Fish in a Jar

It's the first warm Sunday of Spring, and we have all gone to Patapsco State Park, just outside of Baltimore. The grownups unload the "machines," their radiators hissing from the long hot ride. I run off immediately, up the Cascade Trail until I get to the big rock. Its granite surface is wet and cold, despite the heat of the day, and the ground around it is mossy, a bright green coat of fur fed by the water that seeps through the hills above and creeps out from under the huge boulder. I run my hand across a dry patch of the rough surface and scrape the sweat of the ride from my palm, which quickly turns red and alive with an itching sensation.

A sheet of spider silk fans out like a miniature trampoline across a crevice of the rock. I bend closer and peer at the spider that sits patiently in a walled-in corner, at the mouth of the silken funnel that serves as its shelter. One of its spindly legs is extended forward, resting on the surface of the web, waiting for the vibration that will telegraph the news that something alive—food—has fallen into its trap.

A large black ant comes into my view and meanders across the stone surface. It stops suddenly, frozen in place, inches from the edge of the spider's web. I realize that my heart is beating rapidly, and my hand shakes as I reach slowly toward the ant. I place a finger on the rock, behind the ant, and slide it slowly toward the unsuspecting insect. I hold my breath and then quickly flick the ant into the web. With a speed that startles me, the spider leaps out of its lair and pounces on the ant. Within seconds its victim is wrapped in silk, no longer recognizable, and the spider draws the small white package to its face and pierces the silk shroud with its fangs. I slowly relax the tension in my hunched shoulders and look around. I’m alone. No one has seen what I did.

From the rock I follow the trail of the water until it no longer just soaks the ground, but now flows visibly in a narrow channel until it joins the stream. I look downstream, see no one, and take off my shoes and socks. I roll my pants up to my knees and go into the water, not much above my ankles but still, in the water! The wet and the chill excite me. I'm free to be wet—to jump in the water. To splash. To "make a mess." I don't care if I get wet—I want to get wet—but I need to leave time for my pants to dry in the sun before I return to the family.

The water feels so good.

And the rocks under my bare feet—like scratching a year-long itch.

There are fish in the water, just an inch or two long: thin minnows, a single lengthwise stripe black against an olive gray body. I'm going to catch one. I've brought my empty mayonnaise jar with a long string tied around its neck. I place a small piece of bread inside and carefully submerge the jar so that all the air gets out. And then I wait.

I sit patiently on a rock in the stream, and though it rises a few inches above the surface the water splashes over it periodically as the main current parts and swirls around it. After a while I can feel the wet coming through my pants, and then through my underwear. It feels good on my skin, cold and tingly.

I close my eyes and rest my forehead on my knees.

Something nibbles at my toes. I open my eyes and look into the water. A fish swims against the stream, toward the mouth of the jar, and barely pokes its head into the opening. I wait, but it does not enter and when I move my foot it quickly darts away. Two more fish approach and then a tiny one swims inside the jar and begins to pick at the bread. My heart jumps with indecision. Should I pull the jar up and trap this fish, or wait for a larger one? Will a larger one come?

I decide; I pull the string and raise the neck of the jar from the surface of the water. The fish darts frantically within, trapped by the glass walls. I hold the jar to my forehead, and my eyelashes brush against its surface. I've never been this close to a live fish before. I feel as if I am in the water with it. Sunlight reflects from the scales, scintillates as the fish moves about quickly. I watch for a while.

Then a bird cries out from an oak tree nearby. I’m startled, and when I look up I see a bluejay fly from one tree to the next. It hardly has to flap its wings. It glides so smoothly.

I wish I could fly. I wonder what it feels like to be so free.

I lower the jar into the stream and carefully tip the water out so that my captive fish can leave without injury. I return to the family. My aunts are gathered around the picnic tables, laughing and putting food away into containers. My uncles are spilling pots of water onto the embers in the fire pit below the grill, putting out the last of the fire. Helping with the cleanup.

