Cell Phone Towers in Ridgewood

First it was the installation of solar panels on utility poles and now it is cell phone towers which are making headlines in Ridgewood. Both are technological advances designed to make our lives more sustainable and convenient so on first glance why are residents making such a fuss?

Of course, it is easy for me to judge as I live in Forest Hills, NY and have towers all around me, as well as jets from La Guardia airport passing overhead on a regular basis. You could say this makes me immune to the beauty of nature and the tranquility of a quiet day. Though I knew what I was getting into when I moved here and scenic beauty and quiet afternoons were not part of the bargain of living in the Big Apple.

My hunch is that residents of Ridgewood are up in arms because the rules of the Village are seemingly being changed. I'm not here to argue about Master Plans or the particulars of zoning laws. I'll just point out that if you asked a resident whether they ever thought there would be solar panels in their southern facing front yards or cell phone towers on empty lots, they probable would have said no. It's not part of the idyllic image which Ridgewood cultivates so carefully.

It will be interesting to see how this works out, especially in an era where sources of new tax revenue are few and far between. These cell phone towers do bring in rental money and once you put up one for T-Mobile the other Telco Carriers will come with their checkbooks open. I could see this as being hard for a cash-strapped village government to turn down.

Gum Day

I actually had a teacher in the 6th grade, Miss Jensen, who would let us chew gum on Fridays. It was called Gum Day and you had to be on your best behavior and sitting in the book reading area of the classroom. This section had a couple of old comfy chairs and was screened off from the windows so passer-bys wouldn't see this limited bit of anarchy which was going on in our classroom.

This truly was an anomaly I believe for any classroom in Ridgewood. I can't think of any other teacher in my thirteen years spent in the Ridgewood Public Schools who condoned the chewing of gum during school hours.

Gum chewing was confined to after school where some of us learned to blow bubbles to various degrees of dexterity. I never learned to blow a bubble because I didn't like the taste of Bazooka Bubble Gum which was the standard by which all bubbles were judged. I liked the gum which came in the nickel packs of baseball cards ( 5 cards and a stick of gum). Though it was inferior bubble blowing gum so I would either chew it or throw it away.

Some of you may even remember the introduction of sugarless gum and one preposterous commercial produced by Dentyne. In the ad they stated, that if you chewed Dentyne after a meal you didn't need to brush your teeth. It went to show how brazen a fraud some companies were willing to try on a gullible public. This commercial lasted for months before being pulled from the airwaves after protests from dentists and parents alike.

Teaching Cursive Writing

Cursive writing was taught to everyone in the Ridgewood School System usually in the third grade. We were admonished to write our signatures neatly as this would likely be the same style we would use for the rest of our lives.

Implied in this warning was the strongly held opinion that something we did now would have repercussions much later in our lives. The same thing was said about cracking one's knuckles but to this was adding a warning about some hideous deformity which would surely afflict one's hands if you continued to crack your knuckles.

I heeded the second warning but am one of many I know who has let their cursive skills atrophy. The fear now is that with the use of computers some students many never learn cursive, except to sign their names. This would be a shame as there is an artistic skill which can inherently be taught along with cursive writing, even if I am not an art lover who makes this a personal practice.

Some educators are going as far as to complain that children are "losing time where they create beauty every day." These same people have a hard time making this a practical argument for cursive. Probably because they are mourning the beauty and the aesthetics of an increasingly lost artistic skill as well as an ability to read historical documents like the US Constitution in its original form.

Though this begs the question whether cursive is a 21st century skill. I am on the fence as to whether it is one. I do remember being kept after school because my handwriting was bad, though a lot of good this did me.

I have no problem with the teaching of cursive if it is placed in the context that those who learn to write by hand learn better. I recall it mostly as a rote exercise devoid of attempts at creating something appealing to gaze at or that by learning to write clearly by hand would make me a more capable student in the future.

Sometimes all it takes is a change of context for a seemingly cryptic lesson to become, in the words of the poet John Keats "a thing of beauty." In the end the argument for teaching cursive might come down to whether we want to teach our children be added that a thing of beauty can also be a joy for ever.

Solar Panels in Ridgewood

It's hard for an outsider like myself to come down on either side of the argument about the aesthetics of solar panels being mounted on PSE&G utility poles in Ridgewood. Our old house didn't have the southern exposure these panels require so we probably wouldn't have had a quarrel to pick. Though I can see how they might be an eyesore to some who once had a view and now found they were on the frontline in the fight to expand the use of clean energy in New Jersey. There hasn't been much warning according to reports in today's New York Times. People say they have left their homes for a few hours and returned to find the solar panels installed and the installers long gone.

There is talk in the village of steering the installations to the roofs of schools and that to me makes sense. As a matter of prudent public policy and as a teaching moment for students, placing them on the flat roofs of the public schools might very well be the best solution. Nobody is talking badly about solar power in general it's just how they look in someone's front yard and how that might lower the value of the property. If the installation of solar panels somehow lowered homeowner's property taxes there might be a line of people volunteering their utility poles. It might be difficult to place a dollar value on a view from one's front window but given enough incentive I bet people would name a price where suburban aesthetics could be bought.

HDTV

Let's be clear about one thing: no matter how much I might characterize the 1960s and 70s as a golden time to grow up in Ridgewood, there is still one thing without question which is better now: TV. We had channels 2,4,5,7,9,11,13, and the UHF (Ultra High Frequency) if you wanted to be adventurous. We had mostly black and white sets with rabbit ears and there was no cable or remote controls.

Today I can lay in bed at night and watch my Yankees live in HD (High Definition) or record them and watch something else. I can mute the sound at my whim and channel surf to my heart's content. It would probable do my heart good to get up and change the channels and volume like we used to do, but I'm not going to look this gift horse in the mouth. The fact that the picture is so sharp you can see the players sweat just adds to the experience.

While TV has become better it has also become a more personalized and solitary experience. Sure we still gather around the TV on occasion but with no where near the frequency as when we watched rockets blast off into space or for funeral processions of slain presidents. We don't even pay attention to the commercials anymore and nobody gets a laugh by repeating Alka Seltzer catch phrases like, "I can't believe I ate the whole thing" or even Wendys, "Where's the Beef?"

I'm not the one to judge whether this loss of a collective memory of what was on TV the night before is good or bad. It likely is just another sign of the times and what most people call progress. Nobody I know wants to give up their remote, or their cable connection, or HDTV and trade for an old black and white. Though I bet someone in the future will draw the connection between the obesity epidemic in this country and the introduction of the TV remote control. I don't believe we are watching more TV we are just naturally not getting up as often as we used to in order to change channels or fuss with the antennas. All those calories we used to burn are one day going to be estimated and give everyone pause for thought.

Baseball Played Without The Lines and Bases

It is impossible to travel through Ridgewood these days and not marvel at all the well groomed ball fields. There are more now than when I was growing up and they are infinitely better cared for by the Village. I am glad for the children living close by as these are good places for them to learn about life and the fine lines of differences between us all.

I can recall as a youth how when it rained the Willard School field would flood and the water would stand for days. It would produce a mud, in the outfield particularly, which made for many comical moments for these unlucky enough to have the outfield as their position. We called it the "Creek Mud" and one unlucky soul even had this nickname awarded to him after one very memorable slide through the creek mud in an attempt to field a ball.

It's funny to me now how our games were played with rags for bases, foul lines which were approximated and always a source of contention, and with various patches of grass in the outfield that no suburban homeowner would ever allow to grow on their property. All of these obstacles didn't deter our desire to play baseball. These were just incorporated into our games and became variations on a theme which could be played with a full contingent on each side or with half the outfield designated as foul territory. If somebody who didn't know the rules of the game had watched us all day they would have become quite confused as to what we were doing. You see, baseball could be played off the wall, off the steps, with a kickball, on a stickball court, and on any manner of baseball diamond we might configure. We might play with a hard ball, softball, red kickball, wiffle ball, or tennis ball. It was all the same to us, but to a stranger it would have been a real head-scratcher for someone to say them that we were all playing the same game.

