Son of Jersey, Scholar of Syracuse

My dad, Frank E Funk, was born in Jersey City and raised in New Jersey, the only son in a family with four daughters. A high school graduate, he initially did't go to college, in part because he knew that war was coming:

I'd gotten out of high school in 1940, and you could tell the war was coming. You know, the march into Poland and all kinds of things. And Britain was in it early and so on. So I was saving money to go to college. Nobody else in my family had gone to college. I have four sisters.
So I didn't go to college. I went to work for a valves company and did all kinds of other things. Eventually, after Pearl Harbor, all young men wanted to get into the service, and most of us wanted to be a hot pilot. I went to get a physical and was rejected because of a deviated septum. I went and got it operated on and went back the same day. And I remember the doctor looked at me and pulled the cotton out and said, "I can't even see, but I can tell you've had an operation done on your nose. Accepted." And then you went to basic training, Atlantic City, then to a classification center in Nashville, where you had all kinds of tests. Then you'd go to the bulletin board, and if your name was on it in the right way, you'd go to an officer's school. If it wasn't you'd go to a gunnery school and be a noncom, or an enlisted man, a gunner. I evidently made it to navigation school at Monroe, Louisiana, and the government spent about $87,000 on each of us and taught us to navigate by the stars, celestial navigation, and then they sent us to Europe. And my sextant to do the star sighting was in a polished wooden box at the corner of my muddy tent in Italy. But if they needed to, they could have sent me the Pacific, you see. So that's the way it was.

He first came to Syracuse, NY in March 1943 as part of his training as a navigator for the Army Air Force. He didn't actually get to Europe until 1944, where he flew seven missions before bailing out of a (probably) sabotaged plane and ending up in Stalag Luft 1. When the prison camp was liberated, he was evacuated to France, where he met General Eisenhower:

Yeah, we were in Marseilles, on a chow line, ready to be shipped out. And usually, by boat, which gave them a chance to fatten us up on the way over to the States. Anyway, the story goes like this. We noticed this commotion, and here comes Ike Eisenhower and a whole retinue of people with him. And he stopped and it sounds like I'm making this up, but I swear, I'm not. He stopped the guy next to me and he said, 

"Where are you from, son?"  

And the guy said, "Kansas, sir."  

"Oh, the hell you are. You know, I'm from Kansas too," and they both laughed. And he says, "Got a question to ask you," says Ike. "Would you rather go home quickly, or in style?"  

And this kid, without missing a beat, said, "Both, sir." And he laughed and moved on. And that's a wonderful memory of a world renowned figure and humanizing. And he was that way with the troops, and it was genuine. You know, it wasn't phony. "Oh, the hell you are. I'm from Kansas." You know, it was like-- it made him very human and special.

Eventually, Frank made it back to the States, and went to college on the G.I. Bill:

When I first got in the service, as so many men were going in soon after Pearl Harbor that the classification center was jammed. So what they did was to send you to a campus in a college training detachment, and I went to Syracuse University. And so, I wanted to go, I knew it, and it was a beautiful city, and I wanted to go back to it, and I did. And eventually, you know, got my undergraduate degree there, on the GI bill. Went to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania as an instructor, working on a master's. Finished my master's, went to Purdue University to get my doctorate in 1955.

He returned to Syracuse University in 1956, this time as Assistant (later Associate) Professor of Speech. I was born the following year. What I remember of his professorial days was my Mom driving me down to the University on the day JFK was shot, and leaving me sitting in a classroom at the Hall of Languages, drawing headstones.

In 1965, Frank became Assistant Dean at S.U.'s University College. About five years after that, he succeeded Cliff Winters as dean of U.C. He finished his 32-year career at Syracuse as Dean of University College and Director of Continuing Education.

In 1988 he retired and moved to Wilmington NC, where he quickly got involved in the community there, at the local NPR station, the Wilmington Railroad Museum and at First Presbyterian Church. He spent the last few years of his life in memory care here in Tucson.

