It Says So in the Childcraft!

Another post in a series on Famous Family Sayings

In my family, when you made a definitive statement about something you had to be able to prove it. Mom and Dad taught us to question things, so if I said something like “The moon is made out of cheese” someone would ask where I had heard that and then tell me to prove it. Most families had some version of encyclopedias back then, including mine, even if they were a little out of date by the time I started using them. So I’d break out the encyclopedia that included an entry about the moon and then… realize my older brothers had just made a fool of me.

We also had another option that had entries on a whole bunch of topics, a book called Childcraft. It was basically an encyclopedia for kids, with simple language, pictures and illustrations. There were multiple books, but I think we only had one – How Things Work. I used to look up things in there all the time (OK, so I was a little nerdy as a kid), as did other members of my family. That book contained a lot of good information and I found it quite interesting.

One time, my sister had one of those definitive statement moments and when asked how she knew, her simple response was, “It says so in the Childcraft!” While what she said may have been true, my older brothers pounced all over that statement and made a joke out of it. In fact, they thought it was so funny, they started using that line all the time (which us younger ones picked up on and copied so we could be cool like them). That line got used so much it became a Famous Family Saying.

Here are some fictional examples of how this line may have been used:

One of us younger ones: “It’s getting cloudy outside, I think it’s going to rain.”

One of the older ones: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

Me: “Anyone know what’s for dinner?”

Older brother: “Roast beef.”

Me: “Again? Are you sure?”

Older brother: “Yup. It says so in the Childcraft!”

Older brother: “Joey has a new girlfriend.”

Me: “I DO NOT! Who told you that?”

Older brother: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

Older brothers: “Don’t tell Mom what we’re doing. You wanna know why?”

One of us younger ones: “Why?”

Older brothers: “Because if you do…” (fist punching other hand) “You wanna know why?”

One of us younger ones: “Why?”

Older brothers: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

One of us younger ones: “You’re in TROUBLE!”

One of the older ones: “What?!?! I didn’t do anything. How do you know?”

One of us younger ones: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

This last example would have been followed by a mad dash to get away before we got a noogie…or worse.

If you made any kind of statement that sounded smart, there was a good chance it would be followed by “It says so in the Childcraft!” It was funny at times, not so funny at other times. When you were just being a know-it-all, it was funny for everyone. When you were trying to be serious about something and got mocked with that line, it could be very frustrating. Now that I think about it, it was always funny for everyone except the person at whom “It says so in the Childcraft!” was aimed.

We used that phrase so often that the publishers should have been paying us royalties. For years, there wasn’t a week that went by that “It says so in the Childcraft!” didn’t get uttered by at least one of us. The strange thing is, I don’t remember Mom or Dad ever getting involved with this and having to stop it like they did with so many other things. I can’t say no one ever got hurt (at least emotionally), but I guess it never got out of hand. Eventually, as we got older, it died out.

Kids today wouldn’t know an encyclopedia from a cyclorama. Instead of researching something using an encyclopedia, they do their research using the internet. You could make a strong case that their “It says so on the internet” is our “It says so in the Childcraft!” With one exception that is; everything in Childcraft was true. I don’t know if the Childcraft books are still published, but if they were, you could probably look up “internet” and it would say that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. That would be awesome, because when someone asked me how I knew, I could say “It says so in the Childcraft!”

Goofing Around in the Back of the Car

With the start of warm weather, Road Work season is in full swing here in the Northeast. Even though most of it is done overnight, the work can continue past the 6 AM stop time and cause traffic issues for those of us trying to get to work on already busy highways. One day last week that scenario played out for me and I was stuck in a traffic jam about 7 miles away from my exit. After a few minutes I was behind a school transportation van and couldn’t avoid noticing a little girl in the last seat because she was staring straight at me. Once she got my attention, she smiled and waved to me until I waved back.

As we inched up the highway I noticed she was doing the same thing to other cars that were passing the van, with mixed results. A few people waved back and she’d smile and go on to the next car, but most of the people didn’t even acknowledge her existence. When the traffic stopped, she would stare at the car next to her, concentration on her face, just waiting for someone to look at her so she could smile and wave to them. It appeared to me that some people gave their full effort to not look at her. Maybe they didn’t want to smile while sitting in a traffic jam, thinking that maintaining the angry face would make the cars in front of them go faster. In that little girl’s world, traffic jams are not a problem.

