Ernie: The Autobiography Read Online Free PDF

It’s too bad, really.
    Mrs. Simone made a lot of pizza. That’s how pizza got started: with moms who had dough left over from making bread. They’d roll it out and spread some tomato sauce on top with some salami and mushrooms or whatever they had there, and heat it for dinner. Today, people like Mrs. Simone, making homemade pies, would be wealthy! Maybe she should have gone to New York and worked with Oscar.
    My favorite activity was hiking on Pine Rock Mountain. Joey and I felt like explorers, picking among the boulders and thistles. You didn’t worry about Lyme disease back then. If a tick bit you, you burned it off with a cigarette or hot match. If you got poison ivy, you washed and scratched.
    We used to go everywhere together. We’d go swimming, always bare, at Martha’s Hole and Ear Hole and all kinds of places. Back then nobody thought anything of boys skinny-dipping. We didn’t go in the lake—which was actually some kind of quarry that had filled with water—because too many people had drowned there. If you threw something in you couldn’t see it hit bottom. It was that deep.
    We also used to go to Farnham’s Farm to steal apples and vegetables we couldn’t grow. We didn’t do it to be mean but to help our folks. The more we ate there, the less we had to eat at home. I’d always tell my mother “I ate at Joey’s,” and he’d tell his Mom he ate at my place. Fortunately, Mr. Farnham never caught us. I don’t know what story we would have told him. He was always busy with a big stone crusher he owned. It kept grinding rock that was hauled from Pine Rock Mountain. The stone was used to make roadbeds and such. Maybe it was Mr. Farnham, or maybe I just got bigger, but when I went back to my old home Pine Lock seemed more like a hill than a mountain.
    One night, we went looking for celery because we wanted something to munch on. We were crossing the Beaverdale Cemetery when we came to a big hedge that separated the graveyard from a large garden. As we started to go through it, up popped several heads. We ran like the dickens.
    “Hey, where you going?” hissed a voice.
    It was three of our buddies who had just finished searching for potatoes in the same garden. It was crook meeting crook. Since they were already over there, they grabbed a few stalks for us. They weren’t just being nice; they liked the danger.
    Joey and I also knew a spot where bakery trucks would drop off cartons of two-day-old bread they couldn’t sell anymore. They left it outside the bakery where, I suppose, it was going to be ground into bread crumbs or croutons or some such. We always took as many of those boxes as we could carry. Sometimes more, hiding some of them and then going back. The first time I brought it home, my mother asked, “Where did you get all this stuff?”
    I told her and she worked some wonders with it to freshen it up—putting it in the oven with water, remoisturizing it—and it tasted just fine.
    I started seeing less and less of Joey as we grew older, since he had to work with his mother and father so they could save money and buy a house. Occasionally, when I had the time, I would help them out. My buddy Joey Simone had gone into business selling fish and chips. He had a little store of his own and also brought his products to factories to sell. I remember one day Joey and I were rattling along in his truck. You could hear every bolt and piston and spring in that thing— boom, bidda boom, ping, bang.
    I said, “My God, doesn’t this thing drive you crazy?”
    Joey said, “No, I just turn up the radio a little louder.”
    Now that I think of it, maybe Joey was the forefather of the iPod generation!

Chapter 5

A Little Family History

    N orth Haven, Connecticut, was our family town. That’s where my parents and their siblings stayed and had children. My Uncle Freddie became a good mechanic. My father was a jack-of-all-trades. My Uncle Joe ran a steam shovel for the International Silver Company in