Archive for the ‘Memories & Milestones’ Category
Further Confessions of a Newspaperboy
V-E Day prepared me for covering such news events as downtown fires, tumultuous strikes, Detroit riots and similar chaos during my later career as a newspaperman. The prime rule is: Keep Moving.
Downtown North Bay became bedlam on Victory in Europe Day. We dodged army tanks, drunken soldiers and whooping civilians as we wiped our eyes of tears induced by the celebratory smoke bombs bursting endlessly all around. It was early afternoon on May 8, 1945 when the bells rang and we scrambled out of school. Someone – I think it was Clare Salidas who lived two houses away – was running and shouting about the war being over and hauling our ass downtown to sell the newspaper Extras that would carry the news.
It was the end of more than five years of headlines scoring the wins and losses of Allied troops (highlighting Canadians) versus Hitler’s hordes overseas. It meant husbands, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, relatives and neighbors no longer would be fed into the war machine. It meant those in prisoners-of-war camps would be coming home. It meant we would no longer glimpse enemy prisoners of war — their uniform featured a denim jacket/smock with a large bright-red circle on the back — stretching their legs as the trains stopped at the CNR station en-route to camps out in the Prairies. It meant no more rationing. It meant time to party. As the end-of-war news tore through town, soldiers stationed at the local barracks spilled out in tanks and jeeps and, when they ran out of vehicles, ran out themselves. They chewed up the pavement rumbling up and down Main Street. I don’t recall any shots, blank or otherwise, being fired but the town was smothered by the smoke bombs popping everywhere.
All the stores closed. The staff and merchants joined the public party. My indelible first lesson was to keep moving in a crowd because you never know what turns it will take. I don’t recall if the Nugget gave us the papers that day but I had about at least a couple of dozen. I still had most of them when I got home even though I had sold them many times over.
Everyone was either drunk or acted like it. Soldiers, women, old men were all yelling, “Hey, kid, gimme a paper.” They’d flip a quarter or a dollar at me — a couple of different guys each tossed a $5 bill at me — and rarely took a paper. Soldiers and civilians alike tossed bottles of booze and beer at each other to share. Guys were climbing lampposts to try to see over the smoke. Gals were dancing in and around the moving vehicles.
The iconic sailor-kissing-a-girl on the streets of New York on V-J Day some three months later was rather tame compared with what went on during V-E day in downtown North Bay. For example, I saw one couple in kahki and swirling skirt enthusiastically making unabashed love in the front alcove of Fosdick’s Book Store. I don’t recall seeing any pictures of that. To a 10-year-old kid, all this was great fun.
It was well after dark when I dumped my papers and headed home. At the kitchen table, I counted my money. My usual tote was around to 50 cents. My V-E Day income was almost $45, which was more than my father made in a week as an Ontario Northland Railway section hand.
– 30 –
Confessions of a Newspaperboy
As a prologue to some of the memories that follow in what could become a series of flashbacks, my newspaper career began way back during World War II on the streets of North Bay, 220 miles (350 kilometers) north of Toronto.
It was a busy Northern Ontario railroad town just shy of 18,000 people when I became a newspaperboy selling the North Bay Nugget on the street at time when home delivery was not the norm. I was 8 years old.
My education began then, after being a rural rube all my life. We moved into town on New Year’s Day 1943 and I started selling papers in the spring after the snow and ice finally went south. Or maybe they went north. I would run the dozen blocks downtown from St. Rita’s School. Home was on the way so I dropped off my books and picked up 22 cents to buy 11 papers. We bought them still warm off the presses for 2 cents each and sold them for 3 cents. Paydays were great because a lot of buyers would flip us a nickel and let us keep the change. The paperboy price later went up to 3 cents and we sold it for 5 cents. Not as many tips then.
We fought for first place in the line at the press-room doors on Oak Street behind the Nugget that was housed in what was then the St. Regis Hotel at the west end of downtown where Algonquin Street angled off Main Street. When I got my papers, I’d scramble up one side of Main Street. They usually sold within the first two blocks. (I managed to pick up a few steady customers among the merchants.) Then I’d scramble back and buy another 11 and scoot into the pubs at the east end of Main and wrap up my sales day. Why I bought them in elevens, I don’t recall. Maybe that was all I could handle at first, but I began buying two dozen at a time before my three-year stint ended when we moved to the east end of town.
