Lots of “firsts” in LaCrosse. I went to my first concert; Herman’s Hermits. I fell in love, or something similar, for the first two or three times. I made my first efforts to dance. It was square dancing and since they were telling me what to do, I did OK. I went to the emergency room yearly for one thing or another. I tried really crappy beer — Old Style — that almost put me off from ever drinking beer.
One emergency room visit sticks in my mind. The three musketeers were riding our bicycles home for lunch from school and I was riding my “beater” bike a 24-inch J.C. Higgins coaster. I slammed on the brakes to skid around the sidewalk corner and aim me toward the front door of the house and the front wheel of the bicycle kept going and I went over handle bars meeting with the sidewalk with the left forehead above my eye. Tim rode on hollering he would stop after lunch to pick me up. I stood up, put my hand to my head and realized I was touching the bone and had a pretty wet and red hand. I walked in, Mom saw the issue grabbed a towel and told me to hold it against my forehead and said we were going to the hospital. At that time we only had one car and Dad had it at work. Clarice Jacobs, Dads, bosses wife and big buddies with Mom had a two door T-bird with electric windows. She came over and gave us a ride to the hospital while worrying that I might get blood on the seats. No worries, I was holding the towel on it pretty hard and was distracted by opening and closing the little back window with the window switch. After picking gravel out of my forehead and pulling it back together with about eight stitches, I went back to school against Mom Hagar’s wishes but I had to go since it was very studly.
Other things that stick in my mind. Steve Johnson’s family had a big color TV so he would have us over to watch Star Trek in living color – that was living. There was a large city playground adjacent to one of the Trane Air Conditioning plants where there was a summer program. Leaving out all of the preamble; Jeff Hunt was on a swing and Bill Johnson (Steve’s cousin) had a board and went to swat Jeff in the butt as he swung back. Jeff put his head way back and got a pretty solid wallop to the back of his head. The end result was that for whatever reason his left eye sort of popped out of the socket, an ambulance came and they wrapped his eye in a warm cloth and were off. Jeff was back in action the next day. From that day on he was known as One-Eye.
During our stay in LaCrosse, Mom Hagar’s brother George returned from serving in Vietnam. He had returned via San Francisco and since his efforts to buy a new Rambler American for the sole reason that it had reclining bucket seats that he could sleep in overnight had not been fruitful, he ended up with a Jaguar Sedan. He drove across country stopping to visit us which was pretty memorable. The whole local kid gang gathered for a back yard barbecue and wanted to know how many bad guys he had offed.
One Christmas, I got a record player which immediately put me into a 45-rpm record buying spree. With my increased responsibility of mowing and shoveling while continuing not to belch or fart at the table while eating I had gotten an allowance increase to a whopping $1.00 /week. Every Saturday I would hop on my bike, ride over to the K-Mart where the latest hits could be had for the princely sum of $0.79 and made my record purchase of the week. Now and then, I would save up or take on an additional job around the house and pop for an album which I was always surprised that I did not wear out. Remembering back, the oddest album I had was a collection of songs by David McCallum who at the time was playing a Man from Uncle on TV and would eventually go on to be Ducky on NCIS.
So many things… Joe Tikle had a paper route and I would help him by folding, riding and tossing. I fell in love with the idea of getting my sailplane license which many years later, I did.
For whatever reason, I do not remember our departure from LaCrosse much except that it was mid-summer and I was severely bummed out leaving the gang. We were off to Newburgh, NY. Dad Hagar had requested the job assignment there so that I could have four years for high school in one place. I think that there was also the draw of most of his family lived in that area and we were only a couple hour drive from Hazleton, Pa., Mom Hagar’s home. I do remember that we went through Canada on the way to Newburgh going through the iron ore and nickel districts and stopped at Niagara Falls to see it because in 1969 they stopped the flow over the falls for studies on how to keep it from eating itself up. Yet another geologic influence on my young mind.