Windsor Gardens Life

Windsor Life Page 26 Windsor Writers A Cozy Place by Pete Clark A long time ago when my bones didn’t creak with every attempt at moving, the southeast corner of U.S. 26 and Main Street marked the beginning of Shoshoni, Wyoming’s business district. The Shawver Hotel’s entrance faced out on 26 and the part of the hotel’s floor facing Main Street housed the Yellowstone Drug Store. On the other side of Main Street was the Golden Rule Store. The upper floor of that building contained Wind River Lodge No. 25 AF&AM along with Eastern Star and Job’s Daughters. My father was a member of the Lodge. The Yellowstone Drug Store was my favorite place in Shoshoni. The drug store was composed of a soda fountain with a counter and a few booths, surrounded by walls, glass display cases and counters filled with general merchandise including over-the-counter drugs and books. If the pharmacist saw something in a book salesman’s inventory that he thought I might like, he would buy a copy and hold it under the counter until I came into the store. The Yellowstone Drugstore served the best malts and milkshakes in the country. During the winter when the temperature was way below zero, sometimes I would go into the drugstore during school lunch hour and buy a double-dip black walnut ice cream cone. Every bite would find the ice cream more frozen and nobody asked for bites. Sputnik’s reaching Earth Orbit in October, 1957 sparked a huge interest in amateur rocketry among high school students. I was no exception and was able to get the components for rocket fuel through the drug store. My father taught me to use household products to create fuzzes and explosive propellants. Rocket building and launching was safe and exciting when handled with care. The drugstore was owned and operated by a registered pharmacist who lived in Shoshoni and was a Navy veteran of World War II. He had served as a pharmacist’s mate and had gone ashore with the Marines as a medic when they assaulted Japanese-held islands. He told me that during the battle for control of one of the islands, a native came to the Marine position and asked him to go to a village and help the chief’s daughter who was enduring a difficult child birth. He went to the village and performed midwife services that brought a strong healthy child into the world without undue harm to the mother. When everything was finished and he was ready to return to the Marine camp he was informed that if things had gone wrong, the islanders had planned to kill him. Today’s chain drugstores come up short in almost all categories when compared with the Yellowstone Drugstore, which has been gone for decades. Today the corners of U.S. 26 and Main Street, except for the above mentioned Masonic Lodge, are abandoned. The only business left on Shoshoni’s Main Street is the Wagon Wheel Bar. It is sad to see the block filled with empty windows staring across at each other, but I am part of the problem. I left and never moved back. You Might Need Mazel to Say What You Mean by Irv Sternberg Consider the dilemma of the foreign-born young man or woman who is struggling to learn English as a second language. They are taught that one mouse becomes “mice” if there is more than one. But more than one house becomes “houses.” And while the newcomer struggles with this inconsistency – and many more – they must learn the many slang terms which form almost a second English language. When I was a young man, if I called a girl fat I was insulting her. In more current times, the word “phat” could mean great, wonderful or terrific. A couple who is “intense” is serious; a “dingbat” is a less than an intelligent person; a “kegger” is a beer party; someone “just off the boat” is naïve or uninformed; and if you’re “jerking me around” you’re “pulling my leg” or wasting my time. More timely slang includes such new words as “mezzed” for messed, and the phrase “pump and dump,” means a one-night stand or to drive off without paying for gas. I used to think that anyone who was “sick” suffered from a physical or mental illness. Some young people today use that word to mean you are cool or awesome. Is it any wonder I’m as confused by current conversation as the immigrant who “just got off the boat?” And then there’s the complexity of English grammar and proper usage. Despite drills in English class, so many of us still puzzle over whether to use that or which, who or whom, not to mention the conundrum created when we must select a pronoun. I cringe when I hear an adult, who should know better, say: “Me and him went to a nice restaurant,” or “my grandmother left a generous inheritance to my sister and I.” If all that isn’t enough to send José back to Mexico City, consider the influence of previously-arrived immigrants whose native tongue has infiltrated the English we learned growing up. Italian, Irish, Polish, Germans and others – all have contributed to the richer vocabulary we have today. In my old neighborhood in Newark, N.J., I learned that a “goombah” was an Italian relative; “blarney” was an Irishman’s exaggeration; and “kaput” in German meant broken. Most of the Polish words I learned I can’t repeat here. After all, I learned them in the street. And then there are the Yiddish words spoken by my mother and father when they didn’t want my sister and me to know what they were talking about. In the New York metropolitan area, where there are more than two million Jews, the English language is spoken with a generous dose of Yiddish terms: chutzpah means nerve, schlepp means to carry something, mazel means luck. You even hear it in the most staid corporate offices in Manhattan. Some of my non-Jewish friends back East know more Yiddish than I do. Colin Powell, before he became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs-of- Staff and Secretary of State, worked for a Jewish merchant as a kid in the South Bronx and learned to converse fluently in Yiddish, You Might Need Mazel to Say What You Mean continued on page 27