The Blog Brothers

Time Slow, Life Rich

2009-01-28T21:51:00.000-08:00

We grew up in a US time when horses were still used to deliver milk and baked goods, and collect recyclables (generically called 'rags' back then)... It was a slow time, when summer days were a week long, and to get from Saturday lunch to the starting bars of the first Looney Tunes of the Saturday matinee with 25 cartoons and cowboy double-feature took about 3 days.

There was no tv then, so all we could do in the living room was live. That was mostly at night. During the day, if not at school daydreaming out the windows we were always out playing, up to many miles away, on foot or bicycle, often taking our lunch with us. The radio was in the kitchen, for listening to after dinner or while doing the drudgery of homework while Mom did the ironing.

The only apparatus in the living room was the big clunky iron telephone you had to dial, then wait for the dial to roll clickingly back till you could whirl in the next number but there were only 5 numbers in those days, since there were about 2 billion people in the world and only a tiny portion in Albany. My Brady/McTeague grandfather, an electrician for the phone company, had one of the standing phones with the earpiece on a side hook and the dial at the bottom, like in all the old black-and-white fast-paced newspaper movies. "Get me the desk!" Things began to change palpably when the phone numbers started getting longer. Where I live now my number is 10 digits long, 15 or more if you're calling from another country.

We had no Victrola, as phonographs (itself a neoarchaism now!) were called back then; the only person in the family who had a Victrola was my Robinson/Kelly grandfather, a NYCRR conductor, who had a then merely quaint wind-up Victrola in his basement, with a big morning glory megaphone where the sound came out. Next to the whizzing green felt turntable it had a little metal cupful of playing needles like headless finishing nails that lasted about an hour and were attached to the tone arm by vising them in place with a knurled knob.

The living room in those days was where guests sat and chatted or Dad read the newspaper in the big red easy chair under the standing lamp by the window after dinner. On really rainy days when we had friends over or went to their house, we played in the living room: checkers, cards (War was a favorite), chess, Monopoly, Clue, Go to the Head of the Class... but when the weather was even remotely tolerable (in winter there were no limits) and we didn't have measles or mumps or whooping cough we would never in a million years have stayed inside, we'd be out somewhere exploring, playing, finding stuff to do all day long, even into dark in summer, home only to eat then out again, except for the detested but implacable Saturday night bath.

Each of those days was about a week long. The school year was about a decade in length, but seemed longer. I remember one time at the end of summer vacation realizing it would be 9 months till summer vacation, an impossible duration, as time-distant as the Civil War, which had ended only 80 years before, when great grandma was a teenager. Then at the start of summer vacation, school was almost 3 months away, in the heart an essentially unending length of time, though we knew better.

Comics were a new thing then too, this was only a few years after the first Batman, the only copy in existence now a crumbling million-dollar item. I used to own millions of dollars worth of comics at today's prices, bought them for dimes I got doing odd jobs in the neighborhood, original Donald Ducks, Little Lulu, Mad, Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and all the many others, read 'em and tossed 'em in a pile, filled my wagon and went trading comics in the neighborhood.

It wasn't a better world in many ways, there was more manifest prejudice, for example, and pollution was the norm-- litter wasn't even a full-blown concept yet (the word 'litterbug' was the winner of a contest to give the phenomenon a name), and though age and nostalgia likely play a big part in my perspective, it seems from here that many of the technoadvances we now enjoy have been achieved at the cost of time's depth and richness. The journey is where the treasures are.

In a Tarzan movie I saw one long-gone Saturday afternoon, Tarzan is shown a movie on a screen set up in the big white hunter’s jungle camp; on the screen Tarzan sees a train rushing at him and panics. "That train in the picture can go from coast to coast in three days," explains the civilized white guy. "What for?" asks Tarzan.

In so many ways, those were the days.

Tall Enough to Tell the Tale

2008-03-01T11:38:00.000-08:00

You've got me there, Bob (see previous post); but as I've been saying more and more frequently lately, it seems to be the names that go first. That means I've got a lot of nameless faces floating around in my head these days, but I've learned to cherish the memories, with or without the names. I do remember that face vividly, though, and also remember his parents - and that '50 Chevy - very well.

I also recall spending an afternoon fishing with him from a rowboat out on the still, cold waters of Brant Lake in the Adirondacks. He was a true character, full of piss and vinegar; and unless my mind is telling tall tales on his behalf, I believe he landed what looked to be a pretty good-sized smallmouth bass that day. Of course, I was far more excited about it than he was; perhaps it looked much smaller to him?

I have a much clearer memory, though, of the dart sticking out of the back of my hand at the Delaware Tavern than I do of the legendary "turkey" moment, for understandable reasons. Not only did it dampen my love for the world of darts (a tough blow for one raised in bars), but to this day I have mixed feelings about the memory itself.

It seems that initially the crowd of revelers greeted my childish mistake - foolishly reaching for darts on the board while someone sober enough to stand but too drunk to see, was about to launch his shoulder-fired missile - with a roar of laughter. Time and the blessed imagination of the Irish, however, have given me a better ending.

As I stood there staring at my impaled hand - Christ-like, virtually nailed to the board - I calmly reached up and drew out the offending projectile, jammed it into the bullseye, and walked slowly back to my seat, droplets of blood tracing my footsteps to the table.

The silence in the room was palpable; but its vacuum was suddenly replaced by a deafening roar of cheering, clapping and the stamping of feet, quickly erasing any vestiges of shame left in my heart. Clutching my bloodied hand with the other, and lifting my head to the onlooking crowd, I whispered hoarsely, 'Don't worry, my friends; it's only a flesh wound.'

How do you remember it? Did I leave anything out?

Author's note, added the following day: I was lying in bed last night, about to drift off to dreamland, when suddenly the ceiling above my bed opened up to reveal a vast midnight sky filled to overflowing with glittering stars. From deep within a bank of silvery clouds came a voice, saying "Bobby! Bobby! Bobby Van Buren!" Then I fell into a deep and restful sleep until the room was once again full of sunlight. Morpheus always seems to do his best work in that twilight zone between wakefulness and the semicoma of deep sleep.

Dartboard

2008-03-01T03:26:00.000-08:00

Hey Mick, got a question for ya--

Remember Chark and Lilian Van Buren, who lived across the street from us and VFW Post 6776, had a then supercool salmon and gray Chevy (1950? another question) and their son X one night hit a turkey on the dartboard at THE dartboardly perfect moment and the house went wild (not the time you got a dart in your hand, I think; kindly elaborate on the dart-in-hand memory and its fringes)-- But my question is: what was the name of the son?

(He had one of the first motorbicycles in Albany that I know of, he explained it to me in front of Einstein's Pharmacy - early 1940s)

Superheroes

2008-02-08T22:15:00.000-08:00

We know how it is, we elder superheroes.

We know because we remember. That's what it's all about, in the end: remembering.

We remember how it was-- sure, we used to move at the speed of light, but we didn't let it go to our heads too much, that was the key: we learned how to handle the gift.

And a great gift it was, to Shazam our way out of any situation, or fly whenever we wanted, just like Captain Marvel or Superman with only a magic cape stolen from the bathroom tied around our neck as we whizzed down the street on foot or bike, looking back to see the supergarment flowing out behind us as we flew through the surrendering air, some of us even tried it out of a second floor or higher window but hyperreality has its limits, even for superheroes with x-ray eyes.

Anyway we didn't fear tall buildings, we could walk fencetops, we could leap broad chasms at a single bound if we had our Keds on and yeah, we used to fly from branch to branch of high trees as good as Tarzan with a slingshot in our pocket and even if we fell we got up and carried on toward our date with destiny, maybe with a cast on, but time travel was easy then, we were superheroes - born that way, like all kids are in their own fashion - invulnerable of course, we boys in my case, no matter how fast we were flying, except against mumps, measles, girls and other forms of kryptonite.

We all remember the dashing and heroic era, our time of swords and capes, six guns and pen knives, slingshots and peashooters, all the need there was in the world of then that required our presence and our attention: the woods and the waters, the dark, the haunted and high places, the things that could explode, the creatures in distress needing rescue in that world where we could run down the stairs like water and cartwheel at will and roll down hills like logs and jump higher, skate faster than anybody, then later in those early years stay out all night and swing from chandeliers on our way to world-saving in between dates with ladies in distress who caused cartwheels in our hearts...

We had our shot when it was our turn, we did our duty when it counted, we saved the world all by ourselves, did our bit to get to now and now it's time to rest, to remember, advise the new superheroes how to handle their gift, tell them of the do's and don'ts we've learned by heart, tell our tales of the intrepid, sit back, have a sip, dig up some more treasure, try to eat an apple...

We can still fly, by the way. Hand me that towel...

leaving a room

2007-11-18T08:45:00.000-08:00

room one:

It was not that I was a bad child, but it was clear early on that I seemed to have a gift for mischief. Consider, for instance, the quiet summer morning in 1944, a day when my father was probably busy taking out machine gun positions in the forests of Germany, while my mother was attempting to hold down the front lines at home. I had just been sent to bed for disturbing the peace. We all had to pitch in and do our part.

Only two and still in diapers, I had been incarcerated for over-reacting to an injustice perpetrated on me by my older brother: he had thrown my stuffed monkey off the front porch. Outraged that insult had been added to injury, I chose this moment to escape from my crib and climb out the bedroom window to rescue my little comrade, still lying, broken, on the sidewalk below.

Hanging only by my fingertips, I seemed to have no fear I'd come tumbling down, apparently lacking a grip on the gravity of the situation. Once out the window, I couldn't quite figure out how to get down; but I wasn't about to let that stop me: rock-a-bye baby be damned, I was going to retrieve that monkey.

