3) Another New Country

Our new home in Niagara Falls, USA was on 60th Street, the same as my birth year. Our house was detached, unlike the one on Jepson Street, which was a duplex. There was a hedge along the north side of the yard with a willow tree within it.

The owner of the house, Mrs. Scalzo, was the first American that I met. We drove down to the end of 60th Street so that I could see what would be my new school. We could not move into our house until November 1, 1968, so we stayed for two weeks in the nearby Fallsway Motel.

A most important possession of the time was a roll of string that I collected, I wound the string around a frame of metal and whenever I would come across a piece of string, I would tie it onto the end so that my collection of string would get ever-longer. I made sure that my string did not get misplaced when we moved.

Our new house faced west so that the sun shone through the window in late afternoon, in the same way as in our house back in England. The Great Lakes Carbon factory was nearby, as well as several other factories, and at night we could hear the sound of cars and trucks on the nearby 190 interstate highway.

Our move from the house in Canada to our house in the U.S. was barely four miles, going in a straight line. Our earlier move from our house in England to our house in Canada had been nearly 4,000 miles. But I had been too young then and this move was much more vivid and would have more of an effect on me. It may have been only four miles and I would still spend plenty of time on the Canadian side, but it was a move to a whole new country.

I was very impressed with my new school as my father took me to the office to get registered. My parents were English and kept talking of seeing the "head master" instead of the principal. The school was two-story and was constructed of pale green brick on one side and white brick on the other side. There were bathrooms and sinks in the classrooms and lockers for coats in the hallways. It was within easy walking distance of home, just as Valley Way School had been.

There was an indoor library on the second floor and next to it, a room with long tables called the All-Purpose Room, which was used for meetings and as a cafeteria. Outside, there was a set of monkey bars for children to climb on for exercise and also a paved basketball court. I had never heard of basketball before. There were two baseball diamonds, in the corners of the school grounds furthest from the school building.

This was a new country and there was some inevitable confusion. I was told to come back into school from the schoolyard from lunchtime when I heard the "bell" sound. On the first day, I did not go back in because it was the sound of an electric buzzer, rather than an actual bell, as it had been at Valley Way. We did not have recess at the new school like we did at Valley Way.

There were differences in spelling, American spellings often omit a U that is included in Canada and Britain. In Canada we lived near Sixth Avenue, but in America we lived on 60th Street.

Terminology was also different. What we called a "rubber" at Valley Way School was called an "eraser" here. This was the Sixties and the word "cool" was everywhere. I had never heard it previously. In Canada if a kid was acting silly, someone would tell him to "smarten up" but over here, I never heard anyone say that.

Going to school in America also meant learning about new places. I first heard that there was a place called Yonkers and I began the American childhood ordeal of learning to spell Mississippi. Although if we had stayed in Canada, it would have been Mississauga instead.

American students started the day by saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag that was in every classroom. Canada had not been as nationalistic.

I had never seen black people up close before. This was an era when "busing" was an issue in the U.S. and there were several black students in each class, although very few black people lived in the neighborhood. By the end of my first day in school, black people were just people like anybody else.

The surface on which the teacher writes is called a blackboard. In Valley Way School, the blackboards had actually been green. But here, they really were blackboards.

We sang songs in class, as we had on the Canadian side, but the songs were different. "Suwanee River" and "Clementine" were two new songs that were sung in class. Years later, as I was travelling around the U.S., I was surprised to find myself crossing the Suwanee River, I had thought that it was just a song and not a real place.

Finally, the school had a big indoor pool and swimming was a weekly activity. The scent of chlorine always reminds me of my first time in that pool. The pool was about the same size as the one in Leslie Park, but there we could only swim during the summer. I was used to swimming and received my red button for swimming accomplishment during my first week at the new school. Across the hall from the pool was a large gym, the gym had a stage so it could also be used as an auditorium.

My transition to our new country was helped by the girl that sat next to me in class. She watched what I was saying and nicely corrected me when necessary, such as informing me that a rubber was called an eraser here, before I used the wrong word to the teacher or to other students.

On one of my first class trips to the library in school, I had one of those life-changing experiences that come along every so often. I had heard about the Apollo Space Program, in which America was sending astronauts into space, gaining knowledge and experience and working toward the goal of putting men on the moon. I took out the book "Space" by Marian Tellander, a Follett beginning science book.

