Big Universe

Except for that encounter with my dad and a paint can, I don’t remember living in Pennsylvania. We moved to Ohio when I was about 4- or 5-years old.

I do remember visiting Pennsylvania a lot. It was a 3 hour drive from our home near Akron, Ohio. I was a kid so I didn’t drive, that made the ride an adventure. I delighted in it. Knowing we would soon be at the farm, a place of which I was genuinely fond.

It’s hard to imagine my dad and mom being in their 30s when I was 10. My dad was often on the road, driving truck, which left mom at home with 4 children when she was in her 30s. 

Even my memories of Ohio are spotty. What I mean by that is, they don’t feel linear like many other later memories do. My time in the Air Force is pretty linear. My married life in my 20s and 30s flows along pretty smoothly. But my idyllic childhood in the Akron suburbs jumps from incident to incident. 

The nearby canal, playing football across multiple backyards, going to my first movie without parents (Kid Galahad), swimming in the lake and breaking my ear drum. The timing of all these incidents are mixed up. I can only speculate about how old I was and most of those memories are influenced by dreams.

My dreams often take place in Ohio or at the Pennsylvania farm. For many years, one dream I had involved going home from Highland Park School (where I attended grades 5 & 6). In my dreams I get stuck in one area between the school and our church because there was a deep chasm in the way. It was easy to get into but difficult to get out.

Years later, I was traveling in the area and I decided to drive around my old neighborhood. Surprisingly, even though I had never driven there, the roads and the route were so familiar to me that I found my way to our old house at 2960 Pikes Avenue with ease, without a map. As I drove past Highland Park School, I discovered that the area between the school and the church was a cemetery. In my dreams it was just dark and scary. 

The canal at the end of Pikes Avenue really is the famous Ohio & Erie canal. We were told to stay away from it. Of course, that made us want to go there even more. It was a barrier between our neighborhood and what seemed like a very wild forest on the other side. Unless we wanted to swim across, which we didn’t, that area on the other side was a far away land. The bridge to cross was a long walk, all the way out to Manchester Road, which was a major highway. We didn’t want to go there. In the other direction, about the same distance, was a railroad trestle bridge. That was even more dangerous in our minds but much more interesting. And less likely to be found out.

We were closer to the town of Barberton than Akron, near the Firestone Country Club, famous at the time as a PGA event site. Portage Lakes is a small little neighborhood pinched off from the big city by the freeway on one side and green space on the other side of the canal. A perfect little grid of streets tailor-made for boys to roam in safety and freedom. I had a red bike with fenders and a tank between the seat and the tasseled handlebars

Schwinn Red Phantom Tank Bicycle

That bike and my homemade skateboard were my ticket to any place I wanted to go within that enclosed space. We knew the shortcuts through the yards. We knew which friends houses we could just walk into without knocking. We played football across multiple backyards. We played baseball in the street. We played army and cowboys everywhere. We knew what time to go home for dinner, without a clock, mostly mom yelled and we ran home. 

Until I went off to school by myself, my brother Todd was my best friend and constant companion. I was born in 1952, Todd in 1954. So when I went to full-time school at age 6, he was 4 and got left behind — so says my mom. I know we did play together for many years after that. He was always part of our sports games and always my trusted sidekick in the army or cowboys. (Me on the right)

I was intrigued by and often in love with neighborhood girls. I occasionally played house with them and by the time I was in 5th or 6th grade, I would pick one out every year to be in love with. I asked Janet Canning to a dance in 7th grade, but we were both too shy to make it work. She went to the dance with other girls and I went with boys and I’m pretty sure we danced but mostly I watched. I kissed a girl in 7th grade — after walking her home one day. She gave me her picture which I carried in my wallet for many years. I don’t remember her name. I doubt I still have the picture.

Later my best friends were boys I met at school who didn’t live in my neighborhood. The most important was Mike Marcus, who was an amazing artist and cartoonist. He inspired me to become a filmmaker by always being interested in my stories and by illustrating and storyboarding for me. We were inseparable during Junior High. I would write stories with us as characters. Mike Marcus became art director at the Akron Beacon Journal. I’ve never been able to connect with him since I left Ohio for Albuquerque. We might have a lot to talk about as former newspaper guys.

As I said earlier, my memories of Ohio are disjointed:

Listening to kids talk about JFK during the 1960 election. Listening to the radio in school as Alan Shepard went into space. A friend who’s mother died of cancer. I think I went to a funeral once with my parents but never went into the room with the casket. I went for a walk alone in the neighborhood instead and remember it as a spiritual experience. 

Once when I was at a tire store with my dad and brothers, I encountered a man who talked to me in one of the aisles. He wanted something, but by the time I brought my dad back to help him, he was gone. For many years that encounter played in my head as a visit from an angel who was checking up on me.

Angels and God were a part of my life experience at the time because we went to an Evangelical United Brethren Church. Their teaching revolved around “The Revelation” and how we needed to be God-fearing and good Christians so we could rise into heaven during the rapture. In catechism we had to learn all the books of the Bible. At Christmas I was part of a drive-by living nativity (I think I played an angel) at the church. I don’t remember making any friends there, but it was an experience that really put me off religion. Later, when I studied and embraced philosophy and spirituality, I was glad to have had that experience in order to make some comparisons and have first-hand background knowledge of religion. 

