One of the trips my first year in the band, fall of 1959, was a bus trip to some small high school with a ramshackle stadium, and, probably, a hapless football team that was destined to be steamrolled by the juggernaut that was the Big Red football program. I have forgotten what the school was named or where it was, but I remember their stadium as being sad, old, and beat-up. Of course no stadium looked as good as PHS in those days. In the next three years we never went back to wherever this was. I wonder if it was because of what went on with the band after the end of the football game.

We were forming up on the cinder track, getting ready to go on at halftime. We were down at the end of the field, a good distance from the sparsely attended ramshackle bleachers. There was a chain-link fence that separated us from a dimly lit parking lot. As we were waiting, a gang of around a dozen young men sauntered up out of the parking lot, scattered along the chain link fence and started yelling at us. I can’t remember the threats and curses of the time, but it’s a safe bet the word “queers” was somewhere in there. Frank said something to the head drum major, and he whistled us into formation and attention. Frank gave us an “eyes front,” so we weren’t looking at the gang. We knew better than to break formation or say anything. We waited. We ignored their taunts. Frank stood in front of the band.

A loud clang rang like a brass bell as a rock struck one of the big sousaphones. Frank came trotting back beside us at the fence. The following conversation took place. Maybe not in these exact words, but this is the way I remember it.

Frank: “What do you guys want?”

These guys were what we called greasers or hoods, a term I’ve explained earlier. They weren’t high-schoolers, were probably drop-outs, but they weren’t really functioning adults yet either. They had hood hairstyles, long greasy hair swirled into pompadours or the ever-popular buzz cut. They wore hood clothes: leather jackets, white T-shirts, cuffed blue jeans and heavy black boots. James Dean-style hoods.

Gang leader: “We want to kick your queer asses.”

Frank: “We’re not interested. We’re busy.” He glanced over at the field and saw that the home team band was finishing up whatever pathetic drill they had put on, (they were the sort of band who allowed girls as members and carried their music on their arms) and that we needed to get into place behind the goalposts. He turned away and trotted back toward the front of the band.

Clang! Another rock hit a sousaphone, and Frank went into full Teutonic, V-2 rocket mode. He ran back to where the hoods were.

“OK,” Frank yelled at the leader, “You want a fight? You’ve got it. We’ll meet you back here after the game. You’d better round up some more guys, because we are going to kick your asses. Right here! After the game!” He whirled around and blew his whistle and the drum major blew his and the drummers got us marching to our position. We did the drill and went back to the sidelines where the rest of the football game played out. Nobody talked about what Frank had said. He stood off to the side by himself, which is where he always stood, dealing with his fingernails as always, but you could tell he was really pissed off. The game ended. Frank came to the front as we were getting up from our chairs.

“Leave your instruments, we’ll get them later. Form up on the track and get into position. Some guys want to fight us, so we’ll fight. Nobody throws rocks at the Big Red Band. The older guys will tell you what to do.” He walked over to the cinder track and waited.

This was pretty thrilling. Good thing I couldn’t see myself — there I was, this tiny kid putting his piccolo down and turning to one of the older guys. A few of us gathered around him (clarinet) and he gave us a demonstration. The rest of the guys were huddled in small groups.

“Take off your belt,” the older boy said. We wore what is called a Sam Brown belt. The always helpful Wiki tells me it was named for its inventor, Sam Brown — what a surprise — who was a soldier who had had his left arm cut off in a sabre fight and needed a way to keep his blade from clanking around when he was running into battle, one-armed. What typifies the belt is a smaller belt that runs from left to right over the shoulder, which allows the waist belt to hold up any amount of equipment that you want to pile on. The main part of our belt, the part that goes around the waist, was four inches wide, white, and had a very large, square, brass buckle in the front. I see from videos of today’s Big Red Band the belts now have two crosspieces over each shoulder. The older guy showed us how to wrap the belt around your fist so that the belt buckle ended up on the knuckle portion of your hand. That way when you punched someone the buckle did some serious damage, especially if the prong thing happened to be sticking forward when the punch was thrown. Let it be noted that belts of this type could also be usefully employed in a fight by swinging them overhead and smashing them into opposing faces, but we, the band, did our fighting in close formation and didn’t have room to swing anything without possibly hitting our own guys.

I wrapped my belt around my tiny fist and was inordinately proud. I was a warrior, going into my first battle. The drum major whistled us into close formation, four abreast, on the narrow cinder track.

