This is my autobiography, as I remember things. I may spell the names of songs with proper spellings instead of the way it is spelled in the actual songs titles. For example, the title of a song may include the word "gotcha", while I may spell it correctly, "got you" here. I have put the names of songs in lists, rather than in block paragraphs, for ease of reading.
Spellings will be that of the country where the story is taking place. If the story takes place in Canada, then Canadian spellings will be used.
All images that are not listed as Google Earth or Street View are my own photos.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) EARLY CHILDHOOD IN THE FOREST OF DEAN
2) LANDING IN CANADA
3) JEPSON STREET
4) MOVING TO THE U.S. SIDE
5) FOURTH THROUGH SIXTH GRADES
6) JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL
7) HIGH SCHOOL
8) BACK TO THE OLD COUNTRY
9) THE REST OF THE SEVENTIES
10) 1980 AND 81
11) THE EIGHTIES
12) THE NINETIES, PART ONE
13) THE NINETIES, PART TWO
14) TRAVELING AND THE REST OF THE NINETIES
15) THE NEW MILLENNIUM
1) EARLY CHILDHOOD IN THE FOREST OF DEAN
I was born on September 20, 1960, at home, not in a hospital, at the house known at the time as "Sunnybank Bungalow" in the village of Lydbrook, which is on the northern edge of the western portion of Gloucestershire just on the England side of the border between England and Wales and known as the Forest of Dean. The "border" is, of course, not actually a border because England and Wales are both parts of the United Kingdom and so is more like the borders between U.S. states or Canadian provinces.
The following image is from Google Earth. The dark green area, north of the Severn River, is the Forest of Dean. You can see that about a third of it is still forest. The rest is farms and towns, the second image is my photo. I was born where the red dot is in the first image.
I remember it as a typically English village with stone walls and hedges and patchwork fields outside of the trees of the forest. Our house was actually half of a duplex with a porch (known as a "veranda") which offered a nice view of the hill on the other side of the valley along which Lydbrook is laid out. Our house faced west so that the sun shone in during the late afternoon. The words "bungalow", which is a one-story house and "veranda", which is a porch, were not originally English words but were, I believe, borrowed from Bengali.
Our house was a duplex. We lived in the right side as shown in the following image from Google Street View. Our house is at the bottom of the red line. The townhouses to the lower right weren't there when I was a young boy.
This is a photo that I took from about the same perspective.
My mother, Vera, was from Worrall Hill, a satellite village of Lydbrook atop the hill opposite our house. My father, Les, was from Drybrook, another village to the east of Lydbrook. My maternal grandmother, who I knew as "Nanna" lived with us and my father was a bus driver for the Red and White Company.
We had no central heating but there was a fireplace in each room. I had a plastic pail such as the ones that children use to make sandcastles. One day, my mother decided to use the pail to clean the ashes out of a fireplace and to this day, the scent of burning plastic reminds me of this time.
There was no electric refrigerator but in it's place was a small, cool room known as "the larder". Occasionally, I was punished for misbehaviour by being shut in there for a brief period of time. Outside, I had a swing set and there was a pile of coal for use in the fireplaces. The most important industry in the Forest of Dean was originally coal mining.
My prized possession was a blue toy plastic motorcycle. However sometimes I would ride it into the woods nearby, leave it to look at something and then be unable to find it. I also placed high value on a traditional British policeman's hat that I had been given. One Easter, I was given a chocolate egg mounted inside an elaborate cup, which I still have today. In fact, I have the cup here in front of me to help to bring back memories of this time. When we were leaving for North America I decided that I should bring the lump of coal, in front of the cup, with me.
The Forest of Dean also once had extensive iron mines. There were slag heaps in various places in the forest and my father would take me to climb one periodically. They seemed like huge mountains that took me a long time to reach the top. There is still enough iron in the ground that a magnetic compass is considered as unreliable.
There were many squirrels all around and I tried in vain to catch one. One day, there was a hedgehog outside our house. At another time, there was a fox going around the area stealing chickens.
Sometimes, I would be taken for a walk and we would go past a window in which there was always a radio on the windowsill from which music would be playing. But I do not recall having any contact with music myself at this time.
One day, while in Hubert Evans' Barber Shop, I asked where Heaven was because I had heard of it but did not know where it was. I was told that it was straight upward and for years, I thought that for someone to get to Heaven, they had to go to Lydbrook first because Heaven was directly overhead from there.
I had heard of Jesus. I knew that he was an important character, although I did not understand what he did. I thought that Jesus was a local, from around the Forest of Dean. One day, I noticed a large group of men in a room having some kind of meeting and I thought that Jesus must be among them.
At night, I could see the vertical bar of light moving across the wall opposite my bedroom window from the headlights of cars on the road below shining through the gap between the curtains. But one night, there was a loud rumbling such as I had never heard before. It sounded like the footsteps of some kind of giant.
However the following morning, none of the adults seemed to have the slightest concern about any giant. Maybe it was a friendly giant that came out of the forest occasionally to visit our village. The ground was wet and I eventually realized that what I had been hearing was thunder.
One of the first things that I remember learning is that numbers can be expressed either by their symbol, such as "6", or written out, such as "six". Another prominent name is that of Dr. McMinn, the village doctor who delivered both me and my brother, Paul, when we were born.
We would go, in our Volkswagen Beetle, to the shops in Cinderford, a larger town near Drybrook. There was a Woolworths there along with numerous smaller shops. This was the first I heard about America. I was told that Woolworths had began in a place called America.
The nearest city to the Forest of Dean was Gloucester. It was very different from our village. There were many more people and I could see that most of the people in Gloucester did not know each other because they would rush past each other without saying hello. In Lydbrook, it seemed as if everyone who met stopped and greeted one another.
There was a store in Gloucester, the Bon Marche, which was much bigger than Woolworths. I do not know where the name originated but "bon marche" means "inexpensive" in French. (The Bon Marche was later known as Debenhams).
A magnificent building was Gloucester Cathedral. I learned that a cathedral was more important than an ordinary church. I have vivid memories of the light through the stained glass windows and the echos off the walls in the cathedral. Maybe this was where God actually lived, there probably was not enough room for him in the church in Lydbrook. To this day a certain shade of red always reminds me of the stained glass in Gloucester Cathedral. Image from Google Street View.
One day in Gloucester, Westgate Street near the cathedral was being paved and a passing horse knocked over some flammable liquid. There was a massive fire on the street but it did not appear that any buildings were damaged. My father wrapped his coat around my younger brother as we passed by on the other side of the street to protect him from flying sparks.
Looking in these shops in Monmouth, a nearby town, I saw a portrait of a lady, and asked who she was. It was the queen, and she was wearing a crown. Image from Google Street View.
On another occasion I was taken to Chepstow Castle. It would give me a life long interest in history. Image from Google Street View.
We went on a trip to the coast in Wales, probably just for a weekend. It was the first time I had seen the sea. I remember the breeze and the sun reflecting off the water. I remember two words that I had never heard before, "cliff" and "peninsula". Three Cliffs Bay is on the Gower Peninsula and this is what it looks like today.
We went on a trip to London. My father had been a bus driver for a long time and knew his way around. I was shown a building where the laws are made and everything is run from. It was Parliament. Image from Google Street View.
I remember being shown the square where the Mayor of London lives, across from the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange. Image from Google Street View.
I remember the image of a man covered in gold. It must have been the Albert Memorial. Images from Google Street View.
I was taken to visit Lydbrook Primary School, the village school, because I was to soon start school there. But it was not to be, there were other plans in the works. We were soon to move to a place far away. The Canadian Government had been loaning money to would-be immigrants to pay their way to settle in Canada and we were going to live in a place called Saskatchewan.
My father had been to have a look at North America before I was born, and I know that he had been there at least once before that. Here are some of the souvenirs that my father brought back to England, which we then would bring back to North America.
A map and picture book of Ottawa. A postcard from the Ontario town of Smiths Falls. A book of postcards from the New York State Thruway, not long after it was built, postcards from New York City and Whiteface Mountain.
This is Lydbrook Primary School, image from Google Street View.
Before we left we took a day trip to Bristol, the nearest major city. I was shown the Cabot Memorial, for an explorer who traveled by ship, and was told that I would soon be on a ship.
We had sold our car to Eric Webb, the village mechanic, and he was to drive us to the dock at Liverpool, where we were to board a ship. We dropped off my grandmother at my mother's sister's house and then began the long drive ahead. We drove further than I remembered having gone before. The landscape became flatter and with fewer trees than there was in our forest.
It was announced that we were soon to enter the Mersey Tunnel at Liverpool, which ran under the Mersey River. Finally, we were at the dock and a massive ship with several chimneys stood in the water in front of us, the Empress of England. The following two images are from Google Street View. Passenger ships are not used much any more but this is where we boarded the ship for North America.
Eric Webb left in our car so, whatever we were doing, there was no turning back now. Even if we changed our minds, we would have no way to get back home.
We boarded the ship and after what seemed to be a long time, things began to move. The ship was so big that it appeared that it was standing still and that all of England was floating away. The ship had a large dining room for meals. I had a poster made of the ship that we came over on.
For the first time I saw people that were completely different from us and speaking in ways that were incomprehensible. To people outside England it sounds like an English accent is one accent, but it isn't. In the dining room I was next to some people who were speaking English but were from another part of the country and I couldn't understand much of what they were saying.
At the time, I thought that a person was born as either a child or an adult and would be that way all of their lives. I did not yet know that children grew into adults. I walked all around the ship's decks with my father and there was a ceremony in which balloons were released when we were halfway across the ocean.
2) LANDING IN CANADA
We arrived by the ship in Montreal around the first of July 1965. My father had been to Canada previously and had a brother living in Vancouver. We still had a long way to go by train to get to our destination of Saskatoon in the province of Saskatchewan.
We went by ship from Liverpool to Montreal, and by train from there to Saskatoon. I first heard of Toronto when the train made a stop there, at Union Station, along the way.
We carried our belongings across the world in three trunks, that I still have today. This is the largest of the three trunks.
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This is the booklet for newcomers that we were given upon arrival in Canada.
We had stayed in a motel in Saskatoon while my father looked for a job. I remembered that the motel was on a busy main road. When Google Street View became available I looked around until I found it.
This is the motel where we stayed, on Idylwyld Drive also called the Louis Riel Trail. We stayed in an upstairs room, on this side of the motel, I think it was four rooms from the end. But there was a stairway outside that has since been removed. The restaurant where we had meals was next door to the motel. Image from Google Street View.
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My mother and father made the decision to go back eastward, and would end up in Niagara Falls. I am not sure why they chose Niagara Falls, where I would spend most of my life. I think someone who had been on vacation in Niagara Falls told them it was a nice place. The decision was somewhat spontaneous and I think they were told about it by either the person behind the desk in the motel or the restaurant next door.
The taxi driver that took us to the train station said that the station used to be close by until it was moved to it's present location, to the west of the city. This building is along the rail tracks and looks like the old train station. Image from Google Street View.
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I remember getting back on the train, at the Saskatoon Train Station. Image from Google Street View.
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The train ride took us back through the city of Saskatoon. It looks as if passenger trains don't go through the city anymore, but this was in 1965. When the train came to a halt for a while, I was looking at this massive grain elevator that was alongside the tracks. Image from Google Street View.
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Just after the train started moving again we crossed a street, and the traffic was stopped for us. The grain elevator is in the background. Image from Google Street View.
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I was not yet five years old but, with the help of Google Street View, I remember this much about Saskatoon. Sometimes, when "Running Back To Saskatoon" was on the radio, I would wonder what life out on the prairie might have been like.
We ended up in Niagara Falls, Canada. Staying in a tourist's bed and breakfast on Hiram Street near the falls and the Rainbow Bridge. It was run by a woman named Mrs. Fyfe.
There were train tracks nearby and when walking around the tourist area at the top of Clifton Hill, it was often necessary to wait until a train had passed. When the brightly painted caboose became visible, we knew that the end of the train was near.
Queen Victoria Park was adjacent to the falls. There were fountains with coloured lights under the water that would make it seem to glow at night. There were large coloured lights that illuminated the falls at night. First, the white lights would be turned on and then varying colours afterward. To someone who had never seen anything like it before, it was really awesome.
Next to Queen Victoria Park was the magnificent Oakes Gardens and right by the brink of the falls was Table Rock House, with an extensive gift shop inside. The Maid of the Mist was a tour boat that would approach right up close to the falls. In the upper river, above the falls, was the wreck of an old boat from which the crew had been rescued in 1918, it is known as the "Scow".
Oakes Gardens was near where we were staying. Image from Google Street View.
One day I fell in the fountain in Queen Victoria Park and my parents had to rush me home for a change of clothes. Image from Google Earth.
There were two observation towers, for tourists to look at the falls, nearby. The Skylon was still under construction. A hotel was also being constructed right at the bottom of Clifton Hill, it was to be the Sheraton Foxhead, alongside the older Sheraton Brock Hotel.
There were people walking around and looking at the falls from all over the world. It was rare to see a Japanese tourist without a significant amount of camera equipment. I was puzzled as to why we had round eyes but some people from other places had slanted eyes. The air was filled with not only the roar of the falls but the clattering of sightseeing helicopters.
On the Canadian end of the Rainbow Bridge was the bell tower known as the Carillon. It's chimes would become very familiar. Image from Google Street View.
The landscape has been changed since those days. For one thing, the Oneida Silver building was demolished and the space is now occupied by the casino. Also, there used to be a stone arch, the Clifton Memorial Arch, on the road that goes under the Rainbow Bridge but that has long since been removed also.
The red and green of the traffic lights around the Canadian side of the falls seemed to be so vivid. The most memorable falls souvenir was those plastic miniature television sets that were actually slide viewers with various scenes of the falls.
In September of 1965, I began kindergarten at the old Kitchener Street School. It was an old building that has long since been removed. I would be walked there and back every school day. I think I attended there for seven weeks. My father was working at a factory called the Cyanamid, not the one that was in the north end of the city, there was another Cyanamid in Niagara Falls as well.
It is mostly forgotten today but there was a great electrical blackout in 1965 that started in the power plants at Niagara Falls. I don't think I actually remember it but I remember people talking about it.
We landed in Canada just after the maple leaf flag was chosen as the new national flag. I remember that not everyone was pleased with it. "Why does everyone else's flag have three colours but ours only has two"?
3) JEPSON STREET
We moved from the bed and breakfast on Hiram Street to a house on Jepson Street. It was not far away but I would be going to a new school. I was taken to Valley Way School and met it's amicable principal, Mr. Nott. Image from Google Street View.
Kindergarten was in the room with the large windows in the front of the school. Students had kindergarten for a half day, either in the morning or the afternoon. I was in the afternoon session. Behind the school was courts for people to play badminton, a sport that I had never heard of.
Aside from working at the Cyanamid, my father also began driving bus tours around the falls in the summer.
Not far from our new home was a large, old brick building (since replaced by a new building) called the Eventide Home. It was run by the Salvation Army and was for elderly people. There were large oak trees around it any myriads of squirrels attracted by the acorns.
I was away from home for several days at Niagara General Hospital to have my tonsils taken out. The room was a certain shade of green which brings back memories to this day whenever I see that shade.
There were other immigrants all around, the family who lived directly behind us was Italian and in the summer when windows were open, the scent of tomato sauce from their house would remind me that it was nearly dinner time.
The local shopping area was on Queen Street as well as Victoria Avenue. On Queen Street was Kresge and Rosberg's. There was also a hobby shop on Queen Street in which any boy would be glad to spend hours.
The supermarket, where food was bought was closer, Steinbergs was withing easy walking distance of our house. The Steinbergs were a well-known Montreal Jewish family who operated many supermarkets in Canada.
We found a favourite place to eat. La Fiesta, on Main Street, was a fish and chips shop that seemed to have been transplanted directly from the old country. It would remain a favourite place for many years.
In the summer, we would go to King's Bridge Park. This was a park along where the Welland River meets the Niagara River in the village of Chippawa, just east of Niagara Falls. This would also remain a favourite place for many years, although we also went to Dufferin Islands sometimes. We once went to a place called Shalamar in Queenston but decided that it could not replace Chippawa. Another favourite summer outing was to St. Catharines, to watch the ships go through the locks on the Welland Canal.
King's Bridge Park is actually artificial fill that was designed to guide water from the Niagara River into the Welland River. The Welland River, also known as Chippawa Creek, formerly emptied into the Niagara River but it's flow had been reversed to bring water to the Hydraulic Canal, which led to the hydroelectric plants. These two images, from Google Earth and Street View, show King's Bridge Park and about where we used to settle when we first started going there. The inlet on the left side of the first image is where the course of the Welland River used to be.
We would still go to King's Bridge Park after we moved to the U.S. side and, when I was a few years older, jumping off the Weightman Bridge was fun. Image from Google Street View. The wooden deck wasn't there at the time. But this river is dangerous.
However, at least from my point of view, there was nothing to replace the park, Leslie Park, right by our house. In the summer, life revolved around the large swimming pool in the park where anyone could go swimming for a nickel (five cents or .05 dollar). There was a smaller round pool for young children but I wanted to get into the big pool as soon as possible. There were also swings and slides and things like that, but the pool was the main thing. Image from Google Earth.
Near the entrance to the Leslie Park Pool, there was the large red boulder by the flagpole that is still there today. But the original building has been replaced. The life guards had sharp memories and knew who was allowed into the deep end of the pool and who had to stay in the shallow end. To be allowed in the deep end, a swimmer has to pass a test witnessed by a life guard. I had to swim across, back and, across the shallow end in order to be admitted to the deep end.
We had a black and white television that always seemed to be on. There was, of course, shows and cartoons like Superman, The Flintstones, Popeye, Flipper (the dolphin), Dick Van Dyke, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, Casper The Friendly Ghost and, Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Other shows of the time have largely disappeared from memory. There was Daktari, about a woman veterinarian looking out for animals in east Africa. Hercules, a cartoon about the mythical hero with tremendous strength and, Dr. Kildare, about a medical intern. There were also two wartime serials, Combat and The Rat Patrol.
Brand names of various products were to be seen on television advertisements and elsewhere. Borden is a dairy products brand that had a facility in Niagara Falls, Canada and used Elsie the Cow as a mascot as it still does today. My younger brother ate Gerber Baby Food, which also had a facility in town.
By the way, the same baby is on Gerber Baby Food as has been there for generations. The Gerber baby has actually died after living to old age.
One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that there are the same children's cereals today that there was when I first landed in North America. Apple Jacks, Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms, Cap N Crunch.
Other memorable and prominent brands of then and now are Canadian Tire stores, Crisco Cooking Oil and Fresca soft drinks. There was a new soft drink called Wink. A van pulled up one day in the parking lot of Leslie Park by the pool that gave away free samples of Wink to anyone who waited in line. Green Giant was prominent in canned vegetables and all around town, there was signs from Wylie real estate. Station Wagons and convertibles were popular car styles in the later sixties. My father smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes and liked Roleflex Cameras.
It was found that my younger brother was deaf. We would take him to Children's Hospital in Toronto for specialized treatment. I really enjoyed going along on those drives along Lake Ontario to Toronto. But I was somewhat alarmed by the skyscrapers in Toronto, what would happen if someone were on the roof of a skyscraper and they could not get back down and no one knew that they were there?
While we lived on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, a relative came to visit us from England. We were driving back from Toronto Airport and as we were crossing the Skyway at Hamilton, she asked my father to turn on the radio and a whole new interest opened up, that of music. The Beatles song "Hello, Goodbye" was on and I was immediately hooked. I cannot remember for certain, but it was either that song or "A Hard Days Night" which was the first song that I ever listened to.
The later sixties was the heyday of rock and roll music. Back in Niagara Falls, there was the radio station CJRN or there was WKBW broadcasting from Buffalo on the American side. I was only a child but those Sixties classics moved me as much as any adult.
There was, of course, the Beatles. It was virtually impossible to turn on the radio without hearing them. Some other bands produced music that was as good as the Beatles, but none could match the sheer number of hits. Other good bands would get a few hit songs, but everything the Beatles touched was a hit. In fact, I cannot think of a Beatles song that was not a hit.
But the Beatles were only the beginning. Simon and Garfunkel had the three classics "Mrs. Robinson", "At The Zoo" and "Feeling Groovy" while we were living on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.
Petula Clark had "Downtown" and "My Love".
The Monkees sang "Daydream Believer", "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and their own theme song.
There were The Hollies with "Look Through Any Window" and "Stop, Stop, Stop".
The Union Gap was probably underrated and around this time, "Young Girl", "Woman, Woman" and "Lady Willpower" were very popular songs.
The Association was there with "Along Comes Mary" and the haunting love song "Cherish".
There was The Seekers with "Georgy Girl" and "A World of Our Own".
The Doors had "Light My Fire" and the unique rocking instrumentals of "Hello, I Love You".
One of the most cheerful and light-hearted songs of the Sixties would long be a favourite of mine. "The Rain, The Park And, Other Things" by the Cowsills was a Sixties classic. It was about a girl with a beautiful smile who inhabited a park. But she only existed while it was raining, she disappeared as soon as the sun broke through.
If any band could match the Beatles, it was the Rolling Stones. The song of theirs that I remember the most from around this time was "Jumping Jack Flash".
There was also a popular song that was not considered as rock music, "Strangers In The Night" by Frank Sinatra.
Other Sixties classics were "MacArthur Park" by Richard Harris (There really was a MacArthur Park, in Los Angeles)
"Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" by the Buckinghams
"Expressway To Your Heart" by the Soul Survivors
"A Lovers Concerto" by The Toys
"Love Is Blue" by Paul Mauriat
We would drive around and explore the area with the radio always on. Eventually, my parents bought a radio for the house so that I could listen to music at home as well.
Music was not all that I was interested in. I had been given a world atlas that I studied with great interest. There was a country called Sikkim that has since decided to join India. Egypt and Syria were joined as the United Arab Republic. I also had a street map of our town and I memorized every street in Niagara Falls, Canada. There some really nice parts of town, such as Cherrywood Acres.
The first global news event that I can recall turned out to be the Six Day War of 1967. There were people talking about it's religious significance, although I didn't understand what was happening at the time. I also remember the news that three Americans had died in a fire while rehearsing a launch into outer space. This was Apollo 1.
The first I heard of Africa was the 1967 civil war in Nigeria. The region that wanted to separate was called "Biafra". At first I thought the entire continent was called Biafra.
One day I realized that orange is a separate color from red. I had previously thought that they were different shades of the same color.
I was interested in books although I usually just looked at the drawings and pictures. I had a book about animals with drawings of all the great animals of the world. There was going to be a karate class and my father bought me the book "Super Karate Made Easy" by Moja Rone.
At school, we had the world-renown Dr. Suess books in first grade (usually age 6-7). There was a girl named Nancy Rand that was in school book stories.
Finally, I remembered the story in school of G.I. Ant. This ant had a large family and thus a large house. But when he put up a sign in front of his house identifying himself, he alarmed the other ants because he forgot to use punctuation. The sign read "GIANT" and the other ants thought it was a giant that lived there who might step on them.
In fact, I was already fascinated with ants. I watched them whenever I got the chance and I learned all of the parts of an ant's body and how an ant nest functions. There were grasshoppers around too, particularly in the field by the school, along Homewood Avenue.
There was one book that was by far the most important that I had at the time. At Steinbergs, there was the encyclopedia of world history being sold titled "Universal History Of The World". I only got the first volume, the one on ancient history. I merely looked at the drawings at this time but the book would prove important to me later. As far as ancient history goes, near the falls was a museum with all manner of exhibits, including some of artifacts from ancient Egypt. There was a mummy that was later determined to be that of Ramesses I and was given back to Egypt.
Books were not all, there were also games. I spent quite a bit of time with the children's classics Lego Blocks and the drawing contraption, Etch-A-Sketch. I had another toy called the Green Ghost. From somewhere I got a periscope with mirrors, like they use in submarines, so I could crouch down in the car and watch what was happening outside the window.
The neighbors next door gave me a large, plastic beach ball. They also had a jet-black female dog with the appropriate name of "Jet", which would be the first dog I would get to know. For a while, I had a pet turtle. Among other diversions were a train set and an expandable watch.
One boy had a fort at the end of his backyard built between two of those straight trees and bordering a large, open field with electric transmission lines overhead. Another boy near there had a massive, old willow tree at the end of his backyard that had several possible ways in which it could be climbed.
I heard of the idea of putting a message in a bottle. One day, I tried it. I wrote my name and address and put it in a bright red plastic bottle. It was one of the bottles that hold the liquid that children use to blow bubbles. When we went to see the falls, I threw the bottle over.
Several months later, I got a letter in the mail from a boy in Toronto. He had found my bottle on a beach there. The bottle had made it's way right across Lake Ontario.
There was another field further away than the one with the electric transmission lines. Where the Laura Secord Apartments are now located, next to Houck Park, there used to be a field with a pond in it and many large boulders, which were probably dumped from some construction project. To any boy, it was a delight to explore. In this image from Google Earth is the field with the electric lines, between Stanley and Homewood Avenues.
One side of Leslie Park was made for summer. This was the side with the pool. But the other side of the park had a slope and was made for sleds and toboggans in winter. I was given a sled but I left it in the wrong place and my father accidentally ran over it. While sledding one night, I noticed a bright star to the east (probably Sirius). It was the first star that I remember noticing. In this image from Google Earth you can make out the slope by the lawnmower tracks. Jepson Street is at the top.
Canadians often have a better attitude toward winter than Americans do. Canadians try to make the best of winter while the American ideal is to get on a plane and get away from it. Or better yet, move to where there is no snow.
By 1967, my father had gotten a job on the American side in a medical supply company, Jeffrey Fell. He worked in Buffalo and one day there had been a lake-effect snow storm there while it had not yet snowed in Niagara Falls. He drove to get me from Valley Way School so that I could see the snow before it melted. Other children coming out of school were also delighted by the sight of snow and could not wait to make snowballs out of it.
Skating was a part of school and we would be periodically marched with our ice skates to the ice rink which was next to the old Kitchener Street School. This was the old Niagara Falls Memorial Arena and the first sports team that I ever heard of was the Niagara Falls Flyers, which played there.
In first grade, we were taken to see a farm outside Niagara Falls on Thorold Stone Road. To this day, it is the only farm with animals that I recall being on. I was taken horseback riding once around this time but that is the only time I have ever been on a horse.
My great fascination at this time, maybe even more than music, was aircraft. I really wanted to fly in a plane. It did not have to be any type of special airplane, a simple Piper Cub would do. I had a model of a military jet and a book about airplanes.
I wonder why, if kids could build a fort, why couldn't they build a plane that would fly as well? At any rate, I set my ambition for when I grew up to be a pilot, possibly a cropduster pilot. The Beatles song "With A Little Help From My Friends" always reminds me of airplanes.
Other technology that impressed me was the first time I went through a door that opened automatically. It was at a store on Queen Street.
One day, a really large new store opened in Niagara Falls. It was at the intersection of Dorchester Road and Morrison Street. The store was called Towers and it became a magnet for shoppers. It was also exciting when the first tunnel under the Welland Canal opened. I believe it is called the Thorold Tunnel.
On another day, we went to see a new concept in shopping known as a mall. The Pen Centre in St. Catharines is now known simply as The Pen. It's most important store of this time was Simpson-Sears.
People were talking about the new university that had just opened in nearby St. Catharines. It is the highly-regarded Brock University.
This may have been an idyllic time for me, but there was news of the wider world in the sixties. America, the country just across the river, was involved in a war in a distant place called Vietnam. America had plenty of trouble at home as well. News on television showed an American city on fire because of rioting. It must have been nearby Detroit.
In both America and Canada, there was a new type of people known as Hippies who disagreed with the existing order. In fact, I later wondered why the summer of 1967 is known as "The Summer of Love", there was a war in the Middle East as well. In Canada, there were signs all over with a triangular logo promoting Expo 67, which was held in Montreal.
We would read the Bible in school and I had a Bible that I would bring. I would sometimes begin to read it at home, not any particular book I would just read the first chapters of Genesis. The most memorable reading from school was the well-known 23rd Psalm. There were some other children who would go to some type of Bible class and would then be talking among themselves about the wonders of God.
One day, I was in the field with the electric transmission lines overhead near the intersection of Valley Way and Homewood Avenue. I was just looking around with another boy. There was a cloud overhead, one of those fluffy cumulus clouds. The cloud seemed so bright, I was amazed at how bright it was. I am not saying that this was a miracle, but it started me thinking about where God was.
I had wondered if there was a place where a guy could go and he would become super-strong just by going and receiving the energy there, a kind of "Powerland". But I began to think that maybe the real object is to form a connection with God.
At last, I got what I had really wanted. My first bicycle was gold-coloured and had what used to be called angel handlebars and a banana seat. It did not have hand brakes, but stopped when the pedals were reversed. The logo on it was of the Canadian tire manufacturer, Uniroyal.
My father took me to get it at the Canadian Tire store that was on Queen Street. The scent of fresh rubber would always remind me of the new tires on that bike and the catchy instrumentals of the song "Tighten Up" by Archie Bell And The Drells would remind me of how delighted I was to ride it.
I did not like to be told how far I was permitted to go on my bike, I rode all the way to Hamilton Street, which was the extent of our neighborhood. Another time, I rode to the street that goes around in a circle, Epworth Circle, with a school in the middle.
Sometimes, me and another kid would ride to a store called "The Shady Nook", which was behind the Eventide Home. A delicious blueberry pie cost a dime there. I was also fascinated with cherries at this time.
But no matter what other diversions there were, music had become extremely important. There were always new songs on the radio that I was hearing for the first time. The real genius of Rock Music is in the names of the songs. There are thousands of songs and each one had to have it's own name.
There was "Can't Get Used To Losing You" by Andy Williams
"This Guy's In Love With You" by Herb Alpert
"Green Tambourine" By the Lemon Pipers
"Delilah" by Tom Jones
"Little Green Apples" by Roger Miller
"Those Were the Days" by Mary Hopkin.
Other memorable songs were "The Good, The Bad And, The Ugly", which was a movie soundtrack.
"Out Of My Head" by Little Anthony And The Imperials
"The Look Of Love" originally by Dusty Springfield
There was the pleasant instrumental "Cast Your Fate To The Wind".
One of the catchiest Sixties-style tune that I liked was "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight" by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. Although I was, of course, too young to comprehend why a guy would care enough about what some girl was doing tonight to make a song about it.
Other things that got my interest were colours. I was fascinated by the turquoise of robin eggs and also by how people had different eye colours. The blueprints used by architects was also something of great interest to me. Lilac seemed to be the most beautiful scent in the world and I wondered if Heaven might be filled with lilacs. Some people that lived not far away had a backyard pond with brightly-coloured goldfish such as I had never seen before.
One thing that I wanted but never got was one of those bright yellow plastic raincoats that people used to wear, there was another type of raincoat, called oilskin, but I preferred one of the bright yellow plastic ones. I also wondered why I had not been given a middle name and I thought of assigning myself such a name, maybe Andrew or Kenneth.
One boy had learned how to say "Do you speak French"? in French, "Parlez-vous francais"? One day, when my parents were out, it seemed like fun to pick names at random out of the phone book, call them up and, ask "Parlez-vous francais"? Most people just hung up on us.
I pondered a question about the depth of water. One day, near the Welland Canal at St. Catharines, I filled a candy box with small stones and threw it in water. But I did not know how deep the water was and how long it took the box to get to the bottom. There is even a possibility that it is still sinking today. That is unlikely but how can I know for sure?
One word that really mystified me for a while was "catalog". At first, I thought it was something to do with a cat and later that it was something to do with a log.
It was obvious that there was a much bigger country nearby, at least in terms of population. We had learned Canadian geography in school but on the news, there were so many place names that we had not learned in school. One day, my father confirmed that there was a place called "Louisiana" that I had never before heard of.
My brother began going to a school on the American side, St. Mary's School For The Deaf. It was on Main Street in Buffalo, not far from where my father worked.
We sometimes visited the American side. In Buffalo, we went to the zoo and to the large Sears store that used to occupy the building at Jefferson Avenue and Main Street. In Niagara Falls, NY, just on the American side of the Rainbow Bridge, there was another Sears store and another store called Neisners, near a prominent building titled "The Imperial Hotel". (This was before urban renewal). One evening, the police were chasing a car along this street, called Falls Street.
The time came when the decision was made to move to the American side. It may have been that St. Mary's School For The Deaf made it more complicated for non-residents of the U.S. to attend the school. My father was already working on the American side, near my brother's school at a medical supply company. I think what happened is that my father happened to chat with the owner of the company while driving the tour bus around the falls in the summer, and talked himself into a job.
In the summer of 1968, we had to go to the U.S. Consulate in Toronto to get approval to move to the United States. The consulate is the one on University Avenue. We waited for what seemed like most of the day. There was an older couple waiting near us who were moving to New Jersey. There was a man there who looked like the Riddler on Batman, but he wasn't laughing like the Riddler. I was told about the man with the double name of Sirhan who had shot the brother of the former U.S. president, who had also been shot.
One thing that I wanted to do in Canada but never got around to is to swim at the Cyanamid Pool. Those who had been there said it was much bigger than the pool at Leslie Park. I also had only been to another nearby park, Oakes Park, only once and I had wanted to go there again. There was some type of religious instruction or scouts for children beginning in the church across the street from the Shady Nook, but I would be moving away.
During my last summer living in Canada, a veritable earthquake rocked across the airwaves. "Born To Be Wild" was a song by a band called Steppenwolf. It was about motorcyclists, but it may as well have been for us seven and eight-year olds riding our bikes.
Another memorable tune of this time was "I Got To Get A Message To You" by the Bee Gees. It was about a guy who was about to be executed for a crime and was trying to contact a girl one last time.
There was also "Hurdy Gurdy Man" by Donovan
"Time Has Come Today" by the Chambers Brothers
"Sunshine Of Your Love" by Cream
"Dream A Little Dream Of Me" by Mama Cass
"Angel Of The Morning" By Merrilee Rush.
I was the last one in the family to see what would be our new home on the American side. The daughter of the couple from Scotland that lived in the home adjoining ours worked in real estate and had gotten us connected with the home.
Around the time that we were leaving Canada, a new name appeared that would be possibly the most prominent Canadian in history, that of the Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau. The adoration for him would be called "Trudeaumania". While in office he would become the father of a son who would also be prime minister. Adoring politicians is not something that Canadians are known for so he must have been really something.
4) MOVING TO THE U.S. SIDE
Our new home in Niagara Falls, USA was on 60th Street, the same as my birth year. Our house was detached, unlike the one on Jepson Street, which was a duplex. There was a hedge along the north side of the yard with a willow tree within it.
The owner of the house, Mrs. Scalzo, was the first American that I met. We drove down to the end of 60th Street so that I could see what would be my new school. We could not move into our house until November 1, 1968, so we stayed for two weeks in the nearby Fallsway Motel.
Around the time that we moved into our house there was a story on the radio about Martians landing on nearby Grand Island. It must have been convincing because some people thought it was real. The Canadian military sent a force to the border to prevent Martians from entering Canada.
A most important possession of the time was a roll of string that I collected, I wound the string around a frame of metal and whenever I would come across a piece of string, I would tie it onto the end so that my collection of string would get ever-longer. I made sure that my string did not get misplaced when we moved.
