Eden, 1958-1969

Eleven years in 24 minutes. Not that anybody asked...

I was born on 25 September 1951 at Mercy Hospital in South Buffalo, New York, the third son and child of Paige Heath and Edward Italo Lorenzi. At the time, we lived at 129 Leonard Street in Lackawanna, not far from dad’s work at Bethlehem Street and just three blocks south of the intersection of Ridge and Abbot Roads. McKinley Elementary School was at the foot of the street; there was a family grocery store just around the corner on Abbot. By early 1953 there were five Lorenzi children and we obviously needed more room.

To mark the start of the school year, in the first week of September 1958, the then Buffalo Evening News featured a large, front-page picture captioned, “Five march off to school but three must stay behind.” The “five” were the eldest Lorenzi children -- Al, Tom, Peter, Doug and Fran -- marching off to McKinley school. The “three” were on the front steps of 129 Leonard Street; Paige held newborn Mary Ann and Joe and Ted clung to mom’s legs, seemingly tearful at our departure for school. This burgeoning family captured the essence of the post-war baby boom, with dad managing at the steel mill and a full-time mom at home. Perhaps more telling and apocryphal, two months later the ten Lorenzi’s marched out of decaying, corrupt Lackawanna for the green fields of Eden, New York. Mom and dad had found a realtor, Helen Goodyear, who helped them to find our new country home, an old estate owned by a widow, Mrs. Koenig.

Ten Lorenzi’s (Paige and Ed; Allen b. 1948, Tom 1950, Peter 1951, Doug and Fran 1953, Ted 1954, Joe 1956, and Mary Ann 1957) moved to Eden in November 1958, two months after my seventh birthday, fifteen months after the birth of Mary Ann. I entered second grade at the relatively new Immaculate Conception School (ICS), under the tutelage of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart and principal Sr. Mary Martina. Norman George was the pastor, with a new church. Eden would be my home until I left for college in August 1969. In Eden, I would experience the Beatles, color television, private telephone lines, WKBW radio, the assassinations of JFK (1963), MLK (April 1968), and RFK (June 1968) and adolescence. After leaving for college, I would visit my family and spend most of my summers in Eden until my parents moved to Texas in early 1978. Eden formed from age seven to seventeen.

Immaculate Conception was my church for the duration of our time in Eden and my school for five years. The church opened about 1958 and stands today, despite a dwindling number of families, children and priests. The school closed about 2001. At Immaculate Conception I received First Communion in 1959 and was confirmed about 1965. We saw a number of priests assigned to the parish over the years. Leo Benker succeeded Norman George shortly after we arrived. The associate pastor, Fr. Matthew, stayed a short time, succeeded by Fr. Francis Perelli. Dena and I met him again in July 1990 when we went to see him before we married. Perelli presided in Eden for perhaps forty years and the street in front of the church is named for him. The church was large and austere, with unpainted cinder block the primary architectural feature. There was a large, circular stained glass window above the altar. Before the church’s changes in the early 1960’s, the priest said Mass with his back to the congregation. We usually had four altar boys and there were ‘high’ and ‘low’ Masses, with all of the prayers and responses in Latin. Many Monday nights we helped dad count the weekly collection, upstairs in the rectory, often with Mr. Lasota. Usually I counted the hundreds of coins and rolled them in paper tubes.

After I became an altar boy around 1959, dad often dropped us off at the convent on school mornings on his way to work. We’d serve Mass at 7:15 or 7:30 for the nuns, often with Helen Sixt accompanying us on her suitcase organ, and after Mass we’d (usually it was Doug and me) slip over to the school for a breakfast of fried bread and cafeteria milk. School came relatively easy to me yet I enjoyed a mischievous streak, primarily with classmate Roland Hughey. We once formed the Sneaky Little Devils club, dedicated to performing one devious act every day. The school and church were intimately linked, with attendance at Mass, confession, Stations of the Cross, Christmas plays, May Day processions, and funerals. The pastor would usually hand out report cards. We had an annual Easter egg hunt on the grounds and a summer lawn fete, with games of chance and Chiavetta barbeque chicken. We wore navy pants, sky blue shits and navy clip-on ties with the ICS emblem. Girls wore pale blue jumpers and beanies. By third grade some of us would ride our 22” bicycles to school, speeding down the hill, beating the bus, and leaving us anxious to get out of school at the end of the day for the ride home, even though we had to walk the bikes up the big hill. Sr. Martina claims she once challenged Doug to ride his pony, Sunset, to school, and she said he did.

