Humanity Notes

Kanook – Oct, 2009

Sit back and take a stroll back into your memory, whereas if you were lucky
like most my age, you were raised in a small town somewhere in America, or
another country that enjoyed the benefits of the 1950s and 1960s where the
isolation of the little berg tucked away in some corner of planet was our world, our
only world. I had the added benefit of no TV or even a local radio station, where
most of my entertainment came from interactions between my friends and group
functions put on by our parents.
This was small town America, where a trip to a big city by one of our peers
was a major event making them a celebrity when they returned. We didn’t have
access to information telling who was the richest person in the world, or who drove
or owned the latest automobile, we didn’t give a damn – we were at home bent over
the hood of a 49 Ford coupe or a 54 Chevrolet tearing down the engines and putting
in oversized pistons and split manifolds on the straight six’s to get a cool sound, we
might take a can of paint and spruce it up a bit – but this was an option rarely
exercised.
We sat in the local hangout drinking cherry cokes or chocolate sodas, and
there were a few of us that stepped outside behind the building to strike up a Lucky
or a Pal Mall once in a while but even that was rare…and we had our beer parties,
as for drugs – we had no idea what they did or where we could get any. You could
say we were a bit innocent when it came to drugs, whereas we thought a shot of
Novocain in the dentist’s chair was our limit.
As for climate, well the only thing we knew growing up in Southeast Alaska
was if it wasn’t raining it would be shortly, and did we worry about climate
changing? Not a bit, well to be truthful neither did anyone else in our town, we
worried about the fishing season, the hunting season and how many lumber ships
were coming into port for the year, where most of our fathers were longshoremen
and overtime was always a good thing.
As we grew older most of us either worked on fishing boats, or worked the
local canneries, and if lucky some of us got a plum job at the local mill – let me tell
you local hire was the motto of our town, if you were from out of town you either
didn’t get a chance at a job or if one came up it was at the bottom of the pole –
actually no matter your experience you started somewhere below the actual bottom
of the pole. The owners and supervisors of the local establishments knew that if
they violated this little hierarchy strange things might happen, for instance a local
cannery boss hired his brother’s son from Seattle for a high-paying job running a
machine at one of canneries, the next week one of his pallets didn’t make the
Alaska Steamship headed to Seattle and he lost about $7500 – truth be known I had
no idea what happened to it, but word got around that it had slipped overboard
when one of the forklifts slid a bit on the wet dock – hey things happen! His
nephew was moved out onto the unload dock with a $1.50 cut-in-pay, like I said the
town was pretty close especially with their own.
Why we even missed the almost end-of-the-world that was brought about
with the Cuban Missile Crisis, don’t get me wrong we read the Weekly Readers
which we got about a month behind the times, so we really didn’t have to sit and
worry about Kennedy and Khrushchev getting wild with their WMDs, like I said we
were isolated, innocent, not-so-dumb, but in general very satisfied with our own
world of work, study, and play hard. We had a local basketball town team and our
high-school team was so-so, but we had a top notch band, of which I had the honor
of being first chair in the trumpet section, that won top place in Alaska in 62 and 63,
we weren’t bad at all – our favorite music to play was Dixieland and from time to
time we jammed on some pretty cool jazz. That only happened if a few of us had a
few beers before a concert, we had a little tiny girl that could blow the varnish out
of a clarinet, when she got to rockin (after a beer or two) she never failed to bring
the house to its feet. She’d take over the melody and people’s feet not even at the
concert were tappin and thumbs snappin – she is still in my home town, a
grandmother today and the head nurse at the hospital. We had a piano player who
couldn’t read a note of music, the band teacher would have the rest of us stumble
through a new tune and in five minutes “Bugsy” would pick it up and the ivories
would melt. He and I would get together from time-to-time, he would stroll through
a tune and I would pick it up with my muted piece of brass and we’d rock the night
away….hey it was a small town! He retired as one of the senior pilots of Alaska
Airlines a few years ago, and his son Art and him stir up the neighborhood in West
Seattle once in a while banging away on two uprights in his basement – music was
equal to drugs in that little town in Southeast Alaska.
We had a few other diversions beside the regular stuff, another guy and I put
together a 10 watt AM radio transmitter and became the first radio station in the
region, we broadcast on the 1030 band. We played 45s till midnight and on the
weekends broadcast the basketball games. After about 6-months the local Alaska
Communications System big-boss (Sam) caught up with us downtown and informed
us we had to stop, seems one of the local ministers had filed a complaint, we were
knocking out a station from Eureka, California. His daughter was in my class, I took
her out that weekend and poured her out at 1 AM, so full of beer her shoes were
wet – I left her sitting on the front steps of the church. We never did get back on
the air.
