The Leprosy Episode of 1967 pt 1

In order for me to explain the traumatic "Leprosy Incident" of 1967, I have to take you back several years to one of our infamous, Dahlin cross-country trips. In that time in history - in the early sixties it seemed like everyone used gel on their hair to grease it down. It was cool. It is no secret, (that with as many kids as my parents had) that had my dad was always looking for ways of saving money. Who wouldn't, right? Sometimes he would stand on the back porch and ring his hands together nervously watching the dial-thing on the electrical meter spin fast and furious.  The poor guy would moan and groan as he visualized dollars flying away.

 "Turn off the Lights. Shut the doors. What's the matter with you...were you born in a barn?" He'd shout out desperately trying to slow down and consumption of electricity and capture some of those dollar bills that had wings and had taken flight.      "Can't anyone, ever turn off a light when they leave a room?"

Anyway, it was while staring at the spinning electrical meter that he came up with one of his brilliant ideas.  Now-a-days gas is like 30 cents a gallon, but back then it was about 25 cents a gallon and sugar was practically free. He invented hair gel by mixing sugar in a little bit of warm water - heck, who needed Brylcreem?



To the right is a picture of one of my brothers with his hair covered in Brylcreem...  or was it my dad's concoction of sugar water? 
       (isn't he cute ladies) 

It's just what we (as a culture) did...until The Beatles came along a couple years ago and changed everything.   So long greasy hair! 
  Hello "Mop Heads."   Hello long hair!

Anyway, since I was so much younger than the rest of the boys I wanted to make my dad feel good, so I stuck with the sugar-water...concoction all the way through 6th grade.

One day while I was digging through a couple layers of strata in one of the three rooms that collected junk in our house I came across a dusty old set of "World Book Encyclopedias."  The out side covers were red and beat up and looked to be a million years old.  For fun, I looked up California and was shocked to find that it said, California did not have mosquitoes. Well, I tell you right now, that if at one time...California didn't have mosquitoes - IT DOES NOW!   I think in 1963 those little blood-sucking pest discovered our sweet sugar-hair while we were back east and decided to followed us across country all the way back to Venice.  I was embarrassed to let anyone know that it was my family that was responsible for the illegal immigration of sap-sucking-yellow-bellied mosquitoes across the state line into the "Golden State"...which isn't so golden anymore - thanks to the Dahlins.  



To the left,  there I am (in the sixth grade) with my helmet head" -  hair plastered  with that mosquito-loving  potion of sugar-water.


 (speaking of cute?)



You might remember the pool that we had in our backyard..(you know, the one that the big boys used to shock O' Sister Godzilla (blog post 4/26/2013). Well, to be honest, sometimes it was pool and other times it was just a breeding ground for the mosquitoes that we were responsible for importing.   

Whenever Tommy wanted to come over and swim, his mom would interrogate him and ask, "What color is the pool, Tommy?" And if Tommy said it was green, then Mrs. Blaser forbade him from joining me and the mosquitoes larvae that were squirming in our breeding pond - that we still affectionately called a pool. 

Mrs. Blaser was convinced that Tommy would come home one day with malaria , and was told that if he ever lied, he would be grounded for, like - a hundred years!

It was the summer of 1967 and Mr. Blaser next door had just built a brand-spanking-new fence in their backyard. Their house looked like something right off the cover of Sunset Magazine... Ours, on the other hand, was the complete opposite. It was a junk yard which was a veritable paradise for 10 and 11 year-old-boys who liked to monkey around, create go-carts, use our imagination and build forts. A kid could build and do just about anything they wanted back there - it was awesome!

Gherhing the Great and I salvaged all the old "grape-stake" fencing that the Blasers had thrown away. We went through the alley and dragged in a ginormous pile of that old decrepit fencing, which we added to the vast collection of junk that had already been accumulating in my backyard. Tommy helped. I think his dad encouraged him to drag their trash into our backyard - seeing that I wanted it so badly.

