Fall of '54 I was a junior beginning classes at 8am. I was excited because I could take some college level chemistry courses; the first being Qualitative Analysis. My hobby at the time was pyrotechnics, making rockets, flares and some minor explosives. It was later in this year that I set my lab in the basement on fire and my father threw everything in the trash can. One year earlier I accidently blew up a test tube and got a shard of glass in my eye. I lied about the cause and after it was extracted had to wear a black patch for a month. My lab was spared that time.
I got a job after school (12:30), ate my lunch on the subway heading to mid-town Manhattan. I worked for a music service which had a small retail outlet but a large mail order business. We shared office space with an arranger who had some well known clients, including Marilyn Monroe, whom I met twice. I worked four hours a day five days a week for $1 an hour and saved every penny of it. I still worked for my father on Saturdays for $10. Riding home at the same time every day on the subway after work I met two Hispanic girls. We smiled at each other for a few days until I introduced myself. I assumed that they were Puerto Ricans; the one that I was interested in was named Mercede, which she pronounced Mer' the de, which years later I was told that this was a Castillian dialect that no Puerto Rican had. When I asked her for a date she said that I would have to meet her parents first; no problem. The next day she said that her parents absolutely forbade her to date a non-Hispanic. We still saw each other most days, kissed a few times but that was all. The next school year she was gone.
After supper I did homework; three hours every night, even on Fridays. The school assumed that we could handle this and so made us prove it. When I graduated I had an 87% average; they didn't use GPA way back then. I wanted to succeed and my parents wanted it more. I didn't date much that year but still managed to acquire a girl friend; she was after me. Her name was Kathy Clinch and she attended my church. She was 13 when I was 16, but she was tall. The age difference put me off a bit but a year later when I was 17 and she was 14 it didn't seem to matter as much; maybe because then she had breasts and sadly, bad acne. We were friends, not lovers, and we plodded along for another year. She had an older brother who was the same age as my older sister and so her parents were rather cordial; we all went to the same church. I was just waiting to grow up and Kathy was part of that. My favorite song that year was a very slow one compared to the new rockers like Bill Haley.