RHS Class of 1973 40th Reunion

According to the folks on the planning committee of the RHS class of 1973 40th Reunion"

"Well we got together back in December for our first 40th reunion meeting - after all the laughs and inevitable memories and a few drinks we finally talked about places.

Attending were John Wescott, Frank Petrucci, Terri Dimodugno, Jack Wolfstirn and Rick Flannery (missing that day was Tom O'Connor). We met at the Village Grill in Waldwick. We will be meeting again in April! Frank is back in New Jersey!! Frank's another one of those ageless classmates - can you age please!

Hey you're not gonna want to miss this one everybody - its gonna be good! Teachers will be there too!"

Godzilla

A contribution from Jim Schoneman, RHS class of 1974


When older men recall their younger days, there is a tendency towards a selective ransacking of thoughts. It’s not intentional. More likely it has to do with survival. After five or more decades, if we were to remember everything as it actually happened, and then put it all together in one collective notion, many of us would volunteer to spend the rest of our lives in prison. Bill Heavey had it right when he said "that memory doesn’t give a damn what you think." We should be thankful for that.

But there are certain memories that withstand the whack job we politely call “time.” Some of those moments, and one in particular, I recall with clarity. But hardly anybody believes me, because there’s no such thing as a hundred pound snapping turtle.

Several years ago I was out fishing some northern Wisconsin back bay with a friend. Dean and I had been fishing partners for many years, and all you need to know about him is that when the game warden shows up, you want Dean in your boat.Dean and I have a longstanding agreement that if his ploy doesn’t work, then I’ll pay the fine.

We were fishing in early June, and even though the ice had gone out only a month previous, the weeds in this bay had already started to clog its warmer and quieter water; but that’s where the fish were. We casted the edge of the weeds and picked up some perch and bluegills, and the occasional walleye. Then the snapper showed up. By any measure, he was a big snapper; and we watched him while he quietly circled our boat, acting as if he had some previous experience with a fisherman’s leftovers.

When a snapping turtle is in the water, you can only see the top of the turtle’s shell and his snout sticking out above the surface. As a result, the best way to gauge size is to eyeball the distance between the snout and the part of the shell that is visible. Based on our hayseed assessment, it was clear that this was a high ranking cooter.

Dean was impressed. So much so that he put down his walleye rod and proceeded to rig up his hefty musky pole with the strongest and thickest hook he could find. He grabbed a sickly bluegill from the livewell, threaded it onto the hook, and threw it within striking distance of the snapper. Anticipating some form of prehistoric entertainment ahead, I sat down in the boat and popped open a Blatz. As an afterthought, I told Dean that he was going to need a stronger hook.

The snapper took the bait, and Dean managed to drag it to within 10 feet of the boat before it became aware of the minor inconvenience. Then the turtle simply dove into the weeds and dug his claws into the mucky bottom. It was slight bother for the submerged turtle, but above water Dean was picking himself up off the floor of the boat. The turtle had floored him, and he reeled in his slack line to find that his hook was now shaped like a fat toothpick.

“Did you see the size of that monster?!” Dean said. I had, and I was feeling quite satisfied when he was reminded of my warning about the need for a stronger hook. After reassuring Dean that he sure was a big old thing, I took another swig of Blatz, and silently reflected on that other turtle; the one I had seen and battled 30 years earlier. There was no point in mentioning it to Dean. It would only serve to spoil his queerly glorious turtle moment. I knew how Dean felt.

Back at the tavern, Dean proceeded to regale the patrons with the story of his turtle battle. It was fun to listen to, if only because Dean was a good teller of tales. But there came a point when the nonsense needed to be silenced, and I interrupted his story and told him, and everyone else in the bar, that I had once hooked into a hundred pounder. Then I held up my arm and stretched out my fingers, and pointed to the area between my elbow and fingertips. And then I said “His front foot was that big, and his claws were as long as my fingers.”

That got everyone’s attention, because this was a fisherman’s bar, and everyone in there knew that there’s no such thing as a hundred pound snapper, with claws as big as your fingers. Now I had to back up my preposterous claim with an even more preposterous story. But that was easy, because this story was true. I had once hooked into Godzilla.

Around the time South Vietnam fell to the communists, I got a job as a summer camp counselor. That would put me there about 1974 or ‘75, depending on which side you talked to. The camp was located in Harriman State Park, in lower New York state, and was situated on the banks of tiny Lake Stahahe.

Lake Stahahe was a small mounatin lake, perhaps 100 acres in surface area. It was long and narrow, and about 20 feet in its deepest hole. At its northern end there was a concrete dam that held back a ten foot head of water; so in its original state, Lake Stahahe was probably no more than a wet pothole, surrounded by bog. Once through the dam, the waters of Stahahe Brook flowed north, until it reached the upper stretch of the Ramapo River.

There were several small, rocky islands at the lake’s southern and deeper end. The biggest island we called Blueberry Island. It was simply a granite formation that for thousands of years had been nurturing a patch of wild blueberries. They tasted good in the pancakes.

This whole scene, including the pancakes, was nestled in a wild and comfortable valley of the Ramapo Mountains.

I worked the waterfront at the camp, and taught swimming and canoeing to poor kids from the South Bronx, and rich kids from Long Island and the Jersey suburbs. It was on this waterfront that I first heard of Godzilla.

Every summer camp has its legends of ghosts and goblins and escaped madmen who would dismember you in the dark if you misbehaved, but this camp had an advantage when it came to spook stories. It was only 20 miles from there, at a place called Sleepy Hollow, that Washington Irving was inspired to write about that headless apparition, riding on a horse. The Headless Horseman. There was something about the mountains and valleys and forests of the Ramapo and Catskill ranges, especially at dusk or dawn, that made a guy consider that a zombie with a hatchet could actually be waiting for you in the dim and misty twilight. It also helped having the Appalachian Trail run right through the camp. The only people who walked that trail were the deranged and parasitic type, and sometimes they’d get lost and ask us for spooky directions. But none of this has much to do with turtles.

What made Lake Stahahe truly unique, at least back in those days, was its infestation with Eurasian Milfoil. Sometime during the mid 20th century, some hunyak decided it would be a good idea to plant a sprig of the aquatic weed in his fish aquarium. Then, after he had emigrated to America, his fish died. So he flushed his dead fish, and the aquarium water, down the toilet. Somehow, some of that water ended up in Lake Stahahe, and the milfoil spores got together and decided to settle and build a colony. 40 years later, those of us living in the upper Midwest know that the rest is history.

Eurasian Milfoil is bad for lakes, but the turtles seem to like it.

My introduction to Godzilla came on my first day on the waterfront dock. It was during Class 1, Lesson A, of the Red Cross Introduction to Canoeing (RCIC) course. Being a recent graduate of the Red Cross Certified Canoeing Instructor (RCCCI) course, I was proud owner of an RCCCI manual. For Lesson A of the RCIC course, the manual said that the instructor should simply place the student inside the canoe, hand him a paddle, and then give the canoe a good shove.

My first two students sailed away smartly, but the third one, Norbert, was not cooperating. I pointed his canoe north, towards the dam, but as I prepared him for take-off Norbert grabbed the gunwales and started screaming “Don’t send me there! That’s where Godzilla is!!!”

I leafed through my RCCCI manual and scanned it for anything helpful, but there was nothing found in the index that even hinted at how to deal with a student who’s afraid of Godzilla. I did find an index entry relating to how to deal with a gunwale grabber, but that had more to do with the simple fear of water. The Red Cross had not considered that a fear of giant, fire blowing, Japanese dinosaurs might present itself as an obstacle to canoe instruction.

My partner on the dock, Larry, heard the commotion and came over to lend a hand. “What’s the screaming about?” he asked. I told Larry that I was simply pointing Norbert in a canoeable direction when he started screaming something about Godzilla. Larry replied, “Oh. Well, you can’t send them that way Jim. Godzilla’s down there.”