We had many of the characteristics of a post-war Catholic family. Dad spent thirty years (1947-1977) at Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna, the now bankrupt industrial giant that was part of one of the greatest financial busts and booms in American industrial history. Dad moved up the ranks, from an entry-level trainee or ‘looper’ to superintendent of steelmaking. He worked long hours, leaving just after 7:00 each day except Sunday and arriving home in time for our 6:00 family dinner. Only on Saturday did he come home around noon. I remember him calling work about 10:00 most nights, checking the overnight shift, talking about ‘heats,’ ‘tapping furnaces,’ and ‘tonnage’. I remember him once lamenting at how so much of his day was consumed by grievance and safety meetings. In my teens I went to work with him a few Saturday mornings and experienced the heat, power and majesty of steelmaking up close. He enjoyed his family, the success and development of his children, golf and Penn State football.

Mom was a classic, perfect, All-American mother. Better educated than most women of her generation, she studied Home Economics at Penn State and completed her work to be a registered dietician with an internship in New York. She used her education and raised ten of us with skill, patience, love and even more patience. She managed so many issues she merited a senior management position in a large corporation, but she valued each of us so much that she put aside any traditional career thoughts to make sure we had a great upbringing. She worked tirelessly, made many sacrifices in the name of her children, and it worked. She met my dad at Penn State in 1945 and married in 1947.

In the 1958 move to the country, we left behind a four-bedroom, less than 1800 square foot home in Lackawanna; most of the boys shared one large bedroom. That home, 129 Leonard Street, was on a quiet, tree-lined, suburban street, filled with small homes built after the war. We could walk the quarter-mile length of Leonard to cross South Shore Boulevard for McKinley, without ever having to cross another street. In 1957 and 1958, once a week after school we’d walk a mile along Ridge Road, past the Holy Cross cemetery, to Our Lady of Victory, our parish church, for religious education classes.

In contrast, 3158 East Church Street property included a 4000-square foot farmhouse with twenty acres of adventure for a seven-year old, with fall pinecones and spring daffodils in the side yard, a barn out back for indoor games, broad lawns and fields for ball games, and opportunities to explore the mysterious woods at the northern bottom of the property. After the confines of Leonard Street, we felt like pioneering explorers in the new world.

Eden in 2006 remains a town of fewer than 8000 people. In 1958, there were 7800 people, but fewer households and larger families. This was the middle of the baby boom and the high point for Catholic elementary school attendance. Perhaps one in eight children were in parochial schools; priests and nuns were plentiful and inexpensive. With ten children, the Lorenzi’s were not an unusually large family for that era and place. It also was a literally a one-traffic-light town, with a bar (Demerly’s), a bank (Marine Midland), a grocery store (Millers) and a generic beauty shop at the traffic light intersection. By the early 1960s, the Marine Midland moved east across Main Street and built a new bank where the beauty shop once stood. The old bank became an insurance agency (Randall’s). Miller’s store burned down years later and was never replaced. It is now the site of a small park. The Bell’s IGA grocery store moved from its location in town to a new site and building on the main highway – Route 62, North Main Street -- to Hamburg. We frequented Smith and Koch hardware in town and made at least three trips a week to Feasley’s dairy, a combined dairy and store on site, on West Church Street. I recall the heavy metal cases for carrying the six half gallons of milk, and the sugary but pleasurable orange and tropical fruit drinks in the same containers. We’d sign for what we purchased. Mom would sometimes send in a child to pick up stuff; usually the store personnel recognized the Lorenzi kids and recorded our purchases before we were old enough to write things down or do the math. In later years, we’d make late night runs to the milk vending machine on South Main Street for twenty-five cent quarts of milk. There were no late-night services in Eden.

