Sons of The Beatles to form band, will be called 'The Shoots'
Here comes the Son – sons of
the four Beatles to form own band called “The Shoots”
It’s been prophesized ever
since they were born – that the sons of The Beatles stars would follow in their
father’s footsteps and form their own band – and today, that prophecy came
true. In a London radio interview this morning, James McCartney, the son of
Paul McCartney, confirmed circulating rumours that he, Sean Lennon, Dhani
Harrison and Zak Starkey are forming a band, carrying on their superstar
fathers’ musical legacy. This is what he had to say to Radio host Hugh Myrone
Gaines:
- This is something
that we’ve been talking about ever since we we’re little boys getting together
at Christmas and suchlike. Our whole lives we’ve tried to distance ourselves
from our fathers somewhat, but there’s no escaping that we’re all passionate
about making and performing music. We’re starting a band both as an homage to
our fathers and because it seems like the only logical thing to do in an
illogical world. The boys and I are looking forward to a Tour in 2016 where we
showcase our news music. I will admit that we are terribly nervous, especially
Dhani, I mean, we can never live up to what our fathers created, but we will do
our best.
James also revealed the name
of the band and explained the thinking behind it,
- We’re going with “The
Shoots”, it follows along the “The X” formula and the thinking behind the
shoots part is an allusion to plant shoots, you know, a new germinating
beginning, a new plant growing, because that’s what we feel this is. We hope
that it will be approved by the fans, we really spent a lot of time thinking up
that name and I would be so downcast if people hated it
As for the upcoming music,
James explained:
- Of course, we’re
influenced by our fathers’ music – that’s unavoidable, and we have tried to
emulate the rock-pop of the 1960’s, but we’ve also induced some modern
influences, digital stuff that I think blends really well with the classic rock
All four sons are already
musicians and have obviously inherited talent from their fathers, so working
together should not be too much of a stretch for the Beatle-bairns. The touring
will begin in April 2016 and The Beatles fans are already exalted. We found a
few reactions on Twitter:
@Beatlemania “OMG, THEY’RE
BACK, LET IT BE LET IT BE, SO EXCITED #TheShoots"
@Jane96 "Who'd a knew
that the 10's would be the new 60's, so excited!!! #TheShoots"
@JonLever "I hope to God
they'll pull this off, amazing, go boys #TheShoots
Whether you're a The Beatles
fan or not, you must admit that this is terribly exciting. To discuss these
Liverpool-lad news, tweet under #TheShoots
Here is a sample chapter from my new books “No Time to Say Goodbye: Memoirs of a Life in Foster Care.” Now on Amazon.Com
http://amemoirofalifeinfostercare.blogspot.com/
Mywritersite.blogspot.com
I used to be Irish
Catholic.
I used to be Irish Catholic. Now I’m an American—you grow. George
Carlin
The single greatest influence in our lives
was the church. The Catholic Church in the 1960s differs from what it is today,
especially in the Naugatuck Valley, in those days an overwhelmingly
conservative Catholic place.
I was part of what might have been the last
generation of American Catholic children who completely and unquestioningly
accepted the supernatural as real. Miracles happened. Virgin birth and
transubstantiation made perfect sense. Mere humans did in fact, become saints.
There was a Holy Ghost. Guardian angels walked beside us and our patron saints
really did put in a good word for us every now and then.
Church was at the center of our lives. Being a Roman Catholic back then was no small
chore. In fact, it was a lot of work. The Mass was in Latin, conducted with the
priest’s back to the flock. (We were a flock. Protestant were the more
democratically named “congregation.”)
Aside from Sunday Mass there were also eleven
Holy Days of Obligation that we had to attend, and then there were the
all-important sacraments of First Confession, First Communion, and
Confirmation, all ornate and dramatic affairs that happened within a few years
of each other.
We dressed properly in a suit coat and tie
for Sunday mass. Fridays were meatless as a means of penance. At school, there
was prayer in the morning before classes began, prayer before lunch, prayer
after lunch and prayer before we went home. There was also a half-hour of
religion class every day. And there was fasting. In those days, Catholics
fasted eight hours before receiving communion.
Then there was confession on Saturday,
mandatory because Sunday Mass was also mandatory and so was taking Holy
Communion, which could not be accepted without first going to confession. We had to go to confession twice in a week:
once on Fridays, since the nuns were convinced none of us would go on our own
over the weekend, and then once again on Saturday afternoons when Helen made us
go.
