Its time for another installment in The Life of Little Scotty Stamper brought to you by CryBabyNames 2.0 and What I Tell the Kids. The story you are about to read is true..mostly..some of it anyways. This episode was the basis for the 1961 Christmas Eve episodes of Secret Storm...or The Edge of Night. I cant remember. I was only 8 months old. Give me a break. https://youtube/watch?v=V0Go8Xep9fY I present A Christmas Story...from Middletown to Beirut. A few weeks before I started 6th grade at Madison Junior School I was invited by my friend Tom Bush to attend The Nick Clooney Show. Toms mom, Peggy, and her friend, Mrs. Lolli (mother of Phil Lolli, Mary Catherine Lolli, and Jenny Lolli Fink) had tickets to the show and allowed Tom, Toms sister Cindy, and I to go with them. Others may have went with us but later trauma has erased some of the memories of this event! The show was on the first day of my sixth grade year and I was more than happy to miss school! The only thing I knew about Nick Clooney was that his show was taped in the same building that Bowling for Dollars was taped in! Our local school custodian, Harlan Long had recently won $500 with his two strikes in that building! He was a celebrity and I was going to see, maybe even walk on the lane that made him rich! I couldnt wait!!! I had no idea what childhood horrors this invitation would cause! As soon as my mother got the news she ran straight to the phone mounted on our kitchen wall! Within minutes a perfect storm of phone calls crossed township lines into the city of Middletown and from Middletown on to family members in London, Ohio, Wolfe County, Kentucky, and to the southern states of Virginia and Florida. The storm resulted in a phone bill that would later cause my dad to threaten to have the damn phone yanked out of the wall! But that was nothing compared to the trauma about to come crashing down on my tiny soft pudding head like the tropical storm that tossed and stranded the SS Minnow! Sadly, there would be no island refuge to save me. After hundreds of family members and friends being informed by my mother that I was going to be on the Nick Clooney show, plans were made to select my TV debut wardrobe...all without my consent! When the calls went from my mother walking around the kitchen and dining room with the cord of the phone creating a Gordian knot around the furniture and appliances to hushed, secret affairs with my mother stretching the cord to hide in the basement stairway out of earshot I KNEW something bad was about to happen. I awoke early the next morning after a long sleepless and dread filled night. It was a Saturday, usually spent sulking and whining about the end of summer vacation. My mother had returned earlier in her maroon 1965 Corvair from taking my father to work. Without explanation she ordered me to get a bath and get ready to head into town!!!!! This is a childs version of dead man walking! Something bad was coming. She piled us into the car and drove the seven miles into town to my grandmothers house at 122 Curtis Street. And we were greeted by my grandmother Lula Edwards, my uncle and aunt, Bob and Catherine Brown, and my aunt Myra Edawards! It was a posse...just like in the movies! I knew immediately what was going down! We were going to walk downtown to shop for an outfit for me to wear to the show!!!! Oh god, I cried, kicked, threw myself on the dirty sidewalk...I even considered running to the second floor and crawling out the window onto the roof which had worked in the past but it was too late. My aunt Nancy had already thrown my two younger brothers, David and Jeff, into her 1970 Nova and my grandmother had her big paw already tightened around my bony wrist. I would later feel a similar grasp from many police officers, wardens, and guards! The walk began! Im telling you, I would have rather been attacked by a pack of lions than to have went clothes shopping on a Saturday...the LAST SATURDAY OF SUMMER!!!! The shame of my friends seeing me walked by my family, all dressed up like we were going to church...they laughed and laughed and laughed as thy rode their bikes and ran around us asking what I was doing all dressed up! If wasnt being held back my grandmother I would have knocked every one of these jerks off those bikes...I cant believe smoke wasnt coming out of my ears! If I recall correctly I think Todd Hickman may have been involved. Kelli Hydler Spencer can testify to Todds lack of childhood compassion!!!! After having suffered hours of humiliation in dressing rooms in the Central Store, Greathouse, Mabley & Carew,and Worthmores they dragged me to the boys department of J.C. Penneys! By this time my knees were scraped bare from being dragged like a worn out rag doll through the streets and alleys of downtown Middletown, my mind was clouded by the Muzak specifically designed to dull a boy into submission. I had no cry left in me. As the elevator door opened on second floor the entire experience worsened when my Sunday school and vacation Bible school teacher greeted us!!!!! Their plan was perfect. They separated me from he pack, surrounded me with loving family members, AND completed my defeat with the ultimate delinquent child breaker, ANN BAILEY! Ann was a legend among bad kids. She took no prisoners and offered no quarter. I dared to cross