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I received a text message from one of my friends asking when the next blog is coming. I told him that I had no clue because I’m much too lazy. It’s been over a year since my last blog entry, so I thought I would finish this one that I started last September. Youth hockey takes up a lot of my free time. Having two kids who play travel hockey means I am at the ice rink all of the time. I’ve been working on my first screenplay too. It’s a buddy movie about two Chicago cops named Cormac McCarthy and Peter Kraft. Affectionately known as, Mac & Cheese. They are constantly teased in their district and on the streets until they solve the biggest crime to hit Chicago. They are instant heroes and no longer teased about their nickname. Think of Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines in Running Scared – only with funnier character names. It’s an action comedy set in Chicago with no real plot line or depth of characters. Don’t be looking for Mac & Cheese to hit the theaters anytime soon. I’m not really writing a screenplay. I’m not that creative. I just thought it would be a funny premise for a movie. For some reason, I think two cops nicknamed Mac & Cheese is hilarious. Maybe someday.
But I digress…
A couple of years ago, my sister and I had a thread going on Facebook about our exploits as young preteens in the late 70’s and early 80’s. For those of you that missed it, weren’t interested in it, or were not my Facebook friend back then, this is for you.
Local commercials are awesome. They tend to be low budget, but memorable. Everyone in the Chicagoland area still remembers the Victory Auto Wreckers commercial.
Some of my favorites were Bert Weinman Ford, Boushelle’s, Aronson Furniture, Harlem Furniture, and Schmerler Ford, just to name a few. They can all be found on YouTube if you’re interested in checking them out. My sister and I watched a lot of television on Saturday and Sunday mornings. I remember these commercials like it was yesterday. As I wrote in a previous blog, music invokes certain memories. So do television commercials from my childhood. My all time favorite commercial was from Creative Mirror and Design from 1982. Just to give you an idea, I was 12 and my sister was 13. We were in 6th and 8th grade respectively. If you don’t remember it or haven’t seen it in a long time, here it is in all its glory:
Take a second or two to digest what you just watched. There is so much going on in that clip. I’m sure you have a lot of questions about Phil and Sandy, but I’m not going to focus on them. My focus is on the young lady seen at the beginning of the clip. Her name is Pam, and her dad owned Creative Mirror and Design.
Every time that commercial, or any other one featuring Pam, came on the television, my sister and I felt compelled to call Creative Mirror and Design and let them know how we felt about her performance. We were not very kind. We would yell at the person who answered the phone that the only reason the girl was in the commercial was because her daddy owned the company. We would say all kinds of mean things. We would ask why they would cast someone that you can’t understand. We would tell them that she needed acting lessons. We would come up with new insults and just keep on calling. We would mostly focus on her inability to read her lines, though I’m pretty sure we would comment about her personal appearance too. We just wanted her off our screens. “Tell her dad to stop putting her in your commercials. She’s awful!” I don’t think we were the only ones. I think the people answering the phones were used to people like us who called about Pam. I don’t remember how long these commercials ran. However long they ran, we called in about Pam. She was just a teenager who got to be in a commercial. It was a family business and her dad wanted her to be part of it in some way. Unfortunately for her and her dad’s business, we were a couple preteens with nothing better to do. My sister and I probably owe Pam, her dad, and the entire staff at Creative Mirror and Design an apology or two.
