Gray and Maroon [reunion photos]

By Barbara Groark


By strange coincidence, the only flowers left in my garden that the rabbits haven’t bitten down and that aren’t just done this time of year are the dusty miller (gray) and the red coleus plants (maroon). Interesting. Weird.


One piece of sad news from the reunion is that Mary Callahan of Moorestown has died. I have added her name to the “Moment of Silence” article.


I’m trying Picasa for the pictures. When you hit the link, you may be asked to sign in and make up a password, but there is no cost (more Google free stuff) and you may just get an email once in a while. You also may be asked to download the Picasa photo reader so your computer can read the pictures. So say “yes” to that, or “download now,” however you find it on your machine.


I’m sorry I did not get a photo or two at the Amendolas Sunday afternoon. Our numbers were few, and we were all too amazed at our house tour to be analytical enough to take pictures – is that the explanation? In any case, this was an area of neglect on my part. Carol and Tom were gracious hosts, and Tom has amazing collections of antique cars, radio and television sets, and other 20th century technology memorabilia on display – and is working on a really large train set, or system, in his spare time. Carol has a work area/sewing room in her basement where even more products of her fertile imagination eventually make their way upstairs. Everything is new, beautiful, and welcoming, even where it is unfinished. And Carol is blonde now, in case you run into her around town.


Here are three links to the still pics; many thanks to Dan Turygan, Marlene Altamuro Handschuh, and Mary Pippitt Cervantes for passing their photos over to round out my own:


Once at the album page, click once on the first picture, then use the Forward and Back arrow buttons, or you might click the Slideshow button on the album page (ESC button to return).


Friday and Saturday

Saturday Evening

Sunday Morning

The video did come out, though a bit dark. I’ll be getting them posted very shortly.

Between Self and Soul: A Voyage

By Barbara Groark (a poem from some time in the 1980s)

The Dream:

Through the pipe in his teeth, jaw thrust forward
Stubbs says, "We're going after Moby Dick."

I cling flat with both hands to the surfaced submarine,
black and adamantine,
through rough night seas. Waves break over,
but I stay. Behind me an old man in a white
suit and string tie with a little girl by the hand
walks on sea legs toward me through the wind.
I worry for their safety. The wind whips them over-
board. I say, "That doesn't happen."

I awake.

The Waking:
Several years later: Thar she blows. It's Moby Dick,
destroyer of men and boys.
All those boys at the bottom of the sea.
Thar she blows.

The captain's log,

But I am only the lookout.

Ahab is destroyed I hope. Who needs a mad captain?

Should women be in the navy and sail the seven seas?

Some may need to do hard things
their mothers didn't do for lack of knowledge
or courage or wherewithal or need.

Not every man would sail the seas.
Not every woman either. On the water, rocking
steady, boards creaking, the harpooneers watch the
water, the rowers wait, sometimes an hour. Sometimes
he gets away. All those boys at the bottom of the sea.
The captain now is Christ.

No danger of suicide
if we follow our leader.

No danger of suicide.
Moby Dick hates girls and grandfathers.
The girl is six or eight, the grandfather like Santa,
old enough to wobble, moves slowly enough
for a child’s pace. They are safe now behind a rail.
But the rest of us are with the boats and have the whale.
He's slippery and he is cruel.

A diabolic nature,

not human. His animal eyes look at you dully.

I'd been riding him, the whale, for several years.
Ahab beckoned from his back, a dead man beckoning.
I've been dead for several years now at the bottom of the sea.
I'm strange-looking, like those fish that never see the light.
There's no negotiating with him.

Safe, if you follow the leader.

There's no negotiating,
no reason in him.

Yet he has innocent prisoners.

Will they wash up whole on the shore, shaken but alive?
Will they scar like Ahab, marred, bitter, dangerous?
Will they be destroyed before we reach them?

Maybe we can only ease their deaths.
Our father will heal them. They will die to this world
and be with us in the next.

For some the next is now.

Unreason to combat unreason.
Unreason greater than their unreason.
Patience greater than their patience.
Strength greater than their seeming strength.

Patient as hell. Love with no room for fear.

That is what they most fear,
as you've noticed. It puzzles them, your confidence.

