Easily amused

  

Last week’s unrelenting cold and rain has retreated, in the face of the weather that makes autumn. Heavy fog in the valley yesterday morning smelled simply wonderful. The sun burnt it all away, and the afternoons this week have been sharp, crisp. I’ve made excuses to be outdoors.

This evening after supper, sitting in the living room, knitting, a gang of young boys tore up and down between my trailer and Mr. Next Door, yelling like wild young boys. It reminded me of my childhood, and children running and yelling in the evenings, between homes on forty foot lots.

The evening news was still on, dusk closing in fast, and there was a knock at the door. I opened it, and startled several youngsters. “Can Laura come out?” queried the biggest boy. “I’ll ask,” I replied, swallowing my amusement over the sweat streaked face and muddy sneakers on my porch, and Miss Teen America in the next room.

I went to ask and heard she must be in the shower, so I told my Norman Rockwell worthy young fellow, “No, not now.” In my absence, the rest of the gang had collapsed on my porch, three on the bench, one on the steps, one still in the drive. “Who can I say called?” I asked, and I thought I heard “Jay” among the syllables.

“A young man named, I think, Jay,” called for you, I told Laura a few minutes later. “J-J?” “I really don’t know.” “Like, twelve years old!?” “That’s close.”

“We’ll just see about that!” Wet hair snapped behind her, out the door and down the steps, five feet one of indignation.

An inch of knitting later, she was back, on the sofa, in charge of the TV controls. “Well, he won’t do that again!” “Do what?” “Ding, dong, ditch!” “What?” “Ding, dong ditch. Ring the bell and run.”

“But, he asked for you.”

“That’s because you scared ding, dong ditch right out of him when you answered the door.”

We thought we were invincible

In spite of appearing contrary, I have nursed my back these last two days in a state of total sloth. Not my style, and alleviated only a tiny bit by listening to an all time favorite, Middlemarch. I love Elliot’s tour de force, as if she was saying to the world, “look, I know almost everything, and see what I can do with it!”

Her detail is exquisite. Little boys, “standing between their father’s knees as he drove leisurely,” brought to mind first my brothers, then my sister standing in the middle of the front seat of the car, between my parents; the catbird seat. Certainly not safe, but way before seat belts, interstate highways and seventy mile per hour speed limits. My mother could restrain any child in the front seat.

My own children and my nephews enjoyed the same vantage point. As parents we thought nothing of it. My husband and I felt we had improved on the arrangement with the seat we had for our daughter.  Wooden buttons for spinning and a tray of cheerios and the kid was all set.

There were motorcycles, too. My sister-in-law, my brother, my husband and I all rode together. With our children. Beth was six, Shelly four, Michelle three. They had helmets. 

Beth was old enough to ride behind me. Shelly rode in front of my husband; Michelle generally was in front of Helyn. On the gas tanks. Or, as Helyn said years later, “We thought we were invincible.”

This winter is invincible, too.  I drove home from work in sleet and hail, only because, at thirty eight degrees it’s too warm to snow.

Fried eggs

I've mentioned on more than one occasion my mother was not a good cook, except pot roast on Sunday. 

I've spent most of my adult life avoiding cooking, too, but there was a ten year stretch when I did cook.

I was married, and my husband expected three meals a day. Yes, he came home for lunch. There were kids to feed, too.

My mother-in-law was an exquisite cook. Standing roast beef on Christmas Eve. You should have been there. I learned more about cooking from her than I learned in the kitchen of my childhood.

My memory of eggs at home is scrambled eggs, served for dinner, with spinach. (Mine went under the table.) 

I recall fried eggs as an outdoor camping dish, my brothers frying a lot of bacon and throwing in eggs at the end, while I toasted bread in a toaster that fit over another burner. It was a three ring Coleman, and I know a pot of coffee was on the third ring.

Fried eggs as an indoor breakfast dish did not cross my mind until my husband requested them. He watched from the dining card table in our miniscule apartment kitchen, and I do recall the instant I had the eggs nicely in the skillet he was at my shoulder, adding a tablespoon of water and clapping a lid on. OK, that’s how you fry eggs indoors.

My grandmother also was an excellent cook, and gave me some cookbooks. They were old, from the beginning of her marriage, now a hundred years ago. These actually were “housekeeping” books, and I could read about running a vacuum cleaner and dusting, where my skills were adequate.

