The Pink Pearl – Time to Retire when the Rubber Meets the Paper

A Picture is worth 5,000 Words or Less

April 20, 1987 was a very big day for me as it was my first day of working for Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio.  Several weeks earlier, I had interviewed on campus at the University of Cincinnati.  I was an Evening College student majoring in Accounting and set to graduate in June.  Eleven years earlier, I had enjoyed my first day at Miami University and almost got to dine with the President, (read me), where I had set out to earn a degree in Mathematics.  Once I switched over to Evening College, I knew that earning a Math degree was out of the question and so I chose Accounting – hey, it’s got numbers, right?  When I interviewed for P&G, they had their own standardized test for the applicants to take.  I recall it having a lot of algebra and a lot of questions you see on those online IQ tests.  It was one of those times when I left the test feeling like I hadn’t missed a single question – I knew I had aced that puppy!

Where the Hell did my Car Go? – More High School Pranks

Little Red Pinto

In stories like egg wars and What’s that Smell (read me), I’ve written about practical jokes and harmless pranking.  Hopefully your high school weekend and summer evenings in high school contained as much jocularity, frivolity (and carnal pleasures?) as mine did.  In high school, we can’t wait to be older and when we get old, we miss our younger years like crazy.

Foundry Days, Walk Stealthily and Carry a Big Stick

Breakin the law, breakin the law

I am in the mood today to write about another adventure from my days at the foundry.  From 1979 to 1987, I worked for a small family-owned iron foundry named The HP Deuscher Company.  Way ‘back in the day’, the city of Hamilton was quite the little industrial center.  There were plenty of manufacturing employers that supplied salaries capable of sustaining a middle income family.  Hamilton was full of middle income families where the man worked at one of these places and the woman ran the household.  Sadly, companies like Mosler Safe, Champion Papers, Fisher Body Plant of GM and Hamilton Foundry are no longer a massive presence.  But you readers all know this as it’s happened everywhere.  Until we rebuild our manufacturing infrastructure, it will be harder and harder to keep 45 million people in this country off of food stamps (yes, that is an accurate statistic).

Bedtime on Prytania – Boys will be Boys

The Clan

Growing up in a household of eleven people is a real challenge during certain parts of the day.  Mealtime was always interesting, but you already know that if you read the first epic adventure about our family (read me).  Our sleeping arrangements were interesting as well as the house we lived in had originally been built as only a two bedroom, two story.  Maybe it could be considered a three bedroom as there was also a tiny third bedroom upstairs at the rear and it could sleep one comfortably – we stretched it into sleeping two small ones of course.  In fact, when we first moved into that house, that small bedroom was my room.  It appears that it had once been used to sleep a visitor or extended family member too because it had a kitchen sink and cabinets built into it (leading to its smaller size originally).

As a family of eleven, the aforementioned tiny bedroom belonged to the two youngest girls, Lori and Janelle.  The middle bedroom was the largest sized and slept the remaining three girls, Bobbi, JoAnn and Toni.  That left us four boys for the forward bedroom facing the street.  Given we had 9 kids, an uneven number, this is the only arrangement that would work – the sex with 5 had to use the tiny bedroom and couldn’t be split up by the middle bedroom.  We boys each had our own single bed.  There was a set of bunk beds for Mike and Felix.  Steve and I shared a set of trundle-beds. 

Season of Youth – the Magic of the Baseball

Charlie Hustle

In Getting the Boys Snipped, I wrote a brief introduction to some of the more famous baseball characters in the Prytania neighborhood.  Today I thought I might try to condense 3-4 years of neighborhood baseball games into one short story.  As I just wrote that last sentence, I had to stop to feel the impact from this statement.  It really was only just a few years of park baseball because we moved into the neighborhood when I was in 5th grade.  My baseball playing group would have become too big for the park when I hit 8th or 9th grade as it was a small park.  It feels like it was so much longer than just a few short years; everything is larger when you’re young, even time itself.