Buffalo Gal

by Laura Pedersen

  Many of us also walked around with bowling ball bags. Not as a fashion statement, but to hold our Yellow Dot—a polyester ball made by Columbia, known for its good roll and hit. That my parents were not league bowlers placed them squarely in the minority for the Buffalo area. In the seventies there were almost as many bowling alleys as bingo parlors. And there were a lot of places to play bingo, since games were usually run in church basements and a Roman Catholic church could be found in every neighborhood.

  To Buffalo teenagers back then, safe sex meant having your boyfriend over on league bowling night, when it was a sure thing your parents would be out late. We were such a bowling-centric culture that parents explained thunderstorms to frightened children as God bowling in his big alley up in the sky.

  Uncle Jim started working as a pinspotter at Bowlaway on Niagara Street in 1952, when he was fifteen. Before machines, the pins had to be reset by hand after every throw. The pay was twelve cents per game, but Uncle Jim soon received an offer of eighteen cents per game over at the Knights of Columbus on Delaware Avenue. And at the Knights, the guys would often tip the pinspotters by tossing quarters down the lanes.

  What’s the connection between bowling and blue-collar, immigrant-filled industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Saint Louis, and Buffalo? “The modern game of bowling originated in the factory, was popularized by the factory, and projected the ethos and acoustic ambience of the factory,” according to Gideon Bosker in Bowled Over: A Roll Down Memory Lane. “From the dull roar, thunderous claps, and mechanical clang-jangle of automated pinsetters to the arrangement of the alleys, with their clean geometry and mechanics reminiscent of a conveyor-belt line, bowling was a workingman’s game that put a premium on precision, piecework, and team play. Here was a recreational setting where the sound of machines prevailed over the sound of human voices, and where the body’s movements were governed

  by a single imperative—to hook a rolling sphere made of hard rubber into the 1–3 pin pocket and knock ten pins to the floor.”

  The televised bowling competition Strikes, Spares, and Misses seemed to play in a continuous loop. Every time you passed a TV set (“the idiot box,” according to striving parents and local intellectuals), the hushed and tension-filled voice of an announcer best suited to narrating documentaries on glaciers was sizing up the complexity of the next throw. Every kid knew bedposts (seven and ten pins remain standing on the ends, also called goal posts), grandma’s teeth (a random gap-filled group of pins left standing), a dead apple (a ball with no power when it reaches the pins), and the Moses ball (parts the pins like the Red Sea and turns a spare into a strike). Though most of us couldn’t read by the time we started school, we’d learned how to score bowling by hand, using a black-and-white chart and a pencil stub with no eraser, and were adept at the complicated math involving two strikes followed by a spare. Electronic scoring wouldn’t arrive until after we’d finished high school.

  The bowling alley also served as a primary source for the industrial-sized rolls of toilet paper that we used to decorate houses. These could be easily removed from the premises in bowling bags without arousing suspicion. Raising hell on a Saturday night meant being tossed out of the bowling alley for extreme bowling (purposefully hurling a ball into the next lane to mess up hypersensitive league bowlers and watch them

  go berserk), toilet-papering your teacher’s home on a double-dog dare, and then locating a pig to grease and let run through the school on

  prank day.

  The lanes also served as a good place to find guinea pigs. It was widely rumored that if you ate Pop Rocks with soda, the combination would blow up your stomach and you’d die, so older kids regularly offered the young and gullible free supplies if they were willing to experiment.

  ***

  My looks were pretty well set by age three—skin that started to crisp the second the sun came up (even if only in conversation), green eyes in a permanent squint, matching green freckles (add red sunburn to brown freckles and somehow you get lime green), a nose way too big for my face, and an unruly tangle of strawberry blond hair that was the envy of nesting animals during the winter months. My nose was clown red year-round, and there were undoubtedly neighbors who speculated that I was a child alcoholic.

  The only event I can recall from my early years was a hospital visit at age three to have my tonsils and adenoids removed. In the few decades between Dad and Mom’s childhood in the thirties and forties and mine in the late sixties and seventies, many deadly diseases had been reined in through vaccines, sanitation improvements, and antibiotics. These included tuberculosis, typhoid, smallpox, diphtheria, German measles, mumps, pneumonia, infantile paralysis, scarlet fever (to a large degree), and the dreaded polio. Mine was the first generation without the all-too-common limp or shoe lift found on so many of our parents and teachers who’d contracted polio in the forties. Only a decade before our arrival, the American microbiologist Jonas Edward Salk had developed the first effective vaccine, and we are eternally grateful to him for getting us back into the public swimming pools.

  Like many children who don’t thrive in dampness, I was constantly sick with colds, bronchitis, sinusitis, tonsillitis, strep throat, walking pneumonia, and chronic earaches. Alas, no vaccinations had as yet been invented to ward off these annoying scourges. By age five I’d had enough chest X-rays to qualify for a photo finish with Madame Curie in the radiation-poisoning marathon. Penicillin was such a large part of my diet that I eventually became immune to it, along with

  several other antibiotics. One theory bandied about regarding my apparent feeblemindedness was the possibility that partial deafness had occurred as a result of numerous ear infections, and so my hearing was constantly being tested. I carried codeine cough syrup around like a Bowery bum with a flask of Thunderbird stuffed in a hip pocket and was self-medicating by age six. (Though it turns out this is rather common among Irish and Scandinavians, who are for the most part too cheap, stubborn, cynical, or just plain dim-witted to visit doctors.)