Savor or Seize the Moment, Whichever You Prefer

By Dennis Murawski

Well, friends, last month was 40 years since we walked down the Holy Cross auditorium aisles to receive our diplomas. Life has been filled with all that we filled it with, or let slip by. I find it hard to believe that I am approaching a new decade, and particularly one that begins with a six.

We are at the crossroads of life now, maybe a little past the intersection, a point in time, where we can look back and dimly see the beginning of the journey or look forward with clearer sight and see the end, be it our own, or perhaps our parent’s if we are lucky enough to still have them. Maybe, we are blessed and see the beginning when we hold a new grandchild, which I will do today.

My 88-year-old mother keeps telling me to “seize the moment.” As I look back, she has not always been right, but I think she hit the nail on its head with this one. Occasionally, I will sit back and think about my life, what I have done, what I have failed to do. Both unwritten columns have numerous entries. I also keep an index card in my pocket, to jot down things I need to do. My wife, Pam, says I make too many lists.

Looking back, there is a lot of time that is filled with the stuff you need to do just to live. Work – that thing that is interfering with more and more of my life. Housework – paying bills, shopping, cutting the grass, etc. Then there is the really good stuff that makes it all worthwhile – years ago playing with your kids, family trips, watching your kids play sports, or dance in a recital. Maybe there was volunteer work, like being involved in a church youth program for nine years, or doing evenings for engaged couples. Maybe it was coaching youth soccer, then high school soccer or adult/college soccer for the summer. We all have a list of things we’ve done.

I bring this up because, for me, the most enjoyable times I’ve had on this journey are those I spend with people. Maybe it is a primordial thing, or a team player thing. Maybe I enjoy finding out about people, where they’ve been, what they have done. I enjoy the frivolity and jokes of the moment, and the deep conversations about life, what we are doing here, politics, whatever. For me, sharing moments in our lives with friends is what it’s all about.

I am so looking forward to seeing all of you. It’s been 10 years since we were together and there is so much to talk about and share. There have been so many of you I didn’t get a chance to spend time with at the previous reunions, so this will be like a smorgasbord for me. And then there are those coming for the first time. Wow – there are 40 years of life to talk about!

I know that there are still a lot of you thinking about coming. As I’ve told my soccer teams when we are losing, time is not our friend now. We have the opportunity to stop the clock for 48 hours and revel in each other, our common four years at HC, sharing our life stories and expressing our hopes for the future. Then there’s the dancing. Five or ten years from now, the dancing will be slower than right now.

So you have a choice. You can seize and savor this moment in time, or you can put it in the column of ‘things I should have done.’ Either way, Monday October 13th will arrive. You can be basking in the afterglow of a wonderful weekend, or waking up and going back to work after a weekend of yard work, shopping, cooking, or whatever most of our lives are filled with. Sure hope I see you there. The work can wait!!!

Blogger’s Note: If anyone is hesitating to join us because they would be coming alone, please notify me or any committee member to set up any ‘singles’ sharing of rooms. The Flanders offers suites only, so two, three, or four people could be comfortable sharing. - BG

Muzak, Monks, and Food Shopping

By Barbara Groark

However, if you do want to hear the pop music of our own grade school and high school years, sung by the original performers, you need go no further than the your local food store. At least that’s what’s been happening in my neighborhood starting a few months ago. The company that puts out Muzak is no longer using the much-disparaged easy-listening versions of older popular songs – in recent years it’s been Laura Nyro, Billy Joel, The Who, and Jefferson Airplane given the Muzak treatment if I remember correctly, however vaguely. The company now serves up original recordings for shoppers and elevator riders, and the era of current choice is the late fifties and first half of the sixties. I don’t know if the stores are making a mistake.

The other day I was minding my own business picking out some bread or cereal or lettuce or milk, and I almost started doing the Slop as “Carol” by Chuck Berry came on (not “Oh Carol” by Neil Sedaka). I controlled myself, but it was a bit distracting. Then it was the Beatles “I Wanna Be Your Man,” which is not a great sing-along for me, and is kind of noisy if you’re trying to read Nutrition Facts. But then “Just One Look” came on with that opening piano, and I almost (almost) compulsively got into girl-group stance to start singing along. This song is really good for singing along. I tried to remember who the artist was – it kind of sounds like Tina Turner, or at least the Ikettes, but I really couldn’t remember. I wrote down the song name on my shopping list.