Larry was kind enough to elaborate, and he explained that Godzilla was a monster snapping turtle. He lived down by the dam, in the milfoil, and had been around for as long as anyone could remember. On occasion he would come out of the weeds and infiltrate the camper’s fishing hole. From the small and well worn platform of granite and sand above the hole, where the campers would stand and fish, he could be seen on the bottom, six feet down; and all you could see were his giant, white claws. Larry held up his hand, stretched out his fingers and said “His claws are as long as my fingers.”

Over the course of the summer I would often find myself fishing with the campers at the fishing hole. It was right next to the dam. Being next to the dam allowed for a decent flow of water, so the milfoil had never been allowed to take root. The water was clear, and it was loaded with fat bluegills. It was a good fishing hole. Godzilla thought so too, because he was a frequent visitor. He’d be on the bottom, six feet down; and except for those huge white claws, all you could see would be a ghostly shadow of his gargantuan head and carapace. For the kids on the rocks, it was a singular experience. You would overhear many youthful exclamations of the word “Wow!” expressed in various moods and tenses. And then you would see campers holding up their hands, and stretching out there fingers.

Godzilla would never be able to crawl out of the water and show himself completely. For without the benefit of the water’s neutral buoyancy, the shear mass of his body and shell would cause him to be crushed by normal gravity. But there came a day when Godzilla did show himself, at least a part of himself, above water. On that day, out in the milfoil patch, Godzilla stuck his snout up through the weeds. We were standing on the shore and watching, and he was watching us. Based on the size of that snout, it could be none other than the beast himself.

It was time for quick thinking. None of us had a rig suitable for this task. There was no fishing pole on earth that would volunteer for this job. I ran to my tackle box and rifled through its contents, looking for the hook that I knew was in there. And there it was. A zinc plated, galvanized steel triple hook, in size 3/0. It wasn’t necessarily large, but it was thick – and very strong. That hook had served me well at that trout farm back in New Jersey, under cover of darkness. That hook served only one purpose. It was never intended for legal sport.

Now we needed line. Line? This wasn’t a job for “line.” This was a job for rope, or cable or…lanyard string! This was a summer camp. Not only did we make a lot of lanyards, but we had lanyard string holding up our tents. We used it as clotheslines and climbing ropes. We even used it once to tow a 400 pound tombstone off the premises. It was amazing stuff. It looked like a flimsy plastic fiber, about the thickness of yarn, but it was reinforced with some kind of tungsten steel belting that made it extremely strong. I ordered one of the campers to head up to the Arts & Crafts cabin and grab about 30 yards of lanyard string. He returned quickly with the required amount – in green.

I hurriedly threaded the lanyard string through the hook, and told one of the campers to tie one of those strong knots he was supposed to have learned in Frontier Class. We were all acting as a cohesive unit, working quickly and efficiently, and casting fleet glances out to the milfoil to make sure the snout was still there.

The hook was now rigged, and I called for bait. “I need a lively bluegill!” Within seconds, a brightly colored six incher was impaled on the hook. I gave the loose end of the lanyard string to a camper to hold, and then I took that bluegill and gave him a mighty heave. It landed one foot from Godzilla, and it flopped as it lay on top of the heavy carpet of milfoil. It was a perfect shot.

My memory seems to recall that time stood still, and maybe it did. We watched the flopping bluegill, and we watched Godzilla. He was either going to pull his head back under the weeds, or he was going to advance on the bluegill. He chose the latter, and his front legs slowly pulled him through the thick milfoil. When he approached within striking distance, he paused and sniffed the air. And then, as fast as lightning, he opened his jaws and struck.

On shore, the camper holding the other end of the lanyard string held his poise. He would have made a good Marine. We all watched, and patiently waited, as Godzilla took several healthy chomps out of that poor fish. When we were confident that Godzilla had reached the hook, I gave the go-ahead to start pulling.

The camper took up slack and the lanyard string came taught. He pulled, and pulled some more, and even though we could see the camper was pulling with all he had, Godzilla wouldn’t budge.

We were now confident that the hook was firmly lodged in Godzilla’s bony jaw. It was time to put a bit more muscle into this turtle tug-of-war. I took over as chief turtle puller. I wrapped the lanyard string several times around my hand, and grabbed that hand with my other hand. I faced Godzilla, and began to walk slowly backwards on the gravel shoreline.

Godzilla began to part the milfoil. The lanyard string held. As Godzilla sensed his peril he began to backpaddle clumsily, but to no avail. As we pulled him closer to shore, we could see the full outline of his massive carapace. He was as big as a camper’s torso, and twice as thick. He had to weigh at least 100 pounds. But it was becoming clear that Godzilla’s last chapter was being written. I heaved back with all my might, and it was over. Godzilla had reached terra firma. He was out of his element.

What we didn’t realize was that it was all a trick. Godzilla was simply biding his time until his feet could touch the bottom. When he was in about two feet of water he was able to dig his claws into the gravely basin. It was never a contest. Like a Sherman tank, he backed up and never stopped. I had all my weight against the lanyard string, and the next thing I knew I was flat on my ass.

Godzilla had floored me, and as I reeled in the slack lanyard string, I saw that the number of barbs on my triple hook had been reduced by one third. He had broken the hook.

I stood up and joined the campers at the shoreline. We watched Godzilla slowly fade into the depths, and disappear into the forest of milfoil. And then he was gone.

**********

Twenty five years later, I had two little campers of my own, and on a spring day in Wisconsin the boys and I found ourselves exploring the edge of a nearby cattail marsh. As we walked along the cattails, one of the boys found a tiny turtle. He picked it up, and came running over to show it to me. It was a baby snapper, no bigger than a silver dollar. The boys wanted to take him home and keep him for a pet, and daddy was more than happy to oblige.

We named him Godzilla.

When we got home, we found the old 10 gallon aquarium and filled it with water. We threw some sand and gravel in the bottom, and dropped baby Godzilla into the tank. We watched him swim happily around, and then he got tired and rested on the bottom.

After I tucked the boys into bed, I told them the story about my adventures with the real Godzilla, and I explained to them that if they took real good care of their baby Godzilla, he might grow up to be a hundred pounds too. They were quiet, and they listened, and they looked into daddy’s eyes as only young boys can; and then they fell asleep.

As I closed their bedroom door, I took one more look at baby Godzilla. He was sleeping peacefully too.

**********

Aw, Jim. What a sweet ending to this story. Your little boys, falling asleep with baby Godzilla, while daddy tells a story.

Well…yeah. That is pretty sweet, but the story isn’t finished yet.

When we woke up in the morning, we all raced to the aquarium to look at baby Godzilla. He was still resting peacefully on the bottom of the tank. But this morning his eyelids seemed to be a little pale, and his shell had turned white. Oh no.

As God is my witness, I thought turtles could swim. When I saw baby Godzilla sleeping peacefully the night before on the bottom of the tank, I figured that when he needed to take a breath, he’d simply swim to the surface and get one; just like Flipper. The thought had never occurred to me that placing a turtle in deep water, and inside a glass lined canyon, meant certain death. I had not provided safe sanctuary, meaning a rock that would let him climb out of the water - and breathe. I had visions of poor baby Godzilla scratching against the glass all night, trying to gain a foothold somewhere, and then giving up, and drowning.

So I had managed to kill Godzilla after all, but not in a manner that I would dare tell in a fisherman’s tavern. I’m really not sure if the boys have ever forgiven me for that blunder. But they’re adults now, and will have to live with whatever traumas I’ve passed on, without any apology from me.

Now that the story is over, I’m wondering why I ever thought any of this was worth bragging about.

Why Blog?

Every once and while when the ideas for this blog seem few and far between, I have to ask myself the obvious question of why I recount a time so long ago. The answer today is that I believe in the benefits of technology and the Internet in particular. Nothing is ever forgotten on the Internet. Data sits in storage forever. This is a fact, and a good reason to have something memorable and or inspirational to write before you begin a blog as it will follow you to your grave.