The directions for frying eggs were so ludicrous I shared them with some other young wives at work, in the break room. Can you believe, you crack the egg into hot bacon grease, and then you can spoon the hot grease over the egg to hasten the cooking.

Silence. “Well, that’s what I do. How do you fry an egg?” from a person l admired.  I was so tongue tied by the realization that exploded in my mind I could not speak. First, my fried eggs actually were “fried” in water. Second, do not denigrate anything I did not understand well enough to have an opinion.

I never answered Meg’s question and the topic turned, of course. At my first opportunity I asked my mother-in-law, what’s that called, how you make eggs. “Oh, they’re steamed, my dear.”

I still have fried egg moments.

The rock remains

I had opportunity to go by my first school this week, Forest Hill elementary, so I took my camera.  I wanted to see if the rock was still there.

This is the school I went to.  Built in 1926, with art deco embellishments on the building that recognized the Indian trail portaging between the Cuyahoga and Tuscaroras Rivers. 

The City of Akron was able to pass a massive bond issue for the purpose of rebuilding many old Akron schools, Forest Hill among them.  In my childhood my school was on the front half of a city block, the play area on the back half.

The new school was built on the back half of the property, where the rock resided.   This is the new school.   I understand some of the art deco is featured inside the building.

The rock remains.  In my day it was closer to the intersection at the corner of the streets; we could squeeze through the fence at the corner to have a go at the rock during the summer time, too.  We spent hours with a small stone and a tin can, chipping gold off the rock.

The school still faces the same direction; the rock remains behind the school.  Now the half a city block playground in front is entirely surrounded by high mesh fencing, with one gate into the parking lot and the main access through the school proper. 

We walked around the school on the city sidewalks to reach the stone.  Hamilton and Emily were on my original errand, so they were treated to grandma’s elementary school before they reached home.  As I walked along I realized the concrete pad bordering the sidewalk was the pad for the playground fence, once.  There were post holes, filled in with dirt, I guess, all along the pad.

There were names traced in formerly fresh concrete in several of the pads and we could make out most of them.  Here we have Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro and Andrea.  I wonder if Joseph/Fidel was in love with Andrea, or if she were a partner in crime.  May be the later; she didn’t use her last name. Such graffiti was way after my time; no one knew Fidel Castro’s name when I went to Forest Hill.  Even the sixth grade boys weren’t brave enough to write in wet concrete in the 1940’s.

The old trees remain.  They aren’t on the playground; no one plays under them these days.  But, like the rock, they remain.

One thing and another

When I was a young our house was cleaned every stinking Saturday.  I remember every Saturday of my childhood and know I scrubbed the upstairs floors and cleaned the bathroom every stinking Saturday.

Of course I grew up and eventually appreciated the value of organization over chaos.  My daughters and I cleaned every Saturday morning.  We could be done by noon and free to enjoy anything else planned for the day. 

We may have finished so quickly because the girls’ rooms were bypassed, except for vacuuming.  One time, while we were on vacation, our house was robbed.  The girls’ piggy banks were smashed on their bedroom floors.  The police remarked on the ransacking of their rooms. Except for piggy bank shards on the floor, that’s how they left them.

Cleaning this house has never come to the top of any list.  No excuses, but as if Mom, Jan and I were cleaned out.  We had Mark in the beginning, and he is a neat freak, so we could rely on him to sweep any particle up from any floor, and find an inconspicuous place for things he didn’t like to see. But he went off into the world to become a citizen and left us to dust bunnies of several cats and dogs.

We engaged cleaning people.  Some good, some not.  My friend Carol told me one is always looking for the next cleaning person.  She does know; she has twice the house and so many collections her cleaning ladies spend a day. We had cleaning ladies, too, right up to the time we decided we needed kids

.

I call them Child Help, Grandma’s Sole Proprietorship. They do a fine job.  Their rooms are never included in the schedule and the grown-ups take care of their rooms, so the job can’t be that onerous. Some weeks we give it a lick and a promise and some weeks we do a real job.

But, one thing and another, we have done nothing except keep the kitchen clean for several weeks.  And tomorrow is the big family Memorial Day picnic, before Hazel and Tony go home.  As soon as my proprietary cleaners come home from school we will tuck in and get it done.  We could be done before supper. 

There may be pictures of grandchildren scrubbing floors on hands and knees.  Nothing makes my seventy year old knees feel better.

My problem with Catcher in the Rye

        

I finished reading the book last night.  It took me three nights; I couldn’t just skim it.  I started reading the words, looking for clues.