Being the drum major of the band was an extremely important position. Traditionally, the DM is, physically, a big guy. Historically, and by that I mean back in history, part of the DM’s job was to preside over any flogging that had to be done, not that there was any flogging being done in the Big Red Band. Just ass kicking. That year, my first year in the band, our drum major was really tall (especially when I stood next to him) and really tough. He wore one of those beaver fur hats, the sort that the guards at Buckingham palace wear only white, and he carried a long, heavy baton, which he could use to beat the shit out of people. With the hat, our guy stood around eight feet tall. Picture him at the front of our Big Red phalanx as we marched into battle.

We had to exit the stadium, which by now was largely empty, and make our way around back to the dark parking lot. I’m sure that Frank was hoping for a certain amount of discretion on our part, as what we were about to do would surely be frowned on by any authorities. We were in a really hick burg; who knows what side the cops would be on? Even Frank wasn’t about to take on guys with guns.

Today, what we were about to do would be considered insane, especially because the gang we would be going up against would be armed with street weapons featuring names like Glock and Beretta. Back then there were knives and whatever clubs could be picked up along the way.

One of the many things that struck me as we went about getting ready for the fight was how calm and matter-of-fact everyone was. The new guys kept their mouths shut because they knew they had nothing to add and everything to learn by paying close attention, and the older guys acted like it was completely familiar and nothing to get excited about, as if they had made these preparations many times before. And perhaps they had, I didn’t know, this was my first year. As always, everyone seemed perfectly confident that the band would prevail.

Picture it. We were drawn up in a solid, tight formation, red uniformed phalanx. In front was the head drum major, an eight-foot giant wielding a long metal pole. There were a couple of slightly smaller drum majors just behind him. And by his side was our stone-faced, very pissed off German leader, Never-Throw-Rocks-At-My-Sousaphones, Frank. Frank tossed out a command, “On the rim.” The drum major lifted his baton and brought it smartly down and the drums began the cadence.

“On the rim” meant the drummers used the wooden rim of the drumhead, rather that the drumhead itself. This was employed when we wanted to get someplace fairly quietly, but still needed the cadence to stay in step. It produces an odd sound, and on this night, lit by the stadium lights behind us and headed for a dark parking lot, it sounded like the rattle of old, dry bones. Our shoes crunched in unison on the cinder track. Other than these two sounds there was complete silence.

As we approached the lot, we saw the gang appearing out of the shadows. They had indeed called up some reinforcements. Twenty or thirty of them were walking slowly toward us. Some of them were carrying baseball bats and lengths of wood. I was scared shitless but marched along in step with everyone else.

Frank nodded at the drum major who blew a long, very loud blast on his whistle, and the drummers switched from the rim to the head of the drums. After the ominous clacking of the rims, the effect of the massed drums was thundering. I wish I could have stepped aside and just watched this sight: the solid band of red-uniformed young men, belt-wrapped fists, the roaring of the drums. I’m sure it was impressive. Even now it gives me a slight chill remembering it.

After standing their ground for about five seconds, the gawking gang melted away back into the darkness. In another five seconds they were gone. The drum major whistled us to a halt, and we stood there, in the dark, at attention, in complete silence. After a minute, Frank said, “At ease. Go get your instruments and get on the bus. It’s over.”

And it was.

Here’s a lesson about Frank Schroeder. He was never a friend to any of us. He was hard man and took no crap from anyone. He would kick your ass if you screwed up. He demanded as much perfection as he could wring from 80 high-spirited, young men. And he got very angry when anyone threw stones at his sousaphones. You may not have liked him, but by God, you feared and respected him.

 

Stop! Warning! The following blog entry contains material of a sexual nature! Those who continue reading will find tales of the sexual education of a twelve-year-old boy. Evidently, this is way too hot for some of you. My last entry, which included the word “sex” in the title and told of the widespread reading of the novel Peyton Place among the mothers in Parkersburg WV, was too much for some of you. I received shocked! comments and Roger, the keeper of the blog about several early WV history sites, where I had put up a notice of the blog entry, was told it was porn and had to be removed from his site, which he did. I am so proud to have been kicked off the Internet for being Too Hot To Handle. I spoke to Roger, a prince of a man, really, who told me he just figured I had been hacked by a porn site so he took the notice down. Roger knows this is not unusual because he has to deal with these porn hackers all the time, so he was right to take it down. But really, people, anyone who actually read the entry would have found it to be pretty tame stuff.