This funny medieval-style outfit is from a Commencement in the 1970s. Is that Melvin Eggers next to him? Eggers was Chancellor at Syracuse for most of my Dad’s time there.

On this Father’s Day, I’m thinking of my dad, and wondering why I don’t have the same painful reaction to that holiday as I have to Mother’s Day. Perhaps it’s because my dad had a long, good life, my mom, not so much. In any case, this year I've been thinking about all these connections between Dad and Syracuse, NY, and with Syracuse University in particular. Although I moved away from Syracuse in 1979, the choices my Dad made all those years ago still echo through my own life.

Happy Father’s Day to all who celebrate it, whether or not your father is still around.

Karen

Round Robin Challenge: So Many Goodbyes, Part Two

(This is sort of a continuation of my previous entry: Home Again: Part One)

For the last-ever Round Robin Photo Challenge: Goodbye, I asked people to post pictures that convey the theme of saying goodbye - to a person, a place, a stage of life, even to this meme.  As you probably know by now, my brother Steve died on Saturday, September 6th, so I have been saying my goodbyes to him. Beyond that, my trip back East for his burial included a little side trip to the town where I grew up, a place I will probably never see again. And finally, I should say a proper goodbye to this meme, which has been part of my life since 2005.

 

This is the last picture I took of my brother Steve when he was alive. It was December, 2012, and we were in Wilmington, NC. My stepmother had died six months earlier, and it had become evident that my Dad could no longer live safely in his condo, even with round-the-clock unskilled home care. He had been in the hospital in November and almost died. So we four heirs - Steve, my two stepsisters and I - had gathered to make decisions, sign papers in a lawyer's office and close up Dad's place, taking an equal share of its contents and selling the rest to pay for Dad's care. This picture was taken as we visited Dad in a rehab facility. I don't think Dad knew who Steve was that day.

As for Steve, he had spent a good chunk of 2012 in hospitals and a rehab facility himself. He suffered from heart failure, kidney trouble, sleep apnea and edema. The spring of 2014 was sort of a rerun of Steve's 2012 troubles, with a serious leg infection (cellulitis with a bit of gangrene) as an added bonus. But he came through ICU and many rough moments, did his rehab and eventually got to go home. He even had a cataract operation. He was nervous about it before hand, but delighted with the results.

Here is the last photo Steve took with his Canon EOS. At the end, he was sitting in his apartment, enjoying his newly-restored vision and waiting for a pacemaker operation that never happened. Meanwhile, he used his great camera to take pictures off of the TV. 

This was the view from Steve's balcony. We grew up visiting Lake Ontario every summer, with occasional trips to Cape Cod or some other beach spot. I know he loved listening to the waves crashing into the shore of Lake Erie.

Anyway, we all thought he was doing very well, but on September 6th he fell in his tiny bathroom. He managed to call 911, when when the EMTs arrived he had a heart attack in front of them and died. It became my responsibility to fly to Cleveland, arrange for his funeral, sort out his papers, dispose of his furniture and other possessions, and arrange for his burial in Syracuse before returning to Cleveland for the flight home. And that is what I did. I also wrote a brief obituary:

STEVEN ERIC FUNK was "born in Bethlehem" - Pennsylvania, that is, to Frank E. Funk and Ruth Anne Johnson. Steve grew up outside Syracuse, NY, where he earned a Bachelor's degree from Syracuse University. A computer programmer-analyst, he also had a lifelong love of Turkish Angora cats. Heart disease led to several hospitalizations before his death from a heart attack after a fall at his home on Saturday, September 6. Steve is survived by his father, his sister, Karen Funk Blocher (husband John) and numerous cousins. In lieu of flowers, the family requests contributions to the National Wildlife Federation or the cat shelter of your choice. Funeral Mass was Saturday, September 13, 2014 at St. Francis of Assisi Church, Gates Mills, OH. Interment was Monday, Sept. 15, 2014 at St. Mary's Cemetery, DeWitt, NY. Buried next to his grandfather, Ambrose Alexis Johnson (1891-1950). Please sign obituary guest book on Cleveland.com.

