I Write About When I Was A Kid

I Write About When I Was A Kid

By Fred Owens

This is what I remember about when I was a kid, not what actually happened. In this part I write about the trees and the games and the neighborhood.

 

I was born in Evanston, Illinois, the summer of 1946, the fourth child. My parents were renting a house on Prairie Avenue right off Central Street. It was no longer big enough, so they bought the house in Wilmette soon after my birth. The old house on Prairie Avenue stayed in the family because Uncle Ted and Aunt Bea rented it after we moved out and they lived there for many years. We didn’t visit them very often, because Uncle Ted was boring – at least that’s what I thought. He had such a big nose. Aunt Bea had a tiny nose and a sharp mouth, and the food wasn’t any good. My cousins, Dick, Rosemarie and Jerry, were much older than me and they didn’t play.

Uncle Ted was the oldest of Mom’s four brothers. His real name was Ambrose. He had been a stock broker in the 1920s and was making a good living until the Crash. After the Crash he put every last penny back into the market thinking it had reached the bottom. He was wrong, of course. Uncle Ted had no more confidence in himself after that. He would not take any leadership role in our family, even though he was the first born. He just got some nondescript job and kept quiet. He might have been sad. I didn’t notice – I had a lot of uncles.

But the old neighborhood always meant something to me. Mom still liked to do her shopping on Central Street. She would take me with her to the butcher shop and they would give me a slice of liver sausage. We bought our shoes at Vose’s every year. The salesman always had a nice smile and said, “Good Morning, Mrs. Owens. How are you?” New shoes were fun, especially sneakers, because I felt extra jumpy when I got them. The salesman would kneel down in front of me, making me feel special and important. He brought out the silver-metal plate with sliding pieces that measured the length and width of my feet. This was a very positive experience, to have growing feet and to be needing new shoes, and to have a nice mother who always got them for me when I needed them.

The best thing about Central Street was the parade every Fourth of July, followed by the fireworks at nearby Dyche Stadium, the home field for Northwestern University. The parade and the fireworks was a very big deal for me, and the rest of the year, when Mom took me there, the street would resonate in anticipation of the big parade.

Not forgetting Prairie Avenue, because the way from our house in Wilmette to Central Street was down Prairie Avenue, and I always looked at the old house when we drove past. It was a stucco bungalow with dark green wood window trim. Stucco was the right and truest way to build a house, because our house in Wilmette was stucco. Everybody else’s house was different and maybe just as good, but stucco was my standard.

We moved to the new house in August, 1946, six weeks after I was born. The address was 1612 Forest Avenue. I didn’t have a stronger connection to the house than my brother or my three sisters, but I always felt that I was the reason we bought it – because we need the room.

Forest Avenue was well-named. The oak trees and elm trees towered over the house and made a canopy of shade all up and down the street. I knew at a very early age that this was better than what other people had, that a good neighborhood had good trees. They were huge at the trunk, even three feet in diameter for the elm tree in our front yard, although it wasn’t exactly in our yard, but between the street and the sidewalk.

Not for climbing, the trunk of the elm tree soared up to the sky in mighty strength, and the high branches spread out in graceful symmetry. I knew it was beautiful. The oak tree was right in the center of the backyard. It was stronger, the bark was rougher, the limbs more twisty than the smooth curves of the elm. The oak tree was not beautiful but it was awesome – so big and so old, and part of a company of giant oaks in the neighborhood. There was an oak next door, and another one across the alley. We were all under their protection.

For wildlife we had grey squirrels, robins and blue jays. There were acorns. There was a horse chestnut tree a block away that was of some interest, because we could gather the smooth dark-brown chestnuts, just to feel them and throw them away after a while.

We had a great climbing tree across the street, a maple with a short trunk and many horizontal branches. You could jump up, grab one of the low branches and swing up your feet. The bark was smooth and worn smoother because all the kids played in it. I was competent and graceful in the tree branches, never reckless. I shinnied up to a certain height, I never tried to test the limit. It was a good tree, nobody ever fell out.

I hardly noticed the weather, except when it was fun. Summer was good for thunderstorms and lightning. I loved the boom and the crash and the flashing blue light. We might stay out in the downpour and get all wet and jump in puddles, but usually we were shuffled indoors and just got to watch. The night crawlers came out on the sidewalk after the rain, very big fat worms, sprawled out and lazy in a warm puddle. You could fill a jar or a can with them, although there wasn’t much else to do with night crawlers except cut them in half and squash them in various ways. I had only a mild interest in worm torture.

My parents didn’t make me wear shoes in the summer. Basically from when school let out in the middle of June and until school started again in September, I was barefoot, except on Sunday at church. They were more permissive in this regard than some other parents. I had really great feet. I could walk or run anywhere in bare feet, fearlessly, even on gravel, although that was tough.

The best part of summer in our neighborhood was getting to play outside after dinner. That was never allowed during the school year, not just at our house, it was a neighborhood rule. But in summer, after being excused from the dinner table, we could go out and play until the street lights came on. That was a good standard because there was no arguing. When the lights came on, the game was over. Our street light, and I pretty much thought it was ours, I knew we didn’t own it as such, but it was still proprietary to me, because it stood square in the center of our yard next to the curb. It was our beacon, cast iron in a six-sided column, fluted, with three sides that curved inwards and three sides that lay outward and flat, rising to a pretty tower of light with six panes of mottled glass, and each pane tilted outward slightly, and the light topped by a crown and spike. The street lamp was beautiful to me, and I knew it was better than what other people had. It was the home beacon, Mom and Dad never had to call out in the darkness, we always came home.

The games on summer nights were great. There were a lot of children on our block and we played in the street. Forest Avenue was paved with dark-red bricks, as smooth as porcelain, warm or cool to bare feet, with little bits of green moss or tiny blades of grass growing between the cracks. We played Kick Ball, that was sort of like baseball in that someone pitched the soft red ball to a kicker who booted it and then ran some bases, but girls could play. We also played Kick the Can. I don’t remember the rules or how it was played. The most fun was Hide and Go Seek, and we used the big elm tree for Home Base. Come to think of it, the games always centered in front of our house and not down the block. I think that was because we had the most kids. The Giambalvos lived across the street. Jimmy Giambalvo – that made a rhyme -- was two years older than me, and Paul Giambalvo was one year younger than me. Jimmy was dark like his Italian father. Paul was freckled and red-haired like his mother. They were nice people, but their house was kind of sad and subdued. Mrs. Giambalvo was an alcoholic but we didn’t know that at the time.

