Posts Tagged: childhood memory
Childhood Relived, part 2
Still from It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Having purchased the DVD in a bargain bin a few months ago, I managed to pass on to Theo another small part of my own childhood experience just last night: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I first saw it on TV when I was about 8yo. Unfortunately I never saw it in the theater, since this is shot in some crazy-wide Ultra Panavision.
I had not seen it since I was a child, which is to say, a long, long, long, long time. Consequently, this film held an exalted place in my idealized memory of childhood and of comedic film. In that sense, seeing it again after 40 years was ever-so-slightly disappointing, though I still enjoyed it a lot. (I would have enjoyed it more if we had a decent size flat screen. What we have is a small 30″ diagonal, and every once in a while, the size matters.) But more importantly, Theo enjoyed and managed to get through it despite it’s 2-and-half-hour-plus length. He even awoke this morning talking about it.
I’m still not sure who among this ridiculously huge and incredible cast steals the movie: Phil Silvers or Dick Shawn. Ok, or maybe Jonathan Winters. Or maybe it’s the automobiles! I was in awe of the array of vintage vehicles, from modest Dodge Darts to Chrysler Imperials, and most of them destroyed during the course of the film!
Still from It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Still from It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Albany Hill Mini Mart
Albany Hill Mini Mart / © Neo Serafimidis 2011
Photo of Albany Hill Mini Mart from my Albany Commercial Streetscapes project. I suppose it’s not really that exciting a shot, but I have a soft spot in my heart for it. It is kind of an homage, again, to Ed Ruscha, this time to his Twentysix Gasoline Stations book. Although it could be Shore or Wessel, too. But since the project as a whole turns out to be an echo of Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, I’ll just go with that.
In any case, looking at images from Twentysix Gasoline Stations online, I was reminded of something from my childhood: the gasoline station across the street from my Uncle Pete’s shoe repair shop. There were two things about that station that I never understood as a small child. The first was the brand name, which was Terrible Herbst. I didn’t even know that it was the name of anything because it was so strange, and I sure didn’t know how to pronounce the second word. I remember sitting in the shop looking out the window at the station, silently mouthing the words, trying to figure how to pronounce the name by trying to figure out what felt right in my mouth. I wasn’t used to seeing so many consonants in a row. Who knew it was a big regional brand, much less that it’s still around?
The second confusing thing to my feeble five-year-old mind were the signs next to each of the drive entrances. As I remember, they were three-foot-high metal signs on stands with springs so they would give a little in the wind. They were plain white and written in red letters were the words “GAS WAR!” I really did not know what that was supposed to mean. I knew what gas was, and what war was, but I couldn’t put the two together in any way that was meaningful to me. Even now, I have to suppose that “PRICE WAR” would be more intelligible. Despite being confused, I would feel the effect of reading the word ‘war’ as a tiny little adrenaline-like rush, because war was exciting. It made me want to be back at home playing with my army men.
Dang, I can still picture that station in my mind. I sure wish I had a photo of it. Besides being an interesting thing to have, it would help me sort out some of my foggy memory about it, because I seem to remember there being a winged horse, which is the old Mobil graphic, of course. I vaguely think the stations were next to each other. Here is a google streetview of where it/they once stood.
View Larger Map
Swivel the view around to the other side of the street and zoom in a bit to see the little white storefront building where Panos Shoe Repair was located once upon a time. There’s lots of memory there. But that’s a story for a different time.
Memory Dresser
My dresser for my entire childhood.
This was my dresser for my entire childhood — from day one until the day I moved out as a young adult. It contained many memories. I remember digging in the bottom drawer for shorts to wear on the first hot days of summer; and the top left drawer with socks, folded in the special, partial inside-out way my mother used to fold them that made it easier to put them on. I remember hiding cigarettes in the bottom back corner as a teenager. And some other stuff, too.
One particular memory I have is of the time when I was about 13 that my friend Les Wood damaged the dresser. Les was a strange sort of friend. He was in 9th grade when I was in 7th grade. Les was a little scary. He had a streak that was half thrill-seeking and half sadistic. So, periodically I would have to endure some harrowing experience like being being burned on the forearm with a red-hot butter knife while cooking together, or being hiked on the back of a paper bike and plowing through a row of rose bushes.
On the occasion of the damage, which was around the Fourth of July, Les showed up at my house one day with some fireworks. While I was not looking he dumped out an entire box of snakes on to the top of the dresser and lit them. Within moments the room was filled with a choking sulfurous smoke. The snakes curled out into a monstrous heap of twisted ash and burned through the top layer of the dresser, leaving a shallow crater and wide burned area on the top. I was pretty damn mad; even as a teenager, I had a sense of propriety and pride of ownership. My parents, needless to say, were furious. Les just laughed his little sadistic laugh, his small teeth peeking through a thin-lipped grin.
Les’s attitude and behavior never really improved. Two or three years later, when I was about 16 years old, Les had been kicked out of the house and was living around with different friends, or just in the Chevy Vega he drove, and selling drugs for money. During this time, he gave away or sold almost everything he owned. He sold me his once beloved stereo system for about $20. That was my first real stereo, and I set it up on the top of my dresser. One night, I saw Les and Greg Baker, who had been hanging out together, at Geno’s Pinball Palace. Geno’s was a stoner kids’ hangout in Fresno in the mid-70’s. I saw Les outside in the parking lot drinking an Old English 800 Malt Liquor and extremely high on LCD. At one point he was sitting on the curb holding is head in his hands like a vice, his face red and sweating, trying to not freak out.
A few minutes later he was fine, walking around and laughing. Not many people tended to laugh with him. He asked if anybody wanted to go for a drive, go out to the fig orchards that were once plentiful in northwest Fresno and “go figgin'”. That meant driving out into the powdery soft dirt in the orchard and spinning the car around in circles, raising plumes of dust in a whirl of teenage entertainment. The only taker was Greg, who was probably equally high.
They next day we found out that the Vega had hit a giant fig tree at a high rate of speed and exploded on impact. Les and Greg died nearly instantly, we were told. We never really knew whether this was a drug-fueled accident, or Les’s intentional, final act of defiance against a world he didn’t like and that didn’t much like him back.
In any case, we had a yard sale last weekend, and while the dresser was not for sale, it was out because we used it to display other things that were for sale. I had started to refinish it over a year ago, and simply never got the momentum up to finish.The knobs were off, and only the drawers were really done. Three people asked me if it was for sale and offered to buy it, and by the third, I was starting to think that it probably made sense let it go, and do what we were out there to do: lighten our load. The other furniture had not even gotten a second look. I sold it to a woman for $50.
I guess I’ll have to find something else to keep my childhood memories in.
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