PINK GRAPEFRUIT ON
A YELLOW TABLE
After my mother died, I put her furniture in storage in the basement of one of my apartment buildings on the West Side.
The furniture sat there for five years. My older son, Teddy, took the furniture when he went off to law school. The furniture was mildewed, but usable.
When I visited Teddy, I saw my mom’s furniture and suffered post-mom stress disorder. My mother’s sectional sofa meant nothing to me, but her yellow kitchen table was like a punch to my solar plexus. I had eaten at that table for my first 18 years, and now it was in marginal student-housing in Toledo, Ohio!
Unacceptable. My mother’s table belonged in the Cleveland Museum of Art. The table was worth something. It was Formica. It was 1950s. I hope my son doesn’t sell it on eBay or Craigslist.
During high school, I was historically laconic at that table. How’s school? Forget it, I ain’t talking.
My dad, for that matter, didn’t talk much either.
My entire family didn’t talk much. We didn’t watch TV during dinner either. We ate a lot of fish. Fish was cheap. Halibut was very cheap, believe it or not.
For breakfast, we ate pink grapefruit quietly.
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SIDE B
Hitchhiking story . . . Ple-ease, no!
THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE
TO 1970
I occasionally meet young people who lament they didn’t live through the hippie era.
They lived through nothing.
I know that feeling — living through nothing. I missed World War II and felt bad about that.
Skip Heller, a rockabilly musician, posted a video “Reflections of a 44-Year-Old Middle-aged Jewboy.” It was his reminiscence.
About what?
Heller was born in 1965; he missed not only World War II but the hippie era. What could he possibly reminisce about? Transformers?
I hitchhiked across America four times, I think. That’s worth talking about for a minute. One minute . . .
I spent eight hours at the on-ramp in Needles, California, in 100-degree heat. I counted so many Roadway trucks and “Humpin’ to Please” trucks and Consolidated Freightways trucks and Winnebagos . . . it was forgettable.
Worse, no driver ever told me the secret of life. Drivers often asked me my college major and if I knew anybody in Flint, Michigan. (I told drivers I was from Ann Arbor, close by. That got a better response than “Cleveland.”)
Mark Schilling (L) and Bert Stratton, 1970. The sign says "Ann Arbor."
A man in Arkansas said he was the youngest person to ever have a heart attack. I gave him a $10 traveler’s check. That was a lot of money in 1970. You could hitchhike cross-country on $5 in the 1970s. (Five dollars equals $29 in today’s money.)
The hippies — aka freaks — had the worst cars. Alternator troubles, steering problems.
The city of Flagstaff, Arizona, didn’t allow hitchhiking. You had to walk through Flagstaff.
Jim Mandich, a Miami Dolphins star, gave me a ride out of Toledo, Ohio. He had been a standout player at Michigan. He was coming from Ann Arbor, where he had partied with former Michigan players — “studs,” he called them. (Studs die. Mandich died of cancer last year at 62.)
I hitchhiked across country with an English girl. She was cute and Jewish. The problem: she was meeting her boyfriend in California.
In Nebraska I stayed at the house of a future congressman, Mezvinsky. No, that was in Iowa. Mez got busted a decade or so later. For what, I can’t remember.
I last hitchhiked about 1975.
I hitchhiked too much. I should have done something more productive. My knowledge of trucking companies has yet to come in handy.
6 comments
Your Blog titles are getting just more and more intriguing!
I hitchhiked from OSU to Cleveland. Once. In 1975 for Thanksgiving. I think my parents picked me up in Lorain County. Is that near the lake? I was freezing.
My sign said “CLEVE”.
Actually, that day I hitchhiked twice. My first time, and my last time.
Did I mention the compact car full of rural Ohioans that had been driven through chicken manure?
Hitching is indeed a mode of transport our kids thankfully will never know, and your piece certainly brought back the miserable memories.
There were of course rides that made you glad to be out on the open road. But seeing the country one highway shoulder at a time, sometimes for hours on end, was nothing to relish –- my own stand of interminable duration also happened, as it turns out, in the middle of nowhere California, somewhere near Chico.
It’s not just the boredom and monotony of the roadside today’s kids are spared, however, it’s the fear-for-your-life rides with psychos and crazies that you’d only hope to survive, that they won’t have to endure.
Of course, maybe it was just an American thing. The worst I ever had in Europe were the then-closeted gays who would always hope a backpacking American might be luckier for them than the locals. As sorry as I was, in at least one case, to not oblige, those rides certainly were some of the most interesting.
Different strokes, right? I used to love hitchhiking. It got me out of my small-town-boy shell and acquainted me with every variety of humanity imaginable.
I once took it on the road for three months, staying in a hotel one night: first out to San Fran with you, then down to Riverside CA for a long-distance trucking job that didn’t pan out, back up to Vancouver, across Canada to Winnipeg, down to St. Louis and finally back to Ohio.
Cops threatened to bust me, Jesus freaks tried to convert me and a middle-aged gay guy who drove his Caddie with one white glove (pre-Michael-Jackson!) tried to seduce me. I thought of it all as a grist for the writing mill a la Jack Kerouac, my hero. Also, by the time I left for Japan in 1975, I had been to or through 46 states, most by thumb. See the USA indeed.
I never recommended hitching to my kids though. It was crazy enough when I was out there and got crazier later. I nearly got beaten by a gang of redneck punks one time, and injured/killed other times by fast-driving drunks and fools in junkers. I was blessed by dumb luck. Peace.
In the early 70′s I hitch hiked from Providence to a rock festival in Canada with two friends.
Coming home via the New York State Thruway south of Rochester (we met some nice Jewish people there), I got nervous and took the bus home, leaving my two friends to hitchhike. I later learned that shortly after I left, my friends were arrested for hitchhiking, taken to jail and fined.
NICE PIC
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