SNOW PT 11 – Next at the bottom should have been available Wednesday Dec 3, 2014, but not until Thursday Dec 4, 2014 PT 11:
It continued to snow all week, and the forecast was for more snow thru the weekend (that’s when Carl Housemann sent me an additional email suggesting Atlanta was next!) But I didn’t believe him.

I didn’t have to; the old man was fired from his job at Penney’s in Syracuse, he found a similar position at E.W. Edwards in Buffalo (if he agreed to an immediate transfer, which he did) once they found a suitable apartment on Breckenridge St, near public transportation, and we lived there for five years (I lived there also as soon as I returned from Coshocton). And that was when I saw more snow than I thought there was in all the world.

I managed to survive the ‘blood poisoning’ routine (due to shooting myself in the middle finger of my right hand with the BB gun), and the pre-determined outcome of the sentence as a yet unspoken crises (How much is that https://www.wellsfargo.com/online-banking/doggy in the . . .?), and the polio scare (“Wendell delivers papers, the same as you, and he came down with it; what makes you think you’re so immune?”)

Even the trips across the Peace Bridge to the Baby Hole at Fort Erie and the nickel jaunts to Spring Beach, Canada lost their appeal, in that they became so easy and frequent. The old lady had issued a dictum: ”Why don’t you just get a job?”

I had aspirations of getting married to Dorothey Kastner and honeymooning at the Baby Hole, in plain sight of the Peace Bridge. (I became so sunburned at the Baby Hole one summer I forgot all about Dorothy Kastner for an entire weekend.)

On top of the paper route, I had a part time job that summer as a ‘professional photographer’s assistant’. I took the job because I had illusions my presence would be required at ‘shoots’ where naked broads would be filmed.

All I did, however, was sit in dark for an hour each afternoon while the negatives of day (mostly portraits) were suspended in developer. I worked in that man’s basement for two weeks.

I was then at E.W. Edwards’s for a week as ‘a truck driver’s assistant’, and I was required to wear a one-piece uniform with name ‘BOB’ stitched in cursive across the pocket — although I was too young to drive the truck — or even park it, for that matter — I was expected to help deliver the store’s refrigerators and sofas. I lasted four days at that job.

Next, I was transferred to the Soft Goods Department; that was towels, wash cloths, hand protectors, linens, etc. — my job there was to print and staple price tags to thousands of similar items. I showed up faithfully for a week.

The next employment I found was at the Retail Credit Company, and for 37.5Ȼ an hour I was shown an unending supply of shopping carts filled to overflowing with multi-page, typed reports needing to be filed. I lasted five days there.

But during those 5 days I was introduced to chicken chow mien at Benny Wo’s place next door (it became my ‘all-time favorite’, but nobody ever made it like at Benny Wo’s.

Those were the highlights of my old lady’s dictum about “finding just a job” in Buffalo — the old man, I was sure, was responsible for E.W. Edwards’s involvement — though meeting Victor Mature, Arthur Ludd, THE SNOW, and learning from Dorothy Kastner what a whore really was, was on my own ticket.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, I sold one of these silly, biographical stories — Poor, Poor Junior — to SEVENTEEN Magazine. I was walking Betty Thompson home (which I had learned just that day that high school did not start until the 10th grade) when I showed her the check, and said, despite the 10th grade revelation, “Ain’t life grand!”

On a personal note, why has Ch. 11 not referred to Chris Holcomb as their chief meteorologist in several weeks? And why has Brenda Wood not been assigned a driver and given a microphone and notebook? And why is Darren Whatshisface still around, and Jeff Hullinger still doing Sports and not News?

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