Not so this next one. So let me repeat, if you are offended by material of any level of a sexual nature, please, click back to a site where you are comfortable. If, on the other hand, you want a laugh or two, venture on, faithful reader, and join me 65 or so years ago in The Carnegie Library: Den of Iniquity!

The Carnegie, as we always called it, (“Mom, I got to go to the Carnegie tonight!”) will forever be remembered as a place of refuge and wonder to me and many of my generation in our town. Wiki tells me that 2,509 libraries were built on grants from Andrew Carnegie, and the one in Parkersburg, West Virginia, was a beauty. It always reminded me of an Egyptian temple, one that might have a giant Sphinx nearby and be manned, (womanned) by slave girls dressed in Egyptian slave-girl garb. The librarians actually wore standard librarian clothing, and they were always nice, especially after they figured out that you were a smart little bugger who was reading way beyond his age level. Once you established these bona fides, they were happy to recommend adult novels and let you take home as many books as you could physically carry.

The library as refuge. There was some unwritten law back then that said if a child wanted/needed/demanded to be driven to the library (it was too far to walk) any available adult had to take them. When we were younger, and my mother didn’t have a car and dad was working out of town, we would take the bus and she would go with us. But this was only during the day, usually on the weekend. When we were older and we had two cars, mom would drive us after dinner, drop us off and pick us up a couple of hours later. During that time we were expected to research whatever topic we were working on, check out pertinent books and any novels that caught our fancy, and work at our papers on the long communal library tables. Of course we did this — we actually did — but there was a lot of off-topic exploration as well.

For me, the Carnegie was a hot-bed of sex.

As I said, the architecture of the building was more King Tut than the usual Roman Empire influence in public buildings. You walked up broad steps and entered the main room where Nefertiti, er, the head librarian, presided behind a circular kiosk surrounded by a high counter. My memory is of always having to hand my slips in by reaching high and sliding the slip toward this looming lady but surely at some point I must have been tall enough to, more or less, conduct my business without the librarian having to loom over the counter to speak to me. But maybe not. There were marble staircases on one side of this front area that led to an upstairs that was mostly used for storage and was off-limits to the general public. We never went up those steps. God knows what sort of library hi-jinx went on up there.

As you circumnavigated the center island and walked to the back of the large room, you came to the area where the books were shelved. It was four stories high beneath giant glass skylights, the floors made of thick, misty opaque glass panels and accessed by a massive wrought iron spiral staircase that projected, Nautilus-like, up through the center of this vast atrium of knowledge.

The standard drill was you went to the card catalogue, (oh, how I could go on about the wonders of the card catalogue, a resource now sadly missing from libraries everywhere) looked up your subject and found books that hopefully pertained, filled out a call slip with the little pencils that had no erasers they provided, the same pencils handed out at miniature golf facilities, turned your slip in at the desk and someone, apprentice librarians, not the Head Librarian, would go and retrieve your books for you. This waiting period was profitably spent perusing the newest popular novels that were shelved around this front room. When you received your books, piled on the counter with your call slip, you hauled them to the table where you set up camp. You then either studied them and took notes, or you leafed through them to find those that would be of the most use to you.

When I was a little older, and after having established myself as a solid, honorable, book-loving child, I was allowed to roam the four story stacks on my own.

One magnificent evening, I don’t remember how old I was – old enough to care – I started up the spiral staircase. This was the only such staircase I had ever seen, and because the steps varied in size, small where they attached to the center pole, wider at the outer edges, it took a certain amount of concentration to climb them. Not a lot, I wasn’t an idiot, but enough that you had to pay attention to where the handrail was, where you were putting your feet, always checking upward to see where you were going. On this glorious night, I looked up and realized I could look straight up the dress of a high school girl who was ten steps or so ahead of me. And I mean all the way up her dress. I almost fell down a couple of flights of stairs.

I was shocked and had to fight the immediate urge to peer back up at the sight . At the same time I was shamed by the fact that I not only could see the young lady’s underwear, but by the overwhelming urge to do so, forever, or until she found her floor and moved off the steps. Is there any sexual imperative greater for a young pubescent male than to see young women in their underwear? Well, seeing them without their underwear, yes, but that slightly frightening possibility was some years in the future.