My mother asks where I was. “No place” seems to satisfy her, but only for a moment. “Your pants are wet,” she says. I don’t respond, and she hands me a bag stuffed with garbage—paper plates, watermelon rinds—and nods toward the trashcan closest to our picnic tables. It is a big steel drum, almost as tall as I am, swarming with hornets feasting on the remains of the picnics of the day. I get as close as I dare, about three feet from the can, and hurl the bag toward the opening. I watch to make sure that it goes in, and then I run from the bees that fly up as the trash crashes down on them.

The cars are being readied for the return. The trunks are open, the packaged leftovers, the unopened soda bottles, are being stacked into every available space. I carefully place my empty jar between some bags of potato chips.

I get into the back seat of the car, end up wedged between a cousin and an aunt, and then after the long ride home I go to my room and close the door. I read some comics for a while, and when my mother calls to ask if I want something to eat I say, “No; I don't want anything.”

I just want to be alone with the memory of my day. I think about the ant, and the fish, and the bird, wondering: which one am I?

                                                          

The Candle is Flickering Low

The Candle is Flickering Low

When I think of my childhood summers in Baltimore in the 1940s I remember three things: the oppressive heat, lightning bugs, and the Baltimore Orioles. It seemed like we had all three every night.

After supper, everyone went outside. No one had air conditioning. The grownups dragged folding chairs to the sidewalk or—if they had them—to their front porches, and sat and talked, hoping for an occasional breeze as the evening moved from twilight to darkness. I played games in the street with my friends, usually stickball, until it was too dark to see well.

We had a simple method of defining when it was too dark: when the lightning bugs came out. That usually ended stickball, and set off the next game: capturing the lightning bugs and placing them in jars. When we had enough, or just enough collecting, we screwed the tops onto our jars. The tops had a bunch of holes punched in them, too small for the bugs to get out, but large enough that they could breath. Later, when we had to go inside, we would each put our jar in the refrigerator. In the morning we would take the streetcar over to Johns Hopkins University, to the Biology Lab, where we would be paid a penny a bug for that night’s catch.

We were paid—in cash, of course—by the secretary of the Biology Department who told us that the bugs were part of a research program being carried out by a Dr. McElroy. We never saw him—it didn’t matter—we were interested in the pennies. I did meet him forty years later, when I joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, and he was the Chancellor. I introduced myself to him and told him that this was the second time that he was my “boss.” In response to his quizzical look, I explained that I was one of hundreds of kids in Baltimore who had supplied him with lightning bugs.

Lightning bugs are a pretty dim memory now. It’s not just the memory that’s going—the bugs themselves have all but disappeared. The recollection of another flicker remains though—a candle, and an imaginary one at that. The flame flutters and that visual image creates sounds—names—that dance across my memory.

Howitzer Howie Moss

Fireman Johnnie Podgajny

Sherm Lollar

They were the Baltimore Orioles of 1944. They were the best team in the International League—the gateway to the Major Leagues for most players at that time.

But I’m off the track. It’s the candle. Its creator was the radio announcer for the Orioles: Bill Dyer. In the forties, Dyer managed the Baltimore Bullets professional basketball team. At the same time, he was doing Orioles games on WITH Radio. In the summer, when the Orioles had a game at night, every radio in the neighborhood was on. And on the usually hot and humid nights, the grownups were in their chairs on the sidewalks, or on their porches. The radios were in windows facing the outside, and the men listened to the game. CBS Newsman Charles Osgood says that as a nine year old, he would walk through his Baltimore neighborhood and all the houses had their windows open, the Orioles game was on, and you could walk from place to place and not miss the game.

We didn’t walk. We sat on the steps, cheering the team to victory.

It did not matter to us that the Orioles were not a major league team. They were “our” team—“dem Birds.” And we got to see players a year or two before they “went up” to the Majors. I can still remember the names of the other teams in the International league at that time: the Newark Bears, the Jersey City Giants, the Syracuse Chiefs, the Rochester Redwings and the Buffalo Bisons. And since it was called the International League, there were the two Canadian teams: the Montreal Royals and the Toronto Mapleleafs.

Some nights, the game progressed very slowly. So much so, that when our bedtime came around, the game was only in the seventh or eighth inning. That did not prevent me from hearing the rest of the game, however, because I had a radio at the side of my bed. It was an old Philco model, with a wooden cabinet about two feet tall, and shaped like a bullet. 