Well, thank heavens for YouTube. It turns out that I never knew the woman’s name in the first place, only every word to the song. She was an obscure one-hit wonder of a singer named Doris Troy, and here she is, or was. (Warning: Don’t play this link until you are in a place of relative privacy, with enough dance room for a cha-cha.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvpLeRa4phk


Before YouTube, what did we do to find out important historical information such as this? Well, we had arguments in bars and at family reunions, and when nothing came of that went to the people who are the archivists and historians of our age, such as Jerry Blavat (who currently has a one-hour educational oldies radio show on WXPN-FM in Philly on Saturday evenings at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time if you’re interested [ http://xpn.org/xpn-programs/geator and I think you can listen on the Internet if you are from way out of town.]).

Or go to Dave Marsh’s book The Heart of Rock and Soul: 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made (New York: DaCapo Press, 1999). I resorted to this valuable book at one point after hearing a band in a bar playing a pretty nice version of “Some Kind of Wonderful” (not the Drifters song), and my cousin-in-law reminisced about the song as recorded by Grand Funk Railroad. Not blaming him a bit for being a few years younger than I, I pointed out that I thought the original was by another group, a black R&B group whose name wouldn’t come to me. We put the issue aside (no money involved). But I got to the reference section of a bookstore later on and found the above-mentioned song-critique encyclopedia and looked up the title in the index (“Kind of”, not “Kinda”).

Item 594, the Soul Brothers Six. Atlantic, 1967. As it says on page 390, “As for the Soul Brothers Six, who knows what became of them? They seem to have been from Philadelphia; judging from what I can hear, they may have been that town’s answer to Dyke and the Blazers.” [“Bugaloo Down Broadway”]

I was glad to be vindicated, and I sent my cousin-in-law a memo (no email at the time). And I went back to the store and actually bought the book, which has proved valuable since then. And who knew that Dyke and the Blazers even needed an answer?

If you’d like to refresh your memory, here is a version by neither GFR nor SB6, and I think it sounds better than both of them, being by a men’s a cappella group:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHRLrYWPVwo&feature=related


Have you been to any grade school or high school choir concerts lately? It seems that the music teachers and choir directors have been digging into the girl and boy doo-wop and R&B repertoire for the past few years and getting the kids to learn some of our era songs, like those guys in that video. Since one of my nieces is a singer, I’ve heard concert versions of “My Girl” by Mary Wells, “The Lollipop Song” (I forget by whom), as well as “Over the Rainbow,” which by the way has been again recorded by one of today’s singers, and the kids like it all over again. Sounds like they are trying to have fun with the older music, and please some of the parents and grandparents in the audience (and possibly annoy others).

It seem like adult choirs and barbershop quartets are also making a comeback among the really rebellious, and the barbershop guys are incorporating doo-wop and R&B sounds among their older standards. I can vouch for this, since I saw a barbershop singing competition a few years ago, rebelliously, at the Wildwood Convention Center (Wildwood, now advertised as the Doo-Wop Capital of the World). That was fun to hear.

And if we recall our history even more, class, we can see why, for example, communism never really took hold in this country. We already had a voice of the people on the radio every day. While other people had Hitler or Mussolini haranguing them, the Allies had Bing Crosby and Duke Ellington. While other people had Khruschev, we had Elvis. Are music and dancing the opiate of the masses? Or did they help us win wars? Or are they just excellent anger management tools? (All of the above?)

Anyway, there was a time in the 1970s, following the political assassinations, when that old American music was disparaged and apparently voluntarily suppressed. Even the blacks stopped dancing. Something was obviously wrong. Only the gays, like the monks of medieval Europe, seemed to be keeping the knowledge alive till the Renaissance came. Are we seeing that time now?

Here’s another obscure hit that’s made a return; two versions. I give them both because I don’t think Alicia gets the better of Brenda, though she does a good job. And the sound, not great, on the Brenda version is unrestored to digital. [Ibid., page 599, Item 946, Tamla 1964: “…more reminiscent of the pop-soul set pieces Burt Bacharach and Hal David were constructing for Dionne Warwick in those years. Which also marks Holloway as the first really adult Motown artist….”] Again, I would be in a non-public area before opening the links:

Here’s Brenda Holloway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SzeReQR-kw

Here’s Alicia Keys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfycwdZoseM&feature=related

In other news, from some time in the nineties, one of my sisters and her husband, whose son was touring with the Philadelphia Boys Choir, traveled to South Africa in the period after apartheid ended. Her report when she got back included the kinds of music the South Africans were playing on the radio: old Elvis music and other old American rock and roll and R&B. Who would have guessed this would be their choice? They apparently found the songs to be appropriate accompaniment to the big social upheavals that were, and still are, happening in that country.

