The Personal HIstory of Michael F. Nyiri Celebrating My first half century on this Planet.

I was told that I had a twin. A stillborn twin. I was half of a whole, and the other half perished. In the womb, my life was shared. We were a pair. Companions. As mother gave birth, in a painful operation performed by a seeming quack, my life began alone. Thus began my legacy. I might have been dropped. At the same time my "sister" was inconveniently thrown away, like so much trash. When my mother told me the story of my birth, it frightened and amazed me. I had always felt some sort of cosmic connection with some other unknown soul, and with my mother's happenstance recounting of what must be the quintessential of all life moments, I screamed and ran to my bedroom. I claimed I didn't beilieve it.....Yet I believed it without question.

I, Michael Franklin Nyiri, was born at about half past 5 A.M. on May 1st, 1953. I was merely one of the thousands of baby boomers created in a fit of orgasmic splendor by all the returning soldiers from what my father used to call "the big war." I was one of many, yet a singular soul who had found his earthly receptacle. At the moment of my birth, from how my parents later described it when I had calmed down, it must have been painful. Painful and bloody. My vessel chose life. My ill-fated "sister" did not. I was granted breath and life. Flesh and bone. Mind and Heart. I was almost ready to begin my journey through the painful existence called life.

On those very few occasions when my parents saw fit to divulge the story of my birth, it always contained veiled references to the fact that my head exited the womb in a partially crushed condition. The doctor was not the most professional of physicians. My father is said to have flown into a rage at the sight of my sister, which the doctor tried to pass of as afterbirth. Dad supposedly threatened the doctor with certain death if he was not able to save me, and mold my head back to some semblance of "normal". I can feel the bumps on the back of my head. I have never given much thought that perhaps everybody else on the planet does not have a series of valleys and depressions near the back of his skull. I lived. Father didn't kill the doctor. Mother survived her pain, and sired two more children, my sister, nineteen months after I was born, and then my brother, nineteen months after that.

Chapter Two: The Family Moves to California

My early childhood was spent in Nampa, Idaho, a very small town on the outskirts of Boise, the state's Capitol. Even in the present, now, as the gentle strains of memory wash over me, I can remember wisps of snow falling in winter, helping my grandmother to open the sluice gates of the irrigation ditches to "water" the garden in summer, and standing by the incinerator, which was like a large outside oven, watching the trash being burned in the fall. I don't have any early memories of the house I lived in, and I think the memories of Grandmother were strengthened because the family visited her twice while I was growing up, and the memories of place compounded with the earlier times spent with her. But I do remember brief snippets of a life in Idaho before we moved. Very clearly I can see a snowman with a carrot nose and coal for eyes, wearing a hat with a red band. He might have been smoking my Dad's pipe. I remember sitting in the back of a truck somewhere on an old main street, watching life unfold. These memories are among my first.

Mother and Father had married in their thirties, after the war. Frank had divorced his first wife, whom he married shortly before he went into the army at 16, soon after the fighting had stopped. He met Edna, my mother, in Maine, and they lived in a number of small apartments on the East Coast, in Maine and in Massachusetts before moving to Idaho. Father was what they used to call a jack-of-all-trades, or the consummate handyman, able to "work with his hands". He had been a train conductor, a prize fighter, a soldier, a photographer and a knockabout. He impressed my future mother with his worldliness and charm. I was born very soon thereafter.

At two years of age, my parents, my younger sister Mary Jo, my stuffed dog Nicky, and I moved to California where my father had been promoted to a position as warehouse manager of the Joe Lowe Corporation (later called Popsicle Industries), the company which created and sold the Popsicle brand of ice cream treats. While in Idaho, though barely able to comprehend my existence, I do remember that my dad had a number of jobs, selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door, and selling Chevrolet automobiles on a car lot. I do have a strong memory of sitting in the back seat of our 1947 Chevy coupe traveling from Idaho to California. The memories of Los Angeles in 1955 totally erased any strong sense of place I had for Idaho.