The Community House in Hinsdale was another favorite target for our telephone shenanigans. Somehow my sister found out that they had a “joke line” you could call. Each day they would put a new joke on the answering machine for your listening pleasure. They were kid friendly jokes that really weren’t that funny. I can’t remember any of them, but that’s not the point of the story. Let me back up just a little. When we were little, we didn’t really take many vacations. We didn’t have a lot of money and with my dad’s work schedule, it made it difficult to travel. Whenever we did go somewhere, it was a driving trip to some Civil War battle field in Tennessee. Since there were no DVD players in the car, no iPads, or any other electronics to keep us occupied, we had to keep come up with other things to keep us entertained. We did Mad Libs, played the license plate game, counted Volkswagons, listened to the radio, and played a game called Yes, No, or in the Barrel. One person would pick yes, no, or in the barrel while the other person asked questions. The object was to try and make the person who picked yes, no, or in the barrel laugh at your questions. Each question had to be answered with whatever word the person chose. If you laughed, you lost. The questions would be stupid and would often involve poo. “Where do you go to the bathroom?” “In the barrel.” “Do you like the smell of my farts?” “Yes.” You get the idea. It’s a stupid game we played, but for the late 70’s, that’s about all we had. The 70’s also seemed like the glory days of bumper stickers. In trying to find all 50 states’ license plates, I would see a lot of bumper stickers. One in particular had a long lasting effect on me, even to this day. It read, “Save Gas, Fart in a Jar.” I thought that was the funniest thing I had ever read. Sadly, my sense of humor hasn’t changed too much because I still find it funny. So, back to the Community House’s joke line. Since I didn’t find their jokes to be particularly funny, I would leave a message after the joke finished with, “Save gas, fart in a jar.” My joke was much funnier. My sister and I would call everyday at least 20-30 times a day leaving the same “save gas, fart in a jar” message. This went on for an entire summer. One time my sister called and when she was leaving a message, someone picked up the phone. He told her to please stop calling. They were getting annoyed. Do you think that scared us away or made us stop? Of course not. We did it until one day we got the, “The number you are dialing is no longer in service” message from the phone company. We were so relentless that the Community House of Hinsdale had to shut down the joke line and change its number. We were sad to see it go. There was definitely a void that was left when the joke line was shut down.
As I am writing this, the K-Mart that was near where I grew up is being torn down. I have fond memories of K-Mart Automotive. You see, the automotive department’s phone number was only a digit off from our home number. We got a lot of wrong numbers from people trying to reach K-Mart Automotive. If someone other than me answered the phone, the person on the other line was politely told that they had the wrong number. If I happened to answer the phone, it was a different story. Again for reference, I was probably 12 to 15 when I was doing this. I was a kid. I sounded like a kid. People would call and ask when their car would be done. I would tell them that there was a problem and it wouldn’t be ready for another two weeks. They would start screaming and demanding to talk to a manager. I would tell them that they would have to come in and talk to him personally. I’m sure that guy got blind sided several times from irate customers. I would give phony prices for tires, oil changes, and whatever other requests people had. I would try to come up with stuff on the spot. One of my favorites was to give the wrong hours of operation. This wasn’t too nice to those looking for an oil change or new tires at 8:00 pm, only to find out the automotive department had been closed since 5:00 pm or whatever time they really closed. I’m sure the management at K-Mart and all the various customers who called me didn’t think my antics were too funny, but I sure did.
My sister and I were in junior high together for two years: the ’80-’81 school year and ’81-’82 school year. I have to put a disclaimer out there. Any teachers that are Facebook friends with my sister or me, this did not happen to you. If it did, it wasn’t us. That being said, the dumbest thing a teacher could do in the early 80’s was to have a listed number in the phone book. Two bored middle-schoolers on a rainy day with access to a phone book was not good for any teacher listed. Though there were several listed, we really only picked on one teacher. My sister has the incredible ability to mimic other people. She could sound like several of her classmates or at least not like herself. No one ever suspected it was her. I usually was the brains behind the operation and she would carry out the mission. We found this one teacher’s number and decided to call it. My sister would call and just start talking. It would be just random boring stuff. The object was to have the teacher guess who was calling. “XXXX, is that you? “Yes it is, Mr/s. YYYY.” Over the course of the couple of school years, I bet we called this teacher five or six times. We always wondered if our teacher ever confronted the student my sister claimed to be. That had to be an awkward conversation if it ever happened.
