Bel Air High School 1958-62

I arrived in Bel Air moving from Baltimore in ‘58. My mother had fought dad’s Parkville, Overlea hopes (suburbs just over the Baltimore city line, five miles from his mother) and pushed us farther north from the city into a town surrounded by green hills and the horse farms of the Harford County. She hated …

Basic Trainee – Fort Dix, 1967

I was sitting pretty. Sure, Johnson wanted more troops for Vietnam, but that spring he’d said no married men. I had been hitched for a year by then. I thought I was safe. My wife and I had bought into the lower levels of middle America. I found a used car and a little apartment, …

Satellite Shiner – NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, MD 1966

On my first day, I hitched to the NASA gate and walked in. Everyone else drove through. I found the building listed on the  instructions they sent me. It was a big building, twenty stories or so. But inside, it had only one floor with a ceiling a couple hundred feet above. They told me …

Beachbum – Ocean City MD 1962

The sun was up and already bright when my brother Bob and I walked towards the ocean, but before reaching the boardwalk, we turned up the only street with a slight incline. Two other young men, teenagers in truth, George and Frank, waited by the old gray bread van parked at the end of the …

Virginia Polytechnic Institute 1963

(A story written in 1973) _How cold is it, rat? _66 below, sir. _How cold, rat? _SIXTY-SIX BELOW ZERO, SIR. _What’s your class, rat? _Class of ’66, sir. _Pull in that chin, rat. The freshman jams his chin against his throat. His teeth snap from the impact. _How many wrinkles in that chin, rat? _sixty-six, …

New Orleans Sears, 1963

STOCKBOY was typed in caps on my punch card. I pushed the card into the time clock slot, heard a ka-chung, and read the freshly inked "7:54" when I pulled it out. I climbed the back stairs to the toy department and started my job repairing the display shelves after the attack that parents had watched …

Milk Truck Jumper – Bel Air, MD 1962

I saw the rich. They lived on a dairy farm in the country near our town. They played at cow ranching. But mostly they made babies, a dozen or so. The father married into Catholic money and did his end of the deal, making boys mostly, but some girls to space the brood. He was …

Radio Wave Spook – Germany 1968

The map had two pink countries, three green ones, two yellow, an orange and a brown. They said you could make one in just four colors—a math professor from New Jersey proved that—but I didn’t try. We used a five color press. I worked at Modern America Printing. We made maps. “Never a border without …

Blimp Pilot, Backup – Laurel, MD 1965

Sometimes you make mistakes. Sometimes you make big ones. Sometimes you make a bunch. Especially when you are twenty and hormones flow strong and all your dates only want to be your friend. To remedy my life’s problems, I quit my old free and lonely ways, married before I needed to shave, let my draft …

New Orleans Hitching – 1964

Heading to New Orleans, somewhere in Mississippi. Standing in a gas station with my thumb wearing out. An old Chevy pulls up to a pump and two young black guys get out. One comes over. _Where ya heading? _New Orleans. _Us too. Come on. I pick up my duffel and get in the back. The …