by Tim Conway
I didn’t know why Sophia had to see it, but I wasn’t going to argue.
At this point, Sophia was making slipcovers to order, a business that involved two visits to a customer’s home. The first was to take the measurements, and the second was to drape the finished product over the chair or sofa and collect the fee. Sophia was on one of her slipcover gigs when, bug wings flapping in the breeze, Dan and I drove over to get her. We pulled up to the curb, got out, and stood beside the lemon-colored Bugmobile. Sophia came out of the house, took one look, and cried, “Ce s-a întâmplat?” (“What happened?”)
Dan explained. Her face contorted with disgust, Sophia got into the car and grumbled in Romanian as we drove back home. On the way she drew a dollar from her purse and handed the money to Dan saying, “Stop at hardware store and buy black paint.”
That same day, Dan and I scraped away the bugs and applied two coats of black paint. The result was lumpy but at least it was black and not bright yellow.
• • •
Here’s another example of my father’s idiosyncratic thinking. Dan had his own particular logic that rarely, okay, never resulted in a simple one-plus-one-equals-two formula. Late one afternoon on Orange Street, Dan and I were sitting at the kitchen table, Sophia was at the sink, and Lum and Abner were chattering on the radio. (Lum and Abner were radio, movie, and TV stars for twenty-five years. They also were a major influence on country shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show, and Hee Haw. Today they’re almost totally forgotten.) All of a sudden you could see the sky turning an eerie reddish color through the window. At the same moment, a whooshing sound filled the air. The next second, the sky went dark and we heard what sounded like a train thundering up the street. Then, everything was silent.
Dan got up slowly from the table and went to the front door. I was right behind him. He opened the door and stepped out onto the porch with me on his heels. The first thing I noticed was the house across the street no longer had a roof. I saw that trees, not only in our yard but all up and down the street, had either been uprooted or had broken branches dangling from them. Telephone poles, some split down the middle, were a jumble of loose wires. Debris was scattered everywhere. A tornado had torn a path along the river, and Orange Street was one of the hardest hit areas. It was chaos. Dan stood there, hands on his hips, taking in the scene. He looked up the street, then down, then back up again, and shaking his head muttered, “Those damn kids.”
My parents’ quirks were complementary, and they enjoyed each other’s company. They liked to do things together, like dancing. One time they decided to take dancing lessons at a local studio. At the first lesson they were given a strip of paper with two sets of footprints on it, one for the man and the other for the woman. It was a basic dance pattern. The idea was to take the sheet home, put it on the floor, put a record on the phonograph, and step on the appropriate footprints in time with the music. Simple, right? Not for my parents. When I came home from school, I found them standing in the middle of the living room with the music blaring from the phonograph. They looked at me sheepishly and asked if I could help them. Help them? How could I help them when what they’d done was cut out the footprints from the paper and pasted them on the bottom of their shoes? I guess they figured that would make the shoes magically do the steps. When it didn’t happen they were stopped in their glued-on tracks.
Chagrin Falls
We were living the good life in Chagrin Falls when the day came, and I knew it would, because Sophia kept saying it was coming: I was to start school. I was afraid that it might not be the easiest of transitions and I was right. At home I was numero uno and firmly attached to my mother. Forgive me, but I can’t resist saying I learned more at Sophia’s knee than at any other joint. You already know about my wallpapering skill. What you don’t know is that my mother also taught me how to clean, how to cook, and how to sew. Nobody cleans a house better than I do, and I cook very well, too. I was at Sophia’s side when she prepared meals and I watched everything she did. I also honed my cooking skills at the Chagrin Valley Hunt Club. On weekends and during summer vacations, I worked in the club restaurant and on the fox hunt catering truck. My chores at the restaurant consisted of buffing floors, washing and drying pots and pans, emptying garbage, sharpening knives, and peeling and washing whatever needed peeling and washing. Except for the floor buffing, I did the exact same chores at the catering truck. The chef was a good guy. I learned a lot by watching him. After a while, he let me assist him. I made simple dishes and salads. My pièce de résistance (chef talk for “specialty”) was hardboiled eggs. One cooking task I hated was throwing lobsters into boiling water. “They don’t feel a thing,” the chef assured me. Still, I had nightmares about it. I’d wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming about lobsters scratching at the side of a pot desperately trying to get out. Lobster phobia aside, I still can turn out pretty good chow, old-fashioned food with—thank you, Sophia—a slight bow to Romania. Don’t scoff, Romanian cooking blends Turkish, Hungarian, Greek, Slavic, and French styles into a lot of great dishes. You want recipes? Just ask.