I went about my usual library business that night, but my time at the Carnegie was changed forever. I was smart enough to understand that I could not spend my hours there skulking up and down the stairs every time I saw a young woman in a dress headed to the upper floors, that I would surely be found out, arrested and taken to jail, or sent to the dreaded Pruntytown. Pruntytown was a correctional facility in West Virginia where they sent kids who had fallen afoul of the law. Every kid’s mother had said at one time or another when you had done something wrong, “Keep that up and you’ll be sent to Pruntytown!” A visit to Google tells me that Pruntytown still exists and is home to 369 minimum and medium custody male inmates. In my day we envisioned the facility to be filled with children who had been sent there by their parents because of intractable criminal behavior such as looking up girls’ skirts and generally not obeying the rules. In my mind it resembled etchings and lithographs I had see in old books about Victorian insane asylums.

But I must admit, if I was just happening to be headed up the staircase and there just happened to be a female ahead of me I would take the opportunity for a quick peek as I was making sure of my progress up those difficult stairs. Sure, I knew I was risking a two-year stretch at Pruntytown and public humiliation, but it was worth it.

The next brick in the shaky edifice of my sexual education was found again up those same library stairs, on the fourth floor. No one ever went to the fourth floor, or hardly anyone. I don’t know why I was up there that first time, probably nothing more than book curiosity, the drive to see every book that was available to me. But it was there, one day, when I was browsing for nothing in particular, when I pulled out a large medical book on forensic medicine. I probably took it down because I didn’t know what the word forensic meant.

It turns out that it meant that this was a book filled with pictures of dead people, victims of accidents and homicide, and by golly some of them didn’t have a stitch of clothing on. Usually these deceased had some visible disease or wound, but more times than you might imagine, these were minor disfigurements that could be easily ignored, what with all the nakedness to take in. It was pretty easy to just pretend that these were normal everyday people, women — I wasn’t interested in the men — who had simply crawled up on a coroner’s slab, naked, to take a nap.

Surely the most influential photograph was that of a woman’s vagina, complete with a thatch of bush, in Bobby Huffman’s parlance, (if you’ve forgotten, see Entry #9, aptly titled Naked Ladies) that totally blotted out Bobby’s best efforts with the Sears catalogue and a piece of tracing paper. The picture was striking in its detail, and I looked at it, astonished, just as I would be astonished the other three or four thousand times I would climb those stairs, take the book down and furtively stare at it on that lonely fourth floor of the Carnegie Library. Thank God no one ever came up there to see what the hell I was doing, for if they had done so I would have been immediately sent to Pruntytown and locked up for the next ten years in the sexual deviant’s wing. The caption stated (this must have been the forensics’ part) that the vagina was that of a woman who was a prostitute and thus an example of the stretching and general looseness that was sure to afflict the body parts of women in that profession. Since I had never seen one in an unstretched condition, I had nothing to base an opinion of this one on, but it looked perfectly fine to me. What the hell did I know? I wish I could say that I was repulsed by this experience, but if I did I would be lying. One thing I’m pretty sure of is that the editors of that book were full of crap when it came down to the whole stretched diagnosis. I think they just wanted to put a dirty picture in their book in the hopes it would increase sales.

I thought of this photograph years later when reading a biography of the great Victorian art historian, John Ruskin. (born, February 8, 1819; died January 20, 1900) I can almost hear you readers out there sitting up straight and leaning close to these pages, puzzled expressions on your faces, wondering where in hell I’m going with this comparison.

At the age of 30 Ruskin married a childhood friend, Effie Grey. Some years later they divorced and had the marriage annulled. The marriage was unconsummated and Ruskin was accused of “incurable impotency,” by his wife, which he denied. Effie Grey gave this explanation for their non-consummation. These were her words. “… that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April [1848].” What this means is on his wedding night, Ruskin walked into his bedchamber, took one look at his naked wife and almost fainted.

Up to this point, Ruskin’s experience of naked women came only from what he had seen in classical sculpture and painting, in which women were represented with no pubic hair. Remember, he was one of the world’s greatest experts in classical art. When he saw Effie’s pubic region with her natural hair, he was repulsed. And never wanted to have anything to do with her again. Some people dispute this explanation, but most experts agree this is probably what happened. Especially since Effie said so herself. When you take into account that some years later Ruskin fell in love with a ten-year-old girl, it makes even more sense. Fortunately, he didn’t marry the ten-year-old.

