IN ANOTHER LIFE

Downtown Buenos Aires

 I’ve been in Buenos Aires for a couple of weeks. I came the day after my birthday. Something about that, turning three-quarters of a century old, causes you to reflect. Whether you like it or not. I mean, like, despite the fact that I was born American and will die American, that I still feel my American roots deeply, that I still carry some of my native soil with me, like some aging vampire, wherever I go, I’ve now lived in this foreign land half a century longer than I lived in my own.

When that thought hits you unexpectedly, it’s kind of like somebody just punched you in the solar plexus. It takes a minute to catch your breath.  And just when you’re recovering, you start thinking about how familiar you are with this city. Despite its sprawling size, you know it like a New Yorker might know the five boroughs of his or her city. Back when you lived here, you walked its streets, rode its subways and buses, lived in its barrios, reconnoitered its myriad nooks and crannies and knew its people for more than two decades. You come back frequently, and feel at home when you do, despite all of the changes, of which you take note right away. And you almost always wish things were like they used to be. You felt old and streetwise back then, when you left it in your forties, just as you do now. It’s your town—even though it’s not any more.

My corner of Patagonia

Just when you’re contemplating that thought, however, you remember that, for the past three decades, you haven’t lived here anymore, either. No, you’ve been holed-up for thirty years (it will be thirty-one in a week or so) in your own little hollow in the woods, in Andean Patagonia. Out there, in Patagonia, there’s no knowing the place “like the back of your hand.” You may be familiar with enough parts of it to think so, but you’d be kidding yourself. Patagonia is just too vast, wild, untamed and mysterious to “know”, and it’s exceedingly easy to die trying. But then, you don’t try anymore. Those days of exploration are over, but the awe inspired by the surroundings remains. Even your very own surroundings—the immediate ones, as they say—the two acres of forest and cabin that you call home, are awe-inspiring.   

So, anyway, in a place so vast and wild and diverse, you choose your spot, “settle it”, and make it your own. You live near a town for the communications, the medical care, and the groceries, but in the process of adopting it, you may, like me, come very close to becoming a hermit. It’s only when you fly out or fly in, only when you get far enough above it, the nearby town, I mean, that you see just how alone and isolated you really are. All around, it’s miles and miles and miles of nothing. Well, or, of something. But nothing that a man can survive for long. Not on his own. It’s powerful. And daunting. But oh, so beautiful!

Being here—here meaning back in the city—made me remember when I first arrived, like a lifetime ago. First thing I did when I got here earlier this month was go to supper with an old friend, who just also happens to be my brother-in-law, Miguel.

Joy's

We went to our favorite place. Well, his favorite place. I can take it or leave it. But he swears by it. When we walked in this time, however, even he murmured, “Dios mío, this place gets more Kafkaesque all the time.” Actually, it’s more like Dante’s ninth circle of hell.  

The place is called Joy’s—the owner’s own unique spelling of his nickname, Joey, so like Jo-y (I’m guessing his real name is José). It’s at the intersection of a major avenue, Rivadavia, and a narrow alley of a one-block street (locally, una cortada) called La Porteña.

Joy, arguably, offers some of the best pizza and empanadas money can buy. Really. No kidding. Outstanding food.

But the ambiance! It is a crepuscular hole in the wall of indistinct color and dubious lighting with a jumble of furniture that looks as if it were discarded from the block by the auctioneers at a series of pizzeria fire sales. There are only about eight eclectic tables with chairs in varying states of disrepair, and they are always pretty much full, but Joy usually manages to find a place for us.

Joy does a famous business in home delivery, obviously, so the tables are mostly a prop for beer-swilling regulars. Bathrooms are at the back next to the kitchen, but it’s a good idea to make a pit stop before you arrive and to hold it thereafter until you are on more civilized ground, because if the dining area is iffy, the bathroom is almost terrifying. In the men’s, there’s a urinal, a squatter—I mean would you actually want a toilet seat?—and a light bulb dim enough not to encourage close inspection. If you plan to keep your shoes clean, you’ll want to watch your step  as you gingerly pick your way to the pissoir.

The first thought that passes through your mind on entering Joy’s is whether it might not be a good idea to get a tetanus shot before taking a seat. The second is to wonder how the health department has never closed it down. But just then a squad car pulls up, gives one hoot on its siren and a young cop gets out of the passenger side and comes in with his cap under his arm to pick up some packages of food for him, his partner, and apparently for some of the guys and gals at the precinct as well. A streetwise senior reporter I used to work with once told me that you can always tell if a police visit is official or “friendly”. If cops have business with you, they'll keep their caps on. If they’re hoping it may slip your mind to charge them for their lunch, their caps will be under their arms. If there’s one thing cops know, it’s where to eat. They’d be the first to tell you that while the venue might be a nightmare, the pizza and empanadas are righteous.

