I found the old, yellowing notebook up in the dusty attic:
Please note it is not a “diary”. Diaries are for girls. Therefore it is called “Private Files”.
I had kept a journal since 1962 because I’d read “The Real Diary of A Real Boy” (Henry A. Shute; 1902) at around age nine, and enjoyed it so much I wanted to emulate the author. This involved not only keeping a record of my activities, but also having activities worth recording. Such activities tended to be few and far between, in the suburbs of that time, which were meant to be pristine areas of tranquility and beauty, but inadvertently involved idle hands, and created a devil’s playground, because I craved activities worth recording.
The fact the suburbs involved a freedom from work was not initially seen as a bad thing. Child-labor-laws were created in order to spare children the drudgery of working in factories, and suburbs seemed a refuge from such slavery. However children are in fact curious about work and like to see it. On a small farm the child trots behind his father and soon knows every chore, long before they are strong and able. But in a suburb the child often lives in a void, for often the father is gone.
Much ado has been made of poor children in the inner city growing up without fathers, and the harm it causes, however I believe harm was also occurring among the more wealthy people, able to escape the city for plush and yet fatherless suburbs. This was especially insidious in the 1950’s and 1960’s because people didn’t see the harm coming, until the children grew up and many expressed their loathing towards what they’d had to endure.
This is not to say all families suffered. Some fathers made sure to devote time to their families the moment they got home from work. However it was far more typical for a man to feel exhausted, and that he deserved a break, and for him to collapse in an easy chair, crack a beer, and watch the news. Many men were oblivious to the level of dissatisfaction their hard work was creating, and were blindsided when their wives requested a divorce. When I was in grade school divorce was rare, but by the time I was in high school it had become common.
This is not to say everyone experienced divorce. I greatly admire the families that remained strong through those times. They need to write books about how they managed it. But my tale is about a family that slid into dysfunction, and mostly about me.
I could (and have) go (gone) on at great length about causes. Whether you call it Karma or “the sins of forefathers”, actions have reactions, and it is perfectly logical that one winds where one wound up, even if it is an illogical place to be. One can justify being illogical, but why bother? So I shall skip all that. Instead I’ll just introduce you to myself on January first, in the year 1969. I was a junior in high school, but still fifteen years old. (I change names to protect, but all else is verbatim, including misspellings, from my “private files.”)
“Well, a new year has started, and so far it has been a blast. Last night I walked over to the Joyson’s house and had a little mental new years party.
Before I came I had 3 cans of beer so I was pretty happy. I got Izzy out of Bed, and we sat around listening to the radio waiting. Ruth came down and took my fire crackers except for one pack. I thought it was a joke and she’d bring them back but as midnight got closer I got worryed. We went outside and Izzy followed her tracks up to the Docport’s. It was too close to twelve to get them from her so I sat in the Glazier’s driveway and threw my one pack in the air. Then I had can 4 and can 5 of beer and went into the Docport’s. Boy was I drunk. Everything got blurry, well not that but sort of muffled. I said happy new year to Mrs. Docport and Mr. Docport and sat around there for a while. Then we went back to the Joyson’s and Ruth was there. We started throwing snowballs at each other. I jumped at Ruth and gave her a New Year’s kiss. We made a agreement that I’d let her hit me with a snow ball in the face if she’d tell me where my firecrackers were. She made a giant snow ball and hit me with it and then told me where my firecrackers were, then followed a snowball fight. It was great. I was so drunk I didn’t feel cold or hurt. Izzy and Ruth peppered me as I threw, pretty wildly, at them. Then Mr. Joyson told Izzy and Ruth to go in. Ruth did but Izzy stayed as I set off my firecrackers. The first pack I threw into the green. Bang Bang Snap Bnng ffffffftt Bang Snap fffftt Bang The second pack It lit, brought it back to throw BANG it went off right by my ear. Bang…BangBang I dropped (it) right by my feet, also by Izzy’s. I ran up to Izzy’s house, he ran, slipping and falling, into the green. Shit it was funny. I was laughing my balls off. We went into the house and talked. My right ear was ringing like anything. Nothing much happened after that, the snow had changed to rain when I walked home. I got sopped.
