A continuing compendium of reflections upon the desk calendars I found in my junk drawer recently. The calendars run from 1976-2000 and contain much stuff.
Let’s take a look at what can be gleaned from looking through the 1977 calendar:
This year started out with a bang! And it was not a good one as Jan. 1 was the day my father broke his arm falling on the ice at Lake Buelah near East Troy, Wis. My dad’s uncle worked as a groundskeeper at the seminary on the lake and we would go out there every once in a while to fish or swim. On this particular New Year’s Day, we decided to go ice skating. Uncle Clarence had shoveled the snow off a portion of the frozen lake, creating a large, smooth space of clear ice.
My younger brother, myself and my dad got out on the ice after watching Clarence skate circles around us. At least this is how I remember it 31 years later. Now, I have never gotten along very well in the cold, and it was very cold this day. So you know we were not skating — or attempting to skate — since when we stopped I was not yet whimpering and pleading to go home due to frozen fingers, frozen toes or any other body part.
All of a sudden, my dad fell, probably said a “bad” word and clutched his arm. Clarence helped him get up, then Dad said we had to go home. I wasn’t all that upset, but I would have at least liked to get cold first. However, he drove home with one hand, since the arm with the other hand attached was broken.
Now, my dear sweet father claims that he was checked hard into the board by one of his strapping sons (most have been my brother as I was a weakling of a stringbean at the time), and although I do not recall this event in such a manner, I allow Dad to recall it any way he chooses. After all, he is in his golden years now. So, he has earned that right.
Apparently, I was unmoved by this event as I had the audacity to go to my friend Kurt’s house to play the next day instead of staying with my ailing father. Hey, I was 13 years old. Cut me a break, OK?
Kurt’s parents were originally from Hawaii. His mother came to school once when I was in maybe third grade or so and gave a slide show on Hawaii. She used to pack pineapple in cans. If I have the story straight (and it is possible some details of this are not entirely correct), during World War II, Kurt’s parents were stuck in one of those internment camps for anyone who looked like they were from the Eastern part of the continent of Asia, supposedly for “their own good.”
Another thing that took place the first of January was a visit from Grandma Mac, my mom’s mother. I loved Grandma Mac. She always had Archway cookies in a kitchen drawer, hard candy in a dish (the soft-filled red raspberry ones were the best) and Lawrence Welk on the TV.
Another aspect of this calendar was that I had used a puple highlighter to highlight two boxes apiece from January through March. No idea what that was all about.
I also see that I’d written “count dough” a few places. This was a time when I was keeping track of my money. I kept track of what I spent and what I earned and was quite meticulous in the record keeping. And every so often during this period of time, I would tally my net worth. It was five figures at the time, two of them to the right of the decimal place.
By the time 1977 rolled around, I was more of a circular guy, with most of the dates that passed being circled instead of the traditional Xs I used the previous year. X is just so bicentennial! Pshaw!
In March, I had a phone number written down. No idea why. But I just did a reverse phone look-up for it on the Internet and it came up as an unlisted cell phone number. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t someone’s cell phone number in 1977. Remember the first mobile phones? They were so huge. Cannon had one on his TV show. They called them car phones cause they were usually found in people’s cars.
I have “WTMJ 2:00″ written down on March 19th (a Saturday). Wish I could recall what this was for. WTMJ is the big radio station in Milwaukee. It’s part of a media group that included both the big daily newspapers in Milwaukee at the time — the Journal and the Sentinel, since merged — as well as a TV station in town. I have a feeling that because I wrote “WTMJ,” I meant the radio station. It must have been a note to listen to the station at that time for some special reason. I did go to the WTMJ TV studio once when I was in Cub Scouts, but that was well before 1977. Our Cub Scout pack went to a filming of the Bozo show, some local show that aired on Saturday or Sunday mornings. It featured the clown, who did some stuff that I think was supposed to be funny. They also had kids in the audience, and they would pick some out of the crowd to play a game. My friend, Tim, got picked. I did not. But it was an experience anyway.