I suppose that also explains why, despite being in what has become a none-too-safe area of town, Joy doesn’t seem to sweat trouble or getting robbed. (In fact, he’s one of the most laid-back guys I’ve ever known). I figure he takes care of the blue bloods, and they take care of him. But then again, Joy’s isn’t the sort of place where you want to even accidentally stare fixedly at other patrons long enough for them to ask you what the hell you’re looking at, unless you’re in the mood for an altercation. A lot of these (mostly) guys—with an occasional savvy-looking girlfriend thrown in—are fairly marginal types, and hardly amenable to prying eyes.

The clientele is mostly made up of Latin American immigrant population. When I first started living in Buenos Aires fifty years ago, this area of town—Flores-Floresta—was the first I came to know. It was my wife’s family’s neighborhood. It’s still my friend, brother-in-law and brother-by-another-mother’s. Back then, it was an area of town mostly populated by the typical mix of Argentine immigrant bloods—Italians and Spaniards. My wife Virginia and her brother Miguel’s family were all Italians. Some from northern Italy and some from the south, but all “tanos”. Well, except for her paternal grandmother, who was a Basque. Floresta, my wife’s native corner of the world, also had a significant population of Hasidic Jews, who lived side by side with another significant population of Syrio-Lebanese Arabs. So on one corner you had the RC Church of the Candelaria, up the street a branch of the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina, and, almost within spitting distance, a branch of the Centro Islámico. It was very cosmopolitan, and everybody lived in relative harmony and did business with one another.

Buenos Aires’s old rag district, Barrio Once (literally Barrio Eleven) in midtown, hosted the great majority of Jewish population that burgeoned between the two world wars. Today in Buenos Aires Jews number about two hundred thirty thousand, with the city ranking fourteenth for Jewish populations out of all cities worldwide. Definitely a large population, but no comparison with people of some sort of Arab blood—mostly Syrio-Lebanese—that number 3.5 million in Argentina as a whole, but are more integrated into the general population, since a large proportion, on emigrating, were already, or later converted to Catholicism.

Bustling Avenida Avellaneda - the new rag district

Over the years, I’ve seen the demographic and cultural changes that have taken place in Flores-Floresta. And the catalyst was clearly the expansion of Jewish commerce to the west side, beyond the boundaries of the overcrowded midtown area. It was natural that the new, auxiliary rag district that they would found should be in Floresta, where a fairly large community of their number made their homes. At first, it was a few clothing stores and workshops that sprang up on and around Avenida Avellaneda, a main Floresta thoroughfare. But then, suddenly, it was a wave, a trend, and Jewish clothing merchants and manufacturers were buying up every property they could in the area.

It got so that the old traditional majority Italian and Spanish-descent residents quipped wryly that they were going to have to change the name of the neighborhood to Five-and-a-Half, because half the Jews of Once were moving there. One smart guy even seized on that idea and opened a small cafe and bar called Cinco y Medio (Five and a Half) which became immediately popular with local merchants.

Anyway, it was interesting to watch what happened over the course of the following decades.  Jewish merchants hired Korean immigrants to work in their clothing operations in Floresta. As they became ever more upwardly mobile, the Koreans started pooling their money and buying out the Jews. The new Korean proprietors then started hiring newly arrived Bolivian and Peruvian immigrants to work for them, and the Bolivians and Peruvians, learning the process from their Korean bosses, started buying others out and opening clothing operations of their own.    

Bolivians holding an ethnic celebration in Buenos Aires

Today large numbers of Jews and Koreans are investing in other areas of commerce, and Bolivians have taken over as textile industry leaders. In keeping with this trend, the population of Flores-Floresta has mutated as well.

My own personal symbol of that cultural and demographic change is the big restaurant on the northwest corner of iconic Plaza Flores. For many years it was an upscale Italian restaurant that also featured an excellent asado grill and fine Argentine beef. We knew the mostly Italian, white-tunicked waiters by name, because they had been there for decades and were nothing if not professional.  

As the neighborhood changed, so did the restaurant, for a time becoming an all-you-can-eat grill. And now, it is a restaurant and takeout place specializing in Peruvian cuisine.

 But then, everything changes, and so do we. Getting old has an upside. Long experience has taught you some things. You aren’t nearly as scared of, or worried about things as you once were. Being more obviously finite, life isn’t so driven anymore, and thus not as stressful. When a “what if” doubt pops into your head, your wiser self will often say, “so what?” At this stage, who gives a crap?

Then again, obviously, it’s not like there aren’t things about getting old that suck. Perhaps the worst part is that, in your mind’s eye, you’re no older than you ever were. It’s only when you meet friends you haven’t seen in a while and ask yourself how they got to looking so old, or when you pass a store window and gasp at your own reflection that the passage of time smacks you between the eyes. It’s also when you take a seat in the middle on the subway and then wonder how you’ll get up without something to grab onto. Or when you’ve been sitting, like you used to, in a bar talking to friends for a few hours and when you finally stand, with the help of the table, you have to stay there a minute making a little extra small-talk while your vertebrae and knees accommodate themselves, so people won’t have to watch you limp away.  Up to then you might have been feeling just fine and having a great day. C’est la vie.

