Summer in the Early Sixties

“Sit down…shut up…we’re doin’ four hundred miles today.”

I don’t think my Dad actually ever said these words, but we kids joked about them enough as years passed that they became part of the family lore related to our summer vacation road trips from Toledo, Ohio to Holderness, New Hampshire and back. While he may not have actually used these exact words, as my Mom would have doubtless objected strenuously, the modus operandi for this trip was pretty clear. No stopping unless absolutely necessary.

The Old Man was not someone who was prone to strong language like that or of any kind, and certainly not profanity, being the Man of the Cloth as he was. If he ever swore, and it was never any of the really obscene swearwords, you knew you had gotten his attention. I recall him muttering a seething “Goddammit!” under his breath after I told him I had totaled his brand new, emerald green Pontiac Tempest provided to him by the church.

And then there was the New Year’s Eve road flare’s leaking out burning embers from the front yard through an open door onto the family room rug. And what about the Halloween night my hoodlum friends and I were caught by the local constable egging the local movie theatre? Did I mention my Dad was a minister in the community?

Oh, well, his use of salty language might have been more prolific had I spent more time living at home. Sending me off to boarding school must have helped with the old blood pressure.

The road trip to New Hampshire would come in August, and summers growing up in Toledo as a preteen were really wonderful. In June and July it was all about baseball. It was just what I did, constantly, devotedly, myopically, day and night as I both played baseball and listened to the Detroit Tigers on my transistor radio to. Living in Toledo, I was a Tiger fan, but my Dad was an Indian fan, and each of us was equally devoted. We did a trip to Cleveland once to see a Sunday doubleheader, and then he felt obliged to take me up to Detroit one time.

Briggs Stadium my Dad told me was in kind of a rough neighborhood, and I remember him ordering a beer in a tavern we went to for lunch. My Dad wasn’t a beer drinker, so I figured he was just trying to fit in. When the Indians traded Rocky Colavito to the Tigers, I was elated and the Old Man went into a several year deep baseball depression. That gave the Tigers an imposing line-up of hitters in the 3–4–5 spots (Kaline, Colavito, Cash) that let them challenge the hated New York Yankees.

But, yeah, I lived and breathed baseball in the summer, and not just Little League. My daily routine was to “go out and play.” That’s what Mom would say, shooing me out of the house early to go to the playground or someone’s backyard for a pick-up game, and it didn’t matter how many were on a side.

We had games made up for all number of players, and I was quite content to pitch a tennis ball against the garage door or play with a pitch-back for hours on end. Maybe you don’t remember the pitch-back, but it was this netted thing that flung the ball back to you after you heaved it in its direction. With just three people too, you could play “base runner” as one kid would try to steal a base between two others playing catch.

A baseball glove was daily appended to my left hand, so much so that without it I felt like something was missing. One year I lost my Jackie Jensen and had to ignominiously use by sister’s Gus Bell. Miraculously, a summer later I found the Jackie Jensen under the bush that had hid it and kept that wonderful glove until the palm completely rotted out about the time I graduated college. I still have my sister’s Gus Bell. I wonder if she knows that.

But the transistor radio was my connection to the world of baseball outside of Toledo. I vividly recall listening to the seventh game of the 1960 World Series between the New York Yankees and Pittsburgh Pirates when Bill Mazerowski hit the home run shot literally heard around the world. I was 9 years old, walking home from school, listening to that little shitbox cream-colored transistor radio I’d dropped a hundred times and taped back together. Forever after, I was a life long fan of baseball via radio. Still am.

And that was largely my summer gig until August. It was mostly baseball for me, but also the neighborhood gang playing kick the can, sneaking over the fence and digging foxholes in the wooded area behind the Old Ladies’ home, and getting into trouble and learning to smoke Parliament cigarettes my Cousin John Bennett stole from his mom and an occasional trip to Frisch’s Big Boy with my Aunt Betty. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. Eating in the car! And orange pop. My Mom never had pop in the house, but Betty bought me a Big Boy, fries and orange pop that I ate off the glove box door that turned into a tray in her little Buick Special.

The Old Man took all of August off, and we started to go to New Hampshire soon after I was born, took a brief respite for a few years in Michigan where my three sisters and I all learned to water ski, and then headed back to New Hampshire for decades to come.

