Not Exactly Rocket Scientists II: The Totally Unnecessary Sequel

By Gilbert E. Schill, , John W. MacIlroy, and Robert D. Hamilton,

From Not Exactly Rocket Scientists II: The Totally Unnecessary Sequel

"Of the thousands of choices I've had to make in my life, one of the most important was deciding not to dig up Lenny Bruce."

From the Schill story "Where's Los Angeles?"

In this sequel to Not Exactly Rocket Scientists and Other Stories, three lifelong friends, all eventual graduates of the University of Virginia, rush headlong into the chaos of the mid-sixties. The headwinds would be fickle and strong, but they make it through the frothy nonsense of the Aquarian Age with an unshakable faith in friendship, a healthy sense of the ridiculous, a lot of luck, and over twenty new "mostly true" stories. You will encounter old friends and meet new ones too: guys named Squeak and Snatcher from a house called Delta, a character named Rasputin from a university named Virginia, a curse named McFarland, and even a proverb from Turkey. And you will travel from a naked beach in Denmark to a bar above Lake Cayuga, with stops along the way from the Alamo to Tijuana, although you will not actually visit the grave of Lenny Bruce. But you will share a little rye whiskey with Jerry Lee Lewis, attend the trial of a rascally mouse, and learn how to make a martini properly. So buckle up and come along for the ride.

"The fraternity brothers in the 1978 film Animal House would love this rip-roaringly funny collection. You will nod approvingly at the lessons of friendship, the value of mentors with a sense of humor, and the lasting influence and love of place, concluding that this road trip was well worth the time." --Landis Wade, author of Deadly Declarations and host of Charlotte Readers Podcast

"This is a marvelous set of tales of a different time in America...equal parts daring, naive, foolish, and ambitious. With results usually unplanned, but often hilarious, you're sure to chuckle at many, and laugh long and out loud at many more." --R. M. Burgess, author of six novels including the successful Roxy Reid series

"You think it's easy, making people laugh out loud with the written word? Think about it: most of the humor you've read makes you smile, feel amused, bemused, charmed, entertained. Not Exactly Rocket Scientists II makes you erupt in laughter. Out-loud, no-holds-barred yukking it up. The kind of laughter that makes people in the other room call out, "What in the world's going on in there?" The three authors have raised self-effacing humor to a masterpiece level. I'm telling you, buy Not Exactly Rocket Scientists II ..." --Barry Dickson, author of Maybe Today

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662484698

Book preview

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Copyright © 2022 Gilbert E. Schill, Jr, John W. MacIlroy, and Robert D. Hamilton, III

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

This is a work of creative nonfiction, mostly true stories told to the best of each author’s memory. All of the incidents are real, and not the product of the author’s imagination. Some names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of people involved, with a few embellishments to move things along: after all, the authors believe that one of the greatest joys in life is a good story.

ISBN 978-1-6624-8462-9 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-8466-7 (hc)

ISBN 978-1-6624-8469-8 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Munny Talks (with slight formatting changes) was originally published February 25, 2020, in Y'all Magazine, Oxford, Mississippi.

Which Way to Mexico?, We Hit the Quiniela!, Where's Los Angeles?, Mark My Words, She Came in Through the Back Room Window, James of the Delaware, Cold-Blooded Murder, Go Home, Men!, "I Am So Coming Here!, You're the Guy Who Can Read Blueprints, Munny Talks, Ida's Bar and Grill," Copyright © 2022, Gilbert E. Schill, Jr.

The Summer of Love, That Just About Does It, Schlitz-Faced at the Two-Star Ski Resort, Numbers, Just Don't Bring the Sherry, The Curse of Carl McFarland, "I Can't Even Bend Up, The Last Tango in Mural Hall," Copyright © 2022, John W. MacIlroy

I'll Have a Martini, "How Did You Get in Here?, The Case of the Idle Rambler," Copyright © 2022, Robert D. Hamilton, III

Contents

From the Authors

Part 1:

Road Trip!

Which Way to Mexico?

We Hit the Quiniela!

Where's Los Angeles?

Mark My Words

The Summer of Love

Part 2:

College Daze

She Came in through the Back Room Window

I'll Have a Martini

That Just About Does It

James of the Delaware

Cold-Blooded Murder

Schlitz-Faced at the Two-Star Ski Resort

Part 3:

It's Drafty Out There

How Did You Get in Here?

Go Home, Men!

Numbers

Part 4:

On to the Academical Village

I Am So Coming Here!

You're the Guy Who Can Read Blueprints

Munny Talks

Just Don't Bring the Sherry

The Curse of Carl McFarland

The Case of the Idle Rambler

Ida's Bar and Grill

I Can't Even Bend Up

The Last Tango in Mural Hall

Afterword

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

From the Authors

Everybody likes finding out that other people make a mess of things too, most of us just winging it from beginning to end.

We don't try to mess up. We just do.