———-
Well, I got up at 7:30 but dozed until 11:00. For the rest of the day I sat around waiting for Izzy to go bowling with me. I had no hang over. Izzy called up at 5:00 but it was too late.
School starts tomorrow. Shit, vacation was a blast this year. I didn’t do much but what I did do was a blast.
That’s all.
Looking back fifty-five years from the future, I feel I should mention three things.
First, drinking five beers was not typical, and indeed this may have been a first, which made it worth writing down. Apparently I had obtained a six-pack, but I can’t remember how. I have vague memories of sometimes convincing older siblings to buy me booze, and there is even a slight chance my mother and stepfather, (being very liberal and not yet mugged by what permissiveness resulted in), may have bought me a six-pack with the understanding I’d spend New Year’s at home. I had a disgusting ability to bat my eyes innocently and agree to rules I had no intention of keeping, at that time. It now shames me but at the time I thought I was crafty.
Second, Izzy and Ruth were formerly next door neighbors, and our trio created a sort of awkwardness, for my best friend’s sister was “the girl next door.” Izzy could rhapsodize to me about some girl he fantasized was Super-woman, but if I said there was the slightest thing admirable about his sister he gagged.
In any case, when my mother remarried, the spring before, we moved away, and I should mention that “walking to the Joyson’s house” now involved two miles. Basically, when walking home after midnight in the rain, I’d pace from the start of Conant Road in Weston, through the town center, and then down Concord Road, up and over the Jesuit “Weston College” Hill, and then down Sudbury Road nearly to the Wayland border. It was roughly two miles to the Joyson’s house, and two miles home again, and I thought little of it. Oh, to have such strength again!
Third, the reason Izzy was unavailable to go bowling on Sunday may well have been because he was doing his homework, something I often didn’t bother with. He was subject to discipline I was “free” from, and of course he got better grades. His family wasn’t shattered by divorce, and had a stability that made it very attractive to me, yet at the same time I liked to brag about how “free” I was. The truth was I lacked guidance, and I had no one who I felt comfortable going to, when I needed help. In fact, when it came to discipline, I largely had to be my own sergeant.
This led to me doing quite a number of stupid things because, “it is something kids my age do.” It was as if I had a check-list, and read, “fifteen-year-olds break street lights”, and therefore felt compelled to go out and break a street light, even though it seemed like a stupid thing to do. Other things, such as drinking five beers, didn’t seem so stupid and instead seemed like “a blast.” Likely the most illegal thing I did was to go into Boston and buy fireworks in the tiny Chinatown and then resell them out in the suburbs. Likely the most dangerous thing I did was to go joy-riding without a learner’s permit or even a single driving lesson from an adult. Likely the most destructive thing I did was to smoke pot, but at this point I had only smoked a relatively weak marijuana once, hanging around with my older siblings the summer before. Yet all these things largely were “things kids my age do”, and a sort of “rite of passage”, and also were things I could brag to Izzy that I was “free” to do. I think I needed to brag because I felt inferior. In many ways I admired and envied him and his family.
How I felt about school comes across clearly in the next entry.
Thurs. January 2nd, 19689
Well, only the second day of 1968 and already I’m bored. I walked into school and bang! I was turned off. It is such a bore. I can’t communicate in school, for some reason I freeze up and can’t make too many friends.
After school in wreastleing I got killed. I really worked out. I weigh 146 right now. There are three weight classes I want to get in. 140 , pretty impossible, 147 probible, and 154 “if I get fat” wieght class. I’m sort of afraid of losing wieght because it might stunt my growth. As soon as wreastling is over I’m going to put it on.
Tomorrow I’m going to try to get in good with Ruth. I want to be a real friend of her but not realy a lover. I sort of want to wait with her for some reason.
Its pretty cold and dry out. Well thats all that happened today.
It is difficult to describe how boring school was, and also how schooling had a debilitating effect beyond mere boredom. I felt cowed. I was paralyzed. Rather than increasing my activity it decreased it. I hadn’t been encouraged enough, I suppose, and had been discouraged too often, and had reached a point where it felt like I myself was not allowed. To be myself I had to run away, find some other place outside of school.
There is a month-long blank in my “private files” at this point. I had decided there was something “phony” about my former discipline, which demanded I write in my journal every day. What was phony was that I would fall behind two weeks, and write “fake” entries to catch up. I had a discipline in keeping my diary I never displayed when it came to doing homework, but I became free of that self-imposed discipline when I decided it was “phony”.
