Swimming for Lane

My mom had a box of stuff she found in the house and she had us go through it on Easter. I found a few things that sparked ideas about stories.

I'm going to start with the swim card I found. It reminds me of when Dad was on the swim team in High School.

Dad attended Lane Technical High School and at the time it was an all-boy school. Because the school was all boy the swim team did not have suits, they swam in the nude. I guess the idea was that they would be faster.

One time they were at an away meet and the Lane swim team was gathered in their locker room (clearly not the dressing room) and got a rousing pep talk from the coaches. The captains got them further fired and led them to the locker room door full of, well let's just say pep.

They all lined up; cheering and chanting they made ready to burst into the pool room. The captains opened the door and ran out, followed by everyone else.

The trouble was that this school they were swimming against was large and rich enough to have bleachers looking on the pool. The bleachers were full of parents and siblings, some of them even sisters, and maybe a few grandmothers to boot.

The captains stopped dead in their tracks and tried to back pedal. The rest of the team pressed forward, unaware of the problem, but ready to beat the world.

The result was a dogpile of naked teen boys just inside the locker room door.

They had to quickly find suits or they would forfeit the meet. They did, but the suits were from a grade school or something because they were all too small. They did win the meet I think because they wanted to get out of those small suits as soon as possible.

A Second Aniversary

I hesitate to say "Happy" Aniversary, but I do wish it to all of you reading.

We had a Papa dinner tonight.  I suggested everyone put sugar on their pizza, but we settled for roast beef pizza instead.  We had Pepsi (I couldn't find any RC or moon pies) and after we went on a DQ run.  I had a Heath Blizzard.

Tomorrow for breakfast we are going to dip graham crackers buttered with bacon into our coffee.  Then we'll put corn into our omletes.

I wish I had a cigar.

Papa's Day Off

This weekend I had a dream about Dad, my oldest took the day off today and I'm writing on a lap desk Dad made for us, so I thought I'd share a little thing my Dad used to do.


Every now and then he would call us out of school and take us for a walk in the woods. He called it Family Time, though my Mom never came with us.

I never knew if it was because he had had a particularly harrowing experience, or he just wanted to spend time with his boys.

We would go to La Baugh Woods or the Forest Preserve off Milwaukee and Elston, near Superdawg.

I loved those days. We called them hikes, but they were probably just a short walk in the woods. We were young and he captured the time. Sometimes he could be very wise.

Life moves pretty fast and we stopped to look around once in a while, so we never missed it.

Bad Guys, Frozen Pools and Frozen Lakes

With the snowfall of this week I thought of some of Dad's winter stories.  I've already told the Ernie and '67 Blizzard story.  I've already told the winter camping story.

I have a couple of short little stories I could tell.

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The first one was one dark winter evening when Dad and his partner were following a, "bad guy."  They couldn't see him but it had started snowing lightly and they followed the footsteps in the snow.  Eventually they just stopped.

They looked around and heard a voice in the dark, "Three fifteen."

It was an old man in a doorway along the sidewalk.

Dad said that he thought, "No, it's more like 7:15" before he realized that the old man was talking about an appartment number.

Dad and his partner found and arrested the suspect in appartment 315.

Growing up we had a round, above ground, 25' pool.  One particular winter it had frozen over before Dad had had a chance to do something.  I had no idea why, but Dad decided that he had to break the ice that had formed on the pool.

With my Mom watching from the back door, Dad climbed up on the ice with a sledge hammer and started whacking away.

Suddenly the ice cracked from the center where Dad was standing, straight to both sides, cutting the ice into two huge semicircles.  Dad had one foot on each semicircle and they slide away and up, dumping him directly into the four feet of water below.

Mom saw Dad disappear and the ice slide back to close over him solid.  He was completely gone from sight under what was again a solid sheet of ice.

Suddenly Dad popped up through the ice and worked his way to the edge and climbed out.  Later he explained that he had gone under with the sledge hammer in his hand.  He ducked beneath the water to make sure the ice slamming back together did not slam into his head.

Only a couple of years before Dad retired he was driving around alone in a patrol car, as he was wont to do.  He liked to get out of the office and cruise.

Since he was never in a district along the lake I can only assume that he was not really where he was supposed to be when this story happened.

He was driving along the lakefront when he got too close to the frozen water, and it wasn't quite as frozen as he had thought.  The two passenger side tires broke through the ice.

Since he wasn't where he was supposed to be, doing what he wasn't supposed to do, he was on his own to get out.  Slowly he put the car into reverse and carefully, thankfully backed out.