 

Los Angeles, 1955. A city in the throes of growing pains, expanding with concrete and mortar. The first vivid memory I have of driving down the streets of Los Angeles were the "electric buses" which used the old Red Car lines. The spiderweb of electric lines strung above the city streets impressed my small mind with their complexity. The "tunnels" connecting the Harbor Freeway to the Pasadena Freeway seemed to have been blasted through the hillsides by some giant of engineering prowess. Around the city were a series of intricately patterned concrete bridges. Traffic was everywhere. Belching smoke and blaring horns. In 1955 the tallest building in L.A. was City Hall, now dwarfed by skyscrapers, but a visible landmark when we moved to the city. We settled in the Silver Lake district in a rented property, and then moved to Highland Park pretty rapidly, and rented a small house on a culdesac leading to the York Street bridge over the Pasadena Freeway. Highland Park still retains some of the historic charm of being a close suburb of the city proper, and I still have fond memories of spending lazy Sundays under the trees in the park.

My early school experience didn't include kindergarten. Since my mother, a domineering fussbudget whose anal retentive traits I inherited fullblown, took the time to "teach" me how to read and write before the age of five, I was placed into the first grade at Garvanza School in Highland Park in 1958. The school still stands, and whenever I pass an elementary school these days, I am still overwhelmed at the feelings I absorbed when first going through the gates and into the classrooms of academia. We didn't spend too much time in Highland Park, but to my six year old conscience, the years there felt substantial. As awareness became apparent in my psyche, the house in Highland Park, at "107 Oak Terrace",in a culdesac which was torn down in the early seventies, overlooking the "gulley" as my mother used to call the precipice at the end of the street where the hills overlooked the curve of the Pasadena Freeway, bore me many important early memories. I first "fell in love" with a little girl named Kimberly who lived down the street and also attended Garvanza. My little brother Daniel was born in Los Angeles, at County General Hospital, a now crumbling landmark. I remember is the times spent playing with both my brother and my sister, in the yard, in the culdesac area (but never too close to the "gulley"), and in the parks. At school, the shapely legs of the young teacher passed over our little bodies as we took our naps. My aunt Evelyn lived in Echo Park and though my parents' sense of "style" in decorating our rented house seems to have been borne of the forties, my aunt's place was strictly "modern". Her kitchen had boomerang linoleum on the counter tops and we drank milk out of shiny aluminum glasses. By 1960 my father had saved enough money to buy a house, and the family moved again, this time presumably for good, to a house in the San Gabriel Valley area of L.A. in El Monte. The place was incredibly small, but my dad, being one of those "handymen", promised my mother that soon he would transform the two bedroom, one bath house into a showplace even better than the house in which Aunt Evelyn lived.

Chapter Three: The Sixties Begin in El Monte

The trip from Highland Park into "downtown" L.A. was very short. Los Angeles has always been known as a sprawling metropolis, but when you live fairly close to the city's center, the sense of place while in the city proper leads one to believe he really lives in Los Angeles. Highland Park is not that far away, and when my father first drove the family to the new house in El Monte, it wasn't on freeways, and the ride seemed to go on forever. I remember feeling sad that we would be leaving our home, especially when it seemed we were moving far away from my beloved L.A. proper into a large anonymous grid of suburban blocks with cookie cutter homes, most of which were built en masse in the few decades since the war to accommodate the rising tide of the baby boom, of which I was on the back end.

Mother introduced me to my new first grade teacher, and I began school life in El Monte at Shirpser School, a much smaller institution than Garvanza. El Monte was a "suburb" whereas Highland Park was a close neighborhood of Los Angeles. I will always feel like an "urban" child, simply because L.A. is such a big city, but it's sprawling nature means that each neighborhood can feel like an individual small town. El Monte is centrally located, so there was ample access to a large amount of civic and state areas. The "beach" and the "mountains" are "freeway close", and there was certainly no reason to be bored growing up.

Although the experience of having a lot of places to go to means that one feels more a part of the "world", when one is young, the immediate world is what's inside one's garden gate. My mother loved to putter in her garden. She was an aficianado of "rock gardens", and turned our front yard into a veritable desert. Each of us children, my sister, brother, and I, were assigned "chores". Mine were emptying the trash, and mowing the yard. We weren't allowed to freely walk around the neighborhood, even though at that time things were relatively safe in the urban sprawl. My mother, being the dictatorial sort, wanted to make sure she had her eye on her brood at all times. I don't particularly feel that she was overbearing, or that I spent a bad childhood. She was artistic and joined with us in our playtime pursuits.