“Phony”, as I recall, became a word which Izzy and I used a lot. In a rare example of scholarship I had actually read “Catcher In The Rye” in an English class I shared with Izzy, and the one thing we got out of it was the character Holden Caufield’s scorn towards “phony” adults. However I turned it back on myself and scorned any thing I did which appeared “phony.”
This story would rapidly proceed backwards through a series of flashbacks if I dwelt on what prompted me to become “more real”. Let it suffice to say I was troubled by opposing impulses, one of which loved to dream and fantasize, and the other of which loathed liars. At this point in my life school involved too much pretending you were someone you weren’t. You seemingly were suppose to swagger, but I couldn’t fake a swagger when I felt everyone would laugh if I did it. I had to get away.
When I got away I could do stupid things and humiliate myself and somehow the consequences were not so everlasting. For example, I liked to hang around with my older siblings because they were all out of high school, and I felt no word would get back to the hallways if I was a jerk. And one thing I felt I had to do, because “kids my age did it”, was to grapple and grope with the opposite sex to see “how far I could get.” I often felt very uncomfortable midst these experiments, because it was very obvious that no real romance and love was involved, but at the same time it was something you were expected to do.
A particularly absurd situation arose when I somehow included myself in a party involving my older sister’s friends, all around five years older than I was, and found myself in a dark room with loud music where everyone was “necking”. In other words, they were kissing, which is a fairly tame activity by the corrupt standards of 2023, but, by the puritanical standards of small-town1968, was practically an orgy.
And so it was I found myself “necking” with a woman five years older than I was, We boys called that “getting to first base.” I made several attempts to “get to second base” but the woman made it clear that wasn’t going to happen. Once that had been determined, I got bored. What was the point of all this slobbering? My chief desire then became to extract myself from the situation, even as the woman kept kissing. After suffering for what seemed to me like a very long time, I decided I saw an escape, and called out to my older sister, who was somewhere in the darkness, “Hey! Didn’t Mom say we had to be home at nine?” This was so obviously an uncool thing to say I immediately blushed, but it worked: I got the hell out of there, and no news of this debacle got back to the halls of my highschool. At the school such blunders seemed forbidden; no learning-experiences were allowed.
I couldn’t get away through the month of January, and after five weeks of school this entry appears on February 1, when I should have been happy because it was a Saturday and there was no school.
There then follows another long, blank period in the journal. Initially it was because school was proceeding through the dreary days of winter, and there was nothing to record but my paralysis. I seemed to have a complete inability to do homework. Now I can’t help but roll my eyes at myself. Why didn’t I just do the damn job?
Then I was rescued by the weather, and a miscalculation on the part of the town. Explaining their mistake will involve a digression.
On the east side of Weston, where Route 20 crossed Route 128, were two impressive quarries blasted five hundred feet down into solid granite by the Massachusetts Broken Stone company. The racket and rock-dust made by this industry annoyed the rather wealthy inhabitants of Weston, and therefore, when the company requested permission to start a third quarry on their land, the town fathers would not allow it. It was a death knell for the place, for the first two quarries had gone down nearly as far as it was possible to dig and still have the digging be profitable. They had a few years to go before they’d have to find a new place, but had no reason to be nice to the town fathers any longer, and it was at this point they stopped helping Weston snowplow its roads.
Up until that point there had been many snowstorms where Weston was the only town whose schools were able to stay open, to the smug satisfaction of grown-ups and the complete misery of schoolboys like myself.
I can remember many snowy mornings listening to the no-school-announcements on the radio, from A to Z. When they got to the “W’s” I began fervently praying, and then was devastated when “Weston” went unmentioned among the cancelations.
The disappointment nudged me towards Atheism, until someone suggested that the fact school wasn’t cancelled might not be due to God, but due to the fact we had massive quarry trucks rumbling around town, whereas other towns only had underfunded road crews and, in those days, rather pathetically small dump trucks with immobile blades in the front. Weston’s road crew had the most pathetic trucks of all, despite the wealth of the tax-payers, because the town could always count on the quarry for help. But then the town didn’t reciprocate, and help the quarry in return, and abruptly no help was forthcoming from the mine. Thrown back onto its own resources the town, (at that point one of the most wealthy towns in the world), did a pitiful job cleaning its roads, to my everlasting joy.
