2022 – Youthful Stuff & Nonsense
(Ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on March 25, 2022)
My First Car (as opposed to my first REAL car):
I don’t know who gave me this, but my father – who worked in a Chevy dealership in 1959 – is most likely. We were all in love with the design of this car:
I’m guessing it was a kit that I/we put together and that all the decals were included: 
The front seats say, “California Custom” And the back ones show two words that I can make out: “Plating” and “Highlands”.
Around the same time in my life, I was very into Little League. Here are the two trophies I got:
The plastic insert label on the left one is unreadable on the trophy, so I took a separate picture of it and placed it at the bottom.
The label is gone from the other one, but I had scrawled what it said on the dried glue: “1960 All-Stars” (I made the All-Star team in my third and final year).
In high school, I was a bowler in the BCBL (Bergen Catholic Bowling League). We bowled after school on Fridays at a place called “Ten Pin On The Mall” in the Bergen Mall in Paramus, NJ. In my senior year, I apparently had the “HI SERIES” (I guess it wasn’t in the budget to add the “G” and “H” to “HI”) and made the “200 Club”:
And that was the extent of my sporting prowess.
Moving on to my one semester at Seton Hall University in the Fall of ’65 (I hated the place for reasons mentioned previously in this blog)…………….
I didn’t mention this in those reasons because I had forgotten all about it. After recently finding these items in a large box of family history…………I STILL don’t recall it, so I must have either avoided or ignored most of it.
This is really stupid:
I should mention that I also found a plastic bag with a paper bag inside it, a name tag and a small WHITE rubber ball (not a blue one – since SHU’s colors were blue and white, I guess this was my way of thumbing my nose at them because I picked SHU’s OTHER color [yes – I know white is not a color]).
I did find one other item that I also don’t remember:
Since the date was early in the semester, Kangaroo Court must have been where they administered “justice” to all the hazing-rule-breaking freshmen. Obviously, I didn’t go……….and besides – who would want to go to a mixer at a university that had only just started admitting women?
In my 825-member freshman class, SIX were women! And two of those six were NUNS!
I made the right decision to leave SHU after that semester – when I had NO idea what I wanted to do with my life or what I wanted to major in. I spent a couple of years figuring out that it was chemistry, got my degree, worked at it and dumped all of that for the ability to create https://bobleafe.com/.
I found all this stuff in a box of family history that I’ve been working on for months. The same box also includes all of the pictures shown in the two “Mom Shoots The World” posts from last year.
I just found 3 other items from that box that I’ll post below so I can put this box back in storage. (Actually, I also found small collections of stamps and rocks, but I won’t tell you about any of that, lest you think I’m a nerd or something.)
I apparently went to this exhibition at the New York Coliseum in 1959 that I think was inspired by the Sputnik satellite (shown on the cover):
If you want to know what that was all about:
https://kcmeesha.com/2012/04/08/soviet-national-exhibition-in-new-york-city/
I should have sold these booklets last year when they might have had some value. Now?
Zilch.
One of the biggest high school football rivalries in New Jersey is Bergen Catholic vs. Don Bosco.
This is the program from the game during my first semester at BCHS:
It looks like I did some math homework on the top part of the cover.
Lastly, I found my ticket to hell, as written by my mother.
When I graduated from Holy Trinity Grammar School, my parents gave me “My Sunday Missal” (a missal is a book containing the texts used in the Catholic Mass throughout the year.) – everything you ever wanted to know about Masses:
When I recently found the missal, it had a note inside:
Anybody want to buy a missal? It’s in excellent, never-read condition. And – if you act fast – I’ll include a free 1959 USSR exhibition booklet.
Bob, I like seeing the collection of items from your youth. I was surprised by the school-sanctioned hazing, which sounds like its main intent was to demean incoming students during an already tough adjustment year. It is not a good look for the school.
Thank you for sharing the look back at these items and their back story.
I didn’t know you were a 12, almost 13, year catholic school educated student!
I blame pagan kindergarten for putting me on that path and I credit the four years of pagan college that followed for the course adjustment.