Lee Iron and Steel. the large scrapyard in Sanford, North Carolina, is a very busy place with people constantly bringing in scrap metal. But everyday from 12:00 to 12:45, while the scrapyard workers take their lunch, the yard is open to those who want to claim ‘treasures’ before they are disposed. You are required to check in and don a safety vest and then you can peruse the yard and retrieve anything you like, paying for it as you leave.
Pure metal objects: steel, aluminum and stainless are priced by the pound, and the prices of non-metallic items are negotiated when you leave the yard. Consequently, it’s beneficial to take only those pieces that you need, separating them from whatever unnecessary parts to which they may be attached.

I hadn’t been to this particular junkyard yet, and I went there for the first time 2 weeks ago, unsure about the process, but I realized quickly that I was woefully unprepared for the visit. I arrived just before 12 and lined up in front of the entrance building with about a dozen or so other treasure hunters. Most of them appeared to be older than me – 65 to 75 years old, so I felt confident about getting access to the newest items first. Although I’m no spring chicken, I’m an ex-cyclist and, until recently, an avid runner, so I knew that I’m still fast enough to beat these guys to the good stuff.
When we got the OK to enter the yard I moved quickly towards the newest piles of stuff, but I noticed that instead of moving towards the loot, the old timers headed around to the back of the building and emerged pulling and pushing a variety of wagons, dollies and carts that they had brought with them – each of which was loaded with an array of cutting and mechanical tools!

These guys started working their way around the yard cutting, hacking and wrenching away at stuff while I has standing there banging 2 pieces of junk together in an effort to try and free the pieces I wanted. They looked like well oiled machines and I looked like a monkey – I looked down at my hands and realized that my opposable thumbs were the only thing at that moment separating me from the Great Apes! It was a humbling experience!
At the end of 45 minutes, these guys emerged with an incredible amount of valuable material, while I walked out with a heavy duty tricycle and a axle/wheel assembly from an old refer dolly (I was looking for wheels for my next project). Although I only wanted the wheels, I negotiated  a price of $3 for the 2 assemblies – not a bad deal in the end.

So now I have a new plan:  I’ve been collecting parts for the construction of a heavy duty, off road wagon, made completely from salvaged material, for use when I go to those ‘pick-ur-own’ fruit farms near me – it was going to make it look like one of those old fashioned Conestoga wagons that the pioneers used to settle this country in the 19th century (I was going to name it “The Prairie Schooner”). But now, I’m going to upgrade that to a wagon that can also be used during my junkyard adventures – something to which I can attach hacking, cutting and mechanical tools. I think I’ll make it look like a little Sherman Tank – and I’m going to name it “The War Wagon”!

I’ve been investigating the genealogy of my family lately and as I do, I find out some interesting and funny facts. Here’s one that gave me a good laugh.
My Grandfather, Franchesco DiNardo, arrived in the US from Italy in 1905. At the Ellis Island web site I discovered a log entry for his arrival on the ship named Sicilia. The logs, with one line per immigrant, have columns with spaces for recording such information as age, sex, home city, US destination city, etc. One column in the entry was for Occupation, and when I looked at that entry for my grandfather I laughed so hard I almost cried! The entry said, Occupation: Peasant.

Actually, that was a very common entry for many of the arrivals, but the cruelty of it just struck me as funny – I mean, they could have just written ‘none’, right? Anyway, the first thing I did was to call my brother Gary, because I knew he would appreciate this. I told him, and after we both laughed he made a comment that fit perfectly. He said, ‘Only in America!’

In New York, Italian Americans were often called Wops. The Word WOP was derived from the Ellis Island term ‘With Out Passport”. The term wasn’t intended to be derogatory (it was just brutally blunt), but it did convey a certain disdain. During the great Italian immigration is was not uncommon for many folks to arrive without passports. There were so many people leaving Italy for the US in the early 1900s that the Italian ports were filled with people wanting to board ships. Since there was no time to process them, they were just packed onto ships with whatever they could carry, which was very little for most of these folks who, like my grandfather, came from small, poor villages. Hence, With Out Passport. For my grandfather, arriving her to start a new life, the least of his worries was arriving With Out Passport …. heck … be probably arrived WithOut Shoes!