I would get in bed, turn out the lights, turn on the radio and listen to Bill Dyer “call” the game. My radio was old, and the reception of the radio signal was not very strong. To compensate for that, the radio had an antenna—a long copper wire that snaked out from the back of the cabinet. Normally, you would attach the free end of the antenna to a nail banged into the wall somewhere near the ceiling of the room. Mom didn’t allow nail banging in my room. But Dad had taught me that I could transform myself into a human antenna. All I had to do was wrap the uninsulated end of the wire around one finger, and I became the radio antenna. I imagined the radio waves channeling through my body. They tingled—or at least I thought I felt something.

Regardless of what I felt, I heard Bill Dyer “calling” the game. He was a master at baseball radio, and especially when the game was not played in Baltimore, but in one of the other International League cities. Years later I learned that when the team played out of town he was not at the field with them. He was in Baltimore, in the WITH radio studio, at the receiving end of a teletype machine. Someone paid by WITH was at the game, say in Buffalo, and he would type the results of each “at bat” as the progressed. For example, he might type: Lollar at bat. Called strike one. Ball one, LOW. Ball two, INSIDE. Swinging strike two. Fly out to deep left field.

These words were transmitted over a telephone connection, and they then appeared in Baltimore, at the WITH studio, typed in a line on a long, continuous ribbon of narrow paper tape that issued from a kind of a typewriter (the receiving end of the teletype machine). With that tape in hand, Dyer would report the action. But his genius lay in how he embellished the bare facts.

What we heard was:

“Lollar steps up to the plate. He knocks the dirt out of his cleats. Here’s the first pitch.” (Dyer’s voice would rise in excitement.) “It’s called a strike! Lollar didn’t like that call very much.” There would be a short pause. “The pitcher takes the signal. Here’s the windup. The pitch. Ball one.”

Dyer had a selection of recorded crowd noises. When appropriate you would hear fans cheering or booing. You could hear someone selling hot dogs in the aisles. And finally, at least for Sherm Lollar that inning:

“The count is two and two. Here’s the pitch. Lollar hits one to deep left field. It may be out of here. Vitelli is racing to the wall. He leaps. He’s got it. Lollar kicks the dirt in disgust. This inning is over for the Birds.”

Baseball radio announcers were known by their voices, but they also had distinctive phrases that they would use for certain actions of the game. For example, if the batter hit a long drive toward the bleachers, one announcer might say “That one’s headed for the pastures!” while another would shout “It’s going, going, GONE! A home run!”

When the Orioles played “at home,” in Baltimore, then Bill Dyer was at the game in the “announcers booth.” This was no more than a crude wooden shack behind home plate, at the top of the stands. There was no window—just a wooden board that was hinged at the top, swung up by a rope, to make an opening through which Dyer watched and called the game.

If the Orioles were behind in the late innings, and would get a man or two on base, the crowd would hope for a few runs to move them ahead. Dyer had a small red wooden chair in the booth. He would lean out through the opening holding the chair in one hand, shake it in the air, and arouse the fans to chant for a rally. The “little red chair” was Dyer’s trademark as an announcer.

For the “away” games, since he was in the WITH studio, he did not have his red chair with him. There was no need for it, since he had no live audience on hand. For those games, Dyer had another method for fomenting a “come from behind” victory for the Orioles. He would announce that it was time for some runs, that the Birds needed a rally, and tell the listeners that he was walking in a circle around his red chair. Of course we could “see” this as we listened to his running commentary on the game. We thought the chair was magic, because every time Dyer performed this ritual of the chair, the Orioles would score several runs and move ahead in the game. It never failed!

Years later, as an adult, I learned that Dyer simply looked at the teletyped summary of the game coming off of the machine, peeked ahead at the section of the game that had already occurred but that he had not yet announced, saw that there was going to be a rally, and then “predicted” it—we thought he made it happen—for his excited radio fans.

And what if the Orioles were not able to come from behind and win the game? Then Dyer primed us for the loss. In dramatic, somber, tones he prepared us for the end of the game and its sad outcome.