Fortunately for me, though, my mother had grown suspicious when the bedroom suddenly grew silent, and after discovering the empty crib she spied my tiny fingers digging into the second-story windowsill and reeled me in. It would prove to be the beginning of a lifelong pattern.

room two:

I must have been staring at that page for a good ten minutes. It was as blank as my mind, except for name, date, subject, school, up there at the top. Nothing else to add. Or subtract. Or multiply. An algebra test may work for others, but it sure didn't work for me. I walked up and handed the empty page to Sister Ann Marie, walked out into the hallways of Cardinal McCloskey High, and who do I bump into but the Principal, Father Turner, on his way to mail some letters.

"What are you doing out here, son? Class just started ten minutes ago."

"Well, Father, I finished my algebra test early."

"Come with me," he said. "I'm going out to mail some letters." Father Turner, a man given to few words, was utterly silent as we walked all the way down the hill to the mailbox. We then walked back up the hill in the deepening silence, and as we approached the school steps, he turned to me and said, "Go empty your locker, and don't come back again.", an eerie echo of Jesus' words to the adulterous woman, "Go, and sin no more.", except for the complete absence of Christ's love. It would be my last day as a Roman Catholic.

room three:

Bag in hand, all earthly possessions but my Gretsch drums and Zildjian cymbals inside, I kiss my mother goodbye and, in what would prove to be my final (and least convincing) James Dean walk, head down the filthy housing project hallway to the stairs. Just before descending into the inferno, I turn to see my mother crying in the doorway, now reduced to a sagging silhouette.

Both boys now in the Air Force, off to God knows where. It was a near-fatal blow for her, I knew; all the men in her life were now gone. No one left at home now but my thirteen-year old sister, Suzi, and her. I was leaving on a silver plane.

Hormones on the Range

2007-10-24T18:25:00.000-07:00

Today, I shall briefly address that deep and timeless puzzle of life that involves growing up as a young boy (in my case during the 1940s-50s), going to a favorite movie theater on a Saturday afternoon at any time of year and there having to sit through the disgusting sight of my favorite hard-ridin', hard drinkin', quick-drawin' cowboy hero slowly but surely getting roped in despite his matching pair of pearl-handled six-guns, being all smarmy and shucksy and even sometimes kissing a grownup girl to the yucks and boos and retchings of the nearly all male prepubescent Saturday double-feature audience, who either averted their eyes or showered the screen with a hail of popcorn, Raisinets, Milk Duds, Necco Wafers, Junior Mints, Jujubes, Juicy Fruits, Good and Plenties, Mason Dots, Mary Janes, Black Crows and whatever other anti-smarm ammo they had at hand. Weren't these movies made for guys? Like us? What the heck did girls have to do with it anyway? Why did they always have to make movies with long, icky scenes like this in them, where the hero's heroism just melts away before our disappointed eyes? Didn't the moviemakers know what life was really like?

Nothing in that young and intensely male universe was more deeply disturbing, worrisome and revolting than seeing Tom Mix or Gene Autry or Lash Larue or Whip Wilson or Hopalong Cassidy (Roy Rogers too, but he was already married, so it was too late anyway; he had Trigger though, and at least he never kissed his wife) getting all weak-kneed around a perfumy-curly girl who couldn't fast draw to save her life, or even throw a baseball right!

What was going on here, what was all this romance stuff, why were our heroes doing this, we used to wonder en masse in those velvet seats in the boo-filled darkness, not yet having even an inkling of the vast herd of longhorns that was about to stampede through our bodies and minds, leaving our boyhoods back there somewhere in the dust of the heroic wild west; no knowledge that you too, cowboy - ace pitcher, fast-ridin' Delaware Avenue gunslinger that you were – would soon be getting all smarmy and weak-kneed yourself, stammering like a lovesick cowboy in front of the girl of your dreams of the moment...

From the present promontory of my life, though, even as a once-upon-a-time hero and gunslinger I simply can't remember what it felt like to be so hormonally innocent, revolted at the sight of a kiss...

And to think we all expected to go on like that forever...

Fearful Sweetness

2007-09-21T19:04:00.000-07:00

Jesus, it suddenly hit me, they were all down there in that basement, just after the war and the survivors were home, the spring of '46. Even now I can hear the yakkety-yak, the striking darts, the cackle and gab, smell the beer, deviled eggs and cement dust, perfume, cologne, fresh clothing, cigarettes and cigars, the grownups with their drink-smoke breath leaning down to me now and then to tell me how I've grown, even as I look at the photo 60 years later. That was back in the days when the generations drank together, and all the guys and their wives, relatives and friends rented this place, this joint's basement, where one afternoon they drank beer and shot darts, danced and got drunk and took photos like this for the kids to look at one far-away day as grownups, when the war and all the personal destruction that followed had long been spun out into the rusted gossamer that is history, me here today with only little-kid memories of all these people, who look a lot younger than they did then, the women quite girlish now that I'm well past their captured age; the elder, once-ancient folks in the photo are only as old as me now, and with beers in their hands they're standing there around the folding chairs, on one of which sits my mother not much older than my daughter is today, and with a look of such now-obvious anxiety on Mom's face - it's taken me this much life to see it - she must have sensed even then, surrounded only by Dad's friends and relatives, how alone she was and was going to be, how without allies in that group of jovial-looking characters, and though she never told me such a thing I must have sensed it in her all along, known it without knowing, as children do, for what I remember most strongly about that afternoon - like the short-lived attempt at familyhood that followed - was the mood that filled it, of fearful sweetness, of an unnamed goldenness going away, a mood like dust motes in a sunbeam on a paper-thin afternoon, and it cuts me with the edge of half a century that despite all the fears and all the joys in the photo, not one person in it is now living, to tell me more about what I feel...

Swing Low, Sweet Pontiac

2007-09-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

In the fall of 1963, I was a young airman stationed at Griffiss Air Force Base in upstate New York. I had recently returned from a tour of duty just outside Istanbul, Turkey and the Rome/Utica area just didn't have quite enough magnetic pull to keep me in town on weekends. I often hitchhiked the Thruway to Albany, not just because it was my home town, but because it was a place that had a hell of a lot more going on.

On one of those Friday afternoons I was standing roadside with a buddy of mine, a fellow airman, for what seemed to be a very long time. In hitchhiking, as in everything else, there are good days and there are bad days. Things were not going well on this one, and we were growing discouraged. Finally, though, this fairly ordinary-looking Pontiac sedan pulled over and we grabbed our bags and took off down the road and jumped in; me up front riding shotgun, Pete climbing into the back seat.

After rolling along in silence for a while someone finally broke the ice, and then all three of us began rambling on about everything under the sun. Being guys, we eventually stumbled upon the subject of baseball. Our driver mentioned in passing that he used to play the game himself, a remark that went unnoticed for awhile, and we continued to rattle on and on about facts, figures, heroes, etc. Besides, we had all played baseball in the past, hadn't we?

Then, for some reason, it occurred to me to ask exactly what he meant when he said he used to play baseball. Well, he said, I started out playing in high school, then went on to play in the minor leagues. Wow, we said in unison, did you ever make it to the majors? Yeah, I was in the majors for a while. Holy cow! This was getting interesting. Real interesting.

The Thruway can seem like one long endless ribbon of road when you have no one to talk to, but on this one particular autumn evening, I was completely unaware of the outside world. It was just getting dark, and before continuing his story, he slowly reached down to turn the lights on. His face, now illuminated by the dashboard, revealed the unmistakable signs of mischief: an impish little grin at the corners of his mouth and a twinkle in his eye.

I thought he was going to string us along for a while, just for laughs, then admit he was joking. It would have been a pretty damn good laugh, too, because he had us - hook, line and sinker. OK, OK, spill the beans; who'd you play for? The New York Giants, he said quietly. The New York freaking Giants? Are you kidding me? You played for the Giants? You mean the farm team? No, I was in the majors for a few years. Really? What's your name? Robert. Robert Thomson.

Hmm, that didn't ring any bells with either of us, and for a few seconds there we were all suspended in this agonizing silence; and then, all of a sudden, it hit us! You couldn't... possibly... be... Bobby Thomson? Yep, that's what they used to call me.

Holy Jumpin' Jesus! Bobby Thomson! The man who hit the most famous home run in the entire history of the universe; the home run so famous they called it 'the shot heard round the world.' We were stunned. Speechless. To this day I don't remember very clearly what happened after that; I recall the two of us going nuts and jabbering a mile a minute for a while, then settling down to listen, enraptured, to all the details of that day, from the man who had lived them; how he had no memory of running the bases, how he threw up as soon as he reached the locker room, and on and on into the night. We were in the hallowed presence of the biggest Giant in the world.

It was one of the great rides of my life, despite the fact that he had broken my heart when that ball soared over the fence in the last out of the last inning of the final playoff game for the 1951 National League pennant. Though he had delivered a crushing blow to every fan of the long-suffering Brooklyn Dodgers that year, there was no way around the fact that it was a moment of high national drama, a lightning bolt across the American sky, a crowning moment in baseball history. When it happened, I broke down and cried. I was 9-years old.

But on this particular night, I relived it with him, I rejoiced with him. Why? Because the Dodgers, the team I had earned several bloody noses defending as a youth, had finally paid me back for my undying loyalty just a few years earlier by moving the team to Los Angeles, California. The final indignation came when Ebbets Field was torn down and that hallowed ground was covered with high-rise apartment buildings.

Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that I would one day be riding shotgun for the very man who had hit that pitch. But here I was, not only riding alongside him, but cheering for him, celebrating with him. It was all very clear to me; I had finally been avenged. Go, Bobby, go, Bobby, Go!