When I made my first confession at age seven,
we were taught that there were two types of sin: mortal sins, which were
serious sins, and venial sins, which were lesser sins, lying and disobedience. The nuns said that we
would have to narrow our selection to venial sins since we were far too young
to have any mortal sins against our soul.
One of little girls in the group raised her
hand and asked, “What’s adultery?”
“Nothing to worry yourself over, dear,” the
nun answered, “It’s for adults, and it is a most grievous offense against God.”
I liked the sound of that, “most grievous offense against God.” Sounded
serious.
Confession was a big deal and involved a lot
of formality—kneeling in darkness, foreign languages, and solemnity—and I
didn’t waste all that somberness with unworthy sins, so when the priest slid
open the little wooden door that separated us in the dark I began my prayer.
“Deus meus, ex toto corde paenitet me omnium
meorum peccatorum—” In full, the words meant “O my God, I am heartily sorry for
having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because I fear the loss of
heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God,
Who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help
of Thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”
Then the sins were confessed. I told the
priest I had committed adultery.
“Adultery, huh?” the priest said.
“Yes, Father,” I answered as solemnly as I
could. “Adultery.”
“So, how’d that work out for you?” he asked.
“Ah,” I answered, “you know.”
“No,” he said, “actually I don’t. So how many
times did you do this, this adultery?”
“Like, I think, three times, Father.”
“I see,” he said. “And during those times,
were you alone or with others?”
“No, Father,
I was alone.”
“And do you think you’ll be committing this
sin again in the near future?”
“Naw, Father,” I answered. “I’m pretty much
over it.”
As the years went and I became more
confessional-savvy, I learned that the dumber the sin, the lighter the penance,
the prayer for forgiveness that one was required to say up at the altar after
the confession had ended.
So in the name of efficiency, I developed a
pre-packaged list of dumb sins, like “I disobeyed my mother,” or “I fought with
my brother,” or “I failed to say my nightly prayer.”
Through trial and error, I learned that every
now and then I would have to toss a more serious sin into the mix or the
priests might get testy and tax me with a big penance. So I tossed in the
fail-safe sex sin, “I had evil thoughts about _____” and would fill in the name
of the girl who struck me at the moment. I rotated the sins and the priests,
and, overall, the system worked.
One Saturday, Denny and his gang of
desperadoes showed up for confession and slid into the pew with me and waited
for our turn at the confessional.
Denny turned to me and said, “Johnny, you got
any good sins?”
Feeling magnanimous, I shared my formula for
a hassle-free confession, and in closing said, “And then you say ‘I had evil
thoughts about Mary Puravich,’ or whatever,’” using the name of a pretty girl
from my class.
Denny shared my sin system with his friends,
who were always in a hurry to cut their way to the front of the line, have
their confessions heard, and leave without saying their penance. I went in to
the confessional and said my piece, ending with, “and I had evil thoughts about
Mary Puravich.”
“You know,” said the priest, “I gotta meet
this Mary Puravich. She must be some kind of knockout, because the last four
guys in here said the same thing about her.”
For all purposes, school was an extension of
church, and unlike the way we lived in Waterbury, school was no longer
optional. We were to be at Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic School, in
uniform, Monday through Friday from eight a.m. until three p.m. No excuses.
Because I lacked almost any formal education
at that point, I couldn’t read or write, so it was decided that I should start
school from the beginning—first grade—making me roughly two years older than my
classmates.
Assumption was already over fifty years old.
Walter and his sisters had been schooled there in the 1930s and the building ,
basically unchanged, had nothing sleek or new. It had sixteen classrooms for
two hundred and fifty students, no gymnasium or cafeteria, highly polished
wooden floors, and enormously large windows that each had to be opened and
closed with a long pole with a hook on the end of it.
Our teachers were members of the Sisters of
Mercy, an order formed in Ireland in 1831 to aid the poor, arriving in America
in 1843 to minister to the famished Irish flocking to the states. Several of
the nuns who had taught Walter were still living at the convent and filling in
as substitute teachers, and one or two of them were still teaching full-time.
Classes began with the ringing of an enormous
brass handbell by a nun who was strong enough to pick it up and move it around.
Boys and girls played apart from each other on different sides of the school
yard. The boys were clad in white shirts and green ties with the letter A sewn
into the middle of them, black slacks, black socks, and black lace-up shoes.