Our new house faced west so that the sun shone through the window in late afternoon, in the same way as in our house back in England. The Great Lakes Carbon factory was nearby, as well as several other factories, and at night we could hear the sound of cars and trucks on the nearby 190 interstate highway.
Our move from the house in Canada to our house in the U.S. was barely four miles, going in a straight line. Our earlier move from our house in England to our house in Canada had been nearly 4,000 miles. But I had been too young then and this move was much more vivid and would have more of an effect on me. It may have been only four miles and I would still spend plenty of time on the Canadian side, but it was a move to a whole new country.
I was very impressed with my new school as my father took me to the office to get registered. My parents were English and kept talking of seeing the "head master" instead of the principal. The school was two-story and was constructed of pale green brick on one side and white brick on the other side. There were bathrooms and sinks in the classrooms and lockers for coats in the hallways. It was within easy walking distance of home, just as Valley Way School had been.
Three images from Google Street View. Why was 60th Street School built with white brick on two sides, but the rest of the school with green brick? No other nearby schools were built in different colors. My theory was that there were bricks left over from some other building project and they made use of them.
There was an indoor library on the second floor and next to it, a room with long tables called the All-Purpose Room, which was used for meetings and as a cafeteria. Outside, there was a set of monkey bars for children to climb on for exercise and also a paved basketball court. I had never heard of basketball before. There were two baseball diamonds, in the corners of the school grounds furthest from the school building.
This was a new country and there was some inevitable confusion. I was told to come back into school from the schoolyard from lunchtime when I heard the "bell" sound. On the first day, I did not go back in because it was the sound of an electric buzzer, rather than an actual bell, as it had been at Valley Way. We did not have recess at the new school like we did at Valley Way.
There were differences in spelling, American spellings often omit a U that is included in Canada and Britain. In Canada we lived near Sixth Avenue, but in America we lived on 60th Street.
Terminology was also different. What we called a "rubber" at Valley Way School was called an "eraser" here. This was the Sixties and the word "cool" was everywhere. I had never heard it previously. In Canada if a kid was acting silly, someone would tell him to "smarten up" but over here, I never heard anyone say that.
Going to school in America also meant learning about new places. I first heard that there was a place called Yonkers and I began the American childhood ordeal of learning to spell Mississippi. Although if we had stayed in Canada, it would have been Mississauga instead. I appreciated English names, which actually spell the way they sound, or maybe that was just because I came from England.
American students started the day by saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag that was in every classroom. Canada had not been as nationalistic.
I had never seen black people up close before. This was an era when "busing" was an issue in the U.S. and there were several black students in each class, although very few black people lived in the neighborhood. By the end of my first day in school, black people were just people like anybody else.
The surface on which the teacher writes is called a blackboard. In Valley Way School, the blackboards had actually been green. But here, they really were blackboards.
We sang songs in class, as we had on the Canadian side, but the songs were different. "Suwanee River" and "Clementine" were two new songs that were sung in class. Years later, as I was travelling around the U.S., I was surprised to find myself crossing the Suwanee River, I had thought that it was just a song and not a real place.
Finally, the school had a big indoor pool and swimming was a weekly activity. The scent of chlorine always reminds me of my first time in that pool. The pool was about the same size as the one in Leslie Park, but there we could only swim during the summer. I was used to swimming and received my red button for swimming accomplishment during my first week at the new school. Across the hall from the pool was a large gym, the gym had a stage so it could also be used as an auditorium.
My transition to our new country was helped by the girl that sat next to me in class. She watched what I was saying and nicely corrected me when necessary, such as informing me that a rubber was called an eraser here, before I used the wrong word to the teacher or to other students.
On one of my first class trips to the library in school, I had one of those life-changing experiences that come along every so often. I had heard about the Apollo Space Program, in which America was sending astronauts into space, gaining knowledge and experience and working toward the goal of putting men on the moon. I took out the book "Space" by Marian Tellander, a Follett beginning science book.
It was the first book that I ever actually read the words, instead of just looking at the pictures. Reading this book began my lifelong interest in both science, particularly space, and general reading. There was also a popular series of children's science books called the "How and Why Wonder Books".
I became deeply interested in astronomy and space exploration. I read all that I could about it and learned all about the planets, why stars are different colors, how telescopes work and how a rocket uses stages to get to the moon. This was an era of great confidence in science and technology and extensive space travel seemed certain for the future. The distances involved in space were of an order that I had never imagined, distances to nearby planets were measured in millions of miles and distances to stars in light-years, the vast distance that a beam of light will travel in one year.
I got my parents to buy me a small telescope for Christmas so I could look into space for myself. The colored lights on the Christmas tree seemed to be a model of the different colors of stars. I also got a new train set, but now space was my main interest and I did not use it as much as I had the one on the Canadian side.
There was a big open field nearby, as well as a smaller one behind our house. It was where Home Depot and The Regal Cinema now stand. There was a large pond in the field with reeds that would freeze over during the winter and sometimes dry up altogether in summer. The pond was full of frogs and tadpoles (pollywogs). The smaller field behind our house had a small hill, several large rocks, a pile of broken pieces of concrete and, what was left of the foundation and parking lot of a motel that had been there long ago.
The rest of the field was long grass, goldenrod and, milkweed. Sometimes, as one was walking through it, a pheasant would fly up all of a sudden. An old dog from down the street named Bullet was often out there hunting rats.
I would spend hours looking around that field. One of the first things that I did after landing in the U.S. was to build a tepee from several pieces of wood as I had seen on television. I drew a map of the field and named some of the sections after the planets. People who lived nearby would throw their Christmas trees onto a pile and when they had dried out for a while, they would be burned in a bonfire.
This image, from Google Earth, is of the Home Depot and theater that used to be open field.
A new country brought a new set of music. There was "Hush" by a band called Deep Purple.
"Classical Gas", an instrumental by Mason Williams
"Hair" by The Cowsills
"98.6" by Keith
"Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf (These were the Sixties and a "Magic Carpet Ride" was, of course, a euphemism for a drug trip.)
A band with the unusual name of "1910 Fruitgum Company" had a hit with "1,2,3 Red Light".
There was a heavy rock song that seemed to be made for people doing drugs called "In A Gadda Da Vida" by Iron Butterfly.
A Spanish band, Los Bravos, did "Black Is Black".
The Beatles had one of their biggest hits with "Hey, Jude". They also had "Fool On The Hill" at the time we were moving to the U.S. That song was later done by the Brazilian Sergio Mendes.
Every weekday morning after we landed in America in the autumn of 1968, the morning children's show, Rocketship 7, would be on Channel 7. The theme of "I Love Lucy" always seemed to be on and there was a frontier adventure serial, "Daniel Boone". There were cartoons that I was already familiar with like Popeye, Porky Pig and, Roger Ramjet. The Honeymooners, in which they were always in the same room, was another popular show. My information is that the Flintstones were modeled on the Honeymooners.
There was a show about space exploration to go along with my new interest in space. Lost In Space was about a space-travelling family that was trying to find their way back and ran into all kinds of adventures along the way. Of course, there were the westerns such as Gunsmoke.
There was a movie on every Sunday, called "The Big Show Of the Week". The one that I remember best is the H.G. Wells classic, "Time Machine". I heard of an actress named Sharon Tate.
There was also news on television every evening. One of the first things that I recall after landing in the U.S. was the big upcoming election for president. There were three men for voters to choose from. One named Nixon, one named Wallace and, one named Humphrey.
I knew nothing about any of them. A lot of people seemed to like Humphrey, but it was Nixon who won and who would be our new president. His vice-president would be a man named Spiro Agnew.
Politics was always much more visible in the U.S. than it had been in Canada. While living there, I cannot remember that I even knew the name of the prime minister. It was Lester Pearson, for whom Toronto Airport is named.
There was much more on the news. Our kitchen was kind of oddly shaped, making it difficult for a family of four to have dinner around a table, so we would have dinner while watching the news. Now I am very glad of that. There was the war in the jungle in Vietnam every night. There were the protests against the war at home. The news was filled with helicopters and soldiers and places named Saigon, Hanoi, Danang, Hue and, Haiphong.
The newscasters were always on about the NVA (North Vietnamese Army), The VC (Viet Cong or Vietnamese Communists) and the DMZ (The Demilitarized Zone) and the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The protesters at home were carrying peace signs and demanding an end to the war. In our third grade class, we drew cards that would be sent to the soldiers in Vietnam.
There was also racial tension in America on the news. The race riots peaked in 1967, before we lived here but earlier in 1968, Martin Luther King had been assassinated, as well as Bobby Kennedy.
Then there was the Cold War in the news. This was the big picture of world events of which the Vietnam War was just one manifestation. Names like Leonid Brezhnev, Andrei Gromyko (The Soviet premier and foreign minister) and, Mao Zedong were often heard on the news, as well as discussions of fantastic nuclear bombs.
Not long after we landed was the news that the crew of a U.S. ship being held in North Korea had been released. This was the USS Pueblo.
It was easily to believe, by watching the news, that the world was really messed up. In fact, there were Hippies who wanted to change the whole social order and who used less-polite terms than "messed up" to describe the state of the world.
Another name that suddenly appeared on the evening news was that of Joe Namath. There was a game of great national interest called football and he had led his team, the Jets, to be the best team of all. I learned that we had a team nearby also, the Buffalo Bills, but that they were not the best team.
I joined a Cub Scout den, at my parents' encouragement. I enjoyed reading the Boys' Life periodicals that I began receiving as a result. The Cub Scouts were a junior version of the Boy Scouts. I think that scout membership is a good thing although I realized later that the primary purpose, along with games like warball that we played in gym class as well as fraternities in high school, is to prepare boys for being in the military.
Along Pine Avenue (or Niagara Falls Boulevard, as it is now called), the main road near our house, were numerous motels to accommodate tourists coming to see the falls in the summer. The line of motels on both sides of the street went right down to where the city ended at the airport. There were two notable fast food restaurants along the way, the Red Barn and McDonalds. The Red Barn is long gone but McDonalds is still there.
We began doing our grocery shopping at the A & P, in the Pine Plaza about a mile from home. Unlike in Canada, the denominations of money in America were all the same shades of green.
A new country meant many new brands of products that I would be seeing. There was Jif Peanut Butter that was often used to make a sandwich with Welch's Grape Jelly. There was a competition to be the best toothpaste between Crest and Colgate. There was a brand of coffee with the unusual name of "Chock Full O' Nuts", but it must be doing something right because it is still on store shelves today.
To drink, we usually bought cans of Hi C Orange Drink. So-called because it was supposed to contain a lot of vitamin C. I got one of my first lessons in physics when I was shown that to effectively pour out the juice, it was necessary to punch a hole in both sides of the can. One hole was where the juice poured out and the other was so the air could enter in to take it's place.
The product in the supermarket that got my attention was Land O Lakes Butter. There was a native Indian woman on the package holding a box of the butter. Of course, on that box was the same Indian woman holding a box of the butter. And on that one, the same thing. This meant that there must be the same image within itself indefinitely.
America was a new land of Captain Crunch Breakfast Cereal, Cracker Barrel Cheese, Sealtest Ice Cream and, Morton Salt. The newspapers that my father brought home from his job in Buffalo were the Buffalo Evening News and the now-defunct Courier Express.
If I went on a ride to Buffalo, we went past the Dunlop Tire factory and there were signs for the Big E bank everywhere. Sometimes my father brought home a blueberry pie from Freddie's Doughnuts, which was on Main Street in Buffalo near his job.
As always, there were new songs on the radio. The Hollies had another memorable hit with "Carrie Anne".
One of my really favorite songs was "Build Me Up Buttercup" by The Foundations.
There was "Touch Me" by The Doors
"Yummy, Yummy, Yummy" by The Ohio Express
"Gimme Gimme Good Loving" by Crazy Elephant
"Let Me In, Cinnamon" by Derek.
Glen Campbell had "Wichita Lineman" at this time and also did another memorable song, "Galveston".
I first heard of Motown. It was a record label out of Detroit with all black singers and groups. They had a big hit with "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" by Marvin Gaye, although it was recorded by several bands.
I came across another new interest. While living on the Canadian side, I had been fascinated with airplanes. My father had been in Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) and also liked watching planes. This interest returned.
One disadvantage of being interested in space is that it was so inaccessible. I could read about it and look up at the sky but that was about it. With airplanes, I could watch them at close range and had much more chance of flying one someday or at least flying in one.
Niagara Falls, NY had an airport adjoining an air force base. My father took me to look at small airplanes, like Cessnas, and sometimes he was able to talk his way into having us shown the cockpit of airliners. There were often Pan Am and TWA (Trans World Airlines) planes at the airport. One German pilot of a Lufthansa jet showed me all around the controls in the cockpit of the plane.
I read all about airplanes, just as I had about space. There was an elegant French airliner, the Caravelle. Britain and France were working on what was to be a supersonic passenger jet, the Concorde. Belgium had an airline called Sabena. Boeing manufactured the majority of the large jets but Britain had a jet manufacturer called Vickers that made planes for BOAC, British Overseas Airline Corporation. There was also the X-15 experimental rocket plane, operated by NASA.
In one book, I had a detailed diagram of a jet airliner that I really tried to study. In the school library, there was a book with photos and descriptions of military jets. Next to Niagara Falls Airport, there was the massive Bell factory where so much of the equipment that pioneered flight was manufactured, including the "Huey" military helicopters that were being used in Vietnam at the time.
In school, I enjoyed word searching. We were given a long word and had to find as many smaller words as we could that could be spelled with the letters in the long word.
As the weather got warmer in the spring of 1969 and third grade neared it's end, a bunch of us decided to play hooky from school and hide in the large field that I described previously. We didn't get caught so we tried it a second time. (Playing hooky means skipping school).
But apparently, one of our group had told someone in school about what we were doing. That student must have told the teacher, who called the office, who called the mother of one in our group, who drove up to the field, walked over to us and, marched us all into the office at school.
It was decided that our punishment would be to make up the number of hours of school that we had missed sitting in the office after school. It was warm and beautiful weather outside while we were sitting in the office of the school. Playing hooky definitely had not been worth it.
A boy had been bitten by a strange dog and the parents did not know where the dog was. There was a frantic search going on all over the neighborhood to find the dog and be sure it wasn't rabid.
The highlight of the school year at 60th Street School was Play Day. As the name implies, this was a day of play in the warm weather near the end of the school year. Students in the three classes of each grade would be divided into four teams; Red, Blue, Yellow and, Green. Teams were chosen to be as closely matched as possible and the day would be spent on all kinds of athletic events from races to tug-of-war.
I went bowling for the first time at Frontier Lanes in Lewiston. There was a company called Brunswick that seemed to have it's name on so much that was associated with bowling.
There was a girl on the next street from us that always seemed to be what an all-American girl should be like.
As the end of school neared in late spring of 1969, there was a series of new songs and the future seemed as brilliant as the weather. A band called The Fifth Dimension was all over the radio with "Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In".
Years later I would realize that there must be a dimension of space that we cannot see but perceive as time. Maybe the name of this band helped me to think of dimensions beyond our own.
The South African musician Hugh Masakela had "Grazing In The Grass", which was also done by The Friends of Distinction.
Mary Hopkin appeared again with "Goodbye".
There was "Red Rubber Ball" by the Cyrkle
"The Israelites" by the Jamaican Desmond Dekker
"You Made Me So Very Happy" by Blood, Sweat and, Tears.
Topping it off were those two late-Sixties classics; "Dizzy" by Tommy Roe and "Crimson And Clover" by Tommy James And The Shondells.
The summer of 1969 was a special time in America, and many other places, and I could feel how special it was even as a child. That is one reason that I wanted to write this autobiography. There is a saying that "The past is another country." But it is not really another country. Another country is a place that we can go back to visit, but we cannot actually go back to visit the past in the same way.
The trouble with special times is that they are gone so soon. The summer of '69 meant so much to so many people but it lasted for only a few months and then was gone. One way to go back for a visit is to write about it.
When school let out at the end of third grade, it gave me the opportunity to get my bicycle out and do some exploring in my new country. I spent time in that large field nearby, of course. There were plenty of those red-winged blackbirds and the pond often dried up altogether in the heat of summer.
But I went further on my bike. I became intrigued by the shimmering water mirage that makes it look as if there is water up ahead on a hot summer day. But when you get to where the water appeared to be, it has moved further away.
There was a stretch of ground known to locals as "The Tracks" that beckoned to be explored. This was the land between Frontier and Stephenson Avenues east of 56th Street. The original plan had been to build some type of highway there but the plans never materialized and it was left vacant. It was once train tracks.
This image of "The Tracks" is from Google Earth, looking eastward. 56th Street is in the foreground, and Interstate 190 in the background. Frontier Avenue is to the left and Stephenson Avenue to the right.
It is still vacant today, but in 1969 it had a lot more bushes and shrubbery than it does now. Near the tracks, along the sloping side of the Interstate 190, kids often climbed to the top with a piece of cardboard and then slid down while sitting on the cardboard.
There was also the building of forts in the summer. There were several large pieces of folded steel sheet laying around. Pieces of wood could be found and put across the tops of the steel sheets to form a roof.
I obtained a map of Niagara Falls, NY and noticed that there was a distant place called Cayuga Island with a park there called Jayne Park. I could not get as far as the moon like the astronauts were doing but me and some other kids rode our bikes all the way to Jayne Park and back.
With school out and my bike ready to ride, I also got more of a look at the other factories nearby over on 56th Street. There was Union Carbide and Goodyear, aside from the Great Lakes Carbon closer to our house. There were also many more large factories along Buffalo Avenue and smaller industrial buildings, along with a scrap yard, along 56th Street.
All kinds of alarms and other sounds would come from the factories. Those were the days before the pollution controls of today and we would often see the yellow smoke (probably sulfur dioxide from rubber vulcanization) coming from the Goodyear plant.
One day, much of the long grass and weeds in the large field near our house was mowed to make way for a travelling circus. There were quite a few elephants there as well as rides. But it was a shock when I asked how much a soft drink cost at the circus and was told 25 cents. At the Red Barn, a similar drink cost only 10 cents. There was also travelling rides that set up for a while in the parking lot of the Pine Plaza. For swimming, we would still go back to Canada to the pool at Leslie Park and to Chippawa.
Around the house in the summer of 1969, my father set about planting a number of trees. Soon after moving in, we had uprooted the willow tree within the hedge and replanted it in the middle of the yard. We also got a dog of our own, an Irish Setter which we assigned the appropriate name of Rusty.
I was maybe getting a little too fond of food and drink and was gaining weight. There was, of course, the Red Barn and McDonalds a mile or so from home. My father often brought treats home from Freddy's Doughnuts in Buffalo. There was a delicious snack food during the summer of '69 known as Pizza Spins. The motel across the street had a vending machine that sold Johnnie Ryan brand sodas, which were made nearby in Niagara Falls. I also favored Mountain Dew and Hires Root Beer, although Dad's Root Beer was good too.
My father took me to the airport to watch the airplanes quite a few times. One day, a small Cessna plane taxied right in front of a passenger jet which was on a perpendicular runway. The pilot of the larger plane managed to stop quickly enough to avert a collision. There was a squadron of jets stationed at the Air Base and they were always practicing flights and maneuvers over Niagara Falls.
Then came that incredible day when men first walked on the moon. This was certainly the most important event of the summer. People had existed for maybe a million years, civilization for about five thousand years. But this was the first time a human had walked on a world other than the earth. I wondered if the signers of America's Declaration of Independence could have dreamed that the new nation would be the first to reach the moon.
My father took us to see the movie "Bonnie and Clyde". I have never doubted that America was a great country that could do awesome things like putting people on the moon. But it also creates so many of it's own problems and one of the ways it does so is by glamorizing crime. There was a car with numerous holes in it touring around that was claimed to be the car in which Bonnie and Clyde were killed.
In this movie, and far too many others, a life of murder and crime is portrayed like some exciting, alternate way of life. Shows like Gunsmoke may be a fictionalized portrayal of part of American history, but they also send the message that the surest way to solve a disagreement is with a gun.
The murders of the Manson Family were suddenly what everyone seemed to be talking about. One of their victims had been the actress Sharon Tate.
Of course, the summer of "69 meant a joyous festival of new music, even for those who were not at Woodstock. I thought that the four most memorable songs of the summer were "Good Morning, Starshine" by Oliver"
"Poke Salad Annie" by Tony Joe White
"Spinning Wheels" by Blood, Sweat and, Tears
"Get Together" by The Youngbloods.
But that was only the beginning. A band called Kenny Rogers And The First Edition had two 1969 hits with "Ruby" and "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)".
The Canadian band The Guess Who had "These Eyes" and "Laughing".
There was "Sugar, Sugar" by The Archies
"Honky Tonk Woman" by The Rolling Stones
"It's Your Thing" by the Isley Brothers
"Soul Deep" by The Box Tops
"Love Child" by The Supremes
A look into the distant future with "2525" by Zager And Evans. (By the way, since the summer of 1969 we have nearly 10% of the way to the year 2525.)
Creedence Clearwater Revival was on the radio with "Proud Mary", "Green River" and "Who'll Stop The Rain?"
"Guitarzan" was a song by Ray Stevens about a version of Tarzan that played a guitar.
Niagara Falls, NY was a different place in the summer of '69. Dozens of teenagers were always gathering at the City Market in much the same way, I reckoned, as they did at Woodstock. I watched the construction of what was then known as Spallino Towers, a tall building as a home for the elderly. It was easy to feel the hope for the future in the air.
5) FOURTH THROUGH SIXTH GRADES
When school started back, it may not be the same students in one's classroom that there was the previous year because there were three separate classes in the school for each grade. For the first time, I took what was known as the Iowa Tests for aptitude in various things that were given to students across the U.S. early every autumn. We were to read the question and then fill in one of several dots in the multiple choice answers.
Religion was not permitted to be taught in school by this time, but there was a once-a-week activity known as church school. Late in the day, Catholic students walked from 60th Street School to another nearby school for religious instruction and Protestant students went to a nearby church. We did, however, have both a holy scene during the Christmas play. I went once, but I went to the Catholic school by mistake. It was confusing and I didn't go again. I really did not understand the difference between the two or the concepts of religion.
A lot of discussion was about a new football player with the local professional team, the Buffalo Bills. The name of O. J. Simpson was everywhere, whereas last year it had been Joe Namath.
There were large department stores where we would go shopping. The most popular two were K-Mart and Twin Fair. There was also another such store called Grant's. One day, I noticed a hand axe in the hardware section of Twin Fair that I decided I wanted. My father bought it for me and I had a new prized possession.
I ventured into the large field near our home and cut down a small tree. I stripped the bark off it and put tape around one end so that it was like a staff that I could carry around. I got the knack of how to cut a tree down and went and cut another one down. This one took me much less time than the first one.
My next big interest was cars. Once again, it was a matter of accessibility. All I could do with space was read about it and look up into the sky. There was an airport in town and planes were much more accessible than space, but still all I could do was look at or in a plane occasionally. Cars, in contrast, were right in front of me. I was not old enough to drive, but there was our car right outside in the driveway.
My father bought one of several Volkswagens that he had owned at Amendola Volkswagen down by the airport. I looked through the brochures of the different types of car available, the Beetle (or Bug), the Karmann Ghia and, the Minibus. If you asked a boy around this time what kind of car he wanted when he was old enough, the answer would most likely be a Chevy Corvette or a Ford Mustang.
I was nowhere near old enough to drive but I did find a go-kart one day and I brought it home and kept it in the basement. It did not have a motor or anything and I noticed later that it was actually the bottom half of a shopping cart without the basket. But it was my junior version of a car.
I was always interested in how the physics of things work. What would happen if a car happened to run into a fence? It would crash right through, a fence cannot stop a speeding car. But if the car hits a sizable tree, it will demolish the car.
I came to appreciate the structure of those high steel towers used to support high-tension electric transmission lines. There were three sets of them running along 56th Street not far from home. I was also interested in the set-up of the wooden telephone poles that held the wires which delivered electricity and phone service.
There was another open field with a pond nearby. It was not as big as the other one but it had a hill that kids could play and slide on. The hill was actually a pile of dirt used in construction. It was referred to simply as the "Dirt Hill", over by 59th Street. Across 59th Street from the Dirt Hill was a deep trench in the ground.
There was the inevitable mischief. An older boy had gotten hold of a pack of True brand cigarettes and gave one out to any of the younger kids who wanted to try smoking.
Of course, there was new music on the radio. In the autumn of 1969, The Beatles had "Revolution", "Obla Di Obla Da" and "Lady Madonna".
A band called Three Dog Night appeared with "Eli's Coming".
There was "Time Of The Season" by the Zombies
"Venus" by Shocking Blue
"Shiloh" by Neil Diamond
"Suite Judy Blue Eyes" by a band we would hear much more from called Crosby, Stills, Nash and, Young.
One of the most charming songs of the rock era was a one-hit wonder band called The Flying Machine singing "Smile A Little Smile For Me".
I first heard of a band called The Grass Roots. This would become of my favorite bands ever and one that I feel was very underrated. Their autumn 1969 hit was "Midnight Confessions". Maybe the song was from a little bit earlier but this is when I noticed it.
There were new shows on television that I had not yet seen, as well as music. A new cartoon had been introduced, The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. There was My Three Sons and I Dream Of Jeannie. There was the movie Snow White and Charlie Brown's Halloween. A show with contestants called Truth Or Consequences seemed to be on nearly all the time.
Astronauts went back to the moon again in November 1969. It seemed only a matter of time before space flight became routine. Closer to home, a dam was built to shut off the water to the American Falls in order to determine how the cliff face of the falls might be preserved. The Mets won baseball's World Series and a prominent new name in football on our local Buffalo Bills was O.J. Simpson.
As far as food goes, there were two more fast food restaurants around, Henry's and Carolls. All had the usual hamburgers, french fries, soda and, milk shakes. The weight concerns that I should have had were put aside. There were delicious candy bars like Three Musketeers, Mars and, Milky Way. There was a Texaco filling station nearby that installed a vending machine selling hot chocolate.
There were many attractive houses around our area. I liked ranch-style houses but also ones with shutters on the windows and trees in the yard.
I suddenly became concerned with being cool. My parents bought me a pair of purple bell-bottom pants. This was the psychedelic era of tye-dyed shirts, peace signs and, bright colors.
At the beginning of 1970 a new passenger plane was introduced, the Boeing 747. It would gradually replace the smaller 707. The maiden flight of the 747 was made, from New York to London. Seven years later would come the worst aircraft accident ever, when two planes collided at Tenerife. What is not widely known is that one of the planes involved in the accident is the one that made the maiden flight.
There was soon more music. There was the Everly Brothers with "Dream", although this was an older song, it was often on the radio.
There was also "All Right Now" by Free
"No Time" and "American Woman" by the Guess Who.
"Let It Be" by the Beatles.
A new band was introduced, The Jackson 5. Their first hits were "I Want You Back", "The Love You Save", "Mama's Pearl" and "ABC".
I first heard a song that would become one of my favorites years later, "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes" by Edison Lighthouse.
On television, there were several family shows such as The Partridge Family, The Brady Bunch and, Ozzie And Harriet. There were childrens comedies, most notably The Three Stooges, who were certainly geniuses at acting ridiculous. There was also Abbott And Costello, but I watched that much less than The Three Stooges.
We were offered movies in the school gym after school and there was the famed detective show, The FBI, on TV at home. My father took us to the movies to see "The Battle Of Britain" when it was released.
There was more news. The environmental holiday, Earth Day, was established. By that time, nearby Lake Erie had actually been declared as dead due to pollution.
In our town, a massive reconstruction of the downtown area began, known as Urban Renewal. It was to focus on the building of a new modern convention center. There was a high-profile campaign for the mayor of our city, one candidate was named Lackey and the other Ingrasci.
But one event happened that was to overshadow everything else. In the spring of 1970, the decision was made to widen the Vietnam War by sending troops into neighboring Cambodia to root out Communist supply networks. College campuses across America were in an uproar with protests against the war. It culminated in four student protesters at Kent State University in Ohio being shot to death when the U.S. National Guard opened fire on them.
As always, there was still more music. The Beatles had "Come Together".
There was a band called Marmalade with "Reflections Of My Life".
Eric Burdon sang a bizarre song called "Spill The Wine".
Simon And Garfunkel were there with "Cecilia".
There were also "Hitching A Ride" by Vanity Fair
"In The Summertime" by Mungo Jerry
"Come And Get It" by Badfinger
"Love Or Let Me Be Lonely" by The Friends Of Distinction.
I never decided what my all-time favorite song was. But if I had to choose, I just might pick "Cry Me A River" by Joe Cocker. This rocking song was a hit around this time.
Before we knew it, Play Day had arrived at school. For our end-of-year field trip, we went to Tussaud's Wax Museum across the border in Canada. And then, it was out of school for the summer.
During the summers, the roads around Niagara Falls would be filled with cars having out-of-state license plates that were here on vacation to see the falls. During the summer of 1970, I became really fascinated with the view from the observation towers on the Canadian side of the falls and I got my parents to take me up the Skylon or what was then called the Seagram's or Minolta Tower as many times as I could. I can see now how looking at the view from high up helped me to develop a way of big-picture thinking.
One of these two images of the Skylon, from Google Earth, shows the American Falls in the background.
What is now the Tower Hotel was actually the first observation tower overlooking the falls on the Canadian side. Three images from Google Earth and Street View, Horseshoe Falls in background.
There were also museums that I wanted to see, aside from the one that was near the Canadian end of the Rainbow Bridge and had things from ancient Egypt, as well as barrels that had went over the falls and all kinds of other artifacts, there were museums on Clifton Hill, including Tussauds, and the Burning Spring Wax Museum, which was on the high ground right above the falls. A wax museum simply means that it features images of people carved from wax. In the pavilion at the base of the Skylon Tower, there was a museum of elaborate wood carvings by an artist named Potvin.
I had a collection of all of those free brochures offered about all of the tourist attractions in the area. There was always construction and changes going on. A new hotel, which was to be called Michael's Inn was being built around this time at the bottom of Hiram Street, where we had first stayed in Niagara Falls.
The falls were still of interest to us, even after having lived in the Niagara area for five years, and we would often go there. The upper Niagara River was interesting to look at, as well as the falls. Cars could park at the water intakes, where water was pulled in from the river to generate hydroelectricity, and from where a good view of the upper river was offered.
This view, from Google Earth, is of the two structures that house the doors that can be closed to stop the flow of water, through two underground tunnels, from the Niagara River to the power plant. There are two similar structures on the Canadian side.
We took a tour on the river from Chippawa, around Navy Island and back, on a tour boat called The Niagara Belle. This remains the only time that I have been out on the Niagara River.
Swimming was a prominent part of childhood and I would often go, in the pool at the motel across the street from us, or to Chippawa. I got a new shiny black bike to replace the one that I had brought from the Canadian side. This one was an adult bike, without angel bars or a banana seat. It had hand brakes and a three-speed gear shift.
But I was still having too much in the way of calories in food. There was several brands of soda in the store to choose from; Fanta, Faygo and, Shasta. There was an ice cream van that went around neighborhoods and stopping periodically so that people could order ice cream or milkshakes. We started going to Kentucky Fried Chicken, as well as the other fast food restaurants.
Finally, in the summer of 1970, a new fast-food restaurant was built that would become a favorite. The Burger King that is still at the corner of Niagara Falls Boulevard and 74th Street. I watched it's construction and waited for it to open. It was closer to our house than McDonald's or the Red Barn.
If there was ever a best summer for music, it may have been that of 1970. There was no end to the awesome new songs that were on the radio. Some songs were more easy listening.
There was "Snowbird" by Canada's Ann Murray
"Fire And Rain" by James Taylor
"What The World Needs Now" by Jackie DeShannon
The Carpenters had "Close To You" and "We've Only Just Begun".
There was a song, "Joanne" by Michael Nesmith, who had been one of the Monkees. It was about a really sweet girl who lived in the countryside.
Other songs of the summer of 1970 were more rocking. There was "Hand Me Down World" by the Guess Who
"I Can See For Miles" by The Who. This may have been an earlier song but this is when I remember it from.
A group called Badfinger hit with "No Matter What", one of my favorites.
There was "Vehicle", sung by the Ides Of March.
Some songs had a political or sociological message. There was "Big Yellow Taxi" by Joni Mitchell. It was about the destruction of nature by development. About "Take paradise and put up a parking lot" and "Take all the trees, put them in a tree museum and, charge the people a dollar and a half just to see them".
There was the signature anti-war song, "War" , by Edwin Starr. It had the refrain "War can't give life, it can only take it away".
There was "Mama Told Me Not To Come" by Three Dog Night. It was about a guy who ignored his parents' advice not to go to a party, and then found that the people there were doing drugs.
The ultimate political rock song was probably "Ohio" from 1970. It was by Crosby, Stills, Nash and, Young and was about the shootings at Kent State University in Ohio, that had happened a few months previously.
There was also "Question" by the Moody Blues, a song that would always remind me of the time of the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War and the "British Invasion" of music were going on at the same time, but the two didn't have much to do with each other. The exception is this song that the Moody Blues did for their American audience that was dealing with the Vietnam War. The refrain from the song was "Why do we never get an answer when we're knocking at the door with a thousand million questions about hate and death and war"?
The local Air Base held an open house to help public relations and showed the airplanes stationed there. I was on some kind of platform and a little redheaded girl got on the platform also. Years later, my late wife and I knew that we had met before but we never figured out where. After she died I realized that she had been the girl on the platform.
But there were far more memorable songs during this summer that did not fit into any of the above categories. There was a song about a fugitive, "Indiana Wants Me", by R. Dean Taylor.
There was a song about an poor orphan boy left to provide for his family, "Patches" by Clarence Carter.
There was "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" by Stevie Wonder.
There was two older songs that I first noticed at this time, "Well-Respected Man" by The Kinks and "House of The Rising Sun" by the Animals.
The Chairmen of The Board had "Give Me Just A Little More Time".
Freda Payne did "Band Of Gold"
Eric Clapton had "After Midnight", which is one of the best rock songs.
I first heard the band Chicago. The song "Beginnings" almost always seemed to be on the radio.
The song "25 or 6 to 4" by Chicago is about a songwriter who is suffering from writer's block while up in the middle of the night trying to write a song. He looks at the clock and sees that it is just past 3:30 in the morning, it is 25 or 6 to 4 (which would be 3:34 or 3:35).
Around Niagara Falls, we were reading and hearing more and more about the Urban Renewal that was getting under way. It was to be the complete reconstruction of the downtown area of the city.
I learned of another project that I thought would be a disaster. Right in the middle of my beloved field nearby, a Chevrolet car dealership was to be built. It would not take up the entire field, only about 1/3 of it. The pond in the field would be reduced in size and changed in shape by the construction, but it would still be there. Plans were also made to take up a part of the field behind our house with an Exxon gasoline station.
In the summer of 1970 I first played both basketball and baseball, which are two all-American sports. There was a basketball rivalry between Niagara University and St. Bonaventure University, some distance away. The boy across the street was really into basketball and had a basketball net set up.