It was definitely a win-win situation

It was two weeks before school and Gherhing the Great, Tommy and I had just finished building the second best fort in the entire world... Jimmy pooped in the first best fort in the whole world that we had to condemn it and fill in(blog post 7/26/2013). Last year's fort (the best in the world) was in a hole, but this one would be elevated above the ground!  Swiss Family Robinson  - you would have nothing on us.

Take a guess where we built it?  If you guessed right next to the pool-mosquito breeding pond, then you were right. Take a look at the picture of our pool again...(the one pictured above). Do you see the pole that is sticking up - just to the right of the stairs under that patio looking thing. Well, that's where we built our glorious fort that would rival the "Swiss Family Robinson" tree house. 

Using all that discarded and decorroded "grape-stake" us kids had built a thing of true beauty!

Now the test!     A sleep over...YEAH! Gherining the Great Tommy and myself.  

Only when the time came, Mrs. Blaser sat Tommy down in a dark room under a bright lamp and interrogated him about the color of the water. When Tommy described the color in three deep-shades of green that border-lined on blackish (like a scene from the Creature of the Black Lagoon), Mrs. Blaser forbade him Under Pain of Mortal Sin or worst - that he would be grounded for a thousand years. 


Turns out - that moms, know stuff! 


Gherhing and I packed up our sleeping bags, our flash lights, a couple Moon Pies and went out to spend the night in our amazing fort next to the THE BLACK LAGOON!

 Oh, I don't mean to get our family into any kind of trouble for bringing mosquitoes into the State of California, but I do think the Statute of Limitations has passed, should there be any type of Congressional Hearing over the matter.

Since we knew President Johnson (sort of), I guess you can say, he knew us - seeing us all naked and all, I wrote him a letter and begged for a Presidential pardon (Blog Post Snapping turtles)  "Oh Snap!"

Gherhing and I were afraid of the kind of monster that might crawl out of our pool that night, but we had no idea of the nightmare that awaited us.  TO BE CONTINUED!

 

THE DAHLIN ZONE and my biggest nightmare!

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man.  It is a dimension in Venice California in the gap in time between now and then. It is the middle ground between what was fact and what was perceived to be. In it lies the pit of fears regarding the survival of Catholic school and lots of older brothers. It is the dimension of 1960’s in Markie D’s imagination. It is filled with tragedy, humor and a satirical look at the human condition.  

It is known as “The Dahlin Zone”  

I blogged my way through that first terrible week of fifth grade in September of 1966. It is now October 1968, I have just turned 12 and am in seventh grade in Catholic School. Sister Edith is my teacher, and (like a lot of the nuns before her), she has had her share of Dahlin boys (5 or 6 to be inexact, one right after another).  By this time in her long teaching vocation she was just plain tired of the plague that had infested Saint Marks some many moons ago beginning in the 1950's. Sister Edith will forever be notorious for her music lessons and will likely go down in infamy for her "head tones," for cracking rulers over hands of many-a-seventh grader, and for throwing erasers. She had a good arm and nailed me just about every time she hurled one of those chalk-filled bombs in my direction. She is probably in heaven right now playing catch with Jesus (However, I just hope she's not throwing erasers).

Anyway... I skipped reporting on last year - my sixth grade experience. If life wasn't already difficult enough, I mean, being shocked and shot, buried and shoved in the Hamper of Death, Milk Wars and pushing cars, left behind and knocked out, bitten by snakes, tormented and tossed like a salad in the trunk of Gustav's legendary Rat Killer...Sixth Grade was far worst than all of those things combined!

Besides starting the year off on the "wrong foot" with leprosy, and a stolen sweater that embarrassed the heck out of me...Du...Du...Du...I discovered my biggest NIGHTMARE!

