Home for Christmas

“I'll be home for Christmas,

You can plan on me,
Please have snow and mistletoe,
And presents on the tree …”

– I’ll Be Home For Christmas - Ram, Gannon and Kent; recorded by Bing Crosby
in October 1943
I listen to those words every Christmas through the hiss and crack of the 78 rpm record on my Grandfather’s century-old Columbia record playing machine. It’s a copy that my Uncle, Tech. Cpl. Vitaut Voselius sent to my Grandfather in Detroit, through the kindness and, I’m convinced, magic of some USO Troop that helped GIs send Christmas gifts home to their families. Uncle Vittie and his buddies were half-a-world away from home, mistletoe and any presents. They had helped chase the German Army out of North Africa in May of that year, and then hopped to the Italian peninsula to press the pursuit. By the time they met that USO troop in early November; they had fought their way ashore at Salerno, and had survived the worst that the German 16th Panzer Division could dish out.

Uncle Vittie didn’t make it home for Christmas that year, nor did he in 1944; but, by 1945 – thank God – he did. That Christmas, he had dinner with Grandpa, my Mom (his sister) and my Dad; and – like most of the veterans of WWII – got about putting the war behind him and quietly getting back to work in the world that he had just fought to save. Not quite 10 years later, he used the VA mortgage program to buy a little house on Hinton in Riverview Village that my parents rented from him until they could later afford to buy it themselves.
Every Christmas in that little house, and for as long as we were all together, we played that record on Christmas Day, all of us smiling through teary eyes at each other and just loving being together. Today, I’m the last one left from that circle, but I play the record every year for my wife and children.

And you know what? Mom, Dad, Grandpa – and especially Uncle Vittie – all come home for Christmas every time I hear it … if only in my dreams.

Merry Christmas, and the Happiest New Year to all!

Dear Santa, I want a Jimmy Jet, a cup of real hot chocolate, and it to be 1966 again

Forty-three years ago, Christmastime was different. While we wrote our letters to Santa, mom made hot chocolate on the stove, from milk, sugar, Hershey’s Cocoa (from that can with the lid that went “pop!” when she opened it) and love.

Our wish lists were made up of toys made here in the U.S., by long-forgotten companies like Deluxe and Remco. And it seemed like every store – including the grocery and the hardware – magically turned into a toy store at Christmastime.
Do you remember “grocery store toys,” mostly from Deluxe, like Jimmy Jet, Suzy Homemaker and Playmobile? They were packaged in big, colorful boxes that we could easily see (and wish for) from the top of the dairy cases and the frozen food shelves at the National Supermarket.

My daughters drink hot chocolate made by my wife or me in the microwave, from water and a packet from a Swiss Miss box. Their wish lists are made up of things from Best Buy, Amazon.com and iTunes. But, for all that’s different, some things aren’t. The hot chocolate is still made with love, and their Christmas wishes are as magical to them as ours were more than 40 years ago.

Making a list and checking it twice
This is a time of year for list-making – Christmas card lists, wish lists, and lists of our blessings. Here are a few lists that I hope will rekindle some memories of Christmastime long ago Downriver.

Favorite Christmas songs
According to ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), these are the top-5 most performed Christmas songs:
1. The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)
2. Santa Claus Is Coming to Town
3. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
4. Winter Wonderland
5. White Christmas
Is your favorite on the list? I’d bump number 5 to number 1, but all five are favorites of mine.

Favorite Christmas TV specials
Remember when TV specials really were special because we could only see them when they aired? We couldn’t TiVo them, or get them on DVD. Here, according to the A.C. Nielsen Company, are the top-5 most-watched Christmas specials:
1. A Charlie Brown Christmas
2. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
3. Mickey’s Christmas Carol
4. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
5. A Chipmunk Christmas
I certainly agree with number 1 because, well – that’s what Christmas is all about! For me, however, number 2 would be “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol.” That one didn’t even show up in the top-25. I still remember Tiny Tim singing “We’ll have the Lord’s bright blessing, just knowing we’re together …”

I also have fond memories of Christmas specials from entertainers like Perry Como and Andy Williams. You remember the ones … with them dressed in cardigan sweaters and crooning traditional Christmas songs on a festively decorated set that could have been – and maybe, in a sense, was – our collective living room.

Favorite Christmas TV episodes
Next to the specials, our favorite Christmas TV viewing 40 years ago was the Christmas episodes of our weekly TV shows. According to amazon.com, these are the most popular, based on DVD sales:
1. Friends – Dec 14, 2000
2. Bewitched – Dec 21, 1967
3. M*A*S*H* – Dec 17, 1972
4. Growing Pains – Dec 16, 1986
5. The Wonder Years – Dec 14, 1988
“The Honeymooners Christmas” is a childhood favorite of mine. I have it on VHS, and my kids enjoy watching it with me every year.