Miguel and I invariably talk about the old days when we get together. We remember people who are no longer with us, the neighborhoods as they used to be—what used to be here, who used to live where. When we were a little younger, these conversations used to just be a lot of fun. The older we get, the more emotional they become, and now, several times, we surprise ourselves by feeling a knot in our throats and having tears involuntarily well up in our eyes.

Friends for most of our lives, Miguel and I on a
road trip we took together in Canada in 1979.

Miguel has been having some medical issues. They started after he and Virginia’s older sister Alicia died a few years back, following a three year struggle with dementia. Watching that process close up and personal, seems to have drained a lot of strength and resolve from Miguel. Each time I’ve seen him since, in my occasional trips to the city, I’ve noticed, with dismay, how much frailer he has gotten.  Now, however, one of his sons has stepped in and gotten him to start seeing some doctors and to undergo some medical and neurological testing. I’m pleased to see that he is at least feeling less dubious about his condition, that he’s being proactive, that he’s finding out what’s ailing him.

These things sneak up on you. There’s a sort of dichotomy you deal with as you get older. On the one hand, the things you recall seem like they happened only yesterday. As memories, they’re fresh and detailed in your mind. But thought of in chronological terms, it’s as if they had happened in another life to some other person. So much so that, if you don’t remember them mutually with your contemporaries, you might question whether, perhaps, you didn’t just imagine them or make them up. And that, I suppose, is the value of sharing memories—knowing that they are real, that someone else recalls them just the way you do. It’s self-comforting. It’s life-affirming.

Miguel and I talk a lot about the guys at the gym. Back in the day, Miguel was, pound for pound, one of the strongest men I ever knew. He was a highly disciplined bodybuilder, who was once crowned “Mr. Buenos Aires”. He’s the one who got me interested in weights and bodybuilding. I only competed with myself, but for a long time—almost twenty years, in fact—I was highly devoted to it, and spent every spare hour I could in the gym. I went to several different gyms over the years, but Miguel always went to the same one, and still drops by now and again to visit the owner, who is now in his eighties and still working out, leaving running the place to his son.

I always think of that place, the Apolo Gym, as where I learned the weight-training discipline well. Now, over pizza and beer, Miguel and I remember that gym—cramped, spartanly-equipped, but a gathering place for some of the most physically powerful men in the city, none of whom were the yuppy types who frequented the scintillating physical training centers advertised on TV. Rather, they were boxers, wrestlers, cops, firefighters and bodyguards, among others. They took training seriously. It was life-and-death to them, or at least the means of maintaining the tools of their trade. And since I was Miguel’s brother-in-law, some of them befriended me, and taught me what they knew. For the first time in my life, I was an athlete, and loved every minute of it, not just for the sport, but also for the strange array of roughnecks who hung out there and who became my chums.

Ernesto in the seventies

There were two guys everybody looked up to, no matter how powerfully built and gritty they themselves might be. One was the owner, Ernesto. Nobody messed with Ernesto. He was a man of really small stature. Not more than five-feet-five or six,  but so powerfully built that there was no way you could think of him as “small”. He was very image-conscious and made sure all posing images of him were shot with no comparative context—usually outdoors. He owned his own bodybuilding magazine that actually sold on downtown newsstands. Though in person he was laconic, only perfunctorily polite and monosyllabic, he wrote knowledgeably about bodybuilding and bodybuilders, as well as about anatomy and its application to sport. He was an excellent weight-training coach, who, from the outset, made sure that you trained in a disciplined and carefully coordinated manner, creating workout routines and making sure you did them properly. But once you had it figured out, he only provided instruction when you asked for it.

Ernesto’s own training as a phys-ed instructor was obvious, but unless you knew that the murals on the wall of the tiny gym were his, you never would have guessed that he also had a degree in fine arts. He had been a pro wrestler in his youth, performing under the handle of “Mr. Músculo”, and tossing guys twice his size or more around the ring to the delight of local crowds and TV audiences. Part of his performance was also a really impressive display of the muscle control he was famous for, capable, as he was, of individually flexing every muscle in his body, or of combining flexes to create a head to toe ripple effect.

The unobtrusive Apolo
Gym, where some of
the strongest guys in
the city trained.

Wrestling audiences weren’t the only ones who were impressed. Ernesto, over the years, had competed internationally in major bodybuilding contests and had won numerous trophies in his size and weight class. One person who was duly impressed was Arnold Schwarzenegger. After a Florida competition in which they had both taken trophies, five-time Mr. Universe Arnold asked Ernesto to have a picture taken of the two of them together.

“No,” Ernesto responded flatly.

“Why not?” asked Arnold.

“Because I don’t want to,” said Ernesto.