It was the first book that I ever actually read the words, instead of just looking at the pictures. Reading this book began my lifelong interest in both science, particularly space, and general reading. There was also a popular series of children's science books called the "How and Why Wonder Books".

I became deeply intersted in astronomy and space exploration. I read all that I could about it and learned all about the planets, why stars are different colors, how telescopes work and how a rocket uses stages to get to the moon. This was an era of great confidence in science and technology and extensive space travel seemed certain for the future. The distances involved in space were of an order that I had never imagined, distances to nearby planets were measured in millions of miles and distances to stars in light-years, the vast distance that a beam of light will travel in one year.

I got my parents to buy me a small telescope for Christmas so I could look into space for myself. The colored lights on the Christmas tree seemed to be a model of the different colors of stars. I also got a new train set, but now space was my main interest and I did not use it as much as I had the one on the Canadian side.

There was a big open field nearby, as well as a smaller one behind our house. It was where Home Depot and The Regal Cinema now stand. There was a large pond in the field with reeds that would freeze over during the winter and sometimes dry up altogether in summer. The pond was full of frogs and tadpoles (pollywogs). The smaller field behind our house had a small hill, several large rocks, a pile of broken pieces of concrete and, what was left of the foundation and parking lot of a motel that had been there long ago.

The rest of the field was long grass, goldenrod and, milkweed. Sometimes, as one was walking through it, a pheasant would fly up all of a sudden. An old dog from down the street named Bullet was often out there hunting rats.

I would spend hours looking around that field. One of the first things that I did after landing in the U.S. was to build a tepee from several pieces of wood as I had seen on television. I drew a map of the field and named some of the sections after the planets. People who lived nearby would throw their Christmas trees onto a pile and when they had dried out for a while, they would be burned in a bonfire.

A new country brought a new set of music. There was "Hush" by a band called Deep Purple.

"Classical Gas", an instrumental by Mason Williams

"Hair" by The Cowsills

"98.6" by Keith

"Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf (These were the Sixties and a "Magic Carpet Ride" was, of course, a euphemism for a drug trip.)

A band with the unusual name of "1910 Fruitgum Company" had a hit with "1,2,3 Red Light".

There was a heavy rock song that seemed to be made for people doing drugs called "In A Gadda Da Vida" by Iron Butterfly.

A Spanish band, Los Bravos, did "Black Is Black".

The Beatles had one of their biggest hits with "Hey, Jude". They also had "Fool On The Hill" at the time we were moving to the U.S. That song was later done by the Brazilian Sergio Mendes.

Every weekday morning after we landed in America in the autumn of 1968, the morning children's show, Rocketship 7, would be on Channel 7. The theme of "I Love Lucy" always seemed to be on and there was a frontier adventure serial, "Daniel Boone". There were cartoons that I was already familiar with like Popeye, Porky Pig and, Roger Ramjet. The Honeymooners, in which they were always in the same room, was another popular show.

There was a show about space exploration to go along with my new interest in space. Lost In Space was about a space-travelling family that was trying to find their way back and ran into all kinds of adventures along the way. Of course, there were the westerns such as Gunsmoke.

There was a movie on every Sunday, called "The Big Show Of the Week". The one that I remember best is the H.G. Wells classic, "Time Machine".

There was also news on television every evening. One of the first things that I recall after landing in the U.S. was the big upcoming election for president. There were three men for voters to choose from. One named Nixon, one named Wallace and, one named Humphrey.

I knew nothing about any of them. A lot of people seemed to like Humphrey, but it was Nixon who won and who would be our new president. His vice-president would be a man named Spiro Agnew.

Politics was always much more visible in the U.S. than it had been in Canada. While living there, I cannot remember that I even knew the name of the prime minister. It was Lester Pearson, for whom Toronto Airport is named.

There was much more on the news. There was the war in the jungle in Vietnam every night. There were the protests against the war at home. The news was filled with helicopters and soldiers and places named Saigon, Hanoi, Danang, Hue and, Haiphong.

The newscasters were always on about the NVA (North Vietnamese Army), The VC (Viet Cong or Vitenamese Communists) and the DMZ (The Demilitarized Zone) and the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The protesters at home were carrying peace signs and demanding an end to the war. In our third grade class, we drew cards that would be sent to the soldiers in Vietnam.

There was also racial tension in America on the news. The race riots peaked in 1967, before we lived here but earlier in 1968, Martin Luther King had been assassinated, as well as Bobby Kennedy.

