Memorabilia

 

Digging through a junk drawer I found a collection of old stuff that was once important to me.  Each item has a story, of sorts, and tells a tale about some part of my younger life. 

Take the Cub Scout badges, for instance….I don’t remember what each one was for but I did achieve Webelos which meant that I matriculated to the rank of Tenderfoot in Boy Scouts.  I mostly enjoyed Cub Scouts in spite of the uniform requirement.  It was fun with the exception of going door-to-door selling Clamorama tickets.  I hated that.  I was keen about advancing to Boy Scouts but that turned out to be something that I really wasn’t suited for and, though I wasn’t kicked out, I ended up leaving under a cloud due to actions and circumstances that are disagreed upon by all parties to this very day.  That little square silver box holds the Boy Scout ring that I took off my finger on the day I left.

People were always giving me pocket knives.  I have a ton of them and I can’t recall the who or why on most but that red knife is special.  When I was in the first grade I talked my parents into buying it for me at Sears Roebuck in Wichita.  I couldn’t believe that they actually did it.  Being given stuff that we didn’t need was out of the norm.  Look closely and you will see Roy Rogers and Trigger on it.  Dale didn’t make the cut and if she had I wouldn’t have wanted the knife.  I always thought that she was bogus.  In retrospect so was Roy.  I mean that pair dressed like Liberace.  I broke the end of the large blade off carving my name into our chicken coop.

The green things are Heinz Pickle Pins that were featured during the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair at the Heinz exhibit where you could push a little button and a pin or two dropped into a tray.  There was usually a mob of kids waiting their turn and a Pickle Pin Monitor dressed in a green blazer making sure that each kid only got to push the button once.  I went there one day and there was no mob of kids and no pickle monitor.  Out to lunch I guess so I cranked out a whole lot of those pins because I could trade them for gum, candy, a decent used Duncan Imperial, several packs of strings or cigarettes.  As you can see I only have 9 left.  What do you want to trade me?

That brass tag belonged to our dog, Ace.  It’s his rabies tag from Wichita.  Ace was a good dude and my best and only brother. 

That silver thing “north east” of Ace’s tag is one of those tiny cigarette lighters.  They were highly valued by some kids (including me) and came in gumball-type machines in a little clear round plastic case.  Seems like those machines might have cost $25 a try and I spent a few dollars before I finally got one.  It was really exciting when I finally saw it drop but it was very disappointing as a lighter.  Poor performance, no wind protection, leaked in your pocket and that irritated the skin.  Leakage meant that it was always out of fluid and wouldn’t light, you had a scab on your leg and that you always smelled of lighter fluid and Bactine.

The little knife in the scabbard was something that I purchased in a souvenir shop.  I don’t recall where but probably the Roadside Geyser, Estes Park, The Big Well, who can remember?  Some family vacation someplace.  Originally it had a white plastic pearl handle but I thought it looked a bit wussy so I colored it black with a felt pen. 

 That shiny rectangle is my dog tag from Jesse Chisolm Elementary School in Wichita.  All kids were required to wear them to aid in potential body identification after the Russians dropped the bomb.  Note that it lists religion and blood type in case you were still alive.  I wonder if Atheist was an accepted choice in those days?  We lived in fear.

I bet that the Buchan’s Championship patch hangs you up.  There was a bread company in Seattle called the Buchan Bakery and they sponsored an amateur basketball team called the Buchan Bakers.  They won AAU championships in 1956, 1957 and 1960.  Brett Fidler’s Dad refereed AAU games and I got to go to a few of them.  Mr. Fidler gave me that patch and it seemed so cool at the time.

Above the knife are two pins that I think might have been for some school athletic award.  A silver and a bronze.  That would be 2^nd and 3^rd place, right?  The silver pin is actually a bronze pin painted silver.  I don’t remember painting it silver but somebody did so it might have been me.  I may have been out of gold paint.

To the left of those is a pin I got for being on the Junior Safety Patrol.  That pin mattered to me because I was a big shot.  I was an officer and a Second Lieutenant!  Third in command.  At least I was until I was kicked out.  Mr. Aguilera managed the patrol, taught 6^th grade, Spanish and Square Dancing.  He was ill-suited for his job because he seemed to hate kids and had serious anger management issues.  He kicked me off patrol because he didn’t like the way I square danced.  When the call came to swing-your-partner I was paired with Alison Arsove and she swung me hard up against the folded bleachers with a great deal of force.  Aggie went berserk, picked me up, shook me by my shoulders, banged me hard against the wall and stripped me of my commission right there in front of God and everybody.  The bruises didn’t last long but I was totally humiliated and all I had to show for my work ensuring the safety of Montlake crosswalks was that pin.  But wait.  There’s more.  He didn’t just take my silver 2^nd Lt. badge away, he kicked me completely out of patrol.  He found me unsuited to hold a red flag on a stick.  That pin and the school photo of the Safety Patrol is all I have to show for my lack of skills at square dancing.

Some Members of the Junior Safety Patrol

Those little white things are my baby teeth.  None of my baby teeth ever got loose enough to pull.  I would have a permanent tooth coming in somewhere in my mouth and it would have no place to grow so I had to have each of them pulled by a dentist.  My Mom made sure that I had straight, beautiful permanent teeth and she was very proud of them until I got them knocked out in a car wreck.  Oh well.

That little silver and red thing is a West Bend Super Duper 502 fishing lure missing its treble hooks.  It seems that all three barbs got embedded in Chuck Carlson’s thumb and fore finger which is a whole ‘nuther story for a ’nuther time.  Chuck’s fingers were the only thing that either of us caught that day and he had to go to a doctor to have the hooks removed.  I got the lure back sans hooks.  Chuck was grounded and probably beaten for being a dumbass.  Charles Howard Frederick Carlson was one of my closest friends and had a sad and short life.  That lure really is one of my treasured possessions. 

The orange award ribbon was for a Halloween costume party at Montlake Playfield.  I was dressed as a college professor.  Don’t ask.  It was a goofy costume and the ribbon might have been given to me as a mercy award.  It’s hard to understand why I still have that.  

Finally the red and white ribbons were won at a Montlake Playfield track meet.  The red was for the long jump and the white for the hop-step-and-jump.  I only competed in the hop-step-and-jump because it looked silly and seemed to have no practical application in life.  I did the long jump to see if I was ready to make the leap from the roof of the school across the alley onto the lunchroom roof.  It was a personal goal because after so many earlier failures I still thought it might be possible to fly.  I had been working on it for over a year and long jumping everything in sight that I didn’t think would kill me.  I guess I was a pretty strange kid.  The red ribbon told me that I was ready and so I climbed up and did it.  I barely cleared the alley and the impact on the lunchroom room roof would be best described as violent and painful.  

While David Belle may be recognized as the undisputed founder of Parkour I was into it for over a decade before he was born.  It would be a stretch to say that I was a parkour visionary, though, because my young mind didn’t always work through all of the details.  While envisioning the flight I carefully worked on the mechanics of the launch and the flight, itself, but I never gave a second thought to the landing part.  THAT_LANDING_HURT_A LOT.  It was a harsh toke.