Our home at 3158 East Church Street was a rambling, old farmhouse, exactly one point one miles east of the traffic light, near Jennings Road. The Mathwigs lived across the street. The Harris’, later the Maltby’s lived just to the east. The Flints lived to the west of us, with the Miller’s, Cowper’s and Clark’s further down the street towards town. Donald Miller and Bill Cowper were often with the Lorenzi boys for sports and exploring. Beulah Miller sometimes helped mom maintain our big house. For several years we would ride our bikes the quarter mile to a mailbox on Jennings to pick up the evening newspaper; that was the closest we had to newspaper “home delivery”. We had only “party line” telephone service for a short time, even when we had a private line. Our parents tried to impose a three-minute limit on those teenage phone calls. Dad would often lament on how he could not get through from work; the line was busy. This was an old house in need of repair and constant upkeep. The lack of water pressure upstairs was painfully noticeable. The low pressure, the occasional lack of cistern water, and time pressure meant that nights many of us shared the same bath water. Sometimes there were three of us at a time in the tub. I remember one major project early in our time in Eden where we removed pipes to clean them; they were hopelessly clogged with sediment and years of accumulated crud.

This was a farmhouse, expanded from its original foundation. Some pictures we received from a town historian suggested the house might have been built in the mid 1800’s; the town of Eden was founded in 1812. The living room was forty-eight feet long, with two fireplaces. The working fireplace at the west end of the room served as the primary family gathering spot for cold winter nights around the television. Dad had a large desk for his home study at this end of the house. We had five bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs and the tiny master bedroom, a half bath, and a nursery/closet on the main floor. The kitchen needed and received immediate work to handle hearty appetites. We had a large ‘mudroom’ in the back, made even larger as we ripped up an old bathroom and a warren of smaller rooms and the original kitchen over the course of the next several years. The basement was primitive, partially hand dug, cold, and damp. The creaky, ancient water pump always seemed on the verge of collapse. The furnace struggled to drive hot water through the pipes and radiators. In later years, one Al or Doug drilled a hole in the basement floor for a drain to create a makeshift shower in the basement. I recall shivering trips to the cellar to shower; upstairs, there were no showerheads or shower curtains. Walking through the kitchen in a bath towel was an embarrassing, not unusual sight.

The farm was twenty acres of grapes, fields, woods and lawn. Some of the fields dad had us convert by hard raking into lawns. We grew and sold Concord grapes for jelly, not wine. We sold the grapes each year to the local Kraft plant. Before we were old enough to manage the grapes as kids, dad hired the Mr. and Mrs. Brusehaber to prune and prepare the vines. Within years, all this work transferred to the kids and taking care of the grapes became a part of our routine, often resented and always there. Spring pruning – sometimes in knee-deep snow -- and fall picking were the largest chores. For pruning, once I was old enough to be trained to leave four new vines with eight buds and two short sprouts, I’d prune while a trailing younger brother had the lesser responsibility to “pull” the trimmed vines. Some years we’d plant new vines, using a small, flat-bladed hoe to dig a small trench under the wire. For picking grapes in late September or early October, we’d draw upon Pop and Vivian Heath (Paige’s parents), Uncle Chuck and Aunt Ann, mom’s sister Jo-an and Rollie Clark and their two kids, and other members of the extended family. Some nights we’d collect boxes of picked grapes in the dark. Pounding posts, tightening wire, burning brush, fertilizing vines, spraying pesticide, and tying vines each spring were part of the never-ending cycle. We enjoyed burning piles of ‘brush’, the vines trimmed by the pruning. We worried about early cold snaps and hail. We hoped for high sugar content, based usually on a late frost and later picking. I loathed the relentless chores driven by the vineyards, the discipline required to keep up with the plants. Yet dad used the work to teach us responsibility, the need for and value of hard work, and a link from work to money in our college savings accounts.

