June 15, 1968: Puddle-jumping.

An unrelated note: Yesterday I posted the results of a long-simmering personal project to my other blog, Neck Pickup. It’s sorta cool, in a goofy way, and if anyone has time to check it out, I appreciate it. Thanks.

Now for this week’s regularly scheduled programming …

In past blog posts, both recent and distant, we’ve explored the routes my family took to get between Stamford, Conn., where my grandparents lived, and Rochester, N.Y., where my parents settled.

It’s not a short trip, even in the best of weathers. Nor is it a particularly direct route. There are a number of road changes to navigate, and some small towns to pass through late at night when things aren’t as well-lit as they might be.

It looks like my aunt took a different way to get to Rochester, 45 years ago this month. It wasn’t the cheapest way, but she might have gotten a bag of peanuts and a Coke out of the deal.

June 15, 1968. (Why anybody would skip town in the middle of a strawberry festival is beyond me.)

It just so happens that I have a scanned-in picture of my grandfather’s, dated 1968, that I’m guessing shows this exact flight on the tarmac. (It was scanned in under the title of “Elaine Flight.”)

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t believe my grandfather was ever on a plane. So when someone in his family was, it was a big deal, and worth taking pictures of:

Check your bags, ma’am?

“Mad Men” fans, history buffs, and readers over 50 will recognize Mohawk Airlines.

Utica, N.Y.’s second-greatest gift to the world and the first American airline to employ a black stewardess, Mohawk was a successful and well-known regional carrier throughout the 1950s and ’60s. If you were going to places like Glens Falls or Keene or Hartford or Worcester, Mohawk was going your way.

Below, a mid-1960s promotional film for Mohawk. Ah, for those golden days when lengthy meetings with middle-aged men in suits were considered guarantees of quality, rather than the very epitome of stodgy, bullheaded business as usual:

Unfortunately, the little airline that could was already starting to stagger by the time Aunt Elaine bought her ticket.

Only about two weeks after her flight, the national air traffic controllers’ union launched a protest job action that significantly slowed flights nationwide, costing airlines money.

A general economic slowdown in 1969, which blossomed into full recession the following year, hurt all airlines. And a pilots’ strike against Mohawk that began in November 1970 cost the company further money it could not afford to lose.

Undone by this series of body blows, Mohawk agreed to a buyout by Allegheny Airlines in 1971.

A Mohawk jet crash in March 1972 near Albany, N.Y., killed 17 people, providing a bitter coda to the history of a once-successful company. The last Mohawk flight took place the following month.

For those keeping score at home, Allegheny later changed its name to USAir, then again to US Airways, and is now getting swallowed up by American Airlines — a final victory for the national mega-carriers Mohawk used to insult in its TV advertising.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

I don’t know anything about my aunt’s particular flight. I didn’t ask her, and I’m not sure she’d remember it. But clearly she got to Rochester and back.

When we look back at companies that aren’t around any more, there’s a tendency to think of them as failures, losers or relics. If they were any good, the thinking goes, they’d still be here.

There’s some truth to that. But at the same time, some of those companies — like Mohawk Airlines — were pretty good at what they did before the challenges and pressures of doing business brought them down. (It doesn’t take many missteps or much adversity to put a company in the doghouse.)

A successful plane flight isn’t long-lasting currency. The experience recedes quickly in the mind, and we forget how much trust it took us to get on the plane and how much skill it took the airline to get us where we wanted to go, intact and on time.

Somewhere there is a reservoir of karma for these sorts of defunct enterprises … a place where Mohawk Airlines still gets credit for the difficult task of  moving a plane full of people from the New York City area to Rochester one long-ago morning in 1968.

July 1973: Long distance runaround.

If the Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon administrations had wanted a look at my grandfather’s phone records, they wouldn’t have needed a secret court order to get them from Ma Bell.

They would only have had to send someone to stand outside his window and peek in at his calendar — a task so simple, even the bumbling Watergate burglars could have pulled it off.

(I think.)

My grandpa was in the habit of documenting many, and maybe all, of his long-distance phone calls on his calendar. Not only the outgoing calls, but the incoming ones, too.

And if one ran long, that was usually noted, as well. (What d’ya suppose constituted “long” in his frugal view? Fifteen minutes? That was probably when he started pacing and checking the clock.)

For instance, after a blessed event in the summer of 1973, he used some of the free space on his calendar for the following notation:

July 31 and 32, 1973. The Yankees are in first; the Mets are in last. Life is funny.

