Born on the Fourth of July. Ron Kovic
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still hear strings of firecrackers and cherry bombs going off all over the neighborhood.
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The whole block grew up watching television. There was Howdy Doody and Rootie Kazootie, Cisco Kid and Gabby Hayes, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. The Lone Ranger was on Channel 7. We watched cartoons for hours on Saturdays—Beanie and Cecil, Crusader Rabbit, Woody Woodpecker—and a show with puppets called Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. I sat on the rug in the living room watching Captain Video take off in his spaceship and saw thousands of savages killed by Ramar of the Jungle.
I remember Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show and my sister Sue going crazy in the living room jumping up and down. He kept twanging this big guitar and wiggling his hips, but for some reason they were mostly showing just the top of him. My mother was sitting on the couch with her hands folded in her lap like she was praying, and my dad was in the other room talking about how the Church had advised us all that Sunday that watching Elvis Presley could lead to sin.
I loved God more than anything else in the world back then and I prayed to Him and the Virgin Mary and Jesus and all the saints to be a good boy and a good American. Every night before I went to sleep I knelt down in front of my bed, making the sign of the cross and cupping my hands over my face, sometimes praying so hard I would cry. I asked every night to be good enough to make the major leagues someday. With God anything was possible. I made my first Holy Communion with a cowboy hat on my head and two six-shooters in my hands.
On Saturday nights, Mrs. Jacket drove us to confession, where we waited in line to tell the priest our sins, then walked out of the church feeling refreshed and happy with God and the world again. And then Dad and I and the rest of the kids went to church on Sundays. The church was a big place. It was the most enormous place I’d ever seen, with real quiet people sitting up straight and mumbling things. And I remember smelling this stuff and seeing the priest moving back and forth behind the altar, speaking in words we never understood.
And the Sunday comics and Dad cooking big breakfasts of hash brown potatoes and eggs, filling our bellies and making us feel warm and good inside. After breakfast I read the colorful comics on the living-room rug. There was Dick Tracy and Beetle Bailey, Dagwood and Blondie, Terry and the Pirates, Prince Valiant and Donald Duck, Dondi and Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Uncle Scrooge and Gasoline Alley.
My father was a checker at the A&P. He worked real hard. He was like a big hurricane, always moving with his big strong arms, raking the leaves in the back yard or building new parts to our little house. One summer I remember hammering nails on the roof with him and feeling proud to be up there with him doing all that hard work. Sometimes, he’d get angry because all of us weren’t working, or cleaning or just acting busy. It seemed important to be moving whenever he was around and acting busy if you didn’t have anything to do.
We were always moving, all the kids on the block and me, like there was no tomorrow. We cut up our mothers’ broomsticks, hiding the brooms in the basement and taking the sticks out to Hamilton Avenue for that night’s stickball game, where we’d belt high-bouncing Spalding balls for hours off Kenny’s roof and into little Tommy Law’s hedge. We hit eggballs that used to spin crazily sideways with everyone screaming “Eggball! Eggball!” seeing if the guy who was pitching on one bounce could handle the lopsided pop-up. Whoever hit the ball past the second telephone pole right in back of Kenny’s father’s station wagon, or over Tommy Law’s hedge, made a home run. We played every night in the spring and the summer until it was dark and the only light left on Hamilton Avenue was the street lamp.
We collected Topps baseball cards of our favorite players and traded them and flipped them and scaled them down against the wall at Turner’s Bar.
In the spring we dug up worms and went fishing with Bobby Zimmer. I made a Morse code set with Castiglia, stringing the telegraph wires across the street to his house. We did science experiments with his chemistry set and Bobby and I played red-light-green-light on summer nights when Mom was taking the clothes off the line. And when it got dark my sister Sue and I chased fireflies with glass jars.
In the fall we played touch football in the streets and raked the summer leaves that had turned brown and fallen from the trees. We and our fathers swept them and piled them and packed them into wire baskets by the sides of our houses, burning them and watching the bright embers swirl in the wind. And the trees again stood naked in the back yard like they did every fall and winter and the air became fresh and cold and soon there was ice on the puddles in the streets outside our houses.
We’d all go back to school and for me it was always a frightening experience. I could never understand what was happening there. I remember once they called my mother and told her I had been staring out the window. I tried to listen to them, and sit in the chair behind the desk like they told me to, but I kept looking out that window at the trees and the sky. I couldn’t wait until the last day of school when we all ran out of our classrooms, jumping up and down, throwing our books in the air, singing and shouting “No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks!” We were free. And another summer vacation began for all of us on the block.
When the first snow came we’d get our sleds out of the basement and belly-whop on sheets of ice out on Lee Place in front of Richie’s house. We had snowball fights and built snow forts and snowmen. Castiglia and I and Bobby Zimmer used to grab the back bumpers of cars and see how far we could slide down the street on our shoes. Kenny and I would hide in Parkside Woods plastering the cars that passed along the boulevard with ice balls, then get Bobby and Pete and the rest of the guys and go down to Suicide Hill, a tremendous steep hill by the woods, frozen like glass, with a tree stump at the bottom you had to swerve around. Me and Bobby would head straight for it, and just before we were about to hit it, I’d jam the wooden steering bar with my foot, throwing up sparks and ice, just missing the stump by inches. Then both of us would spin off the sled, rolling down the hill on top of each other, around and around, laughing into a huge snowdrift. We made winter gloves out of our fathers’ socks, packing snowballs with them until they became soaked and frozen and our fingers would become numb and we’d have to take them off. I loved when it snowed, and so did all the rest of the guys on the block.
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Every Saturday afternoon we’d all go down to the movies in the shopping center and watch gigantic prehistoric birds breathe fire, and war movies with John Wayne and Audie Murphy. Bobbie’s mother always packed us a bagful of candy. I’ll never forget Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back. At the end he jumps on top of a flaming tank that’s just about to explode and grabs the machine gun blasting it into the German lines. He was so brave I had chills running up and down my back, wishing it were me up there. There were gasoline flames roaring around his legs, but he just kept firing that machine gun. It was the greatest movie I ever saw in my life.
Castiglia and I saw The Sands of Iwo Jima together. The Marine Corps hymn was playing in the background as we sat glued to our seats, humming the hymn together and watching Sergeant Stryker, played by John Wayne, charge up the hill and get killed just before he reached the top. And then they showed the men raising the flag on Iwo Jima with the marines’ hymn still playing, and Castiglia and I cried in our seats. I loved the song so much, and every time I heard it I would think of John Wayne and the brave men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima that day. I would think of them and cry. Like Mickey Mantle and the fabulous New York Yankees, John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima became one of my heroes.
We’d go home and make up movies like the ones we’d just seen or the ones that were on TV night after night. We’d use our Christmas toys—the Matty Mattel machine guns and grenades, the little green plastic soldiers with guns and flamethrowers in their hands. My favorites were the green plastic men with bazookas. They blasted holes through the enemy. They wiped them out at thirty feet just above the coffee table. They dug in on the front lawn and survived countless artillery attacks. They burned with high-propane lighter fluid and a quartergallon of gasoline or were thrown into the raging fires of autumn leaves blasting into a million pieces.
On Saturdays after the movies all the guys would go down to Sally’s Woods—Pete and Kenny and Bobbie and me, with plastic battery-operated machine guns, cap pistols, and sticks. We turned the woods into a battlefield. We