“Watch it! Here they come”

Retirement does strange things to you and one of those things is thinking about your past. While searching my mental files I discovered an odd phenomenon. The more you dig around those memory files the more stacks seem to grow.

Much like my work files, the mental files are all neatly tagged, but incredibly disorganized. One is labeled Athletics(?); another, Loves and Crushes; and another School Days, etc., but standing guard over the stack is a large flashing sign that shouts Best Years of My Life. Taped to the bottom, was this note, with an asterisks:

* “When neighbors saw me coming, Mom told me they’d say, ‘Watch it! Here comes Bud.’” (Since my Dad was Allen Jr., making me Allen III, they called me Bud). We made growing up in Dallas a lot of fun.

My best friend Mike was also my uncle and this probably deserves an explanation. Mike was my mother’s baby brother (by a lot of years, but that’s another story, and he was only a year older than me. He lived on Mockingbird Lane in Highland Park near the Dallas Country Club. His mother, my grandmother, was not wealthy; she just happened to live in a bungalow surrounded by mansions. I lived three miles north of them, near what was later to become the North Park.

On a 14-inch TV with a white lighted frame around the screen, we watched Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, sang along with Miss Francis on Ding Dong School, and fell in love with the Mickey Mouse Club’s Annette. We had matching inflatable Dino the Sinclair dinosaur dolls, and later matching Daisy air rifles. Naturally, we harassed the neighborhood where we lived.

For the most part, Mike and I were reasonably tame until we got our first bikes and could explore new territories. One of our first escapades outside the neighbor got us thrown out of a shoe store in Preston Center because we were putting everything other than our feet in the shoe store’s fluoroscope. It was a machine that somehow imaged the bones in your foot and we were just experimenting to see what X-Ray Vision really look like. Actually, were really making a scientific experiment but the store manager didn’t see it that way.

Eventually we graduated from Schwinns to bus tokens, thus expanding our territory, and we’d catch the Park Cities bus to downtown Dallas. We’d wonder Main and Commerce Streets, sometimes bringing our swimsuits so we could sneak into the Dallas Athletic Club for a quick swim with the real members.

At Walgreen Drug Store, we’d lunch on club sandwiches for 40¢. Some kids had playhouses but we had downtown Dallas as our playground.

We saw our first dirty pictures at a (looking back on it now) pretty seedy arcade, but hormones know no bounds. In the arcade, we would drop a coin into a slot, look through a cardboard scope at dancing ladies as they flip charted through a semi-strip routine.. Their dances were pretty tame by today’s standards but it was pretty wild stuff to 11 and 12 year olds.

When we had the money, we would go to the Majestic Theater for the latest movie. Even if we arrived just before the movie started, it seemed like forever before we saw the organist rise out of the stage and play 10 minutes of music before Pathé or Movietone would officially start the show with a short newsreel. I’ll always remember Don (Red) Berry, Will Bill Elliott, Lady and the Tramp, and a few years later, we saw the Christmas Day premier of a new spy movie called Dr. No starring an unknown actor named Sean Connery. After the movies we’d generally walk east about a half mile to Deep Ellum to one of the pawn shop/used record stores to listen to Red Foxx and Rusty Warren’s forbidden comedy records (they talked about sex and used cuss words).

On one memorable occasion at the movie, we unraveled and emptied the powder from the fuse of a KKK firecracker (I remember them being shaped like a silver tub with the fuse sticking out of the middle. Because of their size they’ve been banned for years), found a couple necking in the balcony and lit it under their chair. Then downstairs we’d casually chat with the theater manager while the fuse slowly burned to the powder and EXPLODED.

It sounded like someone had set off dynamite. The manager went nuts, and we quickly caught the bus back home. I know it sounds like a crazy stunt, and it was, but we were boys, teenage boys at that - is that an excuse or a fact?.

We swam in Turtle Creek until we discovered Highland Park’s sewage overflow emptied upstream from our “swimming hole.” Sewer cooties were to be avoided you know.

By the time we graduated from high school, many had said, “Watch it! Here they come.”

Oh, we had our paper routes, played little league baseball, dated and pursued many other normal activities, but the file I happened to pick up today was labeled Mischief.

Best years of my life? You betcha. Mike now sells real estate -quite well, thank you- and I’m retired now so I have a lot of time for mischief.

Trivia question of the day

(Try it without Google)

The answer will be in tomorrow’s blog.

Yesterday’s Question: What 47-year-old landmark decision by the Supreme Court is still being fought? Prayer in public schools is unconstitutional

Today’s Trivia: In 1950, 35 U.S. troops were sent to that country and thousands are still there. What country were they sent?