Life in the early 60s in Portage Lakes was about riding bikes, playing football or softball in the yard or street, dressing up to play army. Warm days in the summer we slept outside in a tent in the backyard. Freezing days in the winter we ice skated on the patio on a rink my dad made for us. My dad was always working on a car.

My mom was always there for us with food and comfort. We probably drove her nuts because she raised us by herself (my dad was a long-haul truck driver). I doubt she knew where we were but life was different … kids just disappeared for hours during the day and came home when mom called us for dinner (not on the phone, she literally yelled our names.) Breakfast was a bowl of cereal. Cheerios were my favorite, with spoonfuls of sugar on top. Lunch was peanut butter and jelly on white bread. Dinner may have been macaroni and cheese.

My mom says we never ate vegetables except corn (creamed corn was one of my favorites). I remember mashed potatoes with gravy, dinner rolls with gravy, chicken with gravy, pot roast with gravy. 

I must have taken a bus to school to Innes Jr. High and Kenmore High School. I know it was unusual to walk home from school at the time. I even got in trouble once because it took so long to walk home. We stayed after school to see a movie, “Them”, about an invasion of giant ants mutated by atomic radiation. 

The movie was made in 1954 but we had to have been watching it at school in 1964ish. During the walk home we stopped at B&K Root Beer and arrived home at dusk.

While we were having a great time being scared every time we walked over a manhole cover (out of which giant ants might emerge), my parents were not amused.

Usually getting in trouble meant getting grounded for a week that really turned out to be a night — or never. I never really did anything bad. I was curious and a little reckless. We explored everything and while we knew it may not have been “right”, we never had any intention to do harm and as far as I know, we never did harm anything or anyone.

Until I was a teenager in Albuquerque, my encounters with police were mainly for trespassing, once when I was exploring a construction site and once when we were exploring a nearby warehouse area that we thought was abandoned. Both times the cops said we would have juvenile records but I doubt anything was ever written about the incidents. My parents were probably embarrassed for a few moments, but also knew I wasn’t doing anything “bad.” They trusted us and could not imagine any of us becoming criminals. I stood in front of them and listened to them tell me how wrong I had been, then went right back to doing whatever I wanted to do.

Life as a kid in the 1960s was freedom. I was on top of every garage in the neighborhood. I played on the railroad trestle. I carried toy guns and played in the street and dug holes in empty lots. We built forts out of poison oak and talked to strangers and ducked under locked fences. We played outside in all seasons. But we never stole anything, or got into fights, or said anything bad about anyone. 

I was a good student, but terribly bored with how easy school work was. I put in just enough effort to pass, unless it was something that really interested me — like history. I was inspired to read everything I could on the subject. School libraries were my haven. When I discovered sci-fi in Jr. High, I became obsessed. Robert Heinlein was my favorite. “Tunnel in the Sky”, “Farnham’s Freehold”, “Starship Troopers”, “Stranger in a Strange Land”. I probably read every book he wrote. It was during Jr. High that I began writing like mad. Sci-fi. TV scripts. Comic books. 

Superheros and war stories were my favorite comics. Batman, Green Lantern and eventually Spiderman topped the list. I may have once owned Spiderman #1.

I’m sure my mom eventually threw all those comics away. We didn’t think of collecting them. Comics were for reading and discarding. War comics were “The Haunted Tank”, “Sgt. Fury” (later Nick Fury), “Sgt. Rock”.

I was a DC guy. Other than Spiderman, Marvel comics were never too interesting to me. Maybe Fantastic Four. Spidey was cool because he made jokes all the time while fighting. Archie and Uncle Scrooge were also in my area of interest. Archie because of the girls. Scrooge because of the writing. 

Comic books, especially Batman taught me a lot about movie making. Comics are storyboards with long, medium, closeup shots. In many comics the point of view is “locked down”. The story moves but the POV does not. Batman comics showed me that POV could change. Each frame could be of varying size bringing more importance to one piece of the story.

As I read books the words created a world for me that gave my mind a view that was entirely my own. Comics and movies added a dimension that filled that world out in the way an author or visionary wanted us to see it. Saying it is a “dark and stormy night” is one thing, showing it is another. Both have merit. Both caught my imagination and inspired me.

Paying homage to great comics or movies is a huge part of my story. Great writing is paramount. Story-telling drew me in and words kept me reading. I used to read the dictionary and the phone book and encyclopedias. Each had stories embedded in them that I needed to explore. Recently a Facebook page for teachers posted a photo and directed readers to write a story based on the picture with 6 words or less. Not a caption, a story. Those six words may not have told the whole story, but they are often enough to set one’s mind on fire. 

That is one of the ways I learned to write. A teacher in Jr. High gave us a picture and said to write a story based on the picture. I loved that approach! I also learned that what inspired me was the praise that I got from the teacher. When I was a newspaper reporter and editor, I used to sit in a coffee shop and watch people read my stuff. They didn’t have to say anything but often it was enough to see them interested and continuing to read. This memoir may not be great writing, but it does pull on me. It is an exploration of what I was, and what I am.

So I guess my early education was really about exploration. There is a big universe out there and I still want to see it all.