By Hugh McClintock
One more corner to turn and I’ll be lurching toward 80 years of age. Of course, I look to be only, oh, I’d say, 58.
OK, 58 is out-and-out laughable. Remember, however, that persons who freelance newspaper columns are naturally inclined to slightly exaggerate — it goes with the territory.
Nowadays, I tend to hark back on my youth. Actually, harking back is one of the few activities I’m still pretty good at.
I’ve taken up bowling again, and that hasn’t worked at all. True, I’ve gotten over the endless pointing and guffawing of fellow keglers, but I’ve had to lower my sights. Now I become smugly ecstatic if it appears I’ll break a hundred by the eighth frame. I don’t let that emotion show, however, as boasting doesn’t become me. Or is it, “doesn’t befit me?” Never mind.
The last physically strenuous recreation I engaged in was snow skiing. I was in my late 20s, single and employed by now-defunct Douglas Aircraft Co. In the ’60s, Douglas had a missile-engineering facility in Culver City, Calif., where I worked. The San Bernardino Mountains — the San Berdues, as us West Coast hipsters always referred to that span of uprisings — were barely 90 minutes away by auto. Most of the slopes were suitable for beginners, which was right up my alley.
What I remember most about skiing those gentle slopes was trudging along in drawn-out lines, either inching toward a food stand to buy a Coke and hotdog, or frittering away long minutes waiting to latch onto a ski-lift tow-rope, or idly watching skiers schussing down one of the few slopes that was steep enough to test a mountain goat. As usual, I enviously observed those schussers from the tail end of a long queue ending at the opening to a rickety shelter serving as a men’s latrine.
Oh yes, I also remember implausibly colliding with my buddy’s girlfriend about halfway down a bunny slope. Both she and I were trying to get the hang of skiing, and we could only change direction by a beginner’s maneuver called snowplowing. So, of course, we plowed into each other. Her boyfriend zipped by and augured in from laughing so hard. Tuck, the nickname he went by, also worked at Douglas Aircraft in Culver City. Tuck and Jen married that summer.
About this time I began dating Nellie, my now departed wife. Nellie had lots of spunk, but she wasn’t favored with any semblance whatsoever of skiing equilibrium. This I found out the first time we tried skiing one of the beginner slopes at San Berdue. Pigs could ice skate backwards better. In any event, I soon lost interest in snow skiing and incautiously took up the far more hazardous sport of wooing. In that game, as a pal liked to remind me, I hit the jackpot and Nellie won the booby prize.
After residing for some 20-odd years in the seasonally whimsical weather of northwestern Pennsylvania, not to mention spending one year of a four-year Air Force hitch at Seoul Airbase during the Korean War (or whatever politically correct name that conflict now goes by), Southern California, the traffic notwithstanding, was Shangri-la, utopia, Eden. A wit once said newcomers to Southern California need only to fix a thermometer to the dashboard of their car, drive east from the Pacific Ocean until the temperature suits their lifestyle, and stake out a homestead. Nor does that observation miss the mark by much. Roughly, the ambient beach temperatures of California’s southern coastal cities stay in the low 70s much of the year, but 10 or so miles inland temperatures can easily reach 90 degrees.
I left college — graduated, as astonishing as that will sound to people who know me — in 1960, and headed straight for a job with the Douglas aircraft firm. That summer, for the first time, I swam in an ocean: the Pacific. The water was arctic cold, so chilly, especially when compared to a summer dip in Conneaut Lake or French Creek, that parts of me turned purple. And standing idly chest-deep in the Pacific Ocean produced more goose bumps on my flesh than bubbles on a sheet of bubble-wrap packing.
French Creek snaked its way southward about a half-mile or so west of our house in South Meadville, skewering the borough of Cochranton before emptying into the Allegheny River at Franklin. (I guess the community is still called South Meadville.) Regardless, you got there by following Liberty Street out of Meadville, past the crematory, as we called the nondescript building with the tall chimney where years ago Meadville refuse was incinerated, and then descending gradually on two-lane U.S. Route 322 (old Route 322) into the neighborhood itself. South Meadville was a great place to begin growing up, as I did for six years, from the fifth through the 10th grade of school.
Living in South Meadville was like residing in a home that’s favored with a backyard of woodlands, creeks and rolling country fields. What’s more, a quarter of a mile east of our back porch the railroad tracks of the (once mighty) Erie Railroad paralleled Route 322, the often busy highway that doubled as South Meadville’s main street — to our parents’ undying trepidation. Where better than the tracks of Erie Railroad to have your pennies and sometimes even a nickel crushed to tissue thinness by a hulking steam locomotive? And the next day to proudly show those paper-thin compressions, now trinkets on a key chain, to skirted seventh-grade classmates? Never mind that the key chain was a grungy length of old dog leash. Or, that some of the flattened, one-time coins more resembled screw-on bottle lids than pocket change. The charm was in reciting the thundering, ground-shaking adventure to the young maidens, not in flaunting the treasure.
French Creek twisted its way south toward Franklin less than a half mile on the other side of the Erie railroad tracks, that is, less than a half mile west of the train tracks. Like most of the neighborhood kids, French Creek, that venerable, well-fished stream of varying girth and current, was where I learned to swim — for the most part involuntarily, which bouts of older-boy inhumanity to us young nippers I’ll describe in another column.
McClintock, a Conneautville resident, is the author of several books.