I joined a Little League Baseball team. I was on a team called the Yankees. We wore black shirts and were sponsored by a store called Baio Appliance. Each team in the league wore a shirt of a different color and was sponsored by a different business.
It was a summer of baseball diamonds. I thought that we were better than the Red Sox, which we played twice. The Cubs were better than we were, but were not as good as the Orioles. The best team of all in the league was probably the Senators.
We had a big tournament at a school called LaSalle Junior High School, which had several baseball diamonds. This was the first I saw of the big old brick school where I would be going myself in a couple of years. Although we the could see the tall smokestack of the school from the east windows of 60th Street School.
Baseball season finished for the summer with a big picnic at Oppenheim Park, just outside Niagara Falls, beyond the airport.
One thing that the world has really made progress on is air safety. Plane crashes used to be in the news all the time. In the summer of 1970 a plane had to do a landing over at Toronto Airport, but the plane had struck the runway. It came straight down into a field, killing everyone on board. Pieces of bone were being found for a long time.
Fifth grade began in September 1970, with a teachers' strike. Some of the teachers of our school were walking a picket line outside the school. My class was in the same second-floor classroom that third grade had been in, when I had first landed in the U.S. and started at this school.
During this school year, a favorite activity would be drawing designs of the rockets that we might someday build. My father wanted me to start learning a foreign language and would take me to weekly French classes that were then being offered at what was then the high school downtown.
I would first begin to be interested in my English heritage. I had a world atlas with a map of Britain. My father would pick out a town in England, give me the map and I would see if I could find it. I was interested in the maps of the rest of the world as well.
The crime show taking place in England's countryside, the Avengers, was popular at this time and I first went to Fort Niagara, which had been held by British forces in the colonial era. Our social studies at school for this year focused on early American history, including Britain's involvement in it.
I also began learning about what had actually happened in the Second World War, which was on television in movies constantly. Some movies about the war which had ended fifteen years before I was born were The Longest Day, The Dirty Dozen, Anzio, Operation Crossbow and, The Battle Of The Bulge. There was The Bridge Over The River Kwai, which was about the Pacific Theater of the war.
My father had been through the war on an RAF Sterling bomber plane. He was actually assigned to fly with a crew of New Zealanders instead of fellow Britons. There were any number of books about the war in our home. In school, I took out the How And Why Wonder Book Of World War One, which was yet another world war before that one. Boys often played guns or with toy soldiers.
My fitness was poor. In gym class tests, I was unable to do one push-up properly.
Still, there was a Neisner's Store in the Pine Plaza that served delicious chocolate milkshakes and I got one whenever we went there. I watched the large Chevrolet building being constructed in the nearby field.
I had my first experience with death when our Irish setter, Rusty, was killed by a car on the nearby highway. The police called us on New Years Day, 1971, to tell us that both Rusty and another dog had been killed and I went with my father to pick up his collar.
On television, there was The Partridge Family, Hawaii Five-0 and, Mary Tyler Moore. There was Redd Foxx, starring in a serial as Fred Sanford. There was the comedian Flip Wilson and a new serial that was supposed to be scary called The Addams Family.
There was a very interesting show every weekend about wild animals, Wild Kingdom, sponsored by the insurance company, Mutual of Omaha. There were horror movies on Friday night that many kids stayed up to watch and the surreal serial, The Twilight Zone. The most memorable movie, other than the war movies, was Airport.
And, of course, there was music. I was given a record player for Christmas 1970 that made it much easier to listen to music than with just a radio.
There was "Carolina In My Mind" by James Taylor
"Let's Work Together" by Canned Heat
"Jingle Jangle" by The Archies.
The Osmonds had "Sweet And Innocent" and "One Bad Apple".
The Beatles did "Isn't It A Pity" and "My Sweet Lord".
Joan Baez sang a song about the U.S. Civil War, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".
Sugarloaf had "Green-Eyed Lady".
There was "Montego Bay" by Bobby Bloom
Melanie with "Brand New Key"
"Cracklin' Rosie" by Neil Diamond
"Spirit In The Sky" by Norman Greenbaum
"Joy To The World" by Three Dog Night
"Our House" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and, Young
"Fresh As A Daisy" by Emmett Rhodes
"Sweet Mary" by Wadsworth Mansion
"Westbound Number Nine" by Flaming Ember.
The first record that I bought was "Tears Of A Clown" by Smokey Robinson.
The possibility arose that we would move to Williamsville, a suburb of Buffalo. We went to look at a house there that was offered to us but it was an old two-story house and we liked our own home better. But the trip was significant because I heard two new songs on the radio on the drive back home; "Lonely Days" by The Bee Gees and "Candles In The Rain" by Melanie.
For some reason, there were several songs about rain around this time. There was "Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again" by the Fortunes, "Rainy Days And Mondays" by the Carpenters and "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" by B.J. Thomas.
Before we knew it, Play Day was here again and then school was finished for the summer.
The summer of 1971 was another idyllic summer of riding my bike, swimming, roaming around the nearby field and sometimes building a fort. The construction of the Chevrolet dealership in part of the field had left some new hills of excavated dirt for kids to play on.
At the pond in the field, it was fun to throw bottles or cans into the pond and then sink them by throwing rocks at them. Around this time, aluminum soda cans were introduced. They were easy to sink, I sunk one and then when the pond later dried up in the heat of summer, I noticed the can and saw that my rock had gone right in one side of the can and out the other side.
Some kids down on Stephenson Avenue, just across The Tracks, had built a really impressive tree house, maybe the best one I have ever seen. They had even dug holes around the tree as traps for any unauthorized person who might try to access the treehouse, as if it were a medieval castle or Fort Niagara.
I had my first real encounter with crime when my bike was stolen from beside our house. But I was given a new one to replace it, this time a gold-colored ten speed.
Sometimes we would go bowling at a local bowling alley, but I was not a regular bowler like some kids and I never had my own bowling ball or bowling shoes.
The falls were still of interest to us, as well as the museums around the falls. There were many museums, particularly on the Canadian side of the falls. Tussauds was the best known but it was only the beginning. There was the Movieland Museum on Clifton Hill, as well as the House of Frankenstein with all kinds of features about the creations of Boris Karloff.
I ran into a new scientific interest in the summer of 1971 between fifth and sixth grades. I was given a book The How And Why Wonder Book Of Atomic Energy. I gained an understanding of how atoms are structured as well as how nuclear reactors and bombs worked.
A new soap simply called Lava was introduced. It was supposedly based on lava from a volcano and was more effective than ordinary soap. I was given a bar of it.
There was some tourists from Pennsylvania staying at the motel across the street. I and the boy whose parents operated the motel guided them all around the falls area and the Welland Canal.
Of course, there was too much junk food during this summer. Sometimes we would ride our bikes to Kentucky Fried Chicken or Burger King. There was delicious Shasta brand root beer and Faygo introduced a berry-flavored drink called Redpop. Two rival cereals appeared on store shelves, Frankenberry and Count Chocula, but it turns out that they were both actually manufactured by the same company.
One strange thing happened around this time. I and two other boys rode our bikes to the grounds at 60th Street School, which was out for the summer. Suddenly, three teenagers with dazed looks walked over to the school grounds. They walked right past us and did not seem to even notice us. One of them fell down to the ground and started pounding on the ground with his fists, as if he was in the middle of a terrible nightmare. One of the others watched him with a vacant expression on his face while the other one simply stared into space.
I suppose that they must have been using drugs.
On television, a show called Family Affair always seemed to be on. It was about a family in a New York City apartment with a butler called Mr. French. There was Mission Impossible, Room 222 and, The Partridge Family. There was the detective and law shows Cannon, Ironside and, of course, The Andy Griffith Show. The thing that I remember best about television that summer was the Batman movie where the bad guys; The Riddler, The Joker, The Penguin and, Catwoman get together and obtain a submarine.
I just want to state one thing about children being celebrities. A child is not supposed to be a celebrity, a child is supposed to be a child. Nothing can replace an idyllic childhood with ample time spent wandering around empty fields, throwing stones at bottles in ponds, riding bikes and, building treehouses. This is what childhood should be, being a celebrity can come later.
But the most important thing in the summer of 1971 was probably music. Possibly the most memorable song of the summer was "Beginnings" by Chicago. Or maybe "Maggie May" by Rod Stewart.
"It Don't Come Easy" by Ringo Starr, a former Beatle, dominated the airwaves.
Possibly the song that I have listened to the most in my life was "Let Your Love Go" by Bread.
Simon and Garfunkel had a major hit with "Mother And Child Reunion". The song was supposedly based on a dinner of chicken and eggs that one of them was having. Since chicken lay eggs, it was a mother and child reunion.
A band called Yes appeared with "All Good People" one of my favorite songs would be another hit of theirs, "Starship Trooper".
I first heard of another singer named Carly Simon with "The Way I've Always Heard it Should Be".
Some songs of summer 1971 were easier listening like "Peace Train" by Cat Stevens
"Precious And Few" by Climax
"How Do You Mend A Broken Heart" by the Bee Gees
"Me And You And A Dog Named Boo" by Lobo
"Ain't No Sunshine" by Bill Withers.
There was a song that I really liked, "Timothy", by The Buoys. I did not pay much attention to the lyrics, something about a mine that had caved in and a lost miner named Timothy. It turns out that the song was about cannibalism. Three miners had survived the cave-in, but when the rescuers arrived, there was only two. The two surviving miners had cannibalized Timothy to stay alive.
There was a real rocking song which I remember from that summer. "One Fine Morning" was by a band called Lighthouse.
Then there was the Grass Roots, which as I have stated previously was one of the most underrated bands ever. They had two magnificent songs with "Temptation Eyes" and "Sooner Or Later". I felt as if I could listen to these songs forever and never get tired of them.
Just before school started back for sixth grade, there were three more memorable songs; "Funky Nassau" by The Beginning Of The End
"Smiling Faces Sometimes" by The Undisputed Truth
And a really big hit, "Signs" by The Five Man Electrical Band out of Ottawa.
What a summer this had been for music.
Sixth grade was a little bit different from the previous grades. There was more camaraderie between the students. Sixth grade was the final year of elementary school. The following year, we would be going on to Junior High School. At least in terms of elementary school, we had made it to the top together.
Almost as soon as sixth grade began, I plunged into a marvellous new interest. In social studies, we began studying the ancient history of the Middle East. I thought the pyramids were awesome but I also enthusiastically studied the Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Phoenicians and, Sumerians.
I dug out that book on ancient history that had been bought for me at Steinbergs, on the Canadian side, several years before and it now became my most important possession.
I wondered what it might be like to be an archeologist some day. Later, I took a book out of the school library with European archeology also included such as the Minoans and the Etruscans.
An interest in ancient history provided another expansion of perspective. In third grade, I struggled to grasp the astronomical distances that I read about. Distances to planets were measured in millions of miles to the nearer planets and hundreds of millions of miles to the outer planets. Later, looking down from the observation towers on the Canadian side of the falls gave me a look at big picture thinking because the entire city could be seen at the same time. Now, looking back several thousand years gave me the same expansion of perspective in terms of time.
At home, I tried building a fort underground. I covered it over with dirt so that only a hole in the ground could be seen. Everything went fine until a heavy rainstorm came along and filled it with water.
Near the beginning of each school year, we were timed in running the fifty-yard dash during gym class. I was not proficient in athletics, but I was timed at 8.7 seconds. In fifth grade, the year before, I did 10.2 seconds. 8.7 seconds still was not very good, but this gave me a sense that improvement was definitely possible.
In the news at this time was the prison riot at Attica. I had never been there but it was not that far away from us. This was the main story on the news night after night. Prisoners had taken over part of the prison, demanding better treatment. Eventually, the prison was retaken. I now certainly agree that the prisoners should have been treated better. But I also understand that if they would have given into their demands there would soon be an uprising in every prison in the country.
This autumn, I took an interest in football. In one of the first games of the season, our local Buffalo Bills defeated the Detroit Lions. I decided that my favorite team was the Kansas City Chiefs, but I liked the shiny helmets of the Denver Broncos. These were the days when the Colts were in Baltimore, the Cardinals were in St. Louis and, the Rams were in Los Angeles. There were no professional teams from Tennessee, Arizona, Seattle, the Carolinas, Jacksonville or, Tampa Bay. The team from Houston was called the Oilers.
Despite the ongoing protests against the war in Vietnam, it was in style to wear an army jacket and I managed to get hold of one. I thought that plastic palm trees looked really cool and modern. I talked my parents into getting one to put in our hallway.
I went through an interest in ships and watched construction projects that were going on along my walk home from school, the apartment buildings on Girard Avenue across from the school and the houses behind us on 61st Street.
Along came more music. Badfinger had a hit with "Day After Day".
The Stylistics had "What You See Is What You Get".
But my favorite song in the autumn of 1971 was "Two Divided By Love" by The Grass Roots.
We still only had our old black and white television. It could only receive what was known as VHF channels and not UHF. The favorite channel of most kids at school as Channel 29, but that was a UHF channel which we could not get at home.
I really wanted a color TV and I especially wanted to be able to watch Channel 29. This got me interested in how broadcasting and electronics and things like that operated. The number one show of the time was supposed to be All In The Family and another major news event was the chess matches between Fischer and Spassky.
Finally, we got a color television that could get all of the UHF, as well as VHF channels. I was delighted.
There was more music. Not only was there more music, but I was given a round plastic transistor radio. It was a bright red color and looked very space-age. I valued this radio almost as much as our new television.
"Heart Of Gold" was a big hit by Toronto's own Neil Young.
There was, of course, "Bang A Gong" by T-Rex.
Don McLean was on the radio all the time with "American Pie" and "Starry, Starry Night", which was a song about Vincent Van Gogh.
Three Dog Night hit with "Never Been To Spain" and "Old Fashioned Love Song".
There was the instrumental "Joy" by Apollo 100,
"Yo-Yo" by The Osmonds
"Horse With No Name" by America
The unique instrumentals of "Riders On The Storm" by The Doors
"Rocking Robin" by the Jackson 5.
There was an older song called "Itchykoo Park" by The Small Faces, but it was on the radio at this time.
A band called Tony Orlando And Dawn sang "Candida" and "Knock Three Times".
There was a song called "My Baby Loves Loving" by White Plains. I did not have the record but it was on the radio at a certain time every night and I would wait up just to hear it.
During sixth grade, I read more about that great war that had happened before I was born. I actually knew a lot more about what had happened during World War Two than I did about what was happening in the Vietnam War, which was going on at the time. It was a different type of war in which there were no real front lines that we could follow on a map. But there were body counts on television as if it was a sports event.
I had a book about the Battle of the Bulge. I also read for the first time about the Soviet role in the war. The most horrific battle that the world has yet seen is probably Stalingrad. I read the story of a German Stuka dive bomber pilot and the diary of a Polish girl in Warsaw as that city passed from Nazi to Soviet Communist control.
On the news, there was suddenly another war. The war between India and Pakistan in late 1971 seemed to focus on a place called Dacca (or Dhaka). There was video of jets dropping bombs night after night on the news. When it was over, there was a new name of a country that I had never heard of before, Bangladesh.
One evening, two salesmen knocked on our door at home. They were selling Bibles that were really well-made with large print and had extensive photos and artwork included. My parents declined the offer. But after a few minutes, my father decided to find them and he bought one and brought it home.
We were really not religious. However, my father had known a man from our native England who would denounce the idea of religion to anyone who would listen. I think he made my father a little bit uncomfortable and my father reacted by going in the opposite direction and buying the Bible.
I had some skepticism about God but I was interested in ancient history. There was a photo of a stone wall in the Middle East and I built such a wall along the end of our yard, where there was no fence at the time. At the time, I did not really give God a lot of thought myself but picked up the ideas that were around me.
I had done well in those standardized tests that students took every year and I was informed that I could study a language next year in Junior High School. My father chose French for me. We were studying the eastern hemisphere in social studies that year, starting with ancient times, and I also developed a fascination with anything Dutch.
1972 was an election year in the U.S. and the primaries got underway in the spring. Ultimately, Richard Nixon would win re-election. This was also the year that he really opened relations with China and Russia by visiting both.
Sometimes we see events but have no idea how important they are going to be. On the news I watched Richard Nixon's Spring 1972 visit to China. He met with Chairman Mao in the Great Hall of the People. Up to that point America and China didn't even have diplomatic relations. This visit changed the world and today "Made in China" is to be seen everywhere.
In school, we had our own election for class president. There were two boys and one girl running for president. Women's Liberation (usually referred to simply as Women's Lib) was an issue at the time. Indeed the Women's Lib anthem "I Am Woman" was popular. There was talk in school that all of the girls would vote for the girl candidate in the name of Women's Lib. Whether or not that occurred, she won the election.
One evening in May, 1972, it was warm and we were out in the back yard. I looked up and saw a puzzling orange glow in my bedroom window. There was still the transparent plastic sheet that my father had installed over the window to conserve heat in the winter. There was also the smell of smoke. Our house was burning.
My father rushed to get the garden hose to try to put out the fire. But the flow of water had not yet been turned on in the basement. He sent me to a neighbor to call the fire department and then tried to get our new television set out safely. I saw that on the other side of the house, flames were pouring out of the window. It was not long before I could hear the sirens of the fire trucks. A crowd gathered around outside.
The fire did not take long to put out. The smoke did more damage than the fire actually did. I slept at a nearby friend's house. Some neighbors donated clothing to us but I had lost the beloved blue plastic motorcycle and the policeman's hat that I had brought over from England.
I did not miss any school due to the fire. It was near the end of the school year. One day, we were given a tour of the Public Safety Building, the police station. On another day, the class went for a long walk to LaSalle Junior High School, where we would be going in September. Our field trip was to the Buffalo Zoo and, of course, there was our final Play Day.
Around the time that school was letting out of 6th grade to begin the summer of 1972, there was a real rocking song, "Could Have Been A Lady" by a Canadian band named April Wine.
There was also "Immigration Man" by a portion of Crosby, Stills, Nash and, Young. This was one of my favorite songs ever, but I never owned the record.
"Doctor My Eyes" by Jackson Browne
"Me And Julio" by Simon And Garfunkel
"I'm Going To Make You Love Me" by the Supremes and The Temptations
"Last Night I Didn't Get To Sleep At All" by Marilyn McCoo, who had been part of the Fifth Dimension.
6) JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL
The summer of 1972 was the summer before I would be starting 7th grade at LaSalle Junior High School in September. It was a summer filled with the activity of having our house fixed up after the fire. Two contractors, a father and son-in-law, were doing the remodeling.
Not only were we having our house repaired, but significantly improved. The upstairs of our home had never been completed when it was built. We referred to it as the attic and just used it for storage, there was not even a floor in part of it.
This upstairs was to be completed and would be a bedroom for my brother and me. My parents would move into what had been my bedroom. Their bedroom was to become part of the living room so that it extended all the way across the front of our home. It was all to be done with that wood paneling on the walls that was popular during the Seventies.
The rough sub-floor upstairs was pulled up board by board and thrown out to the side of the house. This meant that I had a lot of lumber to mess around with. In addition, there was plentiful paneling scraps from which I would build such things as shelves. The summer was filled with the buzz of saws and the scent of lumber and I would sometimes go for a ride to the nearby Grossman's to get more building supplies.
We got yet another color TV, including UHF channels, to go upstairs when it was finished. At this time before the advent of cable TV, there were dials to move the television antenna on the roof, which had a motor in it. When changing channels, the dial would be positioned to point the antenna in the direction of the broadcast antenna of the TV station in an effort to get the clearest possible picture reception.
When I was a child television operated by an antenna and could be moved around, while telephone operated by a wire and was in a fixed location. Even then I got the idea that it should be the other way around, and it is today.
Television became as important this summer, as music had been previously. There was Sci-Fi Theater on every week with a science fiction movie. The first one I watched was "Them". This was actually the original science fiction movie about ants that grow into giants due to exposure to radiation from the test of the first nuclear bomb in New Mexico and threaten Los Angeles.
I was also introduced to Godzilla and the next week's movie was "Son of Godzilla", about a Pacific island with giant insects to rival Godzilla and son. Then there was another movie, "The X From Outer Space".
The Son of Godzilla gave me an interest in insects and I would take the opportunity to observe spiders, praying mantises, dragonflies and, ants in the field next to our home.
Every day, I would watch reruns of Ultraman. This was about a good monster that would help the Science Patrol to thwart the attacks of monsters that would appear on a regular basis to terrorize Tokyo. Ultraman was like the Japanese version of Superman.
I first became intrigued by clouds and the nature of the atmosphere. I looked up one day, while riding my bike, and saw that there were the usual fluffy clouds (cumulus), but much higher up, there was a very different, wispy kind of cloud (cirrus).
The big news that summer, aside from the visits of Richard Nixon to China and Russia, was the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. There were two rival cereals, Quisp and Quake. Quisp was by far the most popular of the two and a poll was taken on whether Quake should be discontinued. The response was "yes".
In other news, there was a burglary in June of 1972 at an office building in Washington D.C., in which the burglars were caught. The name of the building was Watergate and that name would soon become very familiar.
But even with color TV that could get more channels, the summer of 1972 was still a summer of music.
There was "School's Out" by Alice Cooper
"Everything I Own" by Bread
"You Wear It Well" by Rod Stewart
"Last Song" by Edward Bear
"Summer Breeze" by Seals and Croft
"Saturday In The Park" by Chicago
"Candy Man" by Sammy Davis Jr.
"Going Down" by The Jeff Beck Group.
The record that I got and played most of all was the instrumental "Outa-Space" by Billy Preston.
LaSalle Junior High School was an older building than 60th Street School. It was constructed of light-colored brick and had been built in the 1930s. Today, what used to be called junior high school is usually called middle school. The school was across the street from the Niagara River. I received a bus pass to ride to and from school but would often walk home.
Three images from Google Street View.
Across the street from the Niagara River, as seen in Google Earth.
There was a different class, with different students for each subject. There was four minutes given to get from one class to the next. The day started with first period and lasted until eighth period. A student would have a class, lunch or, study hall during each period.
Each student was assigned a home room. This is where we would go to have attendance taken and for certain other purposes. Home rooms were assigned in alphabetical order of the student's last name. During home room, students that the office staff wished to see (usually for skipping classes) would have their names called on the loudspeaker system to report to the office.
In home room we were assigned lockers, which were in the hallways, and were given combination locks. My locker combination was 2-15-27, but I had never before used a combination lock and had a little bit of trouble with it. Fortunately, there was not enough lockers for all the students and another student was assigned to share my locker and, until I got used to the combination lock, I would just wait for him to open it between classes.
If I remember correctly, there were six elementary schools in the LaSalle section of Niagara Falls that sent their students on to LaSalle Junior High School. 60th Street School, where I had gone, was one of the six. That meant that five out of six students in the new school would be strangers at first. There were a few that I recognized from baseball a couple of years before or had seen at the bowling alley.
There were two brothers in my home room with very long hair and I waited to see if they would be allowed to start school without getting haircuts first. They were allowed to go to school without haircuts. There was a girl that I thought for sure that Barbie dolls must have been modeled after.
In the cafeteria, a different lunch was served daily and I encountered some foods that I had previously been unfamiliar with, like Spanish Rice. I had never had rice before. The general favorite seemed to be pizza. There were treats like ice cream sandwiches. Milk, either white or chocolate, was sold from machines for five cents. Lunch was fifty cents, but some kids had cards that got them a free lunch.
I had French class during eighth period, the final period of the day. There was electric shop, and I became familiar with the basics of electricity. There was also print shop, although the era of setting movable type seems like ancient history now. Seventh grade science focused on biology. In English class, we spent quite a bit of time on the book Treasure Island.
I did not really adjust to sudden change well and it did take me a while to get used to the new school. I would dislike something new at first, but would gradually build an affection for it. When we first landed here, I did not like the nearby factories. But I got to the point where I would be sad to see one of the factory buildings being torn down.
There was roller skating in the gym held periodically. Music would be playing loudly and the song that seemed to be played the most was the heavy instrumental "Rock And Roll" by Gary Glitter.
If a student had a study hall for the last period of the day, he could leave early rather than staying. Periods were 40 minutes, with four minutes between classes, so that student could leave at 2:16 instead of at 3:00.
The school changed it's system so that homeroom came after first period, instead of first thing in the morning. I got my classes switched around so that I had study hall first period.
I would often get to school at the regular time anyway and go for a morning walk during first period. I would often walk from the Junior High School to the B-Kwik store on Pine Avenue (now Niagara Falls Boulevard) next to Burger King. Walking is when I would really think and it became a lifelong habit.
As always, there was new music.
There was the mellow "From The Beginning" by Emerson, Lake And Palmer
"The Hurt" by Cat Stevens
"Alone Again Naturally" by Gilbert O'Sullivan
"Down By The Lazy River" by The Osmonds
"Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress" by The Hollies.
On television, there was a show called "Run For Your Life". It starred actor Ben Gazzara as Paul Brian, a terminally ill man trying to get the most out of the short time he had left to live. He was trying to "squeeze thirty years of living into one or two", as was stated on the show.
There was also reruns of The Patty Duke Show. Lost In Space was still on television. There was Kung Fu and The Pink Panther. There was another monster in sci fi movies named Gamera.
Most important of all, there was Gilligan's Island. It was a semi-comedy about seven castaways stranded on a Pacific island. I got to really admire the knowledge of the professor and to think that I must learn as much as I possibly can, particularly about science.
The Second World War was always on television. My father had went through the war and would often watch movies and documentaries about it. There was the documentary series "The World At War". There was the comedy Hogan's Heroes. There were always movies like The Devil's Brigade, The Guns Of Navarone and, Where Eagles Dare.
In the news were the final Apollo moon landing in December 1972 and the exit of America from the Vietnam War the following month.
Christmas 1972 was a memorable one. I was given two gifts that would really shape my way of thinking for the future. One was a set of books called the Modern Illustrated Library, which I still have today. There was a book in the set about every major subject, each was a major volume put together by an academic team.
There was Science (which I read the most), History, Geography, Nature, Communication and Language, Art, Philosophy and, Man in Society. I treasured these books and read them incessantly. They shaped my thinking for life. You are reading my blog because of these books.
The other significant gift was a set of record albums. On television there was a set called "20 Monster Hits". There was an addition called "10 More Monster Hits". It was records of Sixties and early Seventies music and there were photos of the 1969 Woodstock concert on the album covers. I was a child when Woodstock took place, the people in the photo are at least a decade older than me.
The music in this set included; "Piece of My Heart" by Janis Joplin
"Sylvia's Mother" by Dr. Hook
"Atlantis" by Donovan
"Indian Reservation" by Paul Revere and The Raiders
"Hey Baby" and "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" by The Buckinghams (which I liked when we lived on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls)
"You've Made Me So Very Happy" by Blood, Sweat And, Tears
"I'd Love To Change The World" by Ten Years After
"The Witch Queen Of New Orleans" by Redbone
"Brandy" by The Looking Glass
"Young Girl" by The Union Gap
"The Horse" by Cliff Nobles
"Everyday People" by Sly And The Family Stone
"Arizona" by Mark Lindsay.
During seventh grade, I gained an interest in meteorology and read all about it just as I had my other interests.
I also read more archeology and got back into reading about astronomy. I made use of all the lumber left over after the house remodeling and built things out of wood.
I tried my own writing, keeping a diary. I took an interest in finance for the first time and was fascinated with carbon paper. In the spring of 1973, I had a really great kite, one day I had it so high that it looked like a dot, until it got tangled in the high-tension power lines along 56th street. I had a sling shot with a brace that goes on the wrist, making it more accurate.
There was still more music.
Danny O'Keefe had "Good Time Charlie's Got The Blues".
Vicki Lawrence sang "The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia".
The Beatles song "Penny Lane" had already been around for a while, but this is the time that I remember it on the radio.
Finally, there was the DeFranco Family with the hit "Heartbeat It's A Love Beat". The DeFranco Family was from nearby Port Colborne, Ontario.
During the summer of 1973, after 7th grade, I did a lot of reading in the book set that I had been given for Christmas. I read, or at least looked through, all of the books. But the one about religion and philosophy, I only spent a little bit of time with.
I particularly read the volume about science. My main interest was astronomy and I was given a new telescope with a tripod, much bigger than the one I had gotten back in third grade. My telescope was a refractor, based on a lens, but for the first time I understood the operation of a reflector telescope, based on a curved mirror. The world's largest telescopes are based on mirrors, rather than lenses, simply because a mirror can be supported from beneath and thus can be made much larger. I also had a polaroid camera that took instant photos.
I rode my bike further than ever before. We would often go over to swim in the river at Chippawa, on the Canadian side. I had an inner tube that I would take out on the river. (In those days, tires had an inflatable tube inside). I really enjoyed jumping off the bridge into the river. It was fun to get a flat stone and see how many times I could make it skip off the water.
This also was a time of a lot of trouble, reports of violence and, drugs. I dug out that old book from the Canadian side, Super Karate Made Easy by Moja Rone, and thought about studying it for fitness and self-defense.
There was always new music.
There was "Stuck In The Middle With You" by Stealer's Wheel
"Crocodile Rock" by Elton John
"Get Down" by Gilbert O' Sullivan
"Delta Dawn" by Helen Reddy
"Brother Louie" by Stories
"Smoke On The Water" by Deep Purple
"Playground In My Mind" by Clint Holmes
"The Morning After" by Maureen McGovern.
In eighth grade, beginning in September of 1973, we had a lot of discussion of current events in social studies class. During that time, current events in America can be pretty much summed up in one word: Watergate. Some Republicans In Washington suspected that their rivals, the Democrats, were getting funding from Communist Cuba.
The June 1972 burglary of the Watergate Building was an attempt to find evidence of this. The burglars were caught because the building had doors which would open in one direction but would be locked from the other direction. They put tape over the door latches, but a security guard noticed the tape and called police.
The Republican president, Richard Nixon, apparently did not know about or authorize the burglary. But he was involved in attempts to cover it up. It would lead to his resignation from office. This was the only time anything like this has happened in American history.
Watergate was not the only news around this time. America had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War in the autumn of 1973. A group of Arab countries responded by cutting off all oil supplies to the U.S. The government adjusted the time by one hour in an attempt to conserve energy. Until the crisis was resolved, we were going to school in the morning darkness.
Eighth grade science was about earth science and space and this became my favorite class. I did a project on the operation of a volcano to enter in the science fair. Before the end of the school year, we would go on a field trip to the Ontario Science Center in Toronto on chartered buses.
As always, I did a lot of reading on my own outside of school. I looked at school not as a full education but as merely an introduction to the world. I often did my real learning outside of school because I could follow my own interests wherever they led. Maybe 20% of what I know I learned in school.
There is an advantage to being self-educated. A formal education is a wonderful thing but you learn to think like everybody else. This is fine, as far as knowledge goes, but when it comes to developing new ideas thinking like everybody else is a disadvantage. Someone who is self-educated is more likely to be able to take a leap "outside the box" and notice something that no one else did.
In eighth grade I was really interested in science, particularly space. I memorized most of the moons around the planets in the Solar System. I first grasped what Relativity was about. And I was given a new telescope and a revolving star chart at Christmas.
Aside from space, I read about aircraft and this was when I first understood how an airfoil shape to the wing is what actually makes a plane fly. The most memorable book that I read was "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells. I had watched the movie back in third grade.
One possession that I was really delighted with was a flair pen that I had gotten when they first entered the market. Ultimately, I lost that one but got another.
In the Seventies, when a guy and a girl were dating they would join their names with a plus sign "+". Written all over the place, from book covers to walls, would be "Dave + Debbie" or something like that. Apparently, the plus sign has long since fallen out of style.
There was a flood of new music during eighth grade and I got a tape recorder so that I could actually record songs off the radio. The quality of the sound was not quite as good as actually having the record, but it was a lot easier.
There was "Sweet Gypsy Rose" by Tony Orlando And Dawn
"Jet" by Paul McCartney
"Time In A Bottle" by Jim Croce
"Benny And The Jets" by Elton John
"Seasons In The Sun" by Terry Jacks.
Cher sang "Dark Lady" and "Half Breed".
There was "Hello, It's Me" by Todd Rundgren
"The Joker" by the Steve Miller Band
The heavy rock instrumental "Frankenstein" by The Edgar Winter Group
Harry Chapin with "W.O.L.D."
"Smoking In The Boys Room" by Brownsville Station.
The Grass Roots appeared again with "Wait A Million Years"
I recorded the older song "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" by Neil Sedaka.
The DeFranco Family hit again with "Abra Ca Dabra".
I would sometimes go to Buffalo for the swimming that was offered at the athletic center of Canisius College, near where my father worked and my brother attended St. Mary's School For The deaf. I attended classes at that school to learn the sign language to communicate with my brother. Sometimes, we would go shopping at Towers and Zellers on the Canadian side. (Towers was later taken over by Zellers).
In the news was the death of a hockey player from the local professional team, the Buffalo Sabres. His name was Tim Horton. He had been driving from Toronto back to Buffalo and had been drinking. Driving at high speed his car ran off the QEW in St. Catharines and overturned. He was a partner in donut shops but had no idea how his name would someday be all over on donut shops.
I got a renewed sense of being cool. I got my parents to buy me a leather jacket. I thought that the black light posters that were popular at the time were really cool. I also, unfortunately, began smoking because it appeared to be cool.
I was taken to a church service at the church behind City Hall in Niagara Falls. Both the inside and the outside of the church looked like something straight out of old England. I was not yet very religious but it made me less skeptical toward religion. I suppose that with all of the science reading I had been doing, I was picking up the scientific attitude of being skeptical of religion.
Near the end of the school year, there was a religious group passing out copies of the New Testament in the cafeteria, I took one and it would later be the first Bible that I would really study. I still have it today.
There was a rock concert in Jayne Park on Cayuga Island. A lot of people were openly smoking marijuana. I think that in the Seventies, there was the possibility that marijuana would soon be legalized. This resulted in authorities often adapting a "look the other way" attitude toward it's use.
In the spring of 1974, there was a violent shoot-out on the news from Los Angeles. The police had located a house where a group called The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) was based. They had earlier kidnapped the daughter of a newspaper baron, Patty Hearst. She later joined her captors.
Police surrounded the house and a gun battle ensued. Supposedly the tear gas cannisters that police use get hot and can start a fire if they land on something flammable. That is what we were told happened and shooting continued from inside even while the house went up in flames, but ceased as the walls collapsed. Patty Hearst was not among the dead found inside.
In May of 1974, we went to the courthouse in Buffalo to be sworn in as United States citizens by a judge now known for his liberal views, John Curtin. We spent the rest of the afternoon at the Buffalo Zoo.
I still treasure the copy of the U.S Constitution that I was given upon gaining citizenship. This is what America really is, it is the Constitution. I would study it in great detail.
There was still more music. Around this time, I began to listed to FM radio, particularly 97 Mhz station WGRQ from Buffalo. Previously, I had listened only to AM.
A band called Fancy did a remake of an old song called "Wild Thing".
Chicago had "I've Been Searchin' So Long".
There was "Billy, Don't Be A Hero" by Bo Donaldson And The Heywoods
"48 Crash" by Suzi Quatro, of which I had no idea of the meaning of the song.
