he song that I probably hum and sing most is a commercial for a Chevrolet dealership... that closed permanently in 1956. This is, as many things are, because of my father. Well, I had to listen to or go see every single Harvard football game from the time I was four years old. Now, Harvard Football is an oxymoron itself. And it was especially oxymoronic back in the ’50s when the team, playing about a 10-game schedule, would lose 8 or 9 games every year. Year after year after year. But my father was a Harvard football addict and so we had to either go to the games or we had to listen to them on the radio.

    Now when we went to the games, it was a two-and-a-half hour drive from Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, down to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and along the way, we would get LOST!

    Because when my father got lost, it wasn’t a matter of taking the wrong road. When we got lost, we were… “LOST! ALICE, WE ARE LOST!”

    And I learned as a young boy that being lost didn’t mean that you’d ever be able to get back on the road. It meant that you’d driven off into the world of Esher.

    And the exit you’d taken would never feed you back onto the highway. You were in a twilight zone where you were doing an endless Mobius band out there along Exit 13.

    And then we would sit on the uncomfortable poured concrete Harvard football stadium without even some wooden planks for your rear end in comfort, usually in the rain and watch Harvard lose 50-13 and then you’d go home.

    So staying home was much better.

    I forgot all about this after my dad passed away in 1986. I was in the attic and I was going through his stuff that he’d saved there. He was a packrat, saved all kinds of things and I came across a box of all the stubs for the Harvard football games from the time I was age four on.

    And he would always buy the seasoned tickets even for the games if he wasn’t going to go to that were away because he wanted the Harvard sports program so there was this whole box of hundreds and hundreds of tickets. Now, all the away games; the tickets were whole, because they haven’t been ripped off. We listen to those on the radio.

    I came across one stub of a home game that was whole. It wasn’t ripped off, it was the Princeton game in 1951. And I thought, How come this was a home game and we didn’t go to it? And I had only a few days to clean out all my dad’s stuff but everything I ran across, I had to spend about a half an hour with.

    Anyway, I suddenly remembered that that was the day THE CAR WOULDN’T START!

    There were some other words in that sentence, too—there were some adjectives. There were some polysyllabic and colorful adjectives describing the car.

    So we had to listen to the game at home. The game at home wasn’t so bad, because he couldn’t get lost, he could just lose things. “Alice, where are my keys?”

    Games usually started at 2:00, but at 1:00, probably the most boring radio program in the history of radio came on—That was OUV League Football Roundup.

All the teams,

all the scores,

and all the statistics.

And that was brought to us by…

For the best used cars in town today,

Shop at Emerson’s Chevrolet,

Where the price is right and the deal’s okay—

Emerson’s Chevrolet Corner.

You’ll get higher savings on the cars you buy,

’Cuz at Emerson’s, they satisfy.

Everyone is going down to Emerson’s Chevrolet!

Oh, those golden bargains.

Oh, those higher trade-ins.

Everyone is going down to Emerson’s Chevrolet!

You can buy on easy credit!

It’s a cinch to get it!

Everybody’s shopping down

to Emerson’s Chevrolet Corner!

    ow what my father liked to do was check the time on all the clocks to make sure it was exactly 1:00 because he had this thing about time. I was just surprised he didn’t gather all the clocks in the house together into one room because it would’ve made his job easier, but he had to rush around from room to room, making sure that all the hands were in the right place. It was in static when all the clocks would actually go inside with the radio beep which he always turned on at the hour when he was home and he’d go Grinnich Mean Time.

In fact, he was so                      compulsive about time, he had a wrist-                watch he figured that if he left it off     seven                            and a half hours a night, the                                                 drop-in temp-erature                                                            would cause it to                                                        stay on time. So he                                                       even set his alarm                                                           to wake up in time                                                         to put on and take off                                                    the watch so that it                                                        would stay on time.

So he almost caught ALL of OUV League Football Roundup.

    Then it was time for the game. Now it was the Princeton game. And I’m not going to keep you in suspense, I believe the final score was Princeton 54, Harvard 13 that year. Not that there was ever much suspense anyway.