Our illegal station was setup in the science lab at school, where the little
transmitter was in a little room facing town with a wire antenna hanging out the
window and our broadcast booth was in another little room across the lab, both
rooms were in the front of the lab, with the blackboard and the teachers desk in the
middle. Before morning biology class started I usually go to the broadcast booth
and setup the nights broadcast schedule, taking the requests that had been
jammed into my locker, sorting through them and writing a little monologue to go
along.
 One Sunday evening when George was behind the mike I took a audio
transformer and peeled the windings (wire, very thin) from the core – sitting there
looking at the extremely thin wire and wondering what I could do with it, a light
flashed on and I took the wire and ran it along the baseboard below the blackboard
to the other room. George was paying no-never mind to my project. I then clipped
the middle of the wire and in the other room attached a 110 plug with one end tied
to the ground side of the electrical system in the building. In the booth I tied the
other end to a high-voltage manual generator, with one end of the coil tied to the
same 110 ground, it had a handle on it that when you spun it would put out a
couple of thousand volts with low or little current…strictly a toy.
Our high school science teacher, from Penn State, had finally found a local
girl and she had asked him to give up smoking, he was about 1 week into his stop
smoking project and would sit on a metal stool with his feet propped up against the
desk and his back against the blackboard, and chew the ends of toothpicks – get the
picture. On Monday I went to school a little early and took the two split ends (very
thin wire remember about the size or a little bigger than a human hair) and
wrapped the stripped end around two legs of the four legged metal stool.
One more item I forgot, we had a mirror setup where we could watch the
modulation index on our 10 watt transmitter, in other words by leaving the door
open a crack we had a clear line of vision between the two room.
At the beginning of the 2nd period class I slipped into the booth, open the door
a crack and waited until he gave the class a section to read, went back to his stool
put a toothpick in his mouth and leaned back against the blackboard and was all
settle in. I said a couple prayers to my ancestors, took a hold of the crank and gave
it a twirl.
A yell that hasn’t been heard in town since erupted from the front of the
room followed by a loud crash caused by his body hitting the floor and his stool
flying under the desk in front of him, and before the dust got a chance to hit the
floor a loud bellow, “Bradleyyyyyyy”, as I ran from the room not looking back I
glanced at the students who by now were standing behind their desks with looks of
bewilderment spread across their faces, looking at a the bottoms of a pair of shoes.
I skidded into the principal’s officer my feet searching for a grip on the
hardwood floors, as I flew into the office Mrs. Fisher looked up at me and said,
“What did you do now?” I sat down with a thud and waited.
We both looked up as Bob came thundering into the office, his black normally
precisely combed hair looking like a moose had passed gas on it and his Jack Web
black glasses tilted sideways on his nose and his mouth spewing forth spittle in
copious amounts. After about 5 seconds he shouted, “I want him expelled from
school.”
All the commotion brought the principal from his office, looking over the
situation he told Bob to go back to class and motioned for me to sit. After Bob left it
took an act of God in Heaven to keep both of them from laughing out loud - both of
their eyes wetting up and twinkling like stars on a cold night. You see, it was well
known that even though Bob and I got along, most of the time, we had this thing
going were from time-to-time we drove each other nuts.
Well I did have to take a couple of days off, but it was worth it I was the talk
of the town as someone had finally got to the college grad from back east, an
outsider. This again it was and is a small town with the associated mentality, Bob is
still there and owns a car rental agency, I rented a car from him when I was there in
1998 – seems like yesterday. We broke bread together, funny neither one of us
brought up the audio coil.
It wasn’t all play, I remember an evening before we were going on a
basketball trip, and the local fire alarm went off – small home town fire departments
in those days were mostly volunteer fire departments. Most all of us H/S boys were
volunteers, that night the temperature was below freezing, water pressure was low
and it was a 10 unit apartment building on fire. It was well on its way when our
trucks pulled up, a friend of mine and I were put in charge of a jeep pumper that
pulled a small trailer that carried about 600 gallons of water, which isn’t much when
you’re fighting a fire. Since the closest fire hydrant was hooked up to the other two
pumpers our job was to go down to another hydrant near the local
drugstore/teenage hangout and fill the tank. The drugstore/hangout was owned by
our districts local State Senator and a good friend of all of us, he and my
grandfather were very close. Our 2nd trip down, Dick pulled up and I jumped out
uncapped the tank and pushed a 5” hose into it and Dick opened the hydrant and
we both started inside to get cup of coffee and warm up, we were barely in the door
when the 5” came flying out of the tank and went smashing through the big plate
glass window in the drugstore spraying water like it had a purpose – and oh well you
know the rest, in short it made a mess. The fire made headlines but right under it
was “two fools cause considerable damage in local establishment”. Not a good
way to make the paper.