On Sunday, my buddy Farrell and I went to the Greensboro NC Gun Show. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular but I like to go there occasionally to be entertained by the people who tend to show up for these shows. Most of the people who go are everyday people just like us, but – as anyone who has ever been to a gun show knows – it can draw some really interesting characters!

We stopped at one table and Farrell picked up a 12 gauge pistol grip shotgun and stood there examining it for a while. After a few moments, the old redneck sitting on a folding chair behind the table smiles up at Farrell and bellows out, “That gun look GOOD on ya’ boy!”
We stopped at another table and Farrell picked up an old M4 bayonet in a leather sheath. Farrell asked the guy behind the table (I don’t know his name, but let’s call him Bubba) about the price
Farrell: “What do ya’ want for this M4?”.
Bubba: “240 dollars”
Farrell: “240 dollars! Are you kidding! I wouldn’t pay half that!”
Bubba looks at Farrell, wrinkles his nose and says: “well …. come on back when ya’ll got a job!”

Like I say, I wasn’t there to buy anything in particular, but I saw many interesting items – one of them was an old WW2 M1 Carbine made by IBM (I only learned recently that IBM made a very small number of those carbines for the US military during WW2). As an IBM employee for almost 30 years I’m interested in IBM memorabilia, but at $650 (which is a STEAL) I passed it up. I ended up buying a military surplus P38 Can opener for $1 .

Now that I’m retired I have time to look back on my career and appreciate the many high points I’ve achieved and the adventures I’ve experienced. I rode that wave of software development for 35 years – and it was a real wild ride! 12 years ago I was awarded this Invention Achievement Award by IBM for my first successful patent application in internet technology. Actually, it was my second patent application, but the first one, in 1994, was filtered out before the end of the patent application process because it was not considered a commercially viable application (by the lawyers – sad story). The patent for which this award was given proposed an alternate technique for displaying web pages in a variety of human languages. I started writing software for the internet in 1993.

On Friday, October 13 1967, an incident occurred at the local Hullabaloo Teen Club in East Rochester, NY that was covered extensively by local TV and newspaper articles for the next few days. Although the coverage of the actual events of that night were somewhat accurate, the press speculated on the cause of the problem and cast an unfair characterization of the ‘participants’ in the incident. This is what really happened  … and I know because I was there.

Prologue.

When we were young boys, from the age of 12 or 13 and up, going to teen dances was one of the activities that my buddies and I really looked forward to. It gave us an opportunity to meet girls and it also allowed us to experience this tribal, communal sharing of motion and music that happens on the dance floor. Because it was home to the Eastman School of Music there was no shortage of good music, and good musicians, in Rochester New York.
We first went to street dances held regularly on summer Saturday nights and to the teen dances held in church basements during the rest of the year. We danced to recorded music and got a chance to practice the dance steps we saw on American Bandstand each week. Later, we graduated to the teen dance clubs that hosted the popular rock bands that performed throughout city venues.

Our group was composed of about a dozen guys who moved from dance to dance each week, mostly looking for girls and excitement. Some of us, like me, were dancers – we loved to be on the dance floor gyrating to the music blasting out of the speakers at the front of the band stand. Others of us weren’t there to dance, they were more interested in the inevitable friction that was generated by the rival groups of boys who ventured out of their own neighborhoods to become part of the larger city scene. There was hardly a night when a scuffle didn’t break out between members of rival neighborhood groups, but it was rarely more than a flurry of hands and feet being thrown in brief exchanges between groups of boys. Eventually the size of our group grew as we merged with the rival groups from adjacent neighborhoods, with whom we had become ‘familiar’ .

Although I was there primarily to dance and meet girls, I had a knack for getting right in the middle of everything. I was usually the one trying to cool things off by getting between combatants, but if things got started I was usually right there mixing it up with everyone else. I get ejected from more than a few dances because of my participation in these scuffles – I also got my butt kicked a lot because I didn’t have the sense to stand down, and my attitude was a lot larger than my skinny body.

