I'll never forget seeing Buddy Holly perform on stage when I was a teenager. The audience didn't want him to stop singing. He was the true king of R&R.
One day when I was 5 years old, my mother took me to a big brick building and brought me up a couple of flights of stairs to a bench on the landing and left me there. I cried and begged her not to leave me but she turned around and walked down the stairs leaving me crying my eyes out. (This, like all the things she did, without any warning what-so-ever. I really felt like she was trying to get rid of me. First with the Summer me & my brother spend at a foster home, then this. I found out years later from my father that she also had put me in the New York Foundling Hospital when I was just a baby. In fact that is where my dad met a hot blond nurse who he started dating and eventually married. He also told me that this woman was at my first son Tommy's Christening. I remember a middle aged blond woman who was there that I didn't recognize. That, he told me, was his wife.) The building turned out to be a school. A strange woman heard me crying and opened the door and brought me inside where there were a lot of kids my age. In a minute I stopped crying. Kindergarten turned out to be a lot of fun and I loved playing with the wooden blocks that were about the size of bricks. I would place them on the floor in the shape of a boat and sit in the “boat” pretending to be the captain. School wasn't so bad after all. Then, I went into the first grade and my teacher was a Mrs. Deutsch. She was a freckled faced short skinny red head with a nasty disposition. I was an active kid and she hated me. I probably had ADHD but nobody knew what that was back then. My mother was an alcoholic and probably drank like a fish even when she was carrying me. My older brother was also hyper active like I was so she was probably drinking when she carried him too. Anyway, one day Mrs. Deutsch separated me from the rest of the kids and had me stand in front of the class and told the other kids what a horrible person I was, that I was a failure and wouldn't amount to anything as she pointed a bony finger at me and said to the class “You don't want to be like HIM, do you?” She made me feel like a worthless POS. Remember, I was only 6 years old. My self esteem was shattered. I reasoned that if I'm totally worthless there's nothing to be gained by doing anything in school. From that day on I never did classwork, homework or participated in any school activities. Mrs. Deutsch probably made an entry in my record that I was incorrigible and refused to do anything which followed me through Grammar school because every subsequent teacher treated me different from the other kids as if I was a bad kid. The only thing I did was take tests because I enjoyed them and I usually got very high scores. At my 6th grade graduation when the class pictures were being taken, the teacher whispered something to the photographers and they kept rearranging the seating positions of the kids. I was seated way to the right so that I wouldn't appear in the class group shot. Of course I didn't realize this was the plan until the yearbook came out and I wasn't in the picture.
This was carved into the Lintel above the main entrance on Samuel Gompers High School in the South Bronx. It was a part of the reason I chose to attend this school. This phrase embodied the promise of a path out of a life of poverty which was all I ever knew up to this point. If you ever saw the movie “Blackboard Jungle” you would get the mistaken idea that this was what Gompers was like. You would be wrong. The teachers at Gompers were ex Auto Mechanics, Welders, Boiler repairmen, and any teenage kid who mouthed off to one of these guys ran the risk of an unscheduled flight across the classroom.
I had no idea which "trade" I should pursue, so I was "sold" into choosing oil burner repair because they were having a hard time filling the class with students for such a boring and dirty career. The Summer before school started at 17 years old I took a 7 week road trip to Canada with a friend of the family we referred to as "Mon Unk" which means My Uncle in French.
This old man was the father I never had. Being Dependant on his 1949 Dodge Coronet instilled in me an appreciation and love of cars which has endured for a lifetime.
Upon starting HS and enduring for a semester the uninteresting subject of working on oil burners and envying the guys in the Auto shop, I decided to switch my career path to Auto Mechanics. My first class was under the tutaledge of a Mr Buzzeo. He had a 6 cyl Chevy engine mounted on a stand right inside the classroom as well as other drive train components like an automatic transmission from a Packard and a few other items. I assumed the engine was just for show but after about a months he ran a flex pipe for the exhaust out the window and a water hose from a sink for cooling and started it up and taught us how to adjust the valves with the engine running. Oh the joy!!