7) HIGH SCHOOL
The big news in the summer of 1974 was the utter shock of Richard Nixon's resignation over the Watergate scandal. I watched him address the nation on television, not knowing what he was going to say. The resignation was surprising and shocking. Nothing like this had ever happened before.
If there was a good thing about it, this presidential resignation demonstrated democracy in action. The president in a democracy must live by the same laws as everyone else.
Vice President Spiro Agnew had resigned some time previously due to a tax evasion scandal. He had been replaced by Gerald Ford, from Michigan, who was then sworn in as president.
I built, with some help, a really nice treehouse in the willow tree in our backyard. We also often went swimming at King's Bridge Park in Chippawa. I became really interested in what went on underwater and about dolphins in particular. Flipper, from years before, had been one of my favorite shows on television.
I read about the other side of the Second World War, the Pacific Theater of Operations. I doubt that kamikazes really did that much to stem the tide of the war, but it made for a horrific story.
I read one of the most interesting articles that I have ever read. The May 1974 issue of National Geographic magazine featured a story about our growing knowledge of the universe and how unlike anything in our earthly experience it was. The article also featured stories of the astronomers and theorists who have contributed the most to our understanding of the cosmos. It gave me a lot to think about in terms of the universe and started me reading National Geographic.
I unfortunately continued to smoke cigarettes.
There was plenty of good music in the summer of 1974. There was "Radar Love" by the Dutch band Golden Earring.
"Jimmy Loves Mary Anne" was done by The Looking Glass, although I think this song was actually from a couple of years earlier.
There was "Oh Very Young" by Cat Stevens
"I'll Have To Say I Love You In A Song" by Jim Croce
"Waterloo" by Sweden's Abba
"Rikki, Don't Lose That Number" by Steely Dan
"Be Thankful For What You've Got" by William DeVaughn
"Nothing From Nothing" by Billy Preston
"Rock And Roll Heaven" by The Righteous Brothers
"Sundown" by Gordon Lightfoot, who was from north of Toronto
The instrumental "Machine Gun" by The Commodores
"Dancing In The Moonlight" by King Harvest and
"Hang On In There Baby" by Johnny Bristol.
For ninth grade, in September 1974, I moved on to LaSalle High School. It was a more modern building, built about the same time as 60th Street School had been, I believe in 1956. It was a larger school than the more compact LaSalle Junior High School and we were given six minutes between classes, instead of four. The school had an open courtyard within it and there were more than two thousand students altogether.
The LaSalle school district was actually split according to which school students would go for ninth grade. Going by where I lived, I usually would have went to LaSalle Junior for ninth grade and then go to LaSalle Senior in tenth grade. But I was studying French and ninth grade French was only offered at the senior high school.
Students could, at that time, leave the school for lunch if they wished. There was a fast food restaurant, Henry's, next to the school and there was a pathway across the large field between the school and Burger King. The Red Barn and McDonalds were within easy walking distance of the school.
There used to be a lot of drive-in theaters around. They are relics now, but there was one right across the street from the high school, the Starlite.
In ninth grade, my main interests in school were divided between physics class and social studies. We were basically studying Asia and Africa that year and I learned a lot about the parts of the world that, until that time, I didn't know that much about. I knew a lot more about the Middle East in ancient times than I knew about what was happening there at present. I had always had an interest in other countries, but this class helped to expand that interest to the entire world.
From China came the news that the army of Terra Cotta Warriors had been discovered, at Xian. This was from the time of the first emperor of China.
In physical science, I first grasped why there were different elements and how molecular structures operated. I would read the science class textbook outside of what we were doing in school.
Many guys and girls joined fraternities and sororities (meaning brotherhoods and sisterhoods) and walked around in special jackets. I never joined a fraternity. I did not play any sports in school but was learning karate outside of school.
There was a boy who announced one day while riding home on the bus that someday he was going to have a daughter named Mercedes and that she was going to be an actress. Not long afterward, he moved away and I have never seen him since. But sure enough, today there is an actress named Mercedes Kastner.
One of the highlights of the school year was a field trip to the Ontario Science Center in Toronto, not long before the end of the school year. From the bus windows we could see the CN Tower (Canadian National) under construction. When completed, it was to be the tallest building in the world. Three images from Google Street View and Earth.
Outside of my classes in school, I developed a fascination with radio and electronic communications. I read all the books that I could get hold of on the subject and spent quite a bit of time looking through Radio Shack catalogs. I had a empty chocolates box that I used to store any electronic parts that I could find. I got a pair of walkie-talkies. This was around the time that digital clocks first arrived on the market.
I was also interested in wild animals and I began following football again. There were always Second World War movies on such as Kelly's Heroes and The Great Escape. There was a controversy as to whether Bigfoot (the Sasquatch) was real and we went to see a movie about it. Years later, it would turn out to be a fake.
As always, there was more great music.
The Rolling Stones did "It's Only Rock And Roll" and "Heartbreaker".
Stevie Wonder sang "You Haven't Done Nothing" in a song aimed at departed president Richard Nixon.
There was a band named for a strict gym teacher, Lynyrd Skynyrd, which did "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Free Bird".
Led Zeppelin had their biggest hit ever with "Stairway To Heaven".
There was a song about all the bands called "Life Is A Rock" by Reunion.
"Stairway To Heaven" and "Free Bird" were extremely popular songs. But, I preferred "Beach Baby" by the one-hit-wonder band First Class.
A band called KISS first became popular. There were rumors that it stood for "Kids In Satan's Service".
There was "Angie Baby" by Helen Reddy
"My Eyes Adored You" by Frankie Valli
"Bungle In The Jungle" by Jethro Tull
"Lady Marmalade" by Patti LaBelle.
A band called Sugarloaf, which had done "Green-Eyed Lady" several years before, now had "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You".
Bachman Turner Overdrive sang "Roll On Down The Highway".
Toward the end of the school year, there was "Shining Star" by Earth, Wind And, Fire
"Sister Golden Hair" by America
"He Don't Love You" by Tony, Orlando and, Dawn.
During the summer of 1975, after ninth grade, I continued reading about radio electronics. I gained an understanding of the many different radio frequency bands that were in use. I had a book about Marconi and how the first successful radio transmissions were accomplished. I found that removing the whip antenna from a walkie-talkie and replacing it with a wire half the length of the wavelength used gave the walkie-talkie greater range.
On shortwave radio at the time, which could be received from very far away because the waves reflected off the ionosphere, jammers could be heard. It was radio noise generated, at particular frequencies, by Communist governments who didn't want their people listening to foreign radio broadcasts.
I read the book that was, at the time, a teenage favorite, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.
I sometimes rode my bike as far as a really nice neighborhood around 97th Street, at the eastern extent of Niagara Falls, and back. I did not know it but a few years later, this neighborhood would be world famous, it would be known as the Love Canal. Never would a place be so misnamed.
We often went swimming in the summer at King's Bridge Park in Chippawa. One day, we took a tour of the Oak Hall mansion that is now the headquarters of the Niagara Parks Commission on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. We got a smaller dog, a sheltie, which my parents named Cindy, supposedly after Cinderford, back in England.
In the news, there were two assassination attempts on our new president Ford in the summer of 1975. Both would-be assassins were women, one a former member of Charles Manson's group, Lynnette Fromme.
Just after school had let out for summer, in June, Vietnam was suddenly back in the news. The Communists had waited for a while after the peace treaty of 1973. They saw America distracted by Watergate. They decided to launch an offensive to finally take control of South Vietnam, gambling that America wouldn't bother to get re-involved there again.
The Communists pressed forward, the South Vietnamese defense withdrew in chaos and disarray. Every evening on the news, there were roads flooded with South Vietnamese refugees trying to flee southward. Soon, Communist forces reached the outskirts of Saigon, which was the capital city of South Vietnam.
I watched on television as U.S. military helicopters continuously landed on the roof of the U.S. Embassy, ferrying people away. Next, the leader of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, was on television announcing his abdication.
Then, it was all over. All the effort that America had put into securing South Vietnam was apparently for nothing, at least according to some commentators on television.
There was, of course, music.
There was "Rocky" by Austin Roberts
"Fame" by David Bowie
"Don't Pull Your Love" by Hamilton, Joe frank and, Reynolds
"Bad Time" By Grand Funk.
A German band called Kraftwerk did "Autobahn".
Eight track tapes were popular for music at the time. As the name implies a stereo effect was achieved by having eight separate recordings on the tape, played at the same time, with eight different microphones having recorded the music from eight different positions.
During tenth grade, I continued my interest in radio and electronics. CB (Citizen's Band) radio, often used by truckers, was popular at this time, it was featured in the song "Convoy" by C.W. McCall.
Canada officially converted into measurement using the Metric System and I learned it myself. I studied geometry in school and was particularly interested in how it related to maps. For Christmas, I was given a really nice Rand McNally World Atlas and spent quite a bit of time studying maps and descriptions of countries around the world. The collection of facts in an almanac also intrigued me.
It was around this time that electronic calculators became widespread and messing around with numbers became like a hobby. I tried writing on my own, outside of school, by keeping a diary.
Another valued possession was a physics book that I bought. I found electrolysis to be very interesting and did some experiments on my own with it. By running an electric current through salted water, the water molecules could be broken down into their component hydrogen and oxygen.
On television were reruns of Star Trek and I got so that there was not an episode that I had not seen. There was the police show S.W.A.T. (Special Weapons And Tactics) about the special tactics team and the theme song from this show became a hit song in itself. There was also Charlie's Angels and Starsky And Hutch. Dragnet was originally a police serial show but there was a Dragnet movie as well that was on television.
There was news of a shipwreck on the Great Lakes. A ship carrying iron ore had sunk in Lake Superior. All of the crew had been lost. The name of the ship was the Edmund Fitzgerald and the Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot memorialized it with a song.
There was always more music.
When I was in tenth grade, starting in the autumn of 1975, there was "Lying Eyes" by The Eagles
"Who Loves You?" by The Four Seasons
"My Little Town" by Simon And Garfunkel.
Later in the school year, there was "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen
"Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover" by Paul Simon
"Slow Ride" by Foghat
"Fly, Robin, Fly" by Silver Convention
"SOS" by Abba.
Toward the end of the school year there was "Grow Some Funk Of Your Own" by Elton John.
One of my favorite songs ever was an older song that was often on the radio, "Almost Cut My Hair" by Crosby, Stills, Nash And, Young.
There was another older song, "I Got A Line On You" by Spirit, but it was around this time that I listened to it.
As summer 1976 approached, I began thinking about something that I had given too little thought to up to this point. That was about physical fitness. First of all, I took the pack of cigarettes that I had and when I had finished that pack, I never bought any more.
Muhammad Ali was very popular around this time and I happened to watch his match with Jimmy Young in the spring of 1976. I was to become a fan of Ali, but it is a shame that I watched this match because it was probably the worst fight of his career. Even though he won the 15-round decision. Of all the athletes of my time Muhammad Ali was the most memorable. The trouble with having been a fan of Muhammad Ali is that everybody else is boring afterward. I admired how he stood up for being black, even though it cost him, instead of submitting to the establishment.
I was studying karate, but going rather slow due to my lack of fitness. I began to investigate the training that boxers like Ali did. I put quite a bit of effort into learning more about exercise and physical fitness in general.
The summer of 1976 was not only America's 200th Birthday, it was a life-changing summer for me. I remembered in elementary school gym class, how when being tested for physical fitness I had not been able to do even one pushup correctly. One June day, I got down on our front porch and somehow managed to do five pushups, although probably not in the best of form. Life would never be the same again.
I plunged into working out with as much enthusiasm as I have ever went into anything in my life. I had a photo taken of me when I was about age 14 and looked chubby and awful. Things were definitely going to change, and to change this summer.
I happened to get hold of a book by a former Canadian Air Force officer who had been a fitness trainer. I learned every thing I could about physical fitness. The first thing to be understood is that there are four basic components to fitness; strength, stamina, endurance and, flexibility. Stamina means cardiovascular endurance and there is also the actual endurance of the muscles themselves. The trainee has to decide exactly what he wants to be fit for and what balance of these four should be sought.
I continued building the number of pushups that I could do. I did chinups on a branch of our willow tree. I was in disbelief at how much better I felt, except when I woke up really sore from a workout the day before.
Some of us would get together and spar with karate or boxing. I made a punching bag out of an old sack filled with dirt and newspapers. Around this time, I also underwent a spurt of growth which helped eliminate the moderate amount of fat that I had been carrying.
I followed Muhammad Ali and other boxers and got the book The Heavyweight Champions by Stanley Weston, about the champions of the past. I would read about John L. Sullivan, James J. Jeffries, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Joe Louis and, Floyd Patterson and how they had trained.
Exercise was a passionate new interest. But I did manage to do some other things during this summer. The fireworks at America's bicentennial were marvelous. I went to a local amusement park, Fantasy Island, for the first time. And I managed to get my first date, we rode our bikes to watch the movie, The Exorcist.
Still, there was music. Gordon Lightfoot did "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald", about the ship that had sunk in Lake Superior.
There was a band called Thin Lizzie with "The Boys Are Back in Town" and another song, "Jailbreak".
The Steve Miller Band did "Take The Money And Run".
The Captain And Tennille remade an old song with "Shop Around" and also did "Love Will Keep Us Together".
When eleventh grade began in September 1976, my interests were no longer primarily academic. Physical fitness was now top priority, it was something that I had ignored for too long and was now going to make up for lost time. I studied in detail the operation of all of the muscle groups of the body; the biceps, the triceps, the deltoids, the pectorals, the abdominals, the laterals and, the quadriceps.
I just wanted to keep improving. On that June day when I began exercising, I could only do five pushups. By the time school started back, I could do about 25 and by about the middle of eleventh grade, I first did 50. From that point on, I considered a successful first set of pushups to be a minimum of 50.
I was always looking at the training routines of others to see what I could learn and trying to improve my own program. For Christmas 1976, I was bought an exercise device based on a spring inside a metal tube, known as a Bullworker. They used to be popular, in quite a few countries, during the Seventies.
Yogurt was becoming popular also around this time and peach yogurt became a lunch staple.
Another thing that I was making progress against is the stuttering that I used to suffer from. I had taken speech therapy in elementary school but it did not cure it. I did not suffer from stuttering as severely as some people do, it was only words beginning with a few certain letters that I had trouble with. But it was a nuisance.
In gaining aerobic fitness by exercising, I had more control over the coordination between my breathing and speech. I was still technically a stutterer, but I found that it could now be "overpowered".
I would like to take a minute to discuss stuttering. About one out of every hundred people suffer from it. More males than females stutter, but some of the worst stutterers are female.
Suppose that there is a fearsome tiger menacing your path in life everywhere you go. Now suppose you poke the tiger with a stick one day and find out that it is actually only made of paper. That is what stuttering is like, it is very much like a paper tiger.
Stuttering can most definitely be overcome. If you stutter, first of all talk more slowly. I notice that most stutterers simply try to talk too fast. Stuttering is actually what you do to try not to stutter. The reason that there is no "cure" for it is that every case is different.
One thing that is very, very important is not to worry too much about what people think of you. If you stutter a little bit, so what no one is perfect. If someone does not want to be your friend because you have a minor flaw like stuttering, then maybe you do not need their friendship anyway. Have this kind of attitude, gain some aerobic fitness and stuttering will dissipate.
One day I got in line at a restaurant. I noticed that the man in front of me stuttered. Then it occurred to me that I had overcome it. I hadn't thought about it in months.
If you know someone who stutters, remember that it is a minor flaw. It is no more serious than a person requiring glasses for their eyes or braces for their teeth. Stuttering is often caused by such issues as poor coordination between breathing and speech and does not necessarily mean that a person is nervous.
I doubt that anyone has ever noticed, but there is still one common word that I never say.
I was supposed to have braces when I was a teenager. But I made it clear that there is no way I am walking around with those things on. So now my lower front teeth are uneven.
Late January 1977 is a time that will not soon be forgotten in western New York State. It was that epochal (It is good to begin using new words occasionally) event known as The Blizzard Of '77. There is heavy snow where we live, but usually it does not last for a long time.
Well, this time it did. It kept on snowing and snowing and snowing, day after day after day. I was not out in it and I spent the few days that we had off from school because of the blizzard doing physical training. We had a Volkswagen Beetle that was not about to get through this snow. President Jimmy Carter declared it a state of emergency, which in the U.S. makes the situation eligible for federal emergency assistance.
What actually happened is that Lake Erie, being shallow, is the only one of the Great Lakes that freezes over, if it's cold enough. This stops Buffalo's lake effect snow because water is no longer evaporating from the lake. Late in 1976 the lake froze over. Then a wider scale storm dropped a lot of snow and it piled up on the frozen lake. Next, high winds from the southwest picked the snow up and deposited it across western New York and southern Ontario. So it wasn't "new" snow that was falling.
Lake Effect snow in Buffalo is when the air gets cold but Lake Erie is still warm, so that water is evaporating from it. The prevailing wind is from the west and it crosses the long length of Lake Erie before reaching Buffalo. The cold air cannot hold all the water that has evaporated so it falls as snow on Buffalo and areas to the south. My father was working in Buffalo while we were still living on the Canadian side but he moved us to Niagara Falls because it gets less snow than Buffalo.
In the spring of 1977, I ordered those Charles Atlas exercises that used to be widespread since the 1930s. The exercises involved no weights. I still do some of those exercises, or a variation thereof, today.
Long hair was still in style in the latter Seventies and I went a year without a haircut, from April 1976 to April 1977. Like many teenagers, I suppose it was a way of asserting independence. I began learning to drive in a Javelin (By American Motors, later bought by the French automaker Renault). But the car had some problems and my father traded it in for the Beetle, which had a standard transmission. I did my first developing of photographs that I had taken, in Print Shop class and went to my first job interview.
I had begun to think that I would like to study agriculture. At the time, I disliked cities at the time and wanted to be around everything green.
The most important new movie of the time was Rocky.
There was a tidal wave of new music this year.
Just after I began eleventh grade in September 1976, there was "Turn The Beat Around" by Vicki Sue Robinson
"Year Of The Cat" by Al Stewart
"Rubberband Man" by The Spinners.
There was the Bay City Rollers with "I Only Want To Be With You" and also "You Made Me Believe In Magic".
Every once in a while, a really landmark song comes along. Around this time there were two. There was "Love Really Hurts Without You" by Billy Ocean and "Already Gone" by The Eagles. Both songs will always remind me of exercise.
Later during the school year, there was "Hello, Old Friend" by Eric Clapton
"Walk This Way" by Aerosmith
"Rich Girl" by Hall And Oates
"The Things We Do For Love" by 10cc
"Young Hearts Run Free" by Candi Station.
There was a band that became popular with the unusual name of Blue Oyster Cult. The band had a symbol that was often seen on T-shirts at school which looked like a combination of a cross and a question mark. I did buy their album "Agents Of Fortune" and silk-screened their symbol onto a T-shirt in Print Shop class. The guitar classic "Don't Fear The Reaper" was everywhere on the radio.
I also often took notice of old songs. I bought the record or tape recorded "One Fine Day" by The Chiffons and "Love Or Let Me Be Lonely" by The Friends Of Distinction.
A new term was being heard to describe the style of some songs. That term was "Disco".
Toward the end of the school year, there was the ultimate in heavy rock instrumentals "Green Grass And High Tides" by The Outlaws
"High School Dance" by The Sylvers
"Jet Airliner" by The Steve Miller Band
"Hotel California" by The Eagles. I still have no idea what the song means.
During the summer of 1977, the big news in music was the death of Elvis Presley. I was never really into his music because it was before my time. If I had a favorite Elvis song, it would be "Marie's The Name".
I was struggling with driving. In all honesty, I found cars to be alienating. They were very liberating to a teenager as far as getting around and particularly for dating. But it made it so that a guy was expected to have a car. Not having a car was not really much of an option. But then when one had a car, it meant working a considerable amount of hours just to pay for the car, the required insurance and, fuel. This often meant that school work suffered.
My parents were from overseas and it did not seem to really register with them that a car was a necessity to a teenager. Back in England, there were extensive bus routes going everywhere all day so that having a car was a luxury, rather than a necessity. I had learned to drive the Javelin, with an automatic transmission, but then they had traded it in for one with a standard transmission.
Cars aside, during the summer I went a number of times with my parents over to the park by the river at Chippawa. I would go for long walks from there to the area of the falls. I sometimes looked at the falls from the tower now at the casino that was once named for the Oneida Silver Company. I marvelled at the beauty of Oakes Gardens and this was the only time that I have been on the Maid of the Mist boat and the tunnel behind the base of the falls from Table Rock House. I also went for my first flight and only helicopter ride over the falls.
I got my first job, although I was paid in cash, cutting grass at the motel across the street.
The news in the summer of '77 was dominated by the Son of Sam. This was a serial killer named David Berkowitz. He committed his murders in New York City before finally being caught. I began to wonder why society produces people such as this.
The Son of Sam story did have a kind of ultimate happy ending, years later, when the killer converted to Christianity and began a ministry in prison. It is extensively documented online.
I began to look at that red New Testament Bible that I had been given back in eighth grade. I believed it, but at this point I only considered a Bible as a kind of good luck charm and if I read it, I would do well in school and physical training and a really wonderful girl might develop a crush on me.
At this point I believed in God but had kind of a secular view of it. I believed that God gave everyone certain abilities and talents and the way to honor God was to make the most of whatever He had given you. It was wonderful if someone went to church every Sunday and read the Bible every day, and maybe I would get to that point someday, but it wasn't absolutely necessary right now.
The subject arose of me possibly going back to visit England. By this time, it had become little more than faded early childhood memories.
The first I heard of personal computers with the Commodore, in 1977. But it was all text and a graphical user interface was well in the future. Commands had to be typed in after the C:\.
The two very important Voyager space missions were launched, Voyager 1 and 2. Voyager 2 was actually launched first. Both are still sending back information today. The two took different routes to the outer Solar System.
There was more music in the summer of 1977. Heart had "Crazy On You" and "Magic Man".
There was "Taxi" by Harry Chapin
"Love The One You're With" by Steven Stills
"Black Betty" by Ram Jam
"Christine Sixteen" by KISS
"I Just Want To Be Your Everything" by Andy Gibb.
"Telephone Line" by Electric Light Orchestra
Twelfth grade, beginning in September 1977, was the last year of high school. I continued my devotion to physical fitness. Back in the summer, I had resolved to train for one hundred days straight without a break.
This was actually not a good thing because the body grows not while it is training, but while it is resting after training. The idea behind exercise is that if one tears the muscles down by exercise they will recover when he is resting, particularly sleeping, and, because of the increased demand, will recover to be a little bit stronger than they were before the workout.
I went with another trainee who was joining a boxing gym downtown. I figured that I could really go somewhere if I could just progress like I had been doing with exercise. Besides, I thought that this sport probably had the best overall physical training there was.
The gym would relocate and then close down for a time while funding was being obtained for a new location. By that time, I would have a job and be going to college and would be unable to return to training. But the physical training that I learned there, I have made extensive use of in workouts ever since.
As enthusiastic as I was about physical training, I did have trouble with diet. I improved my diet, but at nowhere near the pace that I improved in terms of exercise. In my last year of high school, I did gain a moderate amount of weight. I had a weakness both for Frito's Corn Chips and for a milk chocolate bar with peanut butter on it.
But I also had gained will power. I lost that weight to the point that when twelfth grade ended with high school graduation, I was about seven pounds lighter than I had been at the beginning of the school year.
I tried to just keep improving all the time. In one youthful stunt, I resolved that I was going to do two thousand pushups in one day. I would get a piece of paper and keep doing sets of as many as I could and keeping track of them until I got to two thousand. I did it in the spring break around Easter 1977 and got my two thousand, but the next morning I was so sore I could barely get out of bed.
It was established that I would spend some time back in England after high school as a graduation present. By that time I had only vague memories of it and did not know what it would be like to go back there. I got a U.S. passport, which was accompanied by a letter sternly warning me of the consequences of getting caught with drugs in another country. Some countries still had the death penalty for drug possession, and the U.S. Government would not be able to help you.
In the spring of 1978, I got my first real job at Tops Supermarket. At the time, it was in the same building in the Pine Plaza that the A & P had once been in. I went for a polygraph (lie detector) test and orientation in Buffalo first. Tops is a supermarket chain across much of the northeastern U.S. I worked first alternating between bagging groceries and collecting shopping carts in the parking lot and then on the evening maintenance crew. I wanted to save some money to take to England.
During the last year of high school, bowling was a favorite weekend activity. I went with some others to see Saturday Night Fever at the movies. A military jet crashed near Niagara University. We went on a field trip with school to Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum (ROM).
I got my real start in writing when a teacher made a deal with me. My job at Tops had maybe affected my school work and I was in danger of failing a class called Writing For Advertising. Without the credit for that class, I would not have enough credits to graduate and I would have to go to summer school. The teacher said he would give me a chance to catch up with an extra credit writing assignment but that it had "better be good".
It must have been good enough because I got through the class and graduated. This gave me the idea that I could write. Soon, I would be on my way back to the old country.
On our Class Day, I had rented a white tuxedo. The song that was chosen for our class song was the old Beatles song "Long And Winding Road". My parents got me a really nice class ring.
Just before the end of school, near the end of the school day, I heard a very loud crash that sounded like it was coming from a distance. A former student and another one that was shortly to graduate with us had been in a car. The former student had been driving, he had been with our class but had left school.
The car was going down 80th Street, adjacent to our school, at extremely high speed. The car had run off the road and hit a large tree. The car had been obliterated. They had both been killed instantly.
For a while, the car had been put on display at one of the main intersections of Niagara Falls as a warning against dangerous driving. A little while before the crash, I had been collecting shopping carts in my job at Tops Market when the one who was driving the car walked nearby. He said "Hi, Mark. I'll be getting my car soon. I'll take you for a ride in it".
Anyway, my last year of high school was really a time for music. Around the beginning of the school year, there was the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The Bee Gees had been around for years, but it the spring of 1978, they really hit their stride. They dominated the charts much like the Beatles dominated their day. The Bee Gees were from a place that does not really get much attention paid to it, Britain's Isle of Man.
Around the beginning of the school year, there had been "Help Is On It's Way" by the Little River Band and "Hey, Deanie" by Shaun Cassidy (a great song).
Disco was gaining ground, there was "Flashlight" by Parliament and "Disco Inferno" by the Trammps.
I actually became very fond of a song from years before that I tape recorded, "Suite Judy Blue Eyes" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and, Young.
This is also when I first really noticed another older song "Gimme Shelter" by The Rolling Stones.
It was toward the end of the school year that new music seemed to really come quickly.
There was "Shadow Dancing" by Andy Gibb
"Jack And Jill" By Raydio
"Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad" by Meatloaf
"Peg" by Steely Dan
"Ego" by Elton John
"Because The Night" by Patti Smith
"Magnet And Steel" by Walter Egan
"Everyone's A Winner" by Hot Chocolate
"Thunder Island" by Jay Ferguson
"Dance The Night Away" by Van Halen
"Copacabana" by Barry Manilow.
"Wonderful Tonight" by Eric Clapton
There was a band that I first heard of, Foreigner, with "Hot Blooded" and later I would hear "Double Vision".
The band called Sweet made the brilliant observation that "Love Is Like Oxygen".
Saturday Night Fever was followed by another movie and soundtrack that I liked. It was simply called "Grease".
High school graduation in 1978. No one who signed my yearbook left an email address. The letter strings www, http, com, org or, edu would have been meaningless strings of letters that one might see on a car license plate. No one talked on cell phones. Relatively few people could even use a typewriter effectively.
Computers were large appliances that displayed block text. The idea of computers resembling television screens and having cartoon-like icons was unimaginable. Photography used standard chemical film.
The outside world was relatively backward. Few people knew anything about a distant land called Iraq. It was where dates were grown and where the ruins of Babylon and other ancient kingdoms were located. Iran was a staunch American ally in the Middle East ruled by a regal monarch known as the Shah.
Islam was a distant and foreign religion. Most people only heard about it when tensions between the Arabs and Israel flared up or when they watched interviews with Black Muslim athletes in America like Muhammad Ali or Kareem Abdul Jabaar. (I always thought that Moslem, rather than Muslim, was the more correct spelling).
Factory jobs in Niagara Falls were secure. One would hear of a guy who had gotten into Carborundum, DuPont, Harrison or, Goodyear and felt that he was all set for life.
One of the newest and nicest neighborhoods in Niagara Falls was the area from 95th to 102nd Streets. It was known that some chemicals had been buried in the area years before. But this area represented the kind of secure suburban dream that America was all about.
The pope was an obscure figure hidden away in a cloister in the Vatican somewhere. The average Catholic probably didn't even know the name of the pope (it was Paul). The idea of the pope being a global celebrity, more popular than the Beatles, was utterly and completely unimaginable.
Things would change.
8) BACK TO THE OLD COUNTRY
I continued working at Tops Market after graduation until July. Near the end of July, I took my first flight, except for the helicopter flight over the falls the previous summer, from Toronto Airport to Heathrow, London's major airport. I managed to get a window seat.
It was very cloudy for the British Airways flight. We took off in the evening and I could not see much on the ground except the lights of some towns in eastern Canada during breaks in the clouds. There were clouds all across the Atlantic Ocean. I had been hoping to see more from the plane.
We were flying eastward, opposite the direction of the sun, so the night was over prematurely and it was day again. The flight was supposedly nearing it's end but all I could see from my window was dense cloud. There was something that looked like a wiggly line in the cloud.
When I looked up again, the wiggly line had become more pronounced. Suddenly, we were out of the cloud and not far off the ground. The wiggly line in the cloud had actually been a river (probably the Thames, west of London). Below were trees and green fields.
The next thing I knew, we were over a strip of concrete, the runway. Then, there was a bump as we touched down and thirteen years after leaving, I was back in England.
It was drizzling in that typically English way. As we continued down the runway to the airport terminal, I could see a lot of other planes on adjacent runways. There was a large jet like our own from Iran Air. This was while the Shah was still in power and it had the lion and sun symbol. There was a smaller, propellor-driven passenger plane from South African Airways.
In the terminal was a modern art style sculpture with a sign "Welcome To Britain" and it really sank in that I was actually back in the old country after all of these years. (To a not-quite eighteen-year-old, thirteen years is a lot of years).
The customs official examined my U.S. passport, asked me the routine question of what I would be doing in Britain and stamped me a visa for six months, with the stipulation that I was not permitted to work in Britain, at least not without further process. I was actually a dual citizen, and still had British citizenship, but didn't have a British passport.
An aunt and uncle had visited us in Niagara Falls for three weeks a short time before, and they came to Heathrow to meet me. I had to get used to getting into a car as a passenger from the right side door (facing forward), as drivers in Britain drive on the left side of the road and the driver's position is on the right side of the car. Someone recently arrived in Britain must also take care to remember this when crossing roads.
We drove for a couple of hours or so across beautiful English countryside on the M4 Motorway before crossing the Severn Bridge and entering Wales. Then, back across the line into England and before I knew it, we were at our destination. This was where I had spent my early childhood, but although the area looked very typically English, it did not look remotely familiar.
After taking a nap to somewhat compensate for jet lag, I was taken to meet other relatives and then it was off for an evening out. All around were hills and trees and ferns and sheep and, of course, that Forest of Dean dialect. This was a far different world from Niagara Falls.
We ended up at a pub called The Angel at Ruardean. My parents often talked about "back home" and I would recognize a lot of the names, but I did not recall ever hearing of Ruardean. There was a group of guys there talking about wrestling matches and hunting wood pheasants in that forest dialect. Everybody seemed to know everybody else.
I quickly noticed that the Forest of Dean was made for walking. Across the hills and valleys, through the beautiful countryside and old villages, I would go for long walks. From Five Acres, where I was staying initially, through Coleford to the Speech House and back. Through Berry Hill, up to Symond's Yat. To Drybrook and Cinderford and back. Sometimes, I would just take a shorter walk to Edge End and back.
If my birth village of Lydbrook had not been pointed out to me, I never would have recognized it. The only thing that looked familiar was the view of the opposite side of the valley as seen from the side where I had lived as a young child.
Not long after arriving, I walked through Lydbrook and up to a place called The Pludds. The summer countryside was so nice that I always wanted to walk further and see more of it. I had a fairly good sense of direction but was not used to the hills that were all around and I suddenly had no idea where I was.
I noticed one of those bright red phone booths up ahead and placed a collect call to my parents back in the U.S. They told me how to get back to Five Acres from there. But soon, I would know my way all around.
There is a country road from Berry Hill, through Bicknor, down to the bottom of Lydbrook. That road was so gorgeous that the thought occurred to me that maybe I had died somehow and did not remember it and that I was now walking in Heaven. I only walked the road once, I wanted to go back and walk it again but somehow never got around to it. Why do you suppose my blog is green.
Image from Google Street View.
There are two really spectacular views from the Forest of Dean. One is from Symond's Yat Rock with the village and the winding Wye River down below and the other is across the Severn Vale, with the city of Gloucester down on the plain below.
Looking across Severn Vale from Cinderford. Image from Google Street View.
I the Forest of Dean sheep were allowed to roam free. Each sheep has a dab of spray paint identifying it's owner, with each farm being assigned a different color. They had a few places where they typically hung out. If someone doesn't want sheep in their yard it is the homeowner's responsibility to put up a fence. There are entranceways like the following, where a human could step over but a sheep couldn't. This is to keep sheep out of the park.
One thing that I did recognize from my childhood there was the shops in the middle of Cinderford, which then included a Woolworth's. I happened to notice a mound of slag that my father once used to take me climbing on. Then, it had seemed like a really high mountain. But now that I was grown up, nimble, and fit, I could scramble to the top in about a minute.
The places that had just been names that I had heard my parents refer to now became real places. My inner Englishman emerged. England was never "foreign", because even if I did not remember that much about it, my parents were English.
I had brought one of those Polaroid cameras that takes instamatic photos with me, an SX-70, and I brought it with me most places that I went. I also bought plenty of postcards and souvenirs.
Driving is done on the left in Britain and there is more traffic circles (roundabouts) but fewer traffic lights than in North America. When someone was just learning to drive, they had to post an "L" for "learner" on the car. There were some three-wheel cars that could be driven on a motorbike license. The street lights were orange because it helps to cut through fog.
All around were patchwork fields, stone walls and stone houses. All over the forest area were cows and horses and, sheep. Walking in Britain on a cloudy day gives one the feeling that they are in a sandwich between the green ground below and the gray cloud above.
The scent of wet plants and of burning wood would always remind me of the Forest of Dean as well as a car with a standard transmission shifting gears. There was extensive bus service and cars were a luxury, rather than a necessity, for most people.
The scent of diesel exhaust would always remind me of riding all around on buses. One had to tell the bus driver the destination upon boarding the bus so that the fare could be determined. The first time I rode a bus, I was still getting used to British money and I got the feeling that I put in more money than I needed to.
School in Britain was done by two levels, O Levels and A Levels. O means ordinary and A means advanced. You might hear someone say "I just finished my O Levels". A Levels are roughly equivalent to Regents in the U.S.
There was a carnival at Cinderford in August, as there was every year. There were rides, a demonstration by the Red Arrows, the RAF aerobatic team and, an exhibition of local amateur boxers. There was a demonstration of a military helicopter landing at the carnival. This playground, image from Google Street View, is where the Cinderford Carnival used to be held.
