Memoir
Preserving Scout camp for new generations
Wow, this brought back memories. The Boy Scout council where I grew up is renovating Camp Squanto, their summer camp in Plymouth, Massachusetts. They plan to spend about $3 million building a new dining hall, a welcome lodge, and other improvements.
I spent a couple of weeks over a few summers there in my youth in the early 80s. Usually, I would spend a week with my troop and then a second week with a couple of friends in the “provisional” troop, which was a catch-all group for scouts whose troop wasn’t at the camp.
I remember that my first time there, I had to take my swimming test at the beginning of the week so they would know my proficiency and where I could swim. Unfortunately, the tests took forever and I happened to be the last kid to go. Also unfortunately, they had a problem that year with eels living under the swim docks and a few boys got bit. Nothing serious, mind you, but somewhat painful. It added an air of … challenge to the swim tests. In fact, just before my turn, the boy before me was bit in the arm and had to be taken up to the aid station.
They had a problem that year with eels living under the swim docks. It added an air of … challenge to the swim tests.
The lifeguard who remained looked at me and said, “Well, you’re the last one, so you may as well try it.” Wait, what?! From his point of view, I was the last kid left so the worst that could happen is that I got nipped too. From my point of view … I could get nipped too!
As an accommodation, he allowed me to swim closer to shore and further from the dock. Gee, thanks. As a result it was the fastest swim test on record. I barely even got wet, I swam so fast. I jumped in and did the required manuevers as fast as possible: crawl, butterfly, hold my breath under water, tread water. Mark Spitz had nothing on me. And I did it the whole time with my eyes closed. I didn’t dare open them under water for fear of seeing the gaping maw of an eel coming at me. Did I mention the little buggers were just a couple of inches long? But in my imagination they were six-foot Moray eels.
Oh, I passed, by the way.
Fighting naval battles for glory and honor
Take a Street View stroll through your memories
One of the unexpected pleasures of Google’s Street View function of Maps is that it allows a nearly literal nostalgic stroll down memory lane. Google recently added more cities to its list of those where Street View works and Pittsburgh was among them. When I lived in eastern Ohio in the mid-90s, I often made trips into Pittsburgh, whether to do shopping in the famed Strip-by-the-River— where in just a few blocks you could get all kinds of Asian, Latin American, or European food ingredients as well as fresh seafood, great meat, and more—or into the college neighborhoods for great restaurants and pubs or the city’s cultural attractions of museums, symphonies, and the like.
While Google Earth and Google Maps have long allowed a top-down view, Street View puts you on the street, looking at storefronts and the people going about their daily business. It’s about as close to being there without hopping on a plane.
I took a virtual stroll through some of my old haunts and recalled places I’d frequented and new places I wish had been there 10 years ago. I could almost smell the fresh tortillas in the Latin American market or the cheese of the Italian grocery or the exotically unidentifiable scents of the Asian foods store. What fun!
Now I just need to remember the names of all my other favorite haunts and check them out once again. This could easily suck up hours of otherwise productive time.
A secret home in the mall
Some “artist”-types set up a secret apartment in an unused space of the parking garage at a mall in Providence and lived there off and on over the past four years.
Michael Townsend, 36, said he and seven other artists built the apartment in a 750-square-foot loft in the parking garage four years ago and lived there for up to three weeks at a time while documenting mall life.
The apartment included a sectional sofa and love seat, coffee and breakfast tables, chairs, lamps, rugs, paintings, a hutch filled with china, a waffle iron, TV and Sony Playstation 2 — although a burglar broke in and stole the Playstation last spring, Townsend said. The artists built a cinderblock wall and nondescript utility door to keep the loft hidden from the outside world.
Sounds similar to something I did years ago. Back in the late 80s, early 90s, after I dropped out of Boston University and before I went back to school, I worked at a factory that manufactured beverage dispensers. One of my primary workspaces was on the end of the production line where the machines were cleaned, prepped, and boxed up. In that area we had stacks and stacks of flattened cardboard boxes, thousands of them, in four-foot-square towers 30 feet high. There were many more boxes than the company would use in a year, which gives you some idea of how well-managed the company was. When we would get a new shipment of boxes, our crew would unload it, and in the midst of building up the giant stacks, someone surreptitiously would throw a spare pallet in, creating a void in the stacks. We called this “The Cave.”
