Danny was in his second grade class at Elmwood School on Friday, November 22, 1963. Sometime in the early afternoon, another teacher burst into the room and frantically whispered something to the teacher, Miss Collins, who began to cry. She excused herself from the class and went out into the hallway. Danny and his classmates heard loud whispering and were understandably curious. Miss Collins came back in, eyes red, but said nothing, and the class continued on as before. School got out at two-fifteen with Danny still in the dark, his innocence about to be shattered. He walked home with his best friend Richard Alden and they approached the corner of Brighton and South Avenues. Richie’s older brother Ronnie, stood there, a “safety patrol” on duty. Ronnie wore his white safety patrol belt and had his arms up in the “T” formation that said, “nobody crosses without my say-so!” Ronnie saw his brother and, without either lowering his arms or taking his eyes off the road, yelled, “Hey, Richie! The President got shot! We don’t have a president!”
Apparently the chain of succession wasn’t one of the questions on the safety patrol test.
The President is dead? Danny barely knew who the president was. He had seen him on TV giving boring speeches and stuff but now he was dead? Danny sprinted all the way home. He had to tell his mom. He walked in just before Ann. She came in and broke down crying hysterically in front of the television, quickly joined by Helen. The assassination coverage obliterated all normally scheduled programming and completely dominated the news, and life. It was non-stop grown-up stuff that Danny didn’t understand, really, but he still felt deeply. Hushed silence and gloom filled the apartment--and really, the world--for days. And then came another moment of shock and horror a couple of days later; accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was lynched, live on national TV. He lurched in pain after he was shot in the stomach by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, and died the next day.
Danny got his copy of the “Weekly Reader” the next Monday and instead of kid-friendly stories and puzzles, the cover was just a large black and white photo of JFK bordered in black. Danny stared at the young president as if seeing him for the first time, and he felt real grief. He had watched the pictures of all the people filing past the flag-draped coffin, and then the procession with the riderless horse. But what struck with him the most was little John-John, saluting as his dad’s coffin went past. Danny understood John-John’s father wasn’t coming home, ever. The whole assassination and its aftermath affected Danny profoundly.
When Danny was eight, the family moved to a beautiful flat in a house on James Street, at the edge of the village-within-a-city of Eastwood. As opposed to the boxy, noisy apartments they lived in before, this place felt like a home. It had French doors, a chandelier, and a closed-in sunporch that looked out on the busy street. Danny spent his spare time on that porch, away from the familial din, and read, drew pictures or colored in his coloring book. And he again had his own bedroom. As usual, the kids made friends quickly, this time with the Mirabelli family around the corner. Danny and June spent many summer afternoons in their pool.
James Street was a busy east-west throughfare with steady, heavy traffic. Helen crossed Danny and June across James Street safely every morning and then they continued the rest of the way to school on their own. One morning, June was sick and stayed home from school. Helen told Danny to stay home, too. She didn’t want him crossing James alone. The kid who loved staying home from school decided, on this morning, he had to go. He said “Oh mom, I’m a big boy. I can cross by myself,” and off he went.
An hour later came a knock at the door. Helen answered it and a Catholic priest, Father Johnston, stood there. Helen had a fleeting thought-- oh, he’s probably trying to get me to go to mass. The reason was much more dire. “Your son was hit by a Syracuse Transit city bus on his way to school, and he was rushed to the hospital. He may be dead, I’m afraid,” the priest told her. That last part was wildly speculative, and unfortunate; Helen collapsed in a puddle of grief and despair, wailing and beyond inconsolable. She was almost immediately struck with a case of psychogenic aphonia--in layman’s terms, a hysterical loss of voice. She called Frank at work, croaked out the spare details, then took a cab to the hospital, poor, sick June in tow. When she got there the news was marginally better. Danny was still alive but unconscious, with a serious concussion. He broke his nose and lost three top teeth. His prognosis was grim. Until he woke up--if he woke up--the doctors wouldn’t know what damage the concussion had caused.
Danny’s accident happened on Tuesday morning. Finally, after two excruciating days, he came to on Thursday morning. He looked around the room and tried to get his bearings. He was obviously in a hospital, and sure felt like he should be. But Danny’s first question wasn’t “Where am I?” or “What happened to me?” but instead “What day is it?” The nurse on duty said, “it’s Thursday,” and Danny said “Oh no! I missed Jonny Quest!” Danny had never missed an episode of the prime time kids’ animated adventure and feared his streak was broken. When the laughter subsided, the nurse, who had kids of her own, explained “No, Danny, it’s only Thursday morning. You haven’t missed it yet.” Only then did Danny get around to asking his second and third, less important questions; “Where am I? What happened?”
