Oli,

I remember that as well. Speaking of a young Catholic (and I know I've told this story before), I remember when the entire school (all of about 80 kids LOL) walked to the corner to watch the first Catholic Presidential candidate's motorcade pass by. We all chanted "Kennedy Kennedy he's our man...." Even the nuns were excited.

The crowd was not that huge at that particular corner maybe because it simply drove by (however sitting in a convertible on top of the back seat. Can you imagine that now?) and didn't stop or because he was new to the scene. Thus, I wormed my way as close as I could get to wave at him (hoping he was waving at me).

In the same line, I actually shook RFK's hand in 68 when he arrived at the local airport.

TIS

I absolutely enjoy every second of reading your stories, I tell you guys, it's better than sex!



I wouldn't worry Turnbull. Seeing you play "Goodfellas dialogue" on a daily basis, I'd say you've got one heck of a memory. I hope to do so when I'm your age. It's a good exercise.

I've got a couple more specific questions; I'm writing on a couple of topics, one about Racism, the other on Boxing. I'd love to hear what you've witnessed in those areas.

Any stories on MLK, civil rights movement, Freedom Riders bus tour, KKK, Jim Crow laws, racism in the south and all over America, any acts of racism you've witnessed.

As far as boxing goes, I'd love to hear your personal experience of attending fights or listening to the radio. Gambling as well.

And keep up with anything else you remember; sport, culture, inventions, religion, etc.

You mean ice box, and, wasn't your mom pissed for melting the block of ice standing there?

Things I have seen in person:

1. The Beatles Miami appearance on the Ed Sullivan show.
2. The launch of the first manned mission to the moon.
3. Elvis Presley
4. The Allman Brothers when they were still a back up band.
5. Various operas at Covent Garden, Paris Opera House and the Met.
6. Game one of the 1955 world series (Jackie Robinson stole home).
7. Baltimore v. Dallas superbowl from the sidelines.
8. Florida State 52 Michigan 21 at the Big House in Ann Arbor
9. The Rolling Stones
10. Vigil at the Dakota the night John Lennon died.
On television, 9/11

My brother-in-law and I used to regularly go the fights in Madison Square Garden in the mid to late '60s. We were big fans of middleweight Emile Griffith, one of the best fighters of the era. We'd also see our favorite slugger, Frankie DePaula, a light heavy from Jersey. He was a mob owned fighter and he'd go on to getting himself whacked because he slept with a wiseguy's girlfriend.

Anyway, one of the strangest fights we attended was the last one at the old Garden (on 8th Avenue). It was March, 1967 and the main event was two good lightweights ~ Frankie Narvaez and Ismael Laguna. Laguna was favored to win and he did so in an unanimous decision (even though it was a very close fight). Narvaez's fans didn't like the decision and they set out to show their displeasure .... they started a RIOT!!

Considering that this was to be our farewell to the old Garden we bought good seats and were sitting on the main level, which had become the target for bottles thrown from the cheap seats. We covered ourselves as best we could and half crawled out just as the organ came crashing down from above.

Happy to be outside, we started our way to the subway to get back to Brooklyn when I saw Muhammad Ali in the parking garage across the street. I walked over, and handed him my newspaper (which coincidentally had a picture of him posing with Wilt Chamberlain) and he signed it. (This was at the time when a lot of people were still calling him "Cassius Clay").

A perfect ending to a perfectly crazy night.

Didn't Griffith kill Kid Paret in the ring sometime in the mid 60s? That must of been a horrific experience for those in attendance.

Yeah.... it was 1962. I saw the fight live on tv. Griffith was gay and supposedly Paret was taunting him about it.

I read Paret had his arms pinned between the ropes so he couldn't protect himself from numerous punches...the ref should of jumped in earlier to stop it.

I don't remember his arms being pinned BUT the ref definitely should have stopped the fight earlier!

It didn't help either that Paret had taken a BAD beating from Griffith in an earlier fight and probably was not in good enough condition to even be in the ring against Griffith again.

I'd love some more old stories, specifically of things you saw with your eyes instead of on TV.

SC and Turnbull, dust off those old gears in your head, maybe spray a little WD-40 on them and enlighten us some more.

I guess I'm looking for more personal experiences rather than big historical events. Just interesting stuff you've witnessed in your lifetime. Surely some of the members who remember (or don't) the days before dirt was invented have a lot of knowledge, wisdom, and funny tales (and maybe a few have tails).