Here is a Google+ "story" that covers my trip Back East in detail. Warning: it contains a few shots taken at the funeral home, and a few taken at the burial.

Beyond all that, Steve was my big brother, my friend and protector when I was young. Later in life I mostly tried to return the favor. Seven years my senior, at one point as we were growing up he liked the idea of having me call him Jem while he called me Scout. We both read To Kill a Mockingbird that year. Occasionally he even let me hang out with him and his friends. If my parents were fighting, he tried to cheer me up by playing with my stuffed animals. 

As an adult, Steve lived far away from my parents and me. In fact, the four of us lived in four different states, hundreds or thousands of miles apart. Steve did his best to hang onto family connections as best he could. He was the family genealogist, and he kept in touch with Dad's sisters (particularly Aunt Marie, the only one who is still alive) and our cousins. Politically, he drifted to the right as I drifted to the left, which made for a few uncomfortable emails.But there was never any doubt that we loved each other. He was my brother! My only sibling, irreplaceable.

Steve believed in the Rainbow Bridge idea, the story that dead pets hang around in a beautiful meadow, waiting to be reunited with their people when they die. If anything like that is true, Steve is hanging out with a number of beloved cats about now.

I have at least one more entry to do here at the Outpost to finish up, probably two. I'll get that done on Monday, and make my rounds. Meanwhile, check out the other Round Robin entrees:

Linking Listas of Monday, October 14th, 12:35 AM

Karen Funk Blocher - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Freda - Posted!
Day One
http://fredamans.blogspot.ca

Ellen - Posted!
Ellen's Phlog
http://ellensphlog.blogspot.com

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

Sylvia D. - Posted!
SMD Paper Arts
www.smdgreetings.blogspot.ca

Karen

A Moment of Syracuse Nostalgia

As I think I've admitted before on this blog, I've become a bit of a Tumblr addict. In case you haven't heard, Tumblr is the latest and greatest in social media/blogging sites. Think of a cross between Blogger, Wordpress and Facebook, only with more pictures, and populated almost entirely by teenage girls. That's pretty much what Tumblr is like. President Obama is on Tumblr now, so you know it's cool.

I've started cross-posting most of my Outpost bits, or at least excerpts thereof, on my Tumblr blog. I have no idea what the Tumblr kids make of these. They probably skip over them, because those posts have no Doctor Who, Harry Potter or Sherlock content, or teen angst about not being in love and flirtations with the idea of suicide. Oh, it's an emotion-fraught world, Tumblr! It's full of extravagent, animated gif-filled posts about One True Pairings of characters whose romances the kids wish to experience vicariously!

But last night, in a Halloween mood, I went looking for postings related to Baron Daemon, the Syracuse horror host of my youth. I wrote about him here at the Outpost back in 2008. Baron Daemon, a corny comedy vampire, was played by  local features reporter Mike Price when I was a kid. I remember the show, but I don't remember his 45 record, The Transylvania Twist, which was a big hit locally, according to what I've read. Last night I found several recordings of this 45 on YouTube, along with clips from the Baron's tv capers of long ago. I thought I'd post them here too, because I can, and because I tend to get more feedback over the years from my Halloween and Syracuse-related posts than from everything else I write about here. So here we go:

Monster Movie Matinee opening credits:



The silly locally-produced stuff at the beginning of the Sunday afternoon creature feature was much more interesting to my child-self than any of the movies were.



More fun with Dr. Witty and Epal.

For Baron Daemon we have:

The Transylvania Twist. This has just a still image of the original 45, but good sound. Not a bad song, either.


The B-side, introduced by the Baron on a local oldies station in the 1980s.


This is my favorite of several Baron Daemon outtakes on YouTube. Search for Baron Daemon and you'll find several more, plus a Syracuse house whose Halloween display lights up in time to the Transylvania Twist.

