Nomads

Ya gotta like 1947. The main story, of course, was Jackie Robinson, but there were other tasty items. Guess what this is ->

Yes boy and girls, it’s the first ever computer bug. Literally. The crew of the Mark II computer at Harvard had a problem. It turned out to be a moth in Relay #70 of Panel F. They actually taped the dead moth onto their ops log.

Also in 1947 the lowest temperature ever recorded in North America was in a place called Snag in the Yukon Territory, population 8-10, depending on who was thawed out when you did the count.

Here’s the mayor posing in front of city hall ->

But wait! There’s more! The first transistor was invented that year, we got the Cold War started, the first Polaroid camera was demonstrated, Thor Heyerdahl crossed a bunch of Pacific Ocean on a raft, cuz, hey, why not?, and Roswell Army Air Field public information officer Walter Haut issued a press release that they had recovered a crashed “flying disk”, but not to worry, it was just a weather balloon.

And, oh yeah, Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan informed the ironically named House Committee on Un-American Activities that Hollywood was riddled with dirty Commies.

1948 was a gas too. The Supreme Court banned prayer in school, we shot our first monkey into space, Gandhi was murdered, Israel declared a state, we had the Berlin air lift, in England the National Health Service was created, something we still don’t have in the States, though we did broadcast the first World Series on TV, but then George Herman Ruth died in his sleep, aged 53. This was also the year “Rhythm and Blues” replaced “Race Music” as a Billboard music genre.

Bull Moose Jackson was the first Rhythm & Blues artist to receive a gold record for his million selling ballad, “I Love You, Yes, I Do.” He was “Moose on the Loose” and maybe his biggest hit was “Big Ten Inch Record”. Here’s some of the lyrics:

I cover her with kisses
When we’re in a lover’s clinch
And when she gets all excited
She begs for my big ten-inch

Record of the band that plays the blues
Well the band that plays the blues
She just loved that Big Ten Inch
Record of her favorite blues

You can actually get it on YouTube.

1948 was also the year the first Kinsey Report appeared. “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” revealed many surprising facts about male humans that should not have surprised anyone familiar with male humans.

It was also about this time they started making mobile phones. That’s right, you heard me. Of course, “mobile” means different things to different folks.

We Gillons were mobile too. We lived at Aunt Jane’s in Kensington, at Aunt Helen’s on Cemetery Lane, and had an apartment around 63rd and Elmwood. It’s around this time I start having memories. Maybe my earliest is Grandmom Wise at the top of the stairs. She died in 1948 so I would have been 4. But there’s something odd about that memory. There is absolutely no action. No one says anything, no one does anything. And when I compare it to other memories it’s the only one like that. All my other memories are mpegs, this one’s a jpeg. She is at the top of the stairs in her house, later known as Aunt Helen’s. She is the typical saintly grandmother, a little chubby, print dress, sensible shoes, granny glasses and she’s smiling down at me at the foot of the stairs.

So how to explain the lack of action? Well, as I said, she died when I was 4. No doubt I asked about her. Where was she? Of course, I was told she went up to Heaven. Maybe you get up to Heaven by first going up the stairs of your house? Hey, why not? Instead of an actual event, this image might actually be my memory of my four-year old idea of Grandmom going to Heaven.

Grandmom Wise, aka Mary Plummer Wise, certainly deserved to go to Heaven. Mom often told the story of how her mother stayed up all night when Mom was a kid, shooing bedbugs off her. I have no idea how many nights she did this or how her four other kids dealt with their bedbugs. Maybe Grandmom ran from room to room night after night, month after month. If so, she probably died of exhaustion.

The CDC, by the way, says that one sign of a bedbug infestation is rusty–colored blood spots due to their blood-filled fecal material that they excrete on the mattress or nearby furniture. Because that’s what they do, you know. They suck your blood. During the day they sleep in tiny coffins. Not every bug in your bed is a bedbug, however. Here’s a helpful chart you can use for bedbug identification ->

Another memory from this time was holding my mother’s hand as we walked down Woodland Avenue on our way to the Horn & Hardart store to buy a pumpkin pie. Which made me very happy. Not only were we getting my favorite pie, we had already bought my favorite cereal. Ranger Joes.

Ranger Joes were puffed rice which, like every other rightminded person on Earth, I despised, but hey, the bag not only featured a picture of a cowboy, they were also called Ranger Joes. My name! And I was big into being a cowboy. Specifically, Roy Rogers.

Somehow one Sunday my cousin Helen spirited me off to Methodist Sunday School. Pop must have been looking the other way. Helen was older so she was in a different class. A staunch Catholic at the time, I adopted an adversarial attitude. When asked my name I said I was Roy Rogers, my idol. No doubt the teacher chuckled and said something like, “Okay, but what’s your real name?” I persisted. No way was I going to reveal my true identity, which seemed of considerable importance, to this prying Methodist. Betraying his keen interest in this intelligence, instead of just giving up and calling me Roy, the teacher sent for Helen. When the situation was explained to her she looked at me, then back at the teacher and said, “His name is Roy Rogers.”

We were a hard bunch in those days.

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Grandpop Wise was a grouch nobody liked. Except me. I liked him because he ate cat food. Made burgers out of it. My first memory of him was probably the time he got fired. He’d just come home from the bar at the corner of Woodland Avenue. No matter where he’d been on any given day, he always came home from the bar. As usual, he was hopping mad, but this time he explained it was because he’d been “fired”. Wow. I imagined him walking down the avenue, right outside the bar, when a long, black car pulls up beside him, tires squealing, and from the back seat a gangster shouldering a flame thrower squirts a stream of fire at him, singeing the nape of his neck. Which explained why he had such a red neck, except it didn’t because he’d always had that dark red neck. Grandpop, target of the Mob, rose in my estimation.

Some years later he had a stroke and the doctors told him he wouldn’t walk again. The hell I won’t, he said. Using the hall railing upstairs he did his own physical therapy and a few months later he drove over to Jersey to thin the Atlantic’s fish population.

Like the Gillons, the Wises also boasted a connection to royalty, this time to none other than Ulysses S. Grant. You see, the S was for Simpson and there was some sort of cousin n times removed who was also named Simpson, or knew someone named Simpson back in Harrisburg, PA which isn’t terrifically far from Point Pleasant, OH, where Grant was born. That’s just too much coincidence. Oddly, Mom insisted this relationship did not extend to her children. It was hers and hers alone. The link was simply too tenuous to extend past her and reach me. Which does not stop me from bragging about my great-great uncle US Grant. I often point out our striking physical similarity.

We Wises do have genuine military connections. Amos Jasper Plummer was killed in Virginia in 1864, part of Grant’s Army of the Potomac that was pressing Robert E. Lee back to Richmond. In December, 1944, my Uncle Huck, aka Amos Jasper Wise, third child of Henry and Mary and part of George Patton’s 3rd Army was killed in the relief of Bastogne. I found online the actual reports for when he was listed MIA and then KIA. The two are separated by almost a month. One can only hope it took that long to identify the body and update the paperwork as opposed to find the body.