My memory, when I read this about Ruskin, flew back to that particular graphic photograph in the medical book, and I thought if Ruskin had ever seen such a thing he would have immediately been struck blind and rendered insane. As for me, I can detect absolutely no overt effect on my psyche, then, over the years, or now. But I still remember it, don’t I?

After this momentous discovery in the library, my sexual education lagged for a number of years until the summer I joined the band. A carnival had come to town, not one of the small ones in the city park, but a big rip-roaring carnival with a giant (to me) Ferris wheel, many scary, vomit-inducing rides, a freak show and lastly, a girly show. The carnival was there from Monday through Saturday and since it was in a large field not far from my house we walked over there a number of times during that week. After taking in the usual sights – the freak show had a bodiless, lady’s head on a table that could carry on a conversation with her viewers, and a bunch of sad animals – a two-headed snake, a two-faced kitten — that were housed in cages that would get them convicted on cruelty to animals charges today. My friends and I would walk by the entrance of the girly show and were told that we were too young to go in. Laughter and loud cheers came from this infamous tent, and strip tease music blared. We knew if we could just get inside we would finally get to see that holy grail, a real, live, naked woman.

On the last night of the show, word was passed around that the girly show would hold one more performance, and the girls would be stripping down to absolutely nothing. But the biggest news was that the guy who sold the tickets at the entrance was no longer concerned about the police busting the operation for allowing minors in. After the last show they would take down the tents and be out of town before the cops could round anyone up. All he wanted was our fifty cents. And he got it.

The tent was pretty full, all men, and it was clear that we were going to have to squirm our way to the front if we were going to be able to see anything at all. I was with my friend Rusty, and we accomplished this maneuver without much trouble. No one behind me was worried about being able to see over me, (Rusty wasn’t much taller than me) so they let us through to the crowd to the edge of the stage.

The last show of the night turned out featured one lone dancer. Maybe she had drawn the short straw and been sent out for this one last performance while the other ladies packed up and prepared to move on.

I don’t remember what the music was, but the dancer shimmied out onto the stage, four feet off the ground, and began dancing around. She wasn’t wearing much, just a bikini bottom, so there wasn’t much tease in the strip. Really, is there any man who really enjoys the long, slow, strip act of a “legendary” performer like Blaze Star? No. Men want to see naked women, and the crowd I was standing with was perfectly happy to forgo the foreplay of a tease.

The lady took off her bikini bottom, waved it overhead and the crowd cheered; this is what they had paid fifty cents to see. She paraded around the stage, bent over, pushed and pulled at her flesh (in a fetching manner) and gave everyone a good show. She was attractive, in a naked sort of way, blond, and shaved, which was a plus in my book. I was happy to see the goods when they weren’t shrouded the way they were in Bobby’s tracings and the photo in the book at the Carnegie library.

As she pranced around, she suddenly seemed to notice Rusty and me at the edge of the stage, leering up at her. I can only imagine what she thought. From up there, I probably appeared around ten years old, and Rusty didn’t look that much older. So she saw us, and crouched down about a foot from my face. It was a revelation, in all senses of the word, to me, which I think she could clearly see. Then she swiveled toward Rusty, who was leaning in close with a maniacal grin. Suddenly, she grabbed his glasses off his astonished face, rubbed them on her lower parts and plopped them back on his nose. The crowd went wild.

I was worried that Rusty might find this somehow, what? Barbaric? Crude? That he was being made fun of? Was he angry?

Nope.

He had the biggest cat-that-ate-the-canary-grin on his face that I had ever seen. The lady stood up, gave a quick bow, and trotted off the stage. The show was over.

As we were filing out of the tent, Rusty turned to me, peering out from his smeary lenses, and said, awe and wonder coloring his words,

“I’m never going to clean my glasses again.”

The new members of the Big Red band were given a packet of music – marches — to learn. Many were by John Philip Souza, not much of a surprise there, and others were by composers I had never heard of. These were packaged in small portfolios, around eight inches by six inches, enclosed in a snap package with a clear plastic front, which made them pretty much waterproof. I’ve said that some bands mounted these music portfolios on special music stands strapped to their arms so they could read the music as they marched. We sneered at any band that resorted to this method. Pussies. We memorized the marches. The drills were too complicated to perform if we were looking at music as well. So we, the new boys, memorized the marches. And woe betide anyone who couldn’t play every one of them from memory.