Father was at work most of the time, in his job at the Popsicle manufacturing plant. I remember, although we were rambunctious at times, my siblings and I were throughout our childhood pretty well behaved. If we got out of line, Mother would mention it to Dad in her noon telephone conversation with him, and we had to suffer the pains of waiting to see what he would do about the particular situation when he got home. Of course Dad never had to do anything but unbuckle his belt, and usually we stayed "good". Looking back, I realize that my childhood was rather strict, and some might say my mother was too controlling. But since I seem to have inherited her "anal retentive" and "controlling" nature, perhaps I see it less so than my siblings. I consider that the environment of spare the rod and spoil the child helped to insill "family values" in me, and although I have never married nor raised a family of my own, my memories of my youth are dear ones, and I feel that most of the problems with "kids today" might stem from the lack of authoritarianism when it comes to parenting in the present.

Chapter Four: An Insular Brood

Throughout elementary school, my family was fairly tight-knit. Father, although away during the weekdays, came home about six p.m. each night for dinner, and usually spent the evenings reading the newspaper and watching television or listening to sports on the radio. Mother cooked, cleaned, and raised us, and joined her husband in the evenings. In the early sixties, the television was already established as the "family center" after dinner, but I remember our evenings sometimes revolved around family endeavors, like playing games, singing hymns around the dinner table, and "performing" skits and musical numbers in homemade variety shows for my parents.

My brother and I were very close, and our "playtime" activities included acting as movie moguls, actors (and actresses when need be) and performing our own "movies" from start to finish. Our collaborative efforts also ran to creating home grown "magazines" and "comic books". Sister was sometimes involved, and sometimes I would play with my sister instead of my brother, but memory serves to tell me we seldom played all together for long because it was always a "two against one" scenario when my brother, sister, and I got together. Each of us children had a large wooden toy box, constructed and painted by my father to hold our personal toys. We never lacked toys. Those toys that were community property were given their own place. Tinkertoys and plastic bricks had their own tubes. Green army men and cowboys and indians occupied the "little men drawer". Building blocks, including those my dad cut and polished in his woodworking shop were to be found in the "block box". My sister had her own room in the front of the house, and my brother and I shared a room. Mother decorated our room with themed curtains and bedspreads. Daniel's theme was the old west, and mine was transportation. My curtains contained a whistling steam locomotive. The wallpaper on my part of the room was decorated with "old car" graphics. I had remained fascinated with automobiles, trucks, and busses after first viewing the L.A. traffic when moving to L.A. My toy box was filled with model cars of all sizes.

Daniel and I established our own "worlds" with our toys, and the denizens of these "worlds" would interact during shared playtime. Daniel created "Cowboytown" and I had "Cartown". We were skilled at drawing, and drew picture books about our "lands". The inhabitants of Cartown were small plastic automobiles that were purchased in bags. Cartown had a mayor, civic leaders, heroes, and villians. At our house, playtime was always elaborate, with a large amount of set up time. The weather is usually nice in Southern California, and we children played in our rather large backyard often and for long periods of time. There were only three of us, but we participated in badmitton games and softball. Summers could find us using exploded cardboard boxes as slip and slides.

I had friends from school throughout the sixth grade, as did my siblings, but we could only visit school friends who happened to be related to mom's PTA cronies. Mother was a whirlwind when it came to the PTA, exercising her creative nature by desinging posters, flyers, logos, and felt boards for the schoolrooms. There was plenty of social engaging amongst us and some of the neighborhood kids. We weren't completely isolated from life, but sometimes it seemed so, especially when someone wanted to do something against our parent's wishes.

We attended baseball games, first the Dodgers, then the Angels. The grass always seemed super green at the ballpark. The family would spend selected Friday nights at the El Monte Drive In, where my love of the movies was born. The family was pretty much always together. I do have a distinct impression that my parents actually had separate interests and were not that close physically, but they always made time for their children.

Chapter Five: Do It Yourself Home

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