I'm trying to think of good ones but mostly it's all birth and death, or both at once. I am not sure how much they have to do with anything but they are things I've witnessed and I'd already typed it out before I re-read the first post. Thinking about it, these are more things I experienced than things I witnessed.

One thing I witnessed on TV was 9-11. 9/11 is coming up. Wonder what they have planned. I was in my web page design class surfing the internet like a good student and saw a plane hit the tower. Figured it was a small plane and didn't think too much of it until my 2nd class when I watched it on TV and saw it was a big plane and then the 2nd crash happened. Pretty surreal day of school, nothing was taught, we watched tv and talked about the events.

Watching my very beloved family dog get it's neck broken (and killed instantly) by a car going 50mph had an impact on me (too?). My dad and I both burying him with tears in our eyes is one of the only unifying bonds I've ever had with him. I was probably 13 or 14 then.

My grandpa hit a deer and brought it home to his farm to use the meat. I remember after the head was cut off sitting in the back of his pickup truck with a pocket knife posing for pictures like I'd cut the head off with that tiny knife. I wish I could find those pictures. I was probably about 8 years old. I didn't think much of it, but looking bad now that sounds pretty weird and funny. That deer ended up being put in a refrigerator, that got unplugged or something. During the hot humid summer. It did not smell very good.

Watching my stillborn son be born at 20 weeks. About 2 months from now it'll be 4 years since. That's a very painful thing still. It is hard to celebrate a wedding anniversary when it will forever be linked to that since they were 2 days apart.

My senior year of high school I lived at that old farm, it hadn't been in use in a long while. There was a half poorly built house with a very unsturdy and buckling floor I slept in for awhile wondering which step would take me to the basement. Poker by candlelight, since there was no electricity. The trailer was a little better. Very old and rotting everywhere but a step up from the "house". I used buckets of collected rainwater to flush the toilet since there was no running water.

I showered about once a week or whenever I could. Washed my hair with rainwater. My dad had gambled all the money away, lost our house, my mom's car (not his, surprise!) and my mom. We'd drive into town to eat fast food (whatever's less than $10 for both of us) or used a gas grill. Canned food, pork and beans from a can. No electricity for a mircrowave, no plates or skillets to use on the grill. My mom ended up living with us and we got electricity then. I'd met my wife online shorty after that through my friend who was off at college. I ended up going to college too. I'm maybe $60,000 in debt in student loans with nothing to show for it, but I got out of that situation. Should've joined the army instead. I was 18 or 19 when I learned how to drive. It was my wife who taught me just before I headed off to college.

Once while walking down a rural road with my towel and shampoo from my aunt's house I was approached from 2 directions with sheriff's cars. The one creeping up behind me used a speaker thing to tell me to turn around and drop the towel. I was laughing and wondering what the hell was going on. I drop the towel and the cop gets out with his gun drawn, he pats me down while the one who came from the front of me stood there. I guess someone called in a report of someone waving a gun around or something. They seemed confused as I was. Offered me a ride but I refused out of some stubborn little fuck you or something. Wasn't that long of a walk anyway.

I've always lived without basic things I need. I had the same hearing aid for close to 20 years but it stopped working a week or 2 ago. The other one had stopped 5 years ago and I got the cheapest one available at $400, that's the only one I have at the moment. Looked up hearing aid technology changes since those things and man it's so crazy and cool and awesome the things they can do now that would eliminate constant daily annoyances but I will never be able to afford them. I think I was better off not knowing what was possible.

Watching my happy and healthy baby girl be born 2 years ago was the best thing I'd seen, but watching her grow every day is better. And one good thing in an ocean of bad.

Fame,
I was a kid in the 60s and only 7 when King was murdered, but do remember integration. Martin Luther King spoke at my dad's union meeting once, but I didn't get to go. I guess I was too little, but my brothers and my dad went and got to shake his hand. I do remember that we had an album of "I Have A Dream", which my dad used to make us listen to all the time.

Not truly realizing there was a world outside the Bronx, I didn't understand segregation. I asked my mother where this was, because blacks sat on the trains and buses with us, went to the same schools, and we had no "colored" fountains or restrooms. My mother told me that it was happening in "the South" and I assumed she meant in the South Bronx, a place where I wasn't allowed because it was so dangerous, but I knew that a lot of blacks lived there.