The first storm was known as “The Lindsey Storm” due to the chaos it caused in New York City, (“Lindsey” was the mayor.) The snow surprised the forecasters, and piled up in the Weston Hills more than in Boston, and measured more than twenty inches in my stepfather’s driveway.
My father had always insisted we shovel our driveway by hand at our old house, but my stepfather had a man come and plow his circular drive, and I had only to shovel the front walk and around the mailbox by the road, and tidy-up a place where he turned his car around. As I did this work it did seem odd to me our drive was far more clear of snow than the town road, but the storm had hit on a weekend, and I felt certain the roads would be clear by Monday. To my delight the roads were not clear enough for school to open until Wednesday. And that Friday school was let out for winter vacation, which meant there was no school for nine further days. As school reopened on Monday the 24th snow was starting to fall as a storm approached from the south, and this storm is remembered as “The Hundred Hour Snow.” It stalled off the coast and just dumped snow hour after hour. Many places received more than thirty inches. Most fell on the 25th, but it kept right on falling and accumulating until the 28th, and we had no school until Friday that week.
In essence, after February 7, we had a total of five days of school in three weeks. I was not inclined to be an Atheist any more.
I wish I had jotted some entries in my “private files” during that time, but I had gone from being too paralyzed to write to being too busy to write. Schools might have been closed, but that did not keep me from trotting two miles to Izzy’s house, or keep Izzy from trotting two miles to mine. We had turned sixteen just weeks apart, and were basically boys in men’s bodies, seething with energy. Often what we then did was walk fast together, peppering every telephone pole we passed with snowballs, and talking as fast as we walked, which was activity which likely would look boring in a journal, but had a satisfaction all its own, difficult to describe.
Only one of our shenanigans can I distinctly recall.
The combined snow of two storms was very deep, especially where it had drifted. The first storm’s snow had a thick crust on top, which made it possible to walk through the second storm’s snow, until you broke through the crust. Then the snow was up to your crotch and your feet didn’t even touch the ground. For some insane, adolescent reason this situation challenged Izzy and myself to jump three stories down from a roof into a deep drift. It took us a while to work up our nerve, but when we finally jumped we jumped together, and even from that height our feet didn’t touch the ground. However we then faced an unforeseen problem. We were stuck in snow up to our armpits like nails into a board. It took considerable struggle and time to extract ourselves.
That was the sort of “life lesson” we learned together. It was much more than I ever learned at school, however Izzy was different, because he did his homework and did learn from school. Also Mr. Joyson wasn’t entirely certain he wanted Izzy hanging around with me, learning my sort of “life lesson”.
It wasn’t until the end of March that another entry appears in the journal.
Sunday March 31st, 1969 Well its been 2 months since I wrote last. A auful lot has happened. We had 5 no school days with two record snow storms. A lot of stuff happened but I'm not going to talk about it. ...Yesterday was a blast. I went and saw "The night they raided Minskies" , a C+ movie, with Izzy. After that we ate at a a Italian place. When I walked in a girl said "Hey, the barber shop is across the street", I said, "Well actually I'm to poor get a hair cut". Another said "I'll give you one for 50¢. I said, "O.K." She said "Well, er, uh..." It was a real friendly exchange. Later we got mildly drunk and we went For a joy ride. It was sleeting and the road was slippery. Once I almost went off the road. Izzy scared my balls off by pushing the button that makes the garage door open automaticly. I thought It was my stepfather. He would kill If he found out I was joy riding. Today was beautiful but rather boring. Tomorrow is monday but I'm not to depressed.
I should note that our interest in the movie was adolescent. Largely the theme was above our heads, but a woman did appear bare breasted, which was unheard of in movies we saw up to that time, which demonstrates how puritanical our society was.
My “long hair” likely barely covered the tops of my ears, and was more likely due to simple neglect than any desire to look like a hippy or make any sort of political statement. The fact I dared banter with the girls at the “Italian place” shows how I needed to escape my town and school, before I so much as dared to talk.