As I hustled around the eight blocks of downtown commerce peddling my papers, I used to see the Nugget’s reporter Ben Ward (he later moved on to a lengthy tenure with Canadian Press) talking with people all over: elected officials outside City Hall (it became a city in 1925), the cop on the corner, owners of the Arcadian Restaurant over a coffee, the postmaster on the steps of the Post Office. THAT’s what I wanted to do when I grew up. As it turned out, I got lucky and did “that” for several decades in such fun towns as Toronto, Sarnia, Kitchener, Windsor, Detroit and San Diego.
What turned me to thinking about those glimmering days was a recent medical visit to check a blockage in my nose. It turned out to be minor but the doctor asked me, “When did you break your nose?” I said I never broke my nose but he said I must have because of my deviated septum and other scarring. The thought clung to my skull for several days until I finally figured out when it must have occurred.
It was the third or fourth day after I became a newspaperboy. While we were horsing around waiting for the presses to rumble and roll, a 13-year-old burly bully named Maurice (Mo-Mo) Bedard walked up to me and said, “Gimme your money.” I was easy pickings because I was a slight kid, but I said no, not just because it was my money but because my mother would slap me silly if I lost my dough. So he grabbed my shirt, punched me in face and took 22 cents out of my pocket.
I recall bawling (don’t know if it was from pain or the loss of the money) but I couldn’t have been injured all that much because the nose didn’t bleed all that badly. I know that because there wasn’t much blood on my clothing — I threw away the hankie I used to soak up most of any mess and the rest didn’t show much because I was wearing a red-checkered flannel shirt — and nothing was said about my appearance when I got home. But that’s the only time my nose was ever smashed.
Billy Larochelle, who was a little guy like me but a heckuva lot more wiry and quicker and athletic and tougher and had a gravel voice that scared people, gave me enough money to buy my papers that day. I went back for a second and third batch so I could pay him back and still have enough money to show my mother when I got home.
The episode has an epilogue that bolstered my standing among my paperboy peers. A couple of weeks later, Mo-Mo, who didn’t sell papers but just hung around to steal money from kids, aimed his eyes at me again and started making his approach. I happened to have a packet of matches on me (we used to share cigarets while waiting for our papers) and the only thing I could think of was to light a match and throw it at him. As it turned out, the entire packet erupted into flames so I tossed it at him.
The gods were on my side because that fiery package flipped neatly into his shirt pocket. He began hopping around and flailing and slapping at it and cursing and swearing and had to rip off chunks of his shirt, all of which made him look like an idiot in front of the 25 or so kids waiting for papers.
He never bothered me again. Nor did anyone else because the word spread not to screw around with that Scaglione kid because “He’s crazy.”
— Cecil Scaglione
‘Twas a good year . . .
. . . for the Scagliones.
Cec Bev Lou Jean
By pre-arranged compact, Bev and I flew (not literally, we each bought a ticket for a Delta jetliner) to Toronto in July to attend Lou’s 75th birthday party put together by his wife, Jean, and they flew (not literally, etc) to San Diego for the party Bev put together for my 80th birthday in December.
Our visit up north also included a drive down to Bev’s folks in Pennsylvania, where we stayed with her uncle Don and aunt Nancy Linderman and managed to rub elbows with most of the extended family.
Earlier in the year, I was wiped out by a vicious malware program that chewed up and spat out everything in my computer. It struck while I was backing up so about a decade of data and info and pix were nuked to oblivion. So I got a new computer with Windows 8 (which I updated to 8.1) . A friend of my son Mike took my old one and scraped and scrubbed the old drive and said it would work again so I got a monitor for it and it is now my work computer. The new one is connected to the Internet but I save nothing on it. Anything I wish to save, I download to a flash drive and walk across the room to my “old” computer with Windows 7 and copy-paste files onto the computer as well onto flash drives labeled for specific files, such as Photos and Archives and Blog and Mature Life Features and so on, all in the name of Redundancy. And it works fine.