  In every picture taken with Santa Claus at the local Hengerer’s department store, I am a pasty white waif with half-closed eyes, leaning into Santa more for support than to secretly share my Christmas list, which had an iron lung near the top, right below the oxygen tent.

  This is not to say that I was considered a sickly child, like those who missed weeks of school due to asthma, heart problems, or other more serious ailments. As people say they are “living with cancer” or “living with AIDS,” we Buffalo kids simply “lived with upper respiratory distress.” Science tells us that heat kills germs and bacteria, and between the long, harsh winters and the energy crisis, we were in short supply of heat—natural or manufactured. The germs easily located these gaps. At any given time, over half the class was hacking, sniffing, sneezing, and wheezing. If the government ever needs a group of individuals highly resistant to infectious disease for a mission into some plague-infested area, my suggestion would be the Buffalo public school teachers. And based on the amount of time they spent on strike and without a contract when I was growing up, it’s safe to say they’d jump at the extra money.

  Upon arriving at a sleepover, I simply handed all my medications to the mother in charge and she lined them up on the counter with the other twenty or so bottles. For those who forgot their Robitussin, St. Joseph’s children’s aspirin, and Mentholatum (our locally manufactured version of Vick’s VapoRub), there were vats on hand.

  Mothers had to be philosophical about contagion or we’d all have been confined to bed for the duration of our childhoods. If you were able to walk the length of the house you were allowed to go out. They just figured that while playing or sleeping with all the other diseased kids, you’d either build up your immune system or give whatever it was you had to someone else.

  By the time we were in school, most of us no longer needed the measuring spoons and cups that came with our medications. Moms would just toss the bottle into the backseat of the car, and the k
ids would take a swig or two, hitting somewhere within range of the recommended dosage. We were champion pill swallowers by age eight. Not only could most of us knock back big chunks of vitamin C and what looked to be doses of antibiotics for horses, but we did so without having anything to wash them down.

  Mothers of large families acted as pharmacists to save on visits to the doctor and costly prescriptions. If a child recovered before the medication ran out or there was an unused refill, then it was stowed in a cabinet along with fifty or sixty bottles of accumulated liquids and pills. The next time someone took sick, Mom searched through her stash and tried to match up the symptoms with whatever the doctor had previously prescribed for a similar ailment, whether it had belonged to that child or another member of the family. Pets were often included in this system.

  Sometimes there would be a week in May, right at the tail end of cold and flu season and just before allergies hit, that I’d emerge for a breath of fresh air while enjoying a brief moment of perfect health. I’d sit underneath the weeping willow tree out front, its long skirt hanging down to the ground. This canopy of leaves formed an enchanting secret playhouse through which I could see out while the inside was shady and protected. I passed lilac and rosebushes on the side of the house and the yellow forsythia blooming directly below my window, all of which would attempt to collapse my lungs and choke me starting in another few days when thick clouds of pollen darkened the summer skies. And if they didn’t fully succeed, winter and bronchitis would be back with a vengeance soon enough.

  Eight

  Buffalo Runs Riot

  Though I don’t remember it, support for the Vietnam War began wearing extremely thin during my toddler years. The war was complicated, to say the least. However two things were certain: (1) in Vietnam there were two huge armies, the North equipped by the Soviet Union and the South by the Americans; and (2) the United States had lost the Korean War in 1953, thereby demonstrating that we couldn’t win a land war in Asia.

  In 1966, four California housewives attempted to block a shipment of napalm bombs. Napalm was a highly combustible and controversial fuel produced primarily by Dow Chemical Company and had a tendency to stick to anything it hit (including civilians) and burn uncontrollably.

  In 1967, a few days before my second birthday, folksinger Woody Guthrie died. Among the many popular tunes he’d penned was “This Land Is Your Land,” a song that could go a long way as our national anthem, being that it’s in a sensible key and contains fewer poly-

  syllabic words.

  Two weeks after my second birthday, 50,000 antiwar demonstrators gathered to march on the Pentagon. There were now almost 500,000 United States troops in South Vietnam. The nation had become its most divided since the Civil War. From inside the White House, President Lyndon B. Johnson could hear the chant: “Hey! Hey! L-B-J! How many kids did you kill today?”

  While Johnson was making his momentous decision not to run for reelection in 1968, I was enrolled in a local preschool. Back then, preschool was not the norm for children the way it is now. Such souped-up socialization was primarily for those with means, or it was intended to keep an only child from becoming an inappropriately behaved lifelong loner (read: homicidal maniac). For me, it was a halcyon period of playing with trucks, singing songs, and painting, during which time it was a commonly held belief that I was mildly autistic. I recall enjoying the school rabbit and playing off by myself with a load in my pants.

  The Summer of Love was followed by The Year of Hate. Dr.

  Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death by a sniper on April 4, 1968, while standing on the second-story balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. King was there to support a strike by the city’s sanitation workers. The night before he died, Dr. King gave a speech at the Memphis Temple Church in which he said, “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” Okay, what did he know and when did he know it?

  Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated just eight weeks later, on June 5, 1968. But I have no real-time recollection of either of these tragedies. I was vaguely aware of talk about busing children from the inner city to the suburbs and vice versa in order to desegregate the schools. And that popular songs included “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” by a young folksinger from Minnesota named Bob Dylan.

  The evening news showed demonstrations and occasionally riots in downtown Buffalo. With its racial, ethnic, and income diversity, the city was a flash point during a time heavily focused on civil rights, desegregation, women’s liberation, war protests, and growing mistrust of the government. Most black leaders were against the Vietnam War because of the high incidence of casualties among blacks—they made up only 11 percent of the United States population but comprised 16 percent of the army’s casualties in 1967, and 15 percent for the entire war. Others were against the draft because the system favored the wealthy and well connected through student deferments and coveted positions in the National Guard (which was not deployed overseas back then) that weren’t easily accessible to the lower classes.

  Bomb threats were constantly being phoned in to universities and government buildings. The courts where my dad worked happened to be a favorite target, and sometimes he’d spend hours standing outside in the cold or arrive home early if the call came late in the afternoon.

  Further complicating matters was growing unemployment. As with other Rust Belt cities, there had been a great migration of blacks to Buffalo in the forties and fifties. They had come to take industrial jobs and escape the rural poverty of the South. Only, many of these jobs were now heading overseas. Residents became increasingly unhappy with poor housing, insufficient employment opportunities, and the fact that most of the work available to them offered no future. Between June 26 and July 1, 1967, rioting on the east side of Buffalo virtually shut down the city. On the night of June 28, forty people were injured, fourteen with gunshot wounds.

  During these turbulent times, my aunt Sue was a teacher at one of the most troubled and overcrowded public high schools in Buffalo. A faculty meeting was called to assign teachers a riot-duty position—the place they’d head in an uprising, so as to maintain control of the agitated student body. My tall, willowy, and anemic aunt was assigned the front doors of a high school housing over two thousand inner-city students. She was to lock the doors, use her body as a barricade to prevent the stampeding mob from exiting, and insist that they calmly and quietly return to their classrooms.

  Fortunately, Aunt Sue was a bit more creative when chaos did indeed erupt in the weeks following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She went directly to her riot station, flung the doors wide open, told the students to have a lovely day as they tore out of the building, and offered change from her own pocketbook in case anyone needed to make a phone call or was short on bus fare.

  At Berkeley in California and Columbia in New York City, college students were staging uprisings and administrators were scrambling to meet their demands by organizing black studies programs and allowing teach-ins (a day set aside for discussion of the Vietnam War). Tensions escalated on May 4, 1970, after four students at Kent State University

  in Ohio were killed when National Guardsmen opened fire into a crowd protesting the United States’ bombing of Cambodia. This set off demonstrations at many other schools across the country that up until then had been relatively peaceful.

  The historical event I recall most clearly from those years is the moon landing in July of 1969, when I was almost four. This is because I rose at dawn and switched on the TV, anticipating a fun-filled morning of cartoons. However, in place of my beloved Flintstones, this damned slow-bouncing man in a white space suit was on every channel—the same footage played over and over and over. It wasn’t exactly rife with the special effects we’d later see in movies like Star Wars, just a big, white tin can, some guys in asbestos-removal outfits, and an American flag be
ing stuck into the ground. A scratchy soundtrack played Neil Armstrong nattering away about a small step for man and a giant leap for mankind, and a big hello to his neighbors back down on Earth.

  Meantime, I just wanted him to float off the screen for good so we could get going with Fred and Barney. They didn’t stop the coverage, and my day was essentially ruined. Thank you, NASA. Had they told me I was watching half a billion dollars being squandered while millions of Americans were still living in poverty, I might have been slightly more interested. At the time, proponents of the space program insisted that the scientific value of a moon landing would add ten years to a man’s life. The best I can tell, all that’s happened so far is that a lot of dentists raked it in after people ended up with cavities from drinking Tang. And Ralph Cramden blustering that he was going to send Alice to the moon was no longer just an idle threat.

  It was the same summer as the famous Woodstock concert in Western New York. But that event didn’t interrupt my TV viewing and no one we knew attended, so I don’t remember it. Plus, I was still operating under the “not quite right” designation, and adults were ready to call it a day if they could just get me to learn my name, address, and phone number, in case I should wander off.

  In the fall of 1969, Yale University admitted its first female undergraduates. Back in my hometown, O. J. Simpson started playing his first of ten seasons for the Buffalo Bills. During that decade, he would set numerous records, including most career rushing yards (10,183) and highest career rushing average (4.8 yards per carry). In 1973, O. J. became the first pro runner to gain 2,000 yards in one season, finishing the year with 2,003 in just fourteen games. The excitement was enough to cause my church to move the Sunday morning service from 11:00 am to 10:30 am so that no devout fan should risk being late for a game, heaven forbid.