Aha moment from Standard Oil

Before I learned to read I knew there was a gas station company called Esso.  I heard it mentioned many times:   "Stop at the Esso Station."   "Let's get gas at Esso."    Well, I knew my letters then but hadn't put them together to words.   So I really thought this place was called "S" "O."   Big moment occurred when I sounded out the sign and saw that it was really "ESSO."

Checking all of this out in Wikipedia, I see I wasn't so wrong.   ESSO was not an acronym itself, but the phoneticized version of S O, for Standard Oil.

Holding the Tape

This weekend I assisted a canvass maker in measuring Fortune for a sun cover over the cockpit.   At one point, he asked me to hold the tape measure.  This reminded me of an earlier tape measure experience.   At some point in my toddler life, my father would occasionally take me with him in his truck to do work estimates.   My father laid, scraped and refinished wood floors.   He usually had two work crews to drop off each day and then would do other customer service or office work, or go out on estimates.   He had a lot of customers down the Jersey Shore...big old Victorian type mansions.   So (assuming I was lacking other child care) he would pack me up in the 1938 panel truck or the new 1948 Dodge panel truck and I would ride with him and (best of all) hold the tape while he measured the floors.   I really felt useful.   Besides it was fun.

My dad was pretty perceptive about kids, and had the insight that kids didn't like long car rides because they were too short to see out the window.   So he built me some kind of sit up seat so I could see the world going by.

On one of these trips he asked me to interpret the following riddle:

Time Flies
I cannot
They go too fast

I had to be told to make the "time" into a hortatory verb.   I've subsequently stumped many folks with this one.

Maestro Alex Chiapanelli

I started piano lessons at 5 yrs old.   Originally a friend of my mothers...it didn't go very far, so my mother moved me up to a very eminent Newark piano teacher:    Alex Chiapanelli, referred to by us as Maestro Maestro .   I think he liked me, but he was very old school.   I would definitely progress in technique.   He did not threaten or hit with a ruler, but he leaned over me with horrible garlic breathe and I was terrified of him....totally.   My first recital, I played some piece that had something to do with going up in an airplane.   So before I started to play, I had to say "contact."   as in how they started the old planes.   I was sharp enough to know this was small kid stuff and be embarassed by it.   Still I went along.   I was pretty proud at this first recital and got a lot of positive attention...not the last time in my piano life.

Maestro Chiapanelli had an old house on Holmstead Place, a rare cul de sac a block or two from Hawthorn Ave.   He had the world's biggest piano.   It went on forever....really like an ocean liner.   Parents had to sit outside in the parlor while the lesson went on.   We were also required to take theory lessons from one of the Maestro's young adult daughters.   She was tall, dark, and also scary.

Well I learned a lot of piano, but no much music.   My mother (dancer, violinist) could see I could win competitions but not play musically, so she moved me on to my life long piano mentor, Milton Peckarsky.   I'll tell more about him in another blog.

Vatican blames pedophilia on homosexuality...totally unfounded

On April 13, in Chile, Vatican Cardinal Vacisio was correct in saying that pedophila is not linked to celibacy. He was way off base in blaming pedophilia on homosexuality. Research shows that most pedophiles are married men. And that most abuse both genders of children. The target seems to be lack of adult sexual development.

 

Click on blog post header to go to link for article.

Global Warming Early Warning

In  July of 1956, the American Scientist published an article by Gilbert N. Plas titled "Carbon Dioxide and the Climate."     Time followed up that year with an article titled "One Big Greenhouse."

18th and 19th century scientists also published work linking atmospheric CO2 and climate.

Nothing new under the sun.  (hehehe)

face in the dirt

I'm not proud of this memory, but it keeps floating up, so maybe I can excise it by publishing.

Diagonal behind our house in Springfield lived a family that we were friends with...including the boy who was my age.   We weren't best friends, but we did hang out after middle school.   One time we got into a playful scuffle that was quite normal for the times.   Just wrestling around.   I was winning and took my chance to humiliate in victory.  I rubbed his face in the dirt.   I have no idea why.   The memory really bothers me, since I don't see myself as a bully, macho, etc.   But at that moment, I guess the running hormones overwhelmed whatever kindness I had at that age.   I don't have many life regrets, but that is one of them.   Maybe carrying the memory is a good reminder.   Alan Yablonsky, I'm sorry.

Lip and Lup

In 1954, the Beckers moved from Newark to Springfield.   This was certainly about upward mobility for my mother and me.   My father had no interest.   He had grown up in Brooklyn suburbs.   His condition for going along.....he would not mow the lawn.   My mother and I agreed, and so he kept his vow, till I was gone and it got difficult for my mother 30 years later.

I remember  the first trip when my mother took me to Springfield to see the house they had bought (yes it was aluminum sided pink; they hated the color for 20 years but wouldn't spend the money to paint a house that didn't need painting..)  We stopped at a car drive in restaurant.   The name was written in script and I read it as Lip and Lup.   Kind of confused me.  Only later did I figure out it was Sip and Sup.....an early sign that I didn't fit in the suburbs.