OK I have work to do. I can’t be browsing around YouTube all day and night!

But another interesting thing that is happening with this music is that it is really big, and I mean really really big all over again in England nowadays, as confirmed by my hairdresser, whose husband is British and goes back home a few time a year. There are some radio guys there who call themselves Northern Soul who are promoting the old R&B music and creating dances that look like a combination line dance, break dance, and just a mushy shuffle, but anyhow it’s not mosh pit metal. These are the guys dancing in back of Duffy on this song, which has a sound a little like “Sally Go Round the Roses” and a little like “Nowhere to Run Nowhere to Hide.” I give it about a 95. It has a good beat that makes you want to dance, or at least join the background girls in the “yeah, yeahs.” See if you agree.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE2orthS3TQ

And finally, something completely ridiculous. This is the Northern Soul guys again, from England, apparently YouTube-savvy, combining an old Motown song with an unrelated dance clip by the Nicholas Brothers, the old vaudeville-type dance team whose heyday was the 1930s and -40s.

I sense a great disturbance in the Force.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_UudmXWuMg&feature=related

And I still haven’t finished my food shopping.

And Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers and grandfathers out there.

Music, Sinatra, and e-Networking

By Barbara Groark

Some time in the 1970s, when disco came in, I started listening to jazz and classical music, even though what felt like home to me was more the Beatles, Motown, Laura Nyro, Bonnie Raitt, and the Roches. Having decided to reconcile with my father’s generation, if not my father himself, I later started listening to Sinatra and other music of the 1940s and -50s. And guess what – I liked it. Maybe it’s because it was always music for grownups, and I’m finally a grownup, or so I hope. I like old Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn records, and this is what has pulled me through the rap, head-banger, and general incoherency - or female bombastic anthem for every song – eras in music. Some of the new kids today, from the Puppini Sisters to Amy Winehouse, are even mining old song collections.

And when you listen to love song followed by love song followed by another love song, you realize why there was a Baby Boom in the first place. Something Christmas-y happens when you listen to that optimistic and confident and sometimes hokey old music. [By the way, Dennis Murawski just became a new grandfather.]

With opera and classical I’m just a visitor, but there is some power in those crazy stories and liftoff is achieved with some of that sound. I visit country and bluegrass music once in a while, too – went to see the Dixie Chicks one time as well as the people from the O Brother, Where Art Thou film soundtrack. And I like some of Beck and some of the new guys and girls.

But if the Chairman of the Board were alive today, he might appreciate the following:

http://americancomedynetwork.com/animation.html?bit_id=25239

That’s a link from my uncle, who keeps sending “spam” email a few times a week, and occasionally they are funny.

Not that this isn’t an awkward transition, but on the same subject of Internet social networks, such as MySpace, Facebook, and others, let alone YouTube, some of which I have been investigating for business reasons, here is an article by Karen Heller, a columnist in the Philadelphia Inquirer, who sometimes sounds like someone I went to school with. By the way, I have a niece who has something like 2,352 MySpace “friends.” I don’t have any, except you guys of course, and several others.

[The article is called “Beware strangers asking to be friends.”]

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/19309699.html

Hodgepodge Blog

By Barbara Groark

I’ve talked so much about the girls, I thought I’d mention the boys who came out of Sacred Heart School, Riverton, and went to Holy Cross, and they are Fran Eschemen and Frank Evers, a couple of unassuming guys, and also John Haller, who is among the deceased. At one of the reunions, Kathy Williams came up to me and pointed out Fran, an unrecognizable tall, thin guy, who had just bought a favorite local bakery, Klipple’s, at River Road and Riverton Road, and which is now an coffee bar near the River Line trains. I don’t know if Fran still runs it. In grade school and high school (and he and I did not speak that whole time), Fran always looked like a forty-year-old businessman, along the lines of the prosperous little guy with the white mustache in the Monopoly game. And he turned into this other taller, thinner person. What an appearance change a lot of men make after high school, like growing five or eight inches! Or in other cases losing one’s hair, which some men find embarrassing but which some women find very appealing. I worked with a girl once who would only date bald men, and she finally married one and lived happily ever after.