The cool thing about a preacher’s family is that you get your living accommodations taken care of by the church, and that includes a good deal of your vacation digs donated by nice parishioners or in exchange for a month of sermons and salvation at the local chapel. We weren’t a well to do family, but were able to live pretty well thanks to the perks of being employed by the One and Only.

The Old Man though was notoriously tight with a buck. He wanted his kids to have what they needed, to be sure, but in my mind he evolved a pretty deep reputation of being, let’s just say, somewhat frugal. Always turning out the lights, turning down the heat and whining about the length of the long distance phone calls. When we went on the August trek to New Hampshire, the big deal was we’d stay in a motel with a pool about half way somewhere between Rochester and Syracuse, and we’d always eat at HoJo’s.

The Old Man really loved the fried clams there, and while he wasn’t really big on sweets, he did have a thing for ice cream. But we’d sit down for dinner and he’d let us kids know, “You can have anything you want, but not the steak!” Yeah, that’s what we all wanted, and my sister Mimi tried to order one more that once.

The typical trip involved the five of us, as my two oldest sisters were off exploring the world. Mom, Dad, my sister Mimi, me and Muffy the Ratdog. In the powder blue Pontiac station wagon packed front to back with a month’s worth of clothes and various provisions, on the hottest days of the summer, with no air conditioning, windows open with the Camel chain-smoking Old Man. My Mom smoked a little, but not as incessantly as Pater Noster. I don’t remember us listening to the radio that much, but I do remember my father liked to whistle a tune, and he was a championship whistler, that’s for sure.

Muffy the Ratdog was a mutt that had enough Labrador genetic material in her that she looked a little like a miniature Lab, but greasier. And during these trips she would shed incessantly, so there was dog hair everywhere. And hot dog breath. And dog spittle, dripping from her hideously ever-present tongue. She would set herself up behind my Dad, who always did all the driving, with her front paws on his seat back and her muzzle on his shoulder, her ears flapping in the wind. A man and his dog. For 750 miles.

Meanwhile, Mimi and I would swelter in the back seat trying very hard to stay away from the dog and not touch each other, and when that happened all hell would break loose. Mom would pack a well-iced lunch, because the Old Man liked butter and mayo on his ham sandwiches. This is a man that also ate bacon and eggs cooked in bacon grease and toast slathered in butter every day of his adult life and was not real big on green things, but with a variety of marginal life style choices including virtually no vigorous exercise still lived to be almost 80.

But Muffy was a special hound. She had hung out at the downtown Toledo church my Dad headed up, and he brought her home for the kids. Being a stray, she always had a voracious appetite. I loved to watch her eat. My Mom would open the can of Rival dog food and she would start to pant lasciviously. Then Mom would scoop out the whole can into the bowl, and the mutt’s eyes would get this crazed look on them and she would start to whimper, her whole body wagging apoplectically.

Then Mom would set the food down and she would inhale it with these loud chomping sounds, occasionally gagging on the obscene volume, but completing the task in mere seconds. It was astounding for the two decades I witnessed it.

Once she grabbed the Thanksgiving turkey off the counter that Mom and set out, not unlike the Bumpus dogs in the movie The Christmas Story. It was sad because the antique platter was destroyed, and I wasn’t sure Mom wasn’t going to eradicate the pup. Not many dogs live as long as she did, an estimated twenty years, then she just wandered off into the sunset, disappearing into the Westchester woodlands one fall day, never to be heard of again, according to my mother. Old Yeller comes to mind.

For years each summer the two-day car ride east was the start of the family vacation. Once we got to Holderness, the “first order of business” according to my Dad after we unpacked the car was a “dip” in Squam Lake, regardless of the hour or weather. Then, a trip to the local market to grab some Cott’s Concord Grape Soda and Wise Potato Chips, which I was convinced were only sold in Holderness, New Hampshire.

And after dinner, there were the marathon card games of Hearts and popcorn with an astounding amount of butter and salt, and usually on chilly nights and mornings, a fire in the fireplace. My dad would always throw in one pine log despite the creosote, just because it smelled so darned great, and just like New Hampshire.

If I close my eyes, I can smell that fireplace right now.

(Photograph by J.E. Hargate)