I did manage to recoup about 60 percent or so of what I lost – material that had been saved on CDs, DVDs, flash drives, an old laptop and a notebook I used to take traveling. That’s been replaced by a new tablet.
Out of both need and want, we got a new fridge, dishwasher, and dryer late in the year and I got my little red car painted – Aztec Red. I use my little red Nissan for a once-a-week Meals on Wheels run. Meanwhile, Bev has been making herself invaluable as a volunteer at Oasis, a St. Louis., Mo. – based seniors’ program that provides classes, travel groups and exercise.
A cozy Christmas to all and a comfortable New Year
The Best Present for any Birthday …
… is being present, followed by the presence of family and friends.
And what a birthday party I had this past week.
Bev worked hard on this gathering and it showed as what felt like dozens of people poured through the front and back doors last Saturday (after my 80th birthday Dec. 2) shouting Happy Birthday and tossing hugs at me and each another.
Brother Lou and his wife Jean flew in from Toronto for a two-week visit. Joe Brown, a longtime friend and former newspaper colleague from Kitchener, Ontario, and his wife Edith drove over from their winter digs in Phoenix. Daughter Heather with husband Steve and the grandkids, Dean and Melia, flew in from the Valley of the Sun. My daughter Cris, and her mother, Peg, from Culver City arrived about the same time as my son, Mike, who lives nearby. Rounding out the group were close friends ex-TV staffer John Beatty and wife Pat, our masseuse Ofelia, former neighbor Dru, and current neighbors Keri and Dave who live in Dru’s former house.
The weather was grand so the group gravitated to the back yard and everyone chatted with everyone else and – the key to any good gathering – enjoyed each other’s company. Bev (and I) forgot to point out in the invitations that gifts were not part of the day. As a result, I amassed a hoard of loot.
Thickening and sweetening the icing on the birthday cake were calls from Kay and Jerry Salyer, despite his disturbingly debilitating illness, and from Colleen and Fernando Cicci from Toronto to wrap up the weekend. The success of the entire event was due to Bev’s planning and pains.
The socializing continued into Sunday when the kids and grandkids came by and we tangled at dominos and on to Monday when Mike dropped in for a few hands of scopa and scopone It really didn’t end until this morning (Tuesday) when Lou and Jean were dropped off at the Air Canada terminal for their flight back home.
While the motion and movement of people in and around the house have ended dramatically and abruptly, the memories will only become burnished as this time slips slowly and silently into the past.
— Cecil Scaglione
He Was a Buddy…
REEVES, Gerry — Worked for The Union, 1969-1979 as assistant city editor (day), county editor, state government writer, Chula Vista office bureau chief, writing fictitious rainfall figures. Doing a lot of photo and video work, some freelance PR projects. Very active in community theater publicity. Travel a lot. Contact: GeraldR5@aol.com; 1318 Pine Drive, El Cajon, CA 92020; (619) 447-2582
That’s how he described himself in the San Diego Union-Tribune alumni directory. He hired on a year before I did and left a year before I did.
We got to know each other covering the South Bay and each other’s back for a few years. When he moved downtown, he would bug me about moving there but we always agreed that the absence of editorial-room politics made the bureaus exceedingly attractive. It was his nudge to City Editor Walt MacArthur that got me to join the financial department with Don Bauder, Denise Carabet, Jim Mitchell, Helen Call and Mary Russell. Charlie Ross and Fred Muir came later. That hiatus taught me to embark on a public relations career to finance my retirement.
Gerry left the Union to become an editor in Tucson and then moved into public relations in Los Angeles before returning to San Diego to manage PR matters at Cubic Corp. Again, he was a booster. I was hired as a contractor and, as well as doing other jobs that cropped up with regularity, I was editor of the company’s in-house monthly magazine for several years. This contributed to the financial health of my PR agency — and my retirement.
