by Tim Conway
The Rec Center was my playground and learning ground. And, it was my introduction to sex. Not sex-sex, but an introduction to the difference between boys and girls and the answer to the question why it was necessary to have two separate areas for bathers to change. I found out thanks to a hole behind the towel rack that had been poked through the cement wall dividing the dressing areas. The older guys had drilled it for the benefit of all the boys to use but only after they’d had their fill of peeking. For a long while, I couldn’t figure out why anyone would come to the Rec to swim and spend so much time lined up at the wall. One day I finally got on the line myself. As I moved forward, I noticed that the person at the head of the line would crouch down and press his face to the wall. Suddenly, I was that person. The next thing I knew my knees bent beneath me and I was peering through the hole. All I saw were benches lined up beneath hooks on the wall where clothes were hanging. What the heck was this? Guys were spending valuable sports time looking through a hole to see . . . Hold it, what was that? Oh, no! I couldn’t believe my eye. A girl! I strained my eye against the hole to get a better view when someone called out, “That’s it for today. We’re closing the pool. Get dressed and clear out.”
This was the one and only time I was able to use the peephole. That very afternoon, Coach Gurney found out what was going on, and the hole was filled.
Like I said, I loved sports and enjoyed all of them, but it bugged me that I wasn’t able to become a jockey. Lots of kids don’t get to do what they aspire to, and not just little twerps from Ohio. You take a guy like Dwight Eisenhower, the thirty-fourth president of the United States. I read this quote of his:
When I was a small boy in Kansas a friend of mine and I went fishing, and as we sat there in the warmth of the summer afternoon on a river bank, we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him that I wanted to be a real major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he’d like to be president of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.
To the end of his days, Eisenhower swore that not making the baseball team at West Point was one of the greatest disappointments of his life, maybe the greatest. Dwight David Eisenhower and Tim Conway, both thwarted in their childhood quests.
I may have been thwarted but I still had a great time in high school. The guys: Marty, Fitz, Jim, Bob, Billy, Tom. And the girls: Rhea, Barb, Sue, Betty, Alice, Rosalyn, Carolyn, and Carol. Just saying their names brings back such wonderful memories. I can’t turn a page of the Class of ’52 yearbook without a smile and a grateful look back. The kids, the teachers, the wonderful people, and that cozy little town where you could embrace life and know it was going to hug you back.
A Little Higher Learning
I chose to attend Bowling Green State University, Ralph Quesinberry’s alma mater and one of the few schools that would accept me with the grades I sported. (Do I think that Quiz put in a good word for me? You bet I do.) In the fall of 1952, along with my friends Marty Hawthorne, Don Britton, Dick Kenney, and Jim Fitzpatrick I entered BGSU. The first semester, our Chagrin Falls ranks thinned out. Marty brought a trunk full of 45 rpm records, spent most of his time listening to them in his room, and was the first to hit the road back to Chagrin. I hung on, but barely. I had to for my parents’ sake if nothing else. I wasn’t your scholarship kind of guy. Sophia and Dan worked their butts off to put the money together to finance my college years. I swore it would all come back to them; it pleases me that, eventually, I was able to keep my word. When I went off to BGSU, Sophia and Dan gave me fifty dollars in spending money . . . for the entire school year. I never told them that it was gone within days. Money was a big problem. I always needed it. Consequently, I took just about any work that came my way. I had some odd jobs and some even odder ones. And now is about as good a place as any to tell you about a few of them.
My first job was in the dining hall at the fraternity I joined, Phi Delta Theta. I waited on tables and washed dishes. Nothing odd about that, but then I moved things up a notch. Broadly hinting that I was sous-chef at the Chagrin Falls Hunt Club, I told the fraternity’s chef that I had experience in preparing food. Before you could say voilà, I was Phi Delta Theta’s assistant chef. I pulled off this stunt for a good reason; I needed round-the-clock access to the kitchen to carry out a little plan to make extra money. Late at night, I’d go down to the kitchen and hard boil eggs, a lot of eggs. Then I’d make egg salad sandwiches, which I’d take over to nearby sorority houses to sell. Not only did I make money, my social life vastly improved. I was king of the lunch run until my fraternity received a whopping egg bill and fingered me the errant egg man. Back to the tables and the dishes for ex-Chef Conway.