I don’t remember — or perhaps I never knew — who my grandparents knew in Trumbull, a town a little farther east in Fairfield County. Apparently someone in Trumbull was a close enough friend to merit calling with some big family news … but not close enough to be identified on the calendar by name, like everyone else.

And apparently my Great-Aunt Eleanor got an especially long call. Perhaps she had news of her own to share.

I sometimes wonder why my grandfather kept such careful track of his long-distance phone calls.

Perhaps he’d had a bad experience with Ma Bell — maybe he’d been charged for eighteen phone calls to Brazil once — and he wrote down all his phone calls from then on, so he could use that record as evidence in case of future disputes.

Or maybe he wrote them down so he could keep tabs on his phone costs, the same way a modern cell-phone user might take pains not to go over their texting limit. Maybe a long phone call to Rochester in the first week of the month meant a foreshortened one in the third week. Money doesn’t grow on trees, after all.

(I am imagining my grandpa in the cell-phone age, shrugging his shoulders and explaining in a bemused tone: “I get free calls on nights and weekends now! So I stopped writing ‘em down. Didn’t seem like I needed to any more.”)

The recent news about the Obama administration commandeering vast amounts of telephony data from Verizon arouses age-old suspicions about just how closely our government is keeping tabs on us.

It makes me wonder what the notoriously venal Nixon administration would have done with those phone records.

And — while I don’t overmuch care how closely The Man is watching me — I wonder whether The Man ever had occasion to check in on William Blumenau of Stamford, Connecticut.

I cannot imagine in a million years that the federal government or its operatives ever had reason to find my grandpa on their radar screens.

Hard-working, middle-aged, politically conservative and disdainful of public protest, my grandfather (and my grandma, and my great-grandma) would have been absolutely the last people to cause the slightest bit of trouble.

The Man would have had His hands full dealing with all the people trying to kick out the jams, tear down the walls and bring the war home in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He would never have cared about the occupants of 1107 Hope Street.

And yet … if today’s government can execute such a sweeping grab for the personal information of its citizens, who knows what might have happened in the past? Does anyone really think this is the first time, legal or not?

I am sure my grandpa never had his own file. But perhaps he was part of a larger one … a row of figures in some paranoid data grab, or a footnote in some foot-high pile of papers.

I kinda wish he were. Not because he was any sort of rebel, but because the inclusion of Bill Blumenau in any list of people to watch would have demonstrated the absurdity of keeping those sorts of lists without a laser-tight focus — as the Obama administration seems to have done.

That’s all speculation, anyway.

For now we’ll return to what we know — a middle-aged man for whom long-distance calls are something of a luxury, scrawling dutifully on his monthly calendar, keeping a detailed record of his communications that the government will never see.

December 1971: What for?

I am a firm nonbeliever in the afterlife; but if there is one, Robert Lowell is going to kick my ass up and down for blog posts like this one.

Leap, lithe epigram.
Your ready-made faith has an audience,
your casual balm a nerve-spot.
If comfort is death we lie,
pennies on the eyes,
hands crossed  like waxwork.

Hail, familiar task,
the soothing and mundane,
thoughtless like breathing.
We base our faith on what we know,
and face each day
armed with our simple competence.

The world spins sideways
in warp and flutter.
The hands that heal, kill.
The force that guards, maims.
The rain that ripens, rots.
The door to the death-chamber
swings freely and silently,
well-oiled.

The familiar is our only friend –
the savor of cut grass,
the squeak of fresh-washed dishes,
the glimmering polish of chrome.
The price of heaven is a job well done.
The walls against lack and want
are built on what we know,
faithfully executed.
We ascend to heaven
on glittering dishes
and polished chrome.

The New York, New Haven and Hartford
skews sideways on frosty rails
while we buy our tickets
on the 7:29.

Lose faith in the routine
and lose all. Cold-packed December,
withered and dwindling,
is no time to question
the blind life-force.

Routine soothes and comforts,
a mother’s washcloth
on a fevered brow.

And when we lose our faith?

The door we have not oiled
swings freely and silently.

December 1971. What for, indeed?

Aug. 2-3, 1970: Where’s that confounded bridge?

A little thematic music – and yes, you knew that was coming, didn’t you?

When last we left our hero (and his wife and his mother), he was packing up his car and heading out of town after enduring a steamy, humid week of vacation.

So where’d they all go, already?