I last read Catcher in the Rye in the early sixties, early on in college.  I was so naïve in those days whole concepts were explained to me.  “Stoned,” for instance, on the release of one of Bob Dylan’s songs.  Holden Caulfield’s ideas are straightforwardly complex; I know I didn’t need any code words explained.  I read the book, probably wrote a required composition on adolescent issues, probably concluding Holden would join the adult world and be no different than the rest of us. 

Remembering only a kid who was affluent enough to live on his own in New York City for two days, I started in again.  I ploughed two thirds through before I could begin to engage with the book.  An alert here; Holden had a brother who died at a young age, and I also have a brother who died too young.  Holden’s Allie died of leukemia around eleven years of age, I believe.  My brother Melvin took his own life at age twenty nine.  The book began having parallels for me.

Holden was troubled about Allie almost from the beginning, and as his state of mind became more obvious, I thought about my brother troubled over his beautiful daughter becoming deaf at six months.  One of Holden’s escapes was alcohol, my brother’s was street drugs.  Probably a drug added to marijuana, PCP, triggered my brother’s paranoia and mania.

When Holden walked from the bar, too drunk to be functioning, asking Allie to get him across the streets and down the blocks, the book finally engaged me as a treatise on mental illness.  I remembered my brother’s despair at the treatment of bi-polar disorder in the 1970’s.  The drugs that made him “sane” kept him asleep day and night.  Without them he could be violent.  And, he was a big man, over six feet, broad shoulders, curly blond hair, cornflower blue eyes that twinkled, an impish smile.

 

Mel sat at my kitchen table one day that spring of 1976.  We were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking about his illness.  “I’ll never be Melvin again, will I?” he asked.   I knew he wouldn’t, but, of course, I lied.  I figured he’d be someone, and Mel trying to be Mel was OK with me

.

It didn’t work out any way.  He closed his garage door, started the car, put all his music on and laid back and listened to the end. 

I was grateful Holden’s planned withdrawal from the world would be as a deaf mute, a plan so unworkable I had to smile at teen age angst.  And that Holden felt enough responsibility for Phoebe not to draw her into his eight dollar plan of running away.  We still end with Holden sitting in the California sanitarium finishing out J.D. Salinger’s cliff hanger:  will he go over the edge or not?  All these years later, I don’t know.  I’ll be interested in my grandson’s take on this one.

Spinach and scrambled eggs

We’ve all been busy, busy today.  I came home from work at two, read blogs I didn’t have time for this morning (before I went to work), then paid bills, and now it’s now.  Jan just appeared from the studio, took a box of spinach from the fridge and said all she had time for today was spinach and scrambled eggs.

Spinach and scrambled eggs! I haven’t had spinach and eggs for supper since I was a kid, and that would be before Jan came along.  I’ve mentioned our mom was an unimaginative cook.  I liked my mom; we were good friends when we were both adults.  I gratefully ate everything she put on the table, and we laughed that I had to leave home to learn there was more to food than casseroles and pot roast on Sunday.

One step back.  I did not eat the scrambled eggs.  She, too, served them with spinach, fresh or frozen.  This dish showed up often during a period I later realized was Lent.  Accompanied by her standard salad:  one leaf of head lettuce on a small plate.  One ring of pineapple on the lettuce.  One scoop of cottage cheese on the pineapple slice.  One maraschino cherry atop the cottage cheese.

I had to leave home to learn there are several ways to cook scrambled eggs.  Mom whisked them in a bowl, added a good deal of milk and scrambled them down to extremely wet.  Into the Boontonwear serving bowl, call the family for dinner.

Fortunately our table was set every evening with a full complement of silverware.  One fork, one knife, one spoon.  I could not have made it through scrambled eggs and spinach without the spoon, which I used to discreetly deposit my scrambled eggs on a ledge that ran under the table.  I remember discovering to my horror that the ledge was available only on the end of the table, not down the length.  I had to swallow cold, wet and runny eggs that night.  I didn’t make that seating mistake twice.

In my defense, I did not know scrambled eggs could have a consistency other than runny.  I would not have known how to ask or describe anything different.   I doubt it would have changed Mom’s cooking.  Remember, we grew up on margarine, in respect to my parent’s opposition to farm subsidies.  When Mom learned margarine would never pass the door of my adult house she said if she had only known….yea.  It still would have been runny eggs and oleo.