We had breakfast/lunch a couple or three times a year. He suffered some severe medical problems over the years. Among them were lung cancer that required surgery, diabetes, and the last time we talked he was losing weight at an alarming rate and didn’t know what was causing it. He had a doctor’s appointment the following week to discuss it.
He didn’t spend much time talking about all that. He liked to expound the benefits of his latest toy — a camera or computer or whatever — and the latest developments with the acting troupe he was working with. We always talked about “the good old days and the good guys” and caught each other up on names and faces we had kept up with. Sometimes we’d wonder how politicians keep getting stupider and stupider.
We were due to nudge one another to set a date for our pre-Christmas brunch. But he died last Wednesday (Aug. 27) in San Diego’s VA Hospital.
– 30 –
The Old Gang that Grew Old
The R & R (relatives and reminisces) jaunt back to Canada included an all-too-brief gathering at the Kitchener home of Joe and Edith Brown that drew former newspaper colleagues Gene McCarthy and Ray Alviano and his wife, Lucille.
From left, are ex-Kitchener-Waterloo Record staffers McCarthy, Brown, Scaglione, and Alviano.
Before getting to the “before” pic, lemme offer some background. Gene was a two-way reporter/photog who covered everything from prostitutes to politicians (some might ask “What’s the difference?”) to princes and police and also wrote a book of a sensational case he covered. (I now have a treasured autographed copy perched in my bookshelves.) Joe was a photographer who got smart before the rest of us and left newspapering early to open his own extremely successful business. Me, you know from reading “About Us” in this blog. Ray joined the K-W Record sports department more than five decades ago and became sports editor for several years until he retired.
Now pick us out of the above foto taken in my basement recreation room during the 1960 Christmas season. Gene is at the extreme right. Joe is in front center with his feet (and white socks) extended over a chair. Ray is being hugged by Lucille in center rear. I’m the dark-haired guy with glasses and cigarette under the ceiling light.
We had a lot of fun recalling escapades of that time in our lives. Amazingly, we had few revisions of each other’s remembrances revived in Brown’s living room a few weeks ago.
A tip of the toque to Cecil
(A tickle and treasure by National Editor Don Wall in the February 2013 issue of FYI — “Forever Young Information, Canada’s Adult Lifestyle Publication,” online at http://www.foreveryoungnews.com)
It’s a familiar byline to longtime readers of FYI, and recently came word that veteran travel writer Cecil Scaglione has earned a citation in the San Diego Press Club’s 39th annual Excellence in Journalism Awards, for the second year in a row.
Scaglione may run an editorial service out of San Diego these days, while we are here in snowy Ontario, but this colleague and I share a special link. Some time back in the mid-1990s, soon after FYI entered into a deal with him to use his writing services, we realized we were both raised in the same town, North Bay, Ont.
Have you ever noticed how home towns seem to become more important to you, the further in time it is since you lived there? Coming from the same small town can link spirits together, and this was the case even though we determined that Scaglione never lived there when I did; he was born in the 1930s and left town to work down south (that’s Toronto!) for the Telegram in 1955, while I was born three years after that. (This means, as the North Bay joke goes, we never went to separate schools together.) So there has been a regular, soulwarming swapping of stories as we share our love for the beautiful city on the shores of Lake Nipissing.
As for his career, after the Telegram, Scaglione moved on to the Windsor Star, the Detroit News and the San Diego Union. He started his editorial service in 1991. The feature that earned Scaglione his travel-writing award this year ran in FYI in April and was titled Chartwell: Churchill at Home. His award-winning travel piece from last year, called The Naples Nobody Knows, saw my friend visiting the hometown of his Italian ancestors. Both stories are posted on our website at foreveryoungnews.com.
Cecil, keep up the good work. – Don Wall
Movin’ Madness ‘n’ Manners
By Cecil Scaglione
Mature Life Features
The next person requesting assistance for a move will have to speak with my attorney. Everything in, on and around me hurts from dragging boxes, lifting furniture, climbing stairs, jumping off trailers, dodging characters carrying stuff, and just trying to stay alive. The soft warm rain we had Wednesday made the entire week survivable. As an aside, on our way to Phoenix, the saguaros that began appearing alongside Highway 8 east of Gila Bend looked scrawny and scorched. On our return trip to our soft and comfortable beds, they appeared saucy and sated and green with the water soaked up during the week’s storms.