“It doesn’t look good for the Birds tonight, folks. The candle is flickering low.”

To a young boy alone in bed in the dark, the room lit only by the dull orange glow from the station dial on the front of the radio, the image of the failing, flickering candle was very strong.

“The candle is flickering low.”

And when it was extinguished for the night, when the game had ended with disappointment, I unwrapped the copper wire from my “antenna finger,” turned off the radio, and went to sleep.

Oakford at War

Oakford at War

We knew about the war. We were old enough to read and make some sense out of the newspaper. The comic books were certainly full of it—at least the ones I read.

 The radio serials—Hop Harrigan, Captain Midnight, and even Tom Mix—simply incorporated the war into the neighborhood, the city, the ranch. My friends and I chased each other with toy pistols, making guttural gun noises (not BANG! like our little brothers did) and arguing and fighting about whether we were shot. When it rained we sat on each other's porches and built models of P47 Thunderbolts and P38 Lightnings, stretching the delicate thin tissue paper over fragile balsa wood ribs. Our tongues tripped uncomfortably and self-consciously over words like dihedral angle and bulkhead. 

We were able to identify enemy aircraft from the silhouette sheets included in the model kits.  Our vocabularies expanded to even more uncomfortable words. We knew the German divebomber, the Junkers Stuka; the Japanese fighter plane, the Mitsubishi Zero—the “Zeke.”

 

Messerscmitt ME 109

Junkers JU 87 “Stuka”

Mitsubishi Zero

Each of our homes had "blackout" shades, ours on the big windows in our sun parlor that faced Oakford Avenue, and every few weeks there was an air raid practice. I asked my father why the shades were green if they were for "blackout." He taught me the word "opaque." Sometimes the air raid practice would come after I had gone to bed, and I would lie there wondering if the plane flying over our house was a Messerschmitt ME 109. I looked at the empty bed next to mine. My big brother was in the Army Air Force. I could draw a Boeing B17 without looking at a picture.

The war movies and the newsreels filled us with the images and sounds of bombing raids, and of men running—half-crouched—through woods and fields. Some of these men were our fathers, or our uncles, or our older brothers. We could never recognize their faces on the screen. Everything was too grainy, too fast, too scary. We talked about the war in school, on the playground, at Cub Scouts. But we learned to avoid “war talk” around Johnny Frazier—at least for a while—after his father's submarine disappeared in the Pacific.

Playing at war didn't seem quite substantial enough to me. There was no blood. We fell to the ground, clutching our stomachs, shouting lines heard at the movies, but making sure not to scrape our faces in the dirt. And then, in June and July of 1945, in that last summer of the war, we learned to become authentic—methodical—killers. We destroyed the Japanese in our own version of the War of the Roses.

I lived in an apartment building. Sylvan Richter lived across the alley, on Ridgewood Avenue. His house had a porch, and a long yard to the street. And all along the pavement to the front steps, Sylvan's mother grew roses.

The roses were also victims of the Japanese. Japanese beetles wearing iridescent purple and brown armor had invaded Baltimore, chewing holes in the leaves and petals of every rose bush that lined the walks to our homes. And we fought back.

The beetle traps were metal cans, painted a bright yellow or green, hung from hooks at the tops of long metal rods staked into the dirt at the foot of each bush. We didn't know what was inside the cans—just that it was "poison" and we were not to touch it. Of course we did touch it. And smell it!

 A strange odor emanated from the cans—a mix of gasoline and sweet perfume. The beetles were attracted to the aroma, and they entered the traps through holes that ringed the top of each can. In the morning we would look into the bottom of the trap and see a mass of drowned, poisoned beetles. What satisfaction—we were winning the war. But for some of us it was too passive a victory. We were not content on the sidelines, counting the kill. We went on the attack.

We were capable of such cruelty. Did the war do that to us? I don't think so. It was the recognition, at a gut level, that we had no control over our lives.  We were eight and nine years old, but we knew that someone—something—was pulling our strings and we flopped helplessly at the ends.