The Tuttles lived next to the Giambalvos. Their two kids, Sally and Lynn, were much older. Lynn was a strong, masculine type of fellow. He had a canoe. Lynn was not a regular boy’s name, to my mind. There were not too many people who were different than us, so I noticed this.

The Wolfs lived on the other side of the Giambalvos. Mr. Wolf owned the hardware store in the village. This was cool because of all the stuff they had there. They had a girl Christine who my younger sister played with, and a boy named Charlie who was much younger than me, but still a lot of fun, and we used to go over to their house a lot and read comics and watch TV. Plus the climbing tree, the maple, was in their front yard. So really the focus of the games was in the middle between our house and a little bit to the right, where the Wolf’s lived. Mom was even friends with Mrs. Wolf, and sometimes Mrs. Wolf came over to our house for a visit. Mom was friends with the other neighbors, but it was more like cordiality.

The Steinbrechers lived next door on our side of the street. Two kids, Marcia and Richie. Marcia was bosom buddies with my sister Carolyn. The Steinbrechers moved away to another part of Wilmette, but we still stayed connected. They were Protestants. The Lynches moved in after the Steinbrechers. The Lynch kids – David, Katy, Molly and several others – were a ton of fun, but they didn’t stay long. Mom really liked Mrs. Lynch. After that the Soderstroms moved. They had only kid and it was boring.

Kick Ball was fun, but it was like weeny baseball and we let the girls in, although the girls didn’t see it that way, because it was understood that street games were never just a boys’ thing.  Girls had jump rope and Hop Scotch. Boys threw baseballs and footballs around although we never organized regular games because there wasn’t enough room or enough boys.

Hide and Go Seek was the most important game because it was full-time for boys and girls. If you were It – I loved that word, It. – That was the beginning of philosophy for me, because I used to ponder the status of being It and how it was used in various games. You didn’t want to get caught and become It, of course, but the good part of being It was being the center of attention, and playing the next game well enough so that you would no longer be It.

If you were It in Hide and Go Seek, you covered your eyes and leaned your face against the elm tree – the biggest and most glorious elm tree on the block, which was Home Base and there was never a question about that – and counted to one hundred, while the other kids ran away and hid, usually not too far away, behind a car or a bush, or around the corner of one of the houses.

When you finished counting you called out, “Here I come, ready or not.” You might do this in a sing-song style for effect. And you began to look for the other players, the idea being to tag them before they could run Home and tag the tree, in which case they were safe. As soon as you caught some other kid and tagged him, then they became It for the next game. Of course there still some kids hiding, so you called out “Allee, allee income, freedom free,” also with style.

The back yard was white-fenced in rectangles of two-inch wide strips with a cap rail that you could walk on like a tightrope. The oak tree was smack in the middle of the yard, which was square. The yard just wasn’t big enough for baseball, but we had various pitching games, using the house as a back stop. It was too easy to hit one over the back fence and into the alley, or even further into the Johnson’s yard. Mr. Johnson was a grouch, and if we dug in his flower beds searching for a lost ball, he got mad. We weren’t scared of him or anything.

The big game was badminton. The back part of the yard was just the right size for a court. This was also boys and girls. We put up the net in early summer and kept it there through the season. We played so much badminton that we wore a six-foot circle in the grass on each side of the net. I loved to slam it and I loved to hit high looping floaters. We played until 21 points, and then we played again.

Mom had peonies and roses against the back fence and roses, but too many children to do much gardening. We respected her garden patch, but she was fairly easy-going about it. If you trampled something you didn’t get a big scolding.

We had a hammock hung between the oak tree and the garage. It had a soft, cotton texture, and mildewed, outdoorsy scent.

The alley was cool. It wasn’t paved. It was the wilderness and the underworld. Day lilies – we called them tiger lilies – grew in a riot between the back fence and the ruts of the cars. They just grew by themselves. We burned the trash in a wire can, so there was debris and ashes around like blackened tin cans. When we were older we went alley-hunting around the neighborhood looking for junk.

A special quiet place for me was the north side of the house, a shady grove where violets and lilies of the valley grew untended. I would sit there on the ground and pick a bouquet and bring them to Mom, purple for violets, and that special tiny white color of the lilies. This may have been why I liked that book so much, the one called Ferdinand the Bull. Ferdinand was the most powerful bull in the pasture of Spain, but they could not get him to fight. He only liked to sit under the cork tree and smell the flowers. As a child I wanted to be strong like a bull, but I didn’t want to fight, I wanted to smell the flowers. Not entirely true. I used to fight and scream with my sisters a fair bit. I never got into punching fights with the other kids, although one time, when Scottie Soderstrom had just moved in next door – he was my age and went to the public school – I punched him really hard in the stomach, I don’t know why. He just ran into the house to get away, and after that his mother wouldn’t let him play with me. Scottie was an only child and he just didn’t know how to act.

That was the yard and the block we lived on. The yard and the block were fundamental markers. The outer boundaries were the through streets with traffic lights and white stripes down the middle. Green Bay Road was two blocks towards the lake and the train tracks went by on the other side of the road. When I was really young the choo-choo trains got me really excited with big towers of white smoke, but the diesel engines came in when I was little older and I was more blasé about that. Shimoneck’s was on Green Bay Road. That was the gas station. I could buy an orange soda for a dime. My allowance was twenty-five cents a week. I was friends with Billy Hoak for a few years when I was about ten. He was pudgy and quiet and he had red hair, but the great thing about Billy was that he could get two dimes from his mother almost anytime and we went to get sodas.

Lake Street was one block from Forest Ave. We didn’t cross that. It was paved with black tar – that was fast for bike riding. Our brick street was cool, but it rumbled under the bike tires. Lake Street was fast in general with cars that clipped along, and it went east to Lake Michigan, one mile away.

Ridge Avenue was three blocks to the west. This was major. The eponymous ridge was only twenty to thirty feet in elevation, but it was the only hill we had and the only hill I knew about. You could ride your bike down the hill and go fast and take your hands off the handlebars and be coasting a long way.

St. Joseph’s church and grade school – St. Joe’s -- was at the intersection of Lake Street and Ridge Avenue, just a short walk from the house, but it was up on that ridge and the church was very tall and imposing. The school building was huge too, facing the church across Lake Street. The drugstore was at the third corner at the intersection. We could buy popsicles and candy bars there.