The farm property contained a massive barn, with lofts, animal stalls and storage rooms; later we’d pour concrete in the main area for an indoor basketball court that achieved great popularity despite its small size. We spent many an hours dribbling and shooting. In summers and in later years the barn hosted parties for teenage Lorenzi’s. There was a shed alongside the barn, a chicken coop, and a four-car garage. The garage housed an old Ford tractor and one of the two cars we had at any point in time. For the first few years we were a one-car family and dad would alternate weeks driving to Bethlehem Steel with George Brenner, a Bethlehem colleague. We spent brutally cold winter evenings in the garage, cracking black walnuts to fill tiny glass gift jars my parents would present as Christmas gifts. I had sore fingers from the repeated missed hits with heavy hammer needed to crack tough shells while also trying to watch grainy black and white television shows on the ancient television we kept there to distract us.

This was a farm in many ways, but more of a hobby or a work camp for kids than a for-profit operation. At various times we had horses, cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, and goats on the farm. For our first Christmas in 1958, we welcomed Boots, a basset-beagle puppy who grew to be a family icon over the next twelve years. She was never very affectionate, spent little time in the house, and was not anyone’s idea of the happy, peppy family dog, but she was always there. We had an old mare, Queenie, and a sturdy Shetland pony, Sunset, as our own horses and we boarded other horses at various times. Cleaning stalls was an awful job; waking up early in the winter to break ice from the horses’ buckets was just as dreary. And the snow! There was so much to shovel and plow. Winter usually kicked in around Thanksgiving (we had more than one football “snow bowl” after Thanksgiving dinner) and surrendered sometime around Easter, even when Easter came in early April.

Christmas was a special time. Contrary to its popular image, western New York experienced a green Christmas perhaps one of every three years. However, winter came early most years. The season would start right after Thanksgiving in those days, not before Thanksgiving, as it seems to appear today. One of the first events would be a gaggle of Lorenzi kids accompanying dad into the woods to cut down a tree from our own forest. Sometimes this was done in two feet of snow, even in November. At other times we’d carry the tree or bring it to the house on the tractor flatbed. These were usually large but scrawny, unshaped, short-needle trees. One year we cut a tree for the expanded mudroom, a tall yet thin thirteen footer. We even drilled a hole in the trunk to insert a branch to fill an obvious gap. It remained a sorry looking yet prized tree. Decorating the tree was a family affair, starting with strings of lights, followed by ornaments, and finished off with single strands of silver tinsel. And then we had to add lights outside. We had a six-foot Santa, a Coca-Cola advertisement, we’d perch and light on the front porch. He was a cheerful, Norman Rockwell figure, and a figure to inspire even the most cynical child. Dad would also wrap the front light pole with evergreens and large exterior, colored lights. A day or two before Christmas we’d view the living nativity scene at the Methodist church. Midnight Mass at Immaculate Conception was for a time after Vatican II, the only night service we’d experience. The church was dark and numerous evergreens, covered in light tinsel, adorned the altar. There was a large crèche off to the side. The choir included the nasal renderings of Basil Kern. Christmas morning was almost too much to anticipate. In recall lights tossing and turning in bed, looking out over the side yard, washed by a full moon, providing a grey but almost bright-as-day light. We’d beg our parents to let us start as early as 5:30 a.m. Dad would flood the room with the powerful lights needed to provide sufficient illumination for his 8 mm camera, so my celluloid images of Christmas morning feature kids blinking and blinded by the camera lights. In later years, we’d put up the tree later, finally waiting until Christmas Eve one year, and the early start of the day we pushed back to more reasonable hours. And each year it was a mystery we tried to solve, attempting to figure where mom and dad hid our Christmas presidents. One year I received an incredible Bowl-a-matic, a clever toy that actually set pins, returned the bowling ball and allowed you to aim the ball down the lane. More than once we received hockey games, five spinning skaters and a shuffling goalie in the net, all controlled by sticks at each end of the game, on a ‘rink’ perhaps thirty inches long. Christmas morning was full of noise and wrapping paper. Some games even survived the day.

