Whatever Happened to What's That Place, Whoz It, and Whachacallit...?

Memoirs of a Geezer!

Reflections and Observations -- A Bright Passage from the Fantasies of Youth 

to Illuminations of Advanced Maturity!

This Episode:      Whatever Happened to What's That Place, Whoz It and Whachacallit..?


Where the heck's the Marine Bank?  I used to work in that building!  Is it gone?  What about my savings account?  (Maybe I never had one there!?)  And what about County Stadium?  I mean, I call and call, and no one answers!!  I want to purchase ducats for next season!!??

I guess it's all part of GeezerHood...  Longing for stuff and places familiar, things and locations we cherished. Goldmanns?  Is Goldmann's gone too??  I was gonna meet Ernie at the lunch counter for chicken fries and a pork cutlet...  maybe mashed spuds!!  

When I first got out of the military, I got a job as a VeriType operator, and had to buy a new suit from Goldmann's. Cost me maybe $26.00.  Oh, but I got caught in a rain storm getting off the Number 32 bus, and had to walk home.  When I arrived, the suit coulda fit maybe Donald Duck.  Oh well...  I still miss Goldmann's!  And I suppose no one uses a VeriType anymore!  And where do I get my $26.00 suits from, already!!??  No matter....  After about two weeks of VariTyper'ing, I burned my Donald Duck suit and took a job in road construction.  

Anyone seen Schuster's?  My Ma and them liked to shop by Schuster's!!  What's it now?  Lofts? A warehouse?  A bank, maybe a walk-in medical place?  We want it back!!  Oh, what the hell...  gone is gone!  Gimbels?    

Let's get back to County Stadium.  Oh...  Now it's Miller Park, is it?  I hear there's some insurance outfit wants to re-name even Miller Park!  What's it?  Scam Am Park or something?  Flam a-Damma-Ding-Dong Park?  I won't have it!!  I shall begin to refer to the stadium as "Effinger Park."  Maybe see if it'll catch on!!  I grew quite fond of Effinger Beer from Baraboo where Uncle Hackett allegedly regained his health drinking Effinger.  

Oh yeah!  Where the hell did they put Harry Brezhinski's tavern?  Used to be on Fratney and Hadley.  Where'd they put it?  People can't go around removing iconic saloons when one is expecting to stop in for a boomba and a shot of cheap whiskey!!  Something's gone terribly wrong, here!!  

And another thing!  I once had a  crummy but rustic office overlooking North Avenue, next to Farwell.  It also overlooked my favorite drug store and lunch counter...  What did they do with Oriental Drug??!  It's been 15, 20 places since then.  Multiple pizza parlors, and now a food court sort of thing!  Maybe they'll bring it back!?...  Oriental Drugs, I mean!

I suppose the Sport Bowl's gone too, what?  North Avenue and maybe 58th Street?  We used to watch Pat and Joey bowl there.  Although I sometimes complained about the bad carnauba wax they slathered on the alleys, I liked to sit at the bar on in the gallery drinking stubby bottles of Mueller Beer, or maybe shorty Pabst's.  (My own average was maybe 45...  Bowling, I mean!) Where do people go for bowling nowadays?  The Narrow Lane (no reference to the aforementioned bowling parlor, but close by for convenience...!) is also no longer in evidence on North Avenue!  A person turns around and everything familiar is gone!! 

Morry's on Prospect, the Koo Koo Club, Trail's End Lodge, George's Tap...  Meyer's Drug

Store and Lemon Phosphates...   Alright, already!  Maybe it's just GeezerHood and missing stuff, familiar addictions and places we liked to hang out!  Like Stoney Calhoun at that bar on 60th and North Avenue.  He played great country tunes, like Wildwood Flower, even though those were the only words in the whole song!  Oh well, the Oriental Theatre's still there.  The Downer too.  Oh yeah, and Zaffiro's!  We go there every year for our special holiday pizza fix.  It's the best.  Anyone seen or been to a "Ham 'n Egger" lately?

 

Sigh...  Guess it's the bane of those of us in the bosom of robust ("middle-plus-a-little") age.  We revel in former glories, allowing memories and thoughts of past pleasures and adventures to play like newsreels in the reverie of our imaginations.  Truth is, I like and embrace change.  Really!!!  But, no one says one can't float on the magic ship of recollection, sails unfurled, billowing...  

Hey!  Where did I park my '59 Oldsmobile with the moon hubcaps??!!  I better call somebody...  SweetHeart!!!...

Humbly Submitted, 02-26-19 -- Joel K.        

  

I don't know... Should Christmas Maybe be Optional...!!??

Memoirs of a Geezer!

Reflections and Observations -- A Bright Passage from the Fantasies of Youth 

to Illuminations of Advanced Maturity!

This Episode:      I don't know...   Should Christmas Maybe be Optional...!!??

Many years ago -- before becoming a curmudgeonly skinflint and a Geezer -- my dear mother asked me to go out and purchase a Christmas tree for her, then repair to her home and erect said holiday shrubbery, complete with stand and appropriate adornments.  (My father would have nothing to do with menial tasks or stoop labor!!)  Being a dutiful son and something of an imbecile, I agreed to the task.

The Infamous Quixotic
Quest:  "Demon Windmill"
of the "Tree Agonies"!...
"Sancho!  My Armor!!" 

After scouting various tree lots containing candidates considered too expensive -- guided by my mother's legendary frugality and explicitly-crafted instructions -- I finally acquired a traditional Blue Spruce that most would have passed by as misshapen, ziggedy-zag angular and somewhat "dented."  I felt the thing deserved either a good home or a decent burial, and thus I effected the purchase.