Men at Arms

2007-08-24T16:19:00.000-07:00

Dad kept the Luger up in the attic in a box he never opened, as far as I know, but other than that he would never have a gun in the house. He never hunted, never bought a gun, never allowed us to have guns, not even BB guns, never spoke of the stuff in the box, and left it behind when one late summer afternoon in 1954 as he sat in the family car beside the VFW Post he called us kids over and hugged us hard, then drove away weeping and never came back.

Dad had been the lateborn youngest (and so the family darling) of four kids: Ed, Alice, Jim and Frank. We lost contact with that half of the family when we had to move down into the slums not long after Dad drove away. All three brothers had volunteered for the Army when the war started, Dad when I was three and Mick was just a year old. I remember watching from my sub-tabletop eye level in the kitchen of our tiny apartment as Mom packed rationed wartime luxuries like chocolate and jam into a box to send to Dad in the winter in Belgium, whatever that was. I recall it so well because I was tragically upset that all those treasures were just-- being sent away! I wonder now if Dad ever received them that winter in the Ardennes… Fortunately, all three sons returned home safely, but none of them ever said a word about their experiences.

Now that I'm older than Dad ever got to be, and having served in the military myself, and having read many books about that part of the war Dad fought through, I look back upon that handsome, intelligent young man as a tragic figure, like so many of his fellow WWII veterans. His joys, his ambitions, his essential goodness and sensitivity had all been war-twisted into a chaos of personal confusion and aimless rage that no one then understood or could share but his buddies at the VFW Post he founded and first commanded, then moved his family next door to.

That way he could quickly be with his fellow soldiers, the only ones in their world who knew what they'd all been through, who shared that same distant weariness in the eyes from the relentless horrors they'd beheld as young men, horrors that had scarred their souls and that in time killed so many of them with whiskey or pistols or cars into trees. They were all still in the same life-or-death mode that some managed to bury at least partially in the graveyard of their past, all just trying to survive for any length of time, there in that beery foxhole of camaraderie from whose open doors all those dreamy summer songs wafted in the sweet torture of what might have been... Mona Lisa, You Belong to Me, Wheel of Fortune, How High the Moon...

Also scattered in that attic box were dozens of war photos of Sherman tanks crushing through German villages, blowing out walls of houses and shops amid smoke and piles of rubble; and
stark photos of dead Nazi soldiers twisted frozen in the snows of Hurtgen Forest; there was the pristine black Luger in its black leather holster (we never did know whether it was loaded), an engraved German officer's bayonet with the grease still on it, a big red swastika flag with bold ink signatures all over it, and other things I no longer remember. When our world collapsed after Dad drove away I don't know what happened to all the stuff in the box, except for the Luger, which one day in the remnants of childhood bliss I took outside to use in playing cops and robbers. Likely some flabbergasted neighbor lady communicated her shock to Mom, who gave the Luger to a gun club her cousin belonged to, and the bayonet to my uncle in the country, where I learned years later my cousins wore it out on farm chores like digging up potatoes...
One autumn day in 1950 or so, when I was about 10, Dad and his VFW buddy Pete S. let me go with them when they took Pete's M1 Garand (the kind they'd both carried during the war) and a heavy box of cartridges, drove out into the countryside somewhere, set up some tin cans against a hillside and started shooting. I'd never heard a real high-powered rifle up-close before; each explosion was for me a shock of the war, roaring from the same kind of gun that had killed the Nazi soldiers in the attic... later would come the images of men, women and children lying in heaps all over Europe; blood, smoke, shrapnel and ruins everywhere amid smoldering wastes that had been populous cities, towns and villages-- there was hell in those rifle booms, a hell no soldiers ever spoke of...

None of the other fathers who had come home from the war ever talked about it either, never told how part of their hearts and souls had been left on a bloody field, though all the kids begged them for some tales. Later, while reading books on the Battle of the Bulge, watching documentaries about the European theater, seeing photos of the aftermath of a notorious massacre or watching elderly men who had been there and were now a part of history pause to wipe away tears as they told at last of the long gauntlet of horrors they had passed through, I wondered each time: is that where Dad was? Is that where those photos of the frozen soldiers were taken? Is that Dad in that column there, head down, marching through the Ardennes Forest snows when I was 4 years old? Was that the village in the tank battle photos? Is this where Mom was sending those packages I cried over?

I used to plead with Dad to tell me some war stories and there must have been many, as the look on his face implied when my questions forced his mind back to those times, but all he ever said was that he'd been a radio man (the one the enemy would try to kill first), and I remember the checkered 99th Infantry Division patch on the shoulder of his uniform when he was dressing for a parade. I also recall his once describing a fighter-bomber trying to land a bomb in a cave on the side of a steep cliff somewhere, another time he said he'd been to the Eagle's Nest, and that was all he ever told. In a documentary I saw not long ago, about US soldiers rummaging through Hitler's abandoned mountain bunker I looked for Dad, thought I'd see him any minute, as a young soldier; maybe that was him, but the film was faded, the past gets grainy, hard to see…

Saving Private Ryan depicted only two hours of the heart's deepest darkness those guys had gone through 24 hours a day for months on end, divorced from life, living as targets, friends blasted to bits before their eyes in the death-dealing cold until those who survived came home, emerging from a nightmare in the furthest pit of living hell into all that was sweetness and light, all that was smiling and prosperous as they stepped out of death and into the welcoming arms of a bountiful America, but each of them carried within himself that scouring nightmare that could never be erased, and they had only each other to silently share the unspeakable they had been part of, still smoldering here amid the clear air and sunshine of what once would have been natural ambition in young men like these, but now among hometown streets with flowers edging the trim lawns of tidy houses, and on through the falling leaves of autumn and beyond, they were the only ones who knew the other side of this warm reality, so they clung together and never said a word about whence they had come, what they had seen, what they had done; they drank together and held together and never said a word: not to their families, not to friends or associates, not even to each other, about the dark visions they carried inside-- never, there amid all this growing happiness they had offered their lives to defend but could not fully share in or enjoy, heroes that they were, being always among the faces they had seen blown to fragments in an instant, there in the smiling faces of their children who kept asking, Did you kill anybody in the war, Dad?

We Interrupt This Program...

2007-08-08T04:51:00.000-07:00

..to bring you an important bulletin.

Nearly two years ago, while Bob was visiting from Japan, he and I were sitting out on the back deck of my home in Desert Hot Springs, just shootin' the breeze, reminiscin' about our past adventures, drinkin' a little yellowtail, one memory-salvo triggering another like fireworks on the 4th of July until the wee, wee hours of the morning. Then one of us - Bob, I think - said, 'This is such great stuff. We should do this online, start a blog site where we send it all out into the blogosphere, rather than having it blown away by the desert wind and end up as a dust storm in the Mojave.'

'Hell, yes,' I said, 'Let's do it. We'll call it The Blog Brothers, and we'll start with our earliest memories, and one after another, we'll swap stories just like we're sittin' out here on the deck; except you'll be on one side of the planet and I'll be on the other. After all, with the internet, who needs geography?' Thus was TBB born. The first post, called First Press Conference, was published on October 14, 2005, and included a photo of the two of us taken early in our hellraising careers.

The basic idea was that each of us in turn would gather together as many of our glittering memories as possible and present them in a somewhat linear, chronological way, without being too constrictive. At times the collaboration felt like a ping pong game in slow motion; one volley following another in close succession. The trajectory began with some of our earliest memories, and proceeded forward in time fairly consistently for quite a while.

Then, from out the blue, I suddenly rocketed forward in time by posting the first of my tales from a war zone called Manhattan, where I drove a cab in the late sixties. I knew it was pretty intense stuff, but I felt I had to get it out before my memories had faded. They were a bit fragile, as you will see. After the second installment, I began to think I had somehow changed the focus of the site, and by the third, I was certain that I had. It was as though I had taken a bone-jarring hairturn in a speeding yellow cab. Sorry, folks.

Since then, Bob and I have been discussing where to go from here. The original focus was supposed to be on our years together, and there were still many more tales to be told before those days ended. We both agreed that it would be best to pull the Instant Karma series off TBB, leaving behind links to a site where that part of my story will continue. The story gets pretty harrowing, and would leave a kind of radioactive dust over all the earlier, fonder memories. So, as of today, we will resume the tales of our adventures up to that fateful day when our trails led us in very different directions.

I'm actually looking forward to that day myself. I'll finally begin to learn a bit more about Bob's later adventures around the globe, some of which I haven't heard to this day. In the meanwhile, let's get back to the mythical city of Albany, capital of the Empire State. There's a lot to do, and there's no big hurry. As I said to Bob on the phone the other day, the only deadline we have for this project is that it has to be finished before we die. Now that's a deadline I can live with.

The Instant Karma series will now continue on a new site, called KarmaDance. Enjoy (if that's the right word); I'll be updating it as I get the stories done.

Let There Be Soul!

2007-05-08T11:44:00.001-07:00

In the beginning the music was formless and void,
and a great emptiness went forth across the airwaves.
All that could be heard therein was Patti Page,
Theresa Brewer and Frankie Laine.
Then God said, "Let there be rhythm, let there be blues!";
and His spirit went forth across the airwaves
in the form of Chuck Willis, Ray Charles and LaVerne Baker.
And God saw that what he had made was good, very good;
and He began to replace the old with the new.
Thus God had provided man with soul,
and from that day forth, man and his descendants
would groove upon the earth. Then God rested,
for He had grown weary from all the dancing He had done.

It must be difficult for younger people who've lived their entire lives in the aftermath of that glorious earthquake, to have any sense at all of what it was like living in a world without Soul, an entire universe void of Rock and Roll. It must seem to them as though it had always existed, but it didn't. There was a time...