In 1940, I was enrolled in Chagrin Falls Exempted School, a big, red-brick building with no distinguishing architecture; it was just a square, red-brick building. The school housed grades one through twelve. When I graduated there were fifty-two students in my class and, although a new high school has been built since then, I’m pretty sure no more than sixty-five or seventy students graduate today. Hey, it’s a small town. The Exempted contained a really big gym, a good-size auditorium, and a large shop with all the tools necessary to make a little shelf to hang at home. When I took Shop in eighth grade, I didn’t make a shelf, I made a bar, the first and only one ever created in the Chagrin Falls Exempted School. Norman Frye, a great guy, taught Shop. Though he questioned why I wanted to make a bar and not a shelf, he let me do it. I set it up in my bedroom and invited my friends over for drinks. I’d get behind my bar and serve Cokes.
My first day at school was challenging. First, in terms of distance—it was a good two-mile walk from our house. Because Dan had to leave at 7:00 A.M. to feed and exercise Mr. White’s horses, I had no ride. My transportation was my two-sizes-too-big, brown-and-white saddle shoes that Sophia “borrowed” from Thomas White’s son, Timmy. She gave them to me saying, “Timmy a abundentei de pantofi. El nu vrea sa la pierdet.” (“Timmy has plenty of shoes. He won’t miss these.”)
Besides the long trek, another hurdle loomed. Up until that first school day, I had never been beyond shouting distance of my mom or dad. Now I was about to spend an entire day out of their decibel range. I was a bit downcast at the prospect. Sophia wasn’t exactly jumping for joy, either. In fact, she walked over to the school and spent hours sitting on the schoolhouse steps waiting for me to appear. Stella Dallas had nothing on Sophia Murgoi Conway. Not surprisingly, my biggest problem that first day was directly attributable to my dear mother who, as I’ve mentioned, had been speaking to me in her native tongue since the day I was born. Romanian was practically my primary language, a fact which Mrs. Palmer, the first grade teacher, couldn’t quite grasp. When she asked me a question in English, I responded in my finest Romanian. She continued in English. Smiling broadly, I replied in, you guessed it, Romanian. My seventeen classmates kept looking back and forth between the teacher and the pupil trying to figure out who was on the right page. At last, very slowly and very deliberately, Mrs. Palmer asked, “Do . . . you . . . speak . . . English?”
“Da, îmi face,” I exclaimed, which translates as “Yes, I do.”
Mrs. Palmer sighed and spoke once again in that slow, deliberate way people speak when the listener seems not to understand. Don’t get me wrong, I understood and could speak English, but somehow I equated “teacher” with “mother” and thought it was more respectful to speak Romanian to her.
“Toma . . . where . . . is . . . your . . . mother?”
I responded just as slowly and just as deliberately, “Ea .
. . este . . . lucru.” (“She is working.”)
Mrs. Palmer gave up.
The day went quickly. By the time the teacher passed out paper cups, poured the milk, and handed out Fig Newtons, my assimilation process had picked up speed. Somewhere between cookie-uri şi lapte (“cookies and milk”) and dismissal time, I decided to file Romanian under What to Speak When I Visit Bucharest and joined my American classmates in using English exclusively. I only talked the old country language with Sophia and I completely stopped doing that around the time I entered the third grade.
“English, Ma, say it in English,” I’d tell her.
Good old Sophia could never say no to Crown Prince Toma, and from that time on gamely struggled to speak like an American. Today, I couldn’t hold a conversation in Romanian if my life depended on it. However, I did put my mother’s mangled English to good use at least twice in my career.