That's all for now!


Karen

Weekend Assignment #242: Local TV Host

I tried to write up a Weekend Assignment topic that was a lighthearted take on $700 billion bailout and the 210 page "Plum Book" of government jobs, asking you to write up why you deserve a government job or a chunk of the bailout cash. But you know what? The topic doesn't really lend itself to lightheartedness. So let's skip that and try something else:

Weekend Assignment #242: Local television used to feature lots of kids' shows and late night movies, often featuring a colorful local host. Share a memory of local tv of yesteryear.

Extra Credit:You've been asked to produce a local tv show. Commercial considerations aside, what kind of show would it be?

Not sure who the guys on the ends are.

I've written before about the 1955-1982 tv series Magic Toy Shop on WHEN-TV in Syracuse. It starred Marylin Hubbard Herr as Merrily, Socrates Sampson(!) as Eddie Flum Num, Tony Riposo as Twinkle (who played the Magic Piano in lieu of talking) and Jean Daugherty (the show's writer-producer) as the Play Lady. Oh and college professor Dr. Lewis B. "Doc" O'Donnell played Mr. Trolley, with a trolley-shaped full mask on his head and the rest of his body not showing. The show was on at 9 AM, right after Captain Kangaroo. I used to watch it in my preschool years, and intermittently thereafter when I didn't have school. To be honest, I found the show kind of tame and boring, especially once I started school. But it had a great, memorable opening, about a smile being the magic key to the magic door to the wonderful Magic Toy Shop.

There were lots of other local shows in Syracuse back then. One weekday afternoon kids' show was hosted by Denny Sullivan, and called either The Popeye Funhouse or Denny Sullivan and His Gang, depending on which source you believe, and possibly what year it was. Sullivan wore a striped suit and straw boater hat, described on one web site as "a carnival barker's outfit." That's probably about right. The show was mostly Popeye cartoons, but I think Betty Boop was also in the mix. It was on WSYR, Channel 3.

Popeye also got weekend exposure on Channel 3, with Salty Sam (Bill Everett) hosting Saturday Popeye Theater. He later hosted Saturday Showboat and Salty Sam's Super Saturday before leaving the station in 1980. Everett's real name was Willard Everett Lape Jr. He died in 2004.

Another weekday afternoon cartoon show was Jet Set, circa 1965. It featured Colonel Skip and his fellow astronaut on the Gemini Five spacecraft, broadcasting cartoons from space. Naturally the show was on Channel Five. The only cartoon I specifically remember being on it was Roger Ramjet, which I hated. It must have had better stuff as well, though, because I watched the show faithfully during its brief run.


The coolest of the Syracuse kids' shows, although it only lasted about four years, was WNYS Channel 9's Baron Daemon and his Bloody Buddies, starring weatherman Mike Price as the Baron, a humorous vampire character. (I've also seen the name spelled DeMoan, but that's incorrect. It was, however, pronounced Day-MOAN.) He even made a novelty record, the Transylvania Twist. I was totally jealous when my friend Joel got to be in the Baron's peanut gallery for his birthday. The show was wiped out in 1967 by a fire at Channel 9's studios at Shoppingtown in DeWitt, which destroyed the sets and costumes. The character had started out hosting late night movies, according to what I read online, but I don't remember that.

I do remember the weekend show Monster Movie Matinee, starring Bill Everett as Epal, his real surname spelled backwards. He was the Igor-like assistant to Dr. E. Nick Witty, played by Alan Milair. All we ever saw of Witty was his dessicated hand with long fingernails, although we heard his voice. I remember being excited one time when Epal conducted viewers on a video tour of the Monster Mansion.

There were also adult shows. Ladies' Day and Phil Markert were two of them. My main memory of the former was a tip about cutting up a whole chicken (.29 a pound) to avoid spending .69 a pound on "whole chicken - cut up." Markert I remember as a piano player and disk jockey. He was fairly amusing.