I look back now and am amazed at how insular and narrow that world view was, but there was no internet, only a few channels of TV, I'm not even sure there was FM radio at the time. If there was, it was pretty limited.

Speaking of MLK, got me thinking. JFK was killed on 63 and both RFK & MLK were killed in 68 (Apr/June). Considering how shocking and unheard of it was when JFK was killed, it isn't shocking, looking back, that MLK/RFK too were killed in the same year? We go from a nation thinking "that's unheard of" to 3 assassinations of political and/or powerful people in 5 years time. No wonder we are all skeptical, critical and untrusting these days no? We know that anything can happen.

TIS

P.S. See how nice LN was to me? SC & TB are older than dirt, but I'm not. Geez, you guys are old.

Very good point, TIS. We went from relative innocence to political anarchy in a very short period of time.





Pay no attention to LN... he's gonna shoot his eye out.

Well, TV was a big part of our lives, so I'll try to make my TV experiences personal:

--In '48, when Harry Truman was running for re-election, Howdy Doody was running for President of the Kids against Mr. Bluster. Our neighbor, Mr. Hughes, had a TV set, and he let me watch the "campaign." When Truman defeated Dewey on Election Day, I scanned the newspaper in vain to see who won the other contest.
--In 1950, Senator Estes Kefauver started broadcasting his famous organized crime hearings. I asked my Dad why they were only showing Frank Costello's hands. He replied that Costello "had a nice manicure."
--In the early '50's, the TV networks broadcast A-bomb tests from Yucca Flats, NV, live. I got up at 6 a.m. to watch every test. Right after the explosion, they'd show soldiers marching directly toward ground zero of the test. I remember thinking, "Gee, I guess the bomb's not so bad." Turns out that's what our government wanted all Americans to think--the better to think that a nuclear war was winnable. Too bad about the soldiers...

There was a GREAT documentary made a few years ago about Griffith's life. It's called Ring of Fire. Here's a condensed version from Youtube. At 6:33 of the clip, you'll see Griffith visiting Kid's grave at Saint Raymond's Cemetery in Throggs Neck, which is five minutes from my house. This was just before I took early retirement, and I was working a funeral at the cemetery the morning that they filmed this. I always liked Griffith a lot, but thought it inappropriate to approach him under the circumstances.

It was very poignant of Griffith when he said he was abused more for being gay than he ever was for killing a man.

Speaking of Muhammed Ali:

I had to go to the Chicago suburbs in '87 on a business trip--in and out of O'Hare the same day. Seated at the gate waiting for my return flight, I spotted a lone man standing stock still about 100 feet away. I looked closer and saw it was Ali. Superficially he looked great--no gray hair, face unmarked, none of the flab that accumulates on ex-heavyweights. But his eyes were a million miles away. Just then a little, middle-aged woman took him by the elbow and turned him toward another direction. Then a group of kids who recognized him ran over to him. A ghost of a smile played on his face--just a ghost. What a shame.

Speaking of M.L. King: I saw him speak at an antiwar rally in NYC in '67. Very forceful. King took a lot of flack from civil rights people who accused him of diverting his influence away from that cause to take up the anti-Vietnam cause. King argued that the war was a war against people of color. Some of his opponents countered that the Armed Forces were one of the few sectors in America where blacks could rise on their merits. King replied that blacks were fighting, bleeding and dying in outsize proportions to white soldiers.

Thanx guys for all them great stories!




did they sell it in record stores? and does it have any other tracks, or just the "I Have a Dream" audio speech?





When was the first time you went to South Bronx?(if you did eventually) - and what was your impression? I remember when "Training Day" came out 10 years ago, and everyone was talking about "The Jungle". ("never come here with anything less than a platoon"). Reputation of dangerous areas could sometimes lose its touch with reality, I wonder how it was with the Bronx in those years.

i wonder what stuff this woman had witnessed in her lifetime?

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/206671/2...mar-pereira.htm

Fame, It was given out at the union meeting when my dad met MLK. I'm not sure if it was available in stores, or if it was given to the members at the meeting.

As for the South Bronx, my brother taught in the famous Fort Apache area. I went to my brother's classroom, and it didn't seem to be that different, except all the kids were African-American. I know that seems an odd observation, but I had lived in a mostly white world, and blacks were always the minority. Now I was the minority, and it was an odd feeling. Not a bad one, just the first time. My brother was there during the 1970s, when the Bronx was burning. However, we moved away in the mid-70s, so I personally didn't see it.