I remember John Haller surprisingly ran for class president in our senior year, and I remember listening to a speech he gave and thinking, surprisingly, “I may vote for him,” and I think I did. I’d known him since grade school, and one of his younger sisters and one of my younger sisters were friends. When he ran for president, there was a new aspect of his personality that came out, one that stayed pretty hidden most of the time, and it was self-assured and confidence-inspiring. If I remember correctly, Harry Lukis beat him out, and I forget who were the rest of the officers.

OK, I got the 1968 yearbook. There were two groups: the Student Council Officers pictured are Daniel O’Connor, Susan Bronesky, Patricia Brant, and Harry Lukis. I guess they ruled the whole school, because there were then officers for each class, the Senior Class Officers being Thomas Albrecht, Sharon Stewart, Donald Osmundson, and Molly Walsh. They all must have ruled justly, because I can’t remember ever feeling too oppressed by their governance. I don’t even know what they were responsible for, they ruled so seemlessly.

Are any of these people in politics today, or is anyone else? Write and let us know. I recently found out Dan Turygan had spent a few years in local politics out in Pemberton Township, Burlington County - another guy who went through big changes after high school.

At one of the reunions, I was sitting at a table near the door chatting with, I think, Trish Brant and Marie Griffin and maybe Branko Galunic. It was about 10:30, after the meal had been served and the tables cleared. A man breezed in the door in informal clothes and sat down and asked if the food was still available and where could he get some? He was kind of dashing-looking and preoccupied with his thoughts, like a member of the Order of the Phoenix or something. We probably pointed out the food area, and when he left we looked at each other and said, “Who was that?” None of us knew. He came back to our table with his plate, and he told us who he was – Anthony Bucci! – and that he was glad food was still being served since he had paid for it, but he had just come from the hospital delivery room where his wife had given birth to a girl (?), but he had been wanting to stop by and say hello to people. I was still trying to remember who Anthony Bucci was, and at some point afterwards I had to get a yearbook, and there he was! Someone else I had not spoken to throughout high school. I hope his wife is less busy in October than she was that night.

I tell you, all most people really need for all-around improvement after high school is a good spouse and a couple of kids under their belts.

No Rollers, No Girdles

By Barbara Groark

What does feminism mean to me? Class, this is our topic for today.

There is the equal pay for equal work part. One summer job I had after high school was in the Wage and Salary section of a major corporation, and I saw for myself the separate wage scales for men and women. This is one of those things kids today find hard to believe, but I also found it offensive then. When I asked the boss about it, he shrugged his shoulders and held out both hands and said, “I didn’t make the rules.” He seemed to agree with me on the unfairness of it, but could do nothing about what the whole general culture and corporate policy had agreed to.

I guess we quieter types can thank the noisier types of the sixties and seventies for bringing some changes about, no matter what we may think of some particular issues. Also, the Catholic school system seemed to prepare us girls to live up to the same general rules as boys, even if there were natural gender differences in some areas. One of my female bosses in the seventies went somewhere each month to have something done to herself so she wouldn’t have a monthly period. Most women ignored that one as unrealistic, but recently I noticed the concept has returned to the general culture, along with the other strange rearrangements of ourselves that are possible now. I hope most people ignore them again.

But possibly more important for the world at large was the invention and mass production of the hand-held hair dryer, which helped eliminate the heavily criticized wearing of daytime and nighttime hair rollers, as well as the discarding of the girdle as a ‘proper foundation garment’ (a term from Sister Coletta’s Clothing Construction I Class).

The rollers I wore in high school to straighten my hair – soup can size and all over my head - made me look like a space alien, or a device to guide the landings of planes. I once saw in a museum a Nigerian head rest: a wooden block women would have at the neck as they lay down at night so they would not ruin the elaborate braided hairdos they had had constructed. That’s how my sisters and I rolled up our pillows at night, so they could be at our necks and below our ears and we would not have to lean the head and rollers against anything. It took some real planning to change positions.

Thank heavens for the Civil Rights Movement. It freed curly-haired people of all types. It took me a few years to go all the way to natural, but I was finally free!