We took full advantage of each of our twenty acres. We built forts in the woods and Doug built one high in the large tree alongside the shed. In the spring, we’d build dams in the numerous run-off streams in the grape rows, and explore the pond and streams in the woods on the Cowper property. We’d catch salamanders, tadpoles, frogs, and crayfish in the icy, fast-flowing gullies. We would fancy ourselves as explorers in colonial times, free of modern devices and building shelters to live off the land. We made hanging ropes, lines, swings and other acrobatic attempts.

Summers meant mowing acres of grass with a push gasoline mower. One escape was to spend as much time as possible at the Bethlehem Management Club swimming pools. We all took to the water during the short western New York swimming season – Memorial Day to Labor Day. Some years, it seemed to take the end of the school years and the Fourth of July before the air warmed enough for swimming. Ted and Fran were the swimming stars. Water was often short in Eden in the summer; we started on a cistern system, with no “city” water, and the sight of tank trucks driving up East Church to fill empty cisterns during especially arid summers was not an uncommon sight. We drank well water from a single spigot in the kitchen, the only water fit to drink. BMC visits also meant, “take a good shower” before we headed home, to save precious water and some time.

The house was large and old, cold in the winter and not air conditioned in the summer. Hot summers were rare in Eden but we did our best to combat heat by sleeping upside, sometimes in a tent, often under the stars. As we grew to our teen years, we’d even use these outdoor sleeping arrangements as a chance to roam even miles from home to meet up with friends who were “sleeping out” as well. We all slept two to a room and, for some time, Ted, Joe and Jim slept in a three-tired bunk bed that almost touched the ceiling and filled what must have been a 5’ x 9’ room with a tiny closet.

Our major play area shifted over the years other than the barn that housed our cold weather, indoor basketball court. At first, we played football in the large, rectangular front yard but dad soon banished us to the smaller field near the chicken coop, where we also tried to set up an ad hoc ball field, with no right field. We started with kickball and moved up to baseball as we grew. By the late sixties we had transformed the cow pasture on the eastern edge of the roadside property into a magnificent, large football and baseball field. Again we had no right field but we had a good 150 feet down the left field foul line and a football field almost half regulation size. Doug and I painted sidelines and hash marks one summer when we grew bored of painting the barn. We installed a steel pole and mesh wire backstop, wooden bases, and goalposts. While this field used as a cow pasture, we tried to build a baseball field behind the Harris house, only this time there was no left field and we used the Knoll fence as our right field wall; I don’t recall anyone ever hitting one over the wall, not even Howard Harris’ older brother, Henry.

In August 1964, our ECS Booster little league team played Rotary for the championship under the lights of the new Corn Festival, a carryover from the 1962 Sesquicentennial. I played third base and had our only two hits that night, thrown out twice trying to stretch singles into doubles against the formidable Kevin Harms. Doug was the catcher. John Walsh played first; we had the Hubbard brothers and Pat Clifford. Rotary had Joe and Stu Marsh and Jeff Striebich. We lost 2-0, in my first and probably only formal competition under the lights.

Much of our life was spent arranging pick up and, when possible, more formal pick up football and baseball games. We’d play “two man” on the elementary school fields, tackle football on the lawn of Immaculate Conception. We would stage games where “hill toppers” took on the “city slickers”, meaning the kids on the hill combined to play kids living “in the city”, i.e., near the traffic light. In later years, we’d pull together twelve or more guys and play a full evening of softball at the Legion field, paying the club $10 for a night under the lights. We could play three games in three hours. Sports were obviously a big part of our lives. Dad would get tickets to Bills’ football games and Sabres’ hockey games and we enjoyed those games, back when a football ticket cost $3.50, $4.50 for a premium seat. We watched Jack Kemp play quarterback before be became a politician.

