Coming off a miserably hot trip to the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix/BMW 5er Fest, I figured I'd be writing about that by now. Instead, as I sat in a Bob Evans restaurant checking facebook halfway across Indiana on the way home last night, I saw the news that Pink had died the day before. I also saw that at least one other classmate didn't recall him, so I figure it's my duty as his old friend to fix that.
During elementary school, I was lucky to have two best friends. Everybody who knew me in those years also knows Homer. Aside from the name, Homer was and is a unique character and we are still good friends today. Pink was the other one. These two were polar opposites in just about every imaginable way. While Lee Richards served as my second mother and Homer a spare brother (with whom I got along better), if I wasn't at Richards' with Homer, odds are I was somewhere with Pink. I don't remember exactly when I met Pink. It had to be by the third grade because I remember rejoicing with him when we both found out that we'd been assigned to Central School's resident 'hottie' (Mrs. Patterson) for the fourth grade.
Pink was an only child of working folks. He'd gotten his nickname from his mother, who simply described how he looked as a baby. For that matter, he was always on the pink side because he was freckled, so he went with it. 'Alan' was a little too bland for his taste anyway. The Affolters lived in a small single story house on Second Drive. I spent days there. Anita was my chain-smoking second mom. Bob wasn't usually home because he was working (Joy Manufacturing, I think), but I remember him as a rough and good-natured guy who also sucked down cigarettes like they were candy. They were always generous hosts, even if I was there daily.
Early on, Pink and I fished. I don't think we ever fished anywhere but the Tuscora Park lake. We never caught anything worth catching, but we fished anyway. If we felt adventurous, we'd take a big hike out north of 'The Lagoon'. At the time, this was a nearly impenetrable wilderness of thorns and briars. It would take us hours to go a half mile and generally no one knew where we were nor when we'd be back. Sometimes, I was sure we'd never get out, even though we never left that small valley. If we weren't fishing or hiking, we were playing with toy soldiers, airplanes, and tanks. We fought every WWII battle over and over in his living room, in his bedroom or in his yard. OK; maybe not the Italians. I guess neither of us knew the Italians had been involved at the time. I do remember that the battalion on the sofa was rarely defeated due to the difficulty of scaling the front. Things were more even when the battleground was the hedge out front or the abandoned ruins of my sisters' Flintstones city-mounted-on-a-board. While we argued over our respective casualty counts, it was an academic exercise, and we never really fought.
Later, we started building models. First it was warplanes (so we could attack the infantry and armor, of course!) and later cars. Pink was my motorhead friend. We both liked Pontiacs and Fords while he occasionally strayed off to build a Chevy. We spent hours at LaFountaine's basement (back around to the right corner) downtown, and at Dale's Hobby Shop, a block east, pondering our next acquisitions. We spent days on end gluing, painting, and customizing in his bedroom. In the end, I don't think either of us built much of anything to be proud of, but we'd enter them in contests anyway and one of us might snag a ribbon. We drooled over the latest and greatest drag racers in the magazines we shared. We 'bench raced' for hours, although neither of us was old enough to drive yet.
We played sports. Football, baseball, and basketball. Day-long games. Wherever we could find a venue, we played. While it was often at 'Krieger Field' at the corner of Second and Park, it was nearly as often in the big open field next to Pink's house at the corner of Dort Lane and Second Drive. To this day, I don't know who owned it, but we were always there playing baseball and football - mostly because there were no windows close enough to break, as there were at my house.
The other players almost always included Tom West, who lived around the corner on Dale Lane, and Dick Avon, another half a block away. Tom's older brother (Ed?) and a couple of his friends would occasionally join us and then we felt like we were playing with the pros. While Pink and Homer were my best friends, we were rarely a threesome. Homer and Pink had completely different interests which rarely, if ever, converged.
John Kennedy was killed when we were in the sixth grade. At 11 and 12 (I'm a few months older.), we felt the shock of the nation, but we weren't quite old enough to completely know why. After the added sensation of seeing Lee Harvey Oswald killed on live television, we got together the next day (Sunday) instead of watching the funeral. I remember it was a bright and not-too-cool day for the season. One of those 'high contrast' days. We were sitting on our bikes on Lake Street in the park, looking out over the lake in the early afternoon. We speculated whether the funeral was over. Pink said it must be, because 'Catholics can't have Mass after noon'. I had no clue, so I went with that (later finding out it hadn't been the case since 1956). I have no idea why that sticks in my mind all these years later.
When the British Invasion washed over us a few months later, we were both caught up in this 'new' rock & roll, but we ended up as contrarian fans of the patriotic-themed Paul Revere and the Raiders. We played records for hours in Pink's room (neither of us played an instrument although I took some abortive keyboards lessons for which I never practiced - because I was off playing with Pink) and we competed to see who could come up with the newest stuff the soonest. I clearly remember him telling me about the Raiders' "Spirit of '67" in his hands before I knew it had been released. Then I went to his house (it was Christmas Day, or the day after) and we nearly wore it out playing it. We like The Grassroots and The Buckinghams a lot. LaFountain's was the place to shop 45s and LPs. Right inside the east entrance, to your left. There they all were.
Pink was also my horndog guy friend. We regularly talked about the girls we thought were hot. Turned out Pink was a 'boob' man and I wasn't, so we never faced the prospect of fighting over any women either of us might hope to attract. Not that either of us had a clue how to do that anyway, in spite of the fact that we'd stealthily read Bob's haphazardly-hidden Playboy magazines when we got the chance.
It wasn't long after that that we diverged. Pink became 'one of the shop guys'. He'd never been much of a scholar and there was no real expectation for him to be anything but what he was and what he became. He was going to start working right out of high school and I was going to be headed to college. My friends were different than his by then and, although I'd always been a kind of 'in between' type, I gravitated more toward the college prep kids and he went the other way. That was it. I rarely saw him through high school and only a handful of times afterward. The last time, he was planted on a bar stool like he'd grown there and the decades of sitting drinking beer for hours every night showed. Pink was never slimmer than 'stocky', even as a child, and he was by then 'morbidly obese', to use the kindest term. I figured then he wouldn't be around long because he seemed to have no real inclination to change. We talked briefly, we shook hands; and then I moved on. We never stopped being friends, but we never continued to be, either ... and maybe that's why I'm saddened to hear he's gone.
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