And if you have read our first book, Not Exactly Rocket Scientists and Other Stories, you know that's the takeaway from that collection of mostly true tales as we stumbled through our boyhoods in a small town in the 1950s and early 1960s. Bouncing from zany caper to caper, we mostly tried, and failed, and then tried again, and many of you told us the stories were not just about us but about your own childhoods too.

We liked that.

Of course, most of you were family who were under duress to buy the book, and close friends who were happy just to see your names in print. We did enjoy the occasional, and much welcomed, bump in sales from others who were a bit further from that circle—folks like the lady who cuts Bud's hair, Mac's dentist, and Rob's fellow usher at the ten o'clock Sunday service at his church. And before the pandemic drove us all into the cave, we tried to cast an even wider net at in-store signings, book club readings, and book festivals. Talking about our book was easier than writing it, and we thank all of you for your support. We even sold one copy of the book on Amazon in China, although we think that was part of some intelligence-gathering operation.

And if those spies thought they would find any meaningful intelligence in Rocket Scientists I, they were in for a nasty surprise.

This time around—and despite the further risk to our reputations and possibly the world order—we're advancing the clock, moving things out from our boyhood bubble. We're still mostly clueless about how things work, and maybe it doesn't matter because almost everything we learned decades ago seems to have been thrown away anyway.

But we are aware of at least one constant, a law of the universe seemingly as demanding as gravity: kids grow up.

We tried, but it didn't take.

A lot of the goofiness on display in Rocket Scientists I stayed in our blood, at least for the next few years. Funny stuff doesn't stop happening just because you graduate from high school. And that diploma does not immunize anyone from stupid, which we continued to find around every corner. Through the serious stuff of college, the draft, and on to law school and business school, we kept a keen eye out for the nuttiness around us. And it was piling up quite nicely in the late 1960s and early 1970s, just waiting for us to join in all the fun.

And that's really what both books are about.

If you weren't along for the first ride, let's get you up to speed about Rocket Scientists I (www.notexactlyrocketscientists.com) which continues, against all reasonable odds and good taste, to be available wherever books are sold. In the first collection, we tried to capture something of the universal magic of youth with stories and adventures that could have occurred almost any place and maybe even any time. But the stories did spring from a certain place and a certain time: mid-century small-town America. We came on the scene after the struggles of a world war in which we lost relatives, but before Vietnam where we lost friends and our innocence.

We know now, of course, that the times were far more complex than we ever imagined and that our narrow world of experiences was just one of many. By choice and circumstance—and likely the arrogance of youth—we were largely unaware of the enormous tectonic, social, and political changes just beginning to emerge all around us. And if our victories were few and scarcely noticed, and our failures rarely the stuff of tragedy, it was not a youth without consequence and meaning.

At least to us.

We have kids and grandkids now, and they have read our first book. Or that's what they say. It is sad but perhaps not surprising that they tell us that it seemed so much simpler back then, and that things were funnier. We don't know about that: after all, folks were exploding atomic bombs out there in the open Nevada air for sport, and there were lots of cracks in the foundation if you looked closely. But we do know this: in zany and haphazard confusion, we found much to laugh about, with the occasional bracing of the bittersweet.

And that's where most of our stories in Rocket Scientists I wanted to go, so we let them.

They begin when we were clueless eight- and nine-year-old boys already beginning to find chaos and stupid everywhere, and they wrap up in our later teens, when we were still utterly clueless. And as Bill Bryson put it in his terrific The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, the 1950s was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron.

And that we were.

Playing pickup hockey on pond ice which resembled bubble wrap, our games collapsed in comedic confusion when no one could agree on who owned the puck, cleverly labeled mine. On the baseball field, we couldn't catch a cold or even hit our IQs, which were fearfully low to begin with. Our bowling balls hit everything but the pins, and our beleaguered football coach—scanning our team roster of players both healthy and injured for any sign of talent—told the sports reporter for our local paper that we're destitute. That was no Knute Rockne moment, only to be outdone with other soul-crushing performances in the classroom—even though we even surprised ourselves by actually muddling through with some academic standing. But the screwups are what we remember. Over in typing class, for example, if we were supposed to type It is now 1958, the line might read Ir uz nou 1498, and things were not going much better in other places. In something awful called dancing school, we exhibited the social graces of a herd of walrus, and we even screwed up in church where we sought redemption. And when everybody started going crazy that the Russians would beat us to the moon, we saddled right up and began building our own rockets, which proved a much greater threat.

While we were stumbling our way through misadventure and chaos, we also knew that our journey in those early years rested on the broad shoulders of the Greatest Generation—the adults who never gave up on us and raised us well and gently.

So we closed Rocket Scientists I with Bud's moving story about that generation. The Most Important Photograph I Never Saw is a kind of final salute, a simple thank you for a job well done. Fortunately, we have also found other new heroes along the way, some of whom you will soon meet.