Everyday in the summer we went to the grassy lawn in front of the high school for marching practice. Before going out front, we would warm up by playing the marches in the band room for fifteen minutes or so. If Frank thought someone, a new guy, was faking his way through the music, he would stop the band, point at the offender, and say, “Turn your music over.” Which meant you then had to play the march, from memory, all by yourself, without the psychic and practical help of an entire band around you. These were terrifying moments, and you could get reduced down the ranks for a bad performance. If you flunked one of these challenges, once out of the band room you knew someone was going to kick your ass all the way down to the practice field. I saw this happen on several occasions, so I broke my usual lethargic practice schedule and learned the marches well enough that Frank, who seemed to have a preternatural ear, couldn’t hear me faking my way through a piece of music.

Semper Fidelis, The Washington Post, The Thunderer, El Capitan, are all classic marches that we would play while executing drills. If you listen to recordings of them today, (they’re all on the Internet) one thing you will notice that is common to all of them is the one instrument you can actually hear individually is the damn piccolo. The masses of brass, lead by the cornets and underpinned by the trombones and sousaphones take the lead, with the reeds — the clarinets and the saxophone filling out the wall of sound — and over it all, flitting, dancing, is the piccolo. You don’t need a whole section of them, one will do, just as that music teacher told me years ago in grade school, it is the littlest, but it is the loudest.

There were three broad lawns that stretched in front of the high school down to the street. A giant horseshoe drive arced up and around the front of the school. We practiced through the month of August, two times a day, two hours morning and late afternoon, on the right-hand lawn, as you looked from the street toward the high school. If the first two weeks of the month was a sort of hell because you were getting your ass kicked, the last two weeks were another sort because of the heat. Even though we worked in the morning and the late afternoon/evening, it was still hot.

The grass was laid out with limestone lines exactly like those on the football field. There was a kid who did this, limed the practice field, and redid it every time the rain washed the lines away, or we wore them away by walking on them. Looking back now I see him as a sort of unsung worker hero who probably never got the appreciation he deserved.

The evening practices had a magic to them. You have to remember this was a small town, West Virginia, in the late 1950s. I’m sure there were the usual bad aspects to our life — poverty, inequality, stupidity — but we, or at least I, didn’t seem to worry about any of that. Maybe the adults were worrying about the Korean War, racism, the atom bomb and other societal ills, but we weren’t. Everyone had enough money to live on and even those who had a lot of money didn’t live very differently from the rest of us. The band was a great leveler: you learned your music, the drills and you did your best. If you didn’t, you got your ass kicked. Outside, there was another world, but we didn’t live in it. The social revolution of the 60s had not yet befallen us; we existed in a lovely haze of hot, halcyon summer days, golden evenings and privilege.

There wasn’t a lot to do in Parkersburg. One of the main attractions was the large city park just a block from our house. You would go there to swim in the pool, fish and feed the ducks in the pond (the Second Largest Man-Made Lily Pond in the World, it was said. Really? The question always in my mind was why was it the second largest? Where was the first largest? It was rumored to be in Japan, but no one really knew.) In the winters the pond froze over, and we ice-skated on it, building bon fires, roasting marshmallows and skating until we were exhausted. When we got back home there was always hot chocolate. We picnicked in the park, played on the swings, and climbed the memorial aircraft gun commemorating the dead from WWII. There was a log cabin museum in the park which never seemed to be open. And a band shell where members of the band would sometimes play concerts on the weekends; the townsfolk would bring blankets and sit on the grass and enjoy the music while little kids ran around. There was a small zoo. I related in an earlier entry that one year a drunken hunter climbed over the fence and shot one of the deer and was caught by the cops trying to drag it over the six-foot, chain-link fence. As my friend Butch reminded me after I posted that entry, the fact that the hunter was a city councilman made this crime even more amusing.

There was a curious bunch of men who would hold meetings in the park at least once or twice a summer where they would bring motors, noisy gasoline engines of all sizes, and set them out on the grass and start them up and leave them running for hours while they sat around in lawn chairs and listened to the infernal racket of the popping, sputtering engines. Why? I had no idea, but they always seemed to be enjoying themselves.