... back in the late 40s and early fifties, when I was a young boy, not long before those sonic booms arrived, that there would be an occasional hint of the approaching storm* coming from radios and jukeboxes, but those intimations were mere anomalies; the first few pieces of a grand mosaic. Those were still innocent times; I was still an innocent child, singing along with Mitch Miller and the Gang, or barking in time with the song, How much is that doggie in the window? (arf! arf!) Really. I'm not kidding. We all did. Until we were saved by Rock and Roll.

Until that magic moment I simply didn't know what I was missing; but looking back, I can see that it was nothing less than two worlds passing in the midnight hour. The earlier world had its charms, and precious little in the way of threats or dangers. The war had ended, we had won, our fathers had returned as heroes (those that were lucky enough to come home; my father was one of them), and we lived our sunny days in a nice, comfortable home in a quiet neighborhood. If we were the Cleavers, I was the Beaver. We were alive long before Beavis arrived, in a time when no one in the land was called Butthead. Like I said, it had its charms.

From the day I arrived on this earth, I had always found my greatest joy and comfort in music. Even as a little boy, I could be found singing and dancing around the house like a musical whirligig. Songs eminated endlessly from the big radio in the living room, when radios were still furniture; songs like Peg O’My Heart by the Harmonicats, or Ghost Riders In the Sky by Vaughn Monroe. Being Irish, of course, I had the added good fortune of spending much of my youth in bars, listening to all the latest pop tunes of the late 40s and early 50s, my face pressed against the glass chamber of the jukebox, as if longing to somehow get inside, to be closer to the source.

When Rock and Roll hit the planet, though, for me it was like an earthquake. As God and good fortune would have it, I was twice-blessed: for this new, pulsing and throbbing sound was let loose upon the land at the same moment that my hormones kicked in. I was 13 in the Year of Our Lord, 1955, when I first heard Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets blasting forth from the speakers outside a tavern on Nassau Lake where our family had rented a cabin for the summer. My brother and I were in the midst of one our endless, effusive displays of brotherly love, tenderly pitching rocks at each other in the dark, when our world suddenly shifted on its axis. Life would never be the same.

It was only later that I learned that Rock and Roll was created by simply putting a white face on a form of music that had been around for years, a genre once known as "race music," later to be marketed as Rhythm and Blues, primarily to black audiences. Blissfully unaware of any of this, I was content with this exciting new sound, until I began to hear the real thing.

Little Richard burst upon the scene with Tutti Frutti, Fats Domino hit with Ain't That A Shame, Chuck Berry sang Maybelline, and by that time I was clean outta sight, somewhere near seventh heaven. From that point on, there was a flood of Black Rock, later morphing into Soul, from Bo Diddly to Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Johnny Otis, Jackie Wilson - it just kept comin', like the rain that lifted Noah's Ark. I was already in a state of ecstasy, gladly skipping over Elvis, Eddy Cochran and Gene Vincent in search of Huey "Piano" Smith singing Rockin' Pneumonia & the Boogie Woogie Flu, or Speedo by the Cadillacs, spinnin' that radio dial.

By the time we were old enough to drive, we started heading out to Thatcher Park at night to park at the overlook, and with a clear sky between us and Buffalo, NY, we could catch WKBW and listen to the finest of musical diamonds in their purest form: rough, raw, sexy and thumping with a groove like nothing else on earth. It was the beginning of soul music, brother, and we were pulling it right down outta heaven.

Ray Charles, James Brown, Johnny Ace, The Impressions, Barrett Strong, The Falcons, Howlin' Wolf, Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, Hank Ballard, Maurice Williams, Sam Cooke, Smoky and The Miracles - we would sit until late into the night with the top down, staring at the stars, radio blasting, talking only between songs.

Like many things in life, it is almost impossible to describe what those moments were like. Suffice it to say that it was like discovering a whole new world, a sparkling new universe. Perhaps Van Morrison said it best: it stoned me to my soul, stoned me just like jelly roll, stoned me just like goin' home.... And, man, was it good to be back home.

*That inkling could be heard in songs like How High the Moon by Les Paul and Mary Ford in 1953, Earth Angel by the Penguins, and Sh-Boom by the Crew-Cuts in the following year, 1954. The widely-acknowledged breakthrough song was Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets the following year, in 1955.

•Photos, from the top: Patti Page at CBS Studio 50 in NY, Doris Day, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Chuck Willis, Laverne Baker, and, last but not least, Little Richard.

The Salamander Legacy

2007-04-04T18:34:00.000-07:00

I remember the summer back in 1951 or so when we discovered there were big numbers of salamanders and snakes in the woods behind PS 23 up on Whitehall Road, the same woods whence I shot out that inviting streetlight with my beloved slingshot, the same woods where Mick and his fellow perpetrators (I don't know where I was that day) hid out after the great unfinished-Thruway Conflagration (about which major event Mick thus far remains mum herein, for some reason, even though the statute of limitations has almost certainly long expired) and the same woods where later I finally found a public-access monocot plant (Solomon's Seal) for the monocot/dicot specimen requirement assigned by my civilian but still noxious natural science teacher at Vincentian Institute where I did my first year of high school and one Sunday afternoon when I was home alone hurriedly prepped the specimen folders using Dad's art tools and got ink all over but only got 1 out of a possible 30 points from the unimaginative teacher... Solomon's seal is a beautiful plant though... You see what happens when one gets talking about the mystic woods up behind PS 23?

Anyway, starting in late Spring/early Summer while school was still in session, Mick and I and the Olander Twins would head up there into the woods – definitely not when we should be in school, it wasn't hookey, no way, that would be unthinkable, could only have been a weekend or a holiday, we haloed ones would never miss a precious and delight-filled sunny day in class at St. James Institute; imagine skipping school just to catch wild animals – and caught red salamanders from under the rocks and put them in our pockets, we also caught a lot of snakes, a small one of which I put in a Sucrets box and took to school, let it crawl around on my desk with its salamander friend.

Each time we went into those woods our salamander-snagging expertise grew, until one day we went up there with a big cardboard box full of high-quality dirt to keep our catch in, for as any great hunter knows, one is loathe to part with a redback salamander one has caught legitimately by hand through sheer cunning and lightning speed; such skills must have their trophies. Plus the salamanders were so cute with those bulgy little black eyes and smiley faces, but even better they were free, and best of all their tails came off and wriggled for a long time and really freaked the girls out, which was great. The snakes were aces at their jobs too; my secret heart-throb Diane Finn was gratifyingly horrified at the sudden snake and salamander on her desk. Such are the enigmatic thrills of boyhood.

To get back to that day-- when we brought the boxful of forest dirt and salamanders home to the yard of our house on Delaware Avenue we counted our catch and found that we were collectively richer by a staggering 146 salamanders, a new world record that I believe still stands in the pre-teen category. Despite the obvious gold-medalness of the event, however, Mom (for reasons known only to moms) refused to allow us to bring the box into the house (not even into our bedroom!), even when we widened our eyes and looked as sad as we could. We would have loved to have those cute little salamanders crawling all over everything all the time, we would have named every one of them within a year or two. Having no other choice, we did the next best thing and tossed the box under the back porch where we could keep our little red treasures close by, and immediately forgot all about them.

Some time later, when one day I remembered our cardboard vault full of salamanders, I crabbed under the porch to check on our wealth and found that time and the weather had pretty much destroyed the cardboard box, and that every single one of our living treasures had wriggled off into the wild, where living treasures do best. Thus it was that Mick and I and the Olander twins so radically altered the salamander biomass of that region of Delaware Avenue. Now all you salamander-rich folks who live there know who to thank.

My Part in the Greatest Election Upset in American History

2007-03-07T18:51:00.000-08:00

When Dad and his buds took me to my first Albany Senators baseball game out at Hawkins Stadium not long after he came back from the war I must have been about 7 years old and still couldn't crack open a peanut by myself, so I and my paper bag of peanuts probably drove Dad and his buds crazy helping me open them just as their guy hit a double or something. I remember there was one player on the Senators who had only his right arm; the other he had lost in the war. He could still hit the ball a good distance, though.

The baseball game was interesting, I guess, but the stadium was even moreso; I'd never seen anything like it, and wandered around, looking. I didn't know much about baseball in those days, since I'd been living on Mountain Avenue with Mom and aunts for the duration of the war (which at that point had been half my life), so there was no baseball or talk of baseball. The men were all off in the war or working overtime, so my wartime neighborhood was mostly populated by little kids and moms, grandmas and aunts with their hands way full.

But the postwar stadium on that sweltering summer day was filled with guys, most of them not long back from the slaughter, savoring survival and yearning for a real down-home ballgame, drinking beer out of paper cups and yelling for the Albany Senators just like the old times. Not knowing a Senator from a congressman, I took my peanuts and wandered down to the infield screen for a closer look, stared at the action awhile, trying to figure out exactly what was so exciting as to cause all these grown men to yell like that and curse the umpires so bitterly. (I learned much of my impressive battery of umpire curses that day.)

Finally I gave up trying to figure it all out right then and there, turned from the screen and found myself face to face with a strange man sitting there in a front row seat right behind the plate, wearing a suit and tie in that heat, with a high forehead, an unusual hair arrangement at the top of it and an unbecoming mustache, all in a combination I'd never seen before, so I stared kind of hard at him.

He smiled in reply, revealing a slightly gap-toothed situation there, reached out a hand and patted me on the head. Everyone for some distance around chuckled with appreciation. The chuckle rippled out through the audience. All very odd. I ran back to Dad and his buds. Why is everybody laughing, I asked. That was Governor Dewey just patted you on the head. Governor? Dewey? Neither meant anything to me, and no grownup explanation seemed to help. All I could do was put that in my wonder basket, along with baseball games and peanut shells.