Loafers and pointed-toe shoes, then all the rage because of the Beatles, were
forbidden. The girls were required to wear black Mary Janes, white or green
knee socks, and a green dress uniform with an under slip, and a white,
button-down shirt. They were also issued green beanies to wear in church,
although I can’t recall that any of the girls ever wore one.
Just beneath the schoolyard was Farrell’s
Foundry. At different times of the day, the mill released its afterburn from
the enormous smokestacks that dotted the skyline. Tens of thousands of black
specks shot into the air, making it look like a black-snow blizzard had hit our
little town. The specks rained down on our white shirts, ruining them forever
with ink-black spots of burned iron.
Every school day started with a prayer, followed
by the Pledge of Allegiance and then religion class. Sometimes one of the
priests stopped by during religion class and opened the floor to discussions,
wrongly assuming the questions would be deep and theological. What he got was,
“Father, all right, look, if the Russians fired an atomic bomb at us and Jesus
flies out of heaven and swallows it and it explodes in his stomach—will he be
dead?”
The best one came from Peggy Sullivan, who
asked, “If Jesus shaves off his beard, will he lose all his magical powers?”
and then, pausing to catch her breath, “and if so, how screwed are we?”
One kid in the class, Patsy Sheehan, resented
having to learn certain things about our religion the difference between venial
sins and mortal sins, the Act of Contrition and so on. When the priest told us
we that we had to choose a middle name for our confirmation, Patsy complained,
“I got enough on my plate already.”
The priest insisted she pick a new middle
name. Patsy asked, “What’s Jesus’s middle name?”
“He’s Jesus. He doesn’t have one,” the priest
answered.
“So, what’s he, special?” Patsy asked.
Then there was Martin O’Toole, a wonderful,
magnificent liar. He lied in such awesome, Herculean fashion that his tales
were artful, Homeric. Our nun once asked, “Mr. O’Toole, why have you not turned
in your homework?”
Martin waited until he had everyone’s
attention and then stood slowly and dramatically from his desk, put his hands
on his tiny waist and said, “Sister, last night I was in my back yard playing
when I picked up a rock from the ground.” He then recounted the scene of him
picking up what must have been a boulder the size of Rhode Island, “and as soon
as I picked it up, oil! Bubbling crude came bursting out of the ground,
millions of gallons of it! I was soaked in oil.” He paused and looked around
the room and added, in hushed tones, “It took me hours to put that rock back on
that oil and save this entire city.”
He returned to his seat and said, “And that’s
why I didn’t time to do my homework, Sister.”
The nun’s jaw had dropped, and the silence of
the moment was broken only when Micky Sullivan, a dense and gullible child,
asked, “What kind of oil was it, Martin?”
“Esso,” he replied. “It was Esso oil.”
Many years later, Johnny became mayor of a
small town in the Valley. An investigation of the town’s finances showed fifty
thousand dollars missing from the treasury and all the evidence pointed to
Martin. When asked to produce the town’s books, Martin said, that “The books
are gone. Mice ate them.” He served two years in federal prison.
Then there was Ilene Flynn, a little
red-haired, freckled-faced, fair-skinned girl who was more pious than the Pope.
I knew a lot about her because the nuns thought we looked alike and paired me
with her for all religious functions.
At our First Holy Communion, Ilene was so
nervous her mouth went dry. Unable to swallow the host and forbidden to touch
it—only a priest could do that—she ran around in circles crying hysterically,
“Jesus is stuck in my mouth! Jesus is stuck in my mouth!” while the nuns
flocked around her shouting instructions about swallowing, “Go like this,
Ilene, go like this!” and then they did a swallowing demonstration that made
them look a lot like penguins eating long fish.
Ilene’s Friday afternoon confessions were
epic. She confessed to everything, I mean absolutely everything, and she
actually said all of her penance, unlike the rest of us who negotiated a
lighter-sentence deal with God before we got to the rail. My policy on penance
was one for five. If I were given thirty Hail Marys as penance, in the deal God
and I worked out, I said six.
Once, Ilene came out of the confessional in
tears, wailing loud enough to wake the dead.
“What is it, Ilene?” Sister asked. “What
happened?”
“Father O’Leary told me I’m going to hell on
a lying rap,” she wailed, “and I don’t know what a rap is!”
Former Kennedy estate in Palm Beach sells for $31M
John and Marianne Castle sell
house to company linked to seasonal Palm Beacher
Jane Goldman.