Danny spent about ten days in the hospital in a four-bed pediatric room. Next to him was a kid named Phil, who had a clef palate; and across, a bald kid named Mark. Mark had cancer. Danny thought about those kids for years, especially Mark. A kid with pediatric cancer in 1965? Probably long gone. Danny remembered both of them as chatty and upbeat despite their problems. They all became instant friends in that room, bonding over comic books and the Beatles and naturally, Jonny Quest. Kids can be so resilient.
Danny stayed home for another week, old hat for him. He bounced back amazingly quickly and then returned to school. He regaled the other kids with fantastic tales of his run-in with the bus, all completely made up because he didn’t remember any of it. A dentist fitted Danny with a top denture plate and Danny delighted in flipping the plate out with his tongue in front of unsuspecting kids, and a kid that can do that goes to the top of the popularity list quickly.
Helen and Frank called a necessary truce during Danny’s crisis, but once he was out of danger the battles renewed. Finally, the Martinis separated in the fall of 1965. With Frank out of the house, not only was his paycheck gone but so was the parental buffer he provided during Helen’s outbursts. Frank paid child support but thirty bucks a week, meager even for the time, wasn’t nearly enough. Helen and the kids were forced to go on welfare. She was understandably even more stressed than before and flew into a rage over little things, a rage that sometimes lasted for days before she burned herself out. Danny and his sisters constantly walked on eggshells. Their little apartment felt radioactive.
Danny’s unusually mild case of cystic fibrosis, still misdiagnosed as chronic bronchitis, didn’t overly affect him. He coughed frequently, was chronically underweight, and bathrooms everywhere were at risk, but he was a relatively normal kid; smart, inquisitive and an excellent student. Danny learned to make friends easily and so did his sisters. Even though he inherited (nature?) or acquired (nurture?) Helen’s explosive temper and her thin skin, he still mostly got along well along with other kids.
Helen and the kids continued their nomadic life, moving from their relatively spacious apartment on James Street to a smaller flat in East Syracuse when the landlord evicted them. Helen always managed to find another place but never in the same school district. The kids were uprooted and forced to say goodbye to everything they knew, over and over. Danny was a sensitive and sentimental kid. He took the losses extremely hard. When Danny became an adult, his desire for stability meant he stayed too long in a relationship that wasn’t working, reluctant to face that pain again.
Helen didn’t drive, so finding a new place and moving was expensive, logistically difficult, and usually under tight time constraints. Unpacking and settling is stressful in the best of households and it often set off Helen’s hair-trigger temper. She flew into a rage over seemingly minor things. A recurring flashpoint was the ceremonial Hanging of the Curtains Rods, which preceded the ceremonial Hanging of the Curtains. The Martini family extensive toolbox consisted of: a butter knife. When Helen tried using that “tool” to screw into hardwood rails, it produced predictable results:
“Son of a bitch!´ Helen yelled as the butter knife slipped out of her hands to the floor. Clang! She tried again and clang! “You fucker!” The repeated clatter of the knife to the floor would’ve made a great sitcom scene but sure wasn’t amusing in real life. It drove her into a rage and then her emotional pot boiled over. She screamed at the kids and railed at the unfairness of it all. Helen’s mood ebbed and flowed like the tide-- calm for a few minutes, then a tsunami. Sometimes Helen was so enraged and stressed she threatened to kill herself as Danny and June cowered and cried. Ann was a little more jaded. She’d heard it all one too many times.
Sometimes in this manic state Helen didn’t reach half-life for hours. The kids just waited until she wore herself out and passed out from exhaustion. She usually woke up and then reacted as if nothing had happened. No apologies for her reign of terror, no “I’m so sorry I lost my temper,” just the unspoken message of forget it and move on. When Danny grew up, after a lot of painful trial and error, he learned to admit his transgressions and apologize when he was wrong. Besides, it was so disarming. There was nothing left to argue about.