Then one day, by the time I could crack open peanuts and was playing baseball, I saw Grandpa Brady wearing a Dewey button in his lapel, must've been just before the Truman-Dewey election of 1948. Dewey was a shoo-in everyone said, and carried New York, but famously lost the election, though he did beat Thurmond. Still, Dewey did do one thing memorable to me, aside from patting me on the head at the ball game (thereby augmenting his portion of the heavily Democratic Albany vote): he pushed through the Thruway legislation that some years later enabled us Delaware Avenue kids to enjoy Pipe City for just one summer day.

Of which more later, when it gets written.

The Big Wind Chill

2007-02-03T18:21:00.000-08:00

Mick's icy post brings back other memories, like the one I'm about to relate. This was back before the wimpy things they call winters today, this was in the time of diamond winters, when the Albany streets were always icyslick unless the snow was up to here. As if that weren't enough, the wind tunnel of the upper Hudson Valley rendered the Capital City close kin to Siberia, with a wind chill factor that shot the temp down to only 50 below or so when it was warm, in which atmosphere we'd stand at night on Elm Street corners being supercool in our thin nylon jackets, no hats, no gloves, being wind chill cool. "All you have to do is relax your shoulders."

We thought of it as hardening ourselves against the elements. Which attitude served pretty well in the city, and even the country, specifically the country along historic country road 9J, the two-lane highway that will forever run south from Rensselaer along the east shore of the Hudson River. I call the 9J historic not only because it is, but also because of all the personal history it holds for Mick and I, as anyone who has read these sketchy chronicles can attest, with much more to come.

To get to the story. We were good in both city and country winters, as long as we stayed there and didn't tempt fate. But tempting fate was part of our natures it seems, as I look back now from the promontory of all those winters. At the heart of one of the Hope-diamond winters of the mid-1950s, I and my cousins Jackie and Teddy, and a fourth guy who might have been Mick, with frost on our eyebrows were hitchhiking north on 9J back to my cousins' house – we hitched everywhere in those days; all the regular drivers along the route (especially the Staat's Express truck drivers) would pick us up - this time, though, it was a dairy farmer and helpers in his pickup, delivering milk to the dairy plant upriver. There was no room for us in the cab and the back was full of milk cans, but it was a ride and we were hard as diamonds; we all clambered up and sat atop the cans.

Then the dairyman took off on business doing about 60mph, and as our asses began to freeze to the icing milk cans our torsos stuck right up there in the hyperArctic wind, where there was nothing between us and absolute zero but our outer surfaces. When we were dropped off about 15 minutes later as icemen, it was hard to break free of the milk cans and then to get get down to the ground; when we tried to walk, we crackled; we had much to say but couldn't talk, our jaws were frozen shut; our ears went "ting" if you struck them with an icy finger. Clanking against each other, we staggered through the warm snow up to the house and inside where it was really hot and we could melt and let the pain begin to roll us around in puddles on the floor.

We all subsequently managed to father children, though, so maybe it wasn't as bad as I remember.

Cool On Ice

2007-01-23T14:06:00.000-08:00

In the process of writing a piece on skateboarding recently, I found myself at a distinct disadvantage: being much older, I had little or no experience of the world of the skateboarder, a world which may as well have unfolded on another planet as far as I was concerned. In the heyday of street skating, I was living an idyllic life in the suburbs, busy raising three young daughters, each of whom pointedly ignored all the Tonka trucks and bulldozers I bought them, preferring to brush the hair on their Barbies, for some weird reason. It was a girl's world; skateboards did not exist.

Casting about to find a way into the mind of the skateboarder, though, I stumbled upon a most valuable insight: I actually was a skater in my youth: an ice skater. As a young inner city boy, I had pretty much the same attitude and behavior as the dudes of So-Cal who put wheels on their surfboards and hit the ground rolling back in the 70s, later to be known as skateboarders. We had the same lust for thrills, chills and spills, the same yearning to kick ass, and the same mad willingness of the truly immortal to just let it fly, regardless of how many pieces you were in when you landed. Wheels, blades - who cares? It was the need for speed. Kind of a guy thing.

There was this big public park practically in our backyard in Albany; looking at it from the kitchen window of our third floor apartment on Elm Street, it appeared to be one great big bowl scooped out of the center of the city- the flat bottom of which served as a football and baseball field in the summer, then transformed into an ice skating rink in the winter. This was one big glassy surface, man, at least to a kid; it seemed to be a mile wide, and we made use of every square inch of it, every free minute of the day. At night it was not unusual to have a bonfire going along the edge to rest and warm up and crow about our exploits.

There was no end to the contests we invented, either, to find new thrills, improve our skills, and to polish our manly credentials. Rubber tires were used to create obstacle courses and hurdles, the stack gaining another tire after each contestant succeeded in jumping it. The task was basically to avoid experiencing the feeling of metal blades hitting rubber in midflight with nothing between you and the ice below but a knitted cap; all while exhibiting a sense of style, of course.

There were a number of kids, mostly younger kids and girls, who just skated, doing figure 8s, spins, loops and other things to occupy their time. A few played hockey, but that was not for us. It seemed too boring, and required playing by an elaborate set of rules. If we had enough manpower, we would prefer to play a game of Head On, which consisted of dozens of skaters on two teams, each starting from one side of the field, who, at the cry of HEAD ONNNN! would launch a high-speed charge across the expanse of ice at one another, the collision in the middle resembling nothing so much as a war scene from Braveheart. As in war, the last one standing was the winner.

But to give you some idea of the true scope of our madness, I will tell you a tale of unmatched bravery, with a bit of bravado, a touch of humor, a pinch of stupidity, and a whole lot of pain.

We awoke one morning to the dazzling sight of a historic ice storm in the city, back in the days when winter could still be expected to behave like winter, and such things were extremely rare. Trees were down, the power was out, the city had been brought to a standstill. Most miraculously, the schools were closed. Bob and I, of course, immediately realized the full potential of the moment, the magical gift we had been given: the entire town had been turned into a skating rink!!! We quickly grabbed our skates and ran out the door to round up some of our skating buddies.

While cruising through the empty streets, we soon recognized a simple but heretofore unrealized fact that, unlike the surface of a skating rink, many streets in our neighborhood sloped down toward the Hudson River, and you could actually ski down them. In fact, someone suggested, if you could find the right streets, you could . . actually . . fly. I don't recall who thought of it first, but suddenly we all looked at one another in a state of electric ecstasy: lying right behind us were the numerous sidewalks of Lincoln Park, many running straight down hill and ending at the icy lake at the bottom. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. What the hell are we waiting for?

We soon found ourselves flying at speeds only dreamed of by other skaters of the world; we were downhill racers with nothing beneath us but metal and ice, crouched for minimum wind resistance, well on our way to establishing new land speed records. But the records were never to be recorded, and are now lost to history. Besides, even if we had succeeded, we ourselves would later smash it more than a decade later, as Bob so beautifully chronicles in his recent post, The Right Stuff. Little did it matter if we did this in a vacuum, though; it was really about the adrenaline. The intoxicating thrill of speed and, oh yeah, the danger.

After each successful run and subsequent laborious return to the top of the hill, we would choose to see who went first. The lead-off run would then set a speed and distance for the rest of us to try to measure up to, and hopefully surpass. On what would turn out to be our last run, Larry won the first slot. He set off tightly coiled down a particularly steep and curvy piece of crystallized concrete. Trouble started about halfway down the hill, though, when his blade hit a crack in the ice, setting him off balance for a split second. That split second sealed his fate.

As he struggled to correct this problem, his skates went out from under him, he hit the ice-coated surface hard, and now found himself flying down the hill in a sitting position, with very little to slow him but the blades of his skates. But it was too late. We knew something was horribly wrong when we heard the scream, a sound like nothing we had ever heard coming from his lips, as he continued to hurtle down the hill. We all instantly set off after him, now a mountain rescue team, to learn what had happened, and tend to our fallen comrade.

Midway down that hill, some anonymous saboteur had thoughtlessly shattered a soda bottle on the sidewalk, just for kicks, I would assume, being somewhat familiar with the phenomenon. Pieces of it were still lying on the concrete when the storm hit, and were now frozen solid to the ground; embedded knives fixed in place as though by Satan, ready to yield maximum pain to its first unsuspecting victim. One particular piece is still seared (frozen?) into my memory: the bottom of the bottle, base down, with several jagged, razor-sharp mountain peaks jutting out of the surface of the ice. Larry hit that thing doing at least forty miles an hour, with nothing to protect him but a pair of well-worn Levi jeans. They may be tough, but they ain't that tough.

Hours later, as we all sat around the hospital waiting room waiting for him to be stitched back together, we couldn't help but crack a few jokes about the event, as boys will. It's an ancient coping mechanism, I believe; probably having helped many a caveboy to get through the night after a particularly bad encounter with a mastodon or sabre-toothed tiger. A number of jokes involved various body parts, as I recall, and what may or may not have become of Larry had he hit the glass just an inch or two in either direction, but I won't go into those details here. Suffice it to say that Larry is living happily ever after, married, with children. 'Nuff said.

Afterthought: All of this, I suppose, was written by the inner boy that dwells within an aging man; a man grateful to this day that he survived the antics of the boy's days of glory, long since past. If you listen real close, though, you can still hear the little guy jumping up and down, shouting, Hey, all you California skating dudes, them skateboards ain't nothin' when the only price you got to pay for a mistake is a few scrapes and bruises and maybe a broken bone or two. You ain't done a goddam thing 'til you come to New York and break the land speed record on a mountain of glass, and pay the full price with half your ass.

Ok, that's it. I've had just about enough! Go over there, sit down and be quiet. I don't want to hear another sound out of you. See, he just hasn't learned yet what the aging man has long since learned: that you can't be immortal forever.

The Migration of the Anglo-Saxons

2007-01-16T10:59:00.000-08:00

To provide a bit more visual context for the previous story, I offer this photo, taken roughly within the same timeframe of those events, with an additional bonus: it includes our trusted steed, the unsinkable '57 GMC panel truck which carried us to some of our greatest adventures from Maine to Cape Cod, from the Catskills to the Adirondacks. Winter or summer, she never let us down. Why, we were actually pre-testing the future retirement lifestyle of a bunch of RV'ers, and livin' our own Kerouac On-the-Road fantasy all at the same time. One of these days we will document the final moments of the old chariot, since she went out in such a blaze of glory.

The photo was taken as we were about to depart for Rendall's wedding, probably in the summer of '66. Rendall, also known fondly as Grendel of the Moors, until this moment was a roommate in the infamous cellar beat pad in Albany, which, like the fine mold growing on its rugs, will produce its own stories on these very pages, in due time. That's me on the left, Rendall in the middle, Bob on the right. Was it really that long ago?

The Right Stuff

2007-01-06T16:21:00.000-08:00

Most people still believe that no toboggan has ever broken the sound barrier. Mick, Marty and I are the only ones who know the true facts of the matter, because together we pushed the toboggan envelope further than it has ever been pushed. There was no one else around at the time, though, so details of that historic occasion are confined to our fading memories, and this humble record of that fateful day. You are therefore asked to pay close attention, since I'm only going to go through this once because of the adrenalin rushes and trembling.

The toboggan ignorance that generally prevailed in the previous century - the early sixties in fact, that unequaled decade - was understandable, since the "sound barrier" was still a relatively new concept in the public mind, as was "heat of reentry." Neither of these phenomena had ever been associated with toboggans, but only because destiny had never before brought together, in the right place and at the right time, the right conditions (i.e., completely icy) and the right men (i.e., completely iced). The Guinness boys weren't there that day because their Book of Records was still just a wee thing; anyway we weren't drinking stout and there was nothing in their book about toboggans.

The new world toboggan speed record required a steep ski slope, completely abandoned by perceptive skiers because of perilously icy conditions, and a toboggan manned by young men full of the right stuff. Things were coming together in that way the universe has with icebergs, unsinkable ships, mountains, college students, what have you. Mick says there were only 3 of us rounding out the wouldabeen Guinness Book crew that day: he, I and the ever-ready Marty, but somehow I can't believe only three of us were that crazy. Surely there must have been more... I have the feeling that there were 4, maybe even 5 tobogganauts aboard, but amnesia has its place. So if you were that fourth or even fifth fellow, please get in touch. I remember Marty was there, because of how far he went beyond our terminus. I remember Mick was there, because of his supersonic torso. I remember I was there, because the ice of fear does not die.

I would have thought Mac was there, we were staying at his family's lodge in New Hampshire, but I asked Mick recently and he said Mac was too sane to have gone up that ice mountain with us, which seems plausible, he being a perceptive skier. At this latterly point in my life it's hard for me to do retrospective sanity assessment with any accuracy; it all looks insane from here. What the hell were we thinking, I can ask now, without feeling too fogeyish. We're all of us men of steel, until one day we regain consciousness and from then on know instinctively that certain actions are not of benefit; the mere recollection of some of them can even induce adrenalin rushes and trembling, so let me get this over with.

It had been flashcold that weekend so we'd spent a lot of time indoors, warming up with our dates and losing perspective on outdoor reality. None of us were skiers (apart from Mac); as city boys we were ice skaters, so in ski country we pretty much stayed in by the fire and partied. But then late in the afternoon of our last day there, rendered dauntless by spiritual consumption we decided that before we departed we had to go out there just one time and show the mountain who was who and what was what, giving no thought to any substantial impact of who against what. There was a toboggan in the loft, so we guys took it out (women are smarter at pretty much all stages of life) and determined to test ourselves against the worst the mountain could throw at us, which, if you think about it in retrospect or at any time without scotch, is quite a lot.

When we arrived in full readiness at the bottom of our Slope of Destiny (a series of gleaming, undulating grades at what in my mind's eye now looks like about a 75-degree angle), it appeared to our happified eyes like a big, beautifully decorated and fun-inviting piece of cake frosted in bright, hard icing. Perfect for skating. I don't know how we climbed the ski run, but we were ice guys, and well experienced with toboggans (always in snow, however), at Lincoln Park, Bowlie's Hill, Synagogue Hill and other speedy slopes around Albany. So there at the top of the run we set up for our one long sunset ride on the historic toboggan: Marty in front, Mick behind him, me at the rear.

We had just pushed off onto the steep glaze and were roaring downward when doubts began to set in as things began to get blurry, the way they do when you get up past 5 Gs; then came the boom as we passed Mach 1 and events began to occur exponentially. My subjective impression was that we lost control even before we went hypersonic, when a brightening glow began to issue from the front of the toboggan as the atmospheric friction corona began to surround us in a womb of light. I suppose that individually we were screaming things like "LEAN LEFT!" "LEAN RIGHT!" "O, GOD!!" and whatnot, mewlings erased by the sonic booms.

The entire launch and reentry took a fraction of a picosecond, if memory serves, setting a new world record; had nothing stood in our way we might have sped on till early summer. If there'd been anything like a ski jump at the end we might even have left orbit, but as I've indicated the mountain headed down. Actually the mountain just stood there unmoving while we went down, setting the de facto - but uncertified - toboggan speed record that has never since been broken or even approached, and I doubt ever will be, given the combined requirements.

As we neared our terminus, one of those old existential questions arose: Why are there concrete stanchions at the bottom of the Slope of Destiny? Beguiled by the scotch and ice of the moment we had failed to notice, down there where the slope administrators would have been working at the time, had they too been insane, a series of concrete stanchions whose purpose even now eludes me. Panzer defense? In a nice, powdery, skiing kind of snow, even the swiftest skiers could stop well before reaching those tank stoppers, but on solid ice like we were enjoying, once you go hypersonic on a toboggan there is no stopping short of the state line, unless you encounter a mountain or its equivalent.

Just before coming to the deadest stop any of us can recall, we'd all been leaning hard right, in vain seeking to avoid our Stanchion of Destiny, which rapidly grew in size and importance until we met it broadside with the toboggan's left edge, closely followed by my 20G left thigh, an impact compounded by Mick's supersonic torso, while Marty wound up in Vermont I believe it was, as Mick and I, still smoking from the heat of reentry, rolled around on the ice howling and unable to rise. Actually, I was doing all the howling; Mick was unable to howl, or breathe at all very much.

While Marty thumbed a ride back to New Hampshire, Mick and I were taken to a doctor, where it was proclaimed a miracle that my femur was intact (eat your heart out, Schwarzenegger), though my left thigh muscle was rendered non-functional for weeks. The impact of Mick's torso upon my knee had broken three of his left ribs. He was taped up tight and gasped well into springtime; I was given a cane with which to hobble from class to class like I was already much older than I am now.

We were young, we were insane, what can I say; that's part of what college is all about, and we completed Downside 101 in a single afternoon. But tobogganing itself remains golden in memory, since we survived. Even now, we survive.

God must have been watching that day and been blown away at the quantity of right stuff in those young rapscallions down there, and decided in her kindness not to let us become the landscape pancakes we seemed determined to be, but to let us off with minor but painful injuries and actual futures, filled with opportunities to avoid the icy slopes of life insofar as possible forevermore. And so we have. To my knowledge not one of us, even with the right stuff, has ever tobogganed down an iced-over ski run again.

Amen.

Merry Christmas To All, And To All A Goodnight!

2006-12-24T13:35:00.000-08:00

'Twas the Night Before Christmas,
by Henry John Yeend King; 1855 - 1924

The Motorcycle Painting

2006-11-29T09:17:00.000-08:00

The Convergence of the Twain

2006-09-16T09:18:00.000-07:00

None of our gang have ever shared this historic moment with anyone before because... well... it reflects negatively on the collective cool of the young gods we were then. But now that we're senior gods and our coolness has tenure, I feel that at last I can lay this legend before the world in all its factual detail.

Events of this quality take a long, long time to come to be; everything has to be just right, the vectors involved are countless. It takes time to get all the cosmic elements set up so that they're precisely in place, as destiny requires. Fate is very fussy that way. We're talking centuries here, even millennia. In 1652, less than 200 years after Columbus kickstarted the whole American adventure, Albany was founded, but it took another 304 or 305 years before the funniest thing that ever happened on the northwest corner of State and Broadway could happen.

And since no one of however devious a mind could have anticipated such an occurrence, there were no journalists on hand to report the occasion, no steadicam helicopters hovering overhead to capture it all on film, so it has been left to me to chronicle that unprecedented event all these decades later, I having survived thus far for this purpose, hopefully among other, nobler purposes.

The players in this unsung historical vignette were myself, Mick, George Calhoun and Marty Zakis, four of the coolest guys on the coolest part of Elm Street, which no longer exists since, after we left, the locality saw no point in continuing. We were strutting southward on the west side of Broadway toward State street, four abreast in a group of native coolness - as was our wont in those heady days of nascent rock and roll, with life in general on the cutting edge of truth and reality – when suddenly before us was a prosperous probably banker/trader type gentleman having likely just closed a very big deal in pork belly futures or something of equally elative power and hastily on his way to another important meeting, who instead of proceeding prosperously on his way was jumping up and down in an unusual manner, with what an instant ago had been a long, hand-rolled cigar, but that was now only an inch long, protruding from his startled lips. The end of the expensive cigar was shattered and splayed like a cheap firecracker, the gentleman himself wide-eyed and gagging because, as it turned out, the greater part of his valuable handrolled cigar had been shoved down his throat by Marty's right ear.

