Mammaries

By Barry Krantz

Barry Krantz was lucky enough to grow up in a small town in the late forties and fifties, one where you knew just about everyones name. You also knew anyone in town who would help you out if you needed it, and youd help them in return.

Growing up in Lawrence, Indiana, in the forties, Barry first met his lifelong friend, Richard, a.k.a. Rocky, in the first grade. In Mammaries, his memoir, he looks back on the fun and the crazy pranks that he and his buddies played on just about everyone when they were growing up; in a small town, you could invent your own fun. He reminisces about going through the twelve years of school with the same group of buddies, many of whom are still friends today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450273473

Barry Krantz

Barry Krantz grew up in the small town of Lawrence, Indiana. He currentlylives in Anaheim, CA. ( NOT L.A. )

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Mammaries

SKU-000188404_TEXT.pdf

Barry Krantz

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Mammaries

Copyright © 2011 by Barry Krantz

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-7346-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-7347-3 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 03/17/2011

SKU-000188404_TEXT.pdf

When I was six, my family moved to Lawrence, Indiana. We lived at 4705 Longworth; it was the smallest house in town. There were five in our family: two boys and a girl. You could stand in one spot and touch every room. The house only had two small bedrooms. The guy who sold it to us was one of the two town drunks. He took the money and built a new house, bigger than ours. My dad, who was called Pappy, had a good civil service job. He was chief electrician at Fort Harrison military base. He made good money; he just didn’t want to spend it on his family. He liked to squirrel it away for stopping at bars after work and saving for his once-a-year vacation to Florida that he took by himself, to visit his mom and sister. He would lie in the sun in December, swim in their pool, and drink, while the rest of us were freezing our asses off in Indiana. My mom, known as Lude Bell, was a sweetheart but a very nervous person. She didn’t like to ride with the old man because he drove fast. I think he mostly did it because it made her nervous. These were small two-lane roads. It was hard to pass cars, especially if you got behind a semi, but most of them would help you. If you flashed your headlights at them, they would flash you back when it was safe.

When I was six, I met a couple of boys in the neighborhood, Richard Bibb and Jack Mullis, and they said they would meet me at my house Monday morning so we could all go to school together. I happened to look out the front glass storm door and saw them standing there, and the school bus was there, so I tried to open the door. They were holding it shut and laughing, and I got scared I’d miss the bus and get an ass-kicking, so I hit the door with my shoulder and broke the glass. They thought it was funny. That was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Our first grade teacher was Mrs. Beverland. She was old and fat, but she did have good dental hygiene. After lunch, she would sit at her desk and floss her teeth, and shit would fly all over the place. That’s why my buddies and I would sit at the back of the class. Also it would be harder for her to know who made the noises. We’d cut coat hangers to about eight-inch pieces, make them U-shaped, bend the ends to small circles, and put rubber bands across them with metal washers in the middle. We’d twist them really tightly and put them under our legs, and when she was at the blackboard, we’d lift our legs and it sounded like we were cutting the cheese. Everybody would laugh, but we never got caught. She did paddle my ass once in the cloakroom. I can’t exactly remember why; it might have been because my fly was open. At six years old, what possible difference would this make?

Anyway, the first grade was where I met Richard Bibb, who was my best buddy all through high school and all through my life—and he will be through death, as we have adjoining cubbyholes. There were about fifteen of us who went through all twelve grades and graduated together in 1960. I wasn’t very nice even in grade school. I’d do anything for a laugh. There was this one girl who had a dead arm; there was no muscle or bone. One day, she and I were in the hallway when the late bell started ringing. She began to run to get to class, and her bad arm started swinging back and forth, almost going full circle. I did the same thing with my arm, but I was behind her. I don’t think she saw me, but I did feel bad, kind of.

I was lucky to grow up in a small town in the late forties and fifties, where you knew just about everyone’s name and everyone in town who would help you if you needed it. In a small town, you could invent your own fun. Richard, a.k.a. Rocky, and I would each get on one side of the street and wait for a car to come by, hopefully driven by an old couple. When they got close, we would act like we were pulling a rope to stop them, and the old man would slam on his brakes. When he saw us laughing and realized that we didn’t have a rope, he’d really get pissed, and we’d run away. On Halloween, the norm was, after dark, to hide in the bushes next to a street and throw eggs and tomatoes at passing cars. It was mostly tomatoes because we could steal them out of gardens, which most people had. We couldn’t get more than one or two eggs from our refrigerators, as they would be missed. When we got tired of that, or tired from running when some of the drivers would chase us, we’d go trick-or-treating. We went to a German lady’s house, as it was one of the nicer homes. She gave us all homemade cookies, which were good. We ate one, thanked her, and she closed the door. As soon as she did, we crumbled the rest of them on her porch. Apparently she was watching us and opened the door. She said she knew all of us and if we didn’t clean it up, she’d call all our parents. Then she handed us a broom.

Richard had a big wang, even in grade school, but it was crooked and he tried to fix it. He would put a tourniquet on it, consisting of two popsicle sticks and a rubber band. All the boys made fun of him: Mike, Terry, Ted, Jack, Al, Don, and the infamous Georgie Carter, but as time went by, the joke was on us. He had a lot of dates, and the rest of us, not so much. Waiting on a school bus, we wasted time trying to embarrass somebody. A new family moved in a few houses from me. That gave us some new people to harass. Bob was my brother’s age, three years older than I was, and his sister, Jackie, was our age. Their last name was Surface. I nicknamed Jackie Sewerface and she hated it, but paid me back at our forty-fifth class reunion.

Jack Mullis was one of my buddies from first grade who lived one house away from me. He was one in a million. At seven or eight years old, I’d be over at his house, and when we’d start to leave, his mom would tell him he couldn’t leave until he cleaned his room. He’d keep on walking out the door and tell her she could clean it. All she’d say back was, Now, Jackie Vaughn, and we were gone. I don’t know why he got away with