One of the more unusual means of making a buck that I was involved in was a scheme cooked up by my frat brother, Bill Bradshaw. I don’t know how much you know about golf, but there’s usually a body of water somewhere on the course. The public golf course in Toledo had a pretty large lake in front of one of the holes. Bill suspected that an awful lot of golf balls wound up in that lake rather than on the green. We got ourselves to Toledo, rented Aqua-Lungs, and went over to the course. We stripped down to our bathing trunks, put on the Aqua-Lungs, and dove in—to golf ball heaven. There were so many of those little buggers they actually formed a solid floor on the lake bottom. We filled up burlap bags with our loot, brought them over to the local driving range, and sold them for a dime apiece. Including transportation and Aqua-Lung rental, we made a profit. I should have stuck close to Bill; he had a real head for business. On the other hand, my pal Dick Moss had a head that should have been examined.
One Christmas, Moss suggested that we rent a truck, buy some fir trees, put them in the back of the truck, and drive around to houses where we would sell them. We were bringing the trees to the customers instead of their having to go out and buy them. Slight hitch. We’d ring the doorbell, and when the homeowner appeared, we’d ask if they wanted to save time and buy a tree from the back of our truck. Every single time the potential customer would ask us to unload the merchandise so they could take a look. Thirty trees had to be unloaded and reloaded. After a dozen or more attempts we hadn’t made a sale. We decided to cut up the trees and make Christmas wreaths which were a lot easier to unload. We sold most of them but still came up short, thirty bucks’ worth of short. When it came to commerce, I never listened to Moss again.
I was so eager to make money I never turned down a job, and, believe me, there were many times I should have. One, in particular, was a bummer. Cecil Collier, the father of my high school friend Rhea, needed four guys to join him in driving five bus chassis from Detroit to Pittsburgh, a nearly twenty-hour trip. I was home from college and was one of those chosen to make the run. The four of us gathered at Cecil’s garage at five in the morning and found him waiting. Our quintet piled into his Oldsmobile and, with Cecil at the wheel, took off. We drove for five hours in driving rain. Two coffee stops and three toilet breaks later, we arrived at the Detroit garage and found five chassis inside. May I remind you that a chassis is the bare frame of a vehicle? And that’s exactly what awaited us in Detroit, five steel frames each with a steering wheel, a gas pedal, and a brake, but without a cab, a seat, or a windshield. We were each given an orange crate that was placed behind the steering wheel and wired to the chassis. Those crates would be our seats for the next two-hundred-fifty-plus miles. Mercifully, we also were given plastic blow-up pillows to place between our butts and the wooden cases. So, the Lafayette Escadrille mounted their respective chassis, blew up their cushions, put them in the appropriate places, and took off. Did I forget to mention that I was the only member of the team who did not have a driver’s license? I was taking a Driver’s Ed course, but I had very little road time under my belt, or should I say, butt. Speaking of butts, my cushion hit a nail on the crate, sprang a leak, and was as flat as a pancake before we hit the outskirts of Detroit. I took off my jacket, folded it, and slipped it between my crate and me. It
wasn’t much of a cushion and it left me wearing a T-shirt in weather that did not improve.
The trip was a nightmare. The rain never stopped and the noise from the rattletraps we were delivering was deafening. By the time we pulled into the receiving yard, I was soaked through, my ears were ringing, and my backside was all but petrified. I crawled out of the chassis, got into a car and, along with the other three guys—Cecil stayed in Pittsburgh—was driven to the Greyhound station. We caught a bus to Cleveland where I transferred to the Rapid Transit in Warrensville Center to take me to yet another station to catch the bus to Chagrin. At a little past 2 A.M., I sat on my bed at home, holding two lousy twenty-dollar bills in my hand and wondering, “What was I thinking of?” I still shudder, recalling that painful misadventure. There’s something else here, though. All these wacky adventures I experienced stayed with me and later, I incorporated them into comedy sketches I wrote. Come to think of it, I began messing around with comedy in earnest at Bowling Green.
