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mermaidcamp

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Science in the Basement

September 12, 2013

I spent a lot of time in the basement of this house in Oakmont, PA as a child.  It contained a player piano, a bar, a collection of dress up clothing, a record player with records, bottles of pigment, some prisms, a Teslacoil, and some fluorescent lights.  In the garage my dad kept bottles of crude oil he admired and chemicals he brought home from the lab to to experiments with me.   I had to practice on the piano daily and I often played with my friends in the playroom downstairs and out in the back yard.  We loved to play with the prisms, which my mom had made during WWII at an optics plant where she had worked.  We also enjoyed grabbing the electric end of the Teslacoil and lighting up the over head lights with our other hand.  How my parents decided that kids could play with the Teslacoil is a mystery, but they did not mind.

Before I left Oakmont I had a conversation with the doctor who presently lives in the house, Merrill D Bowan, O D who specializes in neurological optometry.  He told me about his studies with brain injury patients using prisms.  He has remarkable results helping people correct problems with proprioception and balance.  His work all made perfect sense to me, although I had just met him in the driveway and asked if he minded if I took a picture in the backyard of the basketball backboard my grandfather put up over 50 years ago.  When I looked around and stirred the memories I knew this was always a unique house in this neighborhood.  Our house was special and different because my father was a mad scientist who enjoyed teaching me to make hydrogen bombs for recreation.  The science energy is still there, alive in the brilliant and progressive mind of Dr. Bowan.  It is somehow very natural.  I am glad I had the chance to meet and talk to him.

Leaving Oakmont

June 30, 2013 — 7 Comments

I spent my school career through the 8th grade in the small town of Oakmont, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh. This tiny, close knit (nosey) community was about the Oakmont Country Club and Edgewater Steel, and some other stuff. For kids it was paradise with millionaire robber baron neighbors providing lavish recreational opportunities.  My parents were Republicans who disliked JFK and did not play golf.  On one hand they were non conformist, and on the other, very concerned with image.  I had a running battle with my mother for my entire grade school career about bangs, permanent waves, and white socks.  These symbols of culture and control were so important to my mother that my wishes were never considered.  She stuck my hair in the sink and put stinky stuff and curlers in it against my will, and with loud protest.  She always cut my bangs off, mullet style.  The most important symbol to Ruby Morse was the little girl’s need to wear white anklet socks.  This was truly the most hated of all conditions, the white sock purgatory. Ruby Morse believed that wearing stockings was a sign of loose morals.  I believed she inflicted the white socks as a crazed statement of micro management.  We had deep, basic irreconcilable fashion differences.

Management of any kind was about to fly out the window when the family moved to San Tomé, Venezuela in 1963.  My father became the general manager for Mene Grande ( Gulf Oil) for eastern Venezuela.  This meant that I lived in a big house with servants and my father was the boss of everyone in the town where I lived.  My teachers in school worked for my father, as did all my friends’ parents.  Strangers constantly gave me lovely gifts, and it was obviously too hot to wear white socks.  I was the lucky imperialist 13-year-old with everything.  I lived in a remote place so radio was a lot less available than it had been in Pittsburgh.  The strongest reliable signal came from Radio Havana.  Fidel would hold forth for hours and then they played some music.  Live music was everywhere.  I had a harp serenade at my window by a guy who wrote the song for me.  This could not have happened in Pennsylvania.  Although San Tomé had a golf course, there was no other commonality with Oakmont, PA.  Nothing could have been more drastic, really.  I loved it, but when given the chance to choose where I would go abroad for 10th grade, I chose PA because I still thought of it as my US home.  I have not visited Oakmont since 1964.

I will return to Oakmont to see some of my school friends in a couple of months.  We have all traveled different paths, but mine diverged drastically and forever.  I am bringing back memories and enjoying the stories that my classmates remember.  Some scenes are vivid as I think of them, and some are gone.  I hardly remember any of the parents.  Our personalities are in tact, from what I can detect on our Facebook page.  We will go and physically be in the building where we went to elementary grades together.  I think it will be amazing..our own versions of what we remember.  I look forward to it with great anticipation.