It was easy to capture a Japanese beetle. There were two methods. With care, you could pick a beetle off of a leaf between your thumb and forefinger, gripping it by its sides. It was a delicate task. If your grasp was off just a bit, the beetle was able to turn sideways and grab on to your finger. Beetle legs were clawed and strong. You could not separate the beetle easily from its hold on the ridges of your fingerprints. There were two choices at that point. One was to transfer the beetle into the palm of your other hand and keep it trapped within a loose fist. This could lead, after a while, to a handful of scrabbling beetles, tickling and squirming to break free.

The alternative was to take the single beetle, still between two fingers, and throw it onto the cement pavement—to disable it. This was rarely successful. If the beetle's grip were strong enough it would not be flung easily to the ground. Instead, it would be released from between our fingers at a much-reduced speed, and it would fly away before it reached the walkway.

We honed our skills through the spring and into the hot Baltimore summer. We learned that the beetles were lethargic early in the morning. We belted our holsters to our waists and crept through the jungles of the neighborhood. We met under the wooden back porch of 4008 Oakford Avenue and compared prisoners.

The beetles were transferred to small cardboard cartons—usually the boxes that our mother's kitchen matches came in. In answer to the periodic question—why are all the wooden matches loose in the sink drawer?—we just shrugged without even looking up from our comic books. The beetles scrabbled, agitated, within their prison, and we prepared our "flame-throwers."

Our garages, our basements, were virtual arsenals in the war against the beetles. We had access to paint thinner, lighter fluid, gasoline—if it burned we brought it. In small quantities so that it wouldn't be missed. The boxes containing the "prisoners of war" were placed in a pile and we sat, usually three or four of us, cross-legged, surrounding them. We couldn't stand; the headroom under the porch was no more than three feet, and in places much less. If we stood we were at risk of hitting our heads on the support rafters of the porch, or worse. The underside of the wooden decking was the breeding ground for huge black and gray spiders. They sat in dusty webs waiting for ants, bees, roaches...and small boys playing at war.

We soaked the boxes with the flammable liquids. The intensity of the scrabbling rose to an easily heard frantic scratching. One of us, assigned as a lookout, gave the "all clear" signal. No mother was on the porch above. We opened our matchbooks. We did not close the cover before striking. Flaming matches were tossed into the middle of our circle. With a low "woof" the flammable vapor exploded and the small containers began to burn. We shouted obscenities at the "Japs" and elbowed each other. We were doing our job.

I don't know what the others felt, but I was scared—there was a scrabbling inside my stomach, as if a beetle was in there, clawing to get out. Our outward reactions were varied. We shared the need to be quiet so that we would not attract attention from above, but the excitement of the moment usually overtook us. I remember making bombing noises as I tossed matches into the fire. Sylvan always whined like the siren that announced the air raid practices.

 Johnny Frazier never made a sound; he stared at the pile of destruction until the last flame went out. 

And we glanced at him quickly and then away, and recorded in lasting memory his silence, and though we were just boys we understood that he was the only one among us who knew what the war was all about.

About this Blog

These are stories about time and space. The time is the 1940s—the time of my childhood. The space is just a few square miles of Baltimore. It is a space filled with images that bring back the memories that I share with you here.

Don’t Fence Me In

Some images from childhood come back with such strength, and so without warning, that I startle at their sudden appearance. It’s as if a gust of wind has blown 1940 into my face—stinging me with recollection. It begins with the picture of me on a pony. I’m about three years old, and the picture is taken in front of the house that we lived in at that time, at 4015 Oakford Avenue.

There is a section of the stone wall of the house, a little above the pony’s head, that draws my attention. It’s a small portion where several larger stones came together, leaving an odd-shaped space that needed to be filled in with smaller pieces. 

Whenever I come across this photograph, I always look for this special place. I see a triangle, pointed down, with a short horizontal piece of cement through the middle of it, and it seems out of place with the general pattern of the stonework on this wall. You probably would never notice it, or if you did you wouldn’t give it much thought. So you might wonder why it came to my attention at all. Certainly, when I was three years old, I was not noticing geometrical patterns in the world around me, and cataloging them as like or unlike. It reminds me of the visual “intelligence” tests that display five pictures and ask you to pick out which one is different from the other four.