That incident reminded me of riding in the back of our station wagon as kids. When we all went somewhere in the car, us younger ones sat in the way back part of the station wagon. Did I mention there were no seats back there? Back in those days, seat belts were not required and no one used them, so for us to be sitting back there was no big deal. We could have a lot of fun in the back end of the car. There were many opportunities to annoy my older brothers sitting in the back seat: I could simulate a bug crawling on their neck; I could pull their hair and duck down behind the seat; I could tap their shoulder so they looked at the person sitting next to them and then laugh at them for falling for that old trick; I could sing really loud and/or off-key right behind their ear. Yes, there were lots of things I could do and they couldn’t do anything because we were in the car. As long as I didn’t hear Dad say “If I have to pull this car over...” I felt like it was anything goes.

When bugging my older brothers got boring we’d play games back there, like counting the number of cars of a certain color, or looking for cars from other states if we were on the highway. If we weren’t driving on the highway, we’d exaggerate the turns and roll into each other or amplify the bumps and bang the roof. Eventually, it would get out of hand and Dad would give us the old “If I have to pull this car over…” bit again and we’d calm down – at least for a while. At one point, we had a station wagon that had a third seat – that faced back instead of front. I don’t know whose brilliant marketing plan that was, but you could only fit two kids in it comfortably, it forced you stare at people behind you and it kind of made you feel nauseous going backwards all the time. Besides, it was no fun in the back if you couldn’t even roll around a little bit. I think we just folded the seat down and didn’t use it after a while.

One fond memory I have is riding in the back end of my oldest brother’s 1965 Barracuda. If you don’t know what they looked like, they had a big, sloped rear window. I remember my younger brother and I would lay back there and pretend we were in a military airplane. One of us would say, “Pilot to bombardier. We are over the target area.” The other would reply, “Bombs away!” and we’d whistle to simulate the bombs falling and then make the explosion noises as we made a direct hit.  That was one of the few times that the trip was too short and coming in for a landing was not welcome. 

I want to be more like that little girl in the back of the van, in whose world traffic jams are not a problem and can even be fun. Maybe I should start smiling at people and waving to them. If they don’t smile and wave back, I can always pretend I’m flying high above the traffic in my B-52. Bombs away!

No Playing Ball in the House

On Mother’s Day, while visiting with my wife’s family one of my nephews was kicking a ball against the wall inside the house. He wasn’t kicking it too hard and it was one of those $2.99 lightweight balls, but I found myself telling him that he shouldn’t be doing that inside the house. As is usually the case when an “old” guy tells a young kid who is not their own to do something, he completely ignored me and kept on kicking the ball against the wall. To my relief, his mother told him to stop a few minutes later.

One of the rules in my house growing up was that there was no ball playing in the house. That meant no ball of any kind could be thrown, tossed, hiked, passed, shot or in any way made to fly through the air. We were allowed to roll a ball, but that got out of hand at times, too, and that was usually shut down quickly. We had a nice yard to play in so why did we need to play ball in the house? Because it could be a lot of fun. Remember, this was before the days of 100+ channels on cable and we only had about five or six channels, so sometimes we had to make up our own fun. Putting on our baseball gloves and throwing a ball from couch to rocking chair to the spot next to the fireplace could be a lot of fun, especially when you looked one way and threw the other. Tossing a football back and forth over my sister’s head was always quite entertaining, too.

Inevitably, though, someone would make an errant throw and something would get knocked over, or someone would throw a little too hard and someone else would get hit in the face, or the football would go a little too close to my sister’s head and she’d yell and scream, and Mom would put an end to the game. So at some point Dad laid down the law and there was not supposed to be any more ball playing in the house. I say “not supposed to be” because we were typical boys and still played ball in the house – as long as Dad wasn’t around. We wouldn’t have dared do it right in front of him.

One time, one of my brothers and I were tossing a wiffle ball back and forth. We weren’t hitting the ball; we were just tossing it easily back and forth to one another. We had the TV on and were throwing it occasionally while we watched the show. At some point, I threw the ball to him and he ducked out of the way. The wiffle ball hit the On/Off button of the TV and bounced back to me. We both laughed and went back to watching our show and tossing the ball back and forth. Later on, my brother went to turn off the TV and nothing happened. He pressed the On/Off button again and the TV stayed on. I thought he was kidding so I went over to the TV and pressed the button and got the same result. Now I was getting worried.