When I joined Phi Delta Theta freshman year, I did some minor entertaining for my fraternity brothers. By “entertaining,” I mean that I took about fifteen jokes from a joke book, put them in order, memorized them, and became the master of ceremonies at the frat house and the Newman Club. The Newman Club, a Catholic social organization, was a second home to me. I often performed there with my friend Dick Moss (of the Christmas tree sales fiasco). I questioned Dick’s business acumen but his comedy sense was attuned to mine. We told the same jokes every Friday night at the Newman Club pizza parties. We also dined on the leftover pizza for the next week. Moss and I branched out from the campus to the local fifty-watt radio station. We did comedy sketches with the morning disc jockey and, from time to time, read the morning news. My dyslexia kicked in from time to time, too, and the results were often funnier than the sketches. On one occasion, I reported a story about President Eisenhower’s recent hospitalization. Instead of announcing, “The president has been speaking with a nurse,” I said, “President Eisenhower has been sleeping with a nurse.”
I had one misadventure after another while I was at BGSU. Some were thrust upon me and others were of my own devising, but in each case, the Devil would get my tongue. I got into situations that I easily could have gotten out of if I’d only given a simple honest answer. Suddenly, however, I was Pinocchio. Stories just poured out, and once I was into them, I refused to yield. Here’s an example:
During the hunting season, you had to be very careful when you were out walking on the campus. Hunters flushed out pheasants from the woods onto the open fields, and when pheasants were flying about four feet off the ground the hunters took aim and fired. On any given day in the season, a lot of shot could come a passerby’s way. One fall afternoon, I was walking to class and thrust my hand into my pocket not realizing that an upside down pencil was already there. The lead point went right into my palm and broke off. It hurt like a son of a gun and was buried too deep for me to get out myself. I took a detour to the infirmary where I showed my hand to a nurse.
“What’s this?” she asked, thus innocently creating one of those charged moments when, and I can’t explain it, I can’t help myself. The answer should have been it’s lead from a pencil, but I found myself saying, “It’s a bullet.”
“A bullet?”
“Yep, a bullet. I was walking across the field and evidently someone took a shot at me and hit my hand.” The words tumbled out of my mouth.
“Well, with a bullet involved,” said the nurse, “I have to report this to the police.”
This is the exact moment when I should have said, “Ah, I’m kidding. It’s lead from a pencil.” What did I say?
“Well, you gotta do what you gotta do.”
So the nurse called the cops. A couple of them showed up and she filled them in. Then they turned to question me. I heard myself getting deeper and deeper in the hole.
“Did you get a look at the guy who shot you?” asked one of the cops.
“Nope, too far away.”
“What kind of gun do you think it was?”
“Ahh, don’t know.”
Now, I was really in the soup but I just couldn’t end it. I was elaborating on my tale when the doctor entered the room. He took my hand, took a look, took out the lead, and held it up.
“I understand you said you had a bullet in your hand.”
“Right,” I answered.
“Well, this is pencil lead,” declared the doctor.
“Yes,” I confirmed, “the guy shot me with a Dixon Ticonderoga 2.”
Why I wasn’t immediately put into an observation ward, I’ll never know. I was beginning to learn that if I looked totally sincere and didn’t back down, I could say almost anything and get away with it. By the way, I still have a tiny piece of that lead in my hand. I refer to it as a war wound.
What was my college social life like I hear you ask? Fine, I hear me answer, adding defensively, I had girlfriends. Some were a little more serious than others, but that’s true for all college kids. There was one I liked a lot, enough to pursue her to the full extent of my ability. Let’s call her Sue. One weekend, I decided to drop in on Sue unannounced, probably not a smart move since Sue went to another college some one hundred and twenty miles from BGSU. I hitchhiked my way over and phoned her when I reached my destination.