her years earlier when I refused to come back into the church after playing outside. She, like my grandmother, had Kung Fu grip before Kung Fu was even invented! She carried me by my wrist up the back door to the church to the second floor, my feet barely touching the ground, slammed me into my seat and THREW OUT my chocolate pudding. I still cant bear to even look at chocolate pudding. I knew I was outmatched and collapsed on the tile floor outside the elevator door...the last hope of resistance smashed like a fine crystal wine flute under the heavy brutish high heel of Ann Bailey! I was marched to the boys department while my captors gleefully chatted away bout the weather, the new hymnals at church, everything but the reason we were there. Ann led the way and turned the corner and held out her arms in the fashion of Vanna White! This is what everyone is wearing for back to school and it would be perfect for the Nick Clooney show! I almost fainted at the sight of a mannequin dressed in a white fringed black denim cowboy outfit by Wrangler. Beneath the black denim jacket was a PINK shirt! I was in such a state of shock I needed no captor to keep me from running! As everyone looked for the various garments in my size I was frozen with shock! It was as my mind had left my body! I felt the tears running down my face at the thought of wearing a pink shirt and a jacket with fringe!!!! As they all gathered round with the correct size garments and shoving me toward the dressing room I screamed, PINK IS FOR GIRLS! IM NOT WEARING PINK!!!! Ann, being the evil genius, quite convincingly, assured me I was correct...pink is for girls. But, she also assured me that this shirt was SALMON in color...not pink! The beauty of their plan suddenly came to light! It was PURE GENIUS! Wear the kid down all day long by dragging him around town, bore him to tears...no, no, bore him to the point of insanity with continuous mindless chatter about the weather, new hymnals, the meatloaf at the Parrot and that kid is a malleable as the clumps of gum that littered the sidewalk. We all walked down to Capozzis Shoes and I was bought a pair of black cowboy boots...as if that was adequate compensation for the violation I just experienced. From there, a meal at the Parrot(I dont recall anyone ordering the meatloaf. I had grilled cheese!) and we were on our way back through town to my grandmothers house. I returned home that evening with a white-fringed, black denim cowboy outfit, a pair of black pointy toed cowboy boots(from Capozzis..Frank Capozzi), and a salmon colored shirt! I laid down on the top bunk of our bunkbeds. They next few days were a cloudy blur. The next thing I remember is being in Peggy Bushs station wagon! We drove the thirty or so miles to the station of WCPO in Cincinnati in the Bush familys large gold station wagon. The make and model escape me now but that car went on to serve in many country road egg fights and much mischief for another ten or fifteen years. I was still numb from the terrifying weekend of shopping. As we entered the studio I my spirits did start to pick up. There was the wooden alley and the ball return that Harlan Long so skillfully bowled just weeks earlier. I was hoping to see Nick back stage before the show so I could introduce myself as a personal friend of Harlan. I mean, Harlan was practically a celebrity. And being friends with him I was practically a regular member of the in crowd myself. We were hustled to an area filled with about 50-75 seats, tan folding chairs arranged in a semi-circle just a few feet from a foot high carpeted stage with two nicer padded chairs separated by a small table. As Tom and I fidgeted in our chairs a small man in a coat and tie came out and explained some basic rules for audience behavior, as if I needed that! Who did he think he was lurning! I knew Harlan Long!!! Im one of them...I didnt need to know no rules!!! Finally the lights on the audience went down and the stage lights went up, music cued and Nick Clooney walked out to the polite Midwestern applause of middle-aged wives and children from the farthest corners of southwestern Ohio! I was finally in the big time! Nick made a few opening comments and pushed the products of a few sponsors. He then introduced his first guest...Kenny Price, the country singer known as The Round Mound of Sound! As Kenny took the stage all the horror o the previous weekend paled in comparison to what I was now experiencing!!!! Kenny Price was a very big man and when he walked up on that stage in a white fringed, black denim cowboy outfit with a SALMON shirt I thought the whole world had conspired for months just to embarrass me!!!! He was smiling a huge smile as big as the Christmas star at ARMCOs Middletown works...and he stared straight at me the entire time...after he and Nick shook hands and greeted each other Kenny pointed at me, as if no one noticed we had on the exact same outfit!!!! He kept repeating, Looky there, lookit that boy right there! We got on the zact same outfit! He grabbed me out of my chair and took me up on stage and sat me on his lap! My face felt as if it was a thousand shades of the darkest red! Evidently, this outfit was the featured outfit of the JC Penneys boys and mens departments! I dont recall if Penneys as a sponsor of the show but they should