BOOMER by Tim Engel (smallest ebook reader txt) 📕

I never even tried to do pull-ups. We were more focused on weight lifting and running. We also climbed ropes and poles.
For gym class at Riley elementary we would do the usual fun stuff like play kick ball, dodge ball, tag, and the like. One of my favorites was playing on the jungle gym. The jungle gym I like to hear the sound of that. At the time I didn’t think anything of it but now it makes me smile. The jungle gym was like a pyramid but made of steel tubing that you climbed. And if you got to the top you could go inside and hang from the top or you could slide down a pole. But for the brave hearted, you could climb to the top and then leap off. It seemed like we were 50 feet in the air. When you jumped you wanted to make sure there were no other kids down below you and that you had a clean patch of sand to land in. This was the day of sand use. They weren’t worried about cats using the swand and cleanliness and so forth. The sand worked well in breaking your fall. Kept you from breaking an ankle or worse. It was like a badge of courage if you could leap off the top. You had to be pretty brave and usually the girls wouldn’t jump. Well, some would. Sally Valencia would. She was pretty tough. I wasn’t sure about her. I guess I liked her but didn’t quite know why a girl would be jumping off the top of the ljungle gym.
Sally reminded me of the tough girl on Leave it to Beaver. The one that stood up to the Beave. I liked Sally and didn’t like her at the same time. I’m not sure exactly why. With the knowledge I have now as a grown man, perhaps it was because she was ‘strong’. She stood up to me. I couldn’t push her around (figuratively). Most girls let the boys have the last word. Maybe that’s what made Sally interesting. She was different. I could even see her getting physical with boys. She may have had brothers at home. Maybe that’s where her source of strength came from. The challenges of home with the brothers honed her skill so that when she came across the wayward fella, it wasn’t even a challenge!
MOVIES
Psycho. Come on, you’ve all seen it. You remember it. Like it was yesterday. I remember the first time I saw it. Since I was the oldest available Cousin, I was watching my Cousins at my Aunt Maria’s house. There was Johnnie, Louise, and Anna. They were great Cousins. We had eaten hot dogs, on eof my favorites and even got a chance to go swimming. In fact, this was the very pool where I learened to swim. Aunt Maria, Uncle John, and Mom and Dad were going out for the evening and I was to babysit. The Kids – my younger Cousins had gone to bed and I had the TV all to myself.
Psycho. Was on. There it was. I had never seen it before. Wasn’t this something more for cable TV? They didn’t have cable TV back then. Alfred Hitchcock’s Horror, Mystery, Thriller masterpiece was on tonight. Oh, yeah – this was good. I was going to get myself scared to death! And no one else was there with me (the kids were safely asleep in bed). So it would be doubly scary! Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, and his dominating mother would have a collision of sorts when Janet was caught up in a web of sickness and jealousy. The suspense builds as Janet steals the $40,000 from her employers’ client and then takes off. She doesn’t get far before she pulls into a tired, scary, spooky looking little hotel.
What sticks in my mind the most are two scenes. One is the shower scene where Janet meets her end. I think that all America went ‘stinky’ or converted to baths for several months after this flick hit the screens. Imagine warm water relaxing you, washing off the stress, guilt, terror and fear of being caught for grand theft. When you are most relaxed, the shower curtain is flung open and a mean spirited little woman with big attitude starts swinging wildly with a butcher knife. You put up your hands in defense, but the blade thrusts though and finds its’ mark. You thrash wildly, but begin to weaken. Janet falls and the knife blows stop…the black blood circles and goes down the drain…close up on her eye as the life drains out. Absolute horror poetry. You couldn’t have scared 1960 America any worse! Sleepless nights, now showers, nightmares abound! My heart was pounding in my chest. I jumped up and made a quick round of the house to ensure all doors and windows were closed and locked. What was that!! Oh, shoot – it was Kitty!! I just about peed my pants!
The other scene I found horrifying was when the Detective played by Martin Balsam was going up the stairs to investigate where the thief might be. And out comes Mrs Bates (Norman) with that flying butcher knife again. The horror on his face. It was filmed in such a way that it was like YOU, the audience, was committing the murder. His wide eyed shock and gasping were right in the film lens such that it was you wielding the deadly steel. And it followed him as he backpedaled and began to fall all the way down the stairs. Oh my gosh – could it have been any more horrible? To look directly into the face of a man being brutally murdered and compounding it with him falling backwards down a big flight of stairs. You felt off balance, you felt you were falling, and you felt as if you were the murder. Because that was the attitude of the camera!