I kept track of all the Milwaukee Brewers’ promotional days on my calendar that year. Starting with a kids day special on April 14 against the Baltimore Orioles all the way until the end of September, I wrote them all down. The Brewers played their games less than five miles from our house and we used to go fairly often. When my brother and I got old enough, my dad would drop us off at the front gate and pick us up after the game. We went to bat night once and got a red Coca-Cola bat. That was one of the coolest promotions I ever went to.
We also went when we got a gold-colored three-ring binder. It was my first recollection of a promo day, and my dad called it “present day.” That was also pretty cool. We used to sit in the bleachers for $2 a seat back in those days. Talk about cheap entertainment. I can’t hardly afford to go to Major League Baseball games anymore.
I remember seeing Hank Aaron hitting a home run in the bottom of the 10th inning of the second game of a doubleheader against the Texas Rangers to complete a sweep of the twinbill on July 11, 1976. It was Aaron’s last year in a brilliant career and it was the second-to-last home run of his career. My brother and I took a special city bus down to the stadium and wondered if the bus would wait for us as we, along with thousands of others, waited after the game for Hank to emerge from the dugout and give a curtain call as we chanted his name and cheered for him. Later, when I became a sportswriter, I had an opportunity to interview Hank Aaron.
Here is my younger brother’s recollection of the event: “It was a boring game and we were sitting in the top row of upper deck. To pass time, we were stomping on cups and throwing them up in the air to see the wind carry them out of the stadium. We were out of cups and went to get more soda when a really old security guard accosted us and sent us out of the stadium. He followed us down close to the entrance, but didn’t see us all the way to the gate. It was only the 4th or 5th inning and Dad wasn’t coming to get us for awhile, so we went back in and found seats in the lower grand or lower box right behind the plate. We watched the rest of the game and Hank’s 754th home run to win the game from those seats. I believe he hit a foul on the pitch prior to the HR that just missed the foul pole in left. The HR hit the foul pole for the walk-off win.”
On May 2 (the first school day in May 1977), I started a countdown of the 31 school days remaining until the end of eighth grade. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. Day No. 1 was listed as June 13 (a Monday). If the final day of school was a Monday, we must have had a snow day or two added to the schedule. We typically started school the day after Labor Day and got out the second week of June. My kids start the second week of August and get out before Memorial Day. I prefer it the way we did it. I think August should be a summer vacation month. For one thing, the Indiana State Fair is still going on while kids go back to school.
The summer of 1977 was a year of camping for me. I went to a Russian language camp for almost two weeks in northern Minnesota, then took a week off, and headed to Boy Scout summer camp in northern Wisconsin.
Russian camp was cool. It was my only experience with a language camp. We used Russian money to buy candy. We had name tags with our Russian names. We spoke as much Russian as we could. We eyed the girls, played soccer, visited the Mississippi River headwaters and made friends with kids from all over the place. My dad was a Russian teacher — learned the language in the U.S. Air Force — and I had him for a teacher for three years.
This particular year at Boy Scout camp, I set the troop record for the mile swim and actually swam more than a mile because the guys in the rowboat in front of me went off course. I’d swam during the summer with the local parks swim club, so swimming a mile was no big deal to me. In fact, when I found out we’d gone too far, I wanted to do it again so I could lower my time even further. But I think the adults didn’t feel like rowing a mile again and dissuaded me from my attempt.
I went to Boy Scout summer camp two, maybe three, times. Among the things I recall from that were our troop winning a greased watermelon competition at the beachfront games, accidentally inserting a cooking fork into my assistant pack leader’s forearm (anger and frustration are a bad combination of emotions while cooking), having a slightly younger Scout read Bible passages to me and discuss them with me as we turned in at night, whittling a piece of wood into the shape of a deer’s hoof and giving it to my dad, shooting a 22 very poorly at the rifle range and the final campfire on the final night.