Well, their itinerary wasn’t all that surprising. They went to the suburbs of Rochester, N.Y., to see their son and six-months-pregnant daughter-in-law.

From there they made a day trip to the American side of Niagara Falls, coming back in time to eat at a restaurant that may still be in business in the Rochester area.

And then they made the eight-and-a-half-hour trip home.

Pretty much the only thing of interest to me is the route they took to get home, which involved a bridge I haven’t heard of in a long, long time:

August 2-3, 1970.

In my own life’s travels, I’ve come to associate trips across the Hudson with the Tappan Zee Bridge, with the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge the most frequent second option.

But there’s more than one way to cross the river, and it looks like my grandpa was keeping all his options open.

(An interesting fact from Wiki: The Tappan Zee Bridge was designed to have a 50-year lifespan. It is now 57 years old. Perhaps I will stay on Dean Friedman‘s side of the Hudson for a while.)

At any rate, the Bear Mountain Bridge opened in 1924, and carries U.S. Routes 6 and 202 between Rockland and Westchester counties. It is roughly 25 miles north of the Tappan Zee, and roughly 15 miles south of the Newburgh-Beacon.

Unless you live nearby, it appears to be more of a scenic route — a leaf-peeper’s bridge, compared to the much larger spans to its north and south.

I wonder if my grandpa took it because he wanted to see the sights, or because he wanted to familiarize himself with a backup route, or because there was something happening on the Tappan Zee he wanted to avoid. (Probably not the latter: He would have been hard put to know much about road conditions on a long interstate trip.)

As I said, I didn’t have any memory tracks regarding the Bear Mountain Bridge when I sat down to write this.

But thanks to YouTube, I can retrace my grandpa’s path from the comfort of my computer. And when I saw the footage, it looked ever so slightly familiar. I’ve definitely been there before, though I couldn’t tell you when.

Finally, I see on the calendar that my grandpa had additional vacation at least the first Monday and Tuesday of August, after being off the entire previous week.

His resume says he was let go from that job because business slowed down. I kinda wonder if his extended “vacation” was not, perhaps, a furlough, and a harbinger of things to come.

No matter. He enjoyed his work, and for today’s purposes, we will leave him employed.

Perhaps he is already looking forward to his return to work as he unpacks his bags, shakes off the proverbial road dust, and decides in his mind whether he’ll take the Bear Mountain Bridge when he goes to Rochester to meet his first grandchild.

July 27-30, 1970: A couple days off.

My dad once suggested to me that I write about warm-weather calendar items in the middle of winter, to impart warmth to my readers.

Can’t say I listened to him. (Hey, why start now?)

But I’m going to write about a warm summer week this week, for no other reason than I’ve been craving weather like this for months, and we’re almost there … just about in beer-and-barefoot-grilling territory, so close I can touch it.

This particular summer week has some small degree of retrospective family significance, as well.

July 27-30, 1970.

My grandfather’s job as a draftsman at Time Inc., his breadwinning gig for much of his adult life, ended in January 1970.

He then hooked on from April through September of that year with John McAdams and Sons, a small firm in nearby Norwalk, before work slowed down and they let him go.

He was jobless and looking until he had his first heart attack, in May 1971, at which point he retired.

So the week we’re looking at here — July 27-30, 1970 — might have been my grandfather’s last vacation as a working man.

A minor distinction, to be sure, but a distinction nonetheless. The promise of vacation helps make work tolerable, no matter what your job. And even a dutiful gent like my grandpa needed to put his feet up every now and again.

So what did he do with his time off? Barefoot grilling and beer?

Unfortunately, it seems like he had to spend some of it attending to chores — a doctor’s appointment for my great-grandma here, a service checkup on his car there.

And it may have been too brutally hot for him to really enjoy. (We’ve already established that he didn’t like humidity, and that he didn’t have air conditioning.)

I note that July 28 and 29 have pretty much nothing listed. While he probably spent some time doing routine household chores, like weeding the garden, I imagine he might have just grabbed a glass of cold lemonade and sat down in front of a floor fan for a while.

On July 30, he roused himself long enough to head down to the post office and stop his mail, in preparation for an out-of-town trip.

It’s interesting that he didn’t leave town a couple days earlier, even though there were no commitments on his calendar. Instead, he stayed in Stamford and baked in the stifling heat he disliked for a couple of days.

And then, escape was at hand for the traveling man.

But we’ll get back to that next week, I think.