Daily News Real Estate Writer
Known to millions as the
“Winter White House,” the former Kennedy family compound on the ocean in Palm
Beach has changed hands for a recorded $31 million.
Merchant banker John K. Castle
and his wife, Marianne, sold the 1920s-era house, its two outbuildings and
about an acre of land — with 200 feet of beachfront — to a company associated
with seasonal Palm Beacher Jane Goldman, according to the deed recorded today
by the Palm Beach County Clerk. The Castles bought the estate at 1095 N. Ocean
Blvd. from the Kennedy family in 1995.
The Castles shared the view of
historians who consider the house an iconic piece of American history
associated with one of the nation’s most prominent families. It was a place
where generations of Kennedys lived and played, including President John F.
Kennedy, who is said to have worked on his inaugural address there.
Even so, the town never granted
landmark protection to the house, which has been much changed since it was
designed in 1923 by noted society architect Addison Mizner. But the buyer in
this week’s sale plans to keep the Mediterranean-style residence intact,
according to sources familiar with the deal.
With New York ties, Goldman is
a principal of Solil Management, a family company that manages assets related
to the fortune amassed by her late father, New York City real estate investor
Sol Goldman. She bought the house using a Florida limited liability company
named TGS Florida LLC. In March, Goldman’s 1952 lakefront house at 200 Via
Palma in the Estate Section sold for a recorded $29.85 million, property
records show.
A confidentiality agreement
prevents all parties involved in this week’s sale from commenting, said Paul
Rampell, the Castles’ Palm Beach attorney.
The Castles had paid a recorded
$4.9 million for the North End estate and acquired its furnishings. Their
subsequent two-year renovation added air conditioning for the first time and
carefully preserved several rooms to look as they had when used by President
Kennedy, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and their two young children.
“We wanted to preserve the
things that were preservable,” John Castle told the Palm Beach Daily News in
1999 after the renovation was completed.
Broker Lawrence Moens of
Lawrence A. Moens & Associates handled both sides of this week’s sale, his
office confirmed. He listed the estate in the local multiple listing service
for $38.5 million in April 2014, although he had marketed the property privately
several months prior with ads promoting “a rare chance to own Camelot.” Moens’
listing expired in late March. He could not be reached.
Two months ago, Moens acted on
Goldman’s behalf in the sale of her lakefront house, which was owned by a
limited liability company she controlled. The buyers were television executive
Herbert J. Siegel and his wife, Jeanne Sorensen Siegel, who were represented by
Corcoran Group agents Colleen Hanson and John Campbell.
In all, the former Kennedy
compound has 15,347 square feet of living space, 11 bedrooms, 12 bathrooms and
three half-baths, according to Moens’ sales listing.
The house can’t be seen from
the street, thanks to its high perimeter wall and wooden gate, which are the
only parts of the property landmarked by the town.
The Kennedys successfully
fought against landmark status several times over 15 years, fearing it would
make the estate more difficult to sell. The wall and gate were finally named
landmarks as a condition of the sale to the Castles, who wanted to renovate
without hindrance.
Renovated by Kennedys
Boston-based Joseph P. Kennedy
Sr., the family’s patriarch, bought the house in 1933 from the Wanamakers — of
Philadelphia department-store fame — for use as a winter retreat for his
family, including wife Rose and their children.
The two-story house was
designed for Rodman Wanamaker II by noted society architect Addison Mizner.
With its simplified Mediterranean-style architecture, it was originally named
“La Querida,” loosely translated as “the dear one,” although many sources have
erroneously recorded the name as “La Guerida.” The Castles called the estate
“Castillo del Mar” (“castle by the sea”).
Needing more space for his
large brood, Kennedy Sr. bought adjacent land and hired society architect
Maurice Fatio to expand the house and add a two-story garage building, tennis
court and pool pavilion.
Kennedy Sr. made the house his
legal residence in 1941 and often vacationed alone there, frequently swimming
in the pool, according to his biographers. John F. Kennedy is said to have
written his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage, at the house
while recovering from back surgery in 1956. He and his advisers later discussed
the composition of his Cabinet at the estate, although the president reportedly
spent many nights at a neighbor’s home nearby rather than in the house itself,
according to the late architectural historian Donald C. Curl.