This is not to give myself too much credit as I know I have good posts and bad. The important thing is I believe its important to recall a time and a town much different than the one which stands today. I sometimes sound old and say the "good old days were better" but that is fairly common as we age and I see nothing wrong about my including a subjective judgment or two into a blog for the world to criticize.

The fact is there are somethings I like better about the Village now than when I was growing up. It's hard to argue with a bigger library, more parks, and better cared for ball fields, to name a few of my favorite things.

I may not like the loss of a "local feel" to Ridgewood in the form of individual shopkeepers who operated store like Perdues, McHughs, Bill Lyons, and the hardware stores. Their children went to our schools and they all had commutes to work which were the envy of their customers who had to hop a train or bus into NYC. The localness of Ridgewood I remember has been replaced with restaurants and bank branches and brings with it a superfluousness that didn't exist when we had Moms at home and we at least tried to eat dinner together.

Who is to say Ridgewood won't return to some of the habits of its simpler roots? The furor created by talk of changing Graydon Pool is a good example. It was nice to see people become passionate and engage in a strong public debate over the pool's future. This leads me to believe their is a strong core of people, living among the McMansions, who will steward the Village through the coming years. Hopefully they will remember the history of Ridgewood and will continue to strongly debate any proposed changes to its aesthetics or the aura it so routinely projects as a nice place to live or to be from.

Super Science Saturday

Sorry about the poor quality picture I shot with my I-Phone. I took it at last month's Super Science Saturday at RHS, an annual event where science is the star and not athletics for a change. Don't get me wrong I was a jock and had a good time but now I am a network security geek and was very pleased to see all the attention these young scientists were receiving.

The photo was something of a discovery as it was not something we did in the 1960s and 1970s, namely, honoring teachers for their contributions to our education. You will see a few teachers in the photo receiving long overdue recognition and one teacher who is still active at RHS, Helen Aslanides.

Nature Walk at Habernickel Property

On one of my rare appearances in Ridgewood I drove past a site I found so unsettling that I had to stop and take these photos. If you are like me you can remember the stables on Hillcrest Road in Upper Ridgewood, and all the fun that we had exploring in the Hohokus woods behind them. In winter we went ice skating on the pond, and in summer we went wading in the small pond next to where the horses used to linger by the white fence and eat the grass.

What I later found out was that this is the newest park under construction in Ridgewood. It will have a nature walk and ballfields. The house will also be kept and will provide bathroom facilities.

Rob Lane Meets Dave Rorty

It is always a beautiful thing when old track pals get to see one another many years past their glory. This photo was taken in Sarasota, Florida. Here we have David Rorty and Rob Lane together again. They surely reminisced about past track meets and the time we went to the Penn Relays in 1977.

Hope they get the chance to see each other again soon.

A Sign of Spring

When the baseball pitchers and catchers begin their limbering up in places like Florida and Arizona I can't help but smile. Their annual arrival in these warm weather climates heralds the arrival of spring for people like me.

My RHS friends, like Rob Lane, Dave Rorty and Jens Larson, who live year round in these temperate climates I hope remember how it is now in the northeast and how they might have felt the same thing I feel now: a great sense of relief that winter is almost over!

At the bottom of the page are two of my all time favorite lefty pitchers: Lefty Grove and Ron Guidry. You can look up their statistics but I will add that both were fearless and accepted responsibilities. I personally believe the lessons we learn in sports carry over into the lives we live thereafter; if we only bother to remember them. My favorite lesson from my years of participating in sports has always been to dare to be good. This translates into being brave enough to take a chance and deliver more than you promise. It means standing up for what is right and letting the consequences fall as they may.

I sometimes wish we could put up posters in our bedrooms the way we did as kids of our favorite sports heroes. They were so perfect in their limited sphere of influence, and they did influence a great many young people. It would be wonderful if we could do the same with public figures. Though I realize their jobs and choices are much more complicated than Lefty Grove's or Ron Guidry's. I was told by someone who played with Lefty, Doc Cramer, that Lefty truly had one pitch: the fastball. He would dare you to hit it. His 300 wins and his place in the Baseball Hall of Fame seem to indicate this worked for him. In direct opposition is Ron Guidry, who retired before he was ready to leave the scene. He came back a couple years later and pitched a spring training game against the Yankees first team and shut them down. This wasn't an "I told you so moment" for Guidry. In hindsight, Lefty and Guidry stand as role models to all the hard work that has always been necessary to put into the craft of baseball, or any profession. The beauty of sports is sometimes seen in examples of hard work we can all learn from, especially as we examine the level of effort we all put into our own crafts. Play Ball!

The Way We Live Now

I bought a book of stamps the other day. This was quite unusual for me since I write exactly two checks every month and these are required to be sent via US Mail. When I bought this last book it got me thinking  about how we live now as compared to what I call the "simpler time" in which I grew up in Ridgewood. The mail was a much bigger part of our lives in those days. Now it is mostly an afterthought and sometimes a downright inconvenience. When I am feeling very patient I will go down to my local post office and peak in at the people waiting on line to transact their business. Nobody is happy to be there, especially the people working behind the bullet proof glass. It's not that I live in a bad neighborhood, it's only that people become so infuriated at having to wait on line that even the most calm among us might have a bad day and want to throw something after an infuriating wait to do something seemingly simple like pick up a package. The folks at Fedex and UPS I'm sure have seen these lines for themselves and figured out there was a buck to be had in making sure nobody had to suffer in this way.

It wasn't always like this and at one time working at the post office was a respectable middle class profession. Our mailman in Ridgewood lived in Midland Park and knew everyone on his route, including the kids. If you stepped out of line and you might find yourself on the receiving end of a stern warning to watch your step. He was a nice fellow who liked his job and did it well. The little bit of crowd control in the neighborhood I believe he did because he felt it important and something that civic minded people did as a matter of course.

The post office we had in Ridgewood, like it was in many towns, was not a place to be avoided. It produced wonder in many of us as to how they could possibly send so many packages and letters to so many different places in such a reasonable amount of time. If you recall it was 1963 that ZIP codes (Zone Improvement Plan) were introduced and that solved part of the mystery of the postal system's efficiency. Now we look up our Zip codes online and don't have to visit a post office to look through the huge book of zip codes.

In the 1960s ZIP codes were such a great step forward that the fact was advertised on TV.

I would be hard pressed to think of something today which touches all our lives in the same manner. To mention the Internet and all the new Social Networking applications would be a close second to Zip codes because in the old days you depended upon the US Mail. Today there are many people who still do and don't have a thing to do with the Internet. If something comes to mind I'll probably blog about it but I don't hold out much hope for something replacing Mr Zip in terms of importance in everybody's day to day lives.

So Many Unique Lives

We Ridgewood-ers (Ridgewoodians? Whatever) are spread far and wide. And we live very interesting lives. I recently discovered that one of my classmates is a boxing ring announcer. How cool is that?

The idea of a ring announcer got me to thinking. What other unique experiences have we seen? I'm not talking about skydiving, or running a marathon, or bumming around Europe. Those are special and exciting for sure, but they aren't really unusual. Lots of people do all of those things.

So, my question to you is this: What truly unique and unusual experiences have you enjoyed? Post in the comments, or send me an email (kflechtner*at*gmail*dot*com) and I will post your story to the blog. To get things started, here's mine:

I am an architect, and from the late 1990s until 2002, I helped design the Olympic Village for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. We were all so excited to work on it, and it was thrilling to watch the athletes compete, knowing that they were living in an environment we had created for them.

What's your unique experience?

Andy Pettite

Andy Pettite is retiring.  Pettitte was 240-138 in 16 seasons in the majors.

