Years on the 7s #3: 1957

1957! The second Eisenhower Administration. The year of Sputnik and cars with tailfins.

The folks have a blue and white four-door 1955 Chevy 210, which I yearn to drive. Oh, how I yearn. Oh, how I want them to buy one of those cool 1957 Chevys.

And then there's that black four-door 1934 Buick sitting at the back of the used car lot at Dengler Chevrolet in Fredonia. I visit it regularly. I do sketches of it. I wish I had enough money to buy it. Eventually it disappears.

I also wish I had enough money to get us a television set. We're the only family anywhere without TV. My mother is a holdout. If you want a TV, she says, you'll have to go out and buy one.

Yes, I've emerged as a full-fledged teenager. This is the year my pre-adolescent occupations fall away.

No more piano lessons. No more afternoons listening to New York Yankee games on the radio and keeping running box scores on the blackboard in our playroom. No more Dunkirk Evening Observer paper route (a five-mile slog by bicycle), no more Boy Scouts (I'm five merit badges short of Eagle), no more summer week at Boy Scout Camp Merz on Chautauqua Lake.

I'm getting allergy shots (feathers, corn) from my father. And perhaps still getting haircuts from him too. Not only am I picking grapes in the fall, I'm also pulling brush in the vineyard in the early spring after my father and grandmother prune the vines.

The money I earn goes to buy paperback books like "The Catcher in the Rye," Mad magazine, the Sunday Courier-Express (for the comics) and 45 rpm singles.

I listen to rock 'n roll constantly on the Buffalo stations, primarily a deejay named Hernando on WXRA (later WINE), which I favor because it broadcast the Yankee games. I follow the hits on the Billboard charts, torn from the magazine and posted weekly on the wall in Willsey's, the card shop-cum-record store in downtown Fredonia, and create my own charts as well.

1957 is the peak year for early rock 'n roll. Elvis. Chuck Berry. The Everly Brothers. The Coasters. Jerry Lee Lewis. Even Ricky Nelson and Pat Boone (I got a pair of the shoes he wore, white bucks). And a group called the Crickets, led by a guy named Buddy Holly.

End of my sophomore year at Fredonia High School, beginning of junior year, I'm an A student, equipment manager and scorekeeper for the baseball team.

I stop being a farm kid from Sheridan and start having friends in town. I ride the bus to school, but don't always take it home.

Sometimes I get to hang and drink Cokes with my classmates after school in overloaded booths at the Park Diner in the center of the village. There are football games and basketball games and Friday night dances in the gym.

I'm smitten with Leana Kantor, exotic and buxom, one of the few Jewish students in the school and the only classmate who's younger than me. I carry her books and walk her home sometimes, spend occasional after-school afternoons at her house and wish we'd be more than platonic. She introduces me to "West Side Story," the cartoons in the New Yorker and cigarettes. Parliaments, with the recessed filters.

Our big adventure is on Christmas Eve, when we get served cocktails at the bar in the venerable White Inn. I skip midnight services with the family at the Methodist Church in Dunkirk. When I hitchhike home, they aren't back yet. I crawl woozily into bed and pretend to be asleep when they arrive, but they don't want to wait till morning to open presents under the tree. They roust my surreptitiously half-drunk ass down to the living room for the unwrapping.