Miscellaneous Shit, Part 8

Remember those youth baseball black T-shirts back in the day? I’m not sure how old the “Small Fry” age was, but it was before kids were old enough to have the real uniforms. I recall they weren’t too politically correct in naming the age divisions back then—one division was called “Midget.” Below is Kevin Brown from Maebeth Street, circa 1966.

Yep, playing in jeans. Boy did I hate those lame-ass baserunner helmets.

I want one of these:

Bumper sliding, in which you grabbed someone’s bumper and went for a ride on a street’s packed-down snow or ice, is an Acres thing. It’s hard for people from outside Sixteen Acres to comprehend—although I heard it was done in Haverhill, Massachusetts as well. 

Another Acres thing: raiding gardens at night. “Why the hell would you want to do that?” someone asked me once. I don’t know. It was just something to do. One of my friends even brought a salt shaker once to season the raw vegetables we pilfered.

Here are a couple of Morganetta photos I never ran before. Moganetta was immortalized in fiction in a 2014 novel entitled Leaving Time. She wrote that Morganetta had only one eye. From what I remember, she had two. Picoult was probably using the story of Snowball the polar bear (who lost an eye to a police bullet) to make her story more compelling.

Here is an excerpt from Leaving Time:

My mother was stunned by her condition, too. She flagged down a zookeeper, who said that Morganetta had once been in local parades, and had done stunts like competing against undergrads in a tug-o’-war at a nearby school, but that she had gotten unpredictable and violent in her old age. She’d lashed out at visitors with her trunk if they came too close to her cage. She had broken a caregiver’s wrist.

I started to cry.  

My mother bundled me back to the car for the four-hour drive home, although we had only been at the zoo for ten minutes. 

“Can’t we help her?” I asked.

This is how, at age nine, I became an elephant advocate. After a trip to the library, I sat down at my kitchen table, and I wrote to the mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts, asking him to give Morganetta more space, and more freedom. 

He didn’t just write me back. He sent his response to The Boston Globe, which published it, and then a reporter called to do a story on the nine-year-old who had convinced the mayor to move Morganetta into the much larger buffalo enclosure at the zoo. I was given a special Concerned Citizen award at my elementary school assembly. I was invited back to the zoo for the grand opening to cut the red ribbon with the mayor. Flashbulbs went off in my face, blinding me, as Morganetta roamed behind us. This time, she looked at me with her good eye. And I knew, I just knew, she was still miserable. The things that had happened to her—the chains and the shackles, the cage and the beatings, maybe even the memory of the moment she was taken out of Africa—all that was still with her in that buffalo enclosure, and it took up all the extra space. 

For the record, Mayor Dimauro did continue to try to make life better for Morganetta. In 1979, after the demise of Forest Park’s resident polar bear, the facility closed and Morganetta was moved to the Los Angeles Zoo. Her home there was much bigger. It had a pool, and toys, and two older elephants. 

If I knew back then what I know now, I could have told the mayor that just sticking elephants in proximity with others does not mean they will form friendships. Elephants are as unique in their personalities as humans are, and just as you would not assume that two random humans would become close friends, you should not assume that two elephants will bond simply because they are both elephants. Morganetta continued to spiral deeper into depression, losing weight and deteriorating. Approximately one year after she arrived in L.A., she was found dead in the bottom of the enclosure’s pool. 

The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem the tide with a sieve.The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it . . . some stories just don’t have a happy ending.”

What’s interesting is that the facts of much of this fictional narrative are described in a 2012 Hell’s Acres blog post about Morganetta: the parade, the tug-o-war, breaking a caregiver’s wrist, and ultimately being moved to the Los Angeles Zoo, losing weight in her new home, and dying there. I don’t think the elephant was moved because of a child’s letter to the mayor, but there WAS public outcry about her living conditions. Morganetta got cantankerous when she reached adolescence, not old age. And she wasn’t moved to a buffalo enclosure—they had built her an outdoor cage. But that’s what fiction does—modify facts. Every novelist does this.

Morganetta’s departure and Snowball’s death, both in 1979, help set the stage for the old zoo’s demise:

Another photo I ripped off of a page on Facebook: someone has the old Nora’s Variety sign! For some reason, Nora’s seemed to be the first store to sell baseball cards in the spring, prompting us to bug our parents to take us there. After all, it was a long bike ride to Nora’s Pine Point location at 171 Boston Road, opposite the original Friendly’s.

Speaking of Pine Point, here is a Mutual Ford Giant pic I never published. Read about his roots at a pizza shop giant in Framingham. He was Chicopee’s Plantation Inn man from 1999 to 2013 but then was sold at auction.

Then he was on the south side of Springfield Street in Agawam, set back from the road in a little strip mall across from American Legion Park, but he was reported missing in 2017. WHERE HIS HE????

Yes, there was a Steiger’s in Westfield—in the “Friendly Shops”  AKA the “Westfield Shops” on East Main Street, from 1965 until the Steiger’s chain bit the dust in 1994. Why the whip in the ad? Because it had a bondage and discipline accessories section? NO. Because Westfield is the “whip city,” of course!

The Seven Gables on Boston Road was built in 1963 and by 1968 it was offering “weekly rates,” and the rest is history, including a murder in 1996 when it was the Rodeway Inn. What was that dive bar there called? The Gables Bar, of course.

I had been to Niagara Falls a couple of times as a kid, but I hadn’t heard that a Springfield man went over the falls in a giant rubber ball that contained oxygen tubes to provide him air for 40 hours in case the contraption got trapped under the torrent of water.

After he did this, he moved to Niagara Falls and sold pieces of the ball to tourists. After he ran out, he sold them pieces of tires. When he was 61, he wanted to go over the American side of the falls in a rubber ball—which would have made him the only person to go over BOTH falls, but he never completed the stunt.

See you in Rocktober, folks!