After sixth grade I left ICS and started seventh grade at Eden Central. Eden Central in those days had grades seven through twelve in the large redbrick building on Main Street. It had once housed K-12, but Eden was participating in the baby boom. I think I had outgrown the discipline and limited extracurricular activities of the small, parochial school. Seventh grade in fall 1963 meant a new school, new classmates, and moving from class to class among teachers over the next six years: Mr. Brennan (8th grade English), Castiglia (8th grade Social Studies), Fidel (English), Vandenberg (9thgrade Social Studies), Georger (Math), Gibson (Spanish), Bell (Math), Forocij (7th grade social studies), Duffy (12th grade American history), Haug (Art), Varco (Chemistry), and Hunt (English); Mrs. Casler (English), Castiglia (English), Brenneman (Trig), Klingenmeir (English), Dillenbeck (English), and others. It also meant an end to uniforms and the start of adolescent peer pressure, eyeglasses (at eighth grade), girls, and interscholastic sports. Sports had been a big part of my life, with my first organized team the ECS Boosters as a ten-year old in summer 1962. With all the games we played around the farm, I fancied myself a three-sport star: football, basketball, and baseball. I quickly fell behind in basketball after a great freshman year under Bob Burnside. Burnside went on to coach first junior varsity and then varsity baseball for almost thirty-five years. In our last game, I scored eleven points in our only win of the season over East Seneca, with a close score of about 41-40. More important was the fact that the varsity had a game in North Collins that evening so the team congregated in the gym and we had our largest and perhaps only audience of the year. I remember slick senior guard Rick Kranz commending my free throw shooting. I hoped it might translate into something of value for junior varsity tryouts the coming year. Our best freshman, Skip Ehrhart, was good enough to play j.v. and we lacked any real height and coordination. My specialty was defense and drawing offensive files. I had no outside shot but a reasonable confidence driving to the bucket, even when I was called for traveling. In a game we were winning against Frontier on Amsdell Road, I received a smash in the nose that left my eyes watering. The trainer took me into the locker room, broke open an instant ice pack but also punctured it and left me with some chemical running up my nose. It took some time to recover and when I returned we were well behind and we lost the game.

Barely making Richard Castiglia’s powerhouse junior varsity. In that 1966-67 season we were undefeated save an out of conference loss to Pioneer in the rickety gym early in the season. Once or twice we broke the century mark, with Skip Ehrhart, Gary Kaluza, and Gary Preischel. After j.v baseball in 1966 and batting 4 for 14 with Burnside, playing second base behind Joe Marsh, I also passed on football in my junior year, turning instead to golf. I started my freshman football year as a lineman. A broken nose moved me to the backfield. From then on, I played linebacker, fullback and second-string quarterback. My sophomore football year we won one game; I scored the winning touchdown in our 6-0 win over Alden, after Coach Roof sent me in after a long Preischel to Kaluza pass set us up on the one-year line. I followed Dan Finger’s instructions to follow him into the end zone, just as I followed the fashion and social pressures of the day. A week or two earlier, we had an away game against distant Grand Island. Junior varsity games started at 10:00 so we left Eden about 7:30, fully dressed and ready to play. Although it may have been only early November I remember heavy flakes of snow throughout the game. The Vikings used a spread formation with a man in motion with a simple option scheme that I thought I had figured out by the second quarter, yet Coach Roof rejected my analysis,

