Things about me

This is the oldest family photograph I own. I'm about three years old here. My mother made the skirt. It's possible she had one to match.



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Scenes from my past - Part eighteen

I've been hanging out on this hometown nostalgia page on Facebook. It's brought up a lot of old memories of my childhood. For some reason it sparked a reverie about candy. Don't eat candy anymore but I had a huge sweet tooth as a kid. For a while I was really into Turkish Taffy. It's actually an awful candy but I liked the whole smack it and crack it thing. And their commercials had a great jingle. Don't actually remember this first commercial but the jingle at the end is the original one I remember. And there's great footage of Coney Island in its glory days.


I remember seeing this one on the TV with the new jingle. It explains the smack and crack.



Surprisingly, Bonomo is still in business and somebody is still eating that inedible stuff.

Scenes from my past -- Part seventeen

Been a while since I've added to this series. This is one from my more recent past when I lived in lovely downtown Noho. This photo was taken on a path that was literally a ten minute walk (or less) from the downtown, depending on where you started from. I didn't take this photo but I've walked that path many times. I know exactly where the photo was taken. Morning in the Meadows, Northampton, MA. [George Lenker photo]



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Scenes from my past - Part Sixteen

Taking a break from my youth to revisit one of best places I ever lived, lovely downtown Northampton, MA. Lived in various places in the downtown for about 15 years or so. I worked just up the street from this corner for almost 20 years. It was a magic town in the 1990s. By the time I left in the mid 2000s, it was starting to gentrify and losing it charm. But this painting captures the spirit of the place in its golden years. We called that bridge, the truck eater because big trucks would regularly ignore the clearance warning and get stuck under it. [Sophie Theroux painting]



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Scenes from my past - Part Fifteen

This was one of my favorite buildings in the downtown where I grew up. It was the offices of the local newspaper. Never actually went into it, not ever. But I always really wanted to and look out of those top windows. I love a building with a tower.



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Scenes from my past - Part Fourteen

This was our private playground when I was a teen, long before they turned it into Tarywile Park. It was a private estate at the time. My boyfriend in high school was related to the family who owned it. They were the poor relations. His father ran the dairy farm that was part of the estate. So we got to roam those hundreds of acres of woods and fields by ourselves. There was a big pond where we sometimes had bonfires. There was a ruined castle but we never went inside it. It was dangerous even then. This photo reminded me of those golden years. [John Andrew Zanzal photo]



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Scenes from my past - Part Thirteen

This the corner of West St and Main in the little city where I grew up. I want to say that monument was still in the middle of the road then, but I may be making that up. I'm sure the Greek pizza place was in that modern building on the right. The building on the left was the City Hall. The police department was in the basement.

I was in that PD twice. The first time was when I was about 11 years old. My friend and I found a handbag left in a payphone booth just up the street. The wallet had $80 in it. That was a lot of money then. We turned it into the police. The woman who lost it was very grateful. She didn't give us a reward. We were okay with that.

The second time was when I was 13 and hanging with Vicky Lawrence. The girl who taught me to smoke. We were hanging with her friends, a gang of ruffians. She had a crush on one of them.

We were walking through the big cemetery and a couple of the guys got rowdy and knocked down a gravestone. I was aghast. I told her her I was going home. She walked with me.

All the ruffians scattered in another direction. They got away. We got taken to the station by the cops. We were questioned. I had to call my mother to come take me home. That's the only time I remember my Dad being really pissed at me. I didn't hang around with Vicky after that. [photo via]



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Scenes from my past - Part Twelve

There's a new one now, a big sleek white building, but when I was growing up this was my library. The kid's section was on the first floor. You had to be 12 years old to get to the second floor. While I was waiting to get old enough to get up there, I read fully 90% of the books downstairs. Used to bring home six at a time, more than once a week. I read every book in the mystery section first. Then I moved to the litte room with the biographies. There was one series I especially liked. They had orange covers with a black silhouette. My very favorites were Molly Pitcher, Luther Burbank and Stephen Foster.

This building is still on Main Street. It's a music center of some kind. They renovated it so it doesn't have all the fabulous frills on the roof. This is more what it looked like back then. [photo via]



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Scenes from my past - Part Eleven

Before I-84 was built we drove past the Pink Dinosaur many times. Even after the highway was there, I would make a point to drive on the slow road just to say hello. Sometimes I went into the store. It was a small little mineral shop run by old guy who really loved rocks as much I do. It's gone now, but I still have a gem I bought there around 1970. It's basically a small bit of tumbled smoky quartz. Think I paid a nickel for it, but maybe it was 25 cents. It was called an Apache Tear.

I think the low white building was a bowling alley. I bowled there a few times but mostly we went to the Bowl-a-Rama in town. They had the best pinball machines ever.



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Scenes from my past - Part Ten

This postcard says it's the high school, but by the time I went there they had a built a new, bigger one outside of town. So I went to this school in the eight grade. My homeroom was on the right hand corner of the building, third floor. The state college was right next to it.

When I was four years old we lived a block away from here. I remember walking past the school to play on the stairs to the college campus while we waited to meet my Dad.