We would also call other classmates. My sister would disguise her voice as a boy and would call girls and tell them that “he” had a crush on her. The girl on the other line would want to know who was calling. Again, my sister would always tell them to guess. When the girl would guess a name, my sister would always tell them they were correct. I would be on the cordless phone listening and giving info to my sister. I can’t remember specifically, but I have to believe that my sister set up dates with these people and told them that they would talk about it in school the next day. I’m pretty sure that we had these people asking each other to school dances too. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I have a vague recollection of that happening. I’d be curious to know if we ever made any love connections. I’m sure there were some pretty interesting conversations at school the next day.
Sadly, I have to give yet another disclaimer. If any of my old neighbors growing up are Facebook friends with my sister or me, this did not happen to you. If it did, it was not us. Glad we got that out of the way – again. Another favorite pastime was watching telethons growing up. I have no idea why, but my sister and I always seemed to watch them. One time we were watching the Jerry Lewis Telethon and got jealous of all the names that were being scrolled at the bottom of the screen with the dollar amount that was being donated. We wanted to see our names on the television screen. We didn’t have any money, so we didn’t know what to do. I had the bright idea that we should call in as one of the kids on our block instead. My sister picked up the phone and disguised her voice as a boy and happily donated $25 to the Muscular Dystrophy Association in the name of our neighbor. This is back when you called in with a donation and they sent you a bill a week later. You didn’t need a credit card or anything. Just a name and an address. We had those. About 15-20 minutes later, we saw our neighbor’s name scroll along the bottom of the screen. We just started laughing our brains out. As we continued to watch the telethon, it switched from the national feed to the local feed. This is where local celebrities were manning the phone banks taking donations. The local news anchors were the emcees and talked about the fundraising that was going on in the Chicago viewing area. They interviewed kids with muscular dystrophy to discuss what it was like living with it. Before they went back to the national feed, they handed these kids index cards with a list of people that have made donations since the last time the local feed was shown. As you have probably already guessed, our neighbor’s name get read over the air. “$25 from XXXX YYYY. Thanks, XXXX for the generous donation.” We started laughing even harder. Not only did we get the name scrolled along the bottom of the television, we got it read over the air too. Another 15-20 minutes passed and the door bell rang. It was the neighbor kid. “I know it was you.” “What are you talking about?” “I know it was you that donated money using my name.” “XXXX, we have no idea what you are talking about.” “I just heard my name on the telethon.” The neighbor was pretty angry and told us he knew it was us again and left. About a week passed and he came over again with the envelope from the MDA looking for $25 for the donation. He wanted us to pay the bill because he still thought it was us who made the call. We insisted that we had no idea what he was talking about. Eventually, he told us that his parents felt guilty and paid the bill even though they didn’t actually make the call to the telethon. You’re probably reading this and are appalled by our behavior. I can’t argue with you. Looking back, I don’t know how I came up with the idea. My sister and I just thought it was funny. Though we didn’t have any money to donate, we did get MDA an extra $25 out of it…just not in our names.
What we did as kids would probably get us arrested today. I’m sure we broke some kind of harassment laws while making our prank calls. Thank God there was no caller ID. Because of what we did as kids, to this day, I still have an unlisted phone number. I wouldn’t wish what we did upon anyone. We were relentless. Even now, I still have fun with the phone. Instead of pranking people, I wait for telemarketers to call. I’ve claimed I’m dead, asked for their home number so I can call them back, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t even remember. One of my favorites is when some shopping club kept calling my wife to find out when she was going to sign up. They called every day for weeks, several times a day. We would check the caller ID and let it go to the answering machine. One day I finally decided to answer. The guy asked for my wife. I told him in a crying hysterical voice, “The bitch just got up and left me last week. She took the kids and ran off with another man. Please stop calling. The pain of hearing her name on the answering machine hurts too much. She doesn’t live here anymore.” “I’m sorry sir. I will take her off our list.” They never called again. I’ve got more of those stories. Maybe I’ll write a blog about it. Who knows, it might be another year before the next one is done…
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