An Apple Core, a Toilet: Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood (6 page)

***
 

The struggles and demands of daily life so often consume us, however.
I soon had a good job with a large corporation and the money was flowing again. I lost interest in the photo box. The present was going very well.
But within a year, that company would be hit hard by the recession — the easy money would be shut off — and my struggles would resume.
Before I knew it, I was 30, then 33. I started a freelance writing business. I bought a house in the country — I was isolated there — and struggled hard for three years.
At 36, I moved to Washington, D.C. I landed a lucrative contract position and was sent on the road. I worked nonstop for a year and was 37. Finally, at 39, I was riding high again. I had a nice apartment in D.C. I had met the most interesting woman and was head over heels.
And when that relationship did not work out, onward came my 40s — they went like lightning. I was 44 before I could blink twice. I was doing well in D.C. And then my father came down with a health problem that worried me greatly.
I moved back home to Pittsburgh. My father, thankfully, got well. I had some great years in Pittsburgh and some not-so-great years — each racing by faster than the one that preceded it.
Now here I am already: 50. I’ve been on this planet a half-century. The speed with which time passes is at once comical and worrisome.
I know now that it was just a few heartbeats ago when my dad's mother died — 39 years ago, the same January night when Pirates great Roberto Clemente lost his life in a plane crash while delivering food to the poor.
I was 10 then, but it wasn't so long ago at all.
My grandmother’s husband, my father's father, died in 1937. I used to think that was an eternity ago. But it wasn't at all. He died only 25 years before I was born — not really so long ago.
I know now that my dad was once a young man, just as I once was — and am no longer. There was a time when he felt he had an eternity before him, too — and suddenly he's 79.
 

***
 

Which brings us back to the photo box.
As the fire crackled on that cold February Sunday evening a few years ago, we got it out again.
It was not as full as it had been. My mother had gone through all the items the year before; anything that pertained to particular children, she organized into plastic bags and distributed to us.
The old photos were still there, though. As we dug through the box, I came across a black-and-white photo of a little girl. She's holding a stuffed toy as she looks, suspiciously, into the lens of the camera.

That photo was taken 71 years ago, when the girl had her whole life before her. She didn't know yet that one of her sisters would be struck with polio 12 years later, that her father would die at 49, just a month before her wedding, or that she'd have six healthy children and 17 grandchildren.

That was my mother's picture. It was taken when she was 2.
I found my father's black-and-white high-school graduation photo. He was trim and handsome — with a full head of hair. The photo had red coloring around his lips. When I asked my mother what it was, she laughed, then explained.
 

When he was away in the Army, she would kiss the photo. The red coloring was her lipstick.
I could not help but be touched by my parents’ wedding photos. Even when I was a kid, I was moved by how youthful and attractive they were. But what I saw now was their sense of hope and optimism.
 

They had very little money, but they didn’t care. They were madly in love. They’d have their first child within the year. They would work hard to provide and care for their family. Many other photos in the box show their success.
 

The old, greenish-yellow Polaroids documented so many memories in their lives: the new home built in 1964; Jingles, our beloved dog born in 1972, getting a bath, which she hated; birthday parties, Christmas mornings and many other family events.
The newer photos documented the thinning and graying hair, the high school and college graduations, the surprise party we threw for my father when he turned 50, and, eventually, the surprise retirement party.
 

These photos transported me right back to those moments I knew as a kid, both sad and happy: the cold January day in 1972 when my grandmother died and my father sobbed; the sound of my father driving around the neighborhood, calling out for our dog, the time she disappeared for three days; the Friday evenings sitting around the dinner table, laughing with my sisters about everything and nothing at all.
 

As I worked through these photos with my mother, I was overcome by a rush of old feelings, happy and said — overcome by the passing of time.
There is one photo of my mother in her Mary Tyler Moore tights, young and full of energy, as she always was. I never thought she would get old — never thought she’d slow down.
But there she sat across from me, her bifocals on the tip of her nose, her eyes squinting, her movements tentative and a touch unsure.
She will not be here forever, I know now, and it is unbearable to think that one day soon, she and my father may not be here.
I am angry at time and how it is parting me from the people I love — how it will take my mother and father from me.
And the only thing that can help me make sense of it is the old photo box.

***
 

Those old photos fill me with calm.
They make me remember how blessed I have been to be given the family I was given — how blessed I've been to go through life with such a colorful cast of characters.
They bring perspective and clarity — they help me see the long view, something I forget to do far too often. They remind me that every day really is precious — every moment is.
That is all a photo is, too: a snapshot of a moment in time. It locks our world and our lives in place, so we can see and feel and understand the deep meaning in them.
Sure, it's bittersweet to go through the old photos. They make me sad. But through them, I can relive experiences from so long ago and renew my love for people who are no longer here.
Now a half-century old, I don’t know everything, but I do know this:
If you're lucky enough to still have your parents in your life, go to their house this Sunday and get out the old photo box.

My “David Cassidy” Hair

My sisters made me do it.

And so it was, shortly after I became 12 years old in April, 1974, I became the first boy in St. Germaine School to have his hair parted down the middle the way ‘70s pop star David Cassidy parted his.

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As painful as it is to recall, Cassidy was a big deal in the ‘70s.

He’d been a nobody until 1970, when he got the starring role in “The Partridge Family,” a sitcom about a widowed mother, played by Shirley Jones (Cassidy’s step-mom in real life) and her five children.
 

The family, which lived in the fictional suburb of San Pueblo, Calif., made its living driving around in a psychedelic bus performing smarmy soft-rock music, such as “I Think I Love You.”

