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PANIC 8/10/2013 8:16:49 AM
The year was 1952 and my one and only son was born on August 9. Being a burgeoning star in local broadcasting, I was as proud of us both as proud can be, despite the fact I had to work partime nights at Western Auto to make ends meet.
Of course, in those days the phrase panic attack had not yet been invented by the medical community, although I am certain a few practitioners suspected something was attributable to the curious syndrome of unexplained physical and mental phenomenon that had literally destroyed a number of lives.
Mine, in particular. Well, almost.
But mine was a rare disorder, manifesting itself as more like episodes of dé·jà vu. I was a freshman in high school the first time I experienced it. I think.
I had gone from Buffalo to central Ohio to live with my widowed Grandfather Mills while attending high school at my parents’ old alma mater. The football coach had been the coach when my dad was there, and I foolishly thought this would give me a leg up with the team. Also, I had my own pants, pads and helmet. How could they resist me?
Will I be on the junior varsity in 9th grade, I wondered, or will I be given a spot on the Big Team? Obviously, since I came to Ohio to begin my high school career at CHS the very day the war ended against Japan in 1944, most new students were discharged service men returning from the Pacific to finish their education. I was a mere 14 to their 19-25 years!
Enroute to central Ohio I stayed overnight with my aunt and uncle in Cleveland. Uncle Leroy, a movie theater projectionist, picked me up at the dilapidated train station and drove me to their dilapidated apartment on Euclid Avenue, where I again met Aunt Gladys whom I had not seen in thirteen years. For that matter, I had not seen either of them in that time.
Your Aunt Gladys is a remarkable woman, Leroy told me at length, as we drove from the ancient and dilapidated train depot. She is the greatest human who ever lived, he said. You will see!
I spent the night on their dilapidated sofa and was treated to a dilapidated breakfast of eggs benedict, Texas toast, and sausage in the dilapidated kitchen of their (I refuse to use the word again) four-room apartment.
Aunt Gladys was my mother’s eldest (of five sisters), but she was not Grandpa Lasch’s daughter. Gladys and grandma had left England when Gladys was a baby, where grandma, a single teenage-mother, had been a gypsy fortuneteller with a traveling caravan. Grandma Lasch did not marry grandpa, a Croatian Jew, until they had met in Pittsburgh, some years later.
My grandma and baby Gladys were booked in steerage on the Titanic, but were denied boarding because Gladys had a rash of undetermined origin. They took another ship a week later. Funny how things worked out, otherwise, I would not be here myself. (I would probably have been born a Roosevelt or a Rockefeller. Or at least a Buffett.)
I lasted less than five months with my grandpa Mills in central Ohio; his daughter-in-law, Juanita, married to my dad’s middle brother, my Uncle Don, was waiting for his return from the war in Europe, and she also lived at the old homestead with grandpa Mills. I instinctively knew she did not like me.
The feeling was mutual, and when she brazenly steamed open a letter to my parents (an epistle which maligned her horribly), my grandpa told me he had no choice but to cast me out; I had to go home and be there in time for Xmas.
It was then I had my first dé·jà vu panic attack.
Once back home that December (now in Norfolk, VA) my mother took me to a doctor recently graduated from residency at Tidewater Hospital, a Dr. Theodore Lamarr.
I think this kid has, Lamarr explained, a rare tropical disease he probably got from his Uncle Rollin (my father’s younger brother) who probably got it while serving in the Army in Germany.
(Rollin was my dad’s kid brother and whom I did not see, unbeknown to good doctor Lamarr, until he (Rollin) was discharged in 1945.)
Somewhere along they way, we moved to Rochester, back in New York State (my old man was a department store traveling salesman). It was there I met my first wife-to-be and had my second panic attack.
Another doctor, a Quincy Youngerblood, our landlord in Rochester, said it was just growing pains. He will outgrow it, he explained, and he’ll be okay once he stops thinking about . . . things.
My wife-to-be, whom I decided to marry as soon as I finished high school (to beat the draft), had a job in a laundry and dry cleaning plant owned by Adolphus Trot of Syracuse. We became best friends with Dottie and Phelps Conroy (Dottie was Adolphus’ daughter). We were often invited to the Trot home in Syracuse, just 90 miles down the road, a mere trot away, so to speak.
One Sunday, at church with the Trots, I suddenly became aware of the words in the hymnal and the subject of the sermon before a syllable was sung or spoken. Slumping to my seat, I experienced dé·jà vu: my next panic attack.
Just look at that poor fellow, will ya! the congregation around me cried out. He is so overcome by the significance of it all he cannot stand up! They promptly broke into song: STAND UP, STAND UP FOR JESUS! The pastor began his sermon: Will you stand up for Jesus? Will you be a soldier of the Cross?
I had two more panic attacks, and then, after my son was born, no more ever occurred. Perhaps Youngerblood was right; perhaps I had outgrown it. He should have won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1946. He knew a panic attack when he saw one!
I was 82 this July, and dé·jà vu has become a thing of the past. Too bad. It would be a welcome innovation, especially when writing these columns. It has become so damned difficult remembering the details of so many events. What was that kid’s name, anyway, my first and only son?
He (the kid) recently won a diamond ring—or a gold medal—or something, pitching a softball for the ROC+50s. What was his name?