Psycho is one of those great classics that can be watched over and over and manage to scare the living sugar out of you every time.
1963 brought the release of “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World”. “It’s under a big W, I tell ya…a big W”. And so Jimmy Durante launched a wild, madcap race across the desert , the skies, through a hardware store, and all points in search of the loot, the ill gotten gain. This just before he ‘kicked the bucket’. At the time I didn’t really understand the breadth and cast of this movie. I just knew that it was hilarious, full of adventure, and just plain good old fashioned fun. The 3 stooges as firemen? Bonus! Of course it wasn’t the original 3 Stooges. Curly had been replaced by Joe. It had a lot going for it: A terrific cast – from Buster Keaton and Spencer Tracy to Ethel Merman and Mickey Rooney. The story was great, too – a bunch of unscrupulous, greedy people find out about a pile of dough buried by some crooks. Like pirate loot just waiting to be dug up and enjoyed!
The race of cars through the hilly, curvy road is terrific. A delivery truck driven by comic genius Jonathan Winters, a Volkswagen Beetle driven by Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett and others all racing at break neck speed to be the first to get to the money. The lengths they go to – hiring an old biplane which is on it’s last legs, blowing up a hardware store, hiring cabs and filling up and chasing each other through town. It’s all a lot of fun, albeit deadly if it were in true life.
And when they all get injured falling off firemen’s ladders, they get the last laugh when Ethel Merman comes in at the end yelling at all of them and she slips and falls on a banana peel. Great stuff!
Later in the 60s came the movie “The Graduate”. Dustin Hoffman played a young College boy who is seduced by the neighbor’s wife. Mrs Robinson is played by Ann Bancroft. The script was very good and the movie made Hoffman a star. It was a comedy and a drama. The sound track was crafted by Simon and Garfunkle.
Possibly the movie that had the biggest impact on me as a child was Godzilla. Some of you are already smiling or smirking and thinking, Godzilla? Well, yes – Godzilla. As a youngster I was scared out of my mind by this movie. All of the bad special effects, bad dubbing, bad costumes, bad miniatures, bad music all came together at a perfect time in my life to scare the ever-livin pee out of me. When that music got weird, and your heard that horrible unearthly growl of the great monster, my skin was covered with big goose bumps!! This movie was totally believable to me. I am not sure the first time I saw it, but it was released in 1958, 4 years after I was born. So I was probably very young. It was that grainy, poor quality, black and white edition. It looked like a documentary in retrospect. I remember the scientist. I remember the fisherman uttering in horror …”God-zilla!...God-zilla…” With that unspeakable look of horror on his face. You knew that he had seen something that had changed his life forever.

At that age I’m not sure I even understood that this was fiction. At that age I think that I thought it was a documentary. And what ensued after my watching Godzilla was a recurring nightmare. Here was the nightmare. Godzilla would come from the South…from the Lakewood Golf Course end of the street. Kung…Kung…Kung…you could feel the vibrations through the ground. And every 20 seconds or so he’d let out that unearthly growl which translated loosely means I’m the biggest mamma jamma on the earth and I’m comin’ for You!
So there I was in the front room of the 900 sq ft home at 4823 Hayter Ave. Godzilla was coming. And here was the catch. If while walking down the street he could see you, he would proceed to come over and either cook you with his breath, eat you with his 30” teeth, or stomp you with his tons and tons of machismo. So what you had to do when he was cruising the street was hide. And I would hide just below the big picture window at the front of the house. Why I chose not to go hide in the den, garage, back porch, or back yard; I’m not sure. Maybe it was because I wanted to ‘keep and eye’ on the big guy!
One time he stopped, bellowed, turned, and looked right at me. I figured my time was up. Even though he moved pretty slow, he was so big and bad that he was sure to catch me. I didn’t budge, but played ‘dead’. Good strategy. Worked with bears and giant fire breathing monsters! I’m not sure