When Bob Barker says “Tell ’em about it, Johnny,” I hang on Johnny’s every inflection, delirious from fever and the gleaming Ford Mustang slowly rotating on an automotive lazy Susan.
“It’s a new car! It’s a 1974 Malibu eight-cylinder Chevelle sedan with molded full-foam seating, new grate-pattern grille treatment, and a wide-stance chassis with a look all its own from Chevrolet! It comes fully equipped with deluxe bumpers; outside remote-control mirrors; body side molding; door edge guards; rack-and-pinion steering; steel-belted, white-striped radial tires; Turbo-Hydramatic transmission; deluxe seat belts; and tinted glass!”
And what else do you have for us, Johnny?
“It’s a trash compactor! From Whirlpool, the company that believes quality can be beautiful, comes this Trashmaster compactor that mashes a week’s worth of trash into a tidy disposable bag a little larger than a grocery bag. No more kitchen clutter, Bob.”
I want every one of these things, want to live in a modern California home with a Turbo-Hydramatic transmission and an absence of kitchen clutter and a canary-colored range that cleans itself like a cat. Tell us about that, Johnny.
“It’s a range! Monarch’s double-oven electric range features two stay-clean continuous-scrubbing ovens plus a lift-up cooktop, from the Monarch Range Company, Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, leaders in quality since 1896!”
The contestants from these shows are all from Southern California towns with names—West Covina, Thousand Oaks, Pomona, Fontana, Escondido, Encinitas—that sound like poetry. I am instantly envious of every child who lives in such a place and of the places they go on vacation, which sound nothing like Wisconsin Dells. Tell us about those places, Johnny.
“It’s a trip to Hawaii! We’ll fly two of you round-trip economy on American Airlines from Los Angeles to Honolulu, where you’ll spend six days and seven nights at the Ala Moana Hotel at the entrance to Waikiki! You’ll enjoy the Ala Moana’s nine exotic restaurants and Polynesian-themed swimming pools! The Ala Moana, an American Hotel, part of a prize package worth $8,397!”
There are only three holiday destinations that these game-show contestants ever go to in 1974—Waikiki, Acapulco, and Puerto Vallarta—but all three sound like exceedingly pleasant places when Johnny says “We’ll fly you and a companion round-trip to the exotic El Mirador hotel in the beautiful port city of…Acapulco!”
When Love of Life comes on channel 4 after lunch, ushering in a dispiriting block of soap operas on all three networks, I turn to channel 11 and the Minnesota sick-day standby Mel’s Matinee Movie, hosted by Mel Jass, who introduces Hook, Line, and Sinker, a 1969 comedy starring Jerry Lewis as a dying man traveling the world and maxing out his credit cards.
Mel’s Matinee Movie is hosted from a Twin Cities studio whose set is so dark—an ink-black void—it apparently wants to mimic the surroundings of its viewers. Most of them are shut-ins or nursing-home patients—or kids like me, curtains drawn against the workaday world, half asleep on the couch beneath an orange afghan, in a happy torpor, in the medicated bliss of a school sick day.
5.
Wish Book
The only thing better than a sick day is a snow day, which is a sick day without the sick. It begins like any other. Mom sings the Boone and Erickson theme song, pulling up the shades to flood the room with light. Startled awake, my heart hammers out the drum riff from “Wipeout” while my Vikings book bag hangs in rebuke from the headboard, filled as it is with half-done homework. A familiar dread sets in until I see, through the frost-fringed window, a world outside covered in snow, as thick and muffling as fiberglass insulation.
I bound downstairs to hear Charlie Boone, or possibly Roger Erickson, reading the alphabetical listing of school closings on WCCO. He is only just past Bloomington—“Brooklyn Center, Brooklyn Park, Burnsville”—and the tension as he runs through the whole alphabet is almost unbearable. By the time he is back to the Bs again, I am reminded of a roller coaster, ratcheting up a hill. Then it crests—he gets to B—and I hear it: “Bloomington schools, public and parochial—closed.” Instantly it’s Mardi Gras and V-E Day and the Lindbergh parade all in one, and the flakes falling outside look like ticker tape.
All twenty-six thousand of us schoolkids in Bloomington feel the same way. Each of us is a death-row inmate reprieved by the governor, and we’ll relish every minute of this stolen Tuesday. I’ll take my hockey skates in to be sharpened, the blades throwing off sparks like a welder’s torch, and then carve up the Clearys’ flooded backyard next door, my wrist shots made wicked by the boomerang curve of my Sher-Wood. We’ll clear the ice every ten minutes by skating with a shovel in ever-tightening ovals—because my fondest desire is someday to drive a Zamboni at the North Stars games.
I take off my skates after an hour of impersonating Bobby Clarke of the Flyers and, as always, feel a foot shorter. Inside, Mom has made hot cocoa, warmed on the same stovetop burner on which I curved the Sher-Wood and boiled my hockey mouth guard, this ancient alchemy of fire and ice.
Kevin Sundem walks past outside, dressed in the kind of snowsuit that Minnesotans call a snowmobile suit. I pack a snowball, rear back with the same windup Juan Marichal has on his Topps baseball card, and peg him in the head from sixty feet away. Then I duck behind a tree that looks—like every other tree on the block—like it’s been dipped in white chocolate.
We build a fort, an impregnable igloo stocked with snowballs, from which we conduct guerrilla raids on every other fort on the street, and by day’s end we will rule our block like rajas.
After lunch, my backyard becomes Metropolitan Stadium in a whiteout. Mark Redmond is playing quarterback, his Fran Tarkenton Vikings jersey stretched over his parka so that he looks—bulging in purple—like Violet Beauregarde from Willy Wonka. With his unmittened hand, he throws a bomb that I catch near the sideline, which is the property line between our yard and the Clearys’, and I high-step into the end zone, which is bounded by the swing set and the arborvitae. And then I Nestea-plunge onto my back and lie there a moment to catch my breath before making a snow angel in celebration.
I am so cold that I pull my parka hood with the fake-fur fringe over my authentic replica Vikings helmet. Come Sunday, while watching from in front of the fireplace some football game in Miami or Los Angeles, I’ll look at all those players and fans in their short sleeves and suntans and feel sorry for them.