All around were booths with the military hoping that there would be guys who were impressed enough with the demonstrations to enlist and other booths with people passing out religious literature. I was not yet really a Christian, but I took two tracts that I still have today.
Gloucester is the nearest city to the Forest of Dean. It is a very old city dating back to Roman times. It is based on a grid pattern and the central streets are Northgate, Southgate, Eastgate and, Westgate Streets.
The large store that my parents referred to as the Bon Marche was now called Debenham's. It was next to King's Square, in the middle of Gloucester. Leading to King's Square was King's Walk, a covered walk with shops along it, most important to me were a record store and Smith's Books. There was also the Eastgate Mall with a market alongside it, not far away.
King's Walk is a former street to King's Square, the center of Gloucester, that was covered and turned into a mall. I looked at the records and books whenever I was in Gloucester. At top is the entrance from King's Square, at bottom is the entrance from Eastgate Street. Both images from Google Street View.
I would often ride the bus into Gloucester and sometimes from there to Cheltenham, beyond Gloucester.
The most important and impressive building in Gloucester is the cathedral. Gloucester Cathedral did bring back childhood memories. It got me thinking, at least subconsciously, about religion. Think how important God must have been to people to lead them to build a magnificent structure such as this. The cathedral was originally begun in the Thirteenth Century. Image from Google Earth.
The very definition of a city in Britain is that it has a cathedral. Cheltenham, not far away, has roughly the same population as Gloucester. But it is considered as a town, rather than a city, because Cheltenham does not have a cathedral.
By the way, the origin of many English cities is revealed by the name. Those ending in -cester, -chester or, -caster are of Roman origin. Those ending in -by are of Danish origin and those ending in -ham or -ton are of Anglo-Saxon origin.
As I first noticed in my childhood, Gloucester was so different from the villages of the Forest of Dean in the hills to the west. People in Gloucester did not talk with the forest dialect. There were numerous people from other countries in Gloucester. At that time, the vast majority of immigrants in Britain were from India, Pakistan or, Jamaica.
There were a few panhandlers on the streets in Gloucester. The Labour Party of James Callaghan was in power and the opposition Tories (Conservatives) had billboards in Gloucester showing a long line of people outside the dole (unemployment office) with the line "LABOUR ISN'T WORKING". It was one of the most successful political campaigns ever.
1968, when we landed in the U.S., was not exactly the best year for America. In the same way, 1978, when I first went back to England, was not exactly it's best year. This was mostly due to economic factors and the winter of 1978-79 would become known as Britain's "Winter of Discontent".
But neither had mattered much to me. 1968 in America was when I landed in a new country and discovered the wonders of reading about science, particularly outer space. 1978 was my carefree prime of youth in which I became reacquainted with my native land. I thought one day about how fortunate I was. Had I been ten years older, the U.S. Government would have treated me to a journey to the tropics of Vietnam as a high school graduation present.
I have always had a disconnect with reality concerning Britain in three different ways.
First of all, is the immigrants. There are those in Britain, as in all European countries, who would like to either limit the number of immigrants or keep them out altogether. As for me, I really only got to know Britain beginning in 1978. The immigrants are part of the landscape, I don't know Britain any other way. The Pakistani newsagent selling newspapers is just as British as the Queen, from my point of view. Perhaps they are even more British because they chose to be British, instead of being born there. Nothing is more of a compliment to a country than to have people that were not born there want to live there.
What is more English than a cup of tea? Yet, tea cannot possibly grow in Britain. It is a foreign crop from distant lands that has been incorporated into Britain. If we can incorporate tea, then why not curry and chapati too?
England was originally a melting pot. The people were a mix of Romans, Vikings, Danes, Anglo-Saxons and Normans. I have always viewed the immigrants of today as just another part of the mix.
My second disconnect concerns the Second World War. I knew factually that this is Europe and this is where that war, that I had read about, was fought. But it just didn't seem like that could be true. The only Europe that I have known is the European Union. Britain joined in 1973, five years before I first returned there, it has since left. Germany is a place where one might go to Hamburg or Berlin on business or to Bavaria on holiday. That war seemed like it must have taken place in another Europe on another planet somewhere.
The third disconnect concerns religion. So much of what I know about Britain has come to me not by being there but by reading about it. I have studied all about the heroics of John Wycliffe and later, William Tyndale in defying the church authorities and getting the Bible translated into the English language so than anyone could read it, which the church considered as a threat to it's authority. I have read all about how enthusiastically England joined the Reformation and the care with which the King James Version of the Bible was produced. A prominent part of the landscape is the old churches and cathedrals everywhere.
The truth is, of course, that the Britain of today is quite secular. I was really shocked to learn that William Tyndale was actually born in Gloucestershire. He had done so much not only to get the Bible translated into English, but to shape the modern English language as a result and, it cost him his life. Yet when I was in Gloucestershire, I do not recall hearing anything about a national hero such as this.
I went all around the area where I had been born. To Monmouth, on the border with Wales. To two local castles, Chepstow and Goodrich and to see horse racing at Chepstow. To see Soudley and Cannop Ponds. To St. Briavels and Newland in the forest. Hereford is another old city with a cathedral that may be as impressive as the one at Gloucester. Images from Google Earth and Street View.
My parents had lived at Ross-on-Wye before I was born and I saw why they liked the park along the river at Chippawa so much. It was similar to the park here along the Wye River. At the center of Ross on Wye is the Seventeenth Century marketplace, image from Google Street View, made of red sandstone.
Goodrich Castle is the nearest castle to where I was born. It is made of the same kind of red sandstone as the marketplace and much else around Ross-on-Wye. It is an old Norman castle that was much later used during England's Civil War. The Royalists (Anglicans) held the castle but it was hammered into submission by the forces of Oliver Cromwell (Puritans) using cannon. This was one of the harbingers of gunpowder making castles obsolete as fortifications.
Tintern Abbey is on the Welsh side of the Wye River. The word "abbey" is often seen in Britain but not in North America. An abbey was the church of a monastery, which could sometimes be on the scale of a cathedral. Protestants generally don't have monasteries. When the Reformation came, in the Sixteenth Century, the monasteries were closed and the abbies converted into regular churches, but usually still called an abbey. But some monasteries were in remote locations that were not suitable for an ordinary church, in the days when people had to walk to church. These were simply abandoned, and today can be seen all over Britain. Without maintenance these abbies eventually fell into ruins. Tintern Abbey was a cathedral scale abbey for about four hundred years but has now been abandoned for nearly five hundred years. Walking around it has an apocalyptic feel. In the first image, from Google Earth, you can see that the roof is long gone and the floor is grass.
These two images, from Google Street View, are inside Tintern Abbey.
Further away, I went to the famous mansion at Longleat, down in Wiltshire. I found may way through the famous maze there made of hedges. The moon was visible in the sky and I used it as a directional reference point.
On the way we went by the Royal Crescent, at Bath. Image from Google Earth.
I went to a couple of football (soccer) games, one at Hereford and one at West Bromwich, near Birmingham. The first soccer (football) game that I attended was at the old Edgar Street Stadium in Hereford.
I spent a week out on the coast of Wales, at the resort of Amroth.
I saw Pembroke Castle, in Wales, from outside. The world is fascinated with the Tudor Dynasty. This is where Henry VII, the founder and first king of the Tudor Dynasty, was born. This it can be said that the Tudor Dynasty began here.
There was a massive birthday party that I was taken to, at a place called The Woodlands. Two guys, both named Steve, were turning eighteen at about the same time so they combined their parties.
There was another party, at the Cinderford Rugby Club. It was memorable because it was where I first heard the song "Double Vision" by Foreigner.
There was the smaller Drybrook Rugby Club close by. One evening, there was a party going on there. The DJ (disc jockey in the days of turntables) was playing records and I noticed a number of people giving him drinks. Suddenly, the music stopped. The DJ had passed out from drinking too much, too fast, and had collapsed onto the turntable.
One day, someone told me that Niagara Falls had been on the news. I thought it was probably some feature about the falls. It wasn't. An entire section of Niagara Falls had to be evacuated because of contamination from chemicals that had been buried there before the houses had been built. It would become known as Love Canal.
Another wonderful thing about England is the food. Genuine fish and chips, done the way it is supposed to be done without trying too much to make it into fast food, is absolutely delicious. There is a treat in England known as Malt Loaf. Whenever I went back to England in the future, that would be one of the first things I would look for. Another good English meal is steak and kidney pie.
Loose tea is more difficult to handle than tea bags, but it does have a better taste. Shandy is a drink which is a mixture of lemonade and beer and was sold in vending machines at the time. There was a candy bar, Turkish Delight, which was a westernized version of the original Turkish Delight and packed in an exotic-looking purple wrapper. If it wasn't truly a delight, I wouldn't take the trouble to write about it here.
Walking around this beautiful countryside or around Gloucester, I trimmed some weight until I was genuinely thin. One day, I noticed that the class ring that my parents had bought me had slipped off my finger and been lost.
In the news, the pope had died another one had been chosen. There was the August 1978 attack on London in which members of the PFLP (Popular Front For Liberation of Palestine) had waited outside the hotel which crew members of El Al, Israel's national airline, used. When a bus of Israelis pulled up in front of the hotel, they had opened fire.
I noticed that Britain's murder rate is low enough so that when there is a murder, it is news in the whole country. In America, a murder is usually just local news.
I did a lot of exercise, usually in the morning. Lots of press-ups (push-ups are called press-ups in Britain) and other exercises. I had not yet become really religious or devoted to academics. I thought that the main purpose of life was to exercise as much as possible and be in the best physical shape possible.
To this day if there is ever a time when I don't feel like working out, all I have to do is look at imagery of the Forest of Dean and it brings back the absolutely boundless enthusiasm which I had for physical fitness at this time.
I wanted to stay in Britain and looked into going to an agricultural college or joining the police force.
There was sports on television in Britain all the time. There was only three channels at the time (BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, Independent Television). I watched the movies Roots and Holocaust while I was in Britain. I couldn't resist doing some reading, I bought a world atlas and a book about ancient history.
One day a blond woman was on television, criticizing the government. I didn't know who she was and didn't pay much attention. The following year she would be in the global news. Her name was Margaret Thatcher and she would be Britain's next prime minister.
I was taken to see London for a day. I walked and took photos all around Big Ben and the Parliament building after walking across Westminster Bridge. I walked across Tower Bridge also, but there were just too many people in line at the Tower of London for us to go in. St. Paul's Cathedral was magnificent as was Buckingham Palace and Piccadilly Circus.
I watched the changing of the guard that I had seen so many times on television. We went by the then tallest structure in Britain, the Post Office Tower (now the British Telecom Tower), but it was closed to visitors. I looked at Windsor Castle from the outside on the way back.
There were people in London from everywhere in the world, both residents and tourists. The only thing that was a shock about London was some of the prices, but the same is true of any big city.
I had my eighteenth birthday party in a really nice place called Starden's Country Club in Newent. It has since been destroyed by fire.
Now, let's get around to the music, some of these songs never made it to North America.
A popular radio station of the time was Radio Luxembourg. This radio station was a story in itself. It broadcast from the European country of Luxembourg and was basically to circumvent BBC regulations and often to play songs that the British Government had banned from the radio. The government finally seemed to realize that banning a song will only make it more popular than ever. There was also the weekly British TV show Top Of The Pops.
There was "Hong Kong Garden" by Siouxsie And The Banshees
"5.7.0.5." by City Boy
"Who Are You" by The Who
"Boogie Oogie, Oogie" by A Taste Of Honey
"Talking In Your Sleep" by Crystal Gayle
"Kiss You All Over" by Exile
"Dreadlock Holiday" by 10cc
"Rat Trap" by the Irish band The Boomtown Rats
"Three Times A Lady" by The Commodores
"Forget About You" by The Motors
"Teenage Kicks" by a band from Northern Ireland called The Undertones
"Sweet Talking Woman" by the Electric Light Orchestra
"Hopelessly Devoted To You" by Olivia Newton John.
No songs remind me of this time in Britain like the Parallel Lines album by Blondie. The band was American, named after it's blond lead singer, Deborah Harry, but was successful in Europe and Australia before it was in America. Three songs, "Picture This", "One Way Or Another" and, "Hanging On The Telephone" were always on the radio.
This time in Britain was really an introduction to the New Wave sound in music. It would always remind me of Britain. People here usually used the term "Punk Rock", rather than New Wave, but my understanding is that Punk Rock is actually a subset of New Wave.
I really got a double dose of the soundtrack from Grease. I heard it in the U.S. before leaving for Britain and then found that it was just starting to get a lot of air play in Britain when I arrived.
One evening I went for a ride to Lydney, a town in the southern part of the Forest of Dean, nearer to the Severn River. The ride was memorable because on the way back, I first heard "Rock Lobster" by the B-52s. It was definitely a new type of sound.
Before heading back to the U.S. at the end of October 1978, I got a look in the house where I had been born and spent my early childhood. The house had been expanded. It now had central heating and the fireplaces had been made into shelves. The larder that I used to be shut in as punishment for misbehaviour was now a closet with a shelf.
Then, the news came. The pope that had been chosen only a short time before had died. A new pope was elected. Britain and the rest of Europe was in shock. For the first time in nearly five hundred years, a pope was chosen who was not Italian. The new pope was Polish and the people in Poland looked to be as much in shock as anyone.
There was a terrible accident in Cinderford not long before I left. If I remember correctly, a mother and her two children were killed when their car crashed directly into an oncoming lorry (A British term for a truck).
These three months back in my native England were a very important time to me. I had reconnected with my roots and now felt like a more complete person. I had no doubt that I belonged to a truly great people. Furthermore, I had the advantage of belonging to more than one country and wanted to expand on this to better understand the whole world.
This was a very confident time. I did not know what the future held, I planned to attend college back in the U.S. I had gotten thin and wanted to start some serious weight-lifting. But one thing I felt about the future is that it belonged to me.
9) THE REST OF THE SEVENTIES
Once I got back to Niagara Falls I got a job at Jenss, a large clothing store in what was then known as the Summit Park Mall. It involved general labor, vacuuming the carpet in the morning, unloading delivery trucks, polishing windows and mirrors and, taking out garbage. I worked there until I started at a local college, Niagara County Community College, In January, 1979.
I read quite a bit about England, since I could now relate to it by having been there. It is not really a big country, but I could see that the England I had been to was only a very tiny fraction of the whole country.
I plunged into weight lifting with a passion and also went with another trainee to join a karate school downtown. The thing that is so attractive about weight lifting is the time flexibility. If one joins something like a karate class, it is necessary to commit to being at that class at the appointed time. When one has a job and is attending school, that is often difficult. Weight lifting, in contrast, can be done anytime.
I bought the book "Inside Powerlifting" by Terry Todd and wondered how far I might be able to go with the weights. I read everything I could about different training routines and did all I could to improve mine. I lifted at home and at the college until the following summer, when I joined the YMCA downtown.
There is a tremendous amount of satisfaction in lifting a heavier weight than one has lifted previously. But I would absolutely never have anything to do with taking steroids.
I was going to study mainly photography in college. My father gave me an Olympus OM-1 camera to get me started. Rural Niagara County, outside of Niagara Falls, had a lot of old-fashioned barns and buildings from an earlier era. I would ride the bus to school, as I did not yet have my driver's license, but the ride was an opportunity to read or study.
The Love Canal dominated the news of Niagara Falls around this time. Entire blocks of nice homes, as well as a nearby housing project and a school, would have to be demolished because they were unsafe to live in. We did not live close enough to it to be in any way affected, but it was horrible. Many people who had lived in the area died prematurely.
There was bad news from England too. As I stated, the winter of 1978-79 became known as England's "Winter of Discontent". There were strikes all over the country over wages. Inflation was totally out of control. The Kinks made a song about it, "Superman".
Today, I am what one might term a Democrat or mild socialist in terms of politics. But I know very well the perils of leaning too far to the left and that is what happened in Britain with the Callaghan government. All it accomplished was to invite the Conservatives back into power. It happened in the U.S. as well, in 1979 inflation reached 13%.
There was more horrifying news toward the end of 1978. The name of Jim Jones is largely forgotten today. He was the leader of a cult called the People's Temple. In the jungle of Guyana, in northern South America, he set up a camp for his followers, who were mostly from the U.S.
It ended with more than nine hundred people drinking poison on Jones' command. It dominated the headlines of the news for days.
There was more music. A band named Boston really got my attention. Most notably with "Don't Look Back" and "Something About You".
When I got back to the U.S., I first heard about a band called The Cars. "Just What I Needed" always seemed to be on the radio. Their other songs include "My Best Friend's Girl", "Candy-O" and "Dangerous Type".
Blue Oyster Cult was back with "Godzilla".
There was "So Young, So Bad" by Starz.
Eric Clapton had a hit with "Watch Out For Lucy".
Then there was the disco classic of the autumn of 1978 "Do You Think I'm Sexy" by Rod Stewart.
There were concerts, often in the Niagara Falls Convention Center or Buffalo's Memorial Auditorium but I was not a frequent concert-goer. The only concerts that I went to with widely-known bands were The Doobie Brothers and Styx. (I later learned that the Styx is the mythical river that one supposedly crosses to get into Hell).
Suddenly, on the news, there was some of the most horrible scenes that the world has ever known. Cambodia, the small country just east of Vietnam, had been ruled for four years by a Communist faction known as the Khmer Rouge. They wanted to shut out all outside influences and make Cambodia, which they renamed Kampuchea, back into a primitive rice-growing society.
The Khmer Rouge forced the entire population out of urban areas and into camps in the countryside. The outside world know little of what was going on there. They simply killed anyone who would they thought would not fit in with this giant backward step. This included anyone was educated at all, anyone who spoke French (Cambodia's former colonial power) and, even anyone who wore eyeglasses.
The dead were dumped in areas that would later be known as "killing fields". There were many who were not killed by the Khmer Rouge but starved or died of disease. The final death toll has got to be at least a million people. It was like Jonestown multiplied by about a thousand.
The terrible ordeal ended only when the Khmer Rouge had a falling out with Vietnam. They began launching raids across the border and Vietnam responded with a military offensive that soon drove the Khmer Rouge from power, although they would wage a guerrilla war against the Vietnamese for some time.
Other news came from Iran. The country had been ruled for decades by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. His father ruled before him. This monarchy was referred to as the Peacock Throne and was the same monarchy as had ruled ancient Persia.
The Shah was an American ally and strove to modernize the country. But he was heavy-handed in ruling. He had a secret police force known as SAVAK. He outraged conservative Moslems, who detested him and the western influences that he allowed into the country.
The world would soon become very familiar with the title of Ayatollah, which is a Shiite religious leader in Iran. Back in the early Sixties, the Shah had jailed and then exiled one such troublesome leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He had spent years in exile in next-door Iraq, which also has a large Shiite Moslem population.
Khomeini became the defacto leader of the rebellion against the Shah from exile. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators swarmed the streets in the autumn of 1978. Many soldiers refused to fire on them.
The alarmed Shah pressured Iraq to force Khomeini out and he took up residence in a suburb of Paris, Neauphle-le-Chateau. Khomeini made extensive use of cassette tapes to record sermons, which were very popular in Iran.
The Shah finally made the decision to go into exile in Egypt, which was led by his friend Anwar Sadat. Khomeini returned to Tehran on an Air France jet to a grand welcome.
The Shah had left his prime minister, Shahpour Bakhtiar, running the government. But Khomeini made it clear that no one running the country in the name of the Shah would be acceptable. Bakhtiar went into exile in France.
In other news Idi Amin, the well-known dictator of Uganda, was overthrown. The former country of Rhodesia became the new nation of Zimbabwe. Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party in Britain won the election for prime minister by promising to end the country's "Winter of Discontent". The Yugo, a car made in what was then Yugoslavia, became quite popular.
The United States first heard of a place in Pennsylvania called Three Mile Island. There had been a dangerous meltdown and release of radiation there. Although it was minor in comparison with what would happen seven years later at Chernobyl.
I finally got my driver's license. There were places to go on a weekend night. There was a bar playing mostly disco dance music across the street from Niagara Falls Airport called The Aladdin. Sometimes, there was a band there.
In a city near Niagara Falls called North Tonawanda, there was a street called Oliver Street. There were many, many bars on Oliver Street. The one I remember best from this era was The Bowery. Legend had it that there were so many bars on Oliver Street that no one had ever gone from one end of the street to the other, had a drink in every bar, and made it to the other end of the street.
Whether this legend is really true or whether it was invented by bar owners to drum up business, I don't know.
There was another bar, Daddy's, in downtown Niagara Falls. It would be so jam packed with people on weekends that it was virtually impossible to move. It was a large bar with only one single-file door and I don't know why the fire inspector didn't order it to be reconfigured or shut down, but it was very popular while it lasted.
There was soon more music. Sister Sledge sang "We Are Family".
Cheap Trick had "I Want You To Want Me".
There was "Living It Up (Friday Night)" by Bell And James.
"Ain't Love A Bitch" by Rod Stewart
"Superman" by Herbie Mann
"Good Timing" by the old Sixties band, The Beach Boys
A band called Peaches & Herb did "Shake Your Groove Thing" and "Reunited".
As always, I would periodically develop a fondness for older songs. Around this time, it was "I Saw Her Again Last Night" by the Mamas And Papas and that old favorite of mine, "The Rain, The Park And, Other Things" by The Cowsills.
Being able to drive meant expanding my horizons in our local area. I knew that there was a city to the east called Lockport and one day I drove there from the college just to see what it was like. Either driving or with others, I also saw the Southern Tier of western New York State for the first time, went along for a ride up into the Adirondack Mountains in the eastern part of the state and to an amusement park to the east, Darien Lake.
I had not gone to my own high school prom, but went the following year to the prom of the other high school in Niagara Falls.
After the spring semester of college ended, I got a job at a now-defunct department store known as King's. It was once a chain of stores across the eastern U.S. and was located where the Prime Outlets Mall is now. The store was being remodeled and much of the work was moving things around.
There was a towering train station in Buffalo, of significant architectural merit. At the time I had never seen it. The news came that it was closing.
There was still more music. The summer of 1979 was the summer of Supertramp and their album "Breakfast In America". It included hits like "The Logical Song" and "Good-bye Stranger". I had joined the YMCA downtown and these songs always remind me of weight lifting.
Other songs that I liked were "Highway Song" by Blackfoot
"My Sharona" by The Knack
"Does Your Mother Know?" by ABBA
"Rebel, Rebel" by David Bowie
"Suspicions" by Eddie Rabbit was always on the radio
The Charlie Daniels Band sang "The Devil Went Down To Georgia". The following year the band would have another hit with "The Legend Of Wooley Swamp". And later, "Still In Saigon", a song about a Vietnam War veteran.
There was "Hot Stuff" by Donna Summer
This was still the era of disco and Chic did a song called "Good Times".
In the autumn of 1979, I began a job at a restaurant in the Summit Park Mall called York Steak House. It was next to Jenss, where I had worked the year before. It was the first restaurant that I had worked in and I was not accustomed to the work at that time.
On November 4, 1979, news arrived that was unexpected to most people. A mob of Iranian students had overrun and seized the American embassy in Tehran and had taken the staff as hostages. They accused the embassy staff of spying and began referring to America as "The Great Satan". Mobs chanting "Death To America" and American flags burning became a staple of the evening news.
The embassy had been seized when the former Shah of Iran had arrived in New York City for cancer treatment. The militants wanted the Shah back to stand trial in Iran for abuses during his rule and stated that the hostages would be released when he was returned. It would drag on for 444 days and the Shah would die in exile long before it was over.
Every evening on the news would be the old man in the black turban. Ayatollah Khomeini was a testament to the power of religion. He was willing to defy the whole world. If God was with one then what difference did it make if the world was against us? The world had been becoming more and more secular, but this is what turned the tide.
I felt a resonance with Ayatollah Khomeini and what he was doing in Iran, but I didn't understand why. Later I realized that it was because of history. Oliver Cromwell had once done the same thing in my native England.
Around the same time that this was going on, the Sacred Mosque in Mecca was also seized by militants. This apparently had no connection to events in Iran at all. This event seems to have been largely forgotten today, but it went on for two weeks with many people held in the mosque against their will.
At the college someone was going around saying that there had been a nuclear attack on Toronto. Fortunately that wasn't the case. What had actually happened is that a train carrying chemicals had exploded in Mississauga. It had been one of the largest non-nuclear explosions that the world has ever seen. There was no fatalities but Mississauga had to be evacuated.
As always, there was more music. The autumn of 1979 had "Since You Been Gone" by Rainbow
"Are Friends Electric?" by Gary Numan
"Dream Police" by Cheap Trick
"The Pina Colada Song" By Rupert Holmes (also known as "Escape") was always on the radio
"Message In A Bottle" By The Police
"Rust Never Sleeps" by Neil Young
I also often listened to that old Sixties song "The Cheater" by Bob Kuban And The In-Men.
Just as the decade was about to end, some news arrived. This news set off a chain of events in the world that has not finished yet. On Christmas Eve, classes had finished at the college but it was open for a little bit of extra time to allow students to finish up assignments. I was in an art class. There was a radio playing.
Suddenly, the music was interrupted with a special announcement. The Soviet Union had launched an unexpected invasion of Afghanistan.
The latter part of the Seventies had been my coming of age time. I felt vaguely resentful that the Seventies had been boring compared to the Sixties but it wasn't that bad. If I had been ten years older I would have gotten a visit to Vietnam as a graduation present.
The truth is that I am much more a product of the Seventies than of the Sixties. The Sixties were the decade of social consciousness, when young people tried to change the world. The Seventies, in contrast, were the "Me Decade", when people had given up on changing the world and concentrated on changing themselves. I admit to being a self-centered Protestant that gets wrapped up in my own life. I am not disinterested in social issues but do care more about my own exercise and reading programs.
None of the following songs were ever my favorite song and I never owned any of the records. But this is what I would call the "background music" of the latter Seventies.
"Help Me" by Joni Mitchell
"Ziggy Stardust" by David Bowie
"Lido Shuffle" by Box Scaggs
"China Grove" by the Doobie Brothers
"Strawberry Letter 23" by the Brothers Johnson
Moonlight Feels Right" by Starbuck
"Dreams " by Fleetwood Mac
"Don't Fear The Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult is the one that I did have the record. This song is the greatest advertisement for guitars anywhere.
10) 1980 AND 81
About the time the 1980s began, I got a job in the Perkins Restaurant that used to be close to the Summit Park Mall. It was better organized than York Steak House had been. I worked Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday evenings busing tables or washing dishes. I was attending college during the week.
My Perkins name tag
What I really wanted to be able to do was to lift more weight. I had a strong back and around this time, I was deadlifting well over 400 pounds and bench-pressing 245 pounds.
Before lifting a heavy weight, a lifter must thoroughly believe that he (or occasionally she) can do it. I sometimes read stuff about positive thinking, with this in mind. One day in the school library, I happened across the book, The Amazing Results Of Positive Thinking by that well-known apostle of positive thinking, Norman Vincent Peale. (He must be right about the connection between positive thinking and health because he lived to age 95).
I was merely interested in hoisting some heavier weights down in the gym, but the book had something in it that I had not anticipated. Dr. Peale was a minister and the book contained quite a bit of religion. The book really left my head spinning.
If one had asked me if I believed in God, my answer would have been "yes". But I never really thought that much about religion. Not that I didn't want to. If there was a God that had created me, I would like to get to know him. But, I had too many interests and was too distracted by other things.
There is no doubt that religion is a very powerful force. What this book did was to make me think of religion in a way that I never had previously. For the rest of the day, I was in a kind of a glowing daze. Like I had first realized that there is another dimension to life. How much weight I could lift seemed insignificant by comparison.
When a person forms any kind of connection with God, everything appears brighter. I mean actually, physically brighter. After doing a little bit of reading about God that spring, I was struck at how the grass and dandelions and sky seemed to be actually brighter than before. It was as if I had a new pair of lenses.
Today, I actually disagree with some of what positive thinking is about. In the Bible, what is referred to as "the world" is not something that we should think positively about. It is portrayed as a sinful and foolish place that does not, for the most part, follow the Word of God. It is God that we should think positively about.
But it was this book that got me thinking about religion in a new way.
The local news in the spring of 1980 was dominated by the Love Canal. Perkins, where I was working, was within easy walking distance of it. One day, two government officials had visited the Love Canal area and met with property owners. The people became so mad at them that they took a cue from the Iranians and held them hostage for several hours. The officials were shut in a room and not allowed to leave until the people were given some satisfactory answers.
The international news was dominated by the hostages in Iran. It does not appear that Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the embassy takeover and it looked as if it was a somewhat impulsive action. But once the students and others took it over, he backed them.
I later thought that the real reason behind the embassy takeover is that Iran is a very fractious country. In the revolution that was taking place, a number of factions were vying for control. Khomeini was the leading figure, but by no means did he have the support of the entire country. His chief rival was apparently Ayatollah Shariatmadari.
The seizure of the embassy gave Khomeini a common enemy to unite all the factions against and his backing of the takeover and denunciation of the "Great Satan" cemented his position as leader of the revolution. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 is a classic example of how leaders do not actually start revolutions, but take control and consolidate one that is already underway.
Ayatollah Khomeini had another enemy. Iraq is the country bordering Iran to it's west. The new leader of Iraq was another name which we would all become familiar with, Saddam Hussein. Several years previously, the Shah had forced Iraq to sign an agreement concerning the valuable waterway between the two countries, the Shatt-Al-Arab River (River of the Arabs).
Saddam saw Iran in revolutionary turmoil and cut off from the U.S., which had been it's main ally. He decided to take advantage of the situation. Saddam was also certainty worried about Iran's revolution spilling over into his own majority Shiite population. He renounced the treaty with Iran concerning the river and signed by his predecessor. This was followed by border clashes between the two countries, which in September 1980 turned to all-out war.
Saddam was hoping that Iran's Arab minority in Khuzestan province, just over the border, would join their fellow Arabs, the Iraqis, against the ethnic Persians of Iran (who are not Arabs and speak Farsi, rather than Arabic). The Iranians, meanwhile, were hoping that their fellow Shiite Moslems in Iraq, even though they were Arabs, would side with their co-religionists from across the border in Iran and rise up against Saddam so that Iraq could also be made into a Shiite Islamic Republic.
Neither side got what it wanted and the war dragged on for eight years, with no one gaining much except full graveyards.
As it turns out, it was the war with Iraq that would turn the attention of the militants away from the hostages and they would ultimately be released.
One spring day, I had taken a nap after attending college. When I awoke, I was given some news "They've tried to rescue the hostages". The news was definitely not good.
A military operation had been attempted to try to rescue the hostages. It had been dubbed Operation Eagle Claw. It had not gone well and President Jimmy Carter came on television to take full responsibility for it.
An isolated spot had been chosen in the desert outside Tehran, referred to as Desert One. A group of U.S. military planes and helicopters had entered Iranian airspace and, flying below the radar, had made it to Desert One undetected.
But the desert had sandstorms of fine-grained sand. Helicopters are wonderful machines, but helicopters and sandstorms do not go very well together. The fine sand found it's way into the engines and equipment of the helicopters.
One by one, the helicopters failed due to mechanical troubles. The decision was made to abort the mission. In the blinding sandstorm, the rotor of a helicopter struck the side of one of the planes, which exploded. Eight U.S. servicemen were killed.
The force was evacuated without being detected. The Iranians apparently did not know about the attempted rescue until the next day. Naturally, it gave them more confidence that God was on their side.
What I think happened to this operation to rescue the hostages was that the helicopters had been kept at sea on ships, awaiting such a mission, and the corrosive salt in the air had damaged and weakened equipment on the helicopters.
There were prayers across America for the hostages. After the failed rescue attempt the prayers continued. It turned out that help would come from another direction. With Iran actually being invaded by Iraq, the hostages were no longer needed as a rallying point, those guarding them were needed at the battlefront, and soon they were released.
The Hostage Crisis in Iran took on a life of it's own. It was clear that not all of the prominent people in the country wanted to hold the hostages but speaking out against it was risky.
I along with every other American male my age, was required to register for possible conscription.
There was plenty of other news. The Government of Cuba permitted that basically anyone who wanted to leave could do so. The result was a massive exodus to Florida in what would become known as the Mariel Boat Lift. The Cubans seem to have also emptied their jails by sending criminals to America and there were a few who later committed horrendous crimes among the evacuees.
In Washington state there was a massive volcano eruption, Mount St. Helens. It affected the composition of the atmosphere in the area where it was located. One evening, I was standing outside Perkins Restaurant and I could see the blue tinge to the western sky.
There was a new video game that everyone seemed to be playing, it was known as Pac Man. The French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec held a referendum on independence. The voters decided to remain as a part of Canada.
Our sheltie, Cindy, had died. My parents went to a house in Cheektowaga to buy another one, who we named Prince. This dog would live until 1993.
Prince would more than live up to his name. He would have his own way all of his life. Shelties are very intelligent and family-oriented dogs, but they have a subtle way of taking control of things. The sheltie lets you believe that it is your pet, but you are actually it's servant.
I made another trip back to England in the summer of 1980, this time for three weeks instead of the three months last time. On the flight over was a man a few seats away that was reading a book titled "The New Left" all during the flight. Years later I would see him in the news. His name was Michael Ignatieff and he ran for Prime Minister of Canada. He had been teaching at Oxford during this time.
I continued where I had left off two years before, often taking the bus to Gloucester, Cheltenham or, Hereford. I went down to Weston-Super-Mare, where I had not been before. There was a disco in Gloucester, called Tiffany's, where I went a couple of times, but I see no sign online that it is still there.
This is me on the beach at Weston-Super-Mare.
This time, the sky was not cloudy for the flight over. Prior to landing, we had a magnificent view of what must have been Ealing, a western suburb of London. People beginning the morning commute from the endless rows of houses there.
In the spring and summer of 1980, there was plenty of good music. A band called The Clash had "London Calling" and "Stand By Me".
Toronto's band Rush did "Working Man" and "The Trees". Both these songs were probably older, but this is when I recall them always being on the radio.
Jackson Browne sang "Boulevard"
Charlie Daniels did "In America"
The Pink Floyd album "The Wall" was always playing. How many times did we hear them sing "All in all, you're just another brick in the wall"?
"All in all you're just another brick in the wall ", image from Google Street View.
Lipps Inc. had a disco hit with "Funkytown".
Split Enz did "I Got You".
The old Sixties singer Tommy James contributed a really good song with "Three Times In Love". It was 1980, but that song did have a Sixties kind of sound to it.
There was a local band, that played in bars, called The Road. Their most popular song was "Music Man".
Some older songs that I dug back up around this time were "Paint It Black" by the Rolling Stones and two old Beach Boys tunes "Be True To Your School" and "Shut Down".
I went to a different college in the autumn of 1980, Buffalo State College, in north Buffalo. It was a far different environment than the community college. I voted in my first election, for Jimmy Carter to win reelection. There was a destructive earthquake in central Italy.
In Buffalo and Niagara Falls and other places, someone was going around killing black and dark-skinned men. He killed with a .22 caliber gun and was dubbed the .22 Caliber Killer. He was believed also to be the one who killed taxi drivers and cut out their hearts with a knife.
Near the end of 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed in New York City by someone who said his ambition, and reason for killing Lennon, was to be "something other than a nobody". The attempt was a complete failure.
Toward the end of the year, there was more good music. The Rolling Stones were there with "Emotional Rescue"
The B-52s, who had earlier done "Rock Lobster" gave us another look at their style of music with "Private Idaho".
Kool And The Gang had a couple of hits with "Celebrate" and "Ladies' Night".
Blondie had "Rapture" with it's utterly nonsensical lyrics. But many people believe it to be the first Rap song.
Finally, there was Olivia Newton-John with the magnificent hits "Magic" and "Xanadu".
I also listened quite a bit to a much older song, "It's My Life" by The Animals.
There was a large movie theater down on Main Street in Niagara Falls that I think was called The Rapids and had been there since the 1920s. The theater had eventually closed down. But then, someone had gotten the idea of converting it into a bar which was named, appropriately, The Late Show.
The Late Show became the place to go in Niagara Falls. The best thing about it was how much room there was inside it. There could be several hundred people there and there would still be room to move around. The Late Show had a balcony, which in itself had more room than a lot of bars have in the entire place.
The bars across the border in Canada closed at 1 AM while the bars on the U.S. side were open until 3 AM. As you might expect, there was a rush of Canadians over to bars in the U.S. after closing time over there. The 3 AM closing time was actually the policy of Niagara County. In Buffalo, which is in Erie County, bars were open until 4 AM.
Then, there was Niagara University not far away. The university had it's own bar, The Rathskellar (or simply The Rat), but that closed at 11 PM. At that time, the exodus of NU students to the Main Street area bars began.
NU students often favored smaller bars, instead of The Late Show. There was one bar, which could generously be called "a dive" (a run-down, inelegant bar), known as McQ's. It was popular with NU students and there were other bars close enough for frequent bar hopping.
Aside from bars, Maple Leaf Village was an amusement park located just on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls to which I often went in the summer. It's former location is now occupied by the casino.
I had been taking some drawing classes in school and was getting pretty good at it. I never put in enough time to get really, really good, but I did enjoy drawing for a while
I began working at the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Main Street, not far from The Late Show. I had been a regular customer at the Kentucky Fried Chicken store on the other side of town, near where I lived and found that they needed some workers. But I was put in the store downtown. Aside from working in the store, I painted the outside of the store in the summer of 1981. For a school drawing assignment, I drew a sketch of Colonel Sanders.
I was by now really interested in religion. But I did not read the Bible that much, I read much more about the Bible than the Bible itself. It was during the summer of 1981 that I first read some books by Hal Lindsey about the prophecies about the end of the world in the Bible.
In the Student Union of Buffalo State College, I had picked up some literature about the Bible. I was absolutely amazed at how the life of Jesus had been foretold by the prophets in the Old Testament. I won't go into detail here but it was absolutely astounding. How could this not be true?
God is the ultimate authority, with all others far below. God knows everything, past, present and, future. All that we are trying to learn, God has always known. He can do anything or create anything. The universe and living things could not possibly have come into existence by itself.
Life is a test designed and set up by God, but he will be glad to guide us through it to the best possible life. God should be our main concern in life. One person standing with God can stand against the whole world.
The true objective of life was to get to Heaven. Life was a test in at least two ways, on a collective scale to prove that it is only the ways of God which are correct and, on an individual scale to determine which ones of us will spend eternity with God. What good was anything that a person could accomplish in life if that person failed to get to Heaven?
All we know is this earth and we cannot even imagine the eternal paradise of Heaven. The best of this earth is like rags by comparison. Heaven is what we were really created for.
There was plenty of news in 1981. The hostages in Iran had been released just after Jimmy Carter had left the presidency. One of the first things that new president Ronald Reagan did was to fire striking air traffic controllers, thus indicating that the days of union domination were over.
A warning was issued at Buffalo State College that a girl had been raped by a stranger in a nearby park. This was to be the first we would hear of Buffalo's Bike Path Rapist. He would terrorize the area and would not be caught until 2007. Tragically, an innocent man would spend 22 years in jail due to this.
In Poland, there was a movement called Solidarnosc (Solidarity). It began with a labor union at the shipyards of Gdansk and was led by future president Lech Walesa. It opened the possibility that the Soviet Union would send troops into Poland as it had with Hungary and Czechoslovakia, when movements of independence got underway there.
One day, I was walking across the Student Union at Buffalo State College and there was a bunch of people crowded around a radio, as if some important news was taking place. All I could hear from the radio was that "a sandy-haired male has been arrested".
It turned out that the "sandy-haired male" was John Hinckley, Jr. and that he had shot Ronald Reagan while Reagan was leaving an event at a hotel in Washington. I read about Hinckley and he apparently shot the president to make an impression on actress Jody Foster, because she had been in a movie, Taxi Driver, in which Hinckley related to the character in the movie, who tries to assassinate a politician.
Anyway, there is no way to say that violence on television and in movies is not harmful.
Then there was the news that Israel, feeling threatened by the nuclear program of Iraq, had launched a surprise air raid on the Osirak Nuclear Reactor in Iraq. The Israeli Air Force planes had apparently flown low over the desert and had gotten to the site of the reactor without being detected. The raid was a success but brought international outrage. Even Iran, which was at war with Iraq, condemned the raid.
In the summer of 1981 came one of the most destructive terrorist attacks ever. The government of Iran was the target. A massive explosion in Tehran killed many of Iran's top government officials. Although Ayatollah Khomeini was not among them.
Finally Egypt's Anwar Sadat, who had pioneered peace in the Middle East by meeting with Israeli leaders, was assassinated while reviewing a military parade. His vice president, Hosni Mubarak, took over. Mubarak was ultimately overthrown in the Arab Spring, more than thirty years later.
There was plenty of music in 1981. I listened often to a number of songs from years past.
Such as the rocking "Highway Star" by Deep Purple
"A World Of Our Own" by The Seekers
"Baby, Now That I've Found You" by The Foundations, the band who also did "Build Me Up, Buttercup"
"You Showed Me" by The Turtles
"Shapes Of Things" and "Heart Full Of Soul" by The Yardbirds
There was also the new music.
We first met the Go-Gos with "Our Lips Are Sealed" and "We Got The Beat".
Quincy Jones did the mellow "Ai No Corrida".
Blue Oyster Cult appeared again with "Burning For You"
The Cars had "Shake It Up"
There was a band called Diesel with the song "Sausalito Summer Night" I liked the song but we never heard much more from this band.
11) THE EIGHTIES
John Hinckley, the would-be assassin of President Reagan was often in the news throughout 1982. He came from a wealthy family, his father was in the oil business. His brother and sister were both highly successful. Yet, he ended up as a drifter who finally shot the president, after watching a movie involving an assassination attempt, in an effort to be somebody.
He was ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity. It is not as if he was getting away with anything, he was confined to a mental hospital for decades.
I was giving religion much more of my time and thought. I was anything but a blind follower and I often questioned my own beliefs. I ended up with the set of beliefs that I have today because it was those beliefs that made it through my questioning. Years of reading about science had given me a logical way of thinking. I never had any trouble believing in God and never saw any contradiction between logic and faith.
But I wondered, for example, about the power of faith in itself. Regardless of what one had faith in. One evening, I was sitting in a car waiting for someone. It was raining heavily and the rain on the windshield distorted the lights all around into bizarre shapes and forms.
What if I really had faith that the lighted shapes and forms seen through the windshield were the true reality and that what we saw ordinarily was only an illusion? Would this faith then become an entity in itself and the things that I had faith in would become real just because I had faith in them?
But then why should we want to believe in something just for the sake of believing in it? My logical thought is that the only reason that we should believe something is because it is true. Just the fact that people have always been looking for something to believe in shows that God created us to worship him.
I now understood what the Nazis and Communists had done. They had taken people who, for the most part, no longer believed in God and they had done a magnificent job of giving them something else to believe in. And God allowed the world wars to happen as tribulation for the growing disbelief.
I saw that when people don't believe in God, they just put something else in his place. Instead of serving God and going to Heaven, they will replace it with "having it made". They will put their "faith" in wealth or pleasure or their mate or intoxication in some form. Instead of worshipping God, an unbeliever might "worship" nationalism or an ideology or a leader.
Some who do believe in God only believe enough for the comfort of something to believe in without any of the demands. While the main reason for not believing in God is either that a person is living a sinful life and does not want any God to answer to or a person is disappointed about something and is "punishing" God by not believing in him.
I soon realized two things.
First, to really grasp God it is necessary to see how very different are the ways of God from the ways of the world. The two are not even on the same page.
Second, there is absolutely no connection between intelligence and goodness in people. In the worldly, conventional wisdom way of thinking, there is a close correlation between intelligence and goodness and if evolution were true, this would also be the case. But in God's way and in the reality of the world, there is absolutely no correlation whatsoever.
There is no better example of the vast difference between the ways of God and the ways of the world than Jesus himself. The life of Jesus was foretold in the Hebrew scriptures, the old part of the Bible. They waited and waited for their Messiah. But when he came, they had him executed because they resented his popularity and didn't like what He told them.
Jesus enraged people and got himself crucified because he turned everything upside-down. Except that it wasn't really upside-down. It was actually right-side-up, it was the world's way of thinking that was upside-down. He shined a light on the fact that it was the ways of the world that were upside-down and for this he was condemned.
Before being a Christian, I thought that Jesus was the ultimate authority figure. But nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus was actually the ultimate radical.
By the time of Jesus, the Israelites thought that their religious rituals, their Temple and the fact that they were descendents of Abraham made them right with God. They awaited their Messiah, thinking that he would free them from hated Roman rule.
In the worldly, conventional wisdom way of thinking, the Savior or Messiah would be well-born into a priestly family. He would be educated by the best teachers at the finest school. He would be dressed in the shiniest imported silks. If he was killed, it would be by criminals and sinful people.
But that is not what happened, in fact it was just the diametric opposite. Jesus never went to school. He worked at mundane jobs before beginning his ministry. He was not a member of the religious establishment at all. He never owned anything but his clothes.
This was to show that God does not need all of this worldly wealth and splendor. A simple wood worker, with the wisdom and power of God in him, was the Savior that is now the most influential human being that has ever lived. This was the difference between right-side-up and upside-down.
Most importantly, it was not blatantly sinful people and criminals who got Jesus killed. It was, incredibly, the religious establishment and the so-called "respectable" people. So many of the most sinful people actually repented and followed Jesus. It was the establishment, which felt threatened by his growing popularity, and resented how he pointed out their hypocrisy and emphasis on empty rituals instead of having their hearts in the right place.
The ways of the world are still upside down. For one example, look at how we idolize someone because they can throw a ball or sing a song but truly good people, who are the real heroes, go unrecognized.
Just the fact that Jesus was crucified tells us a lot. The Jews at the time of Jesus had their own justice system, but they were not allowed to put anyone to death. If they felt that one of their own people had committed a crime worthy of death, they had to bring it to the Romans.
The religious establishment wanted to be rid of Jesus. If they could had discredited him in any, such as by proving that one of his miracles was a deception, they would gladly have done so. The fact that they went to all the trouble of dealing with their pagan occupiers in order to get him executed shows us that they were unable to discredit him in any other way.
My idea of Christian theology centered on the idea of perfection. It was not about being good, it was about being perfect. Since God is perfect, not just good but perfect, he cannot accept anything which is less than perfect.
If we have a perfect ocean of water and a little bit of imperfect water to it, the whole ocean becomes imperfect. This is why Jesus explained that anyone who fails at one point of the law is actually guilty of breaking the whole law.
No ordinary person is perfect. People can be very good, but still not perfect. But God helped us along by sending into the world a very special person, Jesus, who was actually begotten from God and did not inherit the ordinary human sin nature.
If a person truly accepts Jesus as his or her Savior, when God goes to judge that person he looks not at the person being judged but at Jesus, the person's Savior, who had no sin.
Sin has to be punished. To leave sin unpunished would compromise God's perfect justice system and bring about imperfection. The Bible states that "the wages of sin is death".
But when God judges that person, he sees the death of Jesus on the cross as paying the price for that person's sin.
Take the rich man in Hell in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 16, as an example. The man actually had quite a bit of goodness in him. He did not want his five brothers to arrive in Hell, like he had. This goes to show that just being good is not enough, one must be perfect, and the only way to do that is to go through Jesus.
I also found it significant that John The Baptist, the herald of Jesus, was from a hereditary priestly family, while Jesus himself was not. That represents the end of the traditional priesthood, and the sacrifices for atonement which they offered, to make way for the once and for all sacrifice, the life of Jesus.
I decided to review the kind of music that I was listening to and did away with anything that was nasty or blatantly sinful. That was one good thing about Sixties music, it was mostly light-hearted romance songs.
During the Eighties, I really spent a lot of time with Sixties music. I had an ever-growing record collection and there are so many Sixties songs that today I associate with the Eighties, rather than the Sixties, because that is when I listened to them so much. But that does not mean that there was not a lot of great new music during the Eighties, because there was.
Around 1982, there was "Roseanna" by Toto. It was always on the radio.
I bought the album by The Police "Ghost In The Machine". The gloomy song on it, "Invisible Sun", was about the troubles in Northern Ireland.
There was the mellow "Us And Them" by Pink Floyd.
And the just as mellow "Run For The Roses" by Dan Fogelberg
April Wine reappeared with "All Over Town".
The Stray Cats did "The Stray Cat Strut".
John Cougar Mellencamp sang "Jack And Diane".
"Kids In America" was actually by British singer Kim Wilde and it really had that Brit New Wave sound to it.
A Flock Of Seagulls brought more new wave with "I Ran So Far Away".
There was "Tainted Love" by Soft Cell.
After The Fire did "Der Kommisar"
New Wave music was a technical step forward from Rock and Disco. The perfection of electronic music made entirely new types of sound possible. I thought that the foundation of New Wave might actually have been that old Sixties band, The Doors, with their extensive keyboarding.
I generally liked New Wave music, particularly Blondie and "Kids In America", but did not have too much concern for putting definitions on every song I heard. I wondered about being a musician myself and bought a guitar at a pawn shop. But I had too many other interests and would just spend a few minutes with it now and then.
Then there was the oldies. I became friends with a couple who would play Sixties songs all evening and talk about the bands and music of that time. Even though it was the Eighties, I spent at least as much time listening to music from the Sixties and early Seventies as to contemporary music.
There was "Summer In The City" and "You Didn't Have To Be So Nice" by The Loving Spoonful.
"Double Shot Of My Baby's Love" by The Swinging Medallions
"This Diamond Ring" By Gary Lewis And The Playboys
"Judy In Disguise" by John Fred And His Playboy Band
"This Magic Moment" by Jay And The Americans
"Here Comes My Baby" by The Tremeloes (A beloved girl used to be called "Baby")
There was no song that typified the music of the Sixties quite like "Bend Me, Shape Me" by American Breed.
The Monkees most rocking song was "Valleri".
"Catch Us If You Can" by The Dave Clark Five
That old favorite, "My Baby Loves Loving" by White Plains
Another old favorite, "A World Of Our Own" by The Seekers
"Where Have All The Flowers Gone?", which was done by a number of different bands.
Finally, two of the best songs ever made. "Just My Style" by Gary Lewis And The Playboys and "She'd Rather Be With Me" by The Turtles.
In 1982, there were two wars going on at the same time. Argentina made a surprise takeover of Britain's Falkland Islands and a task force was dispatched from Britain to get them back, in what became known as The Falklands War. Both countries were U.S. allies and Ronald Reagan tried unsuccessfully to mediate a peaceful solution.
While that was going on, another war broke out in the Middle East. Israel sent a force into Lebanon to eradicate the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). Yasir Arafat was not captured.
Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev died. He would be replaced by Yuri Andropov, who had once been in charge of the KGB. But he was old and ailing also and he would be premier for little more than a year. He was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, who would also rule for not much more than a year. When he died, that represented the end of the "old guard" in the Soviet Communist Party.
I had not finished college at Buffalo State but took an interest in developing my industrial skills. I constructed extensive wooden shelves in our basement and was always interested in learning more about fixing and building things.
A law was passed that permitted turning right on a red light after the driver had determined that no more cars were going through the green light and it was safe to turn. This made driving easier. The number one car at the time seemed to be the Chevrolet Nova. They were everywhere.
I wanted to be in the U.S. Air Force. I did really well on the entrance exam, particularly the electronics section, and was supposed to be trained as an avionics communication specialist. This meant working on and testing the radio communications systems used in aircraft. But, I still suffered at times from a moderate amount of stuttering and they didn't want to give me the job, since a requirement for it is perfect speech.
The owners of the Kentucky Fried Chicken store where I had worked were opening up a combination restaurant and disco in a new mall, The Rainbow Center, right near the falls. I was put to work there.
It was called Scruples and was to be a restaurant during the day and then a disco after dinnertime. It was a nice place, adjoining what was then known as The Wintergarden so that the windows of Scruples seemed to be looking out into the tropics.
It was packed to capacity when it first opened. Being just past the American end of the Rainbow Bridge, it was very popular with Canadians, whose bars closed at 1 AM. In the summer, there were tourists from all over the world in there. In the winter, business inevitably dropped off but there was at that time what was known as A Festival Of Lights right outside that drew people downtown.
During dinner time, the album "Aja" by Steely Dan would often be playing in Scruples. But at night, this was the time when Michael Jackson's "Thriller" album had just been released. It was wildly popular and through the doors came an endless parade of black guys, wearing one white glove and trying to look like Michael Jackson.
Actually, I think that his earlier album "Off The Wall" was technically better. Although "Thriller" sold more albums.
Another of the songs played most at Scruples was "Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats. But I got to where I was really tired of hearing it.
A very popular song of 1983 was "Uptown Girl" by Billy Joel.
Another song was "Our House" by Madness.
"Keep The Fire Burning" by REO Speedwagon
1983 was a landmark year in entertainment. If for no other reason, it was the year we met the "Material Girl", Madonna, with the song by that name.
Madonna is, in many ways, the ultimate celebrity. She has managed to remain in the entertainment headlines, in one way or another, ever since 1983. Madonna has a way of continuously reinventing herself so that she is always right there in front of us.
It is like a magician who can make things disappear. But she is the opposite, making it so that she always appears, in one way or another.
In September of 1983, a South Korean passenger jet accidentally strayed into the airspace of the Soviet Union. A couple of Soviet military jets flew alongside it for a while. The military jets then seemed to have received an order to shoot it down. They dropped back and fired one or more missiles into the plane's engines. Everyone on board the plane was killed. Ronald Reagan angrily referred to the Soviet Union as "The Evil Empire".
There were soldiers from a number of nations in Lebanon on a peacekeeping mission following the war the previous year. The barracks of the U.S. Marines was bombed, resulting in a death toll of over two hundred. The French barracks was also bombed, but the toll was not as high.
There was a tank truck that would deliver water to the U.S. barracks. Militants got an identical truck and made the tank into a massive bomb. They then hijacked the truck that would be delivering the water and drove the bomb truck into the barracks. They then detonated the bomb.
Early in 1984, I brought about some changes. Maybe I felt bad about not finishing college. But I began to really do a lot of reading. I was already reading about religion and exercise and things like that, but I began much more broad general reading. I admired people who really knew a lot and wanted to gain all the knowledge I could. I saw more than ever before how knowledge is power.
I was into serious weight lifting. But I had long thought that of the mind, the body and, the spirit, the body is really the least important. I had managed to deadlift 500 pounds and bench press over 300 and physical fitness would remain a top priority all my life, but other interests were crowding in.
This passion for reading would lead to the writing that I do today. The best way to learn to write is actually by reading. I began concentrating on world events and began reading news periodicals. I wanted to know all about other countries and read National Geographic in particular, and also Readers' Digest. I could still read endlessly about science, particularly astronomy and archeology. That old book about ancient civilizations that I had brought from the Canadian side became valuable yet again.
I just wanted to know everything. But as I have always been, I was all-around and not too focused on any one thing.
I followed that continuing Iran-Iraq war until it finally ended.
I continued reading Christian books, particularly those of Hal Lindsey, Dave Hunt and, Joni Eareckson Tada. In a way, these can be considered as my spiritual mentors. I liked the artwork in Jehovah's Witnesses books and although I am not in this group, sometimes I would read these. I would also read the periodical, The Plain Truth, by The Worldwide Church Of God.
I had a strong sense of improvement. A person should do what they practically can to get better all the time. When it comes to things like exercise, quitting smoking, losing weight or, starting in a new direction, the best thing to do was to just decide what needs to be done, come up with a practical plan, and then just do it. We already know how to live good lives, the problem is that it is often things that we do not want to hear.
When I talked to people to any extent, I usually wanted to have some kind of productive and informative conversation. I did not want to talk about a bunch of nonsense or gossip about other people's business.
What about patriotism? Waving a flag is the easiest thing to do, anyone could do it. Furthermore, all of the modern countries of the world stand for roughly the same principles. What was really the difference in being American or Canadian or Japanese or, any brand of European? There were differences, of course. But the differences were minor, rather than major.
I thought that the way to be a patriot was to improve one's self, to live a better life. To keep improving. To bring more of God into the country. To be healthy and fit and well-informed.
But on the other hand, we should never be too sure of ourselves. In my opinion, the definition of a wise person is one that will thank you when you prove him wrong.
I was an immigrant. There were plenty of other immigrants or foreign students around. I had always studied the world atlas and the news and I saw these immigrants as an opportunity to get to actually know people from these other countries. Immigrants tend to have a broad world view and it is good to at least be exposed to different ways of thinking.
Immigrants are the only people in the world who actually chose their country, everyone else has no control over where they are born. The typical immigrant has to have more "get up and go" to move to the other side of the world. Every immigrant has a life pattern that bears at least some resemblance to mine.
But yet my immigrant story is inevitably quite different from most others. I came to America from another country but it was my people that founded America. America is very much a British Protestant creation. I do have culture clash but it is not with what America itself is about, it is with the values that other people brought later. America is about freedom and "fitting in", other than obeying the law, is not what America is supposed to be about. For example, being pressured to be friends with your neighbors is not friendship at all, it is just a control mechanism. Being expected to smile while in the supermarket is another "fit in" mechanism.
I have definitely undergone some reverse culture shock. I realized how capitalism tends to increase the general level of nastiness that is permissible. Capitalism is based on competition. The system is productive, but a lot of people cannot compete without being nasty and this gets into the culture of a capitalist country.
All I can say is that it is wonderful to sit around with a bunch of well-informed people and have an intelligent discussion without anyone saying anything nasty.
Another factor is the new types of food that immigrants introduce. The average immigrant to America will live several years longer than the average person that was born in America. This is simply because of the tendency to keep eating their traditional foods. But by the second generation, when the usual processed and junk foods have caught on, this advantage has disappeared.
But even though I wanted to learn from other people, I was never a follower. I was always very individual and I could be influenced by someone in a positive way without necessarily taking on "the whole package".
In terms of politics, I was a Reagan anti-Communist. But in all honesty, this was mainly because I got the idea that Republicans were more Christian than were Democrats.
In the latter part of 1984, I worked in an automotive shop for a few months, as well as at Scruples. I first went to the Catholic shrine in Lewiston, NY, Fatima Shrine.
1984 was the year of the Los Angeles Olympics. Some countries had boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics because of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. As you might expect, Soviet Bloc countries retaliated by boycotting these Olympics and holding their own games.
Ronald Reagan was still popular and easily won reelection against Walter Mondale, who had been Jimmy Carter's vice president. The bloody carnage of the Iran-Iraq war showed no sign of ending. A millionaire Australian living in the U.S., Christopher Bernard Wilder, went on a killing spree of young women. Ronald Reagan made a joke about bombing the Soviet Union, not knowing that the nearby microphone was turned on (I wonder now if maybe he did it purposely).
There was a horrific massacre in a McDonalds in San Ysidro, California. India's Indira Gandhi had earlier attacked the minority Sikh's Golden Temple, but was assassinated by two of her bodyguards who were Sikhs. Also in India, deadly chemicals leaked from a Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, killing thousands of people.
I had religious reasons for being interested in the news. I was very interested in the prophecies in the Bible about the end of the world. There was every sign that we were in the "Last Days" now.
Jesus was bound by prophecy to return within the same generation that Jerusalem came back under Jewish control after a long time ruled by Gentiles. There is no mistaking this, it was 1967. The prophecy does not say " when they come back to Israel", which was 1948. But to Jerusalem, which was not until 1967.
It is absolutely amazing that the Jews survived the long diaspora at all, being such a small group of people. But the prophecies stated that they would, and they did. It was prophecied how they would be persecuted during the diaspora. This persecution actually worked in their favor, keeping them from being absorbed by the host countries.
Bible readers for hundreds of years must have wondered how the final wars of the world will start over all that useless sand. But then oil was found under all that sand in the Middle East.
There has to be a "one-world system" in the final days of the world. Today, for the first time in history, instant global transactions move endless billions of dollars around the world every day. We are in a global village like no one could have imagined even a generation ago.
There has to be fearsome destruction in war in the final days. There will be one great nation that will be utterly destroyed by fire within one hour. Today, we have nuclear missiles that could very easily bring this about.
These are just a few items, I do not want to go into detail here. But how much of a coincidence can it be that this return of the Jews to Jerusalem, the one-world system and, the nuclear bombs all appeared in human history at about the same time?
The Bible reveals that after the sinful world is destroyed in this apocalypse, Jesus himself will rule the world directly and it will be the paradise that it was always intended to be. The whole reason for this and for allowing evil to exist is to demonstrate that the ways of God are right and the ways of Satan are wrong.
When Satan rebelled against God, it would require little effort for God to destroy him then. But that would only prove that God is more powerful than Satan. It would not prove that God is right and Satan is wrong. That is where the world comes in, to show that things only work out when done in God's way.
This subject of Bible prophecy has been so discredited by people reading too much into it or saying that the world will end on a certain day. But that is actually a part of the prophecies in itself and when one really studies this subject, it is absolutely amazing.
In music, there was "State Of Confusion By The Kinks"
"Panama" by Van Halen
"Dancing In The Ruins" by Blue Oyster Cult
In older music, I often listened to "Kicks" by Paul Revere And The Raiders
"When You Walk In The Room" by The Searchers
Early in 1985, I got another side job while I continued to work at Scruples. This time it was sweeping and mopping the Rainbow Mall, in which Scruples was located, at night. It was not the most desirable job, but it gave me the opportunity to do quite a bit of thinking.
I remember the news that O. J. Simpson, the former star player from the local Buffalo Bills and now an actor, had married Nicole Brown.
The news that the ailing Konstantin Chernenko had died was no surprise. The new Soviet leader was Mikhail Gorbachev. He was much younger, in his early fifties. He had first appeared on the international scene when he had been sent on a trip to Britain in the autumn of 1984. I was halfway surprised that the long-time Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, never made it to the top position.
Gorbachev quickly began major changes. He realized that Communism needed to be reformed and began programs of Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness to the outside world). He became very popular in the west although he never achieved quite the same popularity in his own country.
Gorbachev affected me also. I followed his efforts at reform closely. I had very much a global way of thinking already and this further opened up my view of the world. I am certain that the Cold War would not have ended peacefully as it did without Mikhail Gorbachev.
I began working full-time in the spring at Classic Fence. Working with wood and fences provided more opportunity to learn practical skills and it meant working outside in the summer. I often did wood working on my own and had an ever-growing collection of tools. Fences cannot be built in the winter where I live and so getting laid off for the cold part of the year provided an opportunity to do a lot of reading.
I had belatedly realized the power of the mind and wanted to learn all that I could. A person should seek knowledge throughout life, and not just in school. Wherever a person is, there will be opportunities to learn something new.
I still would go to bars on the weekends, although not often and I had stopped drinking alcohol. I would just get a Coke.
The Late Show was still there and there was the Club Miami just down Main Street. Third Street was an area with a lot of bars. Night clubs seem to operate best when they are in groups. That way people can hop from one to another. Bars rarely last a long time, soon people get tired of them and want to go to a new place. Bar owners often close one down and open another.
In 1985, the Reagan Administration was undergoing a large military buildup. The idea seems to have been to force the Soviet Union into an arms race that it couldn't afford. The buildup centered around a program of fantastic and futuristic weapons that were to be deployed in space. It was dubbed "Star Wars", after the movie.
At this point, my feeling is that the Star Wars program of the Eighties was mostly a bluff. Whoever heard of a small nuclear bomb in orbit that was surrounded by lasing rods pointing outward? In the event of a nuclear missile attack, the bomb would be detonated. This would cause powerful laser beams to emanate from the lasing rods, which would destroy incoming missiles.
Come on, we are watching too much television.
Iran had gained the upper hand in the war with Iraq in 1984. It launched a new offensive in 1985 to follow it up, but the Iraqis managed to halt this offensive. The endless and deadly stalemate went on. They were too closely matched for either one to manage to defeat the other, so the war just dragged on.
Violence in India between Sikhs and Hindus was in the news continuously. The goal of the Sikh was an independent country called Khalistan.
The previous year, Indira Gandhi's troops had raided the Golden Temple of the Sikhs but then two Sikh bodyguards had managed to assassinate her. In the deadliest act of terrorism involving an aircraft in history, before 9 / 11, an Air India jet on the way from Montreal to London suddenly disintegrated and crashed in the sea near the coast of Ireland.
Coca-Cola introduced a change in it's formula known as New Coke. The response by the public left nothing in doubt. Get rid of this stuff and give us our old Coke back. Coca-Cola continued sales of the original Coke, now known as Coke Classic. The New Coke was on the shelves as well, called just that. The New Coke was later dubbed Coca-Cola 2.
I have adored Coca Cola all my life. It is the one thing that some people may think of as junk food that I have not given up. But I don't drink a lot of it and only drink zero sugar. I actually think that a little bit of acid is good for digestion after a meal.
There was a devastating earthquake in Mexico City. The news came that the wreck of the Titanic had been found. A massive series of rock concerts were held to raise money to alleviate the devastating famine in Ethiopia. Two major concerts were held in Philadelphia and London and smaller concerts in various other countries.
A frightful new disease appeared in the headlines. The disease destroyed the immune system and was almost inevitably fatal. It was spread by illicit sexual contact or sharing of needles during intravenous drug use. There was no vaccination and no cure. It was known by it's acronym, AIDS. Religious conservatives immediately pointed out that one must generally engage in sinful behavior to get this terrible disease, so we can assume that it is a judgment from God.
There was new music during 1985. "Obsession" by Animotion
"Dreamtime" by Daryl Hall
"Sunset Grill" by Don Henley
This was America and sooner or later, there had to be a band named after a gun, .38 Special.
But in 1985, I really got back into the music of the Sixties.
I bought the record "Expressway To Your Heart" by The Soul Survivors.
I did not remember the song "Friday On My Mind" by the Australian band The Easybeats from when I was a child. I somehow missed it. But I really became fond of it at this time.
Then there was "Time Won't Let Me" by The Outsiders.
And that old favorite from back when I lived in Canada, "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight" by Tommy Boyce And Bobby Hart.
1986 began with the death of singer Ricky Nelson. He had songs such as "Traveling Man", "Hello, Mary Lou" and, "Garden Party". He had also played the youngest brother on the old family show "Ozzie And Harriet".
Ricky Nelson was still doing a lot of concerts, although he has past the days when he was earning a lot of money. There was an old airplane that he used to get from one concert to another. The plane had crashed. They had old reruns of Ozzie And Harriet on television all day.
There was soon another tragic crash. I was watching the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger on television from John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Suddenly, something happened. It seemed to split in two and to leave two trails of smoke. At first, I wondered if this was something that was supposed to happen. The shuttle had actually exploded, killing all astronauts aboard.
Down in Haiti the ruler of the country, Jean-Claude Duvalier, was overthrown by a popular revolt and went into exile in France. Haitian taxi drivers in Montreal were so elated that they all stopped their taxis, bringing traffic on many main roads temporarily to a standstill.
Duvalier, known as "Baby Doc" was the son of the previous ruler, "Papa Doc". Doesn't this seem just like a miniature version of the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, who had followed his father on the throne?
Before we knew it, another autocratic ruler was overthrown and went into foreign exile. This time it was the long-time president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos. He went off to exile in Hawaii, accompanied by wife Imelda, who was famous for her vast collection of shoes. At that time it seemed utterly impossible that his son would one day be President of the Philippines.
The world was introduced to the star of democracy that replaced him, Corazon Aquino. She was the widow of a former opponent of Marcos, who had been in the U.S. and had been gunned down at the airport as soon as he had landed back in the Philippines.
Then, there was more news. The U.S. had launched an air raid on Libya as punishment for it's alleged involvement in terrorist activities. In particular, the home of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi had been bombed. The Libyans reported that his adopted daughter had been killed.
Along the way came the worst news of all. The nuclear reactor at Chernobyl (now Chornobyl) had undergone a meltdown. The Soviet news agency, TASS, at first announced a "minor mishap" had occurred, but soon the scale of the disaster became apparent.
Due to the wind direction, Sweden was one of the first countries outside the Soviet Union to detect the radiation from the meltdown. Ultimately, it would even cause a moderate increase in detectable radiation in my native Forest of Dean in distant England.
The next thing we knew, the U.S. Government had been secretly selling armaments to Iran, which was, of course, still at war with Iraq. The money was then being used to help the anti-Communist guerrillas in Nicaragua, the Contras. This brought about a scaled-down version of Watergate, known as the Iran-Contra Scandal.
Iraq was seen as a Soviet client state. I have never been quite sure how close Iraq was to the Soviet Union back in the Cold War. Even though they may have had common cause, Moslems and Communists can only get so close to one another. But anyway, to the anti-Communist Reagan Administration, even Iran must have been preferable to Iraq.
The Iran-Contra Scandal was a scandal in Iran as well. America was still considered as "The Great Satan".
1986 brought what was perhaps the best song of the 1980s. "Cruel Summer" by Bananarama.
I still liked Sixties music. "I Had Too Much To Dream" by The Electric Prunes and "Silhouettes" by Herman's Hermits.
I did ever more reading, particularly when laid off from the fence company for the winter. I would often go to used book sales, sometimes buying former school books. Here is a few of the books that stand out in my memory.
A high-ranking Soviet defector named Arkady Shevchenko wrote a very good book about the inner workings of the Soviet Government before Gorbachev. The book was titled "Breaking With Moscow".
I read several science books by the Russian-born writer Isaac Azimov. He wrote so many books, he was like a machine that writes.
There was also the excellent "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan. It really brought the science of astronomy to the general public.
I went through biographies of The Kennedys, Gandhi and, Gaddafi. And books about business like "Grinding it Out" by Ray Kroc, the story of McDonalds, "On A Clear Day, You Can Still See General Motors" and a book about Ford, which I cannot remember the title of.
It seems best to me to be familiar with all major points of view, whether I agree with them or not. At least to see what other people believe. I read the Communist Manifesto, the Qu'ran (Koran), The Rig Veda, The Bhagavad Gita and, The Upanishads. I read part of Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf (My Struggle).