Although neither of these shows appears on any list I’ve found, I’d put them near the top of any list I’d make:
Studio 60, “The Christmas Show,” that aired on December 4, 2006. You can see the classic musical performance from that show here:
http://www.tvsquad.com/2006/12/09/free-download-of-studio-60s-christmas-musical-performance/
The Gilmore Girls, “Forgiveness and Stuff,” that aired on December 21, 2000

Christmas “cards”
As a kid, my favorite part of the weeks before Christmas was bringing in the mail and opening the cards from friends and family. Well, I guess I’m still a kid (something else that hasn’t changed!) because I still enjoy getting holiday mail. Here are some memories sent to me by holiday e-mail that celebrate Downriver Christmas past:

Susan Maricle wrote, “… Here’s a Downriver memory that I carry with me – at Monroe Elementary in the early 60s, they sold Christmas corsages in the office for 25 cents apiece. They were pinned to a gray felt-covered bulletin board that was propped up on the front counter, so all the kids could see them through the window. They had little extra touches like a pine cone, an ornament, or a bell. I never knew who made them. Perhaps it was the school secretary, Mrs. Frostic, who years later I discovered was a famous artist.

Monroe's Christmas music assemblies were led by Mrs. Hollar. (She was just one of the perfectly named teachers at Monroe, along with Mrs. Staples for Kindergarten and Mr. Green for art.) So in my mind, Christmas corsages and Christmas music assemblies go together. When my son appeared in his first Christmas concert years ago, I ordered a corsage for the choir director. I knew nothing about corsages, except that they probably cost more than 25 cents. I described to the florist, Deb Lalli, the corsages from Monroe, with their little extra touches. She remembered a box of accessories she had in the back room and the finished product was absolutely beautiful!”
Fred Stull wrote to remind me about some very personal Christmas memories. He’s a childhood friend – we grew up on Hinton, in Riverview, where he still lives with his family. “… Some of the things that I have never forgotten about – playing Stratego® (a favorite Christmas present of mine) at your house and the bubble lights in your window at Christmas …”

Thank you, Susan and Fred, for sharing those Downriver Christmas memories; and Merry Christmas, Downriver! May you always remember the joys of our Christmases past, and may you make many new memories this Christmas present.

Soupy Sales, Ben Cooper, and Halloweens Past and Present

Soupy Sales died a week ago. I heard about his death the same day I was taking my daughters shopping for Halloween costumes and pumpkin picking. It saddened me and I reminisced to them about my childhood – “Lunch with Soupy,” and all our local TV legends from the 1950s and 60s – and, because of our mission that day, about what Halloween was like for us 45 years ago.

First of all, I told them, there was no “Halloween season,” with orange lights draped over houses, electronic ghouls suspended from trees, and inflatable graveyards displayed on every other front lawn starting the day we returned to school in the fall.

Our Halloween decoration (singular) was placed on the porch just before dark on Halloween. A carved pumpkin. Period. Usually lit with a candle left over from last Christmas. Big orange vegetables that we carved ourselves at the kitchen table the day before Halloween. They had gap-toothed, crooked smiles and mismatched triangular eyes. And it wasn’t easy, because we carved them with the same knife mom used to carve the Thanksgiving turkey. We were just trying to finish the job with all our fingers accounted for and attached. Have you seen those pumpkin “carving kits” they sell today, with about a dozen assorted plastic “carving tools”? There’s not one item in those packages that a pumpkin has to fear. Now, mom’s turkey knife …

Right about then, we arrived at “Halloween Western Hemisphere” or “Spirit Halloween MegaCavern” or whatever – you know, one of those big-box specialty stores that appears in our neighborhood right after Labor Day and disappears into the mist of their artificial fog machines on November 1 – and my daughters completely tuned me out. They darted around through thousands of square feet of Halloween present, but my memories lingered in Halloween past.

Do you remember when we either dressed in homemade outfits, or one of those boxed Ben Cooper costumes? That was back when Halloween costumes took up a shelf or two at Rexall Drugs or Neisner’s, not 25,000 square feet of display space in a seasonal specialty store. They consisted of a very flimsy fabric costume parody that we stepped into and then tied behind our necks. Each one had a plastic mask artfully designed to equally restrict both our vision and our breathing; that was fastened around our heads with a rubber band which always painfully snagged a few hairs when we removed it to see where we were going – or to gasp for a breath.

There were no “haunted attractions” to thrill us, scare us, and – primarily – empty our parents’ wallets. We had real haunted places (we believed) like the “haunted house” at the corner of Parkway and Valade, where we convinced each other that generations of previous owners were buried in the yard behind the iron fence surrounding the lot. I’ll never know how many pounds of candy we missed collecting on Halloween night because, just to play it safe, we avoided that entire block.