The answer to this mystery has to do with how often I looked at that wall. And that’s part of another mystery: why did we live in so many different places within one block of this house?

The boy on the pony was a popular image in the 1940s, so much so that each summer a photographer would walk the neighborhoods with his (I guess, rented) pony and offer to take pictures of the children. This was an era when people did not travel much, and in my neighborhood this was even more the case because there was no extra money for vacation trips. I think that in putting their children on a pony, the parents could pretend that the family had the mobility that they saw in the movies about other people whose lives were more exciting—more interesting—because they could go on vacations “out West,” or even to South America. Popular songs of that era had titles like “Don’t Fence Me In,” and “I Love the Wide Open Spaces.”

Here’s the beginning of “Don’t Fence Me In”:

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,

Don’t fence me in.

Let me ride through the wide open spaces that I love,

Don’t fence me in.

We didn’t ride wild horses through the wide open spaces. From Oakford Avenue we took the trolley down Garrison Boulevard to Liberty Heights Avenue. And for the first seventeen years of my life, I was fenced inside a very narrow portion of Baltimore. If I take an old map of my neighborhood, and draw the boundaries that I stayed inside of, the map looks like this:

I was born in 1936 in Baltimore  in a house on Fairview Avenue. If you look at the 1935 map above, the number 1 in a circle is at Fairview Avenue. Shortly after my birth, we moved to an apartment at 4006 Oakford Avenue (Number 5). Then it was directly across the street to 4015 Oakford (that’s Number 3). Not long after, we moved around the corner to Number 2, an apartment on Garrison Boulevard, between Oakford and Ridgewood Avenues.

The next stop was 4125 Woodhaven Avenue (number 4), just a few blocks from my birthplace. And then, at the age of four or five, back to Oakford Avenue (4008, next door to 4006) and directly across the street from 4015. So much directly across the street that for the next ten years, when I looked out the front sunparlor window, I faced the house of my pony picture. Yes. We stayed in one place for ten years—a family record.

The commercial center of this neighborhood was the corner of Liberty Heights and Garrison. To give an idea of how confined this region was, I could start at that corner and walk along Garrison Boulevard to either extreme—north to Oakford or south to Woodhaven—in about ten or fifteen minutes.

I began kindergarten at PS 69, and then after sixth grade went three and a half blocks south to PS 42 (Garrison Junior High School) for the next three years. When I finished ninth grade we moved to Windsor Hills (number 6). We stayed there for two years and then moved back to Fairview Avenue (number 7), right across the street from my birthplace. A year later in the summer after my high school graduation, we moved again, not quite back to Oakford Avenue, but close enough (number 8).

The upper (northern) boundary is Ridgewood Avenue, just one block past Oakford. Practically everything I did was below that border. Going down the map from there, my friends and I played games on the fields of the three schools within a few blocks of Oakford Avenue. The red line drawn across the middle is Liberty Heights Avenue. At the left-hand end of Liberty Heights were the movie theatres, the Gwynn and the Ambassador (the purple and green dots), that were our main sources of amusement, especially in the winter months. At the other end, just off the corner of Liberty Heights and Garrison, was the third movie house, the Forest Theatre (the blue dot).

By and large, when I look at this map with the artificial boundaries that I’ve drawn onto it, I am looking at the fenced-in history of the first seventeen years of my life. The first time that I flew on an airplane was not until after we had moved away from this area. During this time I did not ride through the wide open country that I love. I walked about in a narrow neighborhood of Baltimore. But even though I was fenced in geographically, I had an imagination that let me roam wherever I wished to travel.

I did not know that I was confined. Do you wonder how that could be? The answer is: I was very busy. I fought and won a war against Germany and Japan. With my radio I soared with Superman and rode the range with Tom Mix. I listened to the Baltimore Orioles play baseball in exotic places like Buffalo, New York. I studied the life cycles of spiders and ants and butterflies. An entire world opened up to me, and I was so deep inside it—so busy looking and listening—that I could not see any fences. Sixty-five years later, I can draw lines on a map. Sixty-five years ago, there was no map.

The stories that follow tell about what the 1940s in Baltimore were like for me.