The Beatles provided the soundtrack to my teen years. From 1963 to 1969, they were the overpowering cultural icon of the time. In eighth grade (1965) dad let me grow my hair long enough to comb, although hair length was always an ongoing battle. In fashion, we went through polka dots, paisley and ‘bleeding’ madras. The top fashion brand was H.I.S. And there was little or no permanent press. With several teenage boys about the same age and size, there were humiliating conflicts over clothes that we had to share. The greatest shame was to have a schoolmate ask: “Didn’t I see your brother wearing that shirt yesterday?” Once each year at the high school we’d pay for the right to wear shorts for one special day to raise funds for AFS. Even then, socks were required. Never jeans, no slacks for girls, no boy’s hair over the shirt collar, and girls wore skirts just above the knee. It was almost the preppy look, before the term was popular fifteen or twenty years later. My sophomore year I took Jill Stevens to the Christmas dance; Tom took Robin Parmelee. I recall a photo and corsage session in the Parmelee living room. For the junior prom, I was in the court but can not recall my date; perhaps it was Mary Senders. For the 1969 senior graduation week end and dance, dad borrowed a very hot 1963 Corvette for me for the week end and I was able to convince Trudy Hoekstra to come back from Kentucky to be my date. We had dinner at the Marine Midland restaurant with the Grace and Carl Post, a scare when I cracked a leak in the gas tank (downshifting was not in my skill set), and a generally miserable time with Trudy as she was way out of my league, so to speak.

By demographics and upbringing I was a conservative. Ed Sappelt, a high school civics teacher, introduced me to the New York Times and the student radical struggles at Columbia in 1968, the Strawberry Revolution. But I never really identified with the long-haired radicals, the hippies. But I followed the fashion.

I had a variety of part-time and summer jobs. Dad would put money ion our savings accounts at the end of each grape season. With ceremony, he made us think about the value of money and hard labor. I picked strawberries on the Mroz farm, earning seven cents a pint doing backbreaking work. I mowed grass for Supreme Court judge Charles Desmond. I sold soda by the can in the stands at the Erie County Fair. By fifteen, I umpired Little League games for Chuck Pacini. Later, I worked at Knoche Buick-Cadillac, mowed greens at South Shore Country Club in summer 1969 after Joe Batorski died in a tragic May auto accident on East Church Street. After my first year of college – which ended abruptly with the Kent State shootings and school strike -- I worked the summer at Bethlehem Steel in the strip mill.

I attended Boys State at SUNY Morrisville near Syracuse in August before my senior year. In my senior year (1968-69) I hosted the AFS talent show and played Dr. Chumley in “Harvey”. Our team of Susan Gifford, Mark Lindsey and me made it through three televised rounds of Van Miller’s WBEN Quiz Bowl. In the winter, I taped play-by-play of basketball games into my prized, Christmas gift, a portable tape recorder. I transcribed the play-by-play for articles I wrote for the school paper. The basketball team had an incredible run in February 1969, losing in the sectionals. By spring I had a crush on Jan Rodenbach, surpassing earlier, more fleeting interests in Jill Stevens, Joanne Kraft, and Robin Parmelee.

There were fall AFS pizza sales, sock hops after basketball games, dances at the Legion, parties in the barn, swimming and some golf at BMC, pizza on rare occasions at the Eden Pizzeria, swimming at Striebich’s once they built there pool, after earlier years swimming at Kromer’s falls and – even earlier -- Cowper’s pond. We’d visit the CNE in Toronto, the New York World’s fair in 1964, the Curran’s and the Montreal Exposition, and friends around the northeast. In spring 1965, I spent three weeks with Mark Lindsey and his family in a rental home right on the beach in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. We drove down and back in the family station wagon, with Mark’s parents and sister Carol. Dad took four of the older boys to Rome and London over Easter vacation in 1966. In Italy we stayed at the Cavaleri Hilton outside Rome. We saw the Forum and the Coliseum. We visited Florence (the first of three trips I’d make to that city over the next thirty-five years), Anzio, and Naples. In London we stayed at the Carlton Towers and visited the museum to honor dad’s Eighth Army Air Force in Norwich, England. On the way home we spent a night at the St. Regis Hotel in New York.

We’d visit the grandparent Heaths in Franklin, the Lorenzi’s in Creighton, and extended family in Fairlawn/Patterson, New Jersey. We’d climb the big hill behind dad’s boyhood home on Belleview Street in Creighton, where we could watch the trains move up and down the Allegheny River valley, watch the slow-moving brown water, and experience some of the hilly, terraced elements of dad’s grandfather’s family home in Marliana, Italy. Mom took about four of us on a spring trip to New England in 1964. Doug and I took in an April Red Sox game and made our way home to mom’s friend in Charleston by streetcar. The three oldest boys made a Gettysburg and Washington trip with dad one year. Besides the 1966 European trip, I probably flew once before I turned fifteen. We never took a train. Lots of time in the car, before seat belts, air bags, air conditioning or CD players.