I lashed it atop my vehicle, ferried it to my mother's home and then -- discovering that the trunk was as large as a full grown pachyderm's leg -- I shaved the lower portion and then created a homemade base upon which it could stand in all of its repulsiveness.  I turned it completely around several times in a vain effort to find it's most pleasing "face" and then began the process of hooking precious heirloom ornaments and collectible gewgaws to its reedy boughs.  I refused to apply the tinsel that mother had saved year after year packed and pressed in old newsprint.  I opted instead for red and green garland, salvaged from needle-less trees discarded curbside in previous years by "extravagantly wasteful and foolish neighbors."  (Dear Ma-Ma' knew how to save a buck, like no one I've ever known!!) 

Now Don't Forget the Elephant
Referred to in Paragraph 3,
Best Beloved!  Uh!...
Why is He Laughing at Us??!!

 

Mother arrived home with a beam of pure delight upon her tired countenance, until she looked down upon the base.  "How is it supposed to get water?" she wisely asked.  

"Wonderful," I said in reply, the word dripping with sarcasm and boiling anger.  "I'm a much bigger idiot that I ever thought possible."     

"It'll be nude in a week," opined Mother...  needlessly adding, "without any water!"  

"I'll fix it," I replied, the phrase drenched in artificial optimism.  I found a bucket, the only vessel that would work.  "I'll have to trim the base," I said.  "I'll conceal the bucket under a shroud or a serape or something.  Just go and relax.  Watch some television. I'll have it right

"Oh Sonny-Boy-Genius, isn't that the
tree you salvaged last year from the
neighbor's curb?...  Oh my!...  Um,
how will the thing get water?"

as rain in a jiffy!"  I found the power saw and began the remedy.  I had no intention, of course, of un-decorating the tree.  No need!  Far too much effort.  (I did have to get on with my own terribly important business, after all!)  The vibration of the power saw caused several ornaments to fall and crash.  At one point, while kneeling and cleaning the carpet of the shattered shards of precious adornments, I accidentally kicked on the saw and watched helplessly as it tore through a portion of fine carpeting before digging a nice hole in the baseboard that had recently been stripped of several coats of hideous paint.

Mother was displeased.  Father suggested I had been sent by a communist cell to bankrupt and possibly assassinate senior members of the family.  It was at that point I began to realize Christmas and I were destined NOT to be jolly good chums over the long haul.  

That episode now just a "pleasant memory," my wife, Sweetheart, and I have been "scripting" an annual holiday battle.  It's become so routine that we are now able to recite our parts without printed copy or cue cards.  

This Guy?  Known throughout the
Land as "Papa Christmas"(?!)

Me:  "I'm embracing my Jewish half this year.  I can no longer stand the orgy of spending that Xmas has become.  I loathe and despise the whole damn business.  Where's my yarmulke?"

Sweetheart:  "You're going to celebrate Christmas and behave yourself.  You have children and grandchildren who love Christmas, and I want them to enjoy the season and our traditions, including Santa Claus, Muppet music, cookie baking, wrapped presents...!"

Me:  "I'm not putting up a tree.  Why can't you use the Sunday Comics to wrap stuff?  I'll have to work endlessly like a pyramid-builder to replace the money we're devouring.  Why can't the children each get a couple of bucks and some fruit for Christmas?!  They like fruit!"  

Sweetheart:  "Just be quiet.  Don't act like such a cheapskate.  You know how much you eventually love this time of year!  And the kids love it...  that's the important thing.  Where are the credit cards?"

And so it continues, year after year, season after season.  I'm thinking maybe we could ignore Christmas, maybe just every other year or something, like it really isn't on the calendar this time!  "They probly just forgot!!"  I'm not really the cheap piker some people think I am.  It's just that it makes me nervous.  Maybe we're overindulging the children.  What ever happened to nice cheap underwear and socks?  A dandy handkerchief?  A bow-tie that lights when you squeeze a rubber plunger in your pocket!!??

Today it's enormous buildings and space vessels made of little plastic bricks...  thousands of them!  Dolls that walk and drool and excrete and speak in complex sentences with a vocabulary as large as mine.  (And for a supercilious humbug I know lots of words!)

I got one of these back in '53 from
my dear old Grandmama...  Can't
see why anyone wouldn't want one!!
Happy Christmas, Everyone!!!

Well, alright, alright...   to keep peace in the family and on earth in general I'll succumb to the Xmas spirit.  I'll open my wallet and become as a sprinkling system showering coinage and currency and credit like water, feeding and nourishing the Macy's and the Gimbel Brothers and the Marshall Fields and the Goldmanns of Mitchell Street and hosts of other needy retailers desperate for cash and pleading righteously, of course, for their massive share of the nation's wealth. 

But next year, my dears, a new paradigm may present itself like a blazing star newly landed atop an Xmas conifer, and everyone gets a recycled rag doll or an old plastic toy truck and a small bag of salted peanuts...   Maybe a kumquat!

And just wait'll next year!  The rabbi will appear on my front porch with Hanukkah candles, matzo or other seasonal gifts, and then and we'll just see who's celebrating what!!...

...but, Hmmm...   maybe I've just been too far down a certain road...  Sleigh bells, drunken-red-

nosed Rangifer Tarandus, shrieking children peeking up the chimney looking for a corpulent, sooty, red-suited, unshaven, Ho-Ho-Ho'ing, bankrupting lunatic carrying a sack full of stuff and we all know who actually paid for it!  Ah, the joys of the Season!  I love it so!  (Or am I thinking of someone else??!)  I can hardly wait!  I'm fond of eggnog, even.  And there's a certain tentative cheerfulness that pervades the human psyche...  "Sweetheart!  Where did we put my Santa suit??!!"    

Humbly Submitted, 12-07-15 -- Joel K.