Oh, I had barely made it out of Sister Godzilla's class by the skin of my teeth. I'm not joking when I say,  "I barely made it out." My only consolation was the fact that all of the Nuns at Saint Marks already had - like - eight Dahlins before I got there and were not, under any circumstance willing to subject themselves to that kind of pain ever again. Not one of them would ever consider holding anyone of us back for another year. Thanks to the shear number of Dahlins and the rather rambunctious nature of my brothers, who preceded me, I practically had FUNKING INSURANCE.  When I was promoted from fifth grade, it was Sister Godzilla's last year and she tried everything in her power to flunk me back into the fifth grade for another stint- since she was leaving. PAYBACK for the time we had electrocuted her (BLOG Post 4/26/13). Apparently, the Pope vetoed her, because the Catholic Church felt they couldn't afford to ruin a perfectly new teacher, recruited to be her replacement.

I made it!  Just like the Hamper of Death... just like the Templates... and just like Salton Sea, I made it out alive!

Having said all that, why couldn't they have moved me across the hall into the other sixth grade class? Why did they stick me in my mother's class? (The reason was obvious,, to spare the nun across the hall). Yep, my mom had begun teaching the sixth grade at Saint Marks and I mistakenly figured that this year would be like being on a holiday where I could just kick back and relax!  Nepotism had to have it's advantages, right?




I love my mom, but boy was I wrong!

Turns out that, I didn't have a clue!

My mom was funny and there wasn't room in our classroom for two class clowns and besides she could make an example out of me! 

In the future.. they are going to find out some things about little boys.  They are going to discover things like ADD and ADHD and learning styles and things like that.  In 1967 they didn't have those kinds of labels. I don't know if that was a good thing or bad thing. Without being defined or confined by a label I guess we really didn't have all the excuses we have today. But, the way I was wired...let me just put it this way...there was nothing in that classroom setting that was conducive to my particular learning style. We couldn't move enough, we couldn't touch enough, the desk chairs were too hard and too straight...there was too much order... I couldn't learn through my ears and the teachers talked too much. All of this to tell you that...I was special...and they just didn't know it or how to handle someone like me. Shucks, why stand when you can sit? Why sit when you can slough? Why slough when you can lay down? Why lay down when you can crawl around on the floor and grab the girl's ankles. 

Why obey when you can climb over the cloakroom wall and make everybody laugh and why study when you can cheat off Regina's paper.  (It was all pretty simple to me - I don't know why they didn't get it)

Sixth grade would be the hardest ten years I ever spent in school! I figured my mom  might just flunk me, since I was hers. I pictured it in my head - I would probably end up like Jethro Bodine (on The Beverly Hillbillies) as a 26-year-old in Junior High School (I guess by then, at least, I'd be as tall as Marilyn Jones and maybe even have hair on my lip by then like some of the other boys). Anyway, like The Beverly Hillbillies, I was a fish out of water. That very first week I learned that sixth grade in my mom's class would not be a "cake-walk" especially since I arrived on the first day with "leprosy."

I'm going to tell you about that story,  but it all begins a few years earlier about how the Dahlins managed to bring mosquitoes to California.

Yep, we are the one's...all right. And I'll tell you exactly how that came back to bite me (that's a pun)...let's say, it came back to bite me - like a bazillion times AND just two weeks before the first day of school. Everybody knows that sixth graders can be pretty cruel at times and should understand why I wished I have been committed to a Leper Colony Instead.

I would have gladly accepted the bell around my neck and publicly declared myself to be unclean rather than the ridicule of my friends.

...and it all began with my dad's frugal, hair-gel concoction of sugar-water... which I tell you about Next Tme...

...in the mean time, here is a picture of my hair that is as hard as a plastic, baseball helmet...that a gale force wind couldn't mess it up. That is where we get the derogatory expression... "Helmet Head."

Oh, and by the way, The Beatles just came out with a new song, "Hey Jude" sounds pretty cool to me and looks like it's probably going to be a pretty big hit.

Take a bad song and make it better...  Don't be afraid

And anytime you feel the pain, hey Markie D, refrain,
Don't carry the world upon your shoulders