Do I have a favorite among all those offerings? I suspect it depends on how old I was at the time. But I think that overall I have to go with Baron Daemon. And wonder of wonders, there's even Baron Daemon merchandise available from Cafe Press!

Oh, and on the extra credit: I'd do a late night science fiction movie show, with a good dollop of horror and genre comedy.

Update, December 8, 2008: Since a number of people have apparently been looking up various Magic Toy Shop characters on my blog, here are a few additional tidbits of info I turned up tonight, mostly as obituaries:

• Leighton "Sox" Tiffault, known at Fayetteville-Manlius High School when I was there as "Mr. T." or just plain "T" (note this was before Rocky) apparently died in June 2002. He taught music theory and composition at F-M, and was director of the super-select choreographed music group Swing Sixteen, which I once auditioned for though I hadn't a prayer of getting in. One of the songs we sang in a less select high school choir was Busy City by T., and I think he also wrote a spoken word piece we did, Geographic Fugue. His most controversial work was a Mass; people couldn't handle the troping concept, or T's satirical song Let's Go to Confession. Earlier in his career he played piano in the house band of the local tv show The Jim DeLine Gang, which predated Denny Sullivan and the Gang. Tiffault performed unseen as the Magic Piano on Magic Toy Shop, whenever the piano-playing Twinkle the Clown went on vacation. Bye, Mr. T., and thanks for everything!
• Speaking of Denny Sullivan, I've run across an abstract of his obituary, too. He died September 17, 200, age 83. His Popeye-based local show ran from 1962 thru 1971. He was a World War II vet, serving US Army in the Phillipines and Hawaii.

Your turn! Tell us your memories of local tv. If you didn't have kiddie show hosts or late night movies, was there a memorable news or magazine show? Tell us about it! Write it up in your blog along with a link back here, and leave a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll be back in a week with a roundup of your responses. Speaking of which:

1966 and All That

The abandoned railroad bridge in Manlius, 1971

When I Googled for The Magic Toy Shop last night, I happened across a link for a YouTube clip from the same Syracuse broadcaster about the Blizzard of '66. I've written about that storm before, thus:

In late January 1966 I was a little short of nine years old. The Blizzard of '66 was a big deal at the time, as big as the Great Blackout of '65 had been. That Sunday morning, we could see it was more than just a snowstorm. My dad drove up to the P&C in Manlius right after the snow plow made F-M Road temporarily passable. Dad's Rambler American was part of a line of cars that followed the plow into the village. Dad wanted to stock up on bread and milk, in case we couldn't get out again for the next several days. I didn't understand why he was doing it. I figured the P&C wouldn't even be open, because this was in the era of Sunday Blue Laws. But I guess the P&C opened for blizzards, even on a Sunday, because Dad returned with the bread and milk, and a story about how many other people were at the P&C doing the same thing.

The oldest photo I have to illustrate this memory, seen above, is from five years later, when I got first a hand-me-down cheap plastic camera from my dad, and then his old Instamatic, which believe it or not was a step up. (My next camera was a Poloroid One Step, but I think that wasn't until college.) I've never had anything but my memories to go on in writing about the Blizzard of '66 - until now. I don't know whether the following has been online all along, waiting for me to notice. I suspect not.


(Left: a lamppost at Niagara Falls, February 1986)

First: a photo gallery on Syracuse.com. None of the shots are from Manlius, as far as I can tell, but several of them might as well be, especially the ones of sidewalks hemmed in by walls of snow. I'm not going to infringe on their copyright by posting one of the pictures here, but do go take a look!

Next: the YouTube clip. It confirms my memory: the warning came the last Saturday in January, and the storm really hit on Sunday. We were all snowed in for a week. The reporter mentions that the facilities for digging out improved dramatically in succeeding decades.

There's also someone's 8 mm footage of kids playing in the snow, but the picture quality is so poor that it's not terribly illuminating.