Members of the family famously
played touch football on the lawn that stretches down to the beach or played
tennis on the street-side court. After giving birth to her son in 1960,
Jacqueline Kennedy recuperated at the house. In November 1963, the president
spent the weekend in Palm Beach immediately before heading to Texas, where he
was assassinated in Dallas.
Rose Kennedy continued to use
the house after the death of her husband, a former U.S. ambassador to England,
in 1969. She died in Hyannis Port, Mass. — where the family had another
well-known estate — the same year the Castles bought the Palm Beach house.
In 1991, the Palm Beach
property landed in the international spotlight again when it was the site of an
alleged incident that led to sexual assault charges against William Kennedy
Smith, who was exonerated at his trial later that year.
Smith’s uncle, the late U.S.
Rep. Ted Kennedy, was on the property that night with Smith and frequently used
the house during that time.
The house also was a
destination for other members of the extended family, although their visits had
declined by the time the property was sold 20 years ago.
“To us, it was always the beach
house,” Anthony Shriver, JFK’s nephew, told The Palm Beach Post in 2003.
Refurbished and restored
The Castles bought the estate
from more than a dozen members of the Kennedy family and a trust. Among those
listed as sellers on the 1995 deed were Ted Kennedy, the late John F. Kennedy
Jr. and his sister, Caroline Kennedy. Agent Ned Monell of Sotheby’s
International Realty had the $7-million listing, and Paulette Koch, then an
independent broker and today an agent with the Corcoran Group, acted for the
Castles.
An avid sailboater with an
interest in equestrian show-jumpers, John Castle founded the private merchant
bank Castle Harlan in 1987. He serves as chairman and CEO of the company and
its successor, CHI Private Equity. He also heads Castle Connolly Medical Ltd.
and Branford Castle Inc.
The Castles preserved two
adjacent first-floor bedrooms, known as the “President’s Room” and the
“Attorney General’s Room.” The latter name referred to the late Robert F.
Kennedy, who served in that post during his brother’s administration.
The Castles refurbished and
restored beds, a chest and tables they found in the bedrooms when they bought
the house. The furnishings include a massage table reportedly used by JFK
during his recuperation from back surgery.
In the library, most of the
furniture was simply recovered or refreshed, according to the 1999 article in
the Daily News.
The renovation added a turret
to the front facade to house a new spiral staircase. The Castles also built a
two-story addition on the south side. A former loggia became a family room, and
they updated the kitchen with an expanded pantry. Windows also were enlarged to
better capture ocean views.
Outside, the so-called “bull
pen,” where Joseph Kennedy Sr. sunned himself, was rebuilt as a fully enclosed
two-story pool house.
The Castles referred to the
central bedroom as “Rose’s Room,” while two others were called John-John and
Caroline’s rooms because the president’s children were known to have occupied
them. The Castles also merged upstairs staff bedrooms to become guest rooms and
work areas.
During their tenure, the
Castles hosted charitable events at the house benefiting such organizations as
the Children’s Home Society and American Friends of the Uffizi Museum.
In 2011, the Castles were
involved in a high-provide dispute with their immediate neighbors to the north
after Stephen and Jill Karp announced plans to build a guest addition. The
Castles argued for more than a year that the project would impinge on their
privacy and block their ocean view. The Karps’ plans were eventually altered so
that the addition wouldn’t extend any farther east than the eastern façade of
the Castle’s residence.
In 2012, John Castle made
headlines of a different sort when Paul Kucik, a waiter at private Club
Colette, accused him of breaking his finger during a dispute over a bill. No
police charges were ever brought, and both sides agreed to a voluntary
dismissal of a civil lawsuit and counterclaim related to the episode. A third lawsuit
filed against Castle in 2013 by Kucik remains active, circuit court records
show.
But in 2001, John Castle told
the Post that he and his wife took their stewardship of the house seriously.
“We do feel, to some degree, we’re protecting a legacy,” he said.
“I’m a Republican, of course,
so I don’t want to confuse things, but I thought Jack Kennedy was an
outstanding president with a great deal of vision,” he told the same reporter.
“I think a lot of his vision for our country may well have come from the fact
that he was able to sit there on the lawn and reflect on where the country
should go.”
Music of the Sixties Forever: To Sir, with Love
Music of the Sixties Forever: To Sir, with Love: CLICK ABOVE TO WATCH THE COMPLETE FILM
We really didn’t know what a fine and interesting person Dennis was did we?