This is a song about a lovesick fellow, who, so the song’s lyrics go, wakes in the middle of a dream because something keeps knocking on his brain.

Before he goes insane, he holds his pillow to his head, springs from his bed, then screams the words he dreads:

I think I love you

So what am I so afraid of

I'm afraid that I'm not sure of

A love there is no cure for

I think I love you

Isn't that what life is made of

Though it worries me to say

That I never felt this way

Today, judges grant restraining orders against such fellows, but nobody was yet troubled by love-sick madmen in the ‘70s.

So popular was the song, it shot to No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Pop Singles chart. It was the biggest selling record of 1970 — bigger even than “Let it Be” by the Beatles!

What’s worse is that The Partridge Family’s first five albums, released between 1970 and 1972, went Gold. The first three made it to Billboard's Top 10.

Cassidy soon had the highest Q rating — which measures how well a personality is liked by the public — of anyone on television.

His Q rating held a particular power over teenyboppers — despite him being in his early 20’s, every teenybopper in America had a crush on him, including, regrettably, my older sisters, Kathy and Krissy.

***

Ever since the beginning of time, you see, teenage sisters have experimented on their baby brothers, dressing them in the fashions of the time.

Kathy and Krissy tried to treat me as their personal Ken doll (Barbie’s high-fashion boyfriend). They tried to get me to wear pastel-colored silk shirts, gold chains and other comical trends that nobody yet knew were comical, but I fended them off for some time.

My primary role model, after all, was my father, a manly fellow who came of age in the ‘50s. His only dalliance with fashion of any kind came as a teen when he, and all his pals, dressed liked rebel-without-a-cause-actor James Dean.

We still have a photo of our father with his coal-black hair slicked back (we never knew he’d had hair, as he was bald by his late 20’s), wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt with a pack of Lucky Strikes rolled up in the sleeve.

If our dad ever had any bout with coolness, that was it, but it surely didn’t last long. He soon evolved into a typical ‘70s dad with the olive-green leisure suit and white patent-leather shoes and belt, an outfit he’d continue wearing to church every Sunday years after the “Six Million Dollar Man” fashion had passed.

Such dads were mostly suspicious of fashion trends — and of any son of theirs who would eagerly embrace them. And so, for the most part, I, like my father, wasn’t much interested in the fashion trends my sisters foisted on me.

Until I started falling for girls.

It was during the fifth grade that it happened. I don’t recall exactly when I stopped thinking girls were icky, but in the
fifth grade, I remember, I become keenly aware of two things: 1) I was suddenly interested and curious about girls, and 2) I was suddenly aware that they showed no reciprocal interest in me.

And who could blame them?

Like every boy in my school, I wore blue pants, a checkered blue and green blazer and a clip-on blue tie. There was no hope to improve my lot by dressing better.

I lacked the “GQ” good looks that made the more popular kids stand out, and the brown mop of hair atop my head didn’t help matters any.

Worse, I had two floppy ears that, many kids reminded me time and again, looked like two car doors left open. Timmy Schmidt called me “Elephant Ears” or “Dumbo,” after the cartoon elephant who could fly by flapping his large ears.

It didn’t take long for Kathy and Krissy to home in on my self-doubt about the ladies and my horrible insecurity about my ears. They, being of the more cunning sex, soon found their opening.

"If you get your hair cut like David Cassidy, you will blow dry it until it is thick and full!” said Krissy.

“Yeah, and when you blow dry your hair as thick and full as David Cassidy’s, you’ll be able to cover your big, floppy ears!" said Kathy.

I could cover my floppy ears!

And so it was that I was persuaded to become the first boy at St. Germaine School with guts enough to get a David Cassidy shag haircut.

***

The shag involves parting your hair down the middle and, in a "V" shape, feathering it to the sides over your ears — though you don’t necessarily have to part your hair.

So long as it looks shaggy, you’re good to go.

The shag’s carefree, messy style, says ezine.com hairstyle expert Jason Hughes, is all about youth — and, with baby boomers all over the place in the early ‘70s, youth was in abundance.

But here’s what made the shag truly unique for that time: it was a “unisex” style.

Both men and women were embracing variations of the cut — a sameness of style that had been unimaginable during the conformist ‘40s, ‘50s and much of the ‘60s.

And if you were a 10-year-old kid, say, in 1972, yours was mostly a “1950s” upbringing — but, boy, would the world change during your formative years, as male and female fashions got really confusing.

Jane Fonda was the first female star to wear the shag. She didn’t part hers down the middle, but it was shoulder-length and feathered over the sides. Fonda displayed her new look in the movie “Klute” in 1971.

Though Fonda was the first famous
woman
to sport the shag cut, Cassidy was among the first male stars to sport it — he did so at least a year before Fonda did.

Cassidy was soon joined by the Bee Gees, Rod Stewart, Andy Gibb, David Bowie and many other famous males who used blow dryers, once the sole province of women, to fluff out their locks.

By the late ‘70s, with the success of “Charlie’s Angels,” most every woman in America, including my five sisters, was sporting the Farrah Fawcett look — a long, thick, fluffy shag that was a slightly enhanced version of what the male pop stars were sporting.

In any event, somewhere in there a new era had been hatched — one in which the hard lines of the 1950s that had separated men and women in general, and male and female fashions in particular, would be blurred forever.

***

It is worth noting, at this point, that hairstyles have changed plenty throughout history for both men and women.

Roman men wore their hair over their shoulders. Our country’s founders liked their locks long, too. Ben Franklin sported a ponytail. George Washington and other well-to-do fellows of his era wore long white wigs.