ST. LOUIS SUNDAY

The Admiral boat has nothing to do with my blog today, so I'm not really sure why I includrd this picture.  Maybe just because it's SLS. In fact, I'm still bitter because I never got to go on her!

My backyard was not very big, but so much happened there it seemed bigger.

(Like John Dalton in Roadhouse..."I thought you would be bigger!")

The garage took up a lot of room, and I spent a heck of a lot of tom in that place. (Who's Tom?)

The garage was made of oak, and you could not drive a nail into it! In fact, you could hardly stick a dart in the wood! (We had a dart board hanging on a nail that was already sticking out of the wood when we moved there.)

They darts would usually just bounce off the wall!

Then how did they build the sucker?

Someone said the wood must have been green when they nailed it together, and then it got harder when it cured.

Picture of my mom, fluffy's head at bottom left...garage in back.

I personally believe there was an invisible force field lining the inside of the garage, created by an ancient alien race of creatures called Glirkazoids.

We had an old, beat up, worn out pool table that my dad had picked up somewhere. 

It was real cheaply made with a micro-thin, felt surface where the balls rolled around,  and the bottom would drop out of the ball retrieval chute after a few games, and they would roll all over the garage floor.

We could not afford a real cue stick, so my brother Dick made a homemade pool stick that had a roughed up tip that made it super easy to miscue and send the ball careening through the hot, humid, July, St. Louis garage air.

My  most memorable moment in the garage was when Doug Deubel and me were playing pool, minding our own business, and this music came on the radio that was unlike anything we had ever heard!

The sound did not simply reach my ears, it went way down to my heart and soul, and stimulated my imagination!

So here we were playing pool and singing to a song that we really didn't know the words to yet, and feeling like the future was gonna be way cool!

The song was "I Want To Hold Your Hand."

My second most memorable time from the annals of the garage was when I was younger. Maybe 7 or 8.

My dad had an old electrical cord hanging on one of those peg board type thingys above his work bench.

It had an electrical plug on one end and two bare wires on the other end.

I wondered what would happen if I 

plugged the plug into the top holes of the socket, and then stick the two bare wires on the other end into the bottom holes of the socket.

You guys know what an arc welder sounds like, don't you?

I was so surprised when my dad came running out there and didn't even yell at me like he usually did when I did something stupid!

I think he was expecting me to be dead, so almost getting killed saved my life!

One of our favorite things to do (me and my buddies) was to climb up on the garage roof at night, to get a "birds eye view" of all the cool "happenings" going on in the neighborhood.

We loved to watch the next door neighbor guy come home drunk every night, the fancy people who lived behind us having yard parties and such,  the kennel of prize winning beagle dogs owned by the neighbors on the other side of the yard (that our dog Fluffy would violate by climbing the fence), and needless to say, we would have fun making weird sounds, doing bird calls, barking, meowing, anything to confuse and tick off our neighbors from our unseen spot on the garage roof.

I almost forgot about the backyard!

It was about 90 feet long and 60 feet wide.

I'm not sure, my sister Dee-Dee can correct me on this, she remembers everything.

Anyway, it was long and narrow. Great for playing catch with my dad!

My dad was such a great baseball player he could have been on the Cardinals team...but that's a long story.

He could throw a baseball straight up in the air, so high it looked like a marble, and make it come down in the exact same spot he threw it.

That gave me a lot of practice in catching fly balls when I played baseball.

He could throw the ball so hard that it was a little scary playing catch with him, and when he threw his knuckle ball, where it looked like it was moving in slow motion, and you could see the stitches on the ball like it was standing still, it was super frightening!

I would also play fetch with Fluffy for hours on end in the backyard, dad would grill out back there (with his grill made from a 55 gallon drum), we had water fights, washed the cars, wrestled...back then it seemed so ordinary, and even mundane at times.

It is only now that I realize what a paradise we had..uh..right...in...our...own...backyard.