For my father, Halloween was just a warm up to the big event, a mere pick up game on the way to the World Series. The real showdown was the Fourth of July parade on Ashton Road. Forget about dressing up the kids like space aliens or super heroes, this was about something grander, something aspirational, edifying even. This was about beating the Kubeks.
There was still snow on the ground when the scheming began. You could see it on Dad’s face, a faraway look at the dinner table, a pause in mid-sentence, a mental note tucked away for future exploration. We knew what was going on, we knew the themes were beginning to take shape. The march to Ashton Road had begun. And you can bet it had begun five doors down at the Kubek house.
Ashton runs perpendicular to East Monmouth, our street, and the intersection of the two was close enough to see from our front yard. On July 4th Ashton would be lined with people waving flags, a river of red, white and blue running the entire half mile between East Monmouth and Fairmont Boulevard. Midway down the block would be a reviewing stand where the bigwigs stood. These would include the principal of Fairfax Elementary, the president of the PTA, representatives of the Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts, the Girl Scouts and Brownies, maybe even the Chief of The Indian Guides. If it was an election year you can bet the mayor of Cleveland Heights would be there (he probably hit four or five parades that day). And of course there were the three ladies who made up the Ashton Road Parade Committee. They spent all year raising money, getting the necessary permits from the city, and lining up participants. More importantly, they would decide the winner of the big competition. The Spencers and the Kubeks were almost always in the top five so these three ladies were always very much in our minds.
The rivalry began in earnest in the summer of 1963. The Kubeks offered a tribute to John Glenn, the astronaut who had recently orbited the planet. The Spencer kids were the glamorous Kennedys. John played the part of JFK, Amy, arrayed in pink suit and pillbox hat, was Jackie, and I was baby Caroline, sporting a blond wig and pushed along in a baby carriage (I have no memory of this but the photographic evidence is indisputable). We won handily, probably due more to the fact that Cleveland Heights was solidly Democratic than to the merits of our parade entry (in retrospect I think the Kubek’s idea was more imaginative). And of course because everyone loved JFK (except for Oswald, who five months later would assassinate him in Dallas).
The Kubeks upped the ante in 1964 (the same year as the Surgeon General’s warning) with “The Dangers of Smoking,” which featured three of the Kubek kids—Bonnie, Kim, and Robbie—costumed in cardboard boxes painted to look like cigarette packs—Wintons, Camels, and Lucky Strikes—while Candy, the oldest, was dressed up like a big tombstone with “RIP” written across it in large letters. Our entry was embarrassingly predictable: three little Uncle Sams riding bicycles festooned with red, white and blue crepe paper. We got creamed. Even Dad, a two-pack-a-day smoker, had to admit the Kubeks hit it out of the park.
The Rout of 1964 was a wake up call for my father. He would not be caught sleeping again. The following year we came roaring back with the most elaborate entry Ashton Road had ever seen. It was so impressive it made the front page of The Sun Press. Dad had worked on it in secret for weeks. Not even we knew what it was. Every evening we could hear him out there in the garage sawing and hammering away. Though we whined and protested, none of us was allowed in there. Even after we boosted John up to peek through one of the windows all he could see was a large shape under a tarp. Dad was concerned—rightly—that if we found out what it was we would blab and it would get back to the Kubeks. He warned us that even if we were able to get into the garage we would never be able to remove the tarp because he had secured the ropes that held it down with a “bolen,” a type of knot he said only sailors used, a knot so strong it could support the weight of the Queen Mary (the ocean liner, not Her Highness). And if by some freak stroke of luck we were able to untie one of those knots, we would never be able to retie it, not in a million years, and Dad would know what we had done. If that were to happen he swore he would cancel the 4th of July, Halloween, and Christmas that year. We decided not to call his bluff.
The night before the parade Dad went out to the garage one last time. We were supposed to be sleeping but instead we snuck into John’s room, which was at the back of the house and had a good view of the garage. John stared through a pair of binoculars, the kind made for kids but still pretty good. “Whatever it is, it’s big.” Bigger than a car? “No, not that big, but taller than one.” “It’s square and it’s black.” A spaceship? The Batmobile? “No, stupid. Spaceships are round and the Batmobile’s low to the ground.” What could it be then? “Wait a minute,” John said. “It’s moving. He’s pulling it out of the garage.”Pulling it? “Holy moly,” John said. What? What?!? “It’s a float!” That’s when we heard Mom on the stairs and had to scatter to our beds, pulling up the covers and pretending to be asleep. But none of us slept. Not for a long time.