“Hi Sue, it’s Tom. I’m here.”
“Where?”
“I’m on your campus and I wondered if you’d like to have lunch with me.”
“Oh dear, well, you see my mother’s here and we’re leaving right now for the country club. Some friends are joining us.”
“Oh,” I answered.
“Well, um, you’re welcome to join us, too,” replied Sue hesitantly.
“Gee, that’d be swell,” I said enthusiastically. I asked for and received the address and told Sue I’d be right over.
I wasn’t exactly dressed for country club dining but I didn’t exactly know that. Oddly enough Sophia and Dan had never belonged to a club, which left me in total ignorance of behavior and dress codes. I went to the address Sue gave me and was confronted with a slightly smaller version of the Taj Mahal. I walked in and immediately was stopped by a guy in uniform. I explained that I was joining Sue for lunch; he said I needed a jacket and tie. And when I explained that I didn’t have either, he grimaced, disappeared, and returned carrying a jacket and tie, a much better jacket and much nicer tie than I had ever owned. I put them on and entered the dining room. Sue was seated at a table, her mother on one side of her, a nice-looking guy on the other, and an older couple seated opposite them. I said hello and slipped into an empty chair at the end of the table. Unbeknownst to me, Sue and her mother were having lunch with Sue’s “boyfriend” and his parents. Could’ve fooled me, I thought I was her boyfriend. I’d met Sue’s mother and got the feeling that she went to bed every night praying that her daughter would meet a nice boy. Her dreams had come true in the other guy, and here was her nightmare crashing the party. Like I said, Sue was a good person and obviously invited me because she felt bad that (1) She was dumping me, and (2) I’d hitchhiked all that way to see her.
I was totally out of my element, which became very evident as the meal progressed. Unfamiliar with some of the advanced tableware, I proceeded to make gaffe after gaffe. Forget the old one about picking up the finger bowl and drinking the water, they didn’t have finger bowls. What they did have was a gravy boat, a piece of crockery I’d never before come across. It’s a small ceramic pitcher attached to a plate underneath. The plate’s there just in case you spill some of the gravy when you are ladling it out of the pitcher. The ladle sits in the bowl and when the boat is passed, you hold on to the handle and scoop out the gravy. Then you put the ladle back in the bowl and, with a broad smile that says I do this every day of the week, you put the bowl down. That day, a waiter put the gravy boat on the table next to me. I didn’t know what it was or what it contained but I had to do something with it. I thought about it and then too
k a wild guess that I had been served soup. I picked up the bowl and was surprised when the bottom plate came along. I tried to separate the two pieces. I gave up when it became obvious they were inseparable. I remember thinking, Okay, I’ll just put the whole piece in front of me while I eat. I moved the gravy boat, picked up the ladle, and proceeded to eat the “soup.” (Do you eat soup or drink soup?) All eyes were on me. I looked up, smiled, drew my napkin across my mouth, and said, “Very good, a little salty, but really very good.”
After lunch, I said good-bye to Sue. I should have said farewell because I never saw her again. I assume she married the nice boy, who didn’t say one word to me during the meal (actually, no one spoke to me but Sue), and that they lived happily ever after. I hitchhiked back to Bowling Green sadder, wiser, and a little sick to my stomach from the gravy.
You’re in the Army Now
Right after I graduated from BGSU in 1956, I volunteered for a two-year hitch in the United States Army. (Why is it when I tell people I was in the army they always ask, “Ours?”) It was peacetime, and my thinking was why should I wait until I was gainfully employed for the draft to get me? This was quite an assumption on my part since I wasn’t anywhere near being employed. It’s possible I enlisted because I didn’t want to go back to the bosom of my loving, loony family, or maybe I enlisted because I just didn’t know what else to do. A lot of my friends did the same thing. I enlisted and after that leap I had to pass a physical. At one point during the exam, a doctor put his fingers on my private parts and said, “Cough.”