I don't blame him as I lost my desire in 1989 for competition, too. Plus, I never contributed to the NYC Experience in the same way as Andy Pettite did. He also carried on longer than most athletes. Though I have to believe that his forthcoming courtroom scenes regarding his friendship with Roger "Rocket" Clemons helped send him into retirement. Once again, I have no qualms with his choice.

Andy Pettite will never make the Baseball Hall of Fame based on regular season statistics, even though his post-season statistics are off the charts. He admitted to using steroids so it will take a Veterans Committee in 10 or 20 years to let him into the Hall of Fame.

I wish Andy the best in his future endeavors as he belongs to the "Big Four" which Super Scout Gene Michael promoted, and who formed the core which won 4 World Series in 5 years.

Andy, enjoy this time with your children. You have five rings and may one day have a special day with your image placed in Monument Park in the New Yankee Stadium. You did all us Yankee fans proud in this past season when you played hurt. If you had come back our opponents would have bunted on you to no end. With a troubled groin this is not something you should attempt at the age of 38.

Carry the fact with you every day that you will be a Yankee legend for the rest of your life. This is a high honor and not something you ever have to prove again.

Internet Bullies

Bullies have been around as long as I can remember. When they are given their comeuppance it always gives one the opportunity to hide a sly smile.

Unfortunately, when children are bullied on the Internet it is quite a but different from the public shame the old time bullies felt when they were shown the error of their ways. This makes the comparison between now and when I was growing up that much more difficult. Truth be told it is harder now. Truth be told we as adults have to take more affirmative action, in order to prevent our alumni from thinking that a jump off the GW Bridge is their best recourse.

Let's resolve to be better every day. To acknowledge that people are different and that they are born a certain way and cannot help it. Let's take the argument away that people have a choice as to how they are born and how they feel during their adolescence and young adulthood. 


I offer this only as a New Year's resolution.

Peace

Mr C. Bertram Harmon--One of the 100 Best Teachers

This post was sent to me by Chris Stella, class of 1973. I haven't changed a word and completely share his sentiment.


"If you attended the George Washington Junior High in the late 1960's, you knew who Mr. C. Bertram Harmon was. He held one of the more difficult civilian jobs on the Eastern Seaboard. He was the only African-American teacher in the middle school which enrolled students from the Country Club side of the rather conservative, Protestant-Catholic-Republican town of Ridgewood, teaching music.
His classroom was a large, and well-lit place, with tall windows overlooking the rutted, caged ballfield. I believe there were some risers, towards the back. On one wall, was a framed, ornate, latinated ancient page of music. On the other side, was a piano, and during Eighth grade, a stereo phonograph in a walnut case appeared, of the sort that normally would belong in your grandmother's parlor.
He always dressed extremely well. He wore well tailored suits, with a perfectly knotted tie, and the cravat was backed by a gold pin, which served to emphasize his high, well-formed and prominent larynx, from which emanated the most interesting observations, in a distinctive, sonorous voice. His facial features were strong, and unambiguously African. He projected a ferocious, active and self-confident, yet fastidious "look".
* * * *
During my first year, Mr. Harmon was very adamant about his dislike for rock 'n roll music. He thought it was childish, and said so frequently, in theatrical tones of mock horror.
However, the next fall, he had a dramatic announcement to make. He said that over the summer he had considered the matter carefully. He decided that such music was a major cultural force, and that some of it, though not all, was of excellent quality and had a great deal to teach.
He informed his astounded audience of junior high school students, who were used to having their musical tastes derided by every authority figure in the universe, that he had decided that he was going to completely revamp a major part of his method of teaching music. We were going to study rock 'n roll music in a serious way. We were going to learn about where it came from. We were going to develop good rock 'n roll taste. Furthermore, as an assignment we would all have the opportunity to choose a song, play it for the class on the walnut-cased phonograph, and analyze its content and musicological qualities, for our teacher and peers.
Mr. Harmon showed us how our favorite songs were rooted in decades and centuries of jazz, blues, and yes, continental African rhythyms. Analyses of popular music now well accepted or even cliche, were heard in very early iteration, in Mr. Harmon's room.
But, my favorite day was the day he showed us that the familiar Beatles Penny Lane" trumpet solo, heard so frequently on the Cousin Brucie WABC top 40 music show, was less George Harrison and John Lennon, than George Handel, and Johann Bach. Mr. Harmon was able to prove that this piccolo trumpet "riff" had been lifted, more or less intact, from Johann and this other George, another Brit who had honed his craft in Hamburg, Germany, though in the 1700's. The proof-by-listening was made so convincingly, that fourty-two years on, I cannot hear any of these compositions without smiling and thinking of Mr. Harmon.
A wave of excitement passed over the class. Surely Mr. Harmon loved, and would have something provocative to say about the last song on the first side of the Magical Mystery Tour album by the Beatles. (This is the one where John Lennon sings about the "elementary Penguins singing Hare Krishna".) But, here, his love of precision and focus took over. We were disappointed:
"During the next class, we will study what is so terribly wrong about 'I am the Walrus'."
For my analytical presentation, I chose the Classics IV tune, "Traces." A sweet little song, but my presentation was disastrous. I was able to demonstrate to the world only my 45 RPM, Five and Dime store musical sensibility.
Others scored wonderful successes. My friend Bill Walstrum, picked "Thinking is the Best Way to Travel", a song by the early Moody Blues. This music was classically based, but also featured numerous interesting electronic effects, which was what you noticed first.
"So, William", Mr. Harmon said. "This music supports the psychedelic drug culture, does it not?" Bill became quite forceful. No, it is anti-drug. The song is saying that your own thoughts can be much more exciting than any substance.
The prominent larynx bobbed, and for once was silent. Mr. Harmon smiled. We had all learned something. Bill had the made the point with power, and succinct elegance.
C. Bertram Harmon's past, was a complete opacity, and he never spoke of it. There was one exception to this. This was the day when he told us, semi-conspiratorially, that in HIS day as a young high school student, when on the dance floor, he'd been known as THE jitterbug King. It was a highly plausible claim.
* * * * * * *
I do not have a complete sense of what the adult town thought of him. The more liberal tendencies of the people who lived in Ridgewood at the time were in part an abstraction, as there was precious little direct contact with people of ANY different color. At a minimum, I would think, at their core, parents of that time would feel a private need to be convinced. To his 1968 students, having an African-American man as your music teacher, was a cool and exotic thing.
However, I do have one 1971 grown-up data point. A friend's mother, a woman of conventional Ridgewood character, once whispered quietly to me that she felt that "the man is a saint, an absolute saint." By this she was not directing my attention to the fact that Mr. Harmon was able to gracefully bear the stress of being the only African-American teacher, or that he was able to master the loneliness which must have been present. Rather, she meant that it had become known that Mr. Harmon cared about his students as people, that his good influence went way beyond his effect on our musical sensibilities.
A boy, it was rumored, had stolen a car. I believe that this boy was a Caucasian. I do not think he could have been a musically-oriented boy. The word was, that Mr. Harmon had used his good agency, to see to it that although the proper penalty was paid, the boys' future prospects were not destroyed.
As for me, during ninth-grade, he taught a music theory course, extremely advanced in scope. It included the requirement that the students compose original music. I took this course, and displayed no talent or aptitude whatsoever. At the end of the year, Mr. Harmon signed my yearbook with a long, carefully written, unique paragraph, in which he hoped for, and had great EXPECTATIONS of, my future success and happiness. It seemed at once so formal, and yet so heartfelt, that I remember it  to this day.
* * * * * * *
The June, 1970 Assembly was memorable. The large chorus, of which I was not a member, performed for the departing students. Their final work, conducted by Harmon, was spectacularly intricate in its construction. In the manner of a baroque fugue, the various voices repeated and interwove, underlining, emphasizing, strengthening.
Mr. Harmon, had advised the student audience to listen carefully to the WORDS that had been set to the music.
"The words need to be listened to, as they will be quite relevant to the contemporary scene."
And, Bach-like, the words were not! In a glorious fugue-like style, each section of the chorus hurled family-type criticisms at a solitary, unseen adolescent. The refrain was:
"What do you have to say for yourself,? Speak up, speak up, SPEAK UP !!"
First the basses took the role of the father, leveling all the usual complaints about poor grades, back-talk, and rudeness. Then the altos played the role of the mother, SINGING the familiar words about neatness, sloppy and provocative dress, rooms not tidy, all sung in perfect fugue way, in gorgeous harmony and high style, directed tightly by Harmon. Finally the tenors and sopranos sang the stock role of the younger siblings harassing the unfortunate, solitary young person. Finally at the conclusion of the choral work the "Speak Up!" refrain was again re-presented in repetitive order, followed by sudden silence.
Then, one student hand-picked by Harmon, someone who fit the role quite precisely, someone who everyone knew was not doing very well, would weakly gulp in a perfect stage whisper just loud enough for the audience to hear, HELP! Everyone laughed.
There could not have been a more appropriate coda to my junior high school years, and so my career at George Washington ended.
* * * * * * *
If I could have only one Magical Mystery wish with Mr. Harmon, I would be quite selfish. Sure, the guy was a pioneer in several ways, do anything you want with that, retire all names starting with the letter "C.", if you want, I'll back you !
But with Mr. Harmon, I would want only one thing. I would want to sit in the back of his class, perhaps on one of the risers, and just listen to his wonderful voice, as he described the beautiful things that he loved, speaking of how they were constructed, how they worked.  I'd stay as long as they let me.
No doubt, after a while Mr. Cobb, or Mr. Egli would come by and tell me that I had to leave, as my presence had become a distraction. Who is that gray-haired Ridgewood man, sitting on the riser, perfectly still, in the back, they would have begun to ask. And, like the man in the song, I wouldn't give any answers!
But, inside, I would want to shake the kids forcefully. Don't you see?
C. Bertram Harmon, the man, with his knowledge, and devotion, and commanding stage presence, at a minimum he could have been a major success as a university-based musicologist.
However, there he was, by his choice, with us.
He had been been placed there by a town, some of whose residents might have denied how well they were doing by us. The Ridgewood adults had been wise in their placing him before us, some, maybe, without knowing the degree of their wisdom. He was a stabilizing aesthetic and personal presence. He is remembered standing, not sitting, in front, as our Junior High School worlds spun 'round, in varying states of control.