My first thought was, “Dad is going to kill me.” For some reason, whenever I did something stupid (quite a lot) or bad (not as much, but enough) I always thought that. Just so you know, as much as I dreaded him coming home at times like that, none of us were ever killed by my father. I told Mom what happened and she didn’t believe me. The big question was how could a wiffle ball break the On/Off button of a TV? She figured I must have been throwing something else. When Dad came home I had to tell him, too, and his response was basically the same as Mom’s: how could a wiffle ball break the TV? Both my brother and I explained multiple times what happened but no one was buying it. Not Dad, not Mom, and not any of my siblings who weren’t there at the time.

So the interrogation stopped and Dad reiterated that there was no ball playing of any kind in the house and life went back to normal. Oh, except for the TV, because we had to unplug it to turn it off and plug it back in to turn it on again. I think we did this for about a year before we got another TV. Apparently, to fix that button cost almost as much as buying a new set, so it never did get repaired. Every once in a while, someone would ask me “what really happened” that day, and as much as I told them how a lousy, stupid, plastic wiffle ball broke the On/Off button, I don’t think any of them believed me. I even started to doubt it myself – and I was there when it happened!

Take it from someone who’s been there and done that, don’t play ball in the house. Not even with a wiffle ball because you just never know what’s going to happen. Besides, no one will believe you broke anything with a plastic ball anyway.

Did It Really Happen?

A couple people have asked me if some of the things I write about really happened or was it really like that growing up. And another person asked me how the heck I remember all this stuff. OK, you got me. I’m really an only child from a wealthy family and every story is made up. I don’t really have six brothers and two sisters, and there were never card games and board games; I didn’t have to learn to get along with others, or how to share things, or how to wait for things; I got everything and anything I wanted, especially at Christmas; my yard was not the football field or the wiffle ball field where we played for hours; I went on luxurious vacations every year; I didn’t have to count out M&M’s in a Dixie Cup. Well, maybe in some parallel universe or imaginary world that is true, but not here in the real world. All I can say is, I write things as I remember them. Does that mean that everything I write is exactly how it happened? Probably not, but what I write is how I remember things and so far no one has come forward and said, “That never happened.”, or “This is what really happened.”, or “This is how that really happened.”.

I know I have a pretty good memory because there are times I bring up situations and someone doesn’t remember it, but as I fill in the details they’ll say, “Oh, yeah. I remember that!” Then we’ll talk about it for fifteen or twenty minutes and laugh about things that happened. Oftentimes it will lead to the retelling of other situations that happened, some even funnier than the original one we talked about. I don’t know why I have such clear memories of occurrences from decades ago – but can’t remember where I left my cell phone ten minutes ago – but maybe it’s because those were some great times and I drank in all the details.

I try not to make it sound like everything was wonderful when I was a kid, because it wasn’t. We weren’t The Brady Bunch or the Huxtables on The Cosby Show. My family went through some hard times, especially trying to feed, clothe and provide for nine kids. I could focus on the struggles I had as a kid, or that we had as a family, but as I look back on my childhood I don’t see the tough times as much as I see how those times taught me something about life, myself or family. In many instances, those tough times taught me what was really important as opposed to what just seemed to be important. That doesn’t mean I always made the right decisions, I made enough bad ones in my life to last ten lifetimes, but I’d like to think that I learned from my mistakes and grew and changed because of them.

My parents and family were by no means perfect. However, my parents raised nine kids, all who are reasonably successful adults. Not one of us is a criminal or a derelict. Trust me when I say that there were other families we knew that had as many, or almost as many, kids as we did and that cannot be said about them. I’m not bragging or trying to put anyone down, but it would have been easy for any of us to turn to a different lifestyle than we did in order to get the “things” many of our friends had. That we didn’t is a testament to our parents and how they taught us to live.

So did this stuff really happen and was it really like I say it was? As far as I remember, yes and yes. I remember it from my perspective and through the lenses of 30 – 40 year old glasses. Things may be a little fuzzy around the edges, but the main part is very clear. I had parents who loved me, and brothers and sisters that I loved (well most of the time anyway). As my Dad used to frequently say, we always had “a roof over our heads, food on the table and clothes on our backs”, despite some fairly hard times. It’s not all flowers and rainbows today either, but I often think that if my parents got through challenges with nine kids, I can do it with two.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.