That's it for tonight. I had a three hour nap earlier, and I don't want to waste it by staying up any later! But having had my memory jogged last night about the blizzard, I wanted to share my finds with you.

Karen

The Play Lady and Mr. Trolley

My friend Howard emailed me a few days ago to say that Jean Daugherty had died. If you've never lived in or around Syracuse, that news is unlikely to mean much to you. But I know what it means: the Play Lady is dead.

For 27 years starting in 1955, there was a local children's show in Syracuse, produced and directed by Jean Daugherty. Until the very end of the run it was called The Magic Toy Shop. Until it morphed into The Toy Shop Corporation or somesuch, it always began like this, give or take a word or two:

Announcer: This is the door to the Magic Toy Shop. But to open it, you need a key.

Merilee: Mr. Announcer Man, Mr. Announcer Man! I'm Merilee, and I know the magic key. Listen closely, boys and girls, and I'll tell you what it is. A smile is the magic key, to the magic door, to the wonderful Magic Toy Shop. All you do is put your thimbs at the corners of your mouth, like this, and then you turn them up, into a smile, you see? Now you try it. There! A smile is the magic key, to the magic door, to the wonderful Magic Toy Shop. Keep smiling...keep smiling...!

The hosts were Merilee, who spoke in a somewhat Shirley Templesque voice and wore clothes out of the juniors department of a local department store, and Eddie Flum Num, who wore Little Lord Fauntleroy/French painter clothing, including a floppy beret. Both of them sang, but primarily Merilee as I recall. The other two major characters were Twinkle, a clown who played the Magic Piano; and Mr. Trolley, basically a man standing behind a wall so that only his head, encased in a trolley mask, was showing. When Twinkle was on vacation, the Magic Piano (an upright) played itself, with unseen help from my high school music theory and music composition teacher, Leighton Tiffault, better known as Mr. T. And of course the Play Lady, played by Daugherty, would often stop by. On the photo above she's dressed more or less as Little Bo Peep, but in my memory, she wore a house dress with big pockets. The show had songs, stories, and film clips and cartoons, played by Eddie Flum Num on the Magic Projector. It was all extremely innocuous, and more than a little boring once I got to elementary school age.

And that's pretty much all I remember about the show itself, except that it was on WHEN (originally Channel 8, and then Channel 5 when the ABC station WNYS entered the market as Channel 9) right after Captain Kangaroo. But once, when I attended some sort of carnival in Fayetteville, NY, I saw Eddie, and asked where Merilee was. Merilee, who was sitting right there, laughed, well, merrily. "I guess you didn't recognize me with dark glasses on," she said. No, I hadn't!

Apparently Mr. Trolley was played by college professor Dr. Lewis B. "Doc" O'Donnell, who died last August. But that means he and the Play Lady lived long enough to be part of a Magic Toy Shop reunion show in 2003. I was thousands of miles away at the time, of course, but otherwise I would have stopped by. After all, I have the key!




Karen

See also Weekend Assignment #242: Local TV Host

Weekend Assignment Results: True Lies

For last week's Weekend Assignment, I asked you to tell me a story, an anecdotal lie with some element of truth. And oh, the stories you told!

Chuck stretches the topic a little to encompass his claim that the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote an episode of I Love Lucy.

Saqib narrates a harrowing encounter between jaded city kids and a pack of wolves near Albany, NY.

Mike regales us with a cautionary tale of inattentive brothers and a close encounter with death-by-sinkhole.

Sarah tantalizes us with an unviewed video labelled "Alice and the Squirrels."

Florinda presents a novel reason for not being cited for a traffic violation.

Kiva brings us a heartwarming story of a family at Dodger Stadium.

Great stuff, folks! If you haven't already done so, please be sure to tell us where your story departs from reality. As for my own story of a toxic encounter with Onondaga Lake "quicksand," the facts are these:

1. This was based on an actual field trip to Onondaga Lake, circa 1971. I would have been in seventh grade, not tenth. I think the name of my environmental science teacher was Carlson, not Frisson. But yeah, he was young and hip, and he taught the subject with missionary zeal.

