I LEARNED THE IMPORTANCE of being silly from my father. His sense of humor was infectious and my earliest memories are colored by an aura of laughter. He could turn anything into jest. I remember endless times in which my stomach would ache and tears would flow from laughter I could not stop. When he chased me down to admonish or punish me in some way, my collie dog, Blackie, would get between us and let out rapid-fire threatening growls at my father until we all ended up rolling on the floor with sides splitting, punishment forgotten—or, perhaps, humor as punishment was lesson enough.
It was the forties and times were simpler. Our first TV, a 1950 Packard-Bell, came with a record-making machine. As fascinating as the TV was in the beginning, and what I remember most is wrestling—Wild Red Berry and Gorgeous George and my grandmother throwing her shoe at the new TV because Red was doing bad things to Gorgeous—what occupied us most was the recording machine. My father set up regular Sunday “broadcasts” duly recorded on those 45-rpm sized vinyl disks. He would announce at the beginning that this was “station FART operating on 10,000 kilosquawts.” Everyone in the family became a reporter and we tried to outdo one another in good old Scot’s scatological “funning,” as we called it. I remember when we would all be laughing hysterically, Blackie would go running in circles, adding to the mirth, but the cats, all silver Persians which we raised for sale, remained untouched and aloof as is the pride of cats.
The dinner table was an arena for food games. My favorite was tossing peas into my sister’s gaping and eager mouth. When my father would make scrambled eggs with squirrel brains, he’d wear a coonskin cap while frying up (he’d been a short-order cooked when he escaped the hills of West Virginia and came to California) and would pose us puzzles to see if we were getting smarter as a result of such fare.