It seemed like there were hundreds of us kids on the street Halloween night dashing from door to door, jostling for position at each doorstep and shouting “Trick of Treat!” I don’t ever remember knocking or ringing a doorbell because the action was non-stop; nobody had time to close their front door!

Our treats were special too, weren’t they? Nobody worried about eating them before they were examined, X-rayed and scanned for trace elements. Heck, sometimes we ate them right on the porch where we got 'em … like Mrs. Shallaf’s homemade popcorn balls, and Mrs. Brown’s homemade caramel apples – she actually melted the Kraft caramels and dipped the apples herself!

And I remember collecting other special treats, too; ones that related to the neighbors who handed them out. I remember our Twin Pines milkman and pints of cold, delicious chocolate milk – we drained those between his porch and the sidewalk; and the Awrey Bakery deliveryman’s miniature loaves of bread. And, back then, the candy we got really was “fun size” – BIG.

“Dad! We need money!” my daughters cried out, snapping me out of my reminiscent trance at the cash register. Their arms were full of Halloween “must-haves” that I’d never seen before, but their eyes and faces were filled with something very familiar. Excitement. Hey, maybe Halloween hasn’t changed so much, after all.

Next stop was the pumpkin patch. The girls picked a couple of good ones and later that night, we carved them together at the kitchen table… with the knife we’ll use to carve the Thanksgiving turkey.

Things are tight – Pass the bologna and re-use that waxed paper

Coping with today’s struggling economy is nothing new to those of us who grew up Downriver in the late 50s and early 60s.

“Things are tight,” dad used to say, “we gotta’ make ends meet.”

“We have to make every penny count,” mom always said as I followed her up and down the aisles of the National Supermarket.

We ate bologna in all its forms – sliced, chopped and ring – because what it lacked in flavor and nutritional value, it more than made up for in affordability when dad was working on-call at Peter P. Ellis Trucking and three nights a week at Montgomery Ward.

My friends and I learned to recycle before recycling was invented. We re-used the waxed paper and foil that wrapped the sandwiches in our lunch boxes day after day, until the foil was only good for adding to the ball we each kept tucked in our desks at school, and the waxed paper was only good for polishing up the slide on the playground.

Our moms used to mend socks, wash shoe laces and put-up vegetables that they grew in their backyard gardens. Our dads all had very reasonable lawn services – us. And we cut the lawns with push mowers and trimmed them with squeaky clippers that required us to be on our knees and left our hands numb from squeezing the too-big handles with rusty old tension springs.

Decades before “staycations,” we did things close to home when dad would take a week off work in the summer – a night at the Fort George Drive-In, or a day at Bob Lo were big events for us, because mom and dad usually couldn’t afford those kinds of entertainment throughout the year.

Those lessons learned years ago are still good ones. Our family makes an event of $2 movies and trips to the library. My kids re-use their zip-lock sandwich bags and they refill their water bottles a couple of times before recycling them. Me? I still pack my lunch every day, but even though I try to “make every penny count,” and my wife and I try to “make ends meet,” I haven’t once in the past 45 years, ever taken another bite of bologna!

What lessons did you learn growing up Downriver about making ends meet? How did your family cope if things were tight? Has that experience helped you now?

‘What I did on my summer vacation’ – an essay that’s 42 years late

I’m about 42 years late with this essay.

Sister James Marian assigned it to my classmates at St. Cyprian School, in Riverview, in September of 1966, as they struggled to re-adjust to being back in their desks – and their uniforms – after a summer of fun and freedom. She never assigned it to me because I never returned to St. Cyprian that fall. And, as much as my classmates were struggling to re-adjust, I had some significant adjustments of my own.

All through the spring of 1966 my family and I packed. We packed dishes and appliances, books and toys, and I packed my memories and dreams. Throughout those months, I ignored the real estate sign on the front lawn that read “sold.” I still got together with my friends, especially Joe Bishop and Neven Vos, but we spent more time boxing up my belongings than we did riding bikes or playing ball.

Just weeks after leaving St. Cyprian, and watching my old house on Hinton blur through my tears as I stared out the window of my dad’s ’62 Chevy, I found myself at my new house in Detroit, sitting among my boxes of treasures. I refused to unpack because, as I saw it, unpacking meant I was gone forever from Riverview, from Downriver, from everyone and everything I’d known and loved for the first 12 years of my life.

I still wasn’t fully unpacked a year later, but in the summer of 1967, I finally realized that I was gone forever from Riverview. Some people called it a "riot," others a "civil disturbance," but no matter what it was called, for a kid transplanted from Downriver, the summer of 1967 was terrifying. The National Guard and U.S. Army units were marshaled just a block south of my house, at Detroit City Airport. The city was under a curfew and I could see, and smell, smoke from burning buildings just blocks away. I retreated to my room and finally unpacked my box of comic books; to hide out in a world that was familiar to me and, by the last page of the comic, usually made some sort of sense - unlike what was happening around me.

