Humanity Notes

Humanity Notes Kanook – Oct, 2009 Sit back and take a stroll back into your memory, whereas if you were lucky like most my age, you were raised in a small town somewhere in America, or another country that enjoyed the benefits of the 1950s and 1960s where the isolation of the little berg tucked away in some corner of planet was our world, our only world. I had the added benefit of no TV or even a local radio station, where most of my entertainment came from interactions between my friends and group functions put on by our parents. This was small town America, where a trip to a big city by one of our peers was a major event making them a celebrity when they returned. We didn’t have access to information telling who was the richest person in the world, or who drove or owned the latest automobile, we didn’t give a damn – we were at home bent over the hood of a 49 Ford coupe or a 54 Chevrolet tearing down the engines and putting in oversized pistons and split manifolds on the straight six’s to get a cool sound, we might take a can of paint and spruce it up a bit – but this was an option rarely exercised. We sat in the local hangout drinking cherry cokes or chocolate sodas, and there were a few of us that stepped outside behind the building to strike up a Lucky or a Pal Mall once in a while but even that was rare…and we had our beer parties, as for drugs – we had no idea what they did or where we could get any. You could say we were a bit innocent when it came to drugs, whereas we thought a shot of Novocain in the dentist’s chair was our limit. As for climate, well the only thing we knew growing up in Southeast Alaska was if it wasn’t raining it would be shortly, and did we worry about climate changing? Not a bit, well to be truthful neither did anyone else in our town, we worried about the fishing season, the hunting season and how many lumber ships were coming into port for the year, where most of our fathers were longshoremen and overtime was always a good thing. As we grew older most of us either worked on fishing boats, or worked the local canneries, and if lucky some of us got a plum job at the local mill – let me tell you local hire was the motto of our town, if you were from out of town you either didn’t get a chance at a job or if one came up it was at the bottom of the pole – actually no matter your experience you started somewhere below the actual bottom of the pole. The owners and supervisors of the local establishments knew that if they violated this little hierarchy strange things might happen, for instance a local cannery boss hired his brother’s son from Seattle for a high-paying job running a machine at one of canneries, the next week one of his pallets didn’t make the Alaska Steamship headed to Seattle and he lost about $7500 – truth be known I had no idea what happened to it, but word got around that it had slipped overboard when one of the forklifts slid a bit on the wet dock – hey things happen! His

nephew was moved out onto the unload dock with a $1.50 cut-in-pay, like I said the town was pretty close especially with their own. Why we even missed the almost end-of-the-world that was brought about with the Cuban Missile Crisis, don’t get me wrong we read the Weekly Readers which we got about a month behind the times, so we really didn’t have to sit and worry about Kennedy and Khrushchev getting wild with their WMDs, like I said we were isolated, innocent, not-so-dumb, but in general very satisfied with our own world of work, study, and play hard. We had a local basketball town team and our high-school team was so-so, but we had a top notch band, of which I had the honor of being first chair in the trumpet section, that won top place in Alaska in 62 and 63, we weren’t bad at all – our favorite music to play was Dixieland and from time to time we jammed on some pretty cool jazz. That only happened if a few of us had a few beers before a concert, we had a little tiny girl that could blow the varnish out of a clarinet, when she got to rockin (after a beer or two) she never failed to bring the house to its feet. She’d take over the melody and people’s feet not even at the concert were tappin and thumbs snappin – she is still in my home town, a grandmother today and the head nurse at the hospital. We had a piano player who couldn’t read a note of music, the band teacher would have the rest of us stumble through a new tune and in five minutes “Bugsy” would pick it up and the ivories would melt. He and I would get together from time-to-time, he would stroll through a tune and I would pick it up with my muted piece of brass and we’d rock the night away….hey it was a small town! He retired as one of the senior pilots of Alaska Airlines a few years ago, and his son Art and him stir up the neighborhood in West Seattle once in a while banging away on two uprights in his basement – music was equal to drugs in that little town in Southeast Alaska. We had a few other diversions beside the regular stuff, another guy and I put together a 10 watt AM radio transmitter and became the first radio station in the region, we broadcast on the 1030 band. We played 45s till midnight and on the weekends broadcast the basketball games. After about 6-months the local Alaska Communications System big-boss (Sam) caught up with us downtown and informed us we had to stop, seems one of the local ministers had filed a complaint, we were knocking out a station from Eureka, California. His daughter was in my class, I took her out that weekend and poured her out at 1 AM, so full of beer her shoes were wet – I left her sitting on the front steps of the church. We never did get back on the air. Our illegal station was setup in the science lab at school, where the little transmitter was in a little room facing town with a wire antenna hanging out the window and our broadcast booth was in another little room across the lab, both rooms were in the front of the lab, with the blackboard and the teachers desk in the middle. Before morning biology class started I usually go to the broadcast booth and setup the nights broadcast schedule, taking the requests that had been jammed into my locker, sorting through them and writing a little monologue to go along.