My nieces are straightening their hair now again, with the brush-out and hand dryer method, which is a lot of arm work, and I tried that for a little while, but stopped. More variety of straight and curly and short and long seems to be allowed by fashion than in earlier times. A rainy day is not such a disaster as it used to be.

The girdle was an item of women’s underwear which could be seen as a transitional following the strictures of the old corset and freedom of the ‘no bra’ seventies and ‘no underwear at all’ nineties. Slips were next to be discarded, and then entered the push-up bra and thong 2000s. The last seems to be fading from favor as just too uncomfortable. I haven’t bought new underwear since 1998.

I once attended a demonstration of the Gibson Girl era of dress: 1890-1910, a time when women first started appearing as office secretaries, the corset era, when the ideal was the hourglass figure. Who cared if you couldn’t breathe? The attraction to men at that time was supposed to be the narrow waistline. Were men actually asked? The featured speaker at the demonstration came on stage in ankle boots, long dark A-line skirt, and shirtwaist blouse – white cotton with ruffled high neck and long ‘leg-o-mutton’ sleeves, tucked in at the waist, a lot like the gathered, pouf-shouldered sleeves of the 1970s. Or was that the 80s? Then she started peeling off layers: blouse, overshirt, corset, undershirt, to the long chemise – this was a summer ensemble. Then she put it all on again and explained each step. By the end, most of the audience was feeling absolutely no nostalgia for the Gilded Age. And in that era, men were wearing a lot of layers as well: shirt, undershirt, vest, tie, and jacket. Laborers were an exception, but if you were trying to get ahead, you were imitating your betters, even if you were a maid, and that meant lots of layers of clothing, which may have been meant to convey prosperity – you could afford the cloth. There were also old medical theories, later discarded, about covering your skin to avoid disease.

Younger women discarded corsets about the same time as the advent of the car and the vote for women, but the bra was not invented in France till the 1930s. So the twenties were looking a lot like the seventies, ladies’ underwear-wise.

Do you remember in high school there were several times the Guidance Office put out a directive to girls requesting they did not wear colorful, flower-power or bright, solid-colored bras because you could see the colors through our white uniform blouses, and that was a little disturbing to the male teachers, or so it was presented to us. I went to pastel in compliance. The white or beige old-fashioned standards were out of the question, too much like mom’s and grandmom’s underwear. I’m more understanding of mom and grandmom today. They had other things to do and think about besides their underwear.

Do you find even today that high school girls are competing in clothing and underwear, as revealed in gym class, with other girls rather than trying to draw the attention of boys, or especially male teachers? And don’t most boys who are allowed to be themselves not need to be hit with a bludgeon in order to think about girls?

However, despite a swing back to discomfort in underwear, since the sixties and seventies, there seems to be more of a brother/sister bond between kids in school, and people at work, and that’s an improvement from our high school time, when there was a lot more discomfort between the sexes, although other people seemed to have a little less trouble than I did. And the soccer-girl ponytail and easy up-do that have been around for twenty years or so is both easy and mildly traditional looking.

Time marches on, which is mostly a relief. I’m a little amazed to see the person in the mirror I see today. Cuts take longer to heal. I take soy milk with my morning cereal to control hot flashes. The last time I was in a lingerie department, there was something called shapewear, containing lots of Lycra, that is supposed to do all the things a girdle used to do – give you a waistline and keep the fat contained and disguised as firm muscle – but without feeling like a brick wall from the outside or from the wearer’s perspective. Seems like a lot of responsibility for some underwear, and I haven’t bothered much with it, since Lycra seems hot, summer or winter, and the effect is pretty much negligible despite the hype.

So that means the gym, doesn’t it, girls and boys, if we don’t want to end up looking like Queen Victoria or J. P. Morgan. That means running and walking and dancing. That means keeping the weight down for a more comfortable, joint-healthy future. Maybe we can thank the seventies’ feminists for contributing to the good general health and clothing comfort of boomers of both sexes today and the good things that are happening in geriatric medicine for our parents’ generation.

