Slide 73 and 74

The Slide: Me (age 15) with a pretty girl

The Date: Summer 1967

The Photographer: My sister Sally

Every couple years while living in my parent’s home and later while visiting there with my own wife and kids, someone would say, “Hey, maybe tonight we should take out the slides.” This would be followed by a collective groan because taking out the slides meant spending several hours viewing poorly focused images, many showing the back of someone’s head. But with little protest we would relent and again enact the family tradition. It was a sensory experience. The screen had a surprisingly pleasant sweet moldy scent. The projector filled the room with warmth and soothed us with the soft rhythmic hum of the automatic focus attemping the impossible.

Always, part way through, a slide would appear causing my sisters and parents to cheer, “Woohoo!” The slide shows me at fifteen on a beautiful summer day. I’m standing on the back of a pontoon boat with a pretty girl. The girl is facing the camera but I am facing the girl.

“Whoa! What’s that boy thinking?” my older sister would tease. I always protested insisting that my facial expression was the result of the shutter catching me mid sentence. But the context clearly shows me ogling the girl as if about to say, with the rest of my family, “Woohoo! Baby lookatchu!”

My sister Sally took the photo, no doubt hoping to catch me in such a pose. Not surprisingly, she particularly delighted whenever the image appeared. The truth is, I delighted too. Though I never let on, I always anticipated the slide with a kind of nostalgic longing. I met the girl moments before the photo was taken. We spent perhaps three hours together and only a couple minutes alone yet I remember her full name over forty years later. Had I not periodically seen her image I might have forgotten her. But I doubt it. Where I grew up, it was understood that you shouldn’t associate much with people from other towns. This pretty girl was not from my town and so for the first time I felt the exciting lure of the forbidden.

I lived in Port Allegany, a little borough in sparsely populated northern Pennsylvania. Port, as it was called, was a town of about twenty-five hundred surrounded by other little towns roughly the same size. Smethport, Coudersport, Eldred, Emporium, Austin, and Shingle House were all within a circle with a radius of twenty-five miles. If Port was at the center of the circle -and it sure seemed to us that it was- then the northern arc crossed the New York line and included the community of Olean. At twenty-five thousand Olean was, to me, the big city.

As children we were indoctrinated with a fierce provincial pride. We were raised to think that our town was better than others. We were not taught this in a direct way. Surely most of our parents knew better. Our local worldview was, however, the very natural result of living separated from other communities. In elementary school we were taught our school Alma Mater and sang it religiously before every athletic competition.

Although Yale has always favored

The violet star blue

And the gentle sons of Harvard

To their crimson rose are true

We will own our lily slender

No honor shall it lack

While Port High stands defender

Of the orange and the black

I think it’s safe to say that few if any from our town ever attended Yale or Harvard but we did not hesitate to compare our school to these institutions and when we did we found ourselves…well... truer.

We did not often meet children from other towns. The opportunities to do so were few and usually included team competition accompanied by fight songs so we began to see others as rivals. They were the Falcons, Raiders, Terrors and Hubbers. In the latter case we did not know what a Hubber was but we suspected it was unfriendly. We were the Gators. We were defenders of the orange and the black.

We heard stories of older boys driving to other communities and always fights broke out. The following week boys from those towns descended upon ours seeking revenge. If they couldn’t find anyone home they’d toss some manure in our community pool and on it would go. I did not participate in any of this but the stories reinforced the belief that it was better to associate with own kind.

My older sister Sally had a boyfriend named Loren. He had some relatives who owned property on Cuba Lake and he invited our family to join his for a picnic on their pontoon boat. I was uncharacteristically enthused about the trip. Cuba Lake was in New York State well outside my twenty-five mile radius of comfort. But it was a lake. This was attractive because we had very few lakes in our area. More importantly, we were invited to picnic on a pontoon. I had no idea what a pontoon was but it sounded exotic. I remembered saying to Loren, “Are you serious? You mean you can walk around and eat on the boat?”

We drove a couple hours to a little cabin on a bluff above the water. We met Loren’s relatives who all seemed very old. There were smiles and hellos and awkward handshakes. Then a woman handed me a large bag of charcoal saying, “Here you are young man. Make yourself useful. Take this bag down to the boat and give it to Betty.”

I descended wet mossy railroad ties taking care not to slip and wondered how the woman below negotiated such slippery steps. Then I heard her voice. “Hi,” she said, “I’m Betty?”

I stopped and looked from my feet to see a girl standing by the boat’s Webber grill. She was not an older woman. She was a pretty girl very near my own age. “You're Betty?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she answered, “What’s your name?”

“Bob,” I said stepping onto the boat’s deck and putting the charcoal by the grill, “I wasn’t expecting you to be young,” I said, “Every Betty I know is over eighty.”

This made her laugh and that’s all I’ve ever needed to feel comfortable. She started to empty the charcoal and asked if I’d carry some lawn chairs from the landing. During the next few minutes she asked me one question after another; Where do you live? What grade are you in? Do you like sports? I told her I played football.

“Oh, I’ll bet I saw you play,” she said excitedly. “Didn’t your freshman team play against Olean?”

I felt the embarrassment burning in my cheeks. Indeed we had played Olean and lost by seven touchdowns. On a positive note I nearly caught a long pass and would have scored a touchdown had I not run directly into the goalpost. I told her the story and she laughed which almost made the loss worthwhile.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her and the more I looked the more beautiful she became. To be honest, she may not have been more beautiful than some girls in my own town but that was the point. She was not from my own town. She was a city girl from Olean. A girl from Olean was not supposed to be so beautiful, so sweet, so kind. She was the first girl I’d met from another town and so she seemed alluringly forbidden. As the afternoon progressed I didn’t want the day to end. I knew I’d never see her again.

But I did see her again just one more time. Two and a half years later my mother and I were shopping in Olean. We were at the counter in Bradners Department Store and I waited for her while she wrote a check. I wore my orange and black varsity jacket. Two girls entered from the snowy street in red and white Olean colors. As usual, I started to look away when the girl on the right glanced toward me and our eyes met. She broke into a wide smile that was two and a half years prettier.

“Hi,” she said. “How are you Bob?” I might have been able to respond naturally had my mom not joined the group.

‘Mom,” I said. “This is Betty from the pontoon. Remember?”

“Of course I do,” she said reaching out to shake her hand. And then she added “You’re Betty from the slide show.” My mother wasn’t being mean it just slipped out. Betty looked at us quizzingly.

“Oh, uh,” I stammered, “We have a slide show of you. I mean we don’t have a whole slide show of you. We just have one slide of you that we look at. Sometimes. I mean… we don’t just look at your slide. We look at many slides and your's is one of them.”

I was blushing badly and Betty laughed out loud. That was all I needed to feel comfortable.

“It was fun day,” she said smiling.

“Yeah,” I said. “It sure was.”

I stood on the pontoon. We were toward the back of the boat. I helped her with a folding chair. She put some cans of pop in the ice water cooler and turned away from me. I looked at her… and my sister snapped a picture.