Op-ed: A look back at accident-prone Charlie
Recently, SnapChat or TikTok has been presenting short videos of what it was like during the holidays in decades gone by. They seem aimed at the ole folks because they sure are nostalgic. Christmas 1956, Thanksgiving 1965, and Christmas 1978.
AI recreates the streetscape, the outside of the house, then the kitchen preparation scene, and finally the holiday meal. Everything looks warm, peaceful, and wonderful. Nobody was arguing, buried in their phones, or drunk. There were no burned turkeys and no red ball cap politics. It was all perfect. Ha.
Watching those videos got me thinking about the three accidents my brother had that are very possibly impossible to have today, and all three sent him to the hospital.
When my grandfather, the railroad engineer, had a debilitating stroke, our family moved into my grandparents’ house so my mom and dad could help take care of him. The stroke had paralyzed him.
My mom and grandmother took on most of the chores, including laundry and cleaning. One of the incredible newfangled inventions that helped them deal with their 100% cotton fabrics was an electric pressing mangle. Yes, a mangle. Even the name should have been a warning.
The mangle was essentially a large electric ironing machine with rollers, at least one of which was heated. They fed sheets, towels, handkerchiefs, and even shirts between the rollers, and they came out beautifully dried and pressed.
At age 3, my brother apparently decided the machine needed something more challenging than a pillowcase, so he put his hand into the moving parts, and broke his arm. This was the first entry in what would become a rather impressive collection of childhood injuries.
About a year or two later, my mom and grandmother were re-wallpapering Grandma’s bedroom. Wallpapering in those days was not exactly peel-and-stick. You cut a strip of wallpaper, laid it print side down on the floor, slathered homemade wallpaper paste all over the back, folded the wet paper onto itself, carried the slippery mess to the wall, went up the ladder, hung it from the top, brushed out the bubbles, wiped off the extra paste, and then discovered that none of the roses lined up.
At that point I assume Mom probably said, “Doggone it,” because my Quaker side of the family didn’t use strong language.
One freshly pasted strip was lying on the floor when my then 4-year-old brother came running into the room, ran across it, went airborne, and broke his leg so badly that he spent weeks in the hospital with his leg suspended in the air by some sort of medieval-looking contraption. It looked like something someone from the Spanish Inquisition might have ordered from the Sears and Roebuck catalog.
Finally came the accident that could still happen today, although with plastic bottles and aluminum cans, you’d have to work harder by getting a glass bottle of real sugar, Mexican Coca-Cola.
My brother was outside playing with three neighborhood kids when one of them decided it would be fun to throw a soda bottle, a.k.a. Western Pennsylvania pop bottle, onto the sidewalk. It shattered, and one tiny piece of glass flew directly into my brother’s good eye.
He had a “lazy eye,” or amblyopia, which is when during childhood development, the brain begins depending heavily on the stronger eye. When he got older, he even wore a durable plastic patch on his glasses over the good eye to try to force the weak one to work better. It never did.
From that point on, my mother became the ultimate helicopter mother some 40 years ahead of her time. No sandlot football. No baseball. No dangerous activities. Nothing that might threaten his eyesight or his future. And who could blame her? A mangled arm, a wallpaper-created broken leg, and a glass-filled eye.
Poor guy.
And somehow, after watching everything that happened to him, they let me run wild.
Nick Jacobs lives in Windber.