A small town has its advantages and its disadvantage, for advantages
everyone looks out for each other, but in the same turn everyone knows when
someone goes sideways, and like I said a time or two the teenagers got together
and popped a beer or two and danced around a roaring campfire on the local beach.
In 1961, after Alaska had become the 49th State of this glorious union a new school
counselor came to town and the town hired a new policeman from New York City.
Well stopping teenage drinking became their goal in life and they both attacked the
“huge” problem with gusto.
Shortly before Christmas the temperature plunged into the single digits and
the local lake about ten miles south of town froze solid – a couple of us hoodlums
drove out examined the situation and got a bunch of other hoodlums together on a
Saturday morning with a couple of chainsaws, 10 gallons of diesel fuel and went out
an constructed a huge (over 20 feet high) pile of wood, tires and cutup spruce trees.
Around 3 PM, as night was setting in we went back into town and the word got
around that there was to be a skating party at Pat’s Lake right after dinner…cars
lined up downtown in front of the hangout, loaded with food, soft drinks, beer and
some hard stuff and of course over 90 kids. We had one large flatbed truck with
bales of hay and boxes loaded with food and about 25 kids all singing Christmas
carols as we made our way out of town. It was a glorious evening and nary a sad
soul was to be found.
Arriving all the vehicles parked with their lights shining on the huge pile of
wood, one of the guys went over took a rolled up piece of paper and went around
the edges lighting the fire, in about 30 minutes the blaze lit up the lake almost to
the other end – it was a sight to behold. We put our skates on, tucked a six-pack
under our arms with our favorite girl tagging along we skated off into the darkness
of the lake with you know what on our mines…not to be unfortunately but that the
price of growing up where everyone knows everyone and honor still had a place in
our society.
Around nine we ran out of beer, a coin was flipped a couple of times and my
cousin Pat, and one of my good friends John and I were elected to make the beer
run back into town, by now it had been snowing for about 3 hours making the trip
back through the snow and beer clouded eyes a bit tedious, we made it past the
cemetery when a pair of headlights pulled up behind us, well Pat panicked and bit
and threw an almost empty bottle of Olympia out the window, which bounced off
the police cars hood. The reds came on and as John pulled over (he had a VW
microbus) all three of us smoked a full pack of Pal Malls before our NYC boy and the
school counselor pounded on the glass – John rolled his window down and Tony
(NYC boy) got a blast of 2nd hand smoke that would have killed an anti-smoking
advocate. Looking us square in the eyes he asked us if we’d been drinking, now
come on even grown-ups know better than to say “Yes”, we tried to deny the
question, but we failed and were hauled off to the local jail – a two cell unit in the
back of the firehouse. No phone call either. On the way back out of town to the
skating party they stopped and picked up the local State bull, Erskine and by the 1
AM all 90 kids were sitting on folding chairs at the local gym and being branded as
first class hoodlums with no future in life and that only by the quick action of the
counselor and the NYC boy were all of us not dead and on our way to the
underworld. By the way, our parents were in attendance and most all of them had
their roots in this small town, and most all of them had done similar things in their
teenage years…we still were in trouble mind you, it just that parents being parents
they didn’t appreciate the little outsider branding their children as agents of the
devil…not one bit. The all went up and put their John Henry on a piece of paper and
we all went home with our parents having a good grip on one of our ears. We paid
our penance to the parents and life went on, most of us got scolded for being stupid
and were told to keep our ways on the up and up at least until New Years Eve.
Small towns you gotta love them.
Us kids weren’t always on the other side of the law, although we did have our
share of trouble but like me most of us had our grandparents living in town and they
made sure the kids towed the line when it came to the elderly that did not have
grandchildren or children living in town. Most all of the homes had wood stoves,
where just some of newer homes had oil stoves – it was our job to make sure that
the elderly has chopped wood in their wood sheds, so before the winter set in we’d
commandeer a couple of flat beds go down to the local mill and load them with
scrap. Take the loads around dumping them and a couple three guys staying to
split and fill the wood shed, we did this every year that I can remember as the
teenage boys before us did the same. The pay was a cup of hot coco and
sandwiches I can still taste, prepared with salmon, venison and jars full of love – the
only kind to have, you can go to the most expensive place in the Universe and
never taste or appreciate any better.
The life in a small town has changed, I’d bet you good money that today you
cannot walk down a street and see people sitting on their front porch, or even find
a local baseball game where the adults are getting their pants whipped by a bunch
of wild and wooly teenagers, with a barbecue going and hotdogs and hamburgers
served by moms and their girls – you’d have to look long and hard. If you live in
such a town that knows when to turn off the TV and participate in things like this,
don’t move!

Kanook