The last boundary was three blocks to the north. It went Lake Street, Forest Ave, Walnut Avenue, Elmwood Avenue, and then Kenilworth, where the rich people lived and the houses were much bigger

 That was my territory, within that grid. Everything was the way it was supposed to be, and it was always that way. The oak trees and the elm trees covered everything with a summer canopy. Nothing ever happened.

In the fall the leaves came down and there were huge piles and raking teams, us kids, on Saturday morning, raking them all to the curb and burning them in the street. But first we made a big pile and jumped in it. I loved burning the leaves, seeing the first curly whisps of smoke and watching it build and then get dense with rich thick white smoke like whipped cream billowing upwards, and then flames leaping, getting hot,  roaring, and then it would die down slowly, or we would dump more leaves on it and start the white smoke again.

In the winter we had snow, snow men, snow forts, snowball fights, and lying down to make angels. Snowmen we outgrew pretty quickly. Snow forts could happen under the right conditions, with plenty of good packing snow and enough kids to build one or two forts and then start a war. It was stupid to get cold fluffy snow that you couldn’t pack. There was no point in having snow if you couldn’t pack it and make snowballs.

The ideal was good packing snow and enough to get out of school for the day. That was heaven, throwing snowballs. When we were older we used to throw them at the icicles hanging off the eaves of the houses, to knock them down. We would go hunting for big ones and keep throwing until we got it. Even older we got into the riskier games which were to throw snowballs at the street lamps with six panes and knock them out, but usually just one of the panes, because then we had to run away. If we really wanted to be hairy we could go over to Lake Street and throw snowballs at cars driving by. The coolest shot was to land one on the windshield. This could bring the cops around.

And the craziest thing was skitching. I didn’t do it, but the Ridge Boys did. I just wasn’t that wild. You did it on a slow street when it’s packed with snow. You waited until a car came by, then you ran behind it and up to it. You quickly squatted down on your heels and grabbed the rear bumper and went for a wild ride until you fell off and went sprawling.

I didn’t envy those Ridge Boys too much because I was already having a lot of fun and to get into a little trouble was enough for me. Besides that, we lived in a better house. Mom and Dad and the other parents, always Mr. and Mrs. – I had no overall objection to their rule. I knew it was wholesome and it felt good. The world inside that neighborhood was more than enough.

The end of Part One. Coming soon  in Part Two I write about my relatives...."My grandmother wore a black Persian wool coat..."

An Appeal

Frog Hospital used to make money, maybe $700 or $800 a year. That was when I sold subscriptions at $25, but somehow the readership fell off and people stopped paying for it and I kind of gave up. But now I think, well, I need the money. And all I have to do is put the solicitation at the bottom of the newsletter when it comes out. To write a check for $25 or more and mail it to Fred Owens, 1105 Veronica Springs RD, Santa Barbara, CA 93105...... or hit the PayPal button on my blog and do it that way.

https://froghospital911.blogspot.com/

That's the blog with the PayPal button on the side. The blog is simply the archive for the newsletter. Every issue of the newsletter becomes a post on the blog, so it stores some hundreds of back issues. Frog Hospital has been in business since 1998, so there is some longevity in it, although Facebook and other social media outlets seems to be overwhelming. Yes, overwhelming, but we ain't giving up and the Frog Will Roar Again.

--

Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214

My gardening blog is  Fred Owens

My writing blog is Frog Hospital

I got into an Argument with a Trump Supporter

I got into an Argument with a Trump Supporter

By Fred Owens

I prided myself on maintaining a friendly attitude with the Trump supporters that I know. We can have a dialog. We can sort things out. We can at least maintain civil contact. But no more, not from me. The discussion is over. The judgment is clear -- Trump has to go and soon. He is a danger to our country. It's not if or maybe, it's now and completely real. The damning evidence has been presented. Anyone who supports Trump now is a fool and worse. I was at a meeting discussing financial matters with my Edward Jones broker and some of his other customers when a political argument broke out over Trump. The man sitting next to me was a Trump diehard idiot who would not stop talking. The Edward Jones broker is a mild-mannered fellow who only wants to help his people obtain a bit of security and growth, but he lost control of the meeting to the blathering Trumpista.

I lost it at this point. I am no longer willing to engage Trump people at any level. It's time for us to do something good for our country.

Trump must be impeached and removed from office. When that happens, we will be facing -- not a happy time -- but a big mess to clean up. Pence will become President in a caretaker role. He will not be a candidate in 2020, but will only serve to complete Trump's term. Pence will agree to make no major decisions without close consultation with McConnell and Pelosi. The Republicans can put up a dramatic new candidate for 2020, such as Nikki Hilton from South Carolina. They could even win with a a candidate of her caliber, and I could live with that. Just as long as Trump is gone, banished to his golf course, and that will be part of the deal he makes when he leaves the Oval Office. Congress will agree to not pursue criminal prosecution of Trump and Trump in turn will agree to have his most rabid red-hat followers stand down. Trump will golf on in peace after he has dampened the urges of his militia. And the nation will survive.

That's my best outcome scenario. Trump is impeached by the House. Facing conviction by the Senate he makes that deal. Pence takes over as caretaker to fill out the term and no more. Then we have a rousing election battle with some new Republican star -- like Nikki Hilton -- and the Democrats counter with Amy Klobuchar, their strongest moderate.

The nation will survive. It's not going to be pretty, but we can get through this and come out whole.

An Appeal

Frog Hospital used to make money, maybe $700 or $800 a year. That was when I sold subscriptions at $25, but somehow the readership fell off and people stopped paying for it and I kind of gave up. But now I think, well, I need the money. And all I have to do is put the solicitation at the bottom of the newsletter when it comes out. To write a check for $25 or more and mail it to Fred Owens, 1105 Veronica Springs RD, Santa Barbara, CA 93105...... or hit the PayPal button on my blog and do it that way.

https://froghospital911.blogspot.com/

That's the blog with the PayPal button on the side. The blog is simply the archive for the newsletter. Every issue of the newsletter becomes a post on the blog, so it stores some hundreds of back issues. Frog Hospital has been in business since 1998, so there is some longevity in it, although Facebook and other social media outlets seems to be overwhelming. Yes, overwhelming, but we ain't giving up and the Frog Will Roar Again.

--

Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214

My gardening blog is  Fred Owens

My writing blog is Frog Hospital

I Miss LaConner

By Fred Owens

I left LaConner nine years ago, at the end of October in 2010. I took my last day working at Hedlin's Farm Stand and packed up my red Toyota for the journey south to California where I have resided ever since. But it just occurred to me that I've been gone for nine years now and I'm never coming back. Back to visit, for sure, to see old friends and walk old paths, but not moving back to the town where I lived for so many years.