The Cave was our little sanctuary, away from the prying eyes of our bosses, who were usually too busy working on their boat motors or bleeding a deer (yes, they did this once) to supervise us. We’d sneak off in shifts to take naps or just hang out and shoot the breeze. Many times, during the summer, someone would bring in some beers to stock The Cave. Once we even had a small TV and video game system.
Yes, we were overstaffed and underworked and I had much lower moral character then than I do now. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the company was bought out and everyone was laid off.
But there’s something in every boy/man that loves a secret space. If I ever build a home from scratch, it will have secret passageways. How could I not?
The bestest hottest wings I’ve known
I thought for sure I’d told this story before, but I can’t find it in the archives and it’s too good not to be recorded.
When I was a student at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio back in the mid-90s, there was one place that was famous as an off-campus destination: Drovers Inn.
Drovers was built originally in 1848 to house drivers on the wagon trail through West Virginia. Today it’s a restaurant and lodge in the hills across the Ohio River from the Steubenville area. It has a regular dining room on the main floor, but the basement has been turned into a great dark, noisy, friendly pub.
Drovers’ wings stand above them all. They are truly delicious and scrumptious.
We made regular trips to Drovers whenever possible, about 30 minutes down the river and then up into the hills. In fact, I was such a regular that the bartenders would acknowledge me by name when I came in, like Norm from “Cheers”. (Every guy should have such a place at one time or another in his life.) The bartenders also liked to joke that whenever I came I was with a group of women and never the same group twice. Now they may have been exaggerating a little, but I did enjoy hanging out with my female friends. I’m not saying I had exclusively ulterior motives, but you could say that part of it was “opposition research”.
The best chicken wings in the world
Technorati Tags: wings | spicy | West Virginia | college |
There’s a Baptist at my door
When I was still in college at Franciscan University of Steubenville, my last two years there I lived in a house with a group of great guys. One’s now a Dominican priest, another is a married father working in Catholic radio, another works for EWTN, yet another is a monk, and oh yeah, another is a Congressman.
They didn’t all live there at the same time. I nfact, in those two year, I think about eight or nine guys lived there at one time or another and almost all of us were studying theology. It was great. I remember late nights debating capital punishment or playing penny ante poker (with Irish accents required for some strange reason) or having our famous “men’s meat dinners” where the only non-meat dish allowed was beans.
We lived off-campus in a nearby neighborhood called LaBelle, which is not pronounced, as Frenchman would, “lah-bell”, but rather like an Ohioan would, “lay-bell”. Anyway, the neighborhood was full of old houses, many of which were housing students, others being home to faculty and staff and their families, and then more with just the regular folk from Steubenville.
One afternoon Kevin answered the front door. I was upstairs studying or writing a paper or, more likely, procrastinating and didn’t pay too much attention to the long time he was kept occupied until he came up to my room, looking excited.
Now, you have to know that Kevin was just rediscovering his faith. He’d been away from the Church for a while and had come back through some amazing and miraculous events. (Too long to go into now, but I blogged it in the past. At the time of that post he was a SOLT, but now he’s OP.)
The missionary
Technorati Tags: memoir | Steubenville | theology | Baptist | missionary | apologetics | Catholic |
Tales of a dishwasher in an Italian restaurant
When I was in high school, I held several different jobs, including working in the Canton (Mass.) Public Library as a book clerk. But I also worked as a dishwasher at an Italian restaurant called Capriccio’s, also in my hometown of Canton.
I didn’t earn a lot of money working as a dishwasher, but I did come away with a lot.
It was a nice place, but not too upscale. You can’t be too upscale in a local mall. And working there was kind of a family tradition. My sister Francesca had worked there as a waitress and my brother John worked there later, first as a waiter and then as a line cook. He was my connection to the job.
It was quite an education in having a work ethic for a 16-year-old kid. I usually worked the weekend evening shifts. I’d come about 4 or 6 pm (one dishwasher started earlier and the second would come later), and the night would start out slow. If I was lucky, they would have me doing some prep work, slicing cases of mushrooms or opening up can after can of tomatoes for sauce or, if I was unlucky, peeling a giant stockpot full of onions. (The trick is to hold the onion under running water.)
The rhythm of the kitchen
Technorati Tags: restaurant | kitchen | dishwasher | teen job | work ethic | Italian restaurant |