“Oh come on, “Arnold cajoled. “Don’t you want a picture with me?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Suddenly Schwarzenegger started getting offended, then a little pissed off. Who the hell did Ernesto think he was? But even Arnold knew that was a stupid question. Ernesto was every bit the bodybuilder The Terminator was, just in a mighty-mite version.

Realizing he was offending perhaps the most famous physical-culturist of all time, Ernesto said, “Okay, look, I’ll do it if we do it my way.” Arnold grinned and nodded. I mean, you had to hand it to the little guy. He had spunk!

“Okay,” said Arnold.

“All right,” said Ernesto, “me standing in the foreground, and you taking a knee or sitting behind me.”

Schwarzenegger agreed. There were only two photos on the wall in the gym. One was a large poster of Raquel Welsh boasting the skimpy skins she wore in One Million Years B.C. That one hung right above the torture board where we all did our sharply inclined crunchies, and was meant to inspire us to keep sitting up. The other was of Ernesto posing in nothing but a Speedo in the foreground and a smiling Schwarzenegger keeping an amiable low profile in the background—two icons for us to admire and aspire to.

Raquel encouraged us to keep
sitting up on the torture boiard.

But the most intriguing character by far was the Big O. He was a heavyweight. Nearly six feet tall and two hundred twenty pounds of solid muscle. He was a physical trainer, reluctant but talented boxer, and, at the time, an enigmatic and, in his circle, notorious bodyguard whom nobody wanted to cross. Such was his reputation that, when he came to train from work, he would hang his shoulder holster, with his fully-loaded nine-mill automatic snapped down in it, on a peg in the dressing room while he worked out. He knew nobody would be stupid enough to touch it, and that way, he had it close at hand…just in case.  

O was part of what was known, back in those dangerous days, as “la pesada” (literally, “the heavies”). It was a semi-secretive community of plainclothes paramilitary goons, often drawn from among retired or discharged cops and Army personnel, who, prior to the 1976 military coup, acted as a far-right shock force at the service of  leaders of Peronism’s Iron Guard. It was a lawless but vertically well-organized  group that performed every sort of task from gang-style kidnappings and slayings of left-wing rivals, to serving as the bodyguards and enforcers of Peronist union bosses. O was part of this latter group and, we gathered, ranked somewhere at the top of that pyramid.

He had been, for instance, a bodyguard to José Ignacio Rucci, head of the powerful General Confederation of Labor, and a key figure in the dramatic return of General Juan Domingo Perón to the presidency of Argentina after nearly eighteen years in exile. Rucci, one of the most visible heads of far-right Peronism, was murdered by the left-wing Peronist Montoneros urban guerrilla organization the same month and year that I first arrived in Argentina. O was nothing if not a canny survivor and I’ve never been completely sure I bought the story that he simply “had the day off” the day Rucci was assassinated. 

At any rate, O would live on to become one of the chief bodyguards for Lorenzo Miguel (who, after the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic 1972 film, would often be referred to as “The Godfather”). Lorenzo Miguel headed the powerful Steelworkers Union, and was a man with a sharply fascist bent. He would later be rumored to be a key figure in the organization and operations of the clandestine Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, or Triple-A, a far-right paramilitary hit squad whose nominal chief was former Federal Police corporal (who would later magically rise to the rank of captain) and Perón confidant José López Rega.

Lorenzo Miguel

In tamer moments, O had often served too as a sparring partner for famed Argentine heavyweight Oscar “Ringo” Bonavena. Bonavena was a serious contender for the heavyweight crown, who had gone the distance twice with Joe Fraizer (knocking Fraizer to the canvas twice in early bouts of the second fight), and later fought a famous fifteen-round match with Muhammad Ali. Ultimately, Ali KO’d Ringo in the fifteenth bloody round, but had to knock him down three times to do it. Ali grabbed the mic after the fight and shouted, “I have done what Joe Frazier couldn't do—knocked out Oscar Bonavena.” Some experts blamed Ali’s loss on points to Frazier in a subsequent fight on the beating he took from Bonavena before he finally knocked him out.

A flat-footed boxer with the instincts of an alley-fighter and a concrete jaw, Ringo was better known for making other heavyweights see stars with his punches and for being able to take a brutal beating himself while remaining on his feet than he was for grace and style. The Big O, on the other hand, was known for being an almost beautiful boxer to watch, for keeping the other guy’s gloves off of him, and for knowing how and when to land a killer punch. By all accounts, he was a better pugilist than Ringo had ever thought of being, but he had no real ambitions for the ring.

“Do I look stupid to you?” he would say when asked why he wasn’t title-fighting. That wasn’t the sort of question you would want to answer “yes” to. Nor did he look at all obtuse. O had Victor Mature-style good looks, sharp eyes, and, incredibly, a perfect nose and not a scar on his face. “Those guys end up with scrambled eggs for brains. I get in the ring, train the guy, get out and get paid. Let the guys who aren’t smart enough to make a living some other way do the prizefighting.”