Rocket Scientists II moves to new adventures in our next decade, a decade which would turn out to be zanier than we could ever have imagined—even without our more-than-occasional contribution to the whole mess. You will not, however, find us repeating the nonsense that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there.

We were, and we have stories to prove it.

But first, and in just a few paragraphs below, we will give you a preview of how the stories are organized—the idea of organization still a concept largely foreign to the three of us.

*****

We give the honor of our opening section to the Road Trip, one of our first great discoveries after leaving home. Bud gets us in the mood with four truly zany road trip tales, even bringing back some of the folks you may remember from our first book. This seemed to be the right call not only because they were in fact on those trips—and this is a good place to remind you that our stories are at least mostly true—but they will once again be more likely to actually buy the book when they see they are in it again.

We then move into a bit of undergraduate nonsense off the road, with a few stories which we hope will jog a happy memory or two of your own college years, even if you ended up in Montana. Of course, if you ended up in Tibet, you'll likely just shake your head, as we have no idea what that kind of college experience would look like, although we expect it might not be much fun.

The next section is short, and we wanted it that way. Vietnam was the sobering generational slap in the face as we neared the end of our bright college years and moved into the often-dark days of the late sixties. We three were among the lucky. Others, including friends, were not. And those who carried the greater burden of that war have earned the right to the important stories of those years, the longer and searing ones which deserve a more hallowed platform. But we think no one in our generation really escaped the scars of those years, so we think it okay to trespass carefully and only briefly with three draft stories.

And in the last section, we wrap it up with the three of us studying at the University of Virginia. We didn't plan it that way, and only semi-crossed paths there. That was probably a very good thing, as by then we really were supposed to grow up. Maybe we did, at least a bit, but we were still able to find a bit of the zany there too.

*****

Now we promised to close out that senior spring before college, so here's a little more.

We did, in fact, tame things down a bit in our last months at home, mainly because we knew most folks around town had by then enjoyed our antics quite fully enough and were ready to show us the exit. Any exit: off to college, preferably in Tibet, or at least Montana; a job on a tramp steamer out of Bayonne; maybe even a welding school in South Philadelphia. (Looking back now, maybe that welding thing might have been the better choice, as welders can basically write their own ticket today.) But our exit was college, and each of us would head in a slightly different direction but still fairly close to home. Good schools too, still fully accredited even after we left them.

With the next maybe four years dialed in, we wrapped things up with a very tame and quite lovely senior prom at a semi-swanky local hotel—a nice change mostly because it didn't smell like leftover cafeteria fish sticks or gym sweat, sites of our earlier proms.

After the prom, a bunch of us drove down the Jersey Shore to watch the sunrise. Some of us remember it as spontaneous, others say we planned it.

That night, as we all sat on the beach of a friend's house in Mantoloking, on scratchy old blankets in a ragged circle around a small driftwood campfire, even the least poetic of us could feel the tug of things unknown, the bubble already beginning to pop. We knew that we would soon have to pay attention to the wizard behind the curtain, but not just yet. It was a night of breathtaking beauty, about a billion stars up in the sky in a show most people think Jersey doesn't deliver.

But Jersey does, and it did that night, just as it had for us so many times. Soft sand tickled our toes, and the taste of salt floated in the gentle breeze. The man behind the curtain could wait one more night.

There are some moments in every life that are hard to beat, and this was one.

Throughout the night, we shared some of the stories you read in Rocket Scientists I. Other stories were sweetly private then and will remain that way. That's always a curious balance, and from time to time, we are asked why we write, and more importantly, why we write about real stuff. Maybe it's as simple as wanting—needing—to scratch something in the sand, far from the high-water mark, that says I was here. And perhaps that's what we were doing that night, stories shared and stored away, each of us aware that we were already leaving the town of our youth. With the muffled sound of the low rollers in the surf—indifferent to us then, and those who have come before, and those who will come later—we could feel at least something of what Lily Tomlin said a few years later: we're all in this alone.

But that night, we were not alone, and we like to think we had figured that friendship was a buffer against something.

I was here. And so were you.

So maybe mostly true stories of friends, both here and now gone, is a scratch in the sand too.

And you who are not Not Exactly Rocket Scientists-world rookies will recognize in this sequel quite a few of the friends from our first collection: guys like Bay and Suds and Woody and George, friends who have stuck with us forever, maybe against their better judgment. You will also meet a new cast of characters: guys like Squeak and Snatcher from a House called Delta; a mascot named Rasputin from a University called Virginia; and even a curse called McFarland. It's all ahead, and a lot more, after we close out that morning on the Mantoloking beach.

The earth and sun continued to cooperate just as they have for billions of years, and the sun came up right on schedule and in the right place. Sandy and tired, some of us grabbed breakfast at the OB Diner on the way back home, some of the evening's spell already broken: after all, the bright chrome and Formica of a Jersey Shore diner is not the stuff of poetry. But, as always, they served a mean pancake special—and we finally figured out that the OB stood for Ocean Breeze, and not our buddy Terry O'Brien who was the first