“Mildly drunk” likely means Izzy and I secreted a bottle of my stepfather’s beer from the refrigerator and shared it. It was typical of Izzy to play the sort of prank he did by hitting the button in the car that opened the garage door. I recall how horrified I was, and telling Iz to duck down below the dashboard, and him laughing. Lastly, the reason the following Sunday was “beautiful but rather boring” was likely (at least partially) due to Izzy staying home and doing his homework.
Two weeks of silence in the diary is then followed by the first mention of Florida. The journey is called “my third Take-Off” because the summer before I’d been on two adventures; first I hitchhiked to Nantucket, and later I hitchhiked to friends up in Canada.
The Beat goes On Sunday April 13, 1969 Well I took the first step on my third Take-off today. I sent a letter to my grandparents telling them I might come and visit and asking them if I could. If I'm lucky they'll get the letter and send back a reply before friday. I plan to leave on Saturday but I can go on Sunday. I'm wicked mixed up about going. I sorta want to lie in bed all vacation and have to forse myself to go out and do something. Today --- in fact this whole weekend I spent raking the lawn. I think I might have got a slight tan. Shit thats all.
“The lawn” was a considerable area of grass inside my stepfather’s circular drive, holding four apple trees. I may not have done my homework but I was not without usefulness.
“A tan” was a status symbol in that wealthy town during the winter and spring. It suggested you had traveled to the tropics.
I became busier than I ever became doing homework, preparing for my adventure. I carefully packed several changes of cool weather clothes and warm weather clothes, meticulously plotted out my route in a road atlas, and also worked making an elaborate hitchhiker’s sign I could alter as I progressed southward. The top placard read “Florida” in large letters with “via” in smaller letters beneath it. Then, attached to the upper placard by two loose-leaf-folder rings, were a whole series of placards with the names of cities on them. Therefore my sign would read “Florida via NYC” until I reached New York City, where I’d change the sign to read “Florida via Philladelphia”. In Philladelphia I’d change the sign to read “Florida via Baltimore”, and so on and so forth all the way down the coast. On my way back I would flip the top sign over, so it read “Boston via” and the reuse all the bottom signs on my way north.
I hoped the trip would take three days each way but planned on four. If it took four days I’d only stay a day at my grandparents. On the road I planned to stay at YMCA’s, which cost $5.00 a night, and back then you could get a decent meal for under a dollar, but I wanted a little extra so I planned on $5.00 a day for food. I took $80.00 from my savings account to cover the nine day vacation, and hid $60.00 in my right shoe.
Friday, April 18, 1969 Well, I'm going tomorrow and shit it pouring. Its suppose to rain tonight and all tomorrow. I'm wicked scared about having to stand in the rain all day tomorrow. I have to get a ride far enough south so I'll be out of the rain. I'm leaving tomorrow at 7:00. I want to get to Richmond tomorrow. That's about 600 miles. ------- April 18 Izzy came over at 7:30 and I havent been able to get to sleep early like I wanted to. Hell, its been fun as all get out but I need the sleep. While I've been trying to write he has been playing my tape recording. Also I strained my back today and I want to soak it. Shit, its 11:45, I've got to get toget tosleep. I hope it stops raining.
Saturday April 19, 1969
Right now I'm in Richmond Va. at
the Y.M.C.A. I made a all time distance
record for me today.
I got up at 6:00 and talked with
Izzy. (He stayed over night because it rained
to hard for him to ride his bike home.) I ate
breakfast, said bye to Iz, and took off.
Pop drove me to the Mass Pike, gave me 5$
extra, and left.
Suddenly I was alone, standing in the
drizzle, wondering what the hell I was
doing. It just didn't make any sence.
Why was I giving up a quiet restful
vacation for an uncomfterble stand in the
rain? I didn't really know
I went on writing until nearly midnight, stopping only for a sandwich, penning seven more pages meticulously detailing the 9 rides it took to reach Richmond, describing people and the landscapes, and calculating my miles-per-hour and miles-per-ride. But, beyond now pointing out, 54 years later, that this was the same self who seldom passed in homework, (and, when he did, seldom passed in more than a paragraph), I’ll leave the rest of the entry for the next part of this story. I prefer to end with the above because I simply like the writing. A different me had mysteriously appeared.
The post is continued here:
Sunrise's Swansong 