Across the street was an elderly woman who was my mother's friend. Don't really remember her but recall she gave me Vienna cookies. And I can still envision the massive front door with a big oval glass window and lace curtains. [photo via]



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Scenes from my past - Part Nine

This place doesn't look like much but it was the closest market to our house. It was a store when you could buy everything you needed in a hurry. When I was nine years old my mother would often send me to the Henry Street market to pick up milk or lunch meat or pork chops for dinner. They had a big rack of candy bars. For a nickel you could buy a giant Hershey bar or a Sky Bar or maybe a really big Baby Ruth. All the soda came in returnable glass bottles. The 36 oz were worth a nickel, which we traded in for said candy. And they had spinning racks of comic books from Archie, to superheros to true romance. But they wouldn't sell you cigarettes there if you were underage. You had to go to Harry the Gyp for that. He'd sell them to anybody.

The store was about six blocks from my house. You had to cross two busy streets. Nobody thought anything about letting a nine year old make the trek alone.

And right across the street, back then, was Demo's Dry Cleaning. It belonged to my neighborbood friend Geraldine's father. Sadly, I don't have a photo of that.

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Scenes from my past - Part Eight

When I was young, they used to hold teen dances in the St. James Espicopal Church. It's in the center of downtown. Only a few storefronts off the Main Street. After the dance we would go to the Greek pizza place a few doors down and crowd into the booths. The pizza was very greasy.



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Scenes from my past - Part Seven

There were many ways to walk to downtown from the home of my youth. Sometimes I would take this route just to see this house. The internet tells me it is considered the best octagon house of the 12 that survive in Connecticut. This photo was apparently taken in 2008 after it was refurbished.

It was much shabbier when I was young. In fact the whole neighborhood was pretty run down. It was vaguely scary. You wouldn't walk there at night. But in the daytime I would always stop and admire its oddness. That house had a presence that demanded attention.

When I was teenager a friend knew someone who lived there. His name was Lance. He was older than us and had really long hair. Sadly, he never invited us inside. Probably just as well. He felt slightly dangerous.



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Scenes from my past - Part Six

When I was growing up we lived about a mile from Main Street. There was a city bus stop just a block away from the house but I often walked instead. Streets were safe and nobody thought anything about a ten year old wandering them alone. There were several different ways to get there but West Street was one of my favorite walks. There were stores along the way and all the houses were nice. I think I almost recognize these porches.



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Scenes from my past - Part Five

This was the view from my mother's hat store on the Main Street of my youth. We were on the second floor. The lawn on that white bank with all the stairs was always perfectly manicured like an illustration in a fairy tale book. It was always the same length. I don't recall ever seeing anyone mowing it.



The store had a huge bank of large windows across the front. There was step up platform in front of them wide enough to stage a five piece band. We used it to stage the fancy hats on clear acrylic art deco hat racks. And to hold the custom mades awaiting pick up.

Sometimes when I looked out I would see our best customer on the steps of that bank. Her signature color was chatreuse. And by that I mean, every ensemble she wore was chatreuse. All chatruese. All the time. It suited her. I want to say she also had at least one little dog, maybe two, also dressed in little chatreuse coats. But I may be making that up.

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Scenes from my past - Part Four

When I was young, we had a thriving Main Street. Everybody hung out downtown. Shopped there. Ate there. On the weekends there were teen dances featuring the hottest local bands and the occasional nationally famous performers. It was a great downtown to grow up in. This is what it looked like in 1963.



The big store that's disappearing into the far right of the photo was Genungs. Biggest department store in town at the time. They would have the best promotions. Remember once they had well dressed women handing out perfume samples in beautiful little bottles. Another time a Walt Disney cartoonist gave a drawing demo, and then drew a huge cartoon for you to take home. I asked for Daisy Duck because nobody else did and I feel sorry for her.

You can't really see it, but my mom's hat store is in that picture somewhere down the block from Genungs.

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Scenes from my past - Part Three

When I was kid, we had the best neighborhood playground. A beautiful park with a baseball diamond and a horseshoe pit, and a big old pond at the bottom of the hill surrounded by a little woods and a big swamp beyond that. And they had fun equipment. Big metal slides and seesaws and monkey bars. The one we had looked just like this. The big deal was when you were brave enough to do flips over that middle bar at the top and then hang upside down by your knees and wave your arms in the air.



In the summer they had an arts and crafts program. We made lanyards out of plastic strips and potholders on those little looms that you can still buy today. I made dozens of potholders. Pretty sure my mom still has a couple. And the other really fun piece of playground equipment was this merry go round thing. Everybody would grab a bar and run and then jump on while we waited for it to slow down again. Then we would jump off. Whoever jumped off first won the game. The big kids always won.



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Scenes from my past - Part Two

This rock was the marker for Barchi's hot dog stand. It had two faces. Happy on one side and sad on the other. When you saw the happy face you knew you were almost to the lake. On the way home the sad face made you want to stop -- but really -- Texas Hot Wieners had better hot dogs.



And this the lake where I spent the better part of many summers. Learned to swim there. There were picnic tables and barbecue grills up on the hill under the trees. Had many a family picnic there. I remember what a big deal it was to finally be able to swim to that big float and jump off the diving board. And by jump I mean sort of walk off the end while I was holding my nose. Never actually dove off the thing. It was tall.



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Scenes from the past - Part One

Fell down a rabbit hole today and discovered a Facebook group with an album that took two hours to click through. Found many iconic images from my youth. None of the people in this photo is me and it doesn't begin to capture the magnificence of the display John Leahy put up every Easter in front his billboard, but it gives you an idea of how popular it was. One of my fondest memories is going there dressed in our Sunday best to get a photo in front of the giant bunnies.



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