Helen always had a big “dream” of living in a trailer--a mobile home. Her dream came true in 1970 when she discovered a ramshackle and cramped mobile home for rent in an ancient, run-down trailer park on Erie Boulevard in Dewitt, a Syracuse suburb. The trailer park was right in the middle of one of the busiest shopping districts in Central New York and wildly out of place and time. The Martinis’ new home was in a great and affluent school district, Jamesville-Dewitt, and Danny liked the new school. Ann had dropped out by then but got her G.E.D. But for June, it was murder. With her out-of-style cheap clothes and her severely bucked teeth, June struggled.
Outside of school, the kids adjusted well. They always did. Both Danny and June made lifelong friends there in the park. Danny had his first real kiss and his first adolescent crush, with all the accompanying soaring highs and crashing lows. Ann had landed a good job as a teletype operator for Western Union, and she helped out with the bills.
In September, Danny walked into freshman year German class carrying his jacket and books, stymied by the combination of his locker. A big blonde guy who sat next to Danny in the second row, asked him, “Why aren’t you using your locker for that stuff?” Danny sheepishly admitted that the three-digit combination had bested him. Steve just said, “I’ll help you with it after class” and a great friendship was born. That was one of the great “what-if” moments in Danny’s life. Would he and Steve have become friends otherwise? The serendipity of that moment, considering how important Steve and Danny’s friendship would prove to be in the years that followed, was significant.
The valuable real estate the trailer park sat on was too valuable. In the spring of 1972, the owner sold the park and the adjacent motel to a developer, and both were razed. The Martinis were on the move again, this time to an apartment complex in Liverpool, a nice suburb northwest of Syracuse. Liverpool was a much larger, more diverse school district. Helen had managed to finance much-needed braces for her youngest daughter, and June fit in much better at Liverpool, though she began hanging out with the “freaks” and started smoking pot. Danny was neither a freak nor a jock. He asked June one day what group he belonged to, and she said, “The nerds!”
Danny was nerdy. He was also painfully self-aware and knew he lacked the emotional maturity of other kids his age. Other kids drove, dated, and had part-time jobs; Danny did none of those things. He fell further and further behind socially by the time he was a senior. Though he had a few crushes, they weren’t reciprocated, and he desperately wanted a girlfriend. Laura, a girl in his senior homeroom, showed interest. “Are you going to the dance?” she asked him one morning, practically begging him to ask her out. She couldn’t have been more direct if she wrote “Ask me out” on her forehead. Danny just ignored the question, even though she was cute and funny, and had her own car. Danny had no money, no job, no car, and no confidence.
Danny’s first job was a two-day stint at a fast-food joint walking distance from the apartment, Carroll’s Hamburgers. The first night was easy. Danny incurred a few roughly twelfth degree burns while on French fry duty but otherwise survived. The second night, though, he had to help “close.” Cleaning grease traps and scrubbing grills was too much for his tender sensibilities, though. Danny had never worked that hard in his life. He never went back.
Nichols IGA, a grocery store a couple blocks west of Carroll’s, was his next stop. Danny carried his mother’s chip on his shoulder to work, though. He packed grocery bags lighter to make them easier to carry. He and his family had lugged plenty of heavy bags home from the store over the years. One of the register ladies, Gladys, complained. “Hey, put more stuff in those bags!” she admonished him, “They cost three cents each!”
Danny, full of self-righteousness, pulled a quarter from his pocket and tossed it at her. “There’s eight bags,” he said, “Let me know when I run out.”
One snowy evening, some perceived slight punctured Danny’s thin skin, and in the finest Martini tradition, ran. He said, “I quit!” and walked out mid-shift, a stunt right out of his mother’s playbook. One big difference-- Helen would have neither recognized her mistake nor apologized for it. Danny did both, a small sign of growth. He received a well-deserved tongue lashing and got his job back.
For a week.
Just eight days later, Danny woke up, went to the bathroom, and was alarmed by the presence of blood in the toilet. He was terrified, and also terrified to tell Helen, but he woke her with the news. True to form, she went a little nuts. As established, she was not great in a crisis. His mom, though, admirably pulled herself together and called an ambulance. She and Danny raced to the Emergency department at Crouse Hospital in Syracuse.