The thing I did not understand about the Qu'ran is that Moslems accept Jesus as a special prophet who had a virgin birth. Islam is, by the way, the only religion except Christianity which acknowledges Jesus. But Moslems feel that Christians are mistaken to take Jesus as the actual Son of God.
In my thinking, the very definition of a father is "he who causes a woman to give birth". If Jesus had a virgin birth, that can only mean that God (or Allah) is the one who caused Mary to give birth. A virgin birth of a special prophet has to be miraculous. So then, God must be the father of Jesus and Jesus must be his son. Both the Bible and the Qu'ran state that Jesus had a virgin birth. I do not see any other way to look at it.
One thing that most people do not realize about Moslems and Christians is how close they actually are. Of all the major religions in the world, these two are the most similar to one another. There is a close correlation between the way a Moslem tries to live his life and the way a Christian tries to live his life. If we have four people, a Christian, a Moslem, a Jew and, a non-religious person, the first three are far closer to one another than any of them are to the fourth.
In the Middle East, both Christians and Jews have often lived peaceably under Moslem rule. Today, a significant portion of the population of Egypt is Coptic Christian. The Qu'ran tells Moslems that Christians and Jews are "people of the book".
In earlier days, the two religions were actually more similar, at least in form if not theology, than they are today. Christianity is the one that has changed the most since that time. Remember that Moslems have not been as afflicted by secularism as Christians have. Moslems have never had a Darwin to put people off to religion.
I also saw other parallels in Christianity and Islam. Terrorism and cults, for example. Someone in a Moslem country might join a terrorist organization in the same way that someone in a western country might join a cult or other fringe group. Terrorists and western cults are both rebelling against many of the same things.
The western media is yet another parallel. Moslem fundamentalists decry the bad influence of the western media. They might be surprised to know that they are only saying the same things that Christian fundamentalists in the west have been saying for years.
I would not hesitate to read books about why there is no God. One of the reasons that I became a strong Christian is that the arguments against the existence of God make so little sense.
I have never read as many classics as I would like, I am too busy with the Bible. But I did get in Tom Sawyer and Catcher In The Rye. For some reason, Catcher In The Rye was a favorite of both the man who shot John Lennon and the one who shot Ronald Reagan.
I was growing fond of Toronto, about 90 minutes drive away. I knew some people who lived there and tried to visit on a regular basis. In 1986, I first went up the CN (Canadian National) Tower. It was, at that time, the highest free-standing structure in the world. This was truly a great city. There were other great cities also, but not one that I could drive to in 90 minutes.
1987 in America was really a throwback to the Sixties. But it had nothing to do with music. 1987 was when America seemed to come to terms with the Vietnam War. Previously, there had been little discussion about the war. This war was always in the news when I was a child yet, I knew far more about the Second World War than I did about what actually happened in the Vietnam War.
There were suddenly several movies about it. Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill. There was a lot on television about the war and a serial taking place there.
I read a number of books about the war, both factual histories and novels.
Another book that I happened across in 1987 was "Manson In His Own Words". This was basically the autobiography of Charles Manson, whose gang had committed murders in Los Angeles in 1969 that shocked the country. After reading that, I read the book already in print about it, Helter Skelter.
The only new song that really comes to mind from 1987 is "Pump Up The Volume" by Marrs.
There was plenty of news in 1987. There were clashes between Iranian patrol boats and the ships that Ronald Reagan had sent to keep the Persian Gulf safe for shipping. The U.S. retaliated for attacks by destroying Iranian oil platforms. The crews on the platforms were always warned first and given time to evacuate.
A major cult was in the news. This one in the town of Antelope, Oregon and run by a native of India, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. It did not end as badly as Jonestown but the Bhagwan had accumulated quite a collection of Rolls Royces.
One word became very familiar on the evening news: Intifada. This was an uprising in Palestine against Israel. Palestinians throwing stones and bottles of gasoline would be a news staple for quite some time. At the same time, there was a similar uprising in South Africa seeking majority rule.
Finally, the inevitable happened. The worst stock market crash in America since 1929. Reagan had now been governing for nearly seven years. He was very pro business. The trouble is that if wealthy people are allowed to have things their own way too much and for too long, it is not good for either them or anyone else.
In my view, this is simply because most goods and services are produced for consumption by the average person. When the wealthy take too much money for themselves, and pay workers too little, there comes a point where there is not enough money in circulation to buy all of the goods and services that have been produced.
Since it makes no sense to produce goods and services that are not going to sell, factories cut back on production, meaning that workers have even less money, and it spirals into a crash. That is what happened in 1929, as well as 1987. The crash in 2008 was about houses, rather than consumer goods.
One thing that these crashes, including 2008, have in common is that they came after two consecutive Republican presidential terms. The far right Republicanism of Reagan and George W. Bush is a throwback to the 1920s. The more moderate Republicanism of Eisenhower, Nixon and, Ford did not produce any such crashes.
In politics, I had now seen how destructive it was to go too far left, in the late Seventies in both the U.S. and Britain, and now how equally destructive it was to go too far right. I had been a Republican but had noticed that they represent the few people making a lot of money and their mission is to just do whatever they have to do and say whatever they have to say to keep it that way.
But this is not good for anyone in the long run, wealthy people included. The whole economic system depends on consumer spending and when people do not have enough money to buy all the goods and services that have been produced, a recession results.
Too much capitalism also brings out the nastiness in people because the system is based on competition and a lot of people cannot compete without being nasty. It was said of the Eighties that "the only sin was not to win".
Conservatives and Republicans do have a point when the other side goes too far leftward. The predominant sign that an economic system has gone too far to the left is inflation. This hinders lending and cuts into people's purchasing power, also leading to recession.
In early 1988, I decided to move on and got a job in a factory. Thermal Foams made foam insulation and was on Kenmore Avenue in Kenmore. In the summer, I found a higher-paying factory job at Carborundum Abrasives closer to home near Niagara Falls Airport.
I was laid off from there for a time and I worked as a temporary worker at Cascades Paper, another factory. However by the time that was over, I was called back to Carborundum.
That was what factory work was like in the later 1980s. Factory paychecks gave me more money to spend on music. I found some more old Sixties songs that I really liked.
There was "Journey To The Center Of Your Mind" by The Amboy Dukes. I always presumed that they were from Perth Amboy, New Jersey but they were actually from Detroit.
I really liked "Starship Trooper" by Yes. For some reason, it always reminded me of the Vietnam War.
A really rocking oldie was "Hot Smoke And Sasafrass" by Bubble Puppy.
1988 started off with evangelist scandals. It had been Jim Bakker the year before. Jimmy Swaggart condemned him, but now it was Swaggart's turn.
The campaign was underway to determine the successor of Ronald Reagan. There was Reagan's vice president George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, the governor of that most Democrat of U.S. states, Massachusetts. There was also the outside possibility of our first black president with Jesse Jackson, who had actually been with Martin Luther King when he had been shot in 1968.
Mars was closer to earth than it had been in a long time or would be again for a long time. It was like a bright orange light in the evening sky. There was terrible drought in the U.S. in the summer of 1988. Japan was often in the news just for the ever-growing strength of it's economy.
The ship, U.S.S. Vincennes on patrol in the Persian Gulf, had accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger jet after mistaking it for an attacking military jet. All on board were killed.
That seemingly endless Iran-Iraq war finally did come to a negotiated end. Mikhail Gorbachev decided to begin pulling soldiers out of Afghanistan.
There is a saying that history repeats itself. Nowhere is that more true than in the endlessly fascinating country of Iran. This is a country which goes back about three thousand years. It has been a Moslem country for actually only about half of it's history. The coming of Islam to Iran meant the end of the pre-Islamic Persia.
But the interaction between the two halves of Iran's history still has not completely played out yet. The Revolution of 1979 was but a modern reenactment of the original coming of Islam to Iran. The Shah represented pre-Islamic Persia, in fact he had once held a grand celebration of ancient Persia in the ruins of Persepolis. Ayatollah Khomeini represents the new Islamic order that superseded the old Persia, but has never totally eradicated it.
In yet another example of history repeating itself, we have the resemblance between the situations of Martin Luther and Gorbachev. Both saw themselves as reformers and did not want to completely destroy the old order. Both men broke down the barriers to reform that were in their way. But after they had done that, neither was able to control the forces they had let loose.
Luther always considered himself a Catholic, but he saw that the church was in dire need of reformation. He never had any intention of creating rival churches. But once he had breached the wall of papal authority, he was followed by men like Calvin, Zwingli and, Knox who had no intention of reconciling with the Catholic Church and formed entirely separate churches.
In the same way, Gorbachev always considered himself as a Communist and only wanted modernization and reform. But once he had checked the authority of the old guard, he was supplanted by Boris Yeltsin, who jilted the Communist Party altogether. Yeltsin publicly destroyed his Communist Party membership card.
The story of Khomeini was not totally Iranian. I saw him as borrowing from Gandhi in that he successfully portrayed the Shah as not only an oppressor, but an agent of foreign oppressors.
In other news, There was an airshow of Italian military jets, the Frecce Tricolori, at the U.S. military base near Frankfurt in Germany. Two of the planes collided, spraying burning jet fuel all over the crowd watching from a nearby field.
In Pakistan, President Zia boarded a U.S. military C-130 cargo plane. Pakistan was considering purchase of a number of the planes. But someone managed to find out about Zia's itinerary and sabotaged the plane. Zia was killed and it is still not known who did it.
The bonds binding the Soviet Union were loosening. But that was not all good news. The Armenians and neighboring Azerbaijanis (or Azeris) were not getting along very well. There was an enclave of Armenians, known as Nagorno-Karabakh, living in the midst of the Azerbaijanis. Those Armenians wanted to unite with Armenia, even though their territory was not contiguous. This set off a war that would last for a number of years.
The year ended with Armenia in the news for another reason, a deadly earthquake in Yerevan.
There is not a single song from 1989 that I recall while writing this. But there were plenty of oldies that I listened to.
I really liked that old Sixties instrumental "Out Of Limits" by The Marketts.
There was "Down By The Dam" by REO Speedwagon, that I happened across.
Billy Joe Royal is known for "Down In The Boondocks". But he had two other songs that were really good too, "Cherry Hill Park" and "I Knew You When".
No song would remind me of 1989 like "Maybe I Know" by Leslie Gore. I bought that record and would spend quite a bit of time listening to it.
I was forever reading. Here are a few more that I can recall from the late Eighties.
The True Believer by Eric Hoffer is a classic of how human nature drives world events. It is one of my most-read books ever.
I read a number of books by Richard Nixon such as No More Vietnams and Real Peace.
There was the American Indian classic Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.
I read several books, whose names I cannot now recall, about the KGB, the GRU and, Spetsnaz. The GRU was the Soviet military version of the KGB.
The Boy Scout Manual is actually a book that is full of practical knowledge. I really thought highly of it.
There was an excellent book all about the Apollo Space Program that I read. "Carrying The Fire" by Michael Collins.
I often went up to Toronto. The real-estate market there was red hot. Investors were all over hunting for properties to buy because prices were increasing so fast. Like all such bubbles, it couldn't possible last and it collapsed in 1990. But Toronto was still an awesome city.
1989 was absolutely jam packed with news. A devastating oil spill occurred when the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska. The ailing Ayatollah Khomeini died on the same day as the crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square.
As the year proceeded, major world events seemed to come even faster. The protests in eastern Europe against Communism continued. East Germans were travelling to Hungary and then from there crossing into Austria, which was not a Communist country. This started the rapid series of events that led to the East German Government just declaring that the border was open and residents could come and go as they pleased.
The Berlin Wall had finally become irrelevant and would soon come down. What a day that was! I went to work at Carborundum Abrasives in the morning, unsure that was going to happen next and when I got out of work, the wall had been opened.
In all honesty, the real hero of this time was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was when he made it clear that he was not going to support a crackdown that the government of East Germany just decided to declare the border open.
One country after another threw off it's Communist rulers. Poland had done so already. It looked like the one hold out might be Nicolae Ceaucescu of Romania. But it was not to be, his fall was the most spectacular of all. He was overthrown and executed on Christmas Day, 1989.
The collapse of Communism in eastern Europe was not totally good news. It turns out that Communism was all that was holding Yugoslavia together and when it disintegrated, the country disintegrated as well. It would be wracked by a nasty series of wars in the following decade.
George H.W. Bush held a summit with Gorbachev on Malta. Some workers at Carborundum had a television set up to watch a baseball game in San Francisco. Suddenly, the ground there began to shake. It was the Loma Prieta Earthquake that did so much damage.
Then came more news. The leader of Panama, Manuel Noriega, had ignored requests to crack down on drug shipments through his country. He often spoke out against the U.S. Government. George H.W. Bush sent an invasion force to topple Noriega. He took up refuge in the Vatican Embassy, but eventually surrendered.
The decade ended with a real shock. Marc Lepine shot and killed fourteen women at the University of Montreal and wounded many more. This can happen anywhere.
I did some more writing about the Bible prophecies about the last days of the world.
12) THE NINETIES, PART ONE
A few days before the end of the Eighties, I happened to meet a girl named Karen. She more or less shared my religious beliefs. Before the end of 1990, we would be married.
We took a number of trips to Toronto, to the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) and the CN Tower and to all the tourist destinations in the Niagara Falls area. We went all over the area before and after our wedding. To Rochester, NY, Erie, PA. To Brantford, Cambridge, Kitchener and, London in Ontario. A place to go on a Saturday was to have lunch in the food court of the Jackson Square Mall in Hamilton and then spend some time in the adjoining library.
In the news, the Iran-Iraq War had ended a couple of years before. Kuwait was another neighbor of Iraq, very rich in oil. I had thought Kuwait was in support of Iraq, it was an Arab country and an Iranian missile had landed in Kuwait during the war. I was unsure whether it was intentional or not.
I was surprised to now read that Iraqi military forces were massing on the border of Kuwait. Still, it could be just some type of maneuvering. But on August 2, 1990, the newspaper headlines read "Iraq Sweeps Into Kuwait".
Saddam Hussein wanted to reincorporate Kuwait into Iraq. The ruling family of Kuwait, al-Sabah, went into exile and made a plea to the U.N for help.
Horrible stories emerged, supposedly from within Kuwait, about how the occupation force was treating the Kuwaitis. What Saddam's soldiers were allegedly doing to Kuwaiti girls. There was a scene on the news of a Kuwaiti man with his hands chained together behind his back and suspended by his hands on some construction equipment and left high up in the air for hours, as punishment for some infraction.
Certainly there were some abuses going on, but it was difficult to verify exactly which stories were true.
The result was Desert Shield, to prevent further incursion into Saudi Arabia. Then when enough of a force was in place, Desert Shield became Desert Storm and liberated Kuwait. But it was only the beginning of a chain of events that is still going on today.
Unexpectedly, Rajiv Gandhi of India was assassinated. He was the son of Indira Gandhi, who had also been assassinated, in 1984, by Sikh bodyguards after the raid on the Golden Temple. Rajiv had assumed the position of prime minister at that point.
During a campaign, a woman who was a supporter of the Tamil Tigers approached Gandhi with a bomb strapped to her back. She bowed and detonated the bomb, killing him. The Tamil Tigers are the militant force of the Tamils, a minority in neighboring Sri Lanka. Gandhi had sent Indian troops there. The civil war in Sri Lanka went on for years.
Nelson Mandela was released from prison in South Africa in 1990. He had been in jail for many years for agitating for black majority rights. It would not be long before he was president of the country. But at the time, the majority was not unified. There was the Xhosa, which included Mandela and whose organization was the ANC (African National Congress) but also the Zulu, who were rivals of the Xhosa and whose organization was known as Inkatha.
The final major news of 1990 was that Germany was reunited into one country. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl really excelled in handling this. The capital was moved from Bonn back to the traditional site of Berlin.
Karen and I spent eight days out in Vancouver as a honeymoon. The "subway" in Vancouver is actually above the ground and it provides a magnificent view of the city. A subway fare includes a boat ride across to North Vancouver. From the city, Vancouver Island can be seen off in the distance.
We were low on money to go on honeymoon. But I had a mass of books and records that I was willing to part with. There was a market on weekends nearby and in my first effort at selling things, I made more than enough money to go on honeymoon.
Back in the early Eighties, I had thought of opening a store buying and selling used books. Records are a little bit more problematic because it is sometimes difficult to tell if a used record skips or if it is scratched.
I got laid off from Carborundum Abrasives, which manufactured sandpaper, in the autumn of 1990. I got a job at one factory and then to Spaulding Composites (or Spaulding Fiber) in Tonawanda. It was a very old factory and I worked there for just over a year until it also began laying off people and ultimately closed down.
In the summer of 1991, Karen and I took a trip to Vermont, Montreal and, Ottawa. Montreal really made an impression on me. I was surprised at how French it looked. I don't mean just the spoken language, but the buildings as well. There were cylindrical turrets topped by spires everywhere.
We walked all around downtown Montreal. Through McGill University, where so many of Canada's prime ministers were educated, and to see the famous view of the city from Mount Royal.
In Ottawa was the Chateau Laurier, which looks like a castle out of a fairy tale, a short distance from the Canadian Parliament Buildings.
Our favorite movie was Jesus of Nazareth and I wrote my first real book; The Bible And The Nineties.
We made a trip around Lake Erie in the autumn of 1991, starting early in the morning and stopping in Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland and, Erie.
In the summer of 1991, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev was briefly overthrown in a coup by hard-line Communists. Gorbachev spent the three days of the coup in a dacha and Boris Yeltsin made a name for himself by standing atop a tank and refusing to give in. This brief coup certainly destabilized the country further and before the end of the year, the Soviet Union would officially break up.
Many people in the U.S. had lost factory jobs. The government began a program in which someone who lost a job due to foreign competition could go back to college, or other training for a period of eighteen months. The program would pay for the training and for normal unemployment benefits while undergoing the training.
I took a test and was qualified. One stipulation was that the curriculum which I chose had to be approved first, we could not sign up for training in just anything. I decided on lab technician training at the local college, Niagara County Community College, where I had gone before. Lab technician work was not what I truly wanted to do, but it was what would be approved.
I began college for the spring semester of 1992. I had been laid off from Spaulding Composites a short time before, but I actually qualified for this program due to the loss of my job at Carborundum Abrasives.
On March 16, 1992, Karen and I were driving back home from the North Tonawanda Library. We were on Niagara Falls Boulevard just east of Niagara Falls Airport. We lived in an apartment building across the street from the airport and were a couple of minutes from being home.
Karen was driving. I was finishing up reading the newspaper. Karen said something like "I wonder what that car is trying to do". Everything suddenly went black.
The next thing I knew, we were off to the side of the road. I called Karen's name but she didn't answer. There was a strong scent of gasoline. I got myself out of the car quickly and went around to get Karen out. Half of my face felt warm while the other half felt cold.
Suddenly, there were flashing lights everywhere. The hood of our car was open and a fireman was doing something to the engine. I was put in an ambulance. I saw what must have been the other driver, he had a cloth bandage around his eyes. My first thought was that I didn't have any health insurance and I shouted this out. But injuries in car accidents are covered by the auto insurance.
Next, I was in a hospital somewhere. I did not know where I was. A nurse told me that I had been in an accident. I was put to lie on a hard surface in case I had a back injury. Someone asked me a phone number of anyone I might want to notify. I asked about Karen but no one knew anything. My parents, in-laws and their minister arrived.
I found myself in a hospital room. I still had no idea where I was. A black man in the other bed advised me to do all I can to make sure I never have a stroke. I tried to get a look out of the window to get an idea where I was.
I saw that I was high up, on the seventh floor it turns out. I recognized the cylindrical library building of Canisius College at the intersection of Jefferson Avenue and Main Street in Buffalo. I was at ECMC, Erie County Medical Center, in Buffalo. We were taken here because this is the hospital which specializes in trauma.
I knew that I was basically all right. Half of my face had felt warm because I was bleeding. I was battered pretty good and had lost some blood, but it probably wasn't too serious, I was told.
A nurse came in and told me that the doctors wanted to talk to me. I knew that it was about Karen. When they walked in, I could tell by the looks on their faces that the news was not going to be good.
There was severe pressure inside her skull from the swelling of her brain. I think they said they had drilled a hole in her skull to try to relieve the pressure. They said it was probable that blood could not get to her brain due to the swelling. The news about her vital signs was not good and she was showing little sign of brain activity at all. There was still more, for one thing all the ribs on one side of her body were broken in the crash.
We were allowed to see her. She was on life support and the machine was breathing for her. It was determined that there was no chance of her regaining brain activity. I was asked to sign a paper giving permission to turn off the life support system.
13) THE NINETIES, PART TWO
The car of ours which was destroyed in the accident was a Volkswagen Quantum. My parents had been driving the car for a few years but had given it to us as a wedding present. I inherited the auto insurance policy on the car. I had never read the policy or really given it much thought except to pay the monthly premium, but it turns out that the policy provided very good coverage in case of something like this.
The next thing I knew, I had quite a bit of money. This made me ineligible for the government program that I had been on to attend college, but it set me up so that I would not have to work for quite some time. But this was not what I wanted, I would rather bring Karen back.
I was battered pretty good from the accident. I had to go back to my parents' house for a while because I needed some help to put on my shirt and coat. Finally after about a month, I was healed enough to be able to do a few pushups. It was not until this time that I felt really alive again. A couple of weeks after that, I was completely back to normal and only had the task of getting back in shape.
I noticed again how aerobic exercise can overcome stuttering because during the time that I was unable to exercise, the stuttering that I had suffered from previously reemerged. But then it went away again when I regained physical fitness.
I continued with school and really plunged into reading, as well as exercise. I read some newspapers from England om a regular basis, as well. British newspapers are particularly good for international news. There is a strong tradition of being well-informed about the whole world and not just one's own country.
My primary interest was science, but I really wanted to understand all I could about the world as a whole. I had a world view in which America was about four and a half percent of the world and Britain was one percent of the world. I was not about to ignore the rest of the world.
The family that I had married into had not liked foreigners or anything foreign, although this was not true of Karen herself. After she died, I went in the opposite direction. I bought a lot of cassette tapes of different languages. I wanted to at least gain a familiarity with the different languages and I would have the background so that I could learn one or more languages if I really had a reason to do so and speakers of that language to talk to.
1992 saw the spring riots in Los Angeles when four white police officers were acquitted of severely beating a black man and the beating had been caught on videotape. Part of Florida was devastated by Hurricane Andrew. The upcoming presidential election was between incumbent Republican George Bush, Democrat Bill Clinton and, independent Ross Perot.
Yugoslavia was often in the news as the old ethnic tensions in the country surfaced after the binding force of Communism had disintegrated. Algeria had effectively voided an election in which an Islamic party had won, violence would continue for years.
As highly as I valued learning, school itself became a struggle. My motivation for going back to school was to get a job where I would earn enough money to live more comfortably and to take Karen on a trip back to England, among other places. But now, Karen was gone and I had more than enough money for the foreseeable future.
Over the summer of 1992, I was reading a vast amount but not having a job or a set schedule, my sleeping times began to drift so that I was awake much of the night and would sleep very late into the day. This became a problem when school started back, but the last thing I wanted to do was to get dependent on medications to sleep.
Furthermore, training to be a lab technician was not what I had really wanted to do. I had trouble with school, particularly with the lab classes. But eventually, I just took a semester off from school, switched to liberal arts math/science and graduated.
I did not get all top grades, but on the plus side I had completed many more classes than those which were necessary for graduation. I had also went to this college after high school and almost had enough classes for a fine arts degree as well, but that does not really do much for getting a job.
There is one thing which I learned during this time back in college that would prove invaluable later. For the first time, I really grasped how the trigonometric functions worked and a lot of my later writing would depend on this.
After taking the semester off from school, I began keeping a notebook outside of school. I would write down every fact about science that I did not already know, regardless of whether I learned that fact in school or in outside reading. I filled a number of large notebooks with facts and would review them periodically.
As I wrote earlier I am mostly self-educated. About 20% of what I know I learned in school.
One day in the late spring of 1992, my parents were outside when they were approached by a new born gray kitten with black stripes. They said that the kitten was lost and hungry and was not old enough to be away from her mother. They fed her and waited to see if she would go back home, but she didn't. The kitten showed every sign of being abandoned.
The kitten was named Essie. She would live until May of 2015, which would make her 23 years old.
I was still listening to music. But I did a stricter review of the music that I would listen to. It was mostly those cheerful, light-hearted Sixties songs.
There was Shirley Matthews with "Big Town Boy" and "Tobacco Road" by The Nashville Teens.
As you can probably see, I was listening to less and less music as time went on because there are progressively fewer songs which I am listing.
In 1993, the famous Colombian drug lord, Pablo Escobar, was finally located and killed in a shootout in Medellin.
A truck bomb exploded in the parking garage under one of the World Trade Center towers. The plan was to topple the one tower into the other. The explosion did not have enough force to accomplish that, but eight years later the terrorists would return.
The U.S. sent soldiers to try to keep peace in Somalia. A former province of Yugoslavia, Bosnia-Herzegovina was now in the news frequently for ethic violence.
Canada had a contentious election. Conservative Brian Mulroney had really become unpopular, due to economic issues. He had resigned and ended up being replaced by Kim Campbell, from the same party. She had then lost a general election to Liberal Jean Chretien.
In a parliamentary democracy, it is actually the party which is governing and not so much the prime minister himself (or herself). The party can choose to replace the prime minister at any time. While in countries like the U.S., the president cannot be replaced at will by his party.
Jean Chretien was one of the best national leaders ever. During his tenure, Canada was rated by the United Nations as the best country in the world in which to live for eight years, if I remember correctly. It was only after Chretien was gone that the Scandinavian countries usually rate as the best.
There was more news. In the worst cult ending since Jonestown in 1978, the Branch Davidians led by David Koresh ended with the wooden compound of their cult, in Waco, Texas going up in a spectacular inferno as federal agents moved in.
Across the border in Ontario, two girls in their early teens had mysteriously disappeared. It would ultimately lead to the arrest and conviction of Paul Bernardo.
1994 saw a fantastic astronomical event as comet Shoemaker-Levy collided with the giant planet Jupiter. This planet acts as a kind of massive gravitational vacuum cleaner that absorbs bodies which might otherwise collide with earth. Maybe God planned it that way.
What would happen if a comet like this struck the earth? Let's just say you do not even want to think about it.
One day I turned on the television to watch the news. The announcer was describing O. J. Simpson, the former local football star, fleeing in a vehicle while pursued on the highway by about twenty police cars and a formation of news helicopters. Crowds of people lined the highway to watch, as if O. J. was running for a touchdown back in Buffalo's War Memorial Stadium. People were hanging bedsheets from an overpass stating "Go O. J.".
I thought it was a preview of a movie that O. J. had made. But then I turned the channel and it was the same thing on every channel. This was absolutely surreal. It took me a while to grasp that this was actually happening in real life. I kept thinking that it must be a movie.
There was a horrible scene from Honolulu on the news. An African elephant called Tyke had made it clear in the past that she could not stand the life of captivity and performing stunts in front of audiences. Still, Shrine Circus kept her in service.
One day, Tyke killed her trainer and got through a chain link fence. News cameras followed as she ran through the streets of Honolulu with blood all over her from police bullets. Finally, Tyke collapsed in the street from the effects of the bullets in her head. She died a slow and miserable death as cops continued firing bullets into her. She thrashed about with her trunk for a long time before finally dying. This was sickening. This made me sick to my stomach like nothing else ever in my life.
These are wild animals, not dogs, and I would like to appeal to my readers to have nothing to do with live animal acts. I mean wild animals, this does not apply to domesticated animals like dogs, cats and, horses.
From east Africa came news of genocide. There had been a civil war in the nation of Rwanda between the two main ethic groups; the Hutu, who tended to be short and stocky and the Tutsi, who tended to be tall. It began with the assassination of the president of the country.
In April 1995, news came of the devastating terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The really devastating part came a few days later when the stunning headlines informed us that the central character in the bombing was from Niagara County, Tim McVeigh.
He had rented a truck and made it into one massive bomb. McVeigh had been stopped while driving for a traffic infraction and had been identified when an axle from the bomb truck was recovered and it had an identification number on it. This allowed authorities to trace where and to whom it had been rented.
McVeigh was ultimately executed at the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, by lethal injection. His execution was on June 11, 2001, exactly three months before the 9/11 attack. I wonder what he would have thought of 9/11.
A cult released nerve gas into a Tokyo subway. Also in Japan, the city of Kobe was devastated by an earthquake.
It was in 1995 that I first visited The Basilica of Father Baker in Lackawanna, a southern suburb of Buffalo. It was like the local version of a European cathedral.
In the summer of 1995, I took my first trip back to England in fifteen years. Some friends who had relatives in London told me that they were going and since school was out for the summer and I had enough money for a ticket, I went along. The flight was going to Gatwick Airport in London, rather than to the larger Heathrow. But I decided to go to my native Gloucestershire rather than remaining with them in London.
Even though southern England was in the midst of an uncharacteristic heat wave, I was delighted to walk around the place where I was born. I walked the length of Lydbrook one day and up the steep hill to Worrall Hill. No matter where I live, this is where I entered the world.
I went to Oxford one day and did a tour in those open double-decker buses. I went to France through the English Channel Tunnel, which had opened the year before. It was a shopping trip to the Citi Europe Mall just outside Calais.
I could speak enough French to get by. After looking around the mall, I walked around nearby neighborhoods. There was an old fort near the mall which appears as if it was built to face against England during Napoleonic days. I really liked France.
England itself was doing well. A number of people who had moved away to other countries had returned home.
The flight back was the best flight I have ever had. I had a window seat and we had a magnificent view of Ireland on a clear, sunlit day. The small farms across the country appeared mostly as a bright green from the plane. It is easy to see why Ireland is dubbed The Emerald Isle.
When we neared the end of the flight, we passed over Toronto and also got an excellent view. Years earlier, Pope John Paul had opened a church outside Toronto with gold domes. I saw those domes reflecting brilliantly in the sunlight. We were flying at the same altitude as those fluffy cumulus clouds when I recognized the Yorkdale Shopping Centre alongside Highway 401 down below.
There was a strong separatist movement in the Canadian province of Quebec. Efforts to compromise, such as officially recognizing Quebec as a "distinct society", due to it's French language and culture, had failed. I had read the very interesting book Oh Canada, Oh Quebec about the crisis.
There was a referendum in Quebec in the autumn of 1995. This was a vote to determine whether Quebec would remain in Canada or become a separate country. The result was close but it was to remain as a part of Canada. I do not know how much effect it had, but I spent part of the evening doing a special prayer that Canada would remain intact.
Around this time, I saw one of the most amazing sights that I have ever seen. I was on River Road in North Tonawanda one evening heading back toward Niagara Falls. A source of brilliant blue light crossed the sky heading southward. It was higher than the clouds and illuminated the tops of the clouds. The light lasted a few seconds and continued southward.
The next day, I read that it had been a meteor. One can see occasional "falling stars" on any clear night, but I have never seen anything like this.
By 1995, it was no longer possible to ignore computers. The word "cyberspace" was everywhere. There was a really great new system being touted that was supposed to bring the power of computers and the internet to everyone. It did just that.
This new system was called Windows 95. It was the latest operating system produced by Microsoft. In my opinion, Windows 95 was the real beginning of the internet revolution. I began learning to use a computer and find my way around the internet.
I found out that the ship, The Empress of England, which we had crossed the ocean on thirty years before, was sold for scrap metal in 1975 to feed the steel mills in Taiwan.
In 1996, a new group seized power over most of Afghanistan, displacing the warlords who had fought the Soviets and the Afghan Communists. They were supposedly some strict Islamic students who were known as the Taliban.
14) TRAVELING AND THE REST OF THE NINETIES
I was finished with college and still had money. It was time for some travelling. I was planning to spend some time in London when, just by chance, a relative from England had decided to drive across the U.S. and dropped by. I agreed to split the cost of the trip and go along.
Starting early the next morning, one day's driving on Interstate Highway 70 got us as far as Indianapolis. The next day to Junction City, Kansas and the next day to Grand Junction, Colorado. One more day brought Las Vegas.
The Kansas prairie landscape is unique. It was not actually flat, but was kind of rolling. On the high plains, east of Denver, there is the ruins of some type of settlement that looked like wooden buildings from the Nineteenth Century, that could be seen from the highway.
The bleak yet colorful landscape of southern Utah has to be seen to be believed. It is quite a bit what I pictured the planet Mars being like. Then, into Nevada it looks more like it does on the moon.
The most impressive sight in Las Vegas itself is the view from the observation tower, The Stratosphere, at night. Boulder (or Hoover) Dam is the single best-known project from the work projects of the 1930s.
I walked along Venice Beach in Los Angeles and drove up to the Mount Wilson Astronomical Observatory, which was for so long the real center of astronomy in the world. The sunny weather, palm trees everywhere and, Spanish-influenced home styles are gorgeous. Anyone who watches television has seen quite a bit of California already, but it is really nice and I wish I could have spent more time there.
I am not writing much about the places that I saw across America. That is because I basically spent three weeks seeing a slice of the country from a car window. It was an awesome time in itself, but it is impossible to drive around America and stop everywhere and see everything. The trip would go on forever.
Tijuana, across the border in Mexico, was about what I imagined Mexico being like. I bought a souvenir sombrero and a leather bag. Mexico has every bit as much potential as the U.S. or Canada. It just has many more people than it can provide a decent living for.
Mexico has serious troubles with gangs involved in the drug trade. At the time of this writing, this is true particularly of Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, both border cities. But any thinking person knows that the driving force behind these destructive gangs is the demand for drugs north of the border.
Countries like Mexico and Colombia are the ones we associate with illegal drugs. But the most important element in any business is the customer and the customer is not in these countries, but in North America and Europe.
From Los Angeles, I drove to Phoenix, Tucson, Las Cruces and, El Paso. There were so many radio stations devoted to the Bible, it was like the voice of God across the desert.
The desert is awesome. I stopped in Lordsburg, New Mexico and just wandered around in the desert for a while.
From El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, I drove across the vast state of Texas to San Antonio and then to Houston. I took a detour to have a look at Galveston. It is a sub-tropical island with a vast number of palm trees.
Then it was on to New Orleans. This was before Hurricane Katrina and one of the most colorful and charming places anywhere is the French Quarter of New Orleans. This was really a unique city which made quite an impression on me.
I wanted to have a look at the real south and turned northward to Jackson, Mississippi and then east into Alabama to Montgomery. I stayed overnight in Dothan, Alabama and then drove across the Florida panhandle from Tallahassee to Jacksonville and then north to Savannah, Atlanta, Chattanooga, Nashville, Knoxville and finally, to Washington D.C.
Washington was really a nice city in the national government area but I was really struck at how it resembled Paris. It was a Frenchman, Charles L'Enfant, who set up the basic design of Washington.
I stopped by the British Embassy in Washington to pick up the British passport that I had ordered. They had mailed it to me, but I had moved back to my parents' house when my apartment lease expired and it had been returned to the embassy.
The British Embassy was on "Embassy Row" on Massachusetts Avenue, near the embassies of many other nations. The only thing distinctive about the British Embassy is that it had one of those traditional red British phone booths outside. The most impressive embassy to see was easily that of Saudi Arabia.
