9. Socially Speaking
If the word “nerd” had been invented twenty years earlier, it would have been applied to me. When I was in grade school, I was as socially skilled, or inept, as most of the other guys. In other words, social occasions consisted of baseball, football, or basketball games, hiking in the woods, etc. We mostly ignored girls, although I did have a long-standing crush on Peggy Rupert, a cute strawberry blonde who lived across the street from our Second-Avenue ball field. Strangely, even when I began dating, I never asked her out. I wonder why.
Anyway, that all changed when we got to high school. Not only did most of the other guys gain weight and height, they also acquired social skills that were still a mystery to me. I was painfully shy around the girls, and my glasses and reputation as a “brain” didn’t help. I just couldn’t think of anything to say. I remember a bus trip with the History Club when I was a freshman. A couple was cuddled up in the dark of the last row on the way home, but that was way beyond me. I sort of hung around the edges, going to the Pizza House some evenings to hang out and watch the pinochle games in the back room, but I was never a real participant. I didn’t have my first date until I was a junior, in 1957. I had asked a cute freshman who lived across the bridge, to the prom. So, by way of introduction, we went to a movie a couple of weeks before the prom. I guess it was ok, but I sure don’t remember much of it. Then there was an intensive effort by Judy to teach me to dance. Fortunately, I had a certain basic level of coordination, so that worked out well. In fact, a year later, at my senior prom, a classmate came up to me and said "My goodness, Curtis, I didn't know you could dance so…so…sexy." As I mentioned earlier, we went to the prom, but she had to be home early, so we couldn’t go to the post-prom party.
Well, at least that date, awkward as it was,
got me moving toward participation. One of the primary amusements on a summer
evening in Derry was standing around the street corner outside the Pizza House,
the local teen-age hangout. Later, after the Pizza House went broke, mostly
because we kids had little money to spend, the scene moved to Murray’s
Restaurant, right below our apartment windows. Fortunately, Murray’s was better
established and could withstand the effects of the teen-age crowd. Anyway, I
joined the crowd, all of whom I knew, and gradually was included in the activities.
Much of that summer I remember in a series of scenes. I remember riding with
Tom Barnhart in his parents' '54 Plymouth and, somewhere between the Kingston
Bridge and Ligonier, on Rte 30, watching the speedometer touch 100 for a brief
moment. I remember looking up at my keys dangling from a 25-foot-high power
line, where I'd just tossed them. I remember the sound of knuckles on a table
in the back room of the pizza shop, slamming down a card in a game of pinochle.
We spent much of the summer standing along local roads with our thumbs out. Hitch-hiking, or "thumbing," was an accepted way of life, without much concern for robbery or violence. People were very generous about stopping to pick you up. In fact, when I was in college, I often thumbed my way home from Pittsburgh. Anyway, we thumbed to Latrobe to buy records, to Blairsville or Mountain View to swim, and just about everywhere we wanted to go.
About midway through the summer of 1957, Tom McManamy and Sandy Fisher, Mike Dell and Sue Love, and Karen Bertsch and I sort of drifted together in an impromptu group. If someone had a car, we’d take up a collection for gas. Then we might go out Route 30 to Statler’s Par 3 Golf and make fools of ourselves trying to play. I remember lots of laughter. We might just ride around the area, eventually stopping at the Dairy Queen, assuming we had some money left. We went to every fireworks show in the vicinity. I can still see Tom sitting on the hood of the car, lighting matches and tossing them in the air, accompanied by sound effects, while we waited for the real fireworks to start. It was interesting, since Tom and Sandy and Mike and Sue were becoming couples who would eventually marry. On the other hand, Karen already had a boy friend who worked evenings, so she and I were just hanging around together. We seldom went to the movies, partly because Karen and I were on a different footing than the other two couples, which could be a bit uncomfortable. Mostly we just hung out at the pizza house, sipping cokes, playing the juke box (six songs for a quarter), and talking. When I hear "In the Still of the Night," I remember that place. I think that song was on the jukebox for more than a year. We had a great time that whole summer.
That summer also got me started going to dances. There was a Friday night dance at Harry's Danceland, in Latrobe, and a Saturday dance at the Latrobe Armory. We'd go by car if we could, by bus if we had to. The last bus left Latrobe for Derry at 11 PM, so we had to be careful to make it or face a six-mile walk. Harry's often featured major rock and roll groups. We saw Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, the Skyliners, and others there, all at dirt-cheap prices. It was a great time to be a teenager.
My senior year was very different. First of all, the year before, the Derry Borough and Derry Township school districts joined to form Derry Area. In 1957, those of us from the Borough still attended our old schools, where we had roughly 180 students in grades 9 through 12. The township had about four times as many. Then, in 1958, we made the big move to the former township high school to join the rest of Derry Area. So we had new teachers, new people, new building, new teams, etc., to get to know. But, with a little effort, it all worked out. Early in the fall, I worked on the senior class play, handling the sound effects. That got me in the swing of things and made the rest easier.
Around Thanksgiving, my friend Tom Barnhart had a date with Barb Fatora to see “The Ten Commandments,” and wanted someone to double date, taking Barb’s cousin. I knew her slightly from school, so it was ok with me. We paid Barb a visit and talked with her for a while. A few days later we went out on the double date. As it turned out, Barb and I were a lot more interested in each other than in our dates, and it wasn’t long before we were going steady. We went together for the next two years, often triple-dating with Tom and Sandy and Mike and Sue. Try that in a ’49 Ford (Tom’s car). It was a little cozy. The rest of the year was mostly spent with Barb, riding to and from school together, hanging out at lunch, going to dances, movies, and even family gatherings. I spent a lot of time walking across that old Derry bridge to see her.
I remember going on double dates with Tom and Sandy, typically to the Gem Theater on First Avenue, about Midway between our apartment and Pap and Grandma's house. We always sat in the balcony, which was tacitly reserved for kids on dates. That was interesting, since the balcony was not accessible from inside the theater. Instead, you had to go outside, through a side door, then up the steps. So we could go out during the movie and buy pop and candy at Vitale's, which was cheaper than the theater price. Anyway, after the movie, we would walk our dates home, with a suitable amount of time for goodnights. Sandy lived a couple of blocks north of Barb, so I would wait for Tom to come by, then we would walk back across the bridge to Murray's Restaurant. If it was a Friday evening, we would wait until midnight so Tom could have a burger, since Catholics couldn't eat meat on Friday in those days
Barb and I dated off and on for several years, finally breaking up for good when I went to Wisconsin for grad school.
I look back at these last few paragraphs and it seems that there should be more to say, since Barb was such an important person in my life at the time, even to serious consideration of marriage. But, in the end, these paragraphs say all that's important.