One Sunday evening when George was behind the mike I took a audio transformer and peeled the windings (wire, very thin) from the core – sitting there looking at the extremely thin wire and wondering what I could do with it, a light flashed on and I took the wire and ran it along the baseboard below the blackboard to the other room. George was paying no-never mind to my project. I then clipped the middle of the wire and in the other room attached a 110 plug with one end tied to the ground side of the electrical system in the building. In the booth I tied the other end to a high-voltage manual generator, with one end of the coil tied to the same 110 ground, it had a handle on it that when you spun it would put out a couple of thousand volts with low or little current…strictly a toy. Our high school science teacher, from Penn State, had finally found a local girl and she had asked him to give up smoking, he was about 1 week into his stop smoking project and would sit on a metal stool with his feet propped up against the desk and his back against the blackboard, and chew the ends of toothpicks – get the picture. On Monday I went to school a little early and took the two split ends (very thin wire remember about the size or a little bigger than a human hair) and wrapped the stripped end around two legs of the four legged metal stool. One more item I forgot, we had a mirror setup where we could watch the modulation index on our 10 watt transmitter, in other words by leaving the door open a crack we had a clear line of vision between the two room. At the beginning of the 2nd period class I slipped into the booth, open the door a crack and waited until he gave the class a section to read, went back to his stool put a toothpick in his mouth and leaned back against the blackboard and was all settle in. I said a couple prayers to my ancestors, took a hold of the crank and gave it a twirl. A yell that hasn’t been heard in town since erupted from the front of the room followed by a loud crash caused by his body hitting the floor and his stool flying under the desk in front of him, and before the dust got a chance to hit the floor a loud bellow, “Bradleyyyyyyy”, as I ran from the room not looking back I glanced at the students who by now were standing behind their desks with looks of bewilderment spread across their faces, looking at a the bottoms of a pair of shoes. I skidded into the principal’s officer my feet searching for a grip on the hardwood floors, as I flew into the office Mrs. Fisher looked up at me and said, “What did you do now?” I sat down with a thud and waited. We both looked up as Bob came thundering into the office, his black normally precisely combed hair looking like a moose had passed gas on it and his Jack Web black glasses tilted sideways on his nose and his mouth spewing forth spittle in copious amounts. After about 5 seconds he shouted, “I want him expelled from school.” All the commotion brought the principal from his office, looking over the situation he told Bob to go back to class and motioned for me to sit. After Bob left it took an act of God in Heaven to keep both of them from laughing out loud - both of their eyes wetting up and twinkling like stars on a cold night. You see, it was well

known that even though Bob and I got along, most of the time, we had this thing going were from time-to-time we drove each other nuts. Well I did have to take a couple of days off, but it was worth it I was the talk of the town as someone had finally got to the college grad from back east, an outsider. This again it was and is a small town with the associated mentality, Bob is still there and owns a car rental agency, I rented a car from him when I was there in 1998 – seems like yesterday. We broke bread together, funny neither one of us brought up the audio coil. It wasn’t all play, I remember an evening before we were going on a basketball trip, and the local fire alarm went off – small home town fire departments in those days were mostly volunteer fire departments. Most all of us H/S boys were volunteers, that night the temperature was below freezing, water pressure was low and it was a 10 unit apartment building on fire. It was well on its way when our trucks pulled up, a friend of mine and I were put in charge of a jeep pumper that pulled a small trailer that carried about 600 gallons of water, which isn’t much when you’re fighting a fire. Since the closest fire hydrant was hooked up to the other two pumpers our job was to go down to another hydrant near the local drugstore/teenage hangout and fill the tank. The drugstore/hangout was owned by our districts local State Senator and a good friend of all of us, he and my grandfather were very close. Our 2nd trip down, Dick pulled up and I jumped out uncapped the tank and pushed a 5” hose into it and Dick opened the hydrant and we both started inside to get cup of coffee and warm up, we were barely in the door when the 5” came flying out of the tank and went smashing through the big plate glass window in the drugstore spraying water like it had a purpose – and oh well you know the rest, in short it made a mess. The fire made headlines but right under it was “two fools cause considerable damage in local establishment”. Not a good way to make the paper. A small town has its advantages and its disadvantage, for advantages everyone looks out for each other, but in the same turn everyone knows when someone goes sideways, and like I said a time or two the teenagers got together and popped a beer or two and danced around a roaring campfire on the local beach. In 1961, after Alaska had become the 49th State of this glorious union a new school counselor came to town and the town hired a new policeman from New York City. Well stopping teenage drinking became their goal in life and they both attacked the “huge” problem with gusto. Shortly before Christmas the temperature plunged into the single digits and the local lake about ten miles south of town froze solid – a couple of us hoodlums drove out examined the situation and got a bunch of other hoodlums together on a Saturday morning with a couple of chainsaws, 10 gallons of diesel fuel and went out an constructed a huge (over 20 feet high) pile of wood, tires and cutup spruce trees. Around 3 PM, as night was setting in we went back into town and the word got around that there was to be a skating party at Pat’s Lake right after dinner…cars lined up downtown in front of the hangout, loaded with food, soft drinks, beer and some hard stuff and of course over 90 kids. We had one large flatbed truck with

