Summertime in my sixteenth year was boring. I tried to get a job at a local Isaly Dairy store and thought I might be lined up for one in Girard, a few miles from Niles. I never heard the reason why it did not turn out. I didn’t really try very hard to find anything else. Summer employment of teens in the early fifties in northeastern Ohio was scarce; all the openings were filled by young adults seeking full-time work.
I did envy my friend, George Davies, who landed a job as an usher at the Robbins Theater. It would have been great earning money instead of spending it there. I must have attended a movie three or four times a week. I’m not sure where I got the money for it, other than from donations from my mother, with a hope I might be there for bank-nite winnings. It certainly wasn’t from my father, who ignored me most of the time, or at least when he was not threatening my mother and me with financial or bodily harm.
I did, however, start writing my mystery novel that June. By the end of the summer I’d completed four chapters of The Keys of Murder. It was a locked-room mystery at a large country estate. I may still have a copy stuffed away in my closet.
I also spent hours working on my stamp collection. I focused on US stamps and made trips to the Niles Post Office. It’s a good thing each stamp cost only three cents back then. In the forties and early fifties, it seemed that the color of almost every stamp was a variation of purple-violet. I’m not sure why I collected stamps, other than FDR did. I did not know any collectors, personally.
I also had time for continuing my correspondence with foreign pen-pals. I wrote a letter to someone almost every other week. A friend gave me the addresses for two Japanese boys he was writing to, but my mother forbid me to correspond with any “Japs.” For some reason, “Germans” were OK. That summer my favorite uncle, Bill Moransky, did take his family and me to a baseball game in Cleveland when they were playing Detroit. The Cleveland Indians was the team to see in person or listen to on the radio. I seldom did either; my father was the one who listened intently to them on the radio and went with his buddies to the games in Cleveland.
On our return trip from Cleveland, Uncle Bill stopped at Nelson Ledges with its rock trails and a few caves where I felt like Tom Sawyer. Since then I’ve enjoyed the occasional chance I’ve had for spelunking in Pennsylvania and west Texas or in Mammoth Caves in Kentucky and Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.
Another attraction was to visit a shrine, a past-time my mother and her relatives enjoyed. Another uncle, Frank Borecki, took us along with his wife, Rose (my mother’s sister) and their son, Frankie, to Our Lady of Lourdes Shrine near Euclid, Ohio for the Labor Day weekend. I was able to escape the confines of Niles and the Mahoning Valley only on very rare occasions.
I felt a continuing sense of boredom that summer. Since then, I’ve learned I created my own boredom, as did many teenagers who expected the world will freely give them magnificent adventures, like the ones found in the books I read. Nowadays, they use virtual reality and X-Box games to attempt to eliminate that feeling. Nothing much really changes. My boredom was of my own creation, or my own lack of creativity.