This song was the absolute biggest hit in Quebec in 1955, you wont understand a word of it unless you speak French. To the best of my knowledge it's about a dude putting the moves on some chic.
When I was a teenager the last thing I could ever imagine doing was to listen to music from the 19th century. So for today's teenagers, I would like to introduce you to music from 1955 your grandparents era. I'd love to hear your honest opinion of it.
I forgot to mention that my mother in her early years was a singer and dancer who claimed to be in the Zigfield Follies, and she would sing to the members of the senior center, I don't think she did any dancing because her leg was broken when she was in her 20's due to falling down an unlit flight of stairs. Back then the shyster "Doctor" who treated her leg merely put a cast on it. it plagued her for her whole life. Years later she went to the hospital to have her leg repaired and in the x-ray they saw that the broken bone was still separated and fused at a weird angle. They had to re-break her leg and join the bones correctly.
I raised free range Chickens for years. They had a very secure pen and Hen house they would go in at night and I would lock them up so no predators could get at them. Have you ever raised Chickens Ali? What is there in your locale for them to graze on?
I was riding in a car with my dad going up Riverside Drive in Manhattan one night when I was about 7 years old and he started singing this song. When I got home, I told my mother that daddy was singing to me and she said "What? I never heard him sing, he never sang to me! I will never forget that night. That was 73 years ago. Both my parents are gone now, but the memory of that night is as vivid in my mind as if it happened yesterday.
Baron Trump is 14 years old, when I was his age I was working in a grocery store stacking shelves, sweeping the floor, and doing deliveries for 50 cents a day and a sandwich and a soda. My friends envied me for having such a great job. When I wasn't in school or at the grocery store I could go anywhere and do anything I felt like, as long as there was no risk of getting arrested. You might say I was a free range kid. I could go fishing at "Castle Lake" in Central Park, or me and my friend Danny could go explore abandoned buildings looking for hidden treasure or whatever we could find. If I got hungry I could go to the Automat and get 2 slices of bread for a nickle, I would take the bread and make myself a mustard sandwich. All the tables had condiments on a little circular tray including mustard. There was always glasses with a lemon wedge for people who wanted iced tea. I would take a glass, squeeze the lemon wedge and fill it with water and make some weak lemonade to wash down my mustard sandwich. To make a little money we would walk down to Bloomingdales, only 29 blocks one way, and open taxicab doors for ladies for tips. 4 out of 5 times all we got was a thank you. Sometimes not even that. I guess they thought we were employed by the store to open cab doors. For all that, I wouldn't trade my childhood for Barons At least I rarely had to wear a suit and a white shirt and a freakin bow tie.
This is one I am very familiar with for a number of reasons. For starters, like the artist Bela Babai I too am Hungarian. I grew up within the Yorkville section of Manhattan, a veritable hotbed of Hungarian culture. My mother spoke fluent Hungarian. Being born in Budapest, she emigrated to the US at age 13 or so. She didn't speak a word of English when she disembarked from a coal powered steamship at a dock on the lower West side of Manhattan. This was a couple of years before the outbreak of WW1. Looking back from today, I think she was lucky to have made that trip when she did, or she may not have made it without learning to swim thanks to a torpedo from a German U boat. 30 years, and 3 husbands later, yours truly slid down the ways of her birth canal. Of course my father was the best looking and most intelligent of the 3.
I hate to burst your bubble but the teacher was correct (-5+-3 you have -8). look at it this way, if you owe Billy 5 bucks and Bobby 3 bucks, you are 8 bucks in debt.
In the US there is also a North/South divide, an East/West divide, an Urban/City divide, a Black/White divide, and a Jew/Christian divide. But when it rains, we all gather under the same umbrella.
ooby_dooby Forum Posts (7,670)
That's a good question, probably not.
RE: Compare Covers
"And then he kissed me."You've all heard the original by the Crystals. This cover by the Flying Lizards" is, shall we say, quite different.