I wanted to have a look at Philadelphia. I got off the highway and stopped at a store. First of all, the store had a lock on the door and the clerk had to press a buzzer to let me in. Then, the clerk watched every move I made from behind bulletproof glass as if I was there to steal something.
I was really put off by it and just got back on the highway. But it is not fair to judge a city by one store. Several years later, I would spend two weeks in Philadelphia and would realize what a really great place it is. I was working while I was there and did not have much time to simply look around, but I became really impressed with Philadelphia. Those row houses give Philadelphia character all it's own.
In New York City, I went up to the observation deck of the fabled Empire State Building. It opened just as the stock market was crashing in 1929 and was the tallest building in the world for about forty years. The main elevator does not go all the way up to the observation deck, it is necessary to ride that one as far as it goes and then get on another elevator.
Not far away from the Empire State Building is Wall Street, America's financial center. I had a look around there and along Broadway. If I had known that the World Trade Center's days were numbered, I would have went up there too. I want to spend more time in New York City, but have only ever been there for a day or two.
New England architecture, in cities such as Providence and Boston, is unique. This region of America also has a character all it's own. There is nothing just like it anywhere. I had stopped briefly in Baltimore and that city has it's unique brand of architecture too.
Not long after this trip around the U.S. was complete, I was on my way to London. The plan was to get a job and gain some international work experience. I also wanted to be around lots of people from different countries to gain more knowledge of the world and hopefully get some practice at speaking other languages.
The flight was unremarkable. I stayed at a hotel adjoining Heathrow Airport for a couple of days until I found a bed and breakfast further into the city. During my 1995 trip to Britain, I had passed through the bus terminal of Victoria Station in central London and noticed a service connecting travellers with local bed and breakfast accomodations. This was where I went to.
I began getting used to navigating London's Underground (subway). I had studied the map of London extensively before coming over and I took the Piccadilly Line to Victoria Station and got set up with a vacancy at a bed and breakfast.
I went about looking around London and going through want ads for jobs. I was a dual citizen of the U.S. and Britain, but I had a passport from both countries and the British passport would be required as identification to get a job.
The bed and breakfast that I was at was going to be closing for renovations. I moved to a nearby hostel that I had noticed. This was the type of place where I wanted to stay, there was a cafeteria and travellers from all over the world. There were a lot of people in particular from other European countries. One would never guess that there had been a war between Britain and Argentina fifteen years before, because there were quite a few Argentines in London.
I got a look at the original Tussauds Wax Museum, with the adjacent planetarium and the world-famous Camden Market, it is easy to spend the whole day there. The British Telecom Tower (BT Tower), the tallest building in Britain before Canary Wharf, was nearby but was still was not open to visitors, just as when I had stopped there years before.
I went to a service at the massive All-Souls Church, the one next to BBC Headquarters, there were people there from all over the world. That is what Heaven will look like.
But the hostel where I was staying was available only on a daily basis. No matter how long a person had stayed there, there was no guarantee of accomodations the following night. That was because there was a lot of groups that stayed there. There was an Argentine football (soccer) team there for a while. And the hostel had to have room for the entire group.
Finally, I sought other accomodations. For the rest of my time in London, I stayed at a bed and breakfast run by some people from Morocco, Surtees Hotel. It was on Warwick Way, near the intersection of Belgrave Road, a quick walk from Victoria Station, and one block over from the elegant Eccleston Square.
I was not far north of the Thames River and that massive old Battersea Power Station was just across the river. With it's four chimneys, it was known as the "upside-down grand piano". This location was near Westminster Cathedral with Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament within easy walking distance. Big Ben looks really impressive with the clock face lit at night.
I had never really been to Birmingham in England. So, I went up to spend a day looking around there. In the center of the city was the "Bull Ring" and that cylindrical building known as The Rotunda. Birmingham supposedly had the highest concentration of immigrants in Britain. There was a big four-story mall that had just opened and I spent much of a day in there but cannot now remember it's name.
I took a trip to Paris. The Eurostar is the train which runs from Waterloo Station in London, just across the river from the Houses of Parliament, through the Chunnel (English Channel Tunnel) to Gare du Nord in Paris. There was an alternate route which goes to Brussels, instead of Paris.
In the days before the euro currency, there were machines at Gare du Nord to exchange currencies. I walked from there to the obelisk at the eastern end of the Champs-Elysees Boulevard.
I wanted to have lunch in one of the many restaurants on the famous Champs-Elysees. But there were lines of people waiting outside all of them. The only place without a long line was McDonalds. So instead of French cuisine on the Champs-Elysees, I had a quick lunch at McDonalds.
I walked as far as the Arc de Triomphe (awesome) and walked from there down another street to the Eiffel Tower. The view from the top is as magnificent as any view in the world. In the distance to the west one can see La Defense, these are the modern high rise office buildings of Paris which are not built in the original city.
From there, I walked along the river until I was opposite the island in the Seine River on which the original settlement of Paris was located. I crossed over and took photos of Cathedral Notre Dame, although I did not go in.
It is really amazing, all the famous buildings which I have been outside of but never went in. I have been outside the Canadian Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, The White House, The U.S. Capitol, the Alamo in Texas, The Wall Street Stock Exchange, Buckingham Palace, Britain's Houses of Parliament and, Cathedral Notre Dame of Paris. But I have never been inside any of these buildings.
From there, I walked back to the Gare du Nord. I had missed my train back to London so, I stayed in a hotel nearby and took the train in the morning.
After being back in London for a while, I went on a trip for a few days to Dublin in Ireland. First on a bus to Holyhead Port in Wales and then across the Irish Sea to Dublin.
The first thing one sees upon approach to Dublin by sea is that tall smokestack painted red and white. Obviously, to make the entrance to the River Liffey easier to see.
I got a room at the North Star Hotel in central Dublin. This was the hometown of James Joyce and so many other famous writers and has always been known as a haven for writers. Ireland gets more rain than Britain and it drizzled the whole time I was there. But that only made it seem more like this was really Dublin. It was a charming city, more easygoing than London or Paris.
I walked all around central Dublin, as far west as the Wellington Monument in Phoenix Park and then crossed to the other side of the River Liffey and walked back past Heuston Train Station and the Guinness Brewery. There was the Book of Kells at nearby Trinity College, this is a very old copy of the Bible and a page is turned once a day.
The neighborhoods to the north of the River Liffey are something that I wanted to see also. I recognized Croke Park, the stadium where Pope John Paul had preached years before.
As you might expect, there is a lot of green in Dublin. From the carpeting in the North Star Hotel to the phone booths to the double-decker buses, it seems that most everything that can be painted green has been painted green.
A while after getting back to London, I went on another trip. This time, around Britain. From King's Cross Station, I took a train across Britain to Edinburgh in Scotland. I wished I could have stopped at so many of the places on the way, but so much of the country sped by through the window of the train. This was the first time I had been on a train, other than a subway, since I had travelled across Canada as a young child.
We got to Edinburgh's Waverly Station in the evening. I got a nice bed and breakfast in which to stay, but it was late and everything seemed to be closed as far as getting something to eat. I finally found a pizza place that was open.
Edinburgh seemed to be all made of stone. I took so many photographs. Edinburgh Castle loomed on a hill over the city. Princess Street was below the castle. I walked all around the city and in the castle.
I went to the so-called Camera Obscura next to the castle. This is really amazing for anyone interested in optics. The whole room is like the inside of a camera. I took a bus tour around the city, which showed us along the road known as the Royal Mile and to Holyroodhouse Palace.
From Edinburgh I got on a train to Scotland's largest city, Glasgow. This was a really big city and I walked around much of the central area and took photographs. The mall known as the St. Enoch Center was being partially remodeled.
From Glasgow, I made my way to Belfast in northern Ireland. The island of Ireland is much closer to Britain here than it is further south. I boarded a ferry at Stranraer. We went past some land, then over a stretch of water and then past more land. We were already in Northern Ireland.
Industry in Belfast has always centered around ships. It is easy to see why, Belfast has just about the best natural harbour in the world. I stayed a few days and walked around Belfast. It was an attractive city with bright green hills around it. But there were soldiers patrolling with guns everywhere and armoured vehicles on the streets after sunset.
The next stop on the way back to London was the Liverpool-Manchester area. It was noticably slower in pace and more relaxed than London.
I stayed in the Manchester Piccadilly Hotel on about the seventh floor. In the middle of the night the fire alarm went off and everyone had to walk down the stairs, wait for close to an hour while the building was checked, and then walk back up. A Dutch football (soccer) team was staying at the hotel.
After walking around quite a bit of central Manchester, I spent the rest of the time there in the Arndale Centre Mall. This is the largest mall in a city center in all of Europe, not counting areas outside cities.
In nearby Liverpool, I had a look at it's two cathedrals. The original Catholic Cathedral was bombed in the Second World War and a new one was built in modern style after the war. The massive old Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool is one of the single most impressive structures that I have ever seen anywhere.
I walked to Penny Lane, made famous by the Beatles song of that name. It is a typical Liverpool street except that it does not have the usual metal street signs. Since those signs were always stolen by Beatles fans, the street signs for Penny Lane are painted onto walls instead.
In the song, "the shelter in the middle of the roundabout" is now a restaurant called Sergeant Pepper's. I had dinner there and as you might expect, Beatles songs were always playing. A roundabout, by the way, is a traffic circle.
I walked around and took photos of Liverpool's waterfront. I noticed the air intakes of the Mersey Tunnel and I remembered that this was the tunnel we had driven through while we were leaving England so many years before.
Back in London, I had discovered the Science Museum. It is the one in Kensington by the Natural History Museum and Royal Albert Hall. This is where I extended my science education. The museum was so extensive that I bought a pass to it, instead of buying a ticket every day. I took a notebook to the museum and wrote down every fact in every exhibit that I didn't already know. I already had such an extensive note system, as I have described.
I had also thought about being an inventor and spent time at London's Patent Office doing patent searching to see if something has already been invented. It can now be done online.
One day was spent at the Tower of London. I walked across nearby Tower Bridge and toured the decommissioned naval ship H.M.S. Belfast. Another day was spent in the Imperial War Museum. Yet another day was spent looking around the Barbican and still another at Canary Wharf, the massive office complex associated with Toronto's Olympia And York.
I read some books while in London. One that stands out in my memory is a biography of Pakistan's late president Zia.
The comet Hale-Bopp was easily visible in the evenings, even with all of the light from London. I can only imagine how bright it must have been if seen from far out in the countryside.
I had set the date of May 7, 1997, that if I do not have a job in London by then, I will return to Niagara Falls.
Back home, I often went for a walk around my old neighborhood of Niagara Falls. This was ideal for doing a lot of thinking. I really got further into computers and at the same time saw how this ever-growing internet was a part of the one-world system foretold in the Bible for the last days.
I realized how knowledge and technology were being held back from what they potentially could be by the simple fact that we can often change the world faster than we, as a whole, can really adapt to those changes. We are, in many ways, like a bunch of commoners who find ourselves thrown into the future.
This would lead to me writing the book The Commoner Syndrome.
While trying to digest all of the science information that I had written down, I began to notice something which I had not thought of previously. There are certain underlying patterns in all that there is and everything that exists or happens is a manifestation of these patterns. It took me quite a while to really nail it down but the eventual result was the book The Theory Of Primes.
I worked for just over a year in computer technical support by phone and when I lost that job, it was six months before I got another and spent the portion of that time in which I was not looking for a job really reading and thinking. This is when I really nailed down The Theory Of Primes.
Grasping the underlying patterns in everything did not just result in a book. It really affected my way of thinking. After becoming closely acquainted with these patterns, my thinking felt much more nimble and fluid than before. Because I recognized the same fundamental patterns in everything, I could quickly and easily jump from one field of knowledge to another. It seemed as if this unlocked mental abilities that I would not have had otherwise.
In the news, there was a massacre of foreign tourists in Luxor, Egypt in 1997.
In 1998 came the really surprising scientific news that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down after all, as had been believed. The expansion of the universe was actually speeding up. Two completely separate teams had come to the same conclusion.
I first heard of Al Qaeda in 1998, for the two simultaneous bombings in east Africa.
I read several biographies around this time. Pierre Trudeau really had quite a time wandering around the world in his youth. It was actually Charles DeGaulle who predicted before the Second World War that a future war would revolve around tanks, rather than the trenches of World War One. William Westmoreland, the U.S. general who was in charge of the Vietnam War from 1965-1968 might have made a good president. Two other generals; "Black Jack" Pershing and Curtis LeMay also made interesting biographies and, of course, Ayatollah Khomeini.
Major News in 1999 was the bombing of Serbia, to finally end the war in the former Yugoslavia, and the massacre at Columbine.
15) THE NEW MILLENNIUM
The new millennium began with a change of leadership in Russia. Boris Yeltsin, who had succeeded Mikhail Gorbachev, resigned and Vladimir Putin took the helm.
We can look at it as Russia undergoing a zig-zag. Gorbachev tried to reform Communism but only opened the door for the end of Communism in Russia. Yeltsin represented a swing to the free market. But results were disappointing. The way it looked to me, in the 1990s a few people in Russia got very rich, mostly in energy, but the rest of the country was worse off.
Now, Putin represented a swing back in the other direction. Putin's Russia was to be a more authoritarian society, although certainly not back to Communism. The Yeltsin years were important for the lesson that they provided. Going too far right is as bad as going too far left.
That's one of the problems with Republicans in America. They think that all there is is Capitalism and Communism. Anything that is not pure Capitalism must be Communism.
This is, of course, wrong. The truth is that both Capitalism and Communism have valid points, although neither has all the answers. The best thing to do is not to pick one or the other, but to seek a middle road with the best of both and the worst of neither.
I have noticed that Capitalism and Communism can be compared to a zoo and a jungle. The caged animals in the zoo see the animals running free outside in the jungle and they long for their freedom too. One day the zoo is thrown open and it's animals are set free.
At first, the former residents of the zoo are elated to finally have their freedom. But then they begin to see that while the jungle is free, it is also harsh and competitive. There is nothing to stop the strong from dominating the weak. There is no guarantee of the basic necessities of life.
After a while they begin to think that maybe the zoo was not such a bad place after all.
The zoo represents Communism while the jungle represents Capitalism. The best way is neither the zoo or the jungle, but a middle way between them.
Many Russians bought properties in other countries. There was a new wave of Russians in New York City and London gained the nickname of "Londongrad" for it's many Russians.
Just a few words about freedom.
The price that people have to pay for freedom is to acknowledge that those around them are also free. This means having people around us who choose to be different from us. The basic meaning of democracy is that no one is special.
The trouble is that everyone wants to be special. Freedom does not mean everyone in agreement, it means agreeing to disagree. It means that all we have to agree on is the basic principles of the freedom that we have.
Freedom is like a peak, if we take it too far we pass the peak. Put another way, freedom is like a road than ends in a loop. If we go too far down the road to freedom, to the point where the strong are allowed to suppress the weak or the privileged are allowed to set things up to suit themselves, we go through the loop and end up going back in the opposite direction.
Freedom requires a considerable degree of individualism. The individual has to be at least as important as the group. A group in a free society must be a relatively loose collection of individuals. The challenge is that this goes against thousands of years of human history.
The way for a society to make progress and to find better ways of doing things is to question the way things are done now. A society will be held back if there is too much emphasis on going with the group and reverence for the way things have always been done and will fall behind countries that are more individualistic.
But on the other hand, it requires some special people to handle freedom. Freedom is only valuable if it produces a better society than non-freedom. When freedom loosens the bonds on people, it frees the worst in them, as well as the best.
The usual route to a free society involves the drafting of a constitution, a written plan of government. Humans need leadership or we will just have the law of the jungle. The object is to replace a dictator with a fair "written dictator", which a majority agrees on and which can be amended if necessary by going through an established process.
Freedom, through democracy defined by a constitution, is one of those things that is more difficult in the short-term but usually produces better results in the long-term.
The one advantage which a dictatorship or monarchy retains is that of simplicity. Countries almost never become successful democracies without going through a period of autocratic control first. America went through this period under British kings before gaining independence.
Anyway, I got a job with a large direct sales company. I started selling AT&T phone service and then credit card processing to businesses. The next three years would really be an adventure but becoming a successful salesman represented my final victory over stuttering. If you stutter, don't think it can't be overcome because it can.
Working on commission, with bills to pay, also gave me more of a reason to seek some help from God. Doing sales work, I also saw many towns and villages in western New York that I had never been to before. These included Olean and Salamanca as well as the many villages across the southern tier and eastward toward and around Rochester. I really got to know Jamestown, NY and Erie, PA well.
I reviewed my exercise program and made changes. I would concentrate on calisthenics, push-ups, chin-ups, knee bends, twists, etc., like I did when I first began exercising. I would work out less time per workout than when I was weight-lifting, but I would exercise almost every day, unlike weight-lifting which is usually done every other day.
The next step was a review of my diet. I wasn't fanatical about it but by this time my diet was pretty good and I made it even better. In particular, I realized the importance of water. Most people eat before they are hungry, but wait until they are thirsty to drink. They should do just the opposite. A lot of water is very good.
The most pushups in one set that I had ever done was 78, back when I was nineteen years old. I had equalled it in my early thirties, but couldn't get past it to 80.
I decided to celebrate my 40th birthday, in 2000, by getting 80 pushups. I got to 75, which wasn't too bad. But I had the feeling that someday, it would be 80. In 2006, I first managed to get 80 and then got to 82 in 2008. This is thanks to a better diet.
For some time, I had not been listening to music very much. It was established that I would not actively listen to music anymore at all. Although I would not avoid music in public, or would not leave a place because music was playing. If I was driving late at night I might use music to stay awake. It was definitely a bad influence. All of those years listening to all of those songs was at an end.
It was not even necessary to resolve not to watch television. I cannot even remember the last time I purposely watched an ordinary television program, other than news or documentaries. I have the knowledge to do this writing because I read instead of watching television.
I just had a strong sense of improvement and wanted to go into the new millennium right.
Computers were everywhere by this point. Whereas the Eighties and Nineties revolved around books, the new millennium was all about computers. I figured out how to send mass emails all over the place to spread my message of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible prophecies.
I really enjoyed Google Earth and Street View of the world that was online. It was like looking all through a world atlas when I was a child, but now there was actual photographs of everything. I don't miss traveling at all because I can be anywhere in the world in an instant. No toy that I had when I was a child has gotten my attention like Google Earth and Street View.
Email made it much easier to write to pen pals across the world.
In the news, there were changes south of the border. Mexico had been led by one political party, the PRI, for more than seventy years. But that changed with the election of Vincente Fox, from the opposition.
Maybe this can be considered as the Third Mexican Revolution. The first revolution was for the country to gain independence. The second was to remove leader Porfirio Diaz, who had become a dictator. But then the PRI had managed to control the country for so long.
I was driving a Pontiac Sunbird. It was the most attractive car I ever had and was a nice shade of turquoise, the color I used to like when I was a child on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. But it was also the most troublesome car I ever had.
I next got a Chevrolet Blazer. It was amazing how little trouble I had with it.
The sales work I was doing was always changing. In 2001, we were selling alternate home natural gas and electric suppliers. It was nice walking around in the summer and it was easy to make money at.
Suddenly and unexpectedly came that day. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I had not yet gotten my Blazer and was waiting for my ride to work. The news was on television at a couple of minutes after 9 AM. There was a large fire in one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The news announcer was saying something about an errant plane having hit the tower.
Just then another plane came in and hit the other tower, resulting in a huge fireball. The strike on the first tower, clearly had not been an accident. Just then, my ride to work arrived.
When we got to work, no one knew for sure what was happening except that the country was under attack. The Pentagon, the central military headquarters of the U.S. in Washington, had also been hit by a hijacked plane. There were reports on the internet that there were other planes on the way to targets but the only one that turned out to be true is the one on the way to the Capitol building, which crashed in Pennsylvania before getting that far. There was a report of a plane on the way to Chicago that turned out to be false.
After heading out of the office to get started on our sales work for the day, we had stopped at the Burger King just north of Buffalo State College. It was after we had gotten back in the car and turned the news back on that I learned that both towers of the World Trade Center had collapsed. It was soon announced that many people had gotten to the roofs of the towers, expecting to be rescued from there, and that there were literally hundreds of police officers and firemen inside the towers at the time of collapse.
The North Tower, which had been the first to be hit, had been hit higher than was the South Tower and it was the South Tower which collapsed first.
Al Qaeda had been behind an attack on a U.S. Navy ship in the Middle East the year before, the U.S.S. Cole, and it did not take long to determine that they were behind this attack.
We were working on the West Side of Buffalo that day selling the alternate home energy supplies. The day was spent switching between working and listening to the news on the radio. There are many Spanish-speaking persons, mostly from Puerto Rico, in the area and when going into homes, we saw the footage of what was happening on the Spanish-language television station.
The thought that crossed my mind is that the attackers want us to throw away our principles. They probably want to shut down globalization so that their homelands can remain as they have always been, without foreign influence. And to show that democracy is really shallow in that once America has actually been attacked, it will not really adhere to the high democratic principles that it preaches to the world.
Sadly, the Bush Administration obliged them with the prison at Guantanamo Bay and the unprecedented authorizations of wiretapping and otherwise spying on private citizens. This was actually what Osama Bin Laden wanted. Democracy had peaked in the autumn of 1989 but had hit a low point after 9/11.
On the other hand, George Bush must be familiar with the prophecies in the Bible about the end of the world and the establishment of Jesus' Kingdom on earth. Considering all of his actions during his term, I seriously wondered if he was using his time as president to help this along.
The attackers wanted America to get out of the Middle East and to stay out and were hoping that this one shocking attack would accomplish that.
They certainly wanted to provoke a backlash against those Moslems who go to live in western countries.
Notice that it was easy to find out the identities and backgrounds of all nineteen hijackers. This was part of the plan also. The hijackers were not from Moslem countries which are usually associated with terrorism or are rivals or enemies of the U.S.
The hijackers were Saudis, Emeratis, a Lebanese and, an Egyptian. These countries are three of America's closest allies. In my opinion, this was calculated to anger Americans against their allies in the Middle East, and to further keep America and it's cultural influences away from the region.
Egypt is the largest Arab country and an ally of America. Mohammed Atta was the only Egyptian among the hijackers, yet he was the ringleader. Why would the others make a foreigner the ringleader of the operation? It was to anger Americans against their ally which was the largest Arab country.
Look at the timing of the attack. More Americans would have been killed if both towers had been hit at about the same time. As it was, many people evacuated the South Tower after the first impact during the more than twenty minutes before the South Tower was also hit.
But this was planned for the visual impact. Those more than twenty minutes allowed time for hundreds of cameras and the city's attention to be focused on the towers when the second strike came along.
The average Moslem has no more to do with these hijackers than the average Christian has to do with Jim Jones or David Koresh, or any other destructive cults. As a Christian, I cannot imagine how I would feel if people flew planes into buildings in the name of Christianity.
It is a great mistake to lump people together. When something like this happens, people on both sides tend to think with their emotions. When we lump people together, it tends to be self-fulfilling and we have more people against us than we would have otherwise.
Take Iran, for example. It and the U.S. have their own issues. But the majority of the population of Iran is Persian Shiites and not Sunni Arabs. Not only did Iran fight an eight year war with Iraq, but it had a number of border clashes with the Taliban, along the Iran-Afghanistan border.
While Hezbollah was at war with Israel, Al Qaeda released a propaganda video. But the video did not even mention Hezbollah or it's struggle with Israel. Al Qaeda is Sunni and Hezbollah is Shiite and there clearly is no link between the two.
I don't see how Saddam Hussein could have had anything to do with Osama Bin Laden. I have an old copy of Newsweek stating that after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Osama spoke of gathering a force to help liberate Kuwait.
By the way, just the fact that I am writing things here that questions the government's actions demonstrates that America is a democracy. If there is a country where everyone praises their government and their wonderful leader, it is probably because they do not have much choice.
Another problem is how sensitive so many people are in the world to what others think of them or how they portray them. Suppose you are sitting on a bench and an ant walks by. You know that the ant hates you, hates your country and, hates your religion.
But so what, it is just an ant. Who cares what it thinks? It's thoughts are utterly inconsequential. The same goes for ignorant people. Just consider them as no more than ants. This is not being nasty, it is only being realistic.
Anyway, I had always heard and read of people who had been around when some historic event had happened. Like people who remember what they were doing when they learned that Pearl Harbor had been attacked or John Kennedy had been shot. Well, now I guess I had my historic event. I was watching on television when the second plane hit the South Tower.
In the sales job, I would go to many places beyond the area. Two weeks in Philadelphia. A couple of trips for meetings to New York City (I have not been there since 9/11). One week in Boston and another in Minneapolis. Several trips to eastern New York State.
During the trip to Philadelphia, I was at a sales meeting in Washington. It was not long after 9/11 and I saw the side of the Pentagon caved in. I spent an afternoon walking around the mall and looking at the Vietnam War Memorial.
I often wondered what Heaven is actually like. There is no way we can know at this point. But I wondered if there were places on earth that had at least a pale resemblance to Heaven.
What about Gage Park in Hamilton, Ontario on a nice summer day? Maybe the bandstand in the park could represent God's Throne and the benches amidst the roses would represent the elders around the throne as depicted in the Book of Revelation, chapter four.
I made a resolution which I knew would require some commitment. From now on, I would read the New Testament of the Bible every week. The only exception might be when I would occasionally go back and read the Old Testament.
I have kept to this commitment ever since and usually read the Gospels over twice a week and the rest of the New Testament once. It is one of the best decisions I have ever made.
Of course, it is not always easy to read the New Testament every week. It means little chance for frivolous wastes of time like watching television. But making a commitment to something difficult builds character. Doing a set amount of Bible reading should in no way be taken as a ritual that will build points with God in itself, but it is a chance to show God one's commitment.
Eventually, the sales office closed down and I went to work in a call center doing other sales work. Call centers had replaced factories as major employers in the area. I had become a really proficient salesman and felt that I could pretty much sell anything to anybody. There is an adrenaline element to making a successful sale, but it can also be draining.
In August 2003 there was an electrical blackout to match the one in 1965, which I mentioned earlier. I was at work and everything just shut down. When I got home there was no power either, but I still thought it was a local issue. When it didn't come back on I went out and listened to the car radio. It was far from local, New York City and Toronto were blacked out too.
The really important thing about this call center job is that I could think all day, since the job itself did not require a lot of thinking and there was often a gap between the automatic dialing of calls. A lot of people would be doing crossword puzzles and things like that.
I thought a lot about science and read more about it after work. I will not soon forget the date of March 15, 2004,. I was working selling business lines of credit. I was wondering about what time actually is. With all of this science, no one seems to have a plausible explanation of what time is.
A simple model of the structure of the universe flashed into my head. It easily explained not only what time was but all the whys of Einstein's Relativity and Newton's Laws Of Motion. It would become known as The Theory Of Stationary Space. Answers to all the great unanswered questions about the universe seemed to fit right into the theory.
String theory had too much going for it to be completely wrong but conventional cosmology had some really unsatisfactory solutions.
First, we are told that nothing can ever travel faster than the speed of light. But then we are told that well, the universe must have actually expanded faster than the speed of light for a period of time because that is the only way to explain why the universe is as homogenous as it is. This idea is known as Inflation.
Most astronomers agree that the universe began with the cataclysmic explosion known as the Big Bang, but no one seems to be able to explain what caused it to happen. All of Special Relativity revolves around the speed of light but there is no real explanation available as to why light travels at this speed and not some other speed.
The calculations of the mass and gravity of our galaxy indicate that it should not exist. The centrifugal force of it's rotation should overcome it's mutual gravity and cause it to fly apart. Yet, it doesn't.
Astronomers reacted by theorizing that a kind of "dark matter" must exist, which we cannot see and which contributes to gravity. The problem is that they have been looking for dark matter for about eighty years now and have not found a trace of it.
Then there is "dark energy", which has not been found either but is necessary to explain why the expansion of the universe is increasing.
My model of the universe explained everything in a neat and simple model and has no need of "inflation", "dark matter" or, "dark energy".
I got the idea of starting a blog. The internet was obviously replacing books and although I would not earn money from a blog, I could tell more people about my religion than I ever could if I had it published in a book. I chose a green background because it is reminiscent of a pleasant field of grass.
My blog brought out the best in me like nothing else ever has. If so many people are reading it, then I really have to deliver something that is worthwhile to read.
I had always been interested in science. At times, I thought of things or reasoned solutions to scientific issues but I thought that this must be obvious to others and that I have not discovered anything new. But then when the internet became widespread, I could easily check an idea that I had to see if anyone else had thought of it.
Some of the things I had thought of had indeed already been noticed, but there were quite a few others that had not. I also feel that my commitment to read the New Testament had led God to help me notice new things in terms of science.
A flood of new ideas and discoveries came to me and I wrote them online. The real fruit of knowledge is to bring about new knowledge. There is a difference between having knowledge and having the knack of noticing things that others have not noticed.
The internet opens the possibility of a whole new era in scientific discovery. Anyone in the world has access to most of the information available to any scientist. If someone notices something that could be a new discovery, or at least a new way of looking at things, it is relatively easy to do an online search to see if anyone else has already noticed it.
If anyone can become an actor or actress by posting a video online or become a journalist by writing a blog, then why can't anyone become a scientist? Einstein was not a scientist when he thought of his first theory of relativity, he was a patent clerk in Switzerland. Neither was the idea of the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe, thought of by professional scientists, it was introduced by a Belgian priest, Georges Lemaitre.
There are many other examples, just in the field of astronomy. Milton Humason did not even graduate from high school. He got a job as a janitor in the Mount Wilson Observatory on a hill above Los Angeles. He took an interest in what the astronomers were doing and became one of the most important names in astronomy himself.
It is believed that Humason just missed being the discoverer of the planet Pluto due to a faulty photographic plate. He took a photograph of the as yet undiscovered planet, but it happened to fall on a slight flaw in the plate.
I would like to express a brief opinion on aging. This first decade of the new millennium had been my forties. I could not have dreamed of finding the things and doing the writing that I have done on these blogs when I was in my twenties or thirties. It would have been impossible. I have the focus now that I did not have then.
No one is going to know everything. I think the goal should be to get to where you can reason the things that you do not actually know. Many times, I did not know something but I reasoned what the answer must be and then when I checked online, I saw that it had been correct. Also keep in mind that there are things which are currently "known" that will turn out to be wrong.
I really enjoyed walking. I did so much thinking in the first decade of the new millennium while walking. I also gained a different attitude toward winter. With all of the news about global warming, snow suddenly seemed precious and I often went for walks in the winter. One of the most beautiful sights there can be is a quiet northern landscape with evergreen trees amidst the snow.
I was working with mortgages, helping people with the Obama program to limit the number of foreclosures. My mother was elderly and was having increasing health issues, although she amazed me how she always came through everything. She came through cancer, completely recovered from a stroke and, lived for years with congestive heart failure. But the time came when she had to have someone with her all the time and I had to leave working.
During the time at home with my mother I concentrated on trying to learn the Old Testament as well as I knew the New Testament. When she died I went back to work with mortgages. I woke up in the night and went to check on her and she wasn't breathing at all. I called the hospice nurse but she had always come through before and I 90% expected her to suddenly wake up.
Be sure to spend a lot of time with your parents because someday they will be gone.
Eventually the mortgage programs closed down and I was put to work doing support for the blood glucose meters used by diabetics. It was mostly dealing with elderly people who had adult onset diabetes. First was the shock of being diagnosed with diabetes. While it is manageable it takes about five years off one's life. Then came the real shock of how much insulin is going to cost. It made me more of a health fanatic than ever.
I always continued reading and coming up with new things to write about. As stated earlier I am mostly self-educated. About 20% of what I know I learned in school. But that makes it easier to "think outside the box" and notice things that no one else has noticed.
I did give up on going for walks. A serial killer was caught, the Bike Path Killer. But it turned out that an innocent man has been convicted for one of his crimes and had spent 22 years of his life in prison. He had gone for a walk in the park, on the night that a crime had been committed there, and it had cost him 22 years out of his life. I am sure that there are many innocent people in jail, but it's something that most people don't give much thought to.
The cat that had approached my mother and father as a newborn kitten in the Spring of 1992 died on May 1, 2015, making her 23 years old. Before my mother died she made me promise to take care of her cat. I gave her a backyard funeral.
My brother died in 2017.
The internet is the best thing that ever happened to the individual. There is the establishment, the community and, the individual. Being a Protestant I want to take some power away from the establishment and the community and give it to the individual, although this is not the same thing as anarchy and I don't want to do away with the establishment and the community altogether.
The internet makes it so that anyone can come up with something or what they have to say and go right to the people with it, without requiring the approval of any "establishment" or "community". In a free society that's the way it should be.
In my writing I try to undermine your confidence in the world to some extent. First of all the "world" is not where you should put your faith. You should be putting your faith in God and, for the majority of people who are not blatantly sinful, putting faith in the things of the world is the biggest hindrance to putting faith in God. Second, when we have too much respect for the way things have always been done we are less likely to see better ways of doing things.
There are two things about life that never ceases to amaze me. The first is the difference between the short term and the long term. When we get what we want it sometimes does not turn out to be the best thing in the long run. When we don't get what we want sometimes it does turn out to be the best thing in the long run.
The second thing that amazes me about life is how often there turns out to be a simple solution to something.
Wouldn't it be nice if everything was always easy? Well maybe but you wouldn't be reading this. Everything that humans have ever accomplished was to overcome some difficulty. If everything was always easy, in a way it would be nice but we would be hunter-gatherers living in caves.
Again do not underestimate age. Older people do not have all the answers, we would be living in a paradise if they did. But when I was young I couldn't imagine that one day I would do all of this writing and have all of these readers. If someone had told me I would I simply would not have believed them.
Remember that one of the most destructive words is "talent". People who are "talented" are not talented. They just keep improving. A person without the same sense of improvement will see them and say "That person is so talented". Delete the word "talent" from your thinking and replace it with "improvement".
The gig economy gives still more power to the individual. Having multiple gigs, and doing them whenever you want, makes your job revolve around your life, instead of the other way around. When I was a teenager not driving was like being crippled. Today ride sharing is one of the greatest ideas ever.
The greatest science story was the Hubble Space Telescope. It far and away exceeded all expectations. Now it has been supplanted by the even better James Webb Telescope. Everything had to work just about perfectly to get the Webb Telescope operational and apparently it has. But just when we were full of confidence in what we could do COVID came along and shut the world down.
At least COVID accomplished something in that there couldn't be wars because soldiers could not be in close quarters. No sooner had COVID faded than there were wars, first in Ukraine and then in Gaza.
In 2022 Buffalo had both a mass shooting in a supermarket, which killed ten people, and a blizzard that killed more people than the one in 1977.
The world is now in the precarious position of first, destroying the planet, and second, having more old people relative to young people, than there has ever been before. There are so many unfilled jobs, not because politicians have miraculously created them but because Baby Boomers are retiring by the millions. There has been so much inflation because there are so many fewer productive workers, relative to retirees that are not producing anything but have to be taken care of.
If I had to describe our times in one sentence it would be "We have reached the point where we can change the world faster than we can adapt to the changes that we have made in the world".
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