Terry Mosher
I was just listening to Aaron Neville talk about doo-wop music (it was called R&B back in the 1950s) and what he said hit me square on the head.
“It was the era. A time of great music. I called it the innocence music, you could sit down with your grandmother, your daughter, and nobody is offended,” Neville said.
That’s it!
Even though the Korean Conflict was going on in the early 1950s, that era was the age of innocence. We kids, and I was just becoming a teenager, had no fears, not like today when information, most of it bad, comes at you so fast that it spins your head around and around.
That’s part of the reason why I think my early childhood was idyllic – because it was. I miss that era terribly. No matter the season, and in that part of the world (New York) we had distinct seasons, fall, winter, spring and summer, and we kids were free, free as birds. We came and went without our parents being distraught. We had no organized activities with adults at the controls. We made up our games as we went along and settled our disputes between us without adults around or without them finding out that we just punched each other out.
I moved west in 1954 when my father was transferred to the Mobil refinery at Cherry Pt. in Ferndale and my idyllic world came crashing down. But I did revive it for short periods of time when each summer I made my way back to New York by car, bus, plane and one year when I hitchhiked (prompting my brother David to try it one year despite my efforts to stop him).
Those trips back east (I would stick back there for nearly two years after graduating high school and attend college at Alfred) were always looked forward to by me. I would count the days until I could leave. I worked summers bucking bales of hay, trimming apple trees and working in the potato fields to make enough money to beat it out of town and head east.
By the way, those trips, especially by Greyhound Bus, afforded me the opportunity to find out things about my fellow human beings. I discovered that bus riders became very possessive of their seats and would not leave them for rest stops unless they marked them with their personal belongings, just to let you know they belonged to them.
And people were wary of talking to you, lest you found out they were serial killers. As I suspected more than a few were by the way they looked. So I kept my distance and wore sunglasses so they couldn’t see me looking at them.
I always worried the bus driver couldn’t count, that he would miss a person or two still in the dirty rest rooms at the dirty gas station. On the other hand, sometimes I wished he couldn’t count and would leave a few of the serial killers behind, which also would allow the rest of us to fight over the now empty seats that, for sure, were the best on the bus.
It was monotony by the way to look out the window and watch hundreds of miles of tall corn stalks whiz past in Nebraska and Iowa. I quickly understood why Nebraska is called the Cornhuskers, although Iowa seemed to be buried in more corn.
When I grew tired of Greyhound, I discovered I could con friends to take me to Vancouver and fly Canadian into Toronto and then over Lake Ontario by Mohawk Airlines to Buffalo where, egads, I would have to catch another bus full of serial killers – a Blue Bird Bus ‑ to Olean, New York and then Portville where my roots are still buried deep.
Actually, I think most of my fellow Blue Bird Bus riders were Mafia. Olean was known back in the day for being infiltrated by the Mafia and more than once my beer sipping in an Olean beer garden would be interrupted by a numbers runner arriving to collect the latest numbers and money owed. I always feared there would be a shootout. Not that I feared being shot, but feared a stray bullet would crash into my bottle of Iroquois and deprive me of right to get high in peace.
Those Mohawk prop planes, by the way, were unsafe for man and beast. We wobbled over LakeOntario and I anxiously worried that I would become bait for any huge monster hiding in the lake.
Bu the worse wasn’t my seat in Mohawk. It was a seat in an Air Canada jet that one year couldn’t land in Toronto because it was all fogged in. We circled Toronto like a hungry hawk for more minutes than I like to remember before the pilot came on the intercom and told us the obvious – we would not be landing in Toronto.
The part that worried me was when he said, “We have enough fuel to make it to Montreal.”
Why wouldn’t he?
The pilot had more than once tried to make a safe landing in Toronto. I unfortunately had a window seat which did me no good in two ways. One, I could not see out the window because of the thick fog. Two, I got to watch as we went lower and lower and the fog got thicker and thicker. I’m thinking what high tower or tall building we are going to mistakenly crash into.
Three or four times we went down, and three or four times we came up. If this was water, we would all have drowned.
Thankfully we made it to Montreal and somehow the skies cleared over Toronto and I eventually got a chance to take a flimsy Mohawk on a rocky flight to Buffalo over the forbidding LakeOntario.
No wonder I sat in the bar at the BuffaloAirport waiting to be served an Iroquois. There were three of us in the bar – the bartender and the friend he talked to for over 15 minutes while the other customer – me – grinded my teeth at the other end of the bar waiting for the jerkhead to figure out I was there.
When he finally did walk over he asked in a Mafia tone, “What do you want?” I reached for my invisible pistol in an instinctive reflex before softly saying in a shaky voice, “I’ll have an Iroquois.”
Whew!
Despite some misadventures to get there, I always was glad to get to Portville, my safe haven and my idyllic past. The sigh I let out when I reached Portville could be heard for miles.
If they ever have a contest for whose childhood was the best, I’m entering. I hope the winner gets an Iroquois, which, by the way, isn’t made anymore, which is the shame of all of this. One year I lugged a whole case of Iroquois back to Ferndale. Don’t ask me how I did it, but me and my buddies had a good night playing penny-ante poker. Just don’t ask me about it. My memories of that night are a little beer soaked.
My teen summer years are full of great Portville memories. There was Roxy Tavern pizza, the best in the world (I have tried to duplicate it for 50 years and have failed miserably), Iroquois beer, and an old girlfriend who dumped me when she discovered there were more than one male out there.
There were the nights me and a few buddies went looking for fights, and found them. The nights we went looking for girls, and didn’t find them. The nights we played Euchre at the OldRoseInn while sipping away at – what else? – an Iroquois while listening to the nearby juke box blare out doo-wop.
Ah, the fun times you can have when you are young, safe, secure, and full of yourself. The end times for my idyllic life came after four of us left for California one cold January day in 1960. I had one last blast of it in the months me and Dick lived in Hermosa Beach. Then he was gone, and a week later I was gone, back to Ferndale and then to Western Washington and the start of a young adult life that has led me here.
Now as friends go down one after the other – the latest being Elton Goodwin – the curtain is quickly coming down on my life. It has been a blast for the most part, but it’s tough being old and hard work to stay alive at this point.
But I will stumble on.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.