I ran for the LaConner Town Council twice and for LaConner Mayor once and did very poorly in the vote, coming in a very distant second all three times. And I lived, I should say we lived, including my two kids, Eugene and Eva, and wife, Susan, in a double-wide mobile home on Maple St. I never liked it -- the mobile home. It was like living in a tin can. But it was affordable and it looked nice -- the yard did, the birch tree, the split cedar railing fence, and the clematis on the front porch. We had pet ducks once, until this very nasty raccoon came one night and killed them both. We had Mike Heaton as a non-paying tenant in the back shop until he used up all the fire wood we had stored back there. I don't know where Mike is these days.

The thing is there comes a heart-break in leaving such a loving little town. I need to let go of a lot of memories, good and bad. I have a pretty good life here in Santa Barbara with Laurie. And the weather is sunny and warm and that improves my attitude. Not like LaConner -- 25 years of rain and clouds and all that time pretending I liked it. I didn't like it, I never got used to it. The problem for me is that I never could love LaConner for the way it is. I loved it for what it used to be, I loved it for what I wanted it to become, but the reality of how it is I never could love -- so I was always trying to fix it. I couldn't fix it. I left nine years ago, and I am letting the memories go. And I just realized that's a good thing to do, because you don't need to clutch your memories or lock them up in a box for safekeeping. You just let them go, and they don't actually go away, they just hover around you like a gentle cloud.

--

Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214

My gardening blog is  Fred Owens

My writing blog is Frog Hospital

Sister Hubert

FROG HOSPITAL -- September 25, 2019

I'm having flashbacks of the Watergate hearings this morning. This is serious. Well, all I have to say is that Nancy Pelosi speaks for me. Elizabeth Warren speaks for me. Greta Thunberg speaks for me. They will set things right. What I'm going to do is stay out of their way and tell this tale from the 1950s. 

Sister Hubert

By Fred Owens

This isn't really a story because nothing changed. From 1956 to 1960 everything stayed the same in my life except for a few things like I got bored in school because I was one of the smart kids and there was no challenge to it, just sitting there and staring at the ceiling, but this was in 7th and 8th grade. In earlier years I was pretty happy at school. And nothing changed. I was ten years old in 1956 and I had no concept of change, like upheavals or conflict or evolutionary development. I liked things the way they were, but you might say I knew of no alternative to the way things were. Like the song books. After recess at lunchtime, after we lined up in the hallway and had drinks at the drinking fountain, after we got back into our polished wooden desks all lined up, Sister Hubert told us to bring out the music books and she announced the song, which might go like this "Wait for the wagon, wait for the wagon, wait for the wagon and we'll all take a ride...."  I always enjoyed the singing. But in going over the memory last night, something occurred to me -- we had no choice. Did Sister Hubert ever ask us what song we wanted to sing? No. No choice. That possibility never crossed my mind.

Sister Hubert was tall and a little scary, not quick to smile. She had milky white skin and soft-grey eyes. You could see her face and her hands, everything else was swaddled and robed in black wool with a super-white starched collar around her neck. I liked her a lot, but it wasn't anything cozy.  

The nuns were of the Franciscan order, modeled after the life of Francis of Assisi, so they wore rope belts rather than leather belts out of simplicity. They lived in a convent in back of the school with its own entrance on Forest Avenue. I walked by the convent every day on the way from our house to school in the morning and every afternoon on the way back. I never saw anyone go in or out that entrance. The other way in or out was the kitchen door, and you might see a nun coming or going out that door, but not too often. Outside of teaching us in the classroom and guiding us to church and back, you hardly ever saw them at all. They stayed in the convent  I guess, but I don't know what they did in there. I wasn't curious. And it was always the same. 

I made a list because I remember each one of them distinctly and I liked them all except for Sister Virtunia in 7th grade who was an old sourpuss. Here's the list

Sister Thomasita  -- kindergarten

Sister Clothaire -- first grade

Sister Virgina -- second grade

Sister Laverna -- third grade

Miss Marshall, not a nun -- fourth grade

Sister Hubert -- fifth grade

Sister Laverna, again -- sixth grade

Sister Virtunia -- seventh grade

Sister Gregoire -- eighth grade

Fifth grade was my best year in playground baseball. I was usually picked first or second on the pickup team and I played first base, which had the most action, plus I was a good hitter. I was left-handed but I batted rightie. I got that way because my older brother Tommy was the same way -- left-handed but batting rightie. It wasn't important. Mostly I just loved playground ball -- and hated Little League with all its formalities and worried parents. In playground ball we made our own rules and picked our own fights. The nuns stayed out of it. Short of bloodshed they never interfered. We had huge arguments about whether the runner was safe or out, or whether the ball was fair or foul. The girls skipped rope and played other games, we didn't pick on them. And some of the gangly, non-athletic kids just stood around and didn't play, like Fitz Higgins, one of my good friends. He could not play worth a darn and didn't care either.

Fitz lived over on Chestnut Ave, maybe six long blocks away, you could go down Elmwood past the Murrays, or go down Greenwood past the Muenches and then turn left to Chestnut where the Higginses lived, with six kids, Biff, Fitz, Kathleen, Liz, Danny and Ellen. I liked the whole family which might be why I remember their names.

When I grew up six kids was a big family and three was a small family. We had five kids at our house I thought that was just right. Seven people in all counting Mom and Dad so there was always something going on. But we'll get to that later. I am writing this down in the order it comes from my memory, so it may seem scattered to you, but  you don't live inside my heart/soul/brain. I will be repeating myself and contradicting myself...... it's the natural order of things.  We lived in Wilmette, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. A French trapper named Ouilmette built a cabin there about 1820, near the shores of Lake Michigan. It grew into a village and they changed the spelling to Wilmette. Being near the lake, maybe one mile from our house, meant we had the best trees. Nobody told me this but I knew just from looking up in the yard, that we had the most magnificent oak trees and elm trees towering over our house, giving wonderful shade in the summer and giving strength in the winter. An elm tree in the front yard, three or four feet in diameter at the base -- that elm tree was Home for Hide and Go Seek during summer games after dinner. I'll get back to this  -- the trees and the games we played -- and talk about somebody I had not thought about in years  -- Billy Hoak.