Another key element in this event is coolness. You know what cool is, you've been there, you know what it is to be cool, even when things are hot, and if you've since lived your life in certain key refined ways, you're still cool, like Mick, George and I-- for at this point I have to exclude Marty from those hallowed halls pro tem, since the glowing but absent embers of said fine cigar were now residing deep in said ear, said Marty also jumping up and down, somewhat in the fashion of the prosperously dressed banker but more in the manner of one attempting to get water out of an ear, though in Marty's case the searing flames of hell, Marty leaping more frantically and painfully than the banker while loudly cursing, only as one does in such a unique situation, particularly since - although there is no precedent in all of history to go by, even Columbus didn't know this - one is loathe to poke any of one's fingers into an ear that is crammed to the lobe with the redhot embers of an expensive handrolled cigar, even if it is one's own ear.

Marty was no exception to this rule he himself was establishing at that very moment on the corner of State and Broadway, swatting at the offending organ as it listened to itself crackle and burn. Having thus fled the halls of cool, Marty leaped in several directions of no escape, for our ears follow us closely wherever we go. Head tilted he jabbed at the fiery ear in great haste, said ear the while emitting impressive showers of fine handrolled cigar sparks, sort of like a roman candle in reverse, while the formerly prosperous-looking businessman, who now resembled Oliver Hardy just as the closing credits begin to roll, danced a special kind of crosseyed jig while trying to extract a long and expensive handrolled cigar from his throat without touching the short hot fragment that still protruded, as Mick, George and I did our part by simply rolling on the sidewalk clutching our guts.

After some effort the banker was able to remove the surprisingly long cigar from his throat and go on his way - with a genuine urban legend to hoarsely relate at the meeting - and Marty could stand upright in a wobbly fashion, though his ear was still smoking, as we headed for Woolworth's to ask the lady at the soda counter if we could have a glass of water to pour in our friend's ear.

The next day Marty couldn't hear out of the ear because it was blistered shut, though by then it had became the stuff of legend as a source of helpless laughter up and down Elm Street, laughter the ear itself was able to hear in only a few days.

For the full impact though you just had to be there, and not be Marty.

The Midnight Ride of Danny McNabb

2006-08-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

EVERY NOW AND THEN I get it into my head to make a list of certain things I've done in my life. There's a sense of satisfaction to be gained by stacking up a bunch of items that are normally scattered out over a lifetime, then sitting back and giving them a good long look. Some of them invariably get you thinking, and the patterns that emerge can even give you a new insight or two. Could be anything, like all the cars I've ever owned, or all the houses I've lived in, or maybe all the girls I've slept with. Some of them turn out to be pretty long lists.

My latest is a review of all the close calls I've had; those adrenaline-soaked moments when I've come within a cat's whisker of dying. Considering how I've lived my life, I suspected there might be quite a few of them, and, truth be told, I wanted to see if I was getting close to number nine. While pondering that list, a long ago memory of one of those moments came back with a rush, buried all these years. Suddenly I recalled someone who had been my best friend for all of six months in my freshman year in high school. The mysterious Danny McNabb.

He claimed to be Scotch-Irish and Protestant, but his parents didn't mind if he went to a Catholic school. Apparently he didn't mind either. The first time I saw him was when he strolled into my class at Cathedral Academy in the middle of a school day, and sat down with a sly smile on his face as Sister Marie Frances explained to the rest of us that his family had just moved here from California. You could see right away he was not your average Catholic schoolboy; he was cocky, worldly, brazen; like there was nothing that could faze him. Here he was, a stranger dropped into a strange land, and he seemed to find the whole thing vaguely amusing.

The nuns must've thought they could win him over, bring him into the fold, so to speak; but it was clear from that first day it would never happen. His mind was elsewhere; he was merely tolerating his current situation and was not about to get with the program. What sealed the deal was, when he learned I held the title of Mister Detention for having set a record in that particular department, he began to join me there on a more or less regular basis. We were a bad influence on each other, Father Benson said.

His family was renting a big house on the opposite rim of that great big bowl of green known as Lincoln Park, and I soon got used to making my way over there at all times of the day and night. His parents, who were never home, seemed to be some kind of rich nomads. There was all this stuff just laying around: diamond-studded jewelry, fur coats, leather furniture, you name it. They had more things in that house than I had ever seen in my life, and Danny had the run of the place. He claimed to have lived in every state in the union. There were pictures of him with Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy, things like that. The best part about that house, though, was that we seemed to always have it to ourselves. We threw a few wild parties now and then and drank whatever we wanted from the bar in the dining room. It was at one of these jamborees that we made local history.

I was feeling a little drunk, souldancing in the kitchen to the silky sound of The Five Satins with my girlfriend, when I heard a voice behind me, shouting, Get 'em up, Brady, reach for the sky! I turned to see old Danny boy himself, swaying on his feet, a rifle aimed somewhere in the vicinity of my head.

Put the gun down, you asshole.

No, no, put your hands up, Brady, c’mon.

I'm not kidding Danny. Put the gun down.

Put down the fuckin' gun before you fuckin' kill somebody, someone shouted. He lowered the gun.

Hey, I was only fooling, it's not really loaded. Besides, the safety's on, see?

BLAM!!! A circle of smoke rolled through the kitchen, followed by a stunned silence. The bullet passed through the trash can and lodged itself in the floor below. In the sti-i-i-ll... o-o-o-f... the ni-i-ight, ending in the background. I lunged at Danny, pushing him up against the wall.

You stupid sonofabitch! You could have blown my fuckin' head off! Are you crazy?

He just laughed in my face. Like I said, nothing fazed him.

Hey, take it easy, man. it wasn't your time to go.

I let go of his shirt, walked out the door and headed back across the park, suddenly sober as a judge and shakin' like a leaf. A couple of days later I went back over there and rang the bell for what seemed like an hour. Finally, a neighbor came out on the porch and yelled over at me that the whole lot of them had moved out in the middle of the night, and no one knew where they went. The very next day, she said, a couple of Federal Marshalls were in the neighborhood looking for them.

I had always wondered where they got all their money; Danny said that his father worked for some big company, which also seemed to explain their nomadic life. The jewelry and the furs and the pocketfuls of cash took on a whole new meaning, though, as I began to think back over the last few months. In the end, I concluded that they must have been a family of gypsies, forever on the run, one step ahead of the law; though I'll probably never know for sure. It does seem to be the most logical explanation, though, the more I think about it. They just seemed to disappear right off the face of the earth, and last I heard, criminals aren't eligible for the rapture. If they did make it up there, though, you can bet your bottom dollar they sure as hell would have cleared out of heaven a long, long time ago.

The Island

2006-08-03T14:45:00.000-07:00

It was just about the time when That's Alright, Mama and Rock Around the Clock were hitting the airwaves with sonic dynamite; Mick and I were nouveau-poor city boys and brand-new teens, a tough combination. The cool older guys with Luckies or Camels in their rolled-up t-shirt sleeves had suicide knobs with bathing-beauty pictures in them on the steering wheels of their souped-up late 40's Fords, Chevies and Mercs; the world was a cool place and getting cooler, thanks to all of us. We were ready for anything, and of course it came along.

Being city boys, on city summer nights we'd just hang out on a stoop or a corner, now and then wander the streets looking for city girls, the world's best pizza and whatever else new youth looked for on a balmy night back in those days. But when in one of those souped-up cars we headed out of the city and followed route 9J down along the Hudson River on visits to our cousins' riverside house, we were happily out of our element; country kids do different things in their country nights.

So when one evening a bunch of us just ambled from our cousins' house on down toward the river shore to where one of the country guys said he'd left a rowboat he'd 'found,' we had no idea what we were gladly getting into; we were just heading for the river at sunset, no particular reason, look at a boat, row around, something, anything is great fun at that age except school, and sure enough there was a real rowboat there, quite a big rowboat, and right where no rowboats ever were, which didn’t seem the least bit suspicious to me, anyway a hot rowboat is nothing like a hot car.

Besides, for me all such considerations were erased by the power of the moment: the river scene was like those sepia photos from Civil War days with the mist and the silver light, the calm of the water, and out there across that sheet of silver was the brown-black sliver of the southern end of the island looking like a hundred years ago or so, backed with the crazy-orange of sunset like the fading edge of a dream, the island I'd gazed at so many times as a kid growing up in summers here on this side of the river. I'd always wondered what was over there.

The four or five of us got in the boat and rowed out on the calm water for a while of splashy hijinx until, the island being the only tempting destination within miles, we pulled onto its shore at the very edge of darkness, got out as quietly as any band of night marauders, pushed through the undergrowth that edged the water and found ourselves on the edge of miles of the biggest cornfield this city boy had ever seen, all the more surreal for the starkly diminishing golden light. Absolutely silent. No one around. No one lived there. The workers had all gone home. What's more, the rows and rows of rows were dotted here and there at regular intervals with quadruple-sized burlap bags of just-harvested corn where the big harvester combine had left them, dropped right there before us, as if from heaven, in the unattended silence. Giant bags full of fresh-picked corn all along the hundreds, thousands of corn rows...

You recall how it is in any diminishing light, when the ember of temptation emerges in a group of teenagers, moreso for new teenagers and especially guys, double-especially on their own - like we were on this mysterious, corn-rich island - how that ember ignites out of nowhere, flares up and wavers, then sometimes dies, but more often blooms into a solid flame that lights up the nights of early adolescence? Well in a matter of moments we were as dedicated as any well-paid laborers you ever saw, each shouldering one of those big bags of sweet-smelling corn to the boat, then going back for more until the water was up to the gunnels, but it was calm water, we were skinny; we could make it back across the placid river.