Jim was born 25 July 1960. On Friday 13 September 1963, Mark joined the family as the tenth and last sibling. We had a custom-made dinner table for all of us, with carefully arranged seating, dinner each night at 6 and Sunday brunch after morning Mass. Dad installed a huge bell, taken from a locomotive, on a large post in the front yard; ringing the bell was a signal to get home quickly, usually for dinner. The remodeled kitchen had a commercial-grade grill. A pan with twenty-four scrambled eggs was part of Sunday breakfast, with piles of sausage and bacon. Mom and dad worked out the dinner clean up schedule, with one of us assigned to clear the table, load the dishwasher, scrub pots and pans, wipe the table and counters, and make a final review.

Through much of the sixties, a regular fall Saturday event was a day trip to State College for a Penn State football game. This was where college life first seduced me, as dad would point out places around town and campus from his studies there 1945-1947. He created my idea of college life, especially the pageantry of a football weekend, the fall colors, the rural setting, the throngs of people. We saw Army, Navy, West Virginia, Boston College, Pitt, Syracuse and other regional teams. We even occasionally made a game in Pitt Stadium, more likely Pitt-Notre Dame than Pitt-Penn State. I recall watching Navy’s Roger Staubach and Joe Bellino play at Pitt. Ptti-Penn State games were usually reserved for special week ends for mom and dad, to get away for one of their rare absences from home. Dad’s other annual trip was to Canada for a weeklong fishing trip in August each year. In those days, Penn State was an east coast team and perennial winner of the Lambert trophy for their football prowess. We saw Joe Paterno when he was the new, young coach who replaced Rip Engle, neighbor to my Uncle Rollie and Aunt Jo-an on Mitchell Street. We’d leave Eden early, more than once in a snow storm, arrive in time to briefly tour town and to tailgate, take in the game, take our time after the game, and be home by ten o’clock, often stopping for dinner on the way home through small, decaying industrial towns (Johnsonburg, St. Mary’s Bradford), along back roads, and over the hills. On rare, wonderful occasions, we’d have a room at the historic Nittany Lion Inn and make it a two-night trip. That was luxury.

Eldest son Allen left for Alfred University in fall 1966, to study ceramic engineering, live in a fraternity, and increase my attention to college decisions. Tom left in 1968 for Fredonia, where he studied ceramic art and played basketball on one of the best defensive teams in the country. In the summer of 1968 I wrote postcards to many schools, asking for admissions and financial aid information. I was fascinated and seduced by picturesque college catalogs. In 1969, I applied to Michigan, Penn State, Yale, and Binghamton (Harpur College), and was rejected only by Yale. I could not afford out-of-state tuition, received no school-based financial aid and, by default, chose Harpur. We graduated in late June 1969, marching out of the old high school for the last time – for us and the school, they opened the new high school for the Class of 1970 –- to assemble near the tennis courts under a bright blue sky. I graduated third in a class of 160. Susan Gifford was valedictorian and the senior year transfer Jeff Masters placed head of me; I was hurt to lose out to a last-minute addition to the class. However, it was my good fortune to earn a $1,000 four-year American Legion scholarship at my June 1969 Eden graduation and Regents scholarships and awards that provided $450 a year when SUNY tuition was $400 a year. Late in August, Jim Messecar drove me to my first semester in Binghamton, picking me up at 3:00 a.m. for the five-hour drive to Binghamton and the early morning opening of the residence halls, arriving one week after and less than one hundred miles from Woodstock, the event that characterized my college generation. Prior to that late August 1969 arrival, I’d never set foot on the campus. Lehman Hall would be my first college residence, sharing room 214A with Perry Montalbano and Larry Basso.