A float? An actual float? Ashton Road had never seen a float.
The morning of the 4th Dad was out there before any of us had gotten out of bed. Mom had set out cereal bowls on the breakfast table but we walked straight past them to the back door. Dad stood on a platform which rested on four wheels—real wheels with real tires, the kind you see on a wheel barrow or a soapbox derby car. He was pounding nails into what looked like a large black box, maybe five foot square.
“What is it?” I whispered to my brother.
“It’s a house you idiot.”
Actually, it was a shack, a life sized tar paper shack, complete with a front porch and two kids’ rocking chairs for sitting. Dad was busy painting a sign of some sort when the three of us started exploring, climbing on the platform, poking around inside the shack (you had to stoop down to go in there). Dad finished his sign and affixed it to one of the front corners of the platform with a couple of nails. The sign said “AppalAshton Rd.” We had no idea what it meant, though John pretended he did. Dad tried to explain it to us, that the shack symbolized Appalachia and Amy and I, who were to sit on the front porch dressed as hillbillies, represented the illiterate, backwoods people of West Virginia, and that John, dressed in a coat and tie and sporting a cowboy hat, was President Johnson. The theme of the float was what he called “The War on Poverty,” which wasn’t an actual war but a program to bring electricity to the poor hillbillies and teach them how to read. We had no idea what he was talking about. We didn’t care though, we just knew the Spencers had the coolest Fourth of July entry Ashton Road had ever seen.
When the float pulled onto Ashton Road what started as a few murmurs erupted into loud applause. Even the Kubeks, who knew instantly that their entry, “Democracy Comes to Vietnam,” was dead on arrival, cheered as Dad’s magnificent creation rolled past them. No one had ever seen anything like it on Ashton Road.
It was all down hill from there. When the parade was over the tarpaper shack was parked behind the garage, where we kids spent hours each day pretending it was a fort or a castle or a haunted house. Our favorite game was to pretend it was that solitary confinement box they tortured prisoners with in “Bridge on the River Kwai.” We took turns playing Alec Guinness, seeing how long we could last before the heat made us cry uncle, which wasn’t very long because with the sun beating down on all that black tarpaper it was like a hundred and twenty degrees in there. Eventually that same summer sun melted the seams of the tar paper and caused the walls and roof to curl and crack. A late August downpour caved in the roof entirely. After that we didn’t have much use for the thing.
Dad lost interest too. He knew it would be near impossible to top “AppelAshton” and never seriously attempted it. We did a lame red, white and blue fashion show thing the following year and I can’t even remember what we did the year after that. Dad was just phoning it in, especially now that the Kubeks were pulling out all the stops (their “Salute to Expo ‘67” swept the awards that year). The other thing was the mood of the country had started to creep into the annual competition. The cracks that were opening up in society at large began to appear on Ashton Road. The friendly competition that existed between us and the Kubeks wasn’t all that friendly anymore. We greeted their “Tribute to the Green Berets” with the same stony silence they showed our “Eugene McCarthy for President.” And it wasn’t just us. The Archibalds’ “Hippie Love-In” entry, with its psychedelic music and kids in long-hair wigs and granny glasses, sparked a heated argument between Mr. Beale, who found it amusing, and Mr. Hartell, who thought it an insult to “Real Americans”—at least the ones who lived on Ashton Road. Between Nixon, Vietnam, and the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, celebrating the Fourth had itself become controversial. And so the crowds grew thinner. One year there were so few entries they considered canceling the parade altogether.
Things were starting to change around our house too. Soon my brother and sister would themselves be swept up in that hippie culture with its promise of “free love” and spiritual enlightenment through the use of recreational drugs. I wanted desperately to join them but, being the baby, I would once again be left behind. As for my dad, he too would be left behind, for, though a good, open minded liberal, he would be at a loss to explain why my brother insisted on looking and dressing and acting the way he did, not to mention why he said the things he said. The tensions of the home often erupted into loud, angry exchanges, usually at the dinner table.
By early fall of the year our famous float wowed the crowds on Ashton Road the hillbilly shack had collapsed into a pile of moldering tarpaper and two-by-fours. Dad broke it down into neat piles, bound them together with twine, and set them out on the tree lawn for the garbage collectors. And that was that.
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