All the eggs on the ledge did disturb me.  I could get caught.  And punished.  But that never happened, and the ledge had no egg evidence the next time the Boontoonwear bowl came to the table full of runny eggs.  I was one lucky little girl.  Musing it over many years later it came to me:  the lucky cat!

This bowl is upside down.  Hmmm.....That is the color, though.

The scream house

Unlike the sidewalk, the scream house construction didn’t get documented with pictures.  Half way down the sidewalk, on the left side, there’s a shed type structure put up by the current owner.  Sadly, he tore down the patio and covered up the cobbles to do it.

In the beginning there was the screen house.  Dad built it about 1957.  It was a frame of a house, complete with pitched roof, and screens for walls.  Jan was four.  It was her scream house.  Before he built the scream house dad had to make the patio under it.  He laid hundreds of brick cobbles that he discovered as construction waste at Botzum Brothers, the company mining the pit.  They were his for the taking.  The pile surely weighed a ton and was three quarters of a mile from our house.  A quarter mile of that was the climb back up out of the pit.

Dad furnished the clothes line and paid the neighborhood kids a nickel a cobble to drag those bricks up from the pit and down the street to our back yard.  I think that took us the entire month of June.  After dad laid the stone floor he assembled the scream house on top of it.  Every fall he took it down and stored it in the garage.

The cobble stones, on the left.  Quite a few years after they were laid; probably between the screen house and its replacement.

A glimpse of Jan's scream house over her shoulder.

Dad ran electricity to the garage and the patio.  He dug a trench the length of the yard and laid a pipe that went through the basement wall.  Walt held the ball of cord at one end and dad started up the vacuum at the other.  The line was sucked 200 feet out to the garage.  Then the cord was tied to the electrical line and slick as you know what, the electrical line was pulled through.  This probably did not violate a single zoning code in 1957.

Mom, Jan, Joanne, Walt, Mel, Uncle Bill, Dad.  That grin on dad's face is knowing the timer will trip perfectly.

The scream house was our haven in summer.  Mom set up her sewing machine.  She may even have set up a quilt or two. We ate every meal there. She made pancakes in her trusty electric skillet on the weekends.  One time I reached up to unplug the coffee pot I had just emptied into my parents’ cups.  Just as I reached dad jumped up and shouted “NO,” but my hand had already closed on the plug.  Bare feet on damp stones.  I was thrown the ten foot width of the patio and landed on my back.  Unconscious.  When I opened my eyes dad was compressing my chest and counting.  He looked at me and said, “How often have you been told to wear shoes!”

In 1965, early one April there was a freak wind storm.  My brother Mel had just put the scream house together, and it sailed away forever.  The next patio cover was not screened.  However, it did not have to be disassembled and reassembled annually.  Dad’s health was not up to new construction and Walt was in the Air Force, so Mel and our neighbor Chico built the new patio roof.  The new roof was barrel shaped, with fluted green fiberglass covering.  From then on, when dad was not using his camera for family events he would reach up and store it safely from harm on one of the four by four rafters.

 Mel and Chico, constructing.

Mom supervising.

The camera holder completed.  Right up there on the cross rafter in the foreground.

Made in America and Barberton, Ohio

Mom and Dad were always conscious of the country of origin of products they bought.  I can’t imagine it was a problem when they were children, or even young, married adults.  There wasn’t much money chasing any country’s goods in the 1930’s.  But the end of the world war produced a shift many weren’t noticing.  My parents did.

I was maybe seven or eight, standing patiently in O’Neils, one of Akron’s two major department stores, while my mother sorted through a table of rubbers and boots.  For those not past retirement age, we wore rubbers to school on rainy days, over our shoes to keep them dry.  I’ll bet more rubbers were left at school than any other accessory, proving to parents that leather shoes could survive to walk another day without being the encased in rubbers.

Mother was attempting to match up lefts and rights in the same size for some member of the family when she turned the rubber over and read the country of origin.  Japan.   She was outraged.  “This is the rubber capital of the world,” she said to no one in particular, “and these rubbers are made in Japan.”  She took her complaint to the department manager and we left without new rubbers for some child.

Listening to our parents we learned that with few exceptions foreign goods were inferior and even shoddy, and certainly didn’t keep people in this country employed.  Even the doll I got for my fourth birthday was made right down the road, in Barberton, which I knew then and now.