They said O was one of the fastest heavyweights ever to enter a ring. I later found out why, when, while on a seaside vacation, I wandered into a camera store owned by a rugged, cocky-looking little guy in his sixties who, apropos of nothing, asked me if I boxed. I said, No, that I’d always been too slow to box, why did he ask? “You look like you train,” he said. I said I did a little weight-training.

That got us onto the subject of training and gyms and people we both knew. When I said I went to the Apolo Gym in Buenos Aires, he asked if a guy called O still trained there. I said that, indeed, he did.

“Why, do you know him?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m the one that taught him to box.”

Turned out this pint-sized older guy was none other than Cacho Paredes, a former Argentine champion bantamweight from back in the forties. He asked if I’d ever seen O fight. I said I hadn’t had the pleasure. “He’s fast. Real fast for a heavyweight. That’s because I taught him to fight like a little guy. Stick and move, stick and move, and only go toe to toe when you see the other guy’s guard is down and he’s ready to take one on the chin. That’s boxing. The rest is just brawling. You box with your head, not your fists.”

But for me, O was just a buddy of my brother-in-law’s and the most disciplined weight-trainer I’ve ever known. Our workout times usually coincided, and he was only too willing to take the time to teach me to train effectively. Later, when there was such a thing, I realized that I would have had to pay thousands of dollars to a personal trainer to gain the knowhow that I did working out next to O and working out with Miguel. In fact, after the dark and dangerous seventies, O cropped up again—after a prudential period of lying low—as the owner of a luxury gym of his own, where he made money on the growing middleclass fitness trend, but where he also trained up-and-coming amateur and pro boxers.

Anyway, these, and more, were the times and the guys Miguel and I talked about during our suppers together in Buenos Aires. Like I say, it made him feel a lot better. Indeed, it made us both feel a lot better. We might look like a couple of old geezers. In fact, we might be a couple of geezers. But we knew who we’d been. And we knew too, that if we made the effort to dig deep enough, those guys were still there, living inside of us.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

BALL, FLAG, TREE…

 

Seventy-four years young, in Argentina, I now have to renew my driver’s license yearly. I won’t tell you how many years young my wife Virginia is, but we both end up in the same line at the DMV every year.

Getting your license renewed in Argentina is nothing like getting it renewed in my native US, where, in a lot of states, you can even do it by mail, and where always-on-the-road seniors would consider it age discrimination if they were asked to jump through any more hoops than the average middle-aged driver.

Well, here in Patagonia, as I say, renewal for us older drivers is yearly. And the prerequisites are numerous. First, the car you’re driving to the DMV has to have passed inspection at the Technical Verification Center. The computers there always end up turning up something or other: a poorly regulated handbrake, loose muffler, a millimeter too little tread on a tire, a faulty bushing in the front-end suspension, a stone-pit in the windshield, a less than enthusiastic turn signal…something. And until you go to a mechanic, get the nitpicking thing fixed and go back for re-verification, you can’t renew your license.

Once that’s done, you go to the DMV. There, they very amiably ask you a lot of probing questions about your age and retirement status. Then they take a picture of you, ask if it looks okay to you (let´s face it, at this age, any picture is simply as good as it gets), then they send you to another office where they give you an appointment for a few days or a week hence to take the driving test.

In the meantime, you get sent out on other missions. First, you have to go to a service payments center and pay the license fee. The cashier there also checks to see if you owe any tickets for infractions anywhere else in the country, and if so, you have to pay them before you can renew your license. You have to then take proof of that license fee back to the DMV.From there, you have to go to the offices of the local municipal traffic court. There, they scour computer records to see if you have any outstanding infractions, and again, if you do, you have to pay them. Without the traffic court certificate showing that you’re infraction-free, you can’t renew your license.

That done, you have to go to one of two medical services, tell them you’re renewing your license, and hand them the corresponding form from the DMV. You’ll be asked to wait and then will be called one at a time into a series of consulting rooms, where you’ll need to pass an eye test, a hearing test, a clinical test and a psychological test. If you don’t pass any or all of them, you can’t renew your license. 

Now, after a morning of doing all these things leading up to the medical exam, I don't know how I got out of my psych test without a straitjacket yesterday.  I had been messing around with the mechanic and technical verification for three days when we started the actual DMV process. I told Virginia after we finished with our traffic court adventure that I didn't really  want to do the medical yesterday, since it was already 11:30am and I was pretty sure the medical service closed sometime around noon.

But she insisted. We live more than twelve miles from town, and she figured that, as long as we were in town, we might as well get it all over with in one day, so all we would have pending was the driver’s test.  I had bank business to take care of before the banks closed at one, so I wasn’t very convinced, since I had to go someplace else and collect some money before going to the bank.  

Virginia, meanwhile, went on ahead to the medical service office alone. She called me while I was collecting the money for the bank, and said there were few people at the service, and that she'd already taken a turn for me so I should hurry up. It was after twelve, and, as I say, the bank would be closing at one. I said I had to get to the bank and deposit the cash. She said the medical place would close at 12:45, and I should get over there right away.