Martin Luther King Day

President Reagan signed the holiday into law in 1983, and it was first observed on January 20, 1986. At first, some states resisted observing the holiday as such, giving it alternative names or combining it with other holidays. It was officially observed in all 50 states for the first time in 2000.

I can't say that I remember what I was doing the day MLK was assassinated, as I was in the third grade and couldn't fully comprehend the significance of what had happened.  This abhorrent act and the riots which followed in major urban areas, first Washington, DC, then Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, and LA appeared to me on our black and white TV. It didn't make sense to me at the time for people to trash their own neighborhoods. Now I understand that this is only true if the neighborhoods and the institutions are worth saving. Obviously, the people who were confronting armed police and national guardsmen and were chanting "Burn Baby Burn" didn't hold these places in such high esteem. I had never been to these places so I was left to wonder.

There had been riots before in American cities during the 1960s, notably New York City and Paterson in 1964 and Newark in 1967. Years later I would drive through and around these cities and the blight was still apparent. Truth be told the scars are still apparent in most every city in the country where riots took place and will be for quite some time. The lesson here is that it doesn't take long for a neighborhood to go up in flames, but it takes a very long time to clean up and rebuild afterward.

Hope you all have a nice day off if your calendar allows. Maybe we can all reflect for a moment on how this holiday came into being and all the work that still needs to be done cleaning up the cities which were shattered by riots so many decades ago.

Peace.

Childhood Riddles

As someone who spends a fair amount of time in airplanes I fortunately get the chance to indulge my love of reading. At the moment I am reading "That Old Cape Magic" by Richard Russo. He writes with a style which makes me stop and ponder every once and a while; an admirable trait for any author. This latest novel made me think about the riddles of our childhoods and why growing up doesn't always solve them.

A wise old friend of mine explained it to me simply that their are no answers to some of our questions and I have had to reluctantly accept this maxim many a time instead of pursuing an answer to a question any further. My friend was in his late 80s when he told me this and had seen some terrible suffering in Europe during WWII. He had no answers for all that had happened in his life and had come to realize that it is sometimes better to simply accept things as they are and to quit questioning.

This all makes me wonder if as children we had adopted this stoic attitude how different our lives would have been. I guess the wisdom is in knowing when to develop this attitude and in the meantime hold out a chance that our childhood riddles may one day be answered.

The riddles of my childhood centered around the usual time worn concerns: why someone had died or moved away, or had changed their opinion of me or I had changed my opinion of them. When you are young with a great expanse of time hopefully before you it is easy to believe that a plausible answer might present itself. As we grow up though we begin to see how this might not be the case, and how tragedies will keep occurring for no good reason. I saw this again the other day with the shooting in an Arizona shopping center. We might well never understand the man's motivation, just like we will never know why Lee Harvey Oswald had wanted to shoot President Kennedy. I believe Oswald acted alone and was a deeply troubled individual. Though all during my childhood there was the riddle in many people's minds as to whether he acted alone. Some people still see a plot but after all this time this to me appears unlikely. It's too hard to keep a secret like that for so long. It will just remain one of those childhood riddles that growing up hasn't solved.

New Year's Day

This day used to be all about the end of the College Football season. There were bowl games all day and at the end of the day or early the following one we all knew who was the best team in the country, as voted by the sports writers.

Today we have so many tournaments and games I can't keep count and have stopped trying. The bowl game to decide the national champion is being played on January 10th. It's little wonder that I have stopped following college sports entirely as it would take a monumental effort and I have better ways to spend my time.

When we were kids if the weather was mild enough on New Year's Day we might try to imitate the college guys and play a game of our own. Though usually it was tough to gather a gang on New Year's Day and the weather in northern jersey tended to make the football hard as a rock and not much fun to throw or catch.

Truth be known our football season ended with the first blast of prolonged cold weather. This is when we turned our attention to indoor sports like basketball. The YMCA/YWCA on Oak Street had supervised basketball on Saturday and Sunday afternoons so that's where our parents would drop off Bill Barnett, Bill Steen, and myself and pick us up several hours later. It was a good way for us to mix with the kids from the other side of town as the Y was centrally located and attracted a cross section of people from both George Washington Junior High School and Benjamin Franklin Junior High School.
These long names were always shortened to GW and BF.

Today I will be in Ridgewood with my in-laws, exchanging Christmas gifts and renewing old acquaintances with family members we see only at the holidays. Of course, the college bowl games will be on in the background but nobody at this party will have any "skin in the game" as the old saying goes. It's just hard to break the old childhood habits, especially while we are creating new traditions. I like our new tradition of going back to my old hometown and seeing how it has changed. The changes have mostly occurred on the inside of the houses as the town itself still remains a charming place to visit. The biggest difference between now and when I lived there over 30 years ago would be in the tremendous number of ways people have to spend their time. Back in the 1960s and 1970s we had more in common and were distracted less by the wondrous options which are available as a matter of course. No doubt all these alternatives are a good sign and one we should be glad to live amongst. My only concern is for people who have only known plenitude and whether this will make them resistant to the misfortunes which strike all of us at one time or another. In other words, are the houses today filled with a bit of empathy for those less fortunate or are they only safe fortresses which block out all signs of our sometimes harsh existence?  I hope the former is true and will go on believing that until proven otherwise.

Happy New Year! Make a difference where and when you can as we are all in this together.

New Year's Eve

The first time I was allowed to stay up until midnight on New Year's Eve to see the ball dropped in Times Square I was 10 years old. In those days part of the tradition was to listen to Gaetano Alberto "Guy" Lombardo (June 19, 1902 – November 5, 1977) and his Royal Canadians play their music from the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.  The music may have sounded corny to a first time listener but it didn't take long for one to realize they were a well organized and tight group of musicians.  They were noted for playing the traditional song Auld Lang Syne and their recording of the song still plays as the first song of the new year in Times Square.