E Pluribus Unum

By Barbara Groark

Have you seen the television commercial for Enablex, a pharmaceutical treatment for bladder control problems? The ones with the bouncing water balloons in different colors? It has a group of ‘balloons’ representing the class reunion of 1968, who all seem to have to run to the bathroom a lot. Aren’t we about 25 or 30 years too early for this representation? Shouldn’t we all write to the advertiser complaining that the reunion year ought to be somewhere in the 1940s or early 1950s? The writers must be about 23 (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

I grew up in Cinnaminson on the Moorestown side of Route 130, versus the Delaware River side. My family moved there when I was nine and my mother was pregnant with her fifth child (there would be six). My parents grew up in West Philadelphia, married and moved to Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania, and then we moved to “the country” as my Irish Aunt Win called it, that is, South Jersey. My grade school was Sacred Heart School in Riverton, a few blocks from the river, where the nuns were from Boston and Nova Scotia and had very funny peaked hats and tried to turn us all into little princes and princesses. Before the new parish of St. Charles Borromeo (famous now for its June carnival) was started, we all took the long bus ride on Riverton Road from our bare-new-tree and new-split-level-house side of the highway through leafy Riverton, across the old tracks (now the River Line) to the school, whose original church with its dark-red-painted, wood-slat siding, was built in 1892 for the Irish girls, of which several were relatives of mine (one of the Brennan families), who were the maids in many of the big houses along the waterfront and through the town. The ride was like taking a trip back through time every day, and I occasionally still have dreams of riding along this road. The bus driver was Father Delzell, who occasionally sang to keep us all quiet. He was a very good tenor. We’d hear him again singing the litany amazingly during First Friday afternoons in church. It was interesting to see him in the bus, and then “on stage” in dramatic gold vestments.

But my first school, where I went to first and second and started third grade, was called Holy Cross School in Springfield, Pennsylvania. My first-grade class had 70 or so students, and there were four first grades. My sister Pat started school a year later, and there were 95 or so kids in her particular class, again with four classes of the grade. Our Christmas pageants and May processions were conducted with military precision, with a lot of standing and waiting with folded hands, and I can see now that this was the only way to proceed with numbers like these. The alternative was not to do any of these things, but I think the nuns really needed to get out of the classroom once in a while. I’m much more sympathetic nowadays with those teachers (especially after I taught second grade for a year in Camden).

My third-grade class in the new school, Sacred Heart, had only about 50 kids, and there were only two classes of each grade. (Marie Griffin, Eileen Costello, Janet Sanford, Christine Hill, correct me if I’m wrong on this.) I was pretty good at spelling bees, and have the Miraculous Medals to prove it. Well, I don’t really still have them, but what I’m trying to say is that these numbers were just ordinary to us. Most families had several kids in different grades, with more coming along.

In fact, in Cinnaminson alone, I can name ten families of ten or more children, all Catholic, some of whom moved through Holy Cross High School later. OK, I’ll do it: Vassallos, Rineharts, Kostiuks, Corrs, mmmmmmmm. Well, I confess that, even after consulting my sisters, I can only remember four family names. I used to have them on the tip of my fingers. Guess I’ll have to do a memory dump of more recent useless information, of which there is quite a lot, so I can get back to these important facts.

And then in Holy Cross High School there were the Moseleys and Callahans from Moorestown, with Mary and Kate (or Mary Kate, or Mary Kay, what did you finally settle on?) in our class, and I think the Zehlers were ten. (Or was it fewer, Annette?) Who else?

So perhaps birth control was inevitable after that. One father of a family of ten once said to me, “If all my kids have ten kids, I’m moving to California.”

However, if all the smart people used birth control, why do we have the Congress that we have today? How smart were they?

But how can I criticize? I have no children, a condition not unheard of in people from large families. And we were only six, only average-to-large numbers for that time.

And now that we are in the third quarter of our life span, the financial marketplace advises us to put our supposed millions into medical care, pharmaceuticals, and other services for the aged. Invest in our decrepitude. The numbers will be staggering. That’s something to think about, isn’t it?

I once sat down at a table at an event with a woman, maybe five years older than our graduating class, whose husband as a side job had just made an album of doo-wop music and was traveling around New Jersey with his group. Her view of the financial advice to our age group was, “Nursing homes? Sitting at home in rocking chairs wringing our hands? This is what they are telling us? Sorry, something livelier please - I’m not done yet!”

Me neither. Not that we’ll be training for the Olympics, but there’s no need to rush things.

Occasionally, though, I see a thought on the horizon, and I wait for it to come in closer so I can see what it is, but it just hangs out there. What’s up with that?

Here’s a poem by Billy Collins.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrEPJh14mcU