Bill Hoak was my friend. He was a soft, pudgy kid with red hair and massive freckles. He didn't go to St. Joseph's school like my other friends. I don't even know how I met him. He was a year younger than me and went to Logan, the public school three blocks from where he lived. Billy didn't fit the pattern because he lived in an upstairs apartment with his mother. Just them. An only child and no Dad either. Not a problem. just different. All my other friends lived in a house and had a mom and dad and brothers and sisters. The mom stayed home and the dad went to work in an office  and wore a white shirt. I had no idea what the dads actually did at the office. That was too boring to even think about.

Billy's Mom had freckles too and she was very sweet and soft spoken. The two of them lived on Lake Street across from Vattman Park .... Vattman Park had swings, a teeter-totter and a jungle gym, plus tennis courts, but we only got to the tennis courts later during high school years. Sometimes we walked to Vattman Park in the summer to play, only three blocks,  down Forest Avenue, right on !5th St., look both ways crossing Lake Street and there you were. But I still don't know how I met Billy because he was a shy kid and didn't go outside very much. I suspect that Mrs. Hoak  might have known my Mom, and told my Mom they were new in town and Billy needed a friend -- me. No problem there.

This is where it gets really cool. I would go over to Billy's house to play and his Mom would give us both a dime, and that was for walking one block down Lake Street to Green Bay Road and the train tracks. It was the main intersection, although traffic was pretty light in 1956. We took our dimes to Shimineck's gas station and bought sodas. Usually Orange Crush. We sat on the curb and drank them. Then we walked back to Billy's house, only this time down the alley in back and we looked for bottle caps because we had a collection of different types, even beer bottle caps.

That's what we did. Just Billy and me, no games, no sports, no bike riding, just the walk to the gas station. And here we are looking for ethical guidance  -- the question that I always ask -- Did I hang out with Billy Hoak just so I could get a dime for the soda? Boy, that's a tough one. I did like Billy. He wasn't stupid or anything, but, not to put too fine a shade on it, I was going for the dime. Billy and his Mom moved someplace else after a couple of years. I didn't know where. But I can see the service station clearly in my mind. The soda machine, you could get grape soda or root beer or Seven-up or Coke. All considerations, except I almost always got Orange Crush.  We could sit on the curb and watch the cars come and go for a fill-up and ding the bell. Or we could peek in the repair bays with the hoods up and the mechanics in greasy overalls. These were men who fixed cars and used tools -- they actually did something.

I have something more to say about Sister Hubert, but this is enough for today. I enjoy writing this recollection of childhood.

Laurie and I are leaving on Tuesday, October 1, for a one-week visit to Seattle to stay with Eva, her wife Lara, their two-year-old boy Walter AND the new kid on the block, little Joey, just born, and six weeks old now. What a lovely family. We will also drive up the Skagit, then Up River, then up and over the Casade Pass to the eastern side and the village of Winthrop for a few days of sightseeing.

take care,

Fred

--

Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214

My gardening blog is  Fred Owens

My writing blog is Frog Hospital

Priests, second time

By Fred  Owens
I am greatly concerned about the conflicts and multiple wars in the Middle East. I am greatly concerned about the rising seas, and the thousands of homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks of Los Angeles. I believe that an important part of moving forward and overcoming these daunting problems is to elect a new President in 2020. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts seems to have the buzz and the fury and the momentum, at least right now. I say let her run with it and let us see if she can overcome. She is not the only candidate and we are blessed to have an abundance of choices, but I say give her this week and join the chorus that is cheering her on. In the meantime, I pulled this old story out of the vault. It wakes you back to Saint Joseph grade school in Wilmette, Illinois, in 1956. Just a sketch, or a glimpse of another time and place. I hope you enjoy reading this.

This week's installment features sketches of our three parish priests when I was ten, that being the first part. The second part of this story was an embarrassment for Judy Muench in the third grade and later on it was a greater embarrassment for me. The third part describes Miss Marshall, our lay teacher in fourth grade. Not a nun. You could see her legs.

The cemetery was a key component of my landscape, being right up the street from our house. Dead people lying under slabs of marble with their names and dates chiseled. You could walk in there anytime and wander around. You didn’t have to be respectful like in church. You could run up and down the grassy aisles. And if we hit a ball into the cemetery we just hoisted ourselves up and over the cement wall onto the grounds and searched for the ball. You didn’t have to cross yourself or kneel or make an Act of Contrition.  Maybe teenagers wandered in there at night and did things we never even thought of. I don’t know. I only know it wasn’t spooky.

Up the street from our house on Forest Avenue, two blocks to the convent, then the cemetery, and on the same block was the playground and the grade school, and across Lake Street was the mighty, towering, brick church of Saint Joseph. The church was too awesome with stained glass and divine majesty.

Next to the church was the Rectory where Monsignor Newman lived with his bull dog and two assistant priests. Monsignor Newman was somewhere between  God’s best friend and God Himself.  Either way he was a most elevated person, and not a mean fellow.  Even in admonishment he did not strike terror into the hearts of small children. It only seemed extremely important to do what he said, if he actually spoke to you, which he did several times a year when he came into the class, with the bulldog, and handed out report cards from the sister’s desk in the front.

I always got a check mark for “practices self control,” meaning I was behaving like a whippersnapper, not totally out of control, but possibly subject to closer disciplinary attention. Monsignor  Newman would kindly point that out as he handed you the card, “Owens, it seems you have another check mark after your name. What can we do about that?”

I was too respectful even to answer back. I just took the card and walked back to my seat. Fortunately my parents didn’t care. It was times like that when I knew I had a good mom and dad. Or they just knew that I didn’t “practice self control” too well at home either. However, they also knew I didn’t torture stray cats and I was not headed for the penitentiary.

Back to the rectory. The other priests were Father Sauer and Father Bosen. We never, ever went inside the Rectory. It was a grand brick edifice, about the same size as the convent which held twenty nuns, while the Rectory held three priests plus a housekeeper who cooked and cleaned and fussed. Those three priests never had to lift a finger except they had to wear a black dress – cassock – coming down to their ankles – and hear confessions two or three times a week in a dark cubicle on the side of the church. Can you imagine how boring that might have been for Fr. Sauer, who enjoyed playing golf,  to sit in the dark confessional booth several hours a week and hear the same old petty sins over and over again -- I stole, I lied, I cheated, I had impure thoughts?

