…forces me to think of attending school, when I looked forward to this season. There was little to do, though I’d earn a few bucks washing cars and one summer as an usher in a grand old Loew’s theatre. I think back on that time when I wore a woolen usher’s uniform and saw nothing but An Affair to Remember three or four times a day for a month, and a couple of years later, North By Northwest. I was a kid, 15 years old the first time around and remember rummaging through the theatre’s Lost and Found, finding a draft card. Oh, in those days a draft card was worth a fortune as it said one was 18 and at 18 one could by beer. It belonged to James P. Burns III of Onandaga, NY. Odd how one remembers such things more than five decades later.
Summer was many things to me in those days. When I was 10, I went away to camp in Maine for eight weeks. It was glorious, from the train ride up through (it was overnight) right up until the end. Living in cabins or tent cabins, camping, swimming and learning a bit about life, even at that age. Going to Maine over the past decade or so, I stay across the lake from that old camp and have visited it’s burned remains, just thinking about those days of “sun pictures” and submarines that ran and submerged on baking soda, or was it powder?
Later, summer was step baseball or stickball in New York. My family bounced around a bit between New York, Washington and Philly, with a bit of Houston tossed in, as my Dad was a reporter. And later it was just hanging out in my college town, Bloomington, IN…or New York…or wherever until I discovered Europe was cheap and fun. The first time I went I’d secured a job on a Zim Lines freighter headed for Haifa. I jumped off in Tangier…working a boat over to Algeciras then hitching about the Continent for the summer.
I’ll never forget that first trip, which lasted three months. I started out with about $40, a backpack (nothing fancy, something I picked up used at an Army-Navy store) and a guitar. There weren’t many hitching about playing the guitar so making money was fairly easy, though I frequently got rather negative comments about my voice. For a while I travelled with a Dane, Troels Bernard “Bernie” Lund, from Humlebaek Denmark who also played guitar. Then an Israeli girl, Nurit Beretsky.
Oh my, it’s getting a bit late…more remembrances later.