2. The contaminated gray "sand" that edged the lake really did remind me of quicksand as my shoes sank into it. I remember getting it on my pants legs as well, but my pants weren't jeans. I didn't get my first jeans until eighth grade.

3. To the best of my memory, I didn't fall or even trip, much less get a debilitating rash. I don't remember a ranger station or cleaning up on site. I probably remained filthy until I got home from school.

4. But yeah, it has been called the most polluted lake in the U.S.. Swimming there has been banned since 1940, and yet there is a Lovers' Lane along the nearby parkway. And although it's a Superfund site, it's still in really, really bad shape. But they're working on it!

(Photo snagged from The University Of the State of New York / New York State Education Department / Office of Cultural Education.)

New Weekend Assignment coming up shortly.

Karen

Weekend Assignment: Lie to Me

April Fool's Day is coming! Are you all set to trick your friends and relatives with some elegant and elaborate hoax?

Me neither.

Nevertheless, in honor of April 1st, the BBC spaghetti harvest, NPR's exploding maple trees and the whoppers told by certain political candidates and their detractors, let's exercise our capacity to tell each other some original, harmless fiction:

Weekend Assignment #209: Tell us a story about yourself, something that is plausible but definitely, outrageously false, while containing a kernel of truth. Since we don't want to create any work for Snopes.com, begin your tale with the words, "This is not true," and don't say anything defamatory about any companies, products, celebrities or politicians.

I'll start, shall I?

The deadly shore of Onondaga Lake.

This is not true: When I was in tenth grade, my science teacher, Mr. Frisson, took us on a field trip to Onondaga Lake, there to study the effects of pollution. We were told about the history of the lake, how it played a part in the settlement of Syracuse, salt mining, and the Erie Canal. By the time I was there with the class in the early 1970s, it was where a lot of sewage and industrial waste was dumped. The place stank of sulfur and other awfulness, and all the fish were long-since dead. And yet couples still parked along Onondaga Parkway as a sort of Lovers' Lane, at least until the smell drove them away.

Mr. Frisson was a young, hip teacher, with more fervor than sense, especially when it came to teaching students to respect the Earth. What he didn't realize when he took us out there was that even walking on the polluted shore was dangerous. It was hard to breathe due to the clouds of toxic gases that rose from the lake, and the ground had the consistency of movie quicksand. Disoriented by the fumes, I walked closer to the water than I was supposed to, and quickly got into trouble. I fell trying to extract my sneakers and the cuffs of my bellbottom jeans from the muck, and ended up with the scaly, gray, alkaline gunk all over my pants and my hands. Mr. Frisson had to rush me and five other students to a nearby ranger station to wash up. Even after rinsing off my pants as best I could, and sitting on a towel on the bus ride back, I ended up with pustular rashes on my hands and legs, and had to throw away those jeans. The horrible sand had eaten through the denim in numerous places. My lungs had a burning sensation for two days, and I was picking scabs and dead skin off my hands for a week. Mr. Frisson apologized repeatedly, so I forgave him, and got an A on the paper I wrote afterward.

The good news is that 35 years and one Superfund later, what was once the most polluted lake in the United States is making a remarkable recovery. The flow of treated wastewater ended the year after our field trip, and companies, communities, charities and the EPA worked together to clean it up. It will be a few more years before people will be allowed to fish there again, but they expect to allow swimming this summer, for the first time since 1940.

***

That's it. Can you guess what's true and what isn't? I'll have the answer when I do my roundup of links for this Weekend Assignment, one week from tonight. In the meantime, it's your turn. Tell us your big lie in your blog or journal, with a little truth mixed in, and include a link back here. Then leave a link to your entry in the comments to this one. Got it? Good! I look forward to reading your April Fool's whoppers!

Karen

(Photo snagged from www.upstatefreshwater.org)