Bellamy Salute from the Pledge of Allegiance, and replacing it with the instruction that the speaker place his or her right hand over his or her heart.

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

The “under God” phrase wasn’t added until 1954, well after Bellamy died.

Historic US Route 20

“In New York State, 108 miles of Route 20 from Duanesburg (Schenectady County) on the east to LaFayette (Onondaga County) on the west is designated as a New York State Scenic Byway because of its spectacular beauty and unique history to the westward migration of the state and the nation. “

The federal highway that is the longest in the United States was developed well before the Interstate system. That is Route 20, which starts in Boston, Massachusetts, and ends in Newport, Oregon.

About three years ago, a fellow named Bryan T. Farr decided to drive the length of the highway, which he found to be quite beautiful, as he trekked through a dozen states. After he returned, he took no action about this experience for over a year, but he realized that he had to either do something with the hundreds of photos he took, or move on.

He ended up starting The Historic US Route 20 Association Inc., a 501 (c)3 nonprofit, educational organization. Moreover, he wrote a book, Historic US Route 20. Ambitiously, he decided to make another trip across the country, contacting towns along the way to see if they might be willing to set up some meet-and-greets.

When he got to the Sharon Springs area, the powers that be decided to add him to the schedule of the annual Sharon Springs Garden Party. The intermittent rain held off long enough for him to give his talk on May 24. The Wife and I just happened to be there for the event, and that was the only special talk that day we actually attended.

The next day, we, along with The Daughter, went to the Cherry Valley Museum. Among the factors in its history is the decision by the state in 1952 to have Route 20 bypass the village, which was economically devastating at the time. The Historic US 20 group, not incidentally, is working with locales to provide signage, even if the road was relocated. Later that day, we drove home along much of Route 20 and saw some tornado damage in Duanesburg, Schenectady County from a few days earlier.

I recall that Western Avenue, around Manning Boulevard, began the Great Western Turnpike. And it’s lovely:

US Route 20 is also New York State’s longest highway; 372 miles from the border with Massachusetts to the border of Pennsylvania.
In New York State, 108 miles of Route 20 from Duanesburg (Schenectady County) on the east to LaFayette (Onondaga County) on the west is designated as a New York State Scenic Byway because of its spectacular beauty and unique history to the westward migration of the state and the nation.

The First Presbyterian Church in Cherry Valley is the first church west of the Hudson River to have services in English, which I only recently discovered on our trip there.

As it turns out, we live only a couple of blocks from Route 20 in Albany. I thought it would be neat if some of the merchants on Western Avenue and Madison Avenue in Albany, and on Route 20 in East Greenbush, had signs in their windows signifying that they are part of something greater.