As soon as he got back off the beach and into his own station I don't think he ever went out alone again.  I KNOW he never went driving on Lake Michigan again.

Happy Birthday Papa, Welcome Home

Today would have been Dad's 69th birthday.

Yesterday Dad's ashes were delivered to Garrett's house.

I can only think of one birthday story for Dad.  We would often go to Owasippe on the last week of July and the first week of August.  This would include Dad's birthday very often.

At camp when one of the boys would have a birthday someone from that boy's troop would send the message to the staff to call the boy up on stage at dinner.

You see, at a dining hall camp, each meal had a show.  For breakfast there would be a wakeup song like, "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" or "The Grand Old Duke of York."  For lunch there would be maybe two songs and for dinner there would be a full show with a song and a skit.

Along with the program there would be "Staff Messages" (mustn't say, "announcements" because there is a long song that is launched into when an unsuspecting staff member uses the word).

So on Dad's birthdays one of the hapless staff members would go up on stage and say, "We have a birthday in the house."  At that point he might look at the note someone slipped him or repeat what he was told, "It is little Billy La Fleur's birthday, would Little Billy La Fleur come up on stage please."  With that Dad would stand up and go to the stage and tower over the startled staff member.

The idea of the whole thing is to embarrass some scout, but the tables would be turned and the staff member would find himself trying to lead a birthday song that goes, "Happy Birthday, ugh, Happy Birthday, ugh.  Death and misery in the air, people dying everywhere.  Happy Birthday, ugh, Happy birthday."

Then someone would shout, "To the lake!"  Meaning that the staffman should pick up the birthday boy, physically carry him to and throw him into the lake.  This would be when the staffman finally gave up.

Oh, did I mention that it was always Dad, himself that passed the note of the birthday boy, Little Billy La Fleur.

Papa on the Forth of July

I know this post is coming at the end of July, and I will offer no excuse.  Next year and years from now we will read this on the right date so here goes.

Papa never had a problem bending the rules.  He used to say, "I do not lie, cheat, or steal, but I am sly, cunning and alert."  He was also a big stickler on safety.  So when it came to Fourth of July we never had fireworks.

There was a police officer down the street who used confiscated fireworks.  Papa's safety urge battled with his competitive streak.  He told me that it wasn't right to use those fireworks, but it also wasn't right that when he went to his National Guard annual training period (which he always called, "Summer Camp") he used pyrotechnics, like artillery simulators and even nuclear bomb simulators which put all the other cop's stash to shame, and he couldn't use them at home at all.

One summer he brought home a smoke grenade.  He reasoned that although it was a pyrotechnic, it did not explode and was therefore safe.

It was a purple grenade and he let me pull the pin, let the spoon fly and place it on the sidewalk behind the house (where Collum transmogrifies into Kenneth ).

You'll see in the photo what we expected it to look like, and how it did indeed start.  However, it expands from what you see here and the photo is probably in a pretty good breeze.

That day there was no breeze at first and the cloud built up and expanded.  Then the very slightest of breezes crept up and gently guided the purple cloud of non-visibility across our little street, up the slight rise and onto the Kennedy Expressway (one of the busiest thoroughfares in the country).

It wasn't quite this bad

Traffic instantly stopped.  Under our own smoke screen we snuck away, never to deploy any types of fireworks on Independence Day again.

A Father's Flagpole

I was born in Garfield Park Hospital in Chicago.  My brother Shawn was too, and so was one of my brother's that couldn't stay with us.

Don't look for it, the hospital is gone now.

When they were tearing it down Dad drove by one day.  He noticed that they had not removed the flagpole yet.  He approached one of the workers, the one with the bulldozer.

"I'll give you $50 bucks to knock that flagpole down and if you deliver it to my house I'll give you another $50."

The guy agreed and took Dad's money.  He hit the pole with the bulldozer and knocked it over.  Then he moved to the other side and pushed it again the other way until it snapped at the base.

Dad left and didn't hear from the guy for a couple of weeks.  Finally one day there was a ring at the doorbell.

When Dad answered the door there was a man standing on the porch and there was a truck parked at the curb.  There was a 40 foot pole sticking out the front and back of the truck.

"Where do you want it?"

Dad asked him to drop it in the front yard.  He did and never collected the rest of the money.

Dad planted that pole in the front yard and it is standing in front of my brother Shawn's house to this day.

From Garfield Park to Kostner Avenue