Irritated and nervous, I rushed to the medical office. I got there sweating and out of breath and prayed they wouldn't do the clinical first because I figured my blood pressure  would be through the roof. Virginia was in one of the rooms doing one of the exams. As soon as I sat down, the psychologist stepped out of her room and called my name. I was thinking money, bank, closing time, etc. when she said, “Do you have the form?”

“Form, what form?” I thought, and figured it must be something they had given Virginia at the reception desk. “Sorry, doctor,” I said. “My wife got here before me, and she must have it.”

“Who's your wife?”

“Virginia Mel.”

“Stay here, I'll go find her,” and off the psychologist  went.

All of the sudden, Virginia bursts into the room and says, “It's this form!” holding  a paper in front of my face. “The one they gave you at the DMV!” I apologize profusely to the shrink, explain that I'd been confused as to which form they were talking about, while Virginia goes back to the consulting room she'd come from. I say, “I've been running around town taking care of all sorts of nitpicking things all morning and am a little on edge, sorry.”

The psychologist says not to worry about it, just to relax, but I’m so irritated by now that I’ve been buffaloed into doing this today that my hands are shaking. The woman says, “Okay, let's begin. I'm going to give you three words, and I want you to memorize them. I'll ask you to repeat them later. Ball, flag, tree.” I nod. “Repeat them please.

“Ball, flag, tree.”

“Good. All right. What day is it?” Suddenly, I panic, “What the hell day is it??? Think, Dan, think!”

“Wednesday?” I venture. “Yes, I think it's Wednesday.”

“And the date?”

“October...October...hm...30th? No wait, October 31st.”

She nods, says, “Right date, but it's Thursday.”

“Oh okay. Sorry, it's been a busy confusing week.”

She nods dryly, with a deadpan expression, and says, “What are the three words?

Shit! What are the three freakin’ words? Wait, Dan, calm down. Think!

I say, “Ball, flag, and....ball, flag, and, um...”

“All right,” she says, “write a sentence. Any sentence that comes to mind.”

So what do I write? Hoy es miércoles. (Today is Wednesday)! And even as I'm handing it to her, I'm thinking, “No, you imbecile! It's freakin’ JUEVES (Thursday).”

Then, suddenly,  I shout, “Tree!”

“What?”

“The other word, ball, flag, TREE!”

“Oh right, muy bien. Okay now, see these geometrical figures.” I nod. “I want you to draw them freehand as exactly as you can.”

Now, I've never had any clerical ability. Maybe something to do with my more or less secret dyslexia. But it's the part of intelligence tests where I always end up looking like a moron. So, now I start laboriously sketching the two interlocked figures, and the more I mess with them, the worse they get. When I’m finished it looks like the work of a mentally challenged kindergartner.

She looks at it, hesitates, looks at me,  then looks down again and writes something on the form. Then, she looks up again and says, “What were the three words.”

“Tree...flag...um...(BALL, you freakin’ idiot, BALL!), ball.”

She nods. stamps and initials the form and hands it back to me. When I get outside, I’m relieved to see it says “APTO” (Approved). Virginia is relieved as well. “Wow,” she says, “the shrink looked worried when you sent her to find me.”

Nothing to worry about,” I lie. “I passed with flying colors.”

 

TRAIN WHISTLES

I remember when I was about six, my first grade teacher, Miss Long, took us on a field trip. It wasn’t a distant one. Just from the Centennial Primary School to downtown Wapakoneta a few blocks away. I recall its being a bright blue day, crisp and cold, since we went first thing in the morning.

Wapakoneta train station, built in 1917

We gathered around the teacher like a gaggle of goslings, our breath visible in the morning air. We were on the cobbled platform of the old brick freight depot, on the west side of the Baltimore and Ohio rail line. I don’t know if, as usual, I wasn’t paying attention or what, but I remember asking myself what we were doing there, even if it was exciting and fun to be playing hooky from the classroom.

Then the teacher said, “All right, children, here comes the train.”

We heard the shrill whoop of a steam whistle in the distance, the tracks trembled, and then there was the chug-chug-chug of a steam locomotive, and more whoops of the whistle. We all squealed as the steam engine, pulling a freight formation behind it, hissed vapor that enveloped us on the platform. The train came to a stop at the depot and stood there huffing and sighing like some large, powerful animal that was taking a breather before chugging on. We could smell the coal burning hot in the fire box, and we could see the tender loaded with more mineral fuel behind the engine. Smoke, like our own breath, billowed into the clear morning air from the locomotive’s stack.

Reading Railroad #602 - Painting by Fred Schuster

We were too young to realize the historical significance of the event. We were witnessing the last stop of a steam locomotive in our town, and one of the last regularly scheduled steam freight services on the B&O line.

My home town of Wapakoneta is definitely a train town. Besides spurs that go to the site of the old stock yard and the now defunct cheese, canning, churn and handle factories, there is a main line that runs right through the center of town. When I was young there were still coal yards along the tracks.