have been! I was returned to the audience in short order and the show continued. Minutes before the show ended Nick announced that he had a surprise guest! Oh great, I thought! Another yahoo dressed like Kenny and I!!! But no...this guest was a woman! And a very lovely and shapely woman I might add! Up until this point in my life, women and girls were to be chased and scared away from the areas of the playground that belonged to the boys. I am not sure what happened that day but this woman made me tingle all over. She had on a beautiful pink dress, it appeared to be somewhat heavy for late summer. It may have been a heavy cotton or wool. The lights dimmed as she took center stage. She sang Ill Be Seeing You with the softest of music. It was almost as if she was singing it a capella. She stepped down from the stage and walked through the audience as she sang. She paused by my chair at the end of the second row. Facing away from me, she touched her hand on the side of my face for just a second but for what seemed a lifetime. A second perfect storm was taking place...a storm every man must experience at some point in his life but a storm that I dont think we ever understand. Man, I was IN LOVE! Rosemary Clooney finished her song and the show was over! Before we were excused we were told to look under our seats. We all found a card that listed a prize we would be given on the way out of the studio! And believe it or not my prize was a damn PINK Easy Bake Oven! There was no confusing the difference between pink and salmon on this piece of crap. Tom got a GI Joe and I think Cindy got a football! I dont know what kind of contest from hell gives the winner a pink Easy Bake Oven but evidently I won that contest! We returned to school the next day. Tom and I never discussed the show or the prizes but I am pretty sure CINDY BUSH told everyone that I was the proud new owner of a PINK Easy Bake Oven!!! Fast forward twelve or thirteen years to the Mediterranean winter of 1983. Poor choices, a poor economy, and even poor foreign policies led me to the countries of the eastern Med. The USO shows and their participants did their best to sooth the pain and loneliness of a very violent, tragic, and grief filled Christmas season for the thousands of troops stationed in and around the Middle East. On the 22 of December I found myself not only away from family and friends but away from my own shipmates, Myself and two other sailors were flown to the USS Fort Snelling for some reason. We were housed in an empty berthing area usually occupied by Marines. We were invited to attend a smaller USO show onboard the Fort Snelling but being angry, lonely, tired, and sad I declined and laid in that tiny 6 x 2 coffin like rack with a single Navy issue gray wool blanket. I just wanted to be anywhere but there. I was tired of Beirut, tired of the Navy, tired of living on a ship, tired of the shipmates I would one day miss, tired of wearing the same clothes for months on end, I was tired of life. Just when I was about to fall asleep I heard music. It was obviously recorded but the voice was live. I got up and made my way to the tiniest mess deck I had ever seen and a woman stood near the milk dispensers singing to a group of about 15 sailors and Marines. She wasnt wearing pink. She was wearing an over-sized olive drab Navy foul weather jacket. My world started to fall apart. I didnt think I was going to be able to keep it together as Rosemary Clooney stood there on the mess deck of the USS Fort Snelling singing Ill Be Seeing You. I couldnt watch. I went topside and found a spot along the rail where I couldnt be seen. I cried and cried and cried remembering how much I hated that stupid shopping trip and that ugly white fringed black denim cowboy outfit with that SALMON shirt and that dumb show and that goddamn pink Easy Bake Oven and that beautiful classy woman and that sad song and the first time I fell in love! Those things didnt seem so bad after all. I went to the head and washed my face and tried to look as tough I could...at 105 pounds, wearing bell bottom, patch pocket jeans its not an easy thing to pull off. I returned to the mess deck and found Ms. Clooney surrounded by the other sailors and Marines. She was kind and compassionate and made us feel like we mattered. I introduced myself and related the story of her appearance on her brothers show that seemed a life time ago. I was disappointed when she said she remembered. I though she was just another people pleaser saying what I wanted to hear. As she autographed a photo for me she commented, That Kenny Price got a kick out of you two having the same outfit! That woman took this angry and sad veteran straight back to that ten year old boy, my cheek burning from her touch, confused, delighted, and in love all over again. Here came the tears again. I returned to a strange rack in a strange berthing area on a strange ship. We flew back to the USS Guam the next morning. I hope young people today, especially my nephews and nieces, David Todd Stamper, Leslie Stamper, Taylor Stamper, Jesse Stamper, and Alyssa Stamper value all those similar experiences. In the not too distant future they will become priceless!
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 19:31:02 +0000
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