That’s how I spent my summer vacation in 1967, Sister, in my room, with my comic books, hoping and praying things would get better, and remembering better summers – like 1965.

I started the summer of ‘65 the way I remember starting every summer before – by getting a flat top haircut at Mike’s Barber Shop and getting a brand-new pair of P.F. Flyers.

My P.F. Flyers were not just summer shoes – liberating my feet from the leather torture devices that passed for shoes that I wore daily to school – they were a kind of summer calendar. As they aged, so passed the summer.

By mid- to late-June, the laces were gray with dust from the baseball field. Sometime in July, the rubber at the toes and heels was worn smooth, and by late July I’d usually lost a couple of those metal grommets from the air holes. By August, bits of rubber began to flap around the toes, the logo had pulled off the heel and the laces were frayed. By Labor Day, my P.F. Flyers made their last appearance, usually at the State Fair, with soles worn thin and laces tied two or three holes below my ankle because they had broken weeks before. The day after Labor Day, I was forcing my feet into stiff new leather “school shoes” and my P.F. Flyers were tossed on the floor of my closet.

As I look back, it would have been much more appropriate to give all those old pairs of P.F. Flyers decent burials behind the garage every Labor Day weekend. They were, after all, really summer pals who deserved a better end.

In the summer of ‘65, I saw Elvis in “Harum Scarum” at the Fort George Drive-In with the Podolack family. I went to Bob-Lo and finally got the courage to ride the Wilde Maus, one time. On a dare. Once was enough. The Zugspitz was plenty for this thrill-seeking kid! Throughout the summer of ‘65, I think I consumed about a gallon of frozen custard from Bob Jo’s and certainly ate many dollars worth of penny candy from Ed’s Market.

I listened to my transistor radio – baseball mostly, but some music. I didn’t discover the genius of The Beatles until I was older. That summer, I preferred Dino, Desi and Billy; and Gary Lewis and The Playboys. I rode my bike, too; and we played ball at the park. And I did a lot of just hanging around with my buddies.

My best memories of that last golden summer of my childhood were rekindled just a year ago, in the summer of 2008, when many of those dear old friends and classmates – the St. Cyprian class of 1968 – got together again, thanks to the efforts of my old buddies, Joe and Neven. Despite not "officially" being a part of that class through graduation, they kindly included me in the celebration; and we all shared stories about the 40 years of summer vacations that had passed.

Well, Sister James Marian no longer assigns essays to students. She’s "semi-retired" and living in Monroe, Mich., (and is a very effective fund-raiser for her order - the IHM Sisters, my check is in the mail, Sister ...) – but if she did, and if I were to write an essay for her about what I did on my summer vacation in 2008, I’d write that I rediscovered the deepest, most solid parts of the foundation upon which my adult life was built. I’d write that I reconnected with the first and best friends I ever made in my life. And I’d write that – even after more than 40 years – the best times, the best places, and the best people still live in our memories.

Twenty-two years of cartoons, but a 50-year relationship

This year marks my 22nd year celebrating Downriver communities, people and issues with my editorial cartoons in The News-Herald. Twenty-two years is a long time, but our relationship goes back much longer than that. Thirty years longer, to be exact.

I grew up down river back when it was just that – two words, lower case – and meant, to many people who didn’t live here simply, “that area south of Detroit before you get to Monroe …”

I lived in Riverview (a village when I moved in), on Hinton and I learned my most important life lessons and made the best friends I ever had in that neighborhood and at St. Cyprian School. I got my haircuts at Hubert’s Barber Shop and learned to ride my two-wheeler one memorable weekend in the empty parking lot of People’s Bank.

I saw my favorite movies at the Fort George Drive-In and at the Wyandotte Theater (before there was even an “Annex”). I rode midway rides at the local amusement park at a time when places like Bob-Lo Island and Edgewater Park might as well have been Disney Land, because they all seemed equally distant.

I played “army” at Memorial Park and I made many braided key chains at the activity center (which looked very much like a garage) at Ray St. Park. I collected empty two-cent pop bottles and cashed them in for penny candy at Ed’s Market or at Pat’s Stone Front Market, depending upon which side of town my buddies and I were “working.”

And my best memories are of those buddies – of Mark and Johnny, Joe, Fred and Ronald, David, Richard, Greg, Larry, Kurt and Neven; and of the girls I pretended not to like, too – Carla, Diane, Karen, Philomene and Suzy.

Life and career led me away from Downriver – but not far. My kids have been to St. Cyprian Church, they’ve played at Memorial Park, they’ve had frozen custard at the Bob-Jo and I drag them annually to go Cruisin’ Downriver.

Downriver was, is and always will be, my home, even though my address isn’t on Hinton anymore. Now it’s in my heart.