Ramblin' with Rosemary

There was one time I dismayed them mightily. I had hooked a big fish, and nobody noticed until with a huge heave, it was flip-flopping on the deck. It was a codfish and "Didn’t I know it had a soft mouth?" and "Why didn’t you call for a gaff?" they shouted at me. I thought you only called for a gaff if you had a shark or a whale.

My father was the first in the neighborhood to buy a car. It was a Chevrolet. The body was a shiny, dark ‘bottle-green,’ and the roof had a black canvas-like fabric. To this day ‘bottle-green’ is one of my favorite colors. On weekends he would take my mother, aunt, grandmother, Charles, and me on drives to Yonkers, Westchester, and sometimes as far as Greenwich, Connecticut. The ladies would go to a Tea Shoppe for refreshments (I was never able to figure out why Tea Shoppes spelt Shop with two Ps and an E). While they had their tea and sandwiches, Daddy would bring Charles and me to an ice-cream parlor for a soda or sundae.

In the summer we took trips into New England. At night we would stop at one of those roadside motels with a string of individual cabins. Having always lived in an apartment, I thought this was a huge adventure. Never mind it was about 10-feet by 8-feet with outhouses in the back.

We toured to such places of interest as The Old North Church, Fanuel Hall, Paul Revere’s home, and Bunker Hill in Boston, Bennington Battle Monument in Vermont, and White Face Mountain in New Hampshire. It was on these trips that the seeds of traveling and a thirst for adventure were first planted.

Eleanor and Marguerite were respectively 7 and 5 years older than Charles and I who were separated by 6 months. The girls grew up more like sisters while Charles and I were boon companions and playmates right up to and through grade school. Both families moved from the apartment. We located two blocks away in another apartment, and the Evans’ moved into the first floor apartment of a two-family house across the street. The landlord of Charles’ apartment lived on the second floor. He was a crusty, old Irishman who took a shine to Charles and me and let us have free run of the basement.

It was there that we built our airplane. By turning an empty barrel on its side, we constructed two cockpits. Our propeller was an old broomstick, but we had an authentic (paper) control panel which we obtained by sending away five Wheaties box tops. We spent many hours soaring over mountains, shooting enemy fighter planes with deadly accuracy, flying through blinding snowstorms, and rescuing all kinds of imperiled folk. Before takeoff I would spin the propeller, Charles would yell ‘Contact" (we had to yell over the roar of the engines), I would run around and leap into my cockpit as we started down the runway. When we weren’t flying, we were Secret Service Agents employed by the government to track down enemy spies. We sent each other coded messages in invisible ink that could only be revealed with lemon juice. Our code was designed to foil the cleverest cryptographer. National security will not be compromised now if I reveal the code: #1 = A, #2 = B, #3 = C, etc. As you can see, it was really clever.