As we got older our world grew larger because we now had access to cars and could follow our favorite bands when they played in the granges, bowling allies and teen clubs in the suburban towns surrounding Rochester. And although we were popular with the ‘towny’ girls in those clubs we found ourselves resented by the local boys, who considered us competition for the attention of the girls – and we did got attention!

It was pretty much the dancers of our group that started going to the suburban teen venues – the ‘fighters’ chose to stay in the city and continue the stark street life with which they had become comfortable. So when we went to those dances we usually came with 6 to 12 guys – which was about what we could fit in one or two cars. Just as there had been friction between groups of boys in the city, there was friction between us and the suburban boys, and whatever friction existed internally between them was put aside so that they could focus on the outsiders – the ‘city trash.’ And that’s what they called us – city trash, city scum, etc, and we had to put up with that week after week, in town after town – Webster, Henrietta, Greece, Penfield, and all the rest.

But the trash talk was the least of the problem. We pretty much put up with it, but boys will be boys, and it usually escalated into either spitting or tripping or pushing – and although we were usually outnumbered 10 to 1, we drew the line at any physical contact. Remember – we had spent the last 3 or 4 years struggling for our space at city dances, we weren’t about to let these ‘townies’ push us around. So most nights consisted of a few scuffles and sometimes escalated into major exchanges between small groups of us. We were never daunted by their overwhelming numbers – most of them were all talk, but every one of us – even though we were the dancers from our group – was perfectly willing and able to fight when any one of us was in trouble. We stood our ground, protected ourselves and protected each other.
This went on for a couple of years, but on Saturday night, October 7, 1967 everything changed.

Saturday October 7, 1967.

That night, 6 of us jumped into Lenny’s car and headed out to the Hullabaloo Teen Club in East Rochester New York. Hullabaloo was a national chain of teen dance clubs, and the East Rochester location was a popular venue for our favorite bands and it was a place where we had been dancing for a while. While there that night, we were subjected to the usual cat calling, but no scuffles had occurred. When the night ended and we were leaving the club I remember thinking how nice it had been to just dance and talk with the local girls that we had come to know, and I was pleased that we managed to have a good time without major problems. But all that ended as soon as we stepped out the door into the parking lot. There, between the exit and our car, was a large group of townies – probably 40 or 50 of them – and it was clear from the way they positioned themselves that they were waiting for us.

Their was no way to go around them and get to the car, so we walked right through the group. As we did, they immediately started punching and kicking and screaming at us, and we punched and kicked and screamed right back. I don’t know how many times I got hit or how many times I landed a punch or kick, but it seemed like forever before we made it to the car and climbed in. And we were in pretty bad shape! Most of us were bleeding, swollen and bruised, but Ron was hurt the most. His nose was broken, his mouth was swollen and he was covered with blood. I got behind the wheel of Lenny’s car – I was usually the driver, regardless of whoever’s car we went in, because I had recently turned 18 so I was old enough to drive at night in New York. Just as I put the car into gear, a townie came to the open window and put a shotgun up against my head and said something like, “Get the hell out of this town scumbag, and don’t ever come back!”.

As we drove silently back into the city, bleeding and groaning, we knew without even talking about it that we couldn’t let this group of cowards drive us from this town. If we did, we knew that we’d never be able to go to any of the suburban dances without facing the same treatment. It was quiet in that car for a long time, and then finally someone said, “OK – who are we bringing with us when we go back next week?” I had already begun building that list in my head even before the car left the parking lot.

We spent most of the next week preparing for our return to East Rochester. We spread the word among the rest of our group that we would ALL go back the next week and fix this situation once and for all. We had been willing to put up with the nuisance behavior – the name calling and the minor scuffles – but we needed to let these guys know who they were up against, and what we could do if we lost patience with them.
So we’d be going back the next week, and we were bringing with us the rest of ‘the boys’ …. and as they say in New York – “Dese guys don’t dance!”

Friday October 13, 1967.

On Friday night, October 13, 1967 we returned to The Hullabaloo Club. This newspaper article describes it fairly well: