You know in looking back over all these years I find it incredible and downright astounding what a geek I was. I was more concerned with baseball, airplanes and rockets being launched into outer space. How simple things were at that time.

Most of the roads around our house were dirt roads. There was two churches and a shopping mall. Northgate Plaza.

It had a drugstore, Star Market, shoe store, JCPenneys, and a small hobby store called Winken Blinken & Nod. I loved this store. All the planes, rockets and toys were there, although I could never afford them. Please remember this was when gas was $.38, cigarettes $.24, and a good steak cost one dollar! A good car cost $800 and about the only thing I could do was buy comic books.

I loved the Fantastic Four, Superman, GI Joe, and the classic comic books of all time; The War of the Worlds, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and yes anything about space travel. There were no fast food places. No McDonalds, Wendys or Burger King.

If you were sick, the doctor would come to your house and with all my brothers and sisters he came to our house lots of times. Seems all my parents did was pay for doctor visits! No wonder my father was poor. Just try to get a doctor to make a housecall now…

My school was at the end of my street. It was called Britton Road School: grades kindergarten through sixth grade. I did not like school and would much rather play baseball or anything.

I can remember starting to play the drums. Oh did my parents hate that! Then I went to the trombone and they hated that worse. So I stopped all together. I can remember my father saying the quiet and the serenity and the peace was the best!

My best friend’s name was Scott. I knew everything he did. We did everything together from our Davy Crockett outfits, Boy Scouts, church and building models. Scott would always do automobiles and I would make rockets.

We had other friends in our lives too, Donald, John and Jack. We had the greatest time playing baseball and basketball on Jack’s driveway. There was a hoop set up on his father’s garage. Life was good.

Eastman Kodak had a softball program for kids our age. It was called K.P.A.A. : Kodak Park athletic Association. We would take our bikes from home and ride through the backwoods to Ridge Road where our games would be played. It was about 8 miles! I can remember at the time all the new houses that were being built and thinking ‘where were all these people coming from?’

Scott would never play baseball with us. He was more interested in the girls then us. “yeccccccccch!”

Too bad, winning or losing is what I learned from this game. It taught me what I needed to know later in my life. I can still hear my father’s voice , “Sometimes you win , sometimes you lose, it’s how you play the game .” How did he come up with these great sayings?

Every now and then my father would come up with brain shattering visions with a fact of life tossed in. He was very good at doing that.

There was one week I will never forget.

November 22 at 12:30 PM. This was the day they shot the president of the United States Jack F. Kennedy.

I remember wondering how this could’ve happened in this country. How could it happen anywhere? Something I will never forget on that day was when my mother was watching the black-and-white television set and Walter Cronkite came on and said he had died. She cried and called other people and they cried.

I can remember walking outside and not hearing one bird chirping. There was nothing but complete silence. We all sat around the TV hoping it was a joke, but when they caught the individual who shot the president, I could hear my mother say “Just shoot him.”

Two days later, I can remember the news. They were moving him to another jail and he was shot by another person. I can also remember thinking to myself, ‘What was going on in this country? What had we turned into? Had we all gone crazy?’

I can remember a lot of my friends saying under their breath that my age of innocence had just ended and I did not know it.

I listened to a lot of A.m. radio music. The Sounds of Silence, Look Through Any Window, Homeward Bound, and Scarborough Fair. The Beatles were just coming into their own with She Loves You, Love Me Do and Eight Days a Week.

The winters were wicked in Rochester.

Always went to school and on some days maybe just maybe, we would be let go early. It used to snow so much, the storms would bury my father’s car. My brothers and I would shovel all the people’s homes on the street we would get anywhere from $.25 to $.75! Most of this money we gave to our father and mother for food although we did keep some for ourselves very little for comic books, bubblegum, and candy. Like I said most of it went to food.

My mother was a great cook she could whip up anything and yes we could eat it all. I used to really enjoy the simple things in life peanut butter and jelly, cheese and bologna and without a doubt tuna fish. I still love tuna fish today.

I graduated from Britton Road school and moved on to our middle school this school was in the middle of nowhere and they were still building houses around it new neighborhoods what I didn’t understand was ware they were putting my new high school at the end of the earth.