Impure thoughts was the good one, when they taught us to go to Confession in the second grade, because if you didn’t kick your little sister in the nose, or steal candy bars at the grocery store, then you had to come up with  something.  I had no idea what impure thoughts were, but it came in handy to fill out your quota of sins for the past month or so, because they made you go to confession. It was not like you had a choice.

So there was Fr. Sauer, dreaming of the golf course, but now hidden from view and sitting in the dark. You stepped in the door into this cubicle black as night and knelt down on the kneeler, and the priest slid open the wooden little door at the chin high opening, and then you had to confess something. You must have done something wrong.

“Bless me father, I have sinned. My last confession was two months ago. I was mean to my little sister although I didn’t really hurt her. I stole a candy bar at the drugstore, and I had five Impure Thoughts.”

That was good enough for a pass. Fr. Sauer, if it was him and you surely couldn’t know which priest it was sitting in the dark, would say, “Make an act of contrition and say five Hail Marys.”

Out the door and into the light. I knelt down on the padded riser in the pew and said my prayers of penance. I was willing to accept the general case of doing something wrong. I once said to Fitz Higgins, who read books in his leisure time, who played baseball poorly and didn’t even care that he played poorly, who began slouching even before fifth grade, who became an altar boy and seemed to enjoy that task, I said to him, “I know I did some bad things, but I can never remember what they were, so I just make up stuff when I go to confession, and then I think that’s wrong too – to make up stuff in confession. So what do I do about that?’ I asked  Fitz like he would know the answer. He didn’t know answer.

Fr. Sauer was dreaming about the putting green at the Evanston Country  Club. Par four and a whiskey sour after 18 holes. He was a handsome man and athletic. In summertime, on his day off, one time I saw him come down the Rectory steps from the front door, wearing a bright Hawaiian shirt over shiny pressed slacks.  I bet he had a girl friend somewhere.

Father Bosen was older and bald and not athletic and a bit detached from rambunctious school children. He had a smile which he put on his face for the children, and a warm chuckle.

He was probably gay, and probably celibate too, and cerebral. A private man, although he gave a good sermon at Sunday Mass.

I’m not done writing about the priests in the Rectory or the nuns in the Convent, or the school and the playground in between the Rectory and the Convent. Or the drugstore across the street from playground which was next to the cemetery. The drugstore where I bought candy bars for a nickel. And not, to be perfectly honest, where I stole the candy bars. I stole the candy bars from the grocery store.  Does it matter that I didn’t tell the literal truth to the priest at confession?

Look, I had to come up with at least three sins. Stealing, being mean to my little sister and Impure Thoughts. Years later I began having Impure Thoughts by the bucket.

By fifth grade we were still making jokes about Sister Beatina, the principal. She was enormously fat. Fifth grade boys can make a lot of fat jokes.

Another lunchtime classic that kept us laughing from third grade on was the Judy Muench disaster.  In third grade we had Sister Laverna. She was a small-sized bundle of energy who almost danced around the classroom. Such a lovely and lively women, we all adored her. Which was good because there were 63 kids in our class. This was a St. Joe’s school record that we took some pride in – the most kids in one class. It was a split class, the outer two rows by the window were fourth graders, and the inner four rows were third graders. It was controlled mayhem.

Judy Muench was a perfectly pretty little girl. I kind of liked her. She had brown hair in pig tails and a bouncy, hopeful smile. She wore a red and green plaid dress that day when Sister Laverna called her up to the front of the class for a recital. She came up to the front, a little nervous. She turned and faced her class mates in a rigid posture with her arms tensed. And she began peeing. Right through her dress and making a noisy puddle on the floor. “Sister, I’m going to the bathroom!” she cried with anguish, loud enough for the whole class to hear, and then she ran out the door and off to the girl’s room.

We dared not laugh. This was very awkward. Sister Laverna fetched a towel and wiped up the small puddle. Wasn’t this awful?

Little boys are not kind creatures.  Put four of us at the lunch table in the cafeteria, four trays, four cartons of chocolate milk. All the children laughing and talking. We told the Judy Muench joke for two years. Over and over again. “Sister, I’m going to the bathroom!” Laughing till we snorted. But at least we never teased her to her face. I always liked her. I walked by her house on the way to play with Fitz Higgins and if I saw her outside I said hello.

Just to balance this embarrassing episode, I will recount my own folly. Years later, in our senior year at high school, me and Doug Serwich and Nick Marsch got drunk on Country Club malt liquor. We broke into a duplex apartment under construction, just howling and throwing stuff around. The cops came and took us in to the station and called our parents. It was very shameful. Doug’s parents and Nick’s parents decided that I was the bad influence in this trio and forbad me from social contact with their precious sons.

My parents did not blame some other kids for my stupidity. The figured I was smart enough or dumb enough to make my own mistakes, so they said nothing about my choice of companions.

Truly, it was Nick Marsch who inspired this mini-crime spree. Nick was the second oldest of ten children from a very wealthy family. His Dad rode to work in a limousine. But Nick, who was smart enough to know better, became a midnight vandal, cruising the public junior high school near his house, breaking windows and tipping things over. Nick invited me and Doug to join him the night we got caught. Nick was basically responsible for the vandalism. Me and Doug could take credit for the drunkenness. Malt liquor – ugh!

But this was high school, many years after the Judy Muench incident in third grade, which was never mentioned but not forgotten. The Muench family was large. Mr. and Mrs. Muench were warm friendly parents. I really liked them.

So it was our turn to be embarrassed and ashamed.  We got hauled into the police station in Winnetka. Our parents collected us. Two weeks later we had a juvenile hearing, and our lawyer was Mr. Muench himself, in a grey three-piece suit with rimless spectacles on his nose and speckled grey hair around his ears, the epitome of dignity, standing before the judge, like a ritual repeated often enough in these leafy suburbs.

“These are not bad boys, your honor, but let this be a lesson to them, let them seriously consider how wrong it was that they acted. How careless it was to bring this shame on themselves and their families. We ask the court to be lenient because this was a first time offense. I know these boys and it will not happen again.” So we got off easy.

The other topic at the cafeteria lunch table was Miss Marshall the fourth grade teacher.  She had legs. This was astounding. She had legs because she wore a skirt and she wasn’t a nun. She was a lay teacher, the only one in the school, and you could see her legs. This was a matter of great fascination and discussion at lunch time.