The first practitioner of the Sophia Murgoi speaking style, Mr. Tudball, an ongoing character I portrayed on The Carol Burnett Show, had a funny way of talking that people loved to imitate. What I actually did was put the word “huh” in front of other words, like “huh-what are you huh-doing?” Most people thought my accent was Swedish but it wasn’t, it was Sophia-ish, something I pulled from my memories of listening to her. In the many sketches that were aired, Tudball’s dizzy secretary, Wanda Wiggins, aka Mrs. huh-Wiggins, played brilliantly by Carol, drove him to distraction. Their battles were as much fun for Carol and me to do as they apparently were for audiences to watch.
The second character to benefit from my mother’s eccentric English was Dorf, the stunted fellow in the bad toupee who spoke a similar mishmash of my mother’s tongue. More on him later; I’ve got to get back to school days before I’m arrested for truancy.
Another school-associated trauma, one that was not solved as quickly as the language gap, concerned my clothing, specifically, my pants. What was once a mortifying experience for boys of my generation has been almost completely forgotten. I’m talking about the squeaky pants syndrome that plagued all of us who wore corduroy knickers, and we were legion. You couldn’t take two steps without announcing your approach because the friction of two corduroy-wrapped legs rubbing together made a distinct squeak-squeak sound. The individual squeak was bad enough but an orchestra of squeaks was earsplitting. Try to imagine a school hallway filled with lads racing to class with all those cords rubbing together. If you were wearing corduroy knickers, you could not hope to go undetected. Did you ever hear of a bank robber, CIA agent, or hired assassin outfitted in cords? Mothers loved them; they probably invented them to keep track of their sons. Forget about sneaking past your parents’ bedroom when you came home late from a school-night movie. You could walk as bowlegged as an old cowpoke, but that corduroy couldn’t be shushed. Sophia always knew when I came in the front door because she could hear me coming from four blocks away. She kept me in cords well into the eighth grade until, one glorious day—I must have been fourteen years old—she ditched them and I moved into some silent material. What a joy to walk down the street without people making cracks. For a while, though, I missed it; there was something comforting in being accompanied by the sound of your own pants.
Grades one through six at Chagrin Falls Exempted School were relatively uneventful, but there were bright spots here and there. One of them came first thing in the morning when you arrived at the crossing of Washington and Franklin Streets. Officer Smith, the cop who stood guard there, was a big, friendly guy known to one and all as “Smitty.” Every kid who crossed that intersection had a daily treat. You’d stand poised on the sidewalk and then, at the signal change, rush halfway across into Smitty’s outstretched arms. He’d give you a wide swing in the air, turn you around, put you down, and you’d race to the other side. Sometimes the line of kids waiting to get their swing would be so long, you had to wait for two light changes before it was your turn. Even so, no one was ever late for school because of Officer Smith. Smitty was one of a kind.
There was another Chagrin Falls’ citizen who had a big impact on our lives. His name was Ken Shutts, and he established, owned, and ran Chagrin Hardware. Ken’s store was one of the great destinations of my early life. The shelves were jam-packed with every possible article that came under the heading of hardware, and the store itself was a gathering place. You didn’t just come in for a washer or a lightbulb or a screwdriver; you came to while away the time chatting with your neighbors and the proprietor. Ken was always present; I’m not so sure that he wasn’t born in that store. The only problem with shopping there was that Ken ordered so many things that he lost track of his merchandise. Legend has it that a guy from the IRS once turned up and confronted him.
“I’m from the Internal Revenue Service, and we noticed that you haven’t filed an inventory accounting for Chagrin Hardware. Is there a reason for this, sir?”
“Yes,” answered Ken. “There’s too much stuff to waste time counting it.”
Besides his hardware store duties, Ken Shutts was the town’s unofficial psychiatrist. You got a problem? Step into his office over by the bird feeders. No kidding, if a kid got in trouble, his parents were likely to bring him (him, girls didn’t get into trouble in those days) to Dr. Shutts. Ken would have a serious talk with the wrongdoer and pass sentence. No matter what the crime, the punishment remained the same, two weeks of hard labor in the hardware store. He’d set the offender to counting screws, rubber washers, mouse traps, etc., and apparently never shared the results of their labor with the IRS. I served my time in the Hardware counting drawer knobs. Long after I left Chagrin Falls, Ken Shutts remained a very important part of my life.