bales of hay and boxes loaded with food and about 25 kids all singing Christmas carols as we made our way out of town. It was a glorious evening and nary a sad soul was to be found. Arriving all the vehicles parked with their lights shining on the huge pile of wood, one of the guys went over took a rolled up piece of paper and went around the edges lighting the fire, in about 30 minutes the blaze lit up the lake almost to the other end – it was a sight to behold. We put our skates on, tucked a six-pack under our arms with our favorite girl tagging along we skated off into the darkness of the lake with you know what on our mines…not to be unfortunately but that the price of growing up where everyone knows everyone and honor still had a place in our society. Around nine we ran out of beer, a coin was flipped a couple of times and my cousin Pat, and one of my good friends John and I were elected to make the beer run back into town, by now it had been snowing for about 3 hours making the trip back through the snow and beer clouded eyes a bit tedious, we made it past the cemetery when a pair of headlights pulled up behind us, well Pat panicked and bit and threw an almost empty bottle of Olympia out the window, which bounced off the police cars hood. The reds came on and as John pulled over (he had a VW microbus) all three of us smoked a full pack of Pal Malls before our NYC boy and the school counselor pounded on the glass – John rolled his window down and Tony (NYC boy) got a blast of 2nd hand smoke that would have killed an anti-smoking advocate. Looking us square in the eyes he asked us if we’d been drinking, now come on even grown-ups know better than to say “Yes”, we tried to deny the question, but we failed and were hauled off to the local jail – a two cell unit in the back of the firehouse. No phone call either. On the way back out of town to the skating party they stopped and picked up the local State bull, Erskine and by the 1 AM all 90 kids were sitting on folding chairs at the local gym and being branded as first class hoodlums with no future in life and that only by the quick action of the counselor and the NYC boy were all of us not dead and on our way to the underworld. By the way, our parents were in attendance and most all of them had their roots in this small town, and most all of them had done similar things in their teenage years…we still were in trouble mind you, it just that parents being parents they didn’t appreciate the little outsider branding their children as agents of the devil…not one bit. The all went up and put their John Henry on a piece of paper and we all went home with our parents having a good grip on one of our ears. We paid our penance to the parents and life went on, most of us got scolded for being stupid and were told to keep our ways on the up and up at least until New Years Eve. Small towns you gotta love them. Us kids weren’t always on the other side of the law, although we did have our share of trouble but like me most of us had our grandparents living in town and they made sure the kids towed the line when it came to the elderly that did not have grandchildren or children living in town. Most all of the homes had wood stoves, where just some of newer homes had oil stoves – it was our job to make sure that the elderly has chopped wood in their wood sheds, so before the winter set in we’d

commandeer a couple of flat beds go down to the local mill and load them with scrap. Take the loads around dumping them and a couple three guys staying to split and fill the wood shed, we did this every year that I can remember as the teenage boys before us did the same. The pay was a cup of hot coco and sandwiches I can still taste, prepared with salmon, venison and jars full of love – the only kind to have, you can go to the most expensive place in the Universe and never taste or appreciate any better. The life in a small town has changed, I’d bet you good money that today you cannot walk down a street and see people sitting on their front porch, or even find a local baseball game where the adults are getting their pants whipped by a bunch of wild and wooly teenagers, with a barbecue going and hotdogs and hamburgers served by moms and their girls – you’d have to look long and hard. If you live in such a town that knows when to turn off the TV and participate in things like this, don’t move!

Kanook