At least once a year, usually twice, small carnivals would set up for the weekend. There would be rides and games and carnival workers who appeared very exotic to us, leathery, thin, tanned sly-looking people, men and women, who tried to cajole you into tossing rings, firing BB guns, or pitching ping pong balls into small glasses with goldfish. No kid’s mother was ever pleased to see you come home with a goldfish. If you won one it would surely be dead within a couple of days. No one ever won any of the decent prizes.

In the summer the park was filled with picnickers and extended families holding annual family reunions. There were long covered shelters with end-to-end picnic tables where these reunions were held, much coveted, sheltered spaces because of the possibility of rain. On a summer weekend when a reunion was scheduled a member of the family would be assigned the job of going over on a Friday night and sleeping on one of the picnic tables in a shelter so no one else could grab it the next day for their own reunion. I hated our reunion, the Bush family reunion, mostly because as a kid you were continually besieged by at least three or four hundred (no, I am exaggerating) very large aunts who were all enormously fat with arms the size of smoked hams where the skin of the upper arm flapped heavily, bosoms that threatened to smother you and facial hair that tickled and prickled when they gathered you up and gave you kisses. Acres of country dishes were spread out on the tables with several grills nearby pumping out platters of grilled chicken and hamburgers and hotdogs. The men worked the grills and played horseshoes, and the kids just ran around and around. As much as I hated it, I also loved it.

We went to the swimming pool almost every day in the summer. We had books of tickets, one of which you would hand over to the bored teenager at the entrance who would give you a basket that had a number on a small metal plate and a giant safety pin with the corresponding number attached. You’d go into the appropriate dressing room, change your clothes and stash them in the basket and hand it to another attendant behind a beat-up, wooden counter on the way out. The safety pin was attached to your swimming suit. You would give it back to the attendant as you left the pool, and it would be matched with the basket with your clothing so you could change into your clothes and head home for dinner. We would be at the pool for hours and hours and usually had the sunburn to prove it.

One year when I was very young, my Aunt Mary was in town, and she took me to the pool. Because I was so young she dragged me into the women’s side to change my clothes. There were no cubicles there, just benches with all the women stripped down as they were changing. Beside me, an enormous fat woman, and I mean really enormous, stark naked, bent over to put her suit on and her giant behind was so close to me I was severely traumatized; I told my mother I would never go in the women’s side again, no matter what, and I never did. I went in alone on the men’s side and changed by myself; if a pervert had kidnapped me and made me his sex slave I would have preferred it to ever having to see another fat woman’s ass the size of a Volkswagen bus.

Here’s a city park story.

The summer I joined the band I was fourteen; most of my friends were fifteen. By the next summer, the oldest would have their driver’s licenses, which greatly expanded our roaming range. But this summer we were on foot except when our parents gave us rides to wherever we were going. The city park was centrally located to the houses of our small gang that met there at night on the weekends. We certainly weren’t going to have our parents drive us to the park for these revels, nor did we need them to.

These were pre-mall days. In many ways having malls to drop young teens off is a godsend for parents. They’re indoors, climate-controlled, patrolled by their own police forces, clean, have food and drink and provide all sorts of legal entertainment. The city park, on the other hand, was dark and provided plenty of semi-hidden places for small groups of young men up to no good to gather.

There were usually three or four of us: me, (piccolo); Jim Green, (cornet — his brother Dave was first trumpet and one of the leaders of the band); Steve Telemeyer, (drummer — his brother was first clarinet, another leader); Bill Parker, (drums) and Bill Stone, known as Stoney, another drummer. My closest friend Jake Patterson, clarinet, and my neighbor, the aforementioned Butch McGee, drum major. Not that we ever took our instruments to the park with us. Well, actually we did. One night very late we sneaked over to the park and sat in the dark in the band shell and played marches. No one seemed to notice. Or perhaps they did, the music floating in through half-opened windows, causing sleepers to stir and dream of Friday night football games and marching bands.

Our families stretched across the social strata; they knew each other, but didn’t really socialize. The band was the only connection for the adults. Jimmy Greens father ran a dump truck, dirt-hauling business and was rumored to have spent many years traveling across the United States in carnivals before creating his trucking empire. The Greens lived in a new one-story house that was unlike the older homes that the rest of us lived in. His mother was young, and even we, callow youths, knew she was very beautiful. Jimmy’s father was tough and took absolutely no crap from his three boys. Or, we were afraid, his beautiful wife. The oldest brother raced stock cars on mud tracks. Sometimes we went to see him race, and everyone in the audience hated him and booed him, but as far as we were concerned, he was a hero.

