over50music.com

Pittsburgh, 1966. (All names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent.)

When I was sixteen — still young enough to be silly, but old enough to have my first boyfriend – I had an eclectic group of friends from the neighborhood. We were the oddballs. The ones who didn’t quite fit in with the “popular” girls. So in the way that oddballs do, we decided that we were the “rebels”, the nonconformists. Our particular brand of nonconformism conformed to certain conventions. We smoked “ciggy-poohs” and they had to be Marlboros. (This was pre-marijuana). We wore jeans, exclusively when we weren’t at school. We teased our hair. We swore. We wore lipstick and eyeliner. We experimented with beer, but admittedly, I was never any good at that particular skill. We thought we knew all about boys and we shared what little we did know. All of this made us a rather tight-knit gaggle of girls.

Most Friday nights we drove around Squirrel Hill, smoking “ciggy-poohs”, talking about boys, laughing, and listening to the Top Twenty Countdown on the radio. It was my sister and me, the Martini twins, Betty and Marie, and Joy Greenblatt.

Now, Joy was a special case. She usually did the driving in her Ford Falcon. She drove like a guy. She had a lead foot and loved to burn rubber. She had a wild, untamable mane of hair and always drove with her left arm out the window and a cigarette in her right hand. (She chain-smoked, unlike the rest of us who probably only smoked for show, just to say that we did). She had a deep contralto voice and laughed at everything. She was the one who decided our destination for the night, which was usually the Eat ‘n Park drive-in where we treated ourselves to double cheeseburgers, French fries and chocolate shakes. Joy was a holy terror. Looking back now some 45 years later, I suspect that she was a very troubled and insecure young woman, but at the time, we all were in awe of her raw, unfettered bravado.

So on this particular summer night in 1966, we were driving around, feeling our oats, and itching to make trouble. Joy had the most creative idea! She suggested that we drive to Schenley Oval – the “lovers’ lane” section of the park. This was where all the kids (who, unlike us, had dates) went to “neck and pet” in their cars. There was a fountain in the middle of a part of the park called Schenley Oval. It was a two-part plan: First, we would feed a bottle of cheap bubble bath into the gushing fountain, just to see the effect. (My sister provided the bubbles). The second part, and this was a much more challenging proposal, was to go from car to car tickling the bare feet that hung out many of the windows. From the back seat I made a faint protestation, “Couldn’t we get in trouble?” Joy laughed and peeled out into the night. I folded my hands and prayed. KDKA was blaring the 1964 hit, “Leader of the Pack”. As the Shangri-La’s solemnly intoned the schmaltzy story of a fatal motorcycle accident (complete with the sound of a real motorcycle revving – the true hook of the song) we zipped along the winding hills of Pittsburgh, and I wondered if our 1960 Ford Falcon was doomed to a similar fate!

Finally, we arrived at our destination. My sister slipped out of the car and dumped the entire bottle of Soaky’s Bubble Bath (the coveted Goofy edition) into the fountain. We all screamed with laughter as the fountain began to foam at the mouth. Then we executed Part 2.

As Joy crept along at about five miles per hour, our headlights out, Marie Martini, who was riding shotgun, produced a feather duster and began to tickle feet. It was not hard to find naked feet at 9:00 on a summer night in Schenley Oval. We heard a lot of grunts and groans and an occasional muttered, “Hey! What the . . .?!” About five minutes into our little foray, we became aware of a car right on our tail with its brights on. An angry “greaser”, a beefy guy sporting a Brylcreamed ducktail and a black leather jacket, was swearing at us with his left fist pumping up and down outside the window, a sullen looking blonde with a beehive hairdo on the passenger side. When a car pulled out in front of us, we were trapped. The “greaser” strode out of his car, slammed the door, and popped his beet-red face into Joy’s window. He wreaked of Old Spice and Chesterfields. “What-the-hell do you think you’re doing!” Without waiting for an answer, he stomped around to the front of the car and bent the radio antenna down at a ninety-degree angle until it snapped off the car. He then strode back into his car, put his arm around the blonde, and waited until we were able to proceed forward. He followed us out of the park, his brights practically blinding us, and only stopped tailing us when we rounded the corner onto Forbes Avenue.

We drove home as slowly as a dirge. For once, Joy obeyed all the traffic laws, slowing at every yellow light, stopping at every stop sign, each of us praying that the menacing figure in his cherry ’57 Chevy would not suddenly reappear with his gang to do further damage. Naturally, we drove home in silence, our radio being totally useless without the antenna.

I don’t remember what the repercussions were once we got home, or how we paid for the damage to Joy’s car, which was, after all, her father’s car. But I’ll never forget Joy – Our very own “Leader of the Pack”.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.