He married Gerry Stowell after
World War II and they had three children – Richard, Robert and Rustin Weaver.
Dennis Weaver was a vegetarian since 1958 and student of yoga and meditation
since the 1960s and a devoted follower of Paramahansa Yogananda, the Indian
guru who established the Self Realization Fellowship in the US.
The "Earth Ship", the
personal home he commissioned architect Michael Reynolds to design and build in
Ridgway, Colorado during the late 1980s, incorporated recycled materials in its
construction and featured advanced eco-technologies.
In July 2003, Weaver lost a
daughter-in-law, Lynne Ann Weaver (who was married to his son, Robby Weaver),
in Santa Monica, California, when a car driven at high speed plowed through
shoppers at an outdoor bazaar. She was one of ten people killed in the
incident.
He was renowned as an
environmentalist, promoting eating lower on the food chain, use of alternative
fuels such as hydrogen, and wind power, through an educational organization he
founded, The Institute of Ecolonomics. Ecolonomics is a neologism formed by
combining "ecology" and "economics".
He was also involved with John
Denver's WindStar Foundation and he founded an organization called L.I.F.E.
(Love is Feeding Everyone) which provided food for 150,000 needy people a week
in Los Angeles.
Weaver was also active in
liberal political causes. He used his celebrity status in instrumental roles as
a fundraiser and organizer for George McGovern's campaign for president in
1972.]
In 2004, he led a fleet of
alternative fuel vehicles across America in order to raise awareness about
America's dependence on oil.
Weaver was consistently
involved with the annual Genesis Awards, which were created by The Ark Trust to
honor those in the media who bring attention to the plight and suffering of
animals.
There will come a time … when
civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that
preceded it: the idea that we should eat other living things running around on
four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The
people of the future will say “meat-eaters!” in disgust and regard us in the
same way we regard cannibals and cannibalism – Dennis Weaver
A sample chapter from my new book "No Time to Say Goodbye: memoirs of a Life in Foster Care" now on Amazon
FIRST
DANCE, FIRST KISS, SORT OF
1967
Summer came and went and autumn
arrived. That September, the Catholic Youth Organization sponsored a Harvest
Moon Dance in the basement of the Assumption church and everybody who was
anybody in my universe was going.
Around the block from us lived a cute little
girl named Susie Barton, and I asked her if she wanted to go to the dance with
me. “But not as a date,” I said, although I have no idea why I said that. To my
surprise she said yes, but I was reluctant to be happy about it because at that
point in my life every silver lining seemed to have a cloud.
On the big night, I showered, shaved the end
of my chin—the only place where I was beginning to sprout a beard, a matter of
grave concern to me—and laved myself in Old Spice cologne. I had at least four
full bottles ofOld Spice stored away from Christmas gifts past. I didn’t know
that Old Spice was a cologne and not an aftershave, and when I splashed it on
my freshly shaven face, I felt as if my cheeks were on fire and I cried out,
“Jesus God in Heaven!”
Cologne and fair-skinned people don’t work
well together, and my cheeks and chin turned apple red. When I left the house I
looked like a tomato in a tie and sports coat, albeit a well-dressed tomato.
Aside from the abnormal bright red glow on my
face, I thought I looked spiffy and Mod—a short-lived ’60s fashion—in my
then-stylish paisley-patterned vegetable motif tie that stood out brilliantly
against my white Oxford-collared shirt, the only type of buttoned-down shirt I
and most other Catholic school boys owned.
I topped that off with a double-breasted blue
jacket that I thought made me look swinging-London-ish in a working-class
American way, but actually probably made me look like a member of the Gambino
crime family in training. Under my tan peg-leg pants was the pièce de
résistance, a new pair of shiny oxblood penny loafers. I left the house hearing
wolf calls from Denny.
A hardworking kid with a profitable paper
route and a burgeoning weekend yard-maintenance business, I had a healthy pile
of cash built up from shoveling snow and collecting returnable bottles. That
day I bought Susie a dozen roses for twelve dollars, a staggering amount, I
thought, and a box of Whitman’s Sampler chocolates, the middle-sized box. I was
a romantic but also incredibly frugal.
I collected the roses and chocolates from
under the trash can where I had hidden them, because if I had brought them into
the house the ribbing from Denny would never have ended. It would have been the
best thing that ever happened in his life.
