Early last Sunday morning, I was racing through Twitter, avoiding all the victory laps from Democrats (no objection here; fair is fair, to the victor goes the spoils and all that rot, but I didn’t want to read the dispatches, although who wasn’t happy democracy was saved?) and was caught short by a screenshot of a Newsday front-page, posted by someone to commemorate the 61st anniversary of the Nov. 9, 1965 Northeast blackout. Man, that was something: exciting, unprecedented (for me, at 10) and spooky but not in a Cuban Missile Crisis sort of way. Not long after, Tom Paxton wrote a pretty funny song about it, “Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?”, and, with Jetsons-like turnaround, played it a week later on Pete Seeger’s obscure TV Show Rainbow Quest. More about that day below.
As a kid, I didn’t get into too much trouble with my parents, likely because they were worn out by my four older brothers. The first admonishment I remember came on the last day of kindergarten in 1961, when during “nap time” (you’d take a blanket out of your cubby hole and sort-of-sleep on the floor) I cracked a joke for the benefit of Bobby Ringler and Dicky Howard, and Mrs. Keebler, with whom I got along very well, friend of the family, etc., lost her mind and gave me a tongue-lashing for being “disruptive.” My mom was pissed at “Jean”—she was fierce in the rare instances that teachers unfairly bawled out her kids, but I waved off the incident—since was very strange and unwarranted, though peace was arrived at two years later when I drew her again for second grade at Southdown Elementary School in Huntington, New York.
The ‘61 picture above shows Dicky on the left and me on the right on LaRue Dr., outfitted in clothes that were probably from the 1940s, but don’t look half-bad today, especially Dicky’s cool jacket (it’d fetch a lot on eBay today) and my wide-lapel shirt. The ensembles were mis-matched, but neither of us gave a hoot: they were just clothes, get up in the morning, brush your teeth, open a drawer and get dressed. It was a couple of years later when four neighborhood friends and I walked to a nearby construction site—not Dicky, he was chicken—and each of us smoked several Camels, and none barfed or got the stink-eye from our parents. You’d imagine they could smell the smoke, but then again, in 1963 every house had several ashtrays, and a lot of adult smokers (my dad had quit; Mom was a “social smoker,” meaning a Salem every other week at a cocktail party).
A tic I’ve got today, likely common, is making sure before hitting the sack that the stove’s turned off, and anything else that could potentially cause a fire. I trace that back to 1982, when on the way to a croquet match in Hampstead, Maryland (I won the trophy) I couldn’t remember if I’d snuffed out a cigarette before leaving. It gnawed at me, and, upon returning home to my large $110/month Mt. Vernon apartment in Baltimore City, I saw that the Merit had extinguished itself in an ashtray. Close call! I was vigilant after that. In the 1990s at my New York Press office at the Puck Building, before leaving for a drink after work I’d check four times to make sure the portable heater was turned off. It was a running joke with my friends, but it wasn’t really a stifling OCD disability.
I’ve gotten off track. When I was a first-grader, one night, while watching an I Love Lucy re-run with my parents, I was under their bed, lighting matches while they dozed, until the odor ratted me out. No idea why, but no punishment was meted out, just a weary “talking-to.” The ’65 blackout was my undoing. Leading up to that event, I’d melt colorful candles in the playroom’s fireplace, transfixed by the wax forming near-psychedelic patterns on the chopped wood. On that Nov. 9th, my mom, with a flashlight after the electricity sputtered and then vanished at around 5:30, was frantic, looking all over the house for what she thought was several boxes of handy candles.
The immediacy of the predicament must’ve put her intuition into overdrive for she collared me, and, Scout’s Honor, I stoically confessed and when my dad got home from work an hour later, they expressed disappointment (while two of my older brothers, eavesdropping, tried to suppress laughter) in a very sober way, and I did feel foolish. When the power returned the next morning, I was told there was no after-school touch football for me, and that was that. But the real punishment was the denial of participating fully in the blackout, which the coolest event (to a kid) since The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan in early-1964.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023