Having moved into a half dozen homes during my married-with-kids period, several rules and reminders popped up as we transferred a household acquired by two adults and two youngsters over the past decade.
1 – If you’re not carrying anything, get out of the way.
2 – If you are carrying something:
don’t drop it
don’t bang the walls with it, especially in the “new” house
don’t leave it sitting in the middle of the floor — get it out of the way
3 – Make sure relatives, friends and neighbors who volunteer to help show up.
4 – Make sure they show up on time.
5 – Start early; moving stuff after dark is boring, tiring and unnecessary…
6 – … unless you’re moving in the desert, in which case you should start early, take off for siesta during the heat of the afternoon, and resume in the cool of the evening.
7 – Move ALL the big stuff first (see No. 8).
8 – The exception is COMPUTERS. Get them up ‘n’ runnin’ asap.
9 –Stay out of discussions on where things should go – “put the dining table there, the big mirror on that wall, the entertainment center in this room, etc” Let the moving family square up on that stuff.
10 – Before moving, measure all your beds and dressers and appliances and furniture to see if they will fit where you would like to put them. (e.g. The fridge hole in the new house was almost a quarter-inch too small for the fridge being moved. It had to be squished into its stall. A sofa set was too large and bulky for the site the family selected originally so it had to be taken back down the stairs it was laboriously manhandled up and replaced by a less formidable sectional set.
11 – Don’t forget the moving dolly at the “new” house because you need it to manhandle stuff onto the trailer or truck (or moving vehicle) at the old house.
12 – Plug in a fridge at the new house to cool water, lemonade, beer and other refreshments to make the experience more bearable.
13 –Pack a toothbrush in your pocket so you can handle that chore on the first night and morning in the new house without having to scramble through piles of boxes, bags and bins to find it.
These rules apply primarily to short moves done by families and relatives and friends and neighbors who know nothing about moving and for which moving vans and moving people have not been hired.
Still Sizzlin’
Made it Monday through the heat accompanied by dozens and dozens of sand spouts that erupted about mid-way between Yuma and Gila Bend and kept decorating the landscape right into the southern portion of metro Phoenix. We even drove through one that danced onto Highway 8. Fortunately it was a baby but it did “whump” the Highlander a good one.
Moved the kitchen fridge with a dolly onto a trailer and to the new home right after our arrival. It had to be squeezed into the fridge space created by the kitchen designers. We creased the fridge but didn’t break it or jeopardize its integrity and operation.
Tuesday was up-and-down-stairs day with sectional sofas, an exercise anyone who’s moved that type of furniture will readily ID with. And you’ll also recall that sectional furniture — just like refrigerators — fits best only into the first place it was purchased for. After squeezing the massive three-section corner sofa/sleeper out of the old house and into the new house, it was decided (after a lengthy committee meeting) that it would fit and feel best upstairs in the new house. So that’s where it is now. It took with it several thousand calories, a few quarts of sweat, an aching arm, and a dead shoulder .
Most of the kitchen cupboards have been cleared in the old house and filled in the new. Next come beds and computer furniture and nits and gnats. The old house has to be ready Thursday for a week-end real estate open house. Wish us luck.
MTK
This is crazy!
It’s one thing to take pride in not following the crowd but it’s stupid to head into a burning building just because everybody is running the other way. So we announce with profound pride — and substantial stupidity — that we’re going against the flow.
We’re leaving our pleasant Pacific Ocean-cooled community to spend the week of the frying Fourth in Phoenix at a time when the cosmic collective has known for decades that ‘Zonies have been escaping the Hades heat of Arizona by flocking to California beaches since wheels were round.
We’re dashing headlong into the Valley of the Sun to help kids and grandkids move into a new home. The mission is meaningful, but the brain boggles just visualizing heat waves shimmering off the simmering stuff being toted from one set of closets to another.
There is some good news: the new place has a pool and it’s filled with fresh water.
MTK
Mature Life Features 