At Susie’s house on Winter Street I rang the
doorbell and her mother, father, younger brothers, sister, and dog came to
answer it. They just stood there, smiling and staring at me, except for the
little brother, who was embarrassed by it all and covered his eyes and giggled.
After a while, I said, “Hi.”
And they all said “Hi” back at one time and
stared at me some more.
“Oh doesn’t he look so cute?” Mrs. Barton
said, as though I weren’t there to hear it, and then, without warning, she took
a flash photo of me, blinding me. Finally, the little brother called out,
“Susie! That stupid guy is here for you!”
And I thought, “Oh, God, please kill me now.”
Her mother and father greeted me, and I
mumbled “Hello.”
“You seem tense,” Susie’s father said.
“Yes, sir,” I answered, but I wasn’t tense, I
was just being me. In the parlor Susie was standing by the fireplace, wearing a
Mod polka-dot miniskirt, or what passed for a miniskirt in those days; tons of
department-store-bought jewelry, and her hair was up in curls on one side,
which I’m pretty sure was the fashion that year. She was slightly taller than I
but wore new black shoes that didn’t seem to have any heels. She had that
makeup stuff all over her face. She looked nice.
Her still-smiling parents and brothers and
sisters were standing between us but the dog had moved. He was now standing in
front of me with his head in my crotch. Susie smiled and said, “What happened
to your face?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged, and thought to
myself, “God, I don’t ask you for much, but please kill me now.”
Her mother kept saying, “Oh, this is so
precious.”
“Should we go?” I asked, and Susie draped a
white homemade shawl over her shoulders and walked with me to the front door,
her family walking in step less than six inches behind us. When I turned and
shook her father’s hand, he lit up and beamed to his wife. “Look at that,
honey; he shakes hands, isn’t that nice?” as if I was a dog who had learned to
give paw.
“Oh, this is so precious,” the mother
answered.
One of her brothers said, “You look like a
dork,” and I thought, “God, why don’t you ever kill people like that? Simple
bolt of lightning—”
When I stepped out into the cool October
night, I sighed an enormous breath of relief and lifted my eyes to look at the
stars that were shining brilliantly. Mrs. Barton released her last “Oh, this is
so precious” as we walked off into that beautiful night.
Susie and I had what can best be described as
a “clipped” conversation on the short walk to the school. She said something
polite and then lowered her head and pulled her lips together tightly and I
could tell she was thinking, “Oh what a stupid thing to say.” I knew because I
was pretty much an expert at saying stupid things.
I had planned to display what the French call
sang-froid, or urbane cool, but so far that wasn’t working out, so I gave up on
it. That wasn’t me. Not then and not now. I was, and remain, a talkative,
mostly happy and uncool kid with nervous tics, and all I was doing with that
stupid cool thing was making a nice girl nervous.
I stopped in mid-step, looked myself up and
down and said “John, you look fantastic!” and then I turned to her and said,
“Well, that’s enough about what I think of me. What do you think of me?”
It broke the ice. She had a fine sense of
humor and when she laughed, she pulled her head backwards and closed her eyes
and then looked at me. It was pretty good. Relaxed and acting like teenagers
again, we enjoyed the rest of the night. I wowed her with my breathtaking dance
steps and mastery over the Watusi, the Hitchhiker, the Frug, the Monkey and a
little step I invented in the privacy of the shower called the Limbo Twister,
which, to my amazement, never really caught on.
When the dance ended, we walked home. By then
the temperature had dropped to about forty degrees. The moon was out in full
bloom and lit up the streets. We walked along in silence, both happy about a
wonderful evening and sad that it was ending. She shivered and, without a word,
I removed my sports coat and draped it over her shoulders. She looked at me and
smiled and it surprised me, because I had been certain she would shove me away.
We kicked the leaves as we walked along and
looking down, she said, “My feet are as big as boats,” although she seemed to
be talking to herself more than to me. I didn’t know how to answer that so I
looked up at the moon, but there was no script hidden there for me to read. My
stupid lips went dry and stuck to my buck teeth and for a moment I looked like
Humphrey Bogart. So I stared at her feet and said, “Yeah, I dunno, I guess.”
After another second had passed I added, “But
you’re pretty, pretty,” and as soon as I said it I thought, “Pretty, pretty?
John, you’re an idiot.” But she squeezed my hand and when I looked at her I saw
her entire lovely face was aglow with a wonderful smile, the kind of smile you
get when you have won something.
