Tuesday, August 25, 2009
THE FRONT SEAT KID
If you are reading this and have perhaps noticed that the address of this blog is 'the front seat kid, you may wonder about this. I consider myself a 'front-seat kid' because I grew up in an era of more freedom from certain restraints than children now can experience. I was free to have jackknife, a hatchet, to walk and wander the streets and woods, buy tobacco and cigarettes,etc. for others, have bows and arrows, hold guns and sometimes shoot them, do chores that involved manual labor of sorts, and to go to movies,etc. but I also was able to sit on the front seat of cars and trucks when cars and trucks were simply cars and trucks and not the type of today. I was free from being strapped into cars like an astronaut and cars were far more comfortable and ran fast but not at the speeds of today and the highways were not conducive to such speeds or races or 'hurry-ups". I will have more to say on this at a future date.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
MY THREE GRANDFATHERS
You've probably have heard that song which was popular a long time ago,especially on Western/country stations, well, actually what we called 'Hillbilly' and 'Cowboy' music, titled, 'I'M MY OWN GRANDPA'. Well, I had three grandfathers. It happened this way, my father's father, Frank Jones, was,for me, my primary grandfather, for many reasons. My mother's father, Joseph Dubois was my second grandfather,while my third grandfather was Edward 'Ted" Savage, my third grandfather. But to complicate things, 'Grampa Ted' also my Great Uncle on my fatheer's side, as he was my grandmother's,Vera Lucy Jones,nee Savage, brother! HIs wife was Hazel Brown Dubois Savage and their son, Edward (Jr.?) 'Sonny' Savage was both my uncle and my cousin, though I seldom, despite my mother's attempts and urgings, referred to him as "Uncle Sonny'. My grandmother, Hazel had divorced my grandfather Joseph "Joe" Dubois and had eventually married my Grandmother's brother. I also want to say, for the record, that both Grampa Dubois and Grammy Savage were Canadians and had lived and worked in the US for years and collected their social security and died and are buried here in Claremont, no far from each other. Grammy Savage was English/Irish Canadian, while my Grandfather Dubois was French Canadian and with some Indian in him.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
THE 'CATCHER'
JDS wrote the famous book,'THE CATCHER' and when it began evoking those special feelings in adolescents, both young and old,in school or in college, and teachers and English profs,etc. were urging the reading of this book, I did not read the book UNTIL AFTER I had completed a report on it for a psychology class on Adolescent Psych at UNH, and guess what? I got an a+ on it! My writing of the report was based only on what the jacket or back cover of the book contained or said, and a few quick thumb-throughs of the work. I still have the book and my report among some of my papers and books stored in the shed. "Jerry's" name(and,no, it's not the JERRY OF BEN & JERRY'S for all the ignoramuses that might well confuse the two) cropped up once again when I was teaching in a private and expensive Connecticut school for boys because one youth claimed to know JDS personally,based on the fact that the boy and his family came from Westport and he simply had to read everything that JDS had written,of course. The Director of the school in the meetings we held usually weekly among the faculty, enjoyed related this tidbit about the pupil knowing Salinger,etc. but I suspected,having lived in Cornish at the time JDS came there that,not only did he con the other teachers but also his psychiatrist and the school head on this claim. I concluded that it was a way to bolster his ego and self-esteem for many reasons. While there an article appeared that talked about JDS or 'Jerry" and where he lived, which was certainly not Westport,CT, as the jacket blurbs and photo might lead you to believe,but CORNISH,NEW HAMPSHIRE, where he still lives! The student was surprised to learn that I had live in Cornish and surprised even further than I had not met JDS or made any attempt to meet him when I was there. In fact, I had taken another student on a trip to Cornish to spend time in my Aunt's & Uncle's camp/cottage on the old farm property there,but that is another matter. During the time I employed at the school, I found time to read other works by JDS and works on him by various authors as well as to read a paperback, which I still have with some of the others, of short stories in which the main character of the 'CATCHER' was introduced. Speculation on the publication of any or all of his writings done before his actual death si a complete waste of time. And,if any writings exist, after his death, may never be published or, as they say, 'see the light of day'. I suspect that all of this will become a sort of marvelous plot/conspiracy theory or notion. Anyway, for JDS, TIME IS RUNNING OUT! as it is for all of us,so he may well be speeding up what little literary talent and output he has left and I,personally, hope so!
JDS or J.D.S.
If you mistake the letters JDS as being somewhat the same thing as JDL, then you are sadly mistaken.The latter refers to the JEWISH DEFENSE LEAGUE, while the former refers to 'everyone's favorite author'! Probably this topic, as usual, will be more about myself than about JDS himself,but a recent article in NEW HAMPSHIRE MAGAZINE (go to WRITERS' CRAMP for details) prompted me to make mention and I am placing this topic in several of my blogs,including this one,YANKEE BOYHOOD and HAPHAZARD HAUNTINGS & OTHER ODDITIES, for surely the person described in the article appears to be 'an oddity in himself' or an oddity when compared to others except J. Paul Getty, Howard Hughes, Krishnamurti, and some obscure Tibetan Lamas in the Himalayas. JDS arrived in Cornish, NH, during the 1950's and made the pages of the Claremont DailyEagle and also LIFE MAGAZINE,shortly afterwards. JDS had allowed a high school girl to interview him for her school paper and, of course, it went from there into a sort of sensational story of sorts. Since that time,occasional things have cropped up concerning some of which I have read about now and then. My late classmate, BONES, a lifelong Cornish native/resident save for a few journies elsewhere,sometimes encountered "JERRY" who would,in a gesture of passing civility,wave or nod silently. But the unwritten Code of Cornish peopleis/was there-namely-not to impinge on or to invade his particular and perhaps,peculiar privacy,which extendsquite often to others who are not celebrities or less well-known,famed or notorious. It's 'mind your own business' of the taciturn Yankee, perhaps. Especially, when it comes to what are now termed, 'Uppity Flatlanders'. The magazine also contains an acocunt by Ed Bennett, former EAGLE TIMES publisher, who has now opted for the PEACE CORPSwhich I find a bit ironic since during the Viet Nam War in the late sixties,early seventies, I wrote, and had some published,to that paper, criticizing his editorials,etc. to perhaps this extent,though I have no real proof of such, but someone told me when I asked what happened to him,etc., that:"he thought you were out to get him' and this was proffered as oen reason, perhaps among many others, that he gave up the EAGLE TIMES and left town for Vermont. I don't really know. The point is, that I was an ex-PCV at the time I wrote these letters and after that I returned to the Philippines in 1972, just after Marcos declared Martial law, by actually emigrating there and lived there for eight years.
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