Steve Telemeyer’s father was a respected doctor. They lived on a beautiful, tree-lined street of stately homes. We never saw his father, and his mother seemed to exist only in the semi-darkness of their brick home: quiet, frail, delicate. She always seemed faintly amused at our group of boys.

Bill Parker’s father was the head of one of the sprawling chemical plants that lined the Ohio River near our town. He was a big-deal kind of guy, but was hearty and helpful, willing to drive us when he was free, a wonderful father who bought me my first decent steak. More on that later. Bill’s mother was a tall lady, privileged, aristocratic (for West Virginia) probably bored, another mother who observed us with calm bemusement. We liked her. Jake lived fairly far out of town though I was at his house often; more on his parents later.

My mother was much closer to my friends than these other ladies, a sort of den mother who was always willing to pitch in on whatever project — no matter how whacky — we had thought up and needed help executing. She could also be counted on to feed anyone who happened to show up at mealtimes.

I was surprised at one time, back then, when we thought up a really twisted stunt and enlisted her help and she pitched right in. In fact I’m still surprised at it.

Easter was coming. One of the Parkersburg traditions was the annual Easter egg hunt in the city park. As a child attending, in previous years, I had noticed that most of the eggs were snagged by aggressive parents who raced into the park at the given signal, children following, sometimes far behind, and scooped up all the obvious eggs and handed them over to their kids.

That year, the first year in high school, I came up with a plan. I believe it was Stoney and Jake who joined me in this endeavor of revenge. I decided that we three would pose as Easter Egg “Police.” Armed with clipboards, we would go up to every adult we could find grabbing eggs ahead of the children and take their names and addresses, telling them that the city would be sending them a ticket in the mail for breaking the rules of the hunt. I told my mother we needed three clipboards, told her what we intended to do, and asked if she could get them for us. She heard me out and decided it was a funny idea and went out and bought the clipboards and pads of paper for them. Not once did she say,” Someone is going to punch you in the nose,” or, “you’re going to get into trouble.” She just handed over the clipboards the night before the big egg hunt.

The next day, armed with the clipboards, we headed over to the park. There were probably 50 or 75 kids and adults, all formed up around the band shell, waiting for the starting bell to begin. Around us, in the nooks of trees, beneath bushes, nestled in the grass, were the plastic eggs that held small plastic trinkets. A public address system had been set up in the band shell. The announcer, I believe he was a dj for one of the local radio shows, whipped the crowd into a frenzy, called down the count and the egg hunt was on!

And the adults did what they always did.

We did what we had come to do.

Me. “Excuse me, sir?”

Man with small child in tow: “Yes.”

“Did you just pick that egg up from underneath that bush and give it to your child?”

“Well, yes.”

“Do you know that’s an infraction of the rules, which clearly state that the children are supposed to find the eggs on their own?” I tap on my clipboard as if I have a copy of the Official Rules right there.

“I was just helping her.”

“I think it was quite clear that you found the egg, not the little girl. Isn’t that right, little girl?” The little girl hides herself behind her father’s leg.

“I’m going to have to take your address. The city will send you a ticket in the mail.”

Silence.

“What is your name and address, sir?”

Here’s the crazy part — every adult actually gave us their names and address. We each corralled five people and the result was the same for each of us. The adults looked sheepish and trotted out their names and addresses without any more prompting or whining on their part. They’d been caught, and by God they would suffer the consequences. After five people each we called it quits, partially because we had proved our point and shamed the adults who were snatching up the eggs, and mostly because it didn’t cause any fuss at all and soon became boring. Can you imagine pulling a stunt like that today? We’d have been shot, stabbed or beaten by every “wrongdoer” we approached.

When we got back to my house and told our story, my mom had a good laugh and declared it a successful prank and served us all a slice of her famous chocolate pie with whipped cream. She didn’t actually whip the cream, but squirted it out of a can, which was a fairly new product for the time. We called the whipped cream “Fuff” because of the sound it made coming out of the spray nozzle. As in, “Would you like some more Fuff on your pie?”

We had another slice of pie and told the story again and laughed. I believe my mom laughed the hardest of us all.