She did not wear a habit. She didn’t live in the convent. She had her own home somewhere nearby and drove to school in her own car.  This was unusual.  Her dress  came down below her knees, and there they were – legs, bare legs, which was no different than what our mothers wore or what our older sisters wore, but at St. Joseph school, with all those nuns, Miss Marshall was different.  She wasn’t pretty, none of the kids said she was. But she was likable, far less stern than the average nun. I could tell her I needed to go to the bathroom and she would just nod her head, and then I could hang out in the john with my friends, because she didn’t keep track of how many boys had gone to the bathroom and didn’t come back. We had a way of making water balloons and throwing them out the window from the second floor. The nuns would never have let us get away with that, but Miss Marshall wasn’t strict and we liked her for that. And nobody talked back to her, because she stayed calm, and because the nuns would have found out and murdered us for that. Talking back was not done.

I loved the cafeteria. I loved the food. It was down in the basement. When class started at 8:45, the sisters took the milk order in each class room and everybody always wanted chocolate milk. It was a ritual – who wants chocolate milk? Everybody.

Down to the basement at 11:30, in line to check off our lunch cards, then grabbing a tray to go up to the steam counter.  Mrs. Tallman ran the kitchen. She never smiled like she was having fun or like she was glad to see us, but her heart was in it. Feeding all those kids, she was a saint, a stout woman in her late forties in a print dress, brushing a loose hair off her face, near to perspiration with running back and forth into the kitchen and coming back out with steaming trays – spaghetti, hot dogs, chicken, beef stew, grilled cheese sandwiches. I loved the food except for the beef stew. I loved the heaping trays of buttered French bread. They cut the slices on the diagonal from fresh-baked loaves and smeared them thick with butter and you could take two or three pieces. I ate a lot of French bread.

My life at ten was bound by Green Bay Road, Lake Street, the Ridge and the boundary with Kenilworth, another village.  I became geographically fixed on the grid. All the streets in all the towns and cities of the Midwest are fixed on a grid of even rectangles and squares. There are no hills to go around. No curves and very few diagonals. It is literally plane geometry and I always knew where I was. Being lost was not conceivable. As far as I knew the grid went on forever, out to the square corn fields to the west, and to the plane shore of Lake Michigan. In 1956 I had not yet become bored with this landscape.

To the north was Kenilworth, only three blocks that way, but a different town, not off limits strictly speaking but way, way uptown rich.  My little sister Katy went there to visit  Molly Packel. The Packels were  a large parish family and lived in a huge house with an expansive lawn.  Rene Packel was in my class. Rene was an exotic name for one thing, not Susan or Mary or Ann. She was Rene. And she was big and bulky, not fat, not stout, but just larger, so I liked her that way, plus she was smart. Like you could say something to her and it was all right, and she didn’t look back at you like you were stupid and stop bothering her. No, I had actual conversations with her, and I never tried to tease her. She was too big for that.

Those were my boundaries in 1956. Kenilworth, Green Bay Road, Lake Street, and the Ridge.

If you lived in someplace with mountains or even hills, you would not notice the Ridge because it was scarcely a rise in the landscape. Not higher than a two story building. You couldn’t even notice it was there, except everywhere else it was so flat. To me, at age ten, that was the hill and you could ride your bike down the hill without pedaling, even going a little fast. I never saw such a thing as a hill or mountain except in books or on TV.

The Ridge was a water divide. Water to the west flowed down the Desplaines River, which joined the Illinois River, and on to the Mississippi River and then  all the way to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.  Little rain drops flowed all that way to the ocean. And then if the rain drop fell on the other side of the Ridge, then it flowed into Lake Michigan only one mile to the east, flowed into Lake Michigan and then slowly flowed through the straits of Mackinac to Lake Huron and then south to the St. Clair river past Detroit with Canada on the other side, and then to Lake Erie with Cleveland on its southern shore, and then over the Niagara Falls thundering to Lake Ontario. From there, past  Montreal, through Quebec, down the St. Lawrence River, always going east and trending to the north, that little drop of water flowed in to the Atlantic Ocean in the cold north country.

But the divider was the Ridge in our village of Wilmette, and one way flowed to New Orleans and one way flowed to Quebec.

Thank you for reading this little story. Next time I will write about Leroy the class bully. Leroy was his name. I'm not making this up. He was a large kid with a big wicked grin like Ernest Borgnine in From Here to Eternity.

thank you,

Fred

--

Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214

My gardening blog is  Fred Owens

My writing blog is Frog Hospital

--

Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214

My gardening blog is  Fred Owens

My writing blog is Frog Hospital

34 Divers Perish in Boat Fire off Santa Cruz Island

34 Divers Perish in Boat Fire off Santa Cruz Island

By Fred Owens

That's the headline. It's a $500 story and all I have is a 50 cent typewriter -- meaning I don't think I can give those 34 lost souls the respect they deserve and the silence which is their due.

The first responders have recovered 33 bodies. There is one missing. But they don't say it's missing they just say it's not recovered. So we wonder, who is this 34th diver, and is he or she missing and adrift at sea, or trapped too deeply in the wreckage?

We saw the FBI Dive Team unloading their scuba gear at the loading dock in the harbor. The Conception docks nearby, next to her sister ships, the Vision and the Truth. The FBI team and other divers from afar are charged with retrieving the bodies, submerged in 60-feet of cold sea water. The boat lies upside down. Do you think that's an easy job, even if it's people you don't know? And the coroner said they all died of smoke inhalation. That might not be true. Sometimes the coroner might say that smoke inhalation was the cause of death because saying they burned to death is too harsh on the families. As it was, the bodies were burned by the flames and could not be identified without DNA testing.  

Santa Barbara Sheriff Bill Brown was present at the vigil on Friday in memory  of the departed ones. He and Coast Guard Captain Monica Rochester bore the flower wreath in procession. Think of Sheriff Brown's duty. He did not expect this terrible tragedy. Maybe on the dawn of Labor Day, before he heard the alarming news, maybe he was day dreaming of some upcoming fishing trip and a few days off. He had a tough week. No rest for the wicked. No rest for you and me. 

We went out to the breakwater the next day to see the wreath on the memorial plaque, surrounded by many bouquets of white carnations. We walk out on the breakwater quite often, only this time in silence, "in memory of those lost at sea," as the plaque reads.

Keep in mind this is such a familiar place -- like many Santa Barbarans we are at the harbor and the waterfront and the beach almost every day. We see the island out there, 26 miles at sea, but looming large, if you can see it and the sky is clear. When the fog rolls in, what they call the marine layer, then you can't see the island.

