From the moment I came “galloping into the kitchen” on my stick horse at 5, I was bound to be an adventurer. I grew up with TV shows like Zorro, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Cochise on Broken Arrow, and Roy Rogers and his horse, Trigger. So I was always swinging a sword, galloping my horse, or sliding across the floor.
Of course, that particular day I fell, slid headfirst into the cast-iron radiator, and learned what it meant to get stitches in my forehead at the local hospital ER. I wasn’t scared at first, more intrigued by all the medical tools and equipment. At least, that is, until the girl across the hall started screaming. Not sure what was coming, I panicked and started screaming, too.
I did survive it and even got homemade chocolate chip cookies from Mom when I got home. So, I was an old hand at stitches when I ended up back in the ER again the next year, when I fell off a bench and cut open my jaw. The bottom line is that in spite of my reticence to ever let go of the side of that YMCA pool, I not only learned to swim, I became the adventurer.
Nothing was more exciting at the beginning of every summer than the Saturday night family shopping trip to a discount store in Unionville called Myrtle Mills. It had everything, but most especially, sneakers! The new summer sneakers’ trip. To this day, I still remember the smell of rubber as we approached the basement area in the back, where all the new sneakers were on sale.
While I REALLY wanted the sneakers I saw on TV — Keds, with the blue patch on the heel, Red Balls, or the most desired of all, PF Flyers, because the commercial said they made you run faster and jump higher, those were not in our budget. But it didn’t matter. Sneakers meant play, and that’s all I cared about. And the other part of shopping there was that the store was spread through two buildings, one on each side of the street. To get from one to the other, you walked through a tunnel that went under the road. I loved knowing that as we walked through the windowless brick hallway, above us, trucks, cars, and pedestrians were on the street.
There was, of course, as I mentioned earlier, my bravado at the amusement park on roller coasters and other scary rides. My rule was that the only way to ride the roller coaster was right up in the very front seat. I would even wait for the next set of cars if I had to, in order to get that front seat. To that kid, it proved nothing to sit in the back, and I was always looking to test my courage…to prove myself…”brave and tough.” I might be “sensitive,” but I was still brave and would do something anyway.
And as a young child, I was already drawn to “fast cars.” It must have been the racing-stripe sides of that pedal car we had.
But by 11, I had already seen the car of my dreams — a 1966 Ford Mustang. I loved that car. The sleek look, the hood, its wheels. The front grill. That little horse emblem. Everything about that car just oozed adventure and excitement, not to mention the beauty and style. I wanted that car. For that matter, I still do, and at least now I have a model car that’s close to the one I wanted!
Later, I would long for the 1968 royal blue Mercury Cougar that one of my high school teachers had, as well as the Corvette a friend of mine had. While that one was out of my price range, and it was too late for the ’66 Mustang or the ’68 Cougar, when I graduated from college, I did get myself a brand new 1977 silver Camaro with red interior. I wanted a car that screamed speed and style, and that looked like a bullet shot from a gun coming down the road. Later, sick of paying high insurance and taxes on it, and hating how it handled when driving in the snow, I moved on to a Honda hatchback, which I loved for other reasons. While not as exotic, it did have a 5-speed manual with a stick shift on the floor, so that made it fun. And at least once in my life, I got to indulge that sports car fantasy.
But even before cars, roller coasters, or sneakers primed the pump of my adventurous spirit, there was our neighborhood, books, and TV shows.
NEIGHBORHOOD
Outside of my house and daydreams, my neighborhood was my world. The old Slovaks that lived around us, our church and school up the street, and the neighborhood kids we played with who went to our Catholic school, all of that gave me a support system. When I was out playing, whatever was going on at home could recede into the background. “Out in the neighborhood,” I was “normal.” We had our routines. I had friends, and we were equals.
Outside of our friends, the people of the neighborhood ran the gamut. Here was Mrs. R, who always brought out cookies when we played baseball on the street behind us, as opposed to Mrs. K, who was basically mean. If our whiffle ball rolled into her yard behind her wall of 4-foot-high hedges and she was out there, she’d steal the ball and wouldn’t give it back. If we were lucky and she wasn’t around, we’d literally crawl into her yard on our hands and knees to stay out of sight and retrieve it before she could come out and yell.
There was the French church up our street that really wasn’t a church anymore, and someone converted it into a home. That was right near the 2-family home that Lauren Bacall’s son lived in for a while. And then there was the scarier northern end of our street, where the auto body shop was, along with the street with “the rough kids” that we knew to avoid, and some industrial buildings that were just creepy and seemed abandoned. Of course, there was the scary house across the street from us in front, the river, and Hugo’s store next to my “daydream spot” by the brook. So many of the things in my world, from our dance class studio to our hairdresser’s, from our pediatrician to the storefront for my accordion lessons, everything was right there and within walking distance.