Amosandra doll

Sun Rubber Company

Barberton, Ohio

A few weeks after I was four years old I lay on the couch in the living room, drifting in an out of consciousness.  Neighbor women came and touched my forehead.  I looked up and the doctor was looking at me.  Then I was in the hospital and men and women in white uniforms were picking up needles longer than me to stick in my arm.  “This won’t hurt,” they said.  I knew they were lying and screamed.

The next time I woke up I was in bed with the little black doll, Maggie, I had received for my birthday.  I was glad to see her.  I was also starving.  Starving!  A large, white uniformed woman asked me if I was hungry.  Was I ever!  She would be right back with something to eat.  She returned with a tray with a selection of jello’s.  I could pick one.  I cannot eat jello to this day.

But, I had my doll baby.  Maggie and the bed and I were rolled to another part of the ward where I was under a window.  I could look across the street and see children playing at a playground.  I could also look down and see some work going on.   There was a large hole in the ground, and a black man at the bottom of the hole.  The other workers at the top were throwing bricks down to him and he caught them with his bare hands.  Pretty soon his hands were bleeding and the bricks kept coming.  I jumped up and down and screamed and screamed.  When people came I couldn’t make them realize what was happening to the man in the hole.

Then they took Maggie away and my parents were there to take me home.  I asked for Maggie and Mom and Dad said I’d get her back in a few minutes; she had been taken away to be sterilized, so she wouldn’t have measles germs on her.  Someone came in with Maggie, and she was white. The person with Maggie explained all the brown came off in the sterilizer.  I wouldn’t take her; it wasn’t my doll!  My parents may have brought her home, but I don’t recall ever seeing her again.

There was little sentimentality in our house.  Things happened, get over it, get on with it.  I was no longer interested in dolls and never had another one.  Even at four I could understand it would have been smarter to wash that baby with soap and water than throw her in a pot of boiling water.  That was just dumb.  I keep the story of the rubbers handy, but it’s become part of the story of the values of community that my parents understood.  As for the man catching bricks—I was another fourteen years understanding that one.  It could not have happened in the black and white neighborhood I grew up in and didn’t come back to me until I left my insular childhood world.

Addicted to reading

After Heidi, I couldn’t stop reading.  I couldn’t get enough words.  I became addicted in the third grade, and converted what I considered wasted time in class to reading time.   The time between writing one spelling word in a test and waiting for the next, I read another page in my book opened on the seat.  Mrs. Schultz knew what I was doing and never stopped me, although I was sent to the corner once for some other infraction, and my mother came into the room in some volunteer capacity.  As my back was to the room, I didn’t know until I got home that she knew I’d been bad.  At least I wasn’t in the closet with a bag over my head.  When we were in second grade, moving up, that was the word in the hall…hope you don’t get Mrs. Schultz, she puts you in the closet with a bag over your head.  We never knew anyone it happened to, but the rumored threat must have deterred all the behavior worse than my infraction.

I read walking home from school.  My feet knew every sidewalk crack and I did stop and look both ways before crossing the streets, I hope.  At home I lay on my stomach on my bed and read.  In the winter I got under the covers (no heat upstairs in the bedrooms!).  At night I used a flashlight I kept under my pillow.  As my mother made my bed every morning, my habit was no secret.

My ninth grade biology teacher was no credit to the profession.  My class was the first after lunch and he would come in, reeking, assign us a chapter to read, sit at his desk, tip his chair against the blackboard, put his feet up on a drawer and sleep.  I would read the chapter, then go to my latest book.  I never heard him come down the aisle.  He slammed an envelope on my desk, said “Give this to your parents and bring me the answer tomorrow!”  The bell rang.

I gave the envelope to my mother, who read it and said nothing.  My dad read it when he came home.  We ate dinner.  Finally dad said, “Show me your trashy dime novel in a brown paper cover.”  I had no such thing.  Dad suggested it might be the book right on top of my pile of school books.  “Dad, that’s your copy of Life on the Mississippi.  It had that cover on it when I took it off the bookshelf.”

Dad gave me a letter in an envelope to give to my biology teacher.  He suggested I make my own decision about reading in class, when my other work was done and the teacher otherwise occupied.  Each of my brothers had the same teacher for biology and each said “No” when asked if I was their sister.  When Jan got up to ninth grade biology, he had been “dismissed.” 