Then there was the Cold War in the news. This was the big picture of world events of which the Vietman War was just one manifestation. Names like Leonid Brezhnev, Andrei Gromyko (The Soviet premier and foreign minister) and, Mao Zedong were often heard on the news, as well as discussions of fantastic nuclear bombs.

It was easily to believe, by watching the news, that the world was really messed up. In fact, there were hippies who wanted to change the whole social order and who used less-polite terms than "messed up" to describe the state of the world.

Another name that suddenly appeared on the evening news was that of Joe Namath. There was a game of great national interest called football and he had led his team, the Jets, to be the best team of all. I learned that we had a team nearby also, the Buffalo Bills, but that they were not the best team.

I joined a Cub Scout den, at my parents' encouragement. I enjoyed reading the Boys' Life periodicals that I began receiving as a result. The Cub Scouts were a junior version of the Boy Scouts. I think that scout membership is a good thing although I realized later that the primary purpose, along with games like warball that we played in gym class as well as fraternaties in high school, is to prepare boys for being in the military.

Along Pine Avenue (or Niagara Falls Boulevard, as it is now called), the main road near our house, were numerous motels to accomodate tourists coming to see the falls in the summer. The line of motels on both sides of the street went right down to where the city ended at the airport. There were two notable fast food restaurants along the way, the Red Barn and McDonalds. The Red Barn is long gone but McDonalds is still there.

We began doing our grocery shopping at the A & P, in the Pine Plaza about a mile from home. Unlike in Canada, the denominations of money in America were all the same shades of green.

A new country meant many new brands of products that I would be seeing. There was Jif Peanut Butter that was often used to make a sandwich with Welch's Grape Jelly. There was a competition to be the best toothpaste between Crest and Colgate. There was a brand of coffee with the unusual name of "Chock Full O' Nuts", but it must be doing something right because it is still on store shelves today.

To drink, we usually bought cans of Hi C Orange Drink. So-called because it was supposed to contain a lot of vitamin C. I got one of my first lessons in physics when I was shown that to effectively pour out the juice, it was necessary to punch a hole in both sides of the can. One hole was where the juice poured out and the other was so the air could enter in to take it's place.

The product in the supermarket that got my attention was Land O Lakes Butter. There was a native Indian woman on the package holding a box of the butter. Of course, on that box was the same Indian woman holding a box of the butter. And on that one, the same thing. This meant that there must be the same image within itself indefinitely.

America was a new land of Captain Crunch Breakfast Cereal, Cracker Barrell Cheese, Sealtest Ice Cream and, Morton Salt. The newspapers that my father brought home from his job in Buffalo were the Buffalo Evening News and the now-defunct Courier Express.

If I went on a ride to Buffalo, we went past the Dunlop Tire factory and there were signs for the Big E bank everywhere. Sometimes my father brought home a blueberry pie from Freddie's Doughnuts, which was on Main Street in Buffalo near his job.

As always, there were new songs on the radio. The Hollies had another memorable hit with "Carrie Anne".

One of my really favorite songs was "Build Me Up Buttercup" by The Foundations.

There was "Touch Me" by The Doors

"Yummy, Yummy, Yummy" by The Ohio Express

"Gimme Gimme Good Loving" by Crazy Elephant

"Let Me In, Cinnamon" by Derek.

Glen Campbell had "Wichita Lineman" at this time and also did another memorable song, "Galveston".

I first heard of Motown. It was a record label out of Detroit with all black singers and groups. They had a big hit with "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" by Marvin Gaye, although it was recorded by several bands.

I came across another new interest. While living on the Canadian side, I had been fascinated with airplanes. My father had been in Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) and also liked watching planes. This interest returned.

One disadvantage of being interested in space is that it was so inaccessible. I could read about it and look up at the sky but that was about it. With airplanes, I could watch them at close range and had much more chance of flying one someday or at least flying in one.

Niagara Falls, NY had an airport adjoining an air force base. My father took me to look at small airplanes, like Cessnas, and sometimes he was able to talk his way into having us shown the cockpit of airliners. There were often Pan Am and TWA (Trans World Airlines) planes at the airport. One German pilot of a Lufthansa jet showed me all around the controls in the cockpit of the plane.

I read all about airplanes, just as I had about space. There was an elegant French airliner, the Caravelle. Britain and France were working on what was to be a supersonic passenger jet, the Concorde. Belgium had an airline called Sabena. Boeing manufactured the majority of the large jets but Britain had a jet manufacturer called Vickers that made planes for BOAC, British Overseas Airline Corporation. There was also the X-15 experimental rocket plane, operated by NASA.