When I was still a primary schooler, we lived for three years near a siding. It was at the end of our street, South Pine, on the east side of Wapakoneta. I had friends in the neighborhood who were as curious as I was. Both their mothers and mine had forbidden us to hang out on what was known as the “right of way”, a sort of grassy easement near the rail spur. They told us “dirty old bums” hung out there and, if we didn’t want our throats cut, we’d best steer clear.

Hobos riding the rails

Of course, we went anyway. We even had a treehouse down there. And the thought of its being a dangerous, threatening place, made it all the more attractive. We never saw any of the rail hobos our mothers told us about, but we did once discover unsavory evidence that someone had spent the night in our treehouse.

What we actually most liked to do was to pretend we were hobos, with just the clothes on our backs and riding the rails to exciting destinations. Occasionally, we would climb up into some boxcar left standing on the siding. We would pretend we were hiding out, being careful not to be seen by a railroad detective, made infamous by The Grit (a national newspaper targeting a rural readership), for tossing bums off of moving trains after beating the bejesus out of them.

There was only one time we did that with adult permission—although not that of the B&O Railroad. Centennial School was just down the alley from my house and the teacher took us all on a little hike down the road to the easement. It was for our primary school “Hobo Picnic”. It was a day when we all had to dress up, as best we could, like tiny rail bums and carry our lunch in a bandana tied to a stick over our shoulders. The teacher thought it would be more authentic if she took us down by the tracks, and, incredibly, she gave us all permission to climb up into a boxcar standing alone there on the rails.   It had been left with the doors wide open. It was empty except, at the far end, for a stack of still wet hides, probably, we figured, from the nearby stockyard. I still remember their raw, rank odor.

Old Wapak station in use prior to 1917

It was hard to live in Wapakoneta and not have trains in your blood. I mean, there were, and still are, townspeople irritated by the constant delays that having level-crossings all across town signifies. If you’re driving east-west from one end of town to the other, chances are good you’ll have to wait for a mile-long freight train to lumber through. But many of us who grew up in a train town found the passing of each rail convoy to be a satisfying if minor daily event. Many of us still love the click and the clank of wheels meeting the track, the jerking clunk of the couplings as the locomotive slows and accelerates, the rumble you can feel in your chest from the heavy formation rolling down the tracks, each loaded boxcar with a gross weight of a quarter-million pounds.

Another factor that made railroads special for us was that we lived just down the line from one of the world’s most renowned locomotive manufacturing operations, Baldwin Lima Hamilton. It wasn’t called that until it merged in 1951 with another famed locomotive-maker, the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia. Before that, it had been known as the Lima Locomotive Works, named for its home base, the industrial city of Lima, Ohio, my father’s home town, located up the track fifteen miles north of Wapakoneta.

The Baldwin locomotive firm had been a railroading pioneer, founded in 1825. That was when locomotives were being built by hand, a time when there wasn’t even machinery to manufacture the huge cylinders that train engines required, and they had to be turned and bored by hand. The company was named for its founder, Matthias Baldwin, who was originally a talented gold and silversmith but with an obsessive interest in machinery and practical mechanics.

In the early days of his firm, Baldwin partnered with a talented machinist called David Mason. This was the beginning of the Baldwin Machine Company. But it didn’t become the Baldwin Locomotive Works until, after experimenting with steam-driven machinery for several years, Baldwin and Mason, in 1832, put together their first successful steam locomotive, which they called Old Ironsides, an engine they sold to a Philadelphia rail line that, until then, had been purchasing from a steam locomotive manufacturer in England.  

The Old Patagonian Express - La Trochita

I recall once, many years ago, waxing nationalistic on this subject, when I was watching a documentary in Argentina, where I live. It was about the Patagonian Trocha Angosta, a narrow-gauge train that once linked numerous remote destinations in the wilds of the Patagonian region—with a section of the rail link still operating today, but mostly as a tourist attraction, although some local residents still use it to get from point A to point B.

Once a thriving wild west frontier line, La Trochita, as it is fondly known—and better known to Americans as The Old Patagonian Express, since the 1979 best-selling travel book of the same title by Paul Theroux—employed a score of narrow-gauge steam engines, powered by coal from the Río Turbio mines of southern Patagonia back then, but today converted to fuel oil. Anyway, in this particular documentary, they explained that the little stretch of La Trochita that is still in operation is served by seven steam engines that are still operable. When asked about the make of the locomotives, a commentator said they were all Henschells and Baldwins, which he described as “English”.

Well now, at the time, I didn’t yet know that Henschell engines were German, but I sure as heck knew that Baldwins were American. And like a good native son from a Midwestern train town, I didn’t hesitate to get hold of the TV channel airing the program and give them a piece of my mind.