I wondered if  anyone was walking the beach at 3:30 a.m. on Monday, because if the air was clear, that person might have seen the flames from the burning boat, leaping thirty or forty feet into the sky.

The investigation is underway to find out the cause of the fire. The insurance companies and lawyers are getting to work and filing papers. Maritime law creates a special liability for owners of ships at sea. The owners of the vessels and the surviving crew members will be interviewed within in inch of their lives. I pray for their comfort, because because nothing can bring back the lost souls.

Santa Barbara is not a big city. Everybody knows somebody. Anita Dominocielo-Ho, my friend at the Kiwanis Club, reminded me that her husband Victor teaches at a private school.  She said, "Victor and his ninth-grade class booked the Conception for a dive trip later in the month. It could have been him and all those sweet children on that boat." Stories like that are common around town.

Most of the victims came from out of town, but it still hurts really bad. That's our island out there. 

We will keep taking walks on the beach, but the island will never look the same again.

This morning I was awake at 5:30. I heard the hoot owl give a rhythmic chant as the darkness slowly faded. 

That's all for this week,

Fred

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Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214

My gardening blog is  Fred Owens

My writing blog is Frog Hospital

Facts Speak for Themselves

Facts Speak for Themselves

By Fred Owens

I was building facts at the newspaper this week. They have to be plumb and square and true. If you build your facts strong, they will last a long time. They won't move. You can walk away, come back years later, and those same facts will be there, like diamonds or granite.

I built a lot of facts this week at the newspaper. Some were off kilter or out of focus -- I had to throw them back into the sea of information. Information, data, the world is awash with it, meaningless, worthless, formless. But facts! Facts are worth something. They mean something. They are sturdy and reliable. You can build with facts. You can get paid for making facts. It's good work.

I wrote this in 2005 when I had my last newspaper job at the Wilson County News in Floresville, Texas. "You can get paid got making facts," I wrote. Well, you could get paid for that in 2005, but that kind of work is pretty scarce now. Nobody agrees what a facts is nowadays. It's your word against mine. You have Trump and his fake news tirades, yet he is the most complicated unabashed liar in world history. Or you can look to the left, to the academic world and discover a consistent message against objectivity. "It doesn't feel true to me. It all depends on the context."

Facts are disappearing. Words mean whatever you want them to mean. It's too scary.

The next story is by Bill Skubi, a friend of mine who lives in Coupeville, Washington. The story was originally published in the Puget Sound Mail in 1989 if you remember that obscure, quirky newspaper that I once published. The Puget Sound Mail promised “News of Lasting Value” and we kept that promise because this story about a man and his dog is not aged or dated.

Spending Time With Your Dog

By Bill Skubi

The frantic pace of modern life was catching up with me. I was taking a good hard look at the strange kind of person I had let myself become. This began a few weeks ago when Jan told me there was something wrong with Jackson’s ear. I was hearing what she said, but to my utter horror I realized that I didn’t care. Jackson is a lumbering old Yellow Lab. He has been my dog almost eleven years, slightly longer than I have been married to Jan. Just the week before I had caught myself actually trying to give him away to a friend who had moved his family into the country.

The excuse I gave myself was that Jackson was no longer happy living with us, since Jan insisted he be tied. The truth was that he was not happy because I had become too pre-occupied to spend any time with him. He was just this big, sad, obligatory maintenance retriever at the end of his tether. And so was I. That reminded me that it was I who had consciously fled the academic world fifteen years ago. At that point I realized that twenty years of schooling had trained me to read and write obscure sentences about “contingencies and non-linear variables.” At that rate I knew I would probably never live long enough to figure out what I wanted to say, and if I did figure that out, nobody would want to read it.

The writer in me wanted to git back home, do some plain talkin’, leave the footnotes, spend some evenings rocking on the front porch with a big ol’ hound-dog curled up at my feet. And I did it too, but the years brought marriage, a mortgage, and a child, along with career changes, and I let a whole new set of pressures come between me and my humanity. Or to put it another way, part of me woke up and was shocked to be sharing a body with someone who would offer to give away his dog. I really didn’t like the person I had become. I know I am basically an incurably selfish person. I attend church and take my marriage vows seriously knowing they are twin anchors on a spirit I know can be dangerously free, but I had forgotten that Jackson, too, was utterly dedicated to protecting me, and I owed him the same.

So I went to see what was ailing Jack’s ear. It was pretty sore all right, he was awful dirty and so was his house. I gave him a bath, and he was so proud to ride in my new truck and he didn’t even care he was going to the veterinarian. The vet had to keep him awhile to remove foxtail grass seeds from his ears. I went home, cleaned out his house and built him a new run in a place where he would have a good view of things. He was still a little wobbly on his hind legs from the medication when I brought him home. I showed him around his new digs and told him we would have to spend more time together. Then I noticed he was shaking uncontrollably.  At first I could not tell whether he was sick or reacting to the medication. Then I got down to where I could stroke him and discovered he was shaking from pure joy.

Philosophers and theologians will forever debate the highest possible achievement of man on Earth, and I would submit to them that being the object of such perfect love might be right up there.

Anyway, I bought a blanket at the thrift store for Jack to lie on in the truck. I can still be too busy to take him along, but we do have an understanding. And my young son asks a question that I remember asking, “Do dogs go to heaven when they die?” His mother isn’t sure how to answer. As for me, there have been times in my life when I have doubted whether or not heaven really exists, but I have never doubted that dogs would be there if it did.

My Favorite Movies, with a list compiled from memory and not nearly complete

The Vikings

The Grapes of Wrath

Viva Zapata

From Here to Eternity

North by Northwest

Hunt for Red October

Grand Hotel

High Noon

The Verdict

Casablanca

The Graduate

Broadway Danny Rose

Hannah and Her Sisters

Manhattan

The Godfather

Casino

A Bronx Tale

Dog Day Afternoon

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Terms of Endearment

The Quiet Man

To Kill a Mockingbird

The Wild Bunch

On the Waterfront

The Philadelphia Story

My Cousin Vinny

Ferris Buehler's Day Off

Lawrence of Arabia

Citizen Kane

Gone with the Wind

The Wizard of Oz

Moonstruck

Do the Right Thing

Dr. Zhivago

The Shawshank Redemption

Field of Dreams

Clueless

Singing in the Rain

Marty

Notting Hill

Bridget Jones' Diary

Chinatown

That's all for this week,

see ya,

Fred

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Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214

My gardening blog is  Fred Owens

My writing blog is Frog Hospital