While my younger brother and I waited for midnight and were being shown traditions like the Royal Canadians and the sight of all the people at Times Square, we soon realized we needed some confetti to throw at each other at midnight. The first thing we started ripping up was our blank notebook paper used for school reports but after a short while we were steered towards the newspapers in the pantry. In those days before the town began recycling,  this was  the logical thing to do.

When the clock struck 12 the ball began its descent at Times Square and we heard for the first time Guy Lombardo's version of the Robert Burns poem Auld Lang Syne. We could also see on the old black and white TV that people had begun to throw their confetti so we started throwing ours in support. After all the confetti was thrown we picked it up and threw it all again. This second celebration finally wore us out and we were sent off to bed, with the nostalgic tunes of the Royal Canadians playing in the background to lull us to sleep.

Flexible Flyers

With the first winter snow storm fast approaching us here in the northeast, a blizzard no less,  it's easy to remember those times when we saw a snowstorm as the perfect opportunity to have fun with our flexible flyer sleds. They would be hustled down from the attic and then stored in the garage until spring. You never knew when they would come in handy so they had to be close at hand.

This current storm which is coming would have been a slight disappointment because it will fall during Christmas vacation and there would be little chance of us celebrating a snow day with the subsequent loss of a day at school. I say a slight disappointment because sledding was and is too much fun to care whether or not you are doing it instead of attending school.

We had a fine little hill in the school yard at Willard, right behind our home. Dozens of people would use it at one time. As I recall if you made a running start and then threw yourself upon the sled you would travel quickly all the way to the fence at the bottom. We would then turn around and pull our sleds back to the top to do it all again. Such a simple activity, and one which we would repeat for an hour or two. After that time we would either engage in some other snow activity like a snowball fight or just go inside to get warm.

This hill at Willard is the only place I can ever remember sledding. I think this was because our parents would discourage us from sledding in the streets, for obvious safety reasons. Though the streets were never as pristine as the snow at Willard so it wasn't a terrible restriction in our eyes. The Village of Ridgewood would do the snow removal even in our edge of the town fairly early in the morning and would take most of the sledding fun with them.

Later in my younger days I would take up skiing and leave my flexible flyer in the attic for the last time. When we moved from Ridgewood the sleds were donated and hopefully found some kids who  appreciated them the way in which we used to. If given the choice now between skiing and sledding I would take sledding in a heartbeat. Too bad we can't sled down the ski trails as that would be a blast! We could put the sleds on our laps while we road to the top on a ski lift, instead of pulling them up the hill the way we did as kids. Now there is something I would pay for, and would cheerfully weather even a blizzard to engage in.

Christmas Eve

One of the most anticipated days of the year in our house growing up. One year we even wrote our plans down for getting up Christmas Day very early in order to watch Charles Dickens' The Christmas Carol on TV on our old black and white television set. The 1930s version with Reginald Owen as Scrooge was in my mind more faithful to the original story than the 1950s version with Alastair Sim as Scrooge, which had the advantage of better photographic techniques. These both played in the middle of the night so our written plan had the exact time we had to set our alarm clocks to wake up and watch. This was usually a formality as the excitement of Christmas Day usually made us wake up on time every year.

The other aspects of Christmas Eve which comes to mind include how our tree looked with all the presents under it, plus the Christmas decorations we had in our house like the Christmas creche and the red Santa Claus with a light inside. In those days people also wrote Christmas cards to each other and each day's mail in December was sure to include some of these now obsolete reminders of a simpler era. I guess this loss of the annual supply of Christmas cards, the prettiest of which were displayed tastefully in the living room, is the inevitable result of the Internet and it instant communication. Christmas cards are now a quaint memory of when communications from distant places was something we got excited about, whether it was a long distance telephone call or a written note. These were events we delighted in much more than we will ever glory e-mail, instant messages, or phone calls over Skype. The ironic fact is now that we can be in contact without much effort it makes us less likely to do at traditional times like Christmas and via old time methods such as a card sent in the US Mail.


The Village of Ridgewood always did itself proud with decorations. The Christmas Tree near the train station was always a place we would stop and marvel at, along with the infamous Arthur's House of Beauty. I can't remember ever being inside this landmark, as I usually patronized the Barber Shops in Hohokus, but this was another must-see at Christmas time while growing up. I scooped this picture off the Ridgewood Ridgewood-Expats page on Facebook.

I can also clearly remember how our elementary school, Willard, used to have all the grades gather in the auditorium to sing Christmas carols to the parents. They would march us in one grade at a time as I recall and we would do our best to sing the old faithfuls, Silent Night and Jingle Bells. One year there was even a class who sang Oh Tannenbaum in German. They had a stern german woman as their teacher and the kids knew they had to get it right or else! Not that anyone ever got hit in Ridgewood by a teacher but the teachers could make our lives miserable just the same by a look or a cranky disposition. Of course, the worst was having to stay after school. I had a spanish teacher in high school as the last class of the day and she would always threaten us with 5 minutes after school. Just think about it: 5 minutes was all it took to get our attention back to our studies. You would have thought we were being sentenced to a year in jail. I guess our attention spans were shorter back then and we didn't ever want to miss the rush to get out of school and be with our friends.

I hope you all are with family and friends this Christmas and can conjure up some happy memories of your own.

Peace.

Cold December Days

While we were growing up cold December days always heralded our countdowns to Christmas vacation and New Year's Eve festivities. Back then Dick Clark was in his heyday and the first time we were allowed to watch the ball drop on Times Square at 12 midnight on television we tore up newspapers as our confetti and tossed it wildly around the living room until our mother told us to clean it up and go to bed. I still savor the simplicity of my first New Year's Eve celebration, more than most of the rest that have come thereafter.

New Year's Eve 1999 was another memorable one held at the Novy's in Wyckoff was a great time that carried on well into the morning.

Though I have also had the unenviable task of working in restaurants on New Year's Eve. This task along with a desire to enter another profession were not much fun. This was caused mostly by the fact that we began to call it Amateur Night' as it always seemed that people who never went out all year would pick this evening to go out, be grossly overcharged, and show that they lacked the aplomb to truly enjoy themselves on a night out. It was always the little things which ticked them off and caused them to make a scene with the staff. It is for this reason I usually never go out to dinner on New Years and would never in a million years consider standing in Times Square to watch the ball drop. It those cold December days which keep me inside. Not to mention the warm memories of my first New Years as a child, and the best New Year's I ever had as an adult spent at the Novys with many old pals from my Ridgewood days.

RHS 1970 Reunion Web Site

http://ridgewood70.shutterfly.com/

This is a wonderful site, filled with pictures, and sections devoted to every school in town. Well worth the time for a look if only to see some familiar haunts.

Ridgewood Education Foundation Link Added

I received a nice note from Jennie Smith Wilson, the Vice President of the Ridgewood Education Foundation. The Foundation is now included in our list of Ridgewood Links. According to Jennie:

"The Foundation provides support to the Ridgewood public schools through classroom grants and community-wide programs.

We were founded 20 years ago by then superintendent Fred Stokley and a group of residents and in the following years we have given over $400,000 to the schools through programs that directly reach the students and support excellence in education.  We are an independent foundation and not part of the district administration or Board if Education.

Many alumni support the Foundation and the additional exposure would be great."




Hope this helps raise awareness of the work they do.

Elton John

This shot of Elton and John Lennon was taken on November 28th 1974. A day probably didn't go by in the 1970s when you could go an hour and not hear an Elton John tune being broadcast on the radio. He was at the top of his game and the hits looked like they would never stop. Of course, things eventually settled down as they usually do. Though for someone growing up in the 1970s Elton John songs served as a comfortable soundtrack to our young lives.