When I was in the third year of McHale’s Navy, I received a phone call from my mother, supposedly to discuss her grandchildren. She had an ulterior motive and soon got to the point.
“Tommy, I’m hearing that Ken Shutts is going to hire another person to help in hardware store.”
“So?”
“Well, I’m thinking you know Ken pretty well. Why don’t you see if he would consider taking you on.”
I looked into space for a moment and then, with superhuman control, said into the receiver, “Ma, have you been watching TV for the last three years? I’ve been doing a television series.”
“I know, I know. I saw it, but that crap isn’t going to last. You got chance to get good steady job. You should take it.”
Ken Shutts has gone to the big Hardware in the sky where he’s most likely ordering halos in assorted colors. But the family is still running the store. Please, if you’re anywhere near Chagrin Falls I urge you, drop in. It’s like walking into history.
Throughout my school years, I was an average student—rather, a little below average. Although I wasn’t diagnosed with it until many years later, dyslexia was a big contributor to my less-than-impressive grades. Even though it wasn’t easy to live with, especially because I didn’t realize I was living with it, being dyslexic probably was a key contributor to my comic outlook on life. Being funny was a defensive ploy. I was always the smallest kid in the class; humor kept me from getting smacked around. Whenever I was called on to read aloud in school, I’d mess up words or put things into sentences that were nowhere to be found on the page. Everybody thought I was kidding and my efforts usually ended with my classmates laughing their heads off. One time I did a book report on They Were Expendable, a popular novel about World War II. I read it as They Were Expandable. The class went wild.
“Expandable? What are you talking about, rubber people?”
Their laughter poured over me. I thought, gee, I must be funny. I got a taste of performing the hard way and I liked the results. Of course, I can’t discount the original influential comedic source, Dan and Sophia, my in-house George Burns and Gracie Allen.
Going into the seventh grade was somewhat different. I still had the same classmates, but the classes were held in another section of the school where we had almost no contact with the younger kids. My best friend,
Marty Hawthorne, and I moved on up together. Marty was a bit skinnier and taller than I—then again, who wasn’t—and our combined IQ probably wouldn’t have added up to a hundred and ten. No wonder we enjoyed each other’s company. We liked the same radio shows, sports, movies, and all the stuff that bonds kids. We had another chum, Dean Imars, who was a bit more serious. Dean was taller than I, of course, and stocky. I’m sorry to say that Marty and I often took advantage of Dean, mostly because he was not quite as nutty as we were. Dean had a weekly paper route and was paid on Friday afternoon. Marty and I would meet him and suggest a visit to Bright’s Drugstore. Mr. Bright, of pool/outhouse fame, ran the local pharmacy, a real old-fashioned drugstore complete with soda fountain. We would convince Dean to join us at the fountain, and once the root beer floats we ordered were finished, Marty and I would run off, leaving Dean to pay. After all, he was the wage earner.
The number of stupid things kids did in those days was something. Our hijinks may have been dumb but they weren’t mean, just silly stunts that made us laugh. Generally speaking, no one got hurt, physically or otherwise. For example, after trips to the movie theatre, Marty and I would stop in front of the A&P for a bit of fun. The A&P had a cat that roamed the store at night to keep the rodent population from exploding. The cat’s name was Oscar. The store had a big window in front where cereal boxes were displayed. We’d stand at the window and try to catch Oscar’s attention. He’d almost always come around. When he did appear, we waited till he got close and then we’d start yelling and banging on the window. Poor Oscar would turn tail and run through the stacked boxes of cereal. Down they’d tumble. The idea was to see how many boxes we could get Oscar to knock over. One magical evening, Marty really frightened Oscar, who promptly upended an unbelievable twenty-six boxes of Wheaties. We wrote to General Mills, gave them the count, and asked if they would put a picture of Marty on their box cover. They actually wrote back and said that a kid from Michigan named Howard held the record of thirty-one boxes. We had no way of checking, but I’m sure they were brushing us off. I know I never saw a box of Wheaties with a “Howard” on it.