Danny was triaged in the ER and put in a room. He felt fine, just nervous. A nurse entered to check on him. He began to say, “I feel fine,” when suddenly his gag reflex kicked in and he began vomiting blood-- cascading it in a stream. He painted both himself and the unlucky nurse bright red. He looked like Regan, the possessed little girl from The Exorcist-- except he needed a surgeon, not a priest. The diagnosis was a bleeding ulcer, and the doctors were puzzled. Bleeding ulcers were quite uncommon in teenagers, but Danny was an uncommon teenager. His undiagnosed CF meant he wasn’t getting the pancreatic supplements his system needed and his whole digestive system was out of whack.
In 2022, bleeding ulcers are treated with antibiotics when the bacterium H pylori (which wasn’t even discovered until 1982) is the problem. If excessive stomach acid is the issue, protein pump inhibitor medicines like Nexium help reduce its production. In 2022, gastric ulcers are an eminently treatable malady. In 2022.
In 1973, H pylori didn’t yet exist, as far as the medical community knew. It wasn’t discovered until 1982 by two Australian doctors, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren. They were studying patients with gastric ulcers and Dr. Warren noticed a similarity between the severity of inflammation and the presence of bacteria. Biopsies failed to produce the desired result until a test plate incubated three times longer, and voila, they had their man, er, bacterium. They were both awarded the Nobel prize, rather belatedly, in 2005.
The standard treatment for ulcers in 1973 was a so-called “bland diet.” Ulcers, it was believed, were caused by “spicy food.” The doctors at Crouse prescribed a small amount of skim milk every half hour or so. All the milk did was stimulate more acid production in the gut and so was counterproductive. 1973, as far as ulcers were concerned, was the Dark Ages. Danny was lucky they didn’t treat him with leeches.
Dr. Brunenschweiger was a gruff, older internist assigned to Danny’s case who decided to investigate further by performing an endoscopy. An endoscopy is a tube with a light and a tiny camera that is slid down the patient’s throat, about as much fun as it sounds like. Endoscopies in 2022 almost always involve some sort of sedation, but for some reason (see: Dark Ages, 1973) that wasn’t true in Danny’s case. He was wide awake and terrified at what felt like a fire hose being threaded down his throat. And, while in that terribly compromised position, Danny listened as the doctor said, in his thick German accent, “Ah, I can’t see anything. There is too much milk!”--the milk he prescribed. Brunenschweiger took the scope out and muttered, “we will have to try this again.”
“Oh no, you’re not!” exclaimed Danny, “I don’t care if I die from this stupid ulcer! I’m not going through that again.” The bleeding had stopped by then, fortunately, and Danny was released a few days later. “Make sure you eat your stupid, unhelpful, boring bland diet and drink lots of acid-inducing milk,” the nurse didn’t exactly say. Luckily, Danny had no further bleeding issues, and once again he had escaped the Grim Reaper’s icy grasp.
He lost a couple weeks of school days, though and he missed going to class; he missed school. Eight year old Danny would’ve been aghast. He dumped Calculus and Physics when he found himself hopelessly behind after going back, and had so few classes that he said he “majored in study hall.” Danny got tired of that, though and signed up for a couple of electives. He had room for a couple of electives and Miss Frigon, his guidance counselor, suggested Personal Typing. Danny balked at that suggestion, good little chauvinist that he was. “I’m not gonna be a secretary!” he exclaimed, a sentence he still grimaced at the thought of years later. Danny took the course, learned to type, and did not become a secretary, but of all the classes he took in his life, that had the most long-term value.
He, with some prodding from his friend Steve, decided he needed to learn to drive and signed up for driver’s education. He was lucky to have a good and patient instructor, Bob Weinheimer. Danny sailed through the written part of the class, but when it was his turn to take the driver’s ed car on the road, he was the one kid nobody wanted to ride with. All the other kids he rode with already had their licenses and either had their own car or access to a car. Danny had neither. All his actual driving experience was limited to driver ed, and it showed. He was tentative and nervous and the other kids in the car understandably hated riding with him.
By the end of the semester, Danny had gained confidence and was much improved on the road. It turned out that he loved driving, which surprised him. He felt ready to pass the class road test. Three-point turns were no sweat. His Achilles heel was parallel parking, but if he stayed calm he’d be okay. If he stayed calm. The day came for the class road test. Two other confident, almost blasé, kids aced their tests and then Danny fired up the Chevy Impala. Bob Weinheimer sat shotgun, and three fellow students sat in back. They’d been riding with Danny all semester and probably guessed they’d get a great story out of his test.
They were right.
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