The story behind this photo was that Lennon supposedly said he would play live with Elton if his solo album produced a #1 hit. As luck would have it the song "Whatever Gets You Thru The Night" reached number one on November 16th, and Lennon was good to his word. He joined Elton on stage at New York's Madison Square Garden during Elton's Thanksgiving Day concert there.

Thanksgiving Television

We always watched the football games on Thanksgiving Day, between playing football if the weather permitted and eating turkey. We still do the same thing, except for the playing of football. Though there is still a crew that does still participate in an annual Turkey Bowl game and if we are lucky they will post some photos on FaceBook.

My first memory of TV watching on Thanksgiving wasn't of football, it was the Victor Herbert classic, Babes in Toyland starring Laurel and Hardy.

Remember Silas Barnaby and how scary he appeared in the old black and white versions?
Not as scary in the colorized version, or maybe we just outgrow these things. ;-)

Though even to this day the site of the Wooden Soldiers coming to the rescue fills my heart with joy. Good triumphs over evil and the guy gets the girl. This has always been a fine way to start this day, even if we only happen upon the movie these days. As a child it was a certainty and one that could always produce a "I can't look" sort of feeling no matter how many times you had seen it.

Happy Thanksgiving. It's time to see the show!

The Days Before Thanksgiving

I easily recall that these were times filled with great anticipation, not the least because of the long weekend which the holiday afforded us.

There was always a bit of a nip in the air but usually no snow to complain about. We would see plenty of snow in the coming months so November didn't need to add to our burden. There were always still leaves on the trees and on the ground, which if we had strong backs and not too many callouses on our hands we could turn into some spending money.

Thanksgiving was always a holiday with few pressures, as the most important part was to show up at the table at the appointed hour with clean hands and a big appetite. This was not much of a challenge for us kids growing up, especially if we were able to sneak in a football game in the morning with our pals.

Sometimes we had relatives at our table and this always kept us on our best behavior. Though table manners were a custom we were all well drilled in and all it took was a look from my Mom or Dad if we acted out to rein in our youthful energies. These had no place at the dinner table and to this day I always appreciate a host or hostess who makes this clear to their children when I am so honored to have a place at their table.

I hope you all enjoy the holiday. My job this year is to make the pumpkin pies and whip the cream which serves as garnish. I like to do the entire meal but if left to only one task it will always be the dessert that I will select.


Peace.

November Leaves

We saw piles of leaves on Glenwood Road as we were growing up. One year they were piled so high that it was twice the size of the machine designed to bring them to the compost pile. Of course, as kids we saw this as an opportunity to climb to the top and try and throw our friends from the top of the heap.

This only lasted until the "Big Machines" from the village came and eliminated these piles. But until they did the leaf piles were ours to play within. These were some of the best times which I can remember from my Ridgewood days because the leaves were so soft  and our bones were so malleable.

November

This was always the month of the year when each day was an adventure for athletes; sometimes hot and sometimes cold. Up until Thanksgiving  this really didn't matter to us runners or football players (tackle or touch). We glorified in running in the rain or playing football in the mud. Though for obvious reasons the warm days were always more pleasant to compete in.

Enduring both the heat and the cold were realities which were part of the deal we made with ourselves and our coaches. I have written before about the monsoon our 1976 Cross Country ran through in the Eastern States Finals at Van Cortland Park in the Bronx. From the moment we stepped off the bus we were drenched and even more so once we removed our sweats to go warmed up. It is hard to imagine we were very warm at any point, and a glance at our coach, Larry Coyle, showed that his glasses were completely fogged up from the rain. This meant of course that there was no turning back, if the coach could do it we could too.

We did well that day despite the heavy November rain and mud. The team received numerous medals for enduring this maelstrom and no one who ran the race will ever forget it. Among the medals I received and the memories which have endured to this day the Eastern States is among the best. This was partly due to the fact that this was the end of the era for us Seniors; the Juniors and Sophomores knew it was now their turn to succeed us. It was also simply gratifying to say we survived the race because some of our competitors didn't, one boy broke his leg when he slipped in the mud. The scream he let out could be heard all over the park.

As the American poet T.S. Eliot once wrote, "April is the cruelest month.." At times during my youthful, more athletic days, this could have been said about November. I suppose one can always use their memory in hindsight to block out the cold and the rain, to give what was once a test of one's endurance a lighter tone and feel. With any luck this produces the end result of the warm glow which can sustain us through many a cold autumn night.

(Thanks for anonymous who pointed out that in "The Wasteland" it was April which was the cruelest month.)

Halloween

Halloween is a wonderful holiday. Kids get to explore their neighborhoods and grownups give them candy when they knock of their door. It's a good deal for all concerned and it also is a learning lesson for kids. At some point each child has to decide whether or not they are too old to make the candy tour. It's not that they don't want the treats it is just a sign, which they can always choose to ignore, that they need to make a decision about whether or not they are a kid or a teenager. Of course, this is how I remember it in my day.

These days Halloween is celebrated by people of all ages, and grownups go to great lengths to make costumes which reveal their inner selves. I have not been one to dress up since the day I decided I was too old to go out for Tricks or Treats. I have stood by the decision made in the 8th grade and I have never looked back and longed for ringing doorbells and shouting "tricks or treats" or dressing myself for an adult party. To each his own is my thinking.

It is curious to remember that my friends and I used to dress up as hobos, and the complete time it took to fashion our costumes was usually no more than a few minutes. All it took was some old cloths, one of my Dad's old hats, and a bit a charcoal applied to our faces. Maybe a few dry leaves stuffed inside our pockets to add to the desired effect. It was acceptable to dress as a hobo in those days, inexpensive, and required nobody to ruminate as to whether it was politically correct.

I now prefer to celebrate the holiday in more subtle ways, like picking out pumpkins which, in the words of Linus of Peanuts fame, that are sincere. These pumpkins have found a place on my window sill for many years and are never carved or painted. These "sincere pumpkins" stand on their own and need no special treatment. They are sort of like our old hobo costumes, they need no explanation.

RHS 1977 Class Gathering 26 Nov 2010

Many of the class of 1977 received this email from Bill Nolan so I thought it appropriate to re-post it:


"Guys:  I don't know if any of you will be in Ridgewood over the Thanksgiving weekend.  If you are, why don't we get together at Smith Brothers on Friday, Nov. 26th around 7:00ish.  We could grab dinner, or just have a few cold ones.  Fuzzy, please send this out to all the boys.  I lost half of my addresses a few weeks ago when I switched to a new computer.  Cindy Neidig is going to send an e-mail out as well.  Please feel free to send to other class of '77 people.  I hope to see many of you in Nov.  Fuzz, is Ridgewood home on Thanksgiving?  Willie"

The Road Not Taken

My favorite American Poet, Robert Frost, made a timeless observation about the choices we make in his 1920 poem, The Road Not Taken. When I first heard it elementary school I was the young fellow of the poem's first four stanzas. I'm not sure when I became the older person of the closing stanza but I am sure that is me now.

The choices I have made regarding my friends, career, and where I have chosen to live have made a difference, as they do for everybody. I suppose some people consider these choices more than others, and for some they are just agony. This makes me fairly lucky as I have no regrets about the life paths I didn't take, or where I stand in life at the moment. I have seen many stories far sadder than anything I could conjure up and this keeps me honest about what I am doing and where I want to be going.

We all have many times in our lives when there are two roads before us and we need to choose one. I guess one of those roads, ala the Frost poem, I saved for another day was the option to live in Ridgewood. In fact, I have saved it for so long it is no longer a reasonable option, or even one I would consider. This is not to denigrate the town or its inhabitants. We all just grow up differently and cherish different things. I like to remember how Ridgewood was in the 1960s and 1970s and try to keep these memories alive via this blog. It gives me the chance to ponder at length the road not taken. It has also made me realize that for me this has made all the difference.



                                                   The Road Not Taken

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;	5
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,	10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.	15
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.