In one book, I had a detailed diagram of a jet airliner that I really tried to study. In the school library, there was a book with photos and descriptions of military jets. Next to Niagara Falls Airport, there was the massive Bell factory where so much of the equipment that pioneered flight was manufactured, including the "Huey" military helicopters that were being used in Vietnam at the time.

In school, I enjoyed word searching. We were given a long word and had to find as many smaller words as we could that could be spelled with the letters in the long word.

As the weather got warmer in the spring of 1969 and third grade neared it's end, a bunch of us decided to play hooky from school and hide in the large field that I described previously. We didn't get caught so we tried it a second time. (Playing hooky means skipping school).

But apparently, one of our group had told someone in school about what we were doing. That student must have told the teacher, who called the office, who called the mother of one in our group, who drove up to the field, walked over to us and, marched us all into the office at school.

It was decided that our punishment would be to make up the number of hours of school that we had missed sitting in the office after school. It was warm and beautiful weather outside while we were sitting in the office of the school. Playing hooky definitely had not been worth it.

A boy had been bitten by a strange dog and the parents did not know where the dog was. There was a frantic search going on all over the neighborhood to find the dog and be sure it wasn't rabid.

The highlight of the school year at 60th Street School was Play Day. As the name implies, this was a day of play in the warm weather near the end of the school year. Students in the three classes of each grade would be divided into four teams; Red, Blue, Yellow and, Green. Teams were chosen to be as closely matched as possible and the day would be spent on all kinds of athletic events from races to tug-of-war.

I went bowling for the first time at Frontier Lanes in Lewiston. There was a company called Brunswick that seemed to have it's name on so much that was associated with bowling.

As the end of school neared in late spring of 1969, there was a series of new songs and the future seemed as brilliant as the weather. A band called The Fifth Dimension was all over the radio with "Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In".

The South African musician Hugh Masakela had "Grazing In The Grass", which was also done by The Friends of Distinction.

Mary Hopkin appeared again with "Goodbye".

There was "Red Rubber Ball" by the Cyrkle

"The Israelites" by the Jamaican Desmond Dekker

"You Made Me So Very Happy" by Blood, Sweat and, Tears.

Topping it off were those two late-Sixties classics; "Dizzy" by Tommy Roe and "Crimson And Clover" by Tommy James And The Shondells.

The summer of 1969 was a special time in America, and many other places, and I could feel how special it was even as a child. That is one reason that I wanted to write this autobiography. There is a saying that "The past is another country." But it is not really another country. Another country is a place that we can go back to visit, but we cannot actually go back to visit the past in the same way.

The trouble with special times is that they are gone so soon. The summer of '69 meant so much to so many people but it lasted for only a few months and then was gone. One way to go back for a visit is to write about it.

When school let out at the end of third grade, it gave me the opportunity to get my bicycle out and do some exploring in my new country. I spent time in that large field nearby, of course. There were plenty of those red-winged blackbirds and the pond often dried up altogether in the heat of summer.

But I went further on my bike. I became intrigued by the shimmering water mirage that makes it look as if there is water up ahead on a hot summer day. But when you get to where the water appeared to be, it has moved further away.

There was a stretch of ground known to locals as "The Tracks" that beckoned to be explored. This was the land between Frontier and Stephenson Avenues east of 56th Street. The original plan had been to build some type of highway there but the plans never materialized and it was left vacant.

It is still vacant today, but in 1969 it had a lot more bushes and shrubbery than it does now. Near the tracks, along the sloping side of the Interstate 190, kids often climbed to the top with a piece of cardboard and then slid down while sitting on the cardboard.

There was also the building of forts in the summer. There were several large pieces of folded steel sheet laying around. Pieces of wood could be found and put across the tops of the steel sheets to form a roof.

I obtained a map of Niagara Falls, NY and noticed that there was a distant place called Cayuga Island with a park there called Jayne Park. I could not get as far as the moon like the astronauts were doing but me and some other kids rode our bikes all the way to Jayne Park and back.

With school out and my bike ready to ride, I also got more of a look at the other factories nearby over on 56th Street. There was Union Carbide and Goodyear, aside from the Great Lakes Carbon closer to our house. There were also many more large factories along Buffalo Avenue and smaller industrial buildings, along with a scrap yard, along 56th Street.