“Why do you rub your fingers together all the
time?” she asked me, and I felt the breath leave my body and gasped for air.
She had seen me do my crazy finger thing, my affliction. I clenched my teeth
while I searched for a long, exaggerated lie to tell her about why I did what I
did. I didn’t want to be the crazy kid with tics, I wanted to be James Bond
007, so slick ice avoided me.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I bite my nails,
see?” and she showed me the backs of her hands. Her finger nails were painted a
color I later learned was puce.
“My Dad, he blinks all the time, he doesn’t
know why either,” she continued. She looked down her feet and said, “I
shouldn’t have asked you that. I’m really nervous and I say stupid things when
I’m nervous. I’m a girl and this is my first date, and for girls this really is
a very big deal.”
I understood completely. I was so nervous I
couldn’t feel my toes, so I started moving them up and down to make sure they
were still there.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I don’t know why
I do that with my fingers; it’s a thing I do.”
“Well, you’re really cute when you do it,”
she said.
“I know,” I said, and I don’t know why I
said it, but I did.
Near her home, there was an old abandoned
carriage house on the Renahan estate and the wide driveway that led to it was
lined by tall pine trees whose branches reached out across the drive and
touched each other like old, dear friends.
We stopped walking and looked at her house,
whose lights seemed to intrude on the calm night. Instinctively we clasped
hands and walked down the drive and sat on the large marble doorstep of the
carriage house. Thin slivers of moonbeams sparkled through the protective
covering of the pines and we drank in the beauty of it all, she looking off
into the nearby woods and me looking at her.
Without a word, I leaned forward to kiss her,
at the exact moment that she turned to say something and her forehead crashed
into my rather long nose. I recoiled, and she reached out to touch me at the
exact moment I leaned forward again and her fingernail went in my eye. When I
brought my hand up protectively my finger got caught in her loop earring and I
thought, “You know, God, I really don’t deserve this.”
The moment passed. Her ear was bleeding
slightly, I had a welt on my nose and water was pouring out of my left eye When we got to her house, we talked about the
dance for a second and then a curtain moved. The porch light went on.
“Goodnight, and thank you,” she said. I
nodded and smiled and said, “Yeah, and God thank you.” I walked away a few
feet, turned, and said, “That was supposed to be ‘Yeah and goodnight and thank
you’.” And then I prayed for death, yelling at God from inside my head, “What?
You can’t spare a bolt of lightning?”
Then she touched my hand and laughed and I
relaxed and she whispered, “Come here.” I came forward a few feet and she
kissed me and turned and ran slowly into the house wearing my sports coat. When
I walked home the dark the cold was gone and all I felt was warmth and
happiness. And I said to God, “You know there, God, sometimes life is pretty
good and this is one of those times.”
Weird History: TV beatnik bust precedes raid for cops
Doug Fuhrmann
It was a Wednesday night in
March 1960, and Carl Asselta was watching television in his Vineland home
before reporting for duty on the late-night shift.
Asselta worked as a patrolman
on the city's police force. Throughout the year, the force had been breaking up
illegal activities operating from Landis Avenue businesses.
Led by Chief Carl Ford, the
police recently had halted a lottery racket operating from a store that served
as a front for gambling activities.
So it was probably with
interest that Asselta watched the black-and-white drama playing out on his
television set.
After all, that week's
presentation of "Armstrong Circle Theatre" centered on undercover
agents posing to expose a beatnik ring.
It was called, "Raid in
Beatnik Village."
With the fictional beatniks all
raided out, Asselta reported for duty at 11 p.m.
In short order, he and
Patrolmen Mickey Tirelli were dispatched to Chubby's Bun and Burger Restaurant
at 441 Landis Ave.
They had received an anonymous
call that a drinking party was going on. Finding the restaurant locked, but
hearing noise and commotion inside, they entered through a back basement door.
Asselta and Tirelli moved in
and found the only source of light came from a light bulb suspended from the
ceiling.
Huddled underneath was a group
of people amongst the Vodka bottles and paper cups strewn about the littered
floor.
Asselta may have seen more buns
than burgers at Chubby's that night as several of the participants were
partially disrobed.
The officers called for
assistance, arresting eight men and a woman on disorderly charges.
A front-page story in the next
day's Vineland Times Journal told of police raiding a "beatnik-type"
party in the restaurant's dimly lit basement.
Only this time, Asselta had
seen it all play out in living color.
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