Baldwin's "Old Ironsides" - 1832

The Baldwin Locomotive Works struggled in the firm’s earliest years, living project to project for American railway companies. It went through especially difficult times following the panic of 1837, a US financial crisis that sparked a major depression that would stretch on into the mid-eighteen forties. For more than a decade after that, BLW would, to a large extent, live off of steam stock production for railways in the Southern states that were using the rails to an increasing degree to move their agricultural production.

The secession of states below the Mason-Dixon line over the burning question of American slavery practices seemed once again to spell hard times for the Philadelphia steam engine builder. But those concerns turned out to be short-lived. When the Civil War broke out, the Union military began moving troops, supplies and ordnance increasingly by rail, and steam engine production burgeoned as a result.

Baldwin would remain a powerful player in US railroading from then on, until the advent of diesel locomotives. Baldwin had difficulty making the transition from steam to diesel, which led to its post-World War II merger with the Lima Locomotive Works (by then known as Lima-Hamilton, after a previous merger with a machine-building firm based in Hamilton, Ohio).         

Lima Loco's Shay geared locomotive

Long before the merger with Baldwin, however, Lima Loco, as it was colloquially known, was already famous worldwide, for building some of the world’s finest steam locomotives. Founded in 1869, the firm was known, prior to 1878, as the Lima Machine Works.  But it was in that year that industrialist James Alley contracted Lima Machine to construct an innovative geared steam locomotive, specially designed by Ephraim Shay for the lumber industry.

The first Shay engine was completed in 1880 and became an instant hit throughout the US logging sector.  Over the next decade, Lima Loco would turn out some three hundred such steam engines. The Shay locomotives were low-speed, high-traction steam engines designed to pull heavy loads through mountainous terrain. But by the twentieth century, Lima Locomotive had largely covered that market, and was already turning to “super-power” steam technology.

Shay "Dixiana" logging train

This was a homegrown concept developed by Lima mechanical engineer William Woodward. His development concentrated on maximizing the locomotive’s prime capability—namely the generation and use of steam power. This so vastly increased the power and efficiency of Lima’s steam engines that the New York Central railway ended up buying more than three hundred of the Woodward-technology locomotives. While Lima’s production had earlier concentrated on pulling-capacity, the new locomotives of the nineteen-twenties were built for speed, and it was during that time, when my father was a boy growing up in that town, that Lima Loco became internationally renowned for building some of the world’s fastest steam engines. The maximum expression of this new breed of locomotive was the Berkshire 2-8-4, a powerful iron workhorse with a top speed of seventy miles per hour.

The Berkshire 2-8-4 super-power steam locomotive

In hindsight, the Lima Loco was, quintessentially, a steam locomotive builder, and it was superb at what it did. It was proud of that history and sought to hold onto to it, remaining ever loyal to steam. Seeing the writing on the wall, it was the new partner, Hamilton, that pushed to make the switch to diesel technology. Between 1949 (the year I was born) and 1951, Lima-Hamilton constructed just one hundred seventy-four diesels, making it the smallest diesel builder in the US.  Using Hamilton engine technology, more than three-quarters of the diesel locomotives that Lima-Hamilton built were thousand-horsepower switchers for use in America’s train yards. A rare few are apparently still in service today.

Lima Locomotive Works factory floor

But it was too little too late, and the 1951 merger with Baldwin could do nothing to save it. The firm simply couldn’t compete with big diesel-electric locomotive builders like Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD), Alco, and General Electric Infrastructure (GE). Sadly, in 1956, LBH closed its locomotive operations.

Despite this rich railroading history, what I remember most about growing up in a rural train town like Wapakoneta are the train whistles. Someplace in the back of my mind, from the time of my earliest years, I can still hear the shrill steam whistles. And from my early childhood, I can remember wanting to be at the tracks when the trains passed to see whether they were being pulled by a steam or diesel locomotive.

Lima Loco diesel, still operating freight runs in 2016

I was reminded of this when I was stationed in Germany for more than a year with the Army. I traveled a great deal by train at the time, and it wasn’t unusual then, in the early 1970s, for the German railroads to still use steam for switching and freight operations. It was exciting to see those heavy-breathing steam locomotives chug through, steaming, smoking and pulling with all their might.

But the most vivid memory I have of growing up in a train town is of the mourning doppler howl of the powerful diesels passing through, pulling seemingly never-ending formations of boxcars, flatcars and tankers. It always seemed especially poignant at night, lying in my bed in my parents’ home, and hearing it in the distance, as if in a dream. Or sitting after dark with my friend Mark on the roof of the shelter house in the park, smoking pilfered cigarettes and fantasizing about being on the lam, destination unknown. It was the background tune for our casual discussions of stories like Hemingway’s Nick Adams series or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Now when I go back to Wapakoneta for visits, I stay in a tiny house known as the Moonflower Inn. One of the things I love about the place is that it is close enough to the tracks for me to hear the train whistles at night. It’s nostalgic yet comforting, like being back in my warm bed at my family home.

Indeed, wherever I travel, no matter how far, the sound of a diesel locomotive horn is always sure to carry me away, to take me back home to Wapakoneta.