And so we did, quicker and quieter than we'd come. When we reached the home shore our fellow island raiders lugged their big bags off into the dark and home; we lugged ours back to the car trunk and back into the city, where we took what we could eat, then sold the rest to the happy-to-have-really-fresh-corn owner of the Busy Bee supermarket across the street from us on the corner of Hudson Avenue and South Swan Street, where the concrete western edge of Rocky's Folly stands now. We had some food, we had some money, we made some history out of what we had, like memories out of sweet golden nights...

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold War

2006-07-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

AT THE THRESHOLD OF THE SIXTIES - the same year, in fact, that JFK became president - I joined the Air Force. Bob had joined a couple of years earlier, studied Chinese at Yale, and was diligently gathering intelligence in the nightclubs of Okinawa. I was so impressed with this escape plan that I began to consider it for myself. After all, what did I have to lose? I had just squeaked through high school, broken up with my girlfriend, had no job prospects and didn't have a clue as to what to do with my life. I was adrift in the world. Unable to bear a single minute more of nothing to do, I decided to go see this movie that everyone was talking about, a new Hitchcock film called Psycho. I could still catch a matinee at the Palace theater if I could just peel myself off the bank steps.

Perhaps the subtext of this film came a bit too close to my own desperate need to get out of town, I'm not really sure, but I began to get the uncomfortable sense that it was time to get my life in order by the time Marion Crane arrived at the Bates Motel, and I knew I had to take some kind of action after her heart-stopping episode in the shower. By the time her car disappeared beneath the surface of the pond, I had already decided to throw my fate to the wind. I had decided, like my brother before me, to become an international spy.

After slowly savoring my last piece of buttered popcorn, I left the theater and headed down Broadway to the Air Force recruiting center. Within weeks I was standing on the steaming tarmac at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, with twenty or so other clueless recruits, awaiting the ritual shearing and precison herding exercises to follow, which would soon crush any romantic notions I had about being in the military. I had given up a heat wave in purgatory for the flames of hell.

I never did make it to Yale, but wound up studying Russian at Syracuse University, then shipping out to western Turkey to eavesdrop on Russian military activities from across the Black Sea. Situated on an old World War II British air base, our mission was to search out, tape and transcribe any radio transmissions of the Soviet military which might be relevant to NATO security interests. On our own free time, we were allowed to search out, communicate with, and date any women in Istanbul who might be relevant to our own personal interests. We threw ourselves into both missions with great abandon.

Regarding the intelligence gathering, there were a few memorable moments in what was, for the most part, a rather humdrum, monotonous activity; spinning the radio dials, listening to the metallic chatter of Russian bomber pilots on a midnight practice run over Novosibirsk, with an occasional colorful outburst of Russian profanity to keep us awake. One of those moments, however, threw everything we were doing into stark relief, revealing for a brief moment the deadly serious nature of our activities.

On October 16, 1962, JFK learned that there were Soviet missiles in Cuba, and suddenly every movement, every sound coming from the Soviet Union was a matter of life and death for the entire world. This was no longer a game, comrades. For nearly two weeks, our listening post was like the war room in Dr. Strangelove, every soul engaged in a mad and desperate effort to pinpoint and decipher what it was those damn Russkies were thinking and doing.

In the midst of this drama, word began to spread that the steel barrels now surrounding our building contained explosives, and that our commanding officer was under direct orders to blow the place up - with us in it - if the Russkies started to come over the Black Sea. We were top-secret, code-savvy human data banks that the military brass apparently couldn't afford to have fall into enemy hands. Needless to say, we were shocked to learn that we were expendable, that our own government would do this to us. It had a profound effect on the War Room, making the situation even more surreal.

Emotions reached a fever pitch by the 27th, when General Curtis LeMay, Air Force Chief of Staff (and the model for General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove), neglected to enforce Kennedy's orders to suspend all overflights, and a U-2 plane was shot down over Cuba and another nearly intercepted over Siberia. Russia's missile-laden ships were steaming toward Cuba where we had set up a blockade; the irresistable force would meet the immovable object by the morning of the 28th. The world's two superpowers were eyeball to eyeball, and no one appeared to be backing down.

I worked the midnight shift that night, and every single one of us were convinced that there would be no world to go back to when our shift ended. We spent the night sitting around, flipping the dial from the Voice of America to Radio Free Europe, waiting for them to go dead, signaling that we wouldn't make it home to say goodbye to our loved ones, that we would never make it to Paris or Rome. Then, just before dawn, a cheer went up when it was announced over the loudspeakers that Khrushchev had caved; they had struck a deal with us, the installations would be dismantled. We could start planning our trip to Paris.

My career as an international spy ended the following summer, just after we completed tracking Vostok 6, the satellite carrying Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, Russia's first female cosmonaut. On the third night of the flight, we suddenly realized she would be flying right over our outpost. We all filed outside and stood in silent witness as the glow of her spacecraft made its way through the stars overhead, finally disappearing over the Sea of Marmora. It was another of those surreal Cold War moments: a group of young American soldiers standing on the soil of the old Ottoman Empire on a clear, moonless night, connected in some mysterious way with the cluster of Soviet cosmonauts hurtling through space directly above us. In spite of the vast distances and differences, we knew somehow we had shared a profound historical moment, though we would never meet them face to face. A few days later I would be back in the States, soon to begin another kind of war.

The Ratty Sneakers of Happiness

2006-07-07T18:47:00.000-07:00

Even out here in countryside Japan there comes a pre-summer time in a boy's father's life that the boy's mother knows little of, when said father looks at his prepubescent son's awesomely ratty sneakers and with a tear in his eye remembers the equivalently ratty sneakers of his own distant American boyhood when, as summer approached, a sacred desire filled the boy that filled those sneakers, for a new and racy pair thereof in which to run faster and jump farther than ever before toward the summer and the life that loomed, and so it is that the father takes his son into the big city to buy a summer-new pair of really good sneakers, maybe some white high-top Converse All Stars like the father himself used to wear, that got so authentically dirty real quick as he recalls, or maybe a pair of Jack whatsisnames, it was a long time ago runs through his mind as he enters the airplane-hangar-like supersneaker store and his son beelines toward the aerospacefully bioengineered ergonomico-scientific footwear touted by an eight-foot-tall black man whose cutout stands in the corner pointing at the footwear with big looklike dollar signs in his eyes and the son says this is what I want, and the father checks the price and cancels that dream of restoring a '55 Corvette; after all, the kid wants shoes endorsed by a guy who zips a knobbly rubber ball through a hoop 15-20 times on a few good nights a year and for that makes more money in a single season than the father will in his entire life, so why not give the guy the father's salary? At least maybe the son will drool with gratitude, and gratitude drool is worth its weight in gold to the suddenly unmonied father of any gimme-gimme teenager, so the father springs for it, and the son walks out of the store wearing the monetary equivalent of four top-of-the-line snow tires on each foot, and the basketball player can take an extra bimbo out for burritos down in Cancun, and the boy's mother gets to say YOU PAID HOW MUCH FOR A PAIR OF WHAT and within a month or so its ratty sneakers all over again and the father can't help but think how wonderful it is that life relentlessly supplies us with ways to make so many people happy, over and over again like this.

The Mansion of Beer

2006-07-01T18:20:00.000-07:00

Mick, the destruction of Elm Street - and all that heart of Albany now erased - calls for some fine-tuned recollection on our part; we've got to do some glimpses of Elm street history here as we remember it, so I'll begin with a portion of what Rockefeller destroyed, a neighborhood institution I've recalled many times, the Dobler Brewery (which we aimed at with our home runs - Pete Zakis was the only one to ever hit it, as I recall - and which I broke into after it closed down) and what we knew locally as the Dobler Mansion. Erected adjacent to the brewery on the corner of Elm and South Swan streets, it was a true mansion-- built shortly after the Civil War, I believe. It stood right on the southwestern edge of what is now (the concrete wall of) Albany Mall.

The Dobler Mansion was the neighborhood's mansion, something we were all tacitly proud of having in our vicinity. (The only drawback to the brewery's presence was that several times a month the local air was all but replaced by the cloying smell of malt being unloaded...) The name Dobler played a big part in the psyche of the neighborhood, which was also the latterly neighborhood of William Kennedy who - oddly - makes no mention of the brewery in his otherwise quite detailed and excellent book O Albany (see sidebar).

At one point in our frequent movings we lived in an Elm Street brownstone just a couple doors east of the Mansion, where the brewmaster lived and where I used to deliver the Knickerbocker News every weekday evening. I got inside on Saturday mornings when I collected the weekly newspaper fee. The mansion interior was a quiet vision of old wealth and earlier times: polished mahogany staircase and railing, chandeliers, stained glass windows, velvet curtains, ornate doorways to other richly furnished rooms-- a few steps out of my own poor life into another possible world. I shudder to think of all that beauty falling to the wrecking ball... The brewmaster's elegant wife was a kindly lady and always gave me a generous tip, even though by that time the company was already tanking, as tv took hold and big-beer advertising began to rule the business.
Must've been 1959-60 they finally closed down. I was the only one in the neighborhood (that I know of) to get into the brewery after it closed and before it was demolished. One afternoon in the spring or summer of 1960, while on military leave, I climbed from the back porch of our third-floor apartment, scaled the back fence, somehow got into the abandoned brewery and had the run of the place. It had been cleared out hastily; what remained had by then been left lying for some months in the big, silent white rooms. Nothing of what I saw was of particular interest to me, excepting what I realized was a laboratory: I remember wondering what a lab was doing in a brewery, but of course they were always chemically monitoring the beer... Nor was there anything among that equipment or other detritus that to me was worth taking away (what do we know of history at that age), except from the laboratory a small full wooden canister labeled "Magnesium," of which related adventure more in a later post...

That heart of old Albany now lives only in our memories...

Related links: Tour, Genealogy