All kinds of alarms and other sounds would come from the factories. Those were the days before the pollution controls of today and we would often see the yellow smoke (probably sulfur dioxide from rubber vulcanization) coming from the Goodyear plant.

One day, much of the long grass and weeds in the large field near our house was mowed to make way for a travelling circus. There were quite a few elephants there as well as rides. But it was a shock when I asked how much a soft drink cost at the circus and was told 25 cents. At the Red Barn, a similar drink cost only 10 cents. There was also travelling rides that set up for a while in the parking lot of the Pine Plaza. For swimming, we would still go back to Canada to the pool at Leslie Park and to Chippawa.

Around the house in the summer of 1969, my father set about planting a number of trees. Soon after moving in, we had uprooted the willow tree within the hedge and replanted it in the middle of the yard. We also got a dog of our own, an Irish Setter which we assigned the appropriate name of Rusty.

I was maybe getting a little too fond of food and drink and was gaining weight. There was, of course, the Red Barn and McDonalds a mile or so from home. My father often brought treats home from Freddy's Doughnuts in Buffalo. There was a delicious snack food during the summer of '69 known as Pizza Spins. The motel across the street had a vending machine that sold Johnnie Ryan brand sodas, which were made nearby in Niagara Falls. I also favored Mountain Dew and Hires Root Beer, although Dad's Root Beer was good too.

My father took me to the airport to watch the airplanes quite a few times. One day, a small Cessna plane taxied right in front of a passenger jet which was on a perpendicular runway. The pilot of the larger plane managed to stop quickly enough to avert a collision. There was a squadron of jets stationed at the Air Base and they were always practicing flights and maneuvers over Niagara Falls.

Then came that incredible day when men first walked on the moon. This was certainly the most important event of the summer. People had existed for maybe a million years, civilization for about five thousand years. But this was the first time a human had walked on a world other than the earth. I wondered if the signers of America's Declaration of Independence could have dreamed that the new nation would be the first to reach the moon.

My father took us to see the movie "Bonnie and Clyde". I have never doubted that America was a great country that could do awesome things like putting people on the moon. But it also creates so many of it's own problems and one of the ways it does so is by glamorizing crime. There was a car with numerous holes in it touring around that was claimed to be the car in which Bonnie and Clyde were killed.

In this movie, and far too many others, a life of murder and crime is portrayed like some exciting, alternate way of life. Shows like Gunsmoke may be a fictionalized portrayal of part of American history, but they also send the message that the surest way to solve a problem is with a gun.

Of course, the summer of "69 meant a joyous festival of new music, even for those who were not at Woodstock. I thought that the four most memorable songs of the summer were "Good Morning, Starshine" by Oliver"

"Poke Salad Annie" by Tony Joe White

"Spinning Wheels" by Blood, Sweat and, Tears

"Get Together" by The Youngbloods.

But that was only the beginning. A band called Kenny Rogers And The First Edition had two 1969 hits with "Ruby" and "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)".

The Canadian band The Guess Who had "These Eyes" and "Laughing".

There was "Sugar, Sugar" by The Archies

"Honky Tonk Woman" by The Rolling Stones

"It's Your Thing" by the Isley Brothers

"Soul Deep" by The Box Tops

"Love Child" by The Supremes

A look into the distant future with "2525" by Zager And Evans. (By the way, since the summer of 1969 we have come more than 7% of the way to the year 2525.)

Creedence Clearwater Revival was on the radio with "Proud Mary", "Green River" and "Who'll Stop The Rain?"

"Guitarzan" was a song by Ray Stevens about a version of Tarzan that played a guitar.

"A Boy Named Sue" was a 1969 song by Johnny Cash. A father wanted his son to be a tough guy. So, he got the novel idea of giving him the name of "Sue", which is a girl's name. The idea was that the boy would be picked on and bullied with such a name and would have no choice but to be tough.

In the song, the now-grown boy hunts down his father with the intention of killing him for giving him such a name and causing him such grief. But when the old man explains the logic to him, he comes away with a different point of view. (Why didn't he just get a nickname?)

Niagara Falls, NY was a different place in the summer of '69. Dozens of teenagers were always gathering at the City Market in much the same way, I reckoned, as they did at Woodstock. I watched the construction of what was then known as Spallino Towers, a tall building as a home for the elderly. It was easy to feel the hope for the future in the air.