When I was on the road driving to shows I addicted myself to audio books.  I’m not a great fan of movies, especially adaptations of books I love.  The characters in my head are not the ones I see on the screen.  Stories are abridged, plots modified to cover the gaps….on and on.  I’m seldom disappointed in the reading of an audio book.  The few times in the last twenty years one has fallen short, I’ve donated it to the library and found a recording by a different narrator.  So, I no longer walk down the street reading, but you can find me at the gym or in front of the sewing machine with my trusty MP3 player.    To everyone who never interfered, Thanks.  As for the biology teacher, what the heck.  He made my dad chuckle.  I wonder what dad wrote back.

Heidi

When I first remember my dad he was a tall man and slender.  About 6’6”, probably 160 pounds.  Straight bearing, like a soldier, broad enough shoulders.  He did a lot of physical labor at the house after work—turning gardens (with a spade), trundling wheelbarrows of dirt.  Building a room out of the open front porch.  We kids went to sleep many, many nights to the sound of the Shop Smith in the basement.

Dad had some amazing skills he brought out of the army.  He could wiggle his ears, for one.  At the end of his army career, before he was medically discharged, he spent months on his back in the hospital because of ulcers.  To amuse himself he learned to isolate and use muscles.  Like ear wiggling muscles. One eyebrow muscle.  He could make an arch of his little finger and index finger and dance the two middle fingers in and out of the arch.  He could pull off his thumb (which really was a sleight of hand trick).    Of course we children tried and tried and, unlike not being able to take out our teeth like our grandma did, we developed some small dexterous skills ourselves.

And, dad read to us.  It was my 8^th birthday and I’d received Heidi as a birthday present.  He was reading it to Walt and me, and had Heidi half way up that mountain when he got sick.  He went to bed on my brother’s birthday, the day after mine, and then went to the hospital.  We kept waiting for him to come back and read what happened to Heidi at her grandfather’s house.  When I couldn’t wait any more, I found the book and kept on reading.  Walt got bored and wandered off, but I had to know. 

When dad came home he was very skinny and ate baby food from jars for a long time because much of his stomach had been removed to cure the ulcers.  He probably weighed 140 pounds, and stayed that way for years—until he tore down the chicken coop and contracted histoplasmosis.

After a while dad was feeling better and asked me if I wanted to hear more of Heidi.  I had finished it.  “Well, well,” he said.  He took all three of us to the library.  Dad sat on a chair at a table in the children’s section.  His knees were up near his elbows.  He held my little brother, Melvin, on his lap, and all three of us wrote our names on a little white card.  Each of us received a library card to use to borrow any book we wanted from the library.  Mel could print only his name; he was only three, and had sat and practiced it over and over at the dining room table so he could get a library card, too.   The library was downtown, and either mom or dad had to drive us, but it was a weekly outing.  Thanks, Mom and Dad. I’ve never been over the habit.

The gizmo

I am so excited!  Going through all these old pictures I’ve been posting, I turned up a negative.  Some of us remember those!  I held it to the light and hollered:  It’s the gizmo!  Long story, getting the print, but here it is.

This picture is probably 1955.  The little girl is a family friend, exactly one month older than my sister.  The gizmo is probably ten years old then.   It’s been through we four children and all the neighborhood children; lost two rubber baby buggy bumpers, along with any paint it may have had announcing its name.  See the smile on Dorothy’s face?  The gizmo was that loved and wonderful.

Any child with short enough legs could ride it sedately.  Once mastering sedate, the gizmo rider went to the top of the street and came down the hill, shrieking, legs outstretched.  Much larger, older children did this routinely. 

Back down the hill, on the several hundred square feet of blacktop in front of our garage, just riding was OK, but a thrill ride assist from an older child was to die for.  Well, occasionally be injured for.  A big kid could grab the tail end or the front of the gizmo and swing the rider around and around and around in a circle.  Then let go.  Generally the big kid fell down and the gizmo pilot rode it out, braking as much as possible with bare feet, hoping to crash land on the grassy bank or in the grape arbor, not against the garage or in the street. I believe the gizmo corpse that was scrapped another fifteen years later had lost its final rubber baby buggy bumper.

This engineering marvel and childhood fascinator has been described over and over to anyone we thought could replicate it from pipe and an old bicycle seat.  Sadly, the only clear image was in our childhood minds.  Jan emailed this picture to our nephew:  Show this to your dad, maybe with a picture he can make it. 

Or does it require a hill and a quarter acre of blacktop to qualify.  My god, it might need a bicycle helmet.  Never mind.