I’ll share more about our play routines with friends. But for now, simply, the neighborhood was my entire world, and it was full of opportunities for adventures all summer long.
BOOKS:
The biggest influences feeding my adventurous soul, probably more than anything else, were my books. For one, they were always with me, anytime. My books could take me anywhere, to any time period. I could be in real-world history or tunneling to the center of the earth with the crew in Jules Verne. In fact, Jules Verne was one of my absolute favorites, especially a book called *The Mysterious Island.* It was like the adult’s version of the Boxcar Kids, with a group of Civil War soldiers in an air balloon accidentally blown off-course in a storm and ending up on an uncharted Pacific island. They had to figure out how to survive, get food, and build a place to live. It was AMAZING!. So was Robinson Crusoe, or the strange worlds of Greek gods, goddesses, and their myths.
At the other end of the spectrum were adventures in Sherwood Forest with Robin Hood or Ivanhoe, riding a magic carpet with The Peculiar Miss Pickett, or solving any number of mysteries with Nancy Drew. And I was not patient in those books whenever they took time to talk about parties or dresses. I wanted action and to keep the mystery moving.
But my love of adventure didn’t end with the imaginary. I yearned for stories of real people and their courageous acts. So one day I might be a Coastwatcher on a South Pacific Island in World War II spying on the Japanese, or the next I would be trudging through the hell that was the battle of Iwo Jima.
And for me, other than Christmas morning, nothing was more amazing than the annual Scholastic Book Club sale at our school, or whenever the new monthly book club order forms came out. I would save my allowance to be ready for the next sheet, then carefully select my books so I could buy as many as possible. I will always remember that club fondly because most of my reading material then, fiction, history, science, whatever, came from that club.
TV
Aside from Zorro and the other TV shows we watched, there were others, including the one that would show me what kind of man I would eventually marry. First, there were the exotic shows on the New York stations that we could only watch when we were at my grandparents’ place in Bridgeport. Aside from the fun old movies from the 1930s and ’40s, we would watch something called The Thunderbirds. They were a group of marionettes, and it’s funny to watch them now, given their jerky movements. But the story lines revolved around a family who ran a secret organization called “International Rescue.” Anytime there was a crisis in the world, or space, they had a whole array of flying vehicles, rockets, and undersea vessels that they’d launch from secret locations to save the day.
At home, while I always enjoyed Looney Tunes and the Roadrunner cartoons, my absolute favorite was the animated science-fiction series called Jonny Quest — the early 1964 series. And it speaks volumes that I had a crush on a cartoon boy. Every week, Jonny, his friend Hadji, his father, a scientist named Dr. Benton Quest, and their protector, Race Bannon, encountered a new challenge — evil scientists, irate spirits of dead mummies, and WWI fighter aces threatening their lives. They would travel in their own amazing jet, going from deep jungles or the pyramids to mysterious mountain-top retreats, all in their fight to save the world. Aside from all the places they went and troubles they got into, Jonny’s character showed courage as well as kindness. Even my mother loved the show. So we would get a break from Saturday morning cleaning long enough for all of us to watch the latest episode.
There were TV shows like The Wild Wild West, about two secret agents fighting crime in the 1860s west, and we would mimic their judo-like fight moves while we watched. And then there were my childhood “real-boy” crushes – Mark on the Rifleman, Timmy on the Lassie show, and Will Robinson on Lost in Space. Mark was a young boy living in the Old West with his father. He was a sensitive kid, but spirited, and I thought he was so cute. Approachable. Timmy was this innocent, blond-haired young boy who always stood up for his friends, risked his safety to save another, and was often being rescued by his trusty dog. He was the perfect mixture of sensitive and courageous. And while he was an underdog himself, he was never afraid to take on a fight.
As to Lost in Space, I didn’t care that it was hokey and kind of over-the-top, because I was in love with the young boy character on the show — “Will Robinson.” Each week as they battled aliens, crashed into planets, or dealt with the troubles their “sort-of” evil stowaway, Dr. Smith, would cook up, Will was there – brave, brilliant, loyal, and always ready for an adventure. He was this electronics genius, logical, and oh, so “total boy.” Add to it his willingness to risk his life for a friend, his kindness, his sense of right and wrong, and it was, “Oh…be still my 11-year-old heart!”
The reality was, I was a sucker for those sensitive yet brave characters who were heroic — standing up for the underdog, and doing the loyal and right thing. Add in that Will Robinson was a total science geek, smart, funny, and courageous, and I was in love. In a lot of ways, those characters formed my personal “checklist” for the kind of man I wanted in life. And yes, in looking back, I realize I did marry my own version of Will Robinson. But more on that later.
Soul Mosaic 
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