Notes for Vacationers in Sicily

 Sicily vacationers,

If you ONLY went to Taormina Sicily for three days, your whole two-week Sicily trip would be worth it. Cruiseship people stop there for an hour or two Some even get off the ship. You can see Mount Etna from there.

It is on the east coast of Sicily. Explore the ancient Greek/Roman amphitheater, cut into volcanic rock, on the ocean facing Italy. Zigzag walk to the top of the mountain, go to the opera. Mangia, mangia, mangia. Eat, eat, eat. One of our favorite spots in the world. My Sicilian barber Carole Santacrocci said don’t miss it. 

Mt Etna Volcano Tour: I did not want to do it after seeing it on National Geographic. Cold, grey and blustery. Wear a coat, bring a blanket. DO NOT miss it.  It blew its top fairly recently. Our friend Mauricio said that it was so bright that you could read a newspaper there at night in Catania. It might not be open for the tour. Spend the whole day there if it is available. If it’s not, don't spend the whole day there. Ja ja  ... little joke there

Trapani: miss it. The baseball Dimaggio's were from an island off of the coast of Trapani called Isla Mujeres. ycmthis sup. Dad went to San Francisco and eventually brought everyone over. San Francisco is in our state of California.

“Where have you gone Joe Dimaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you / Woo woo woo”

Villa Romano del Casale: A farmer found it buried when he hit a corner with his plow. The best mosaics Sandy and I have EVER seen. Spend the day. Have gelato in the town of Piazza Armerina. This is one of the very Top Four things to see in Sicily. No! Not having gelato, seeing the ruins. My former friend Don Salmond would have thought that. Astounding!!  Most tourists miss it.

Yes!  There really is a town there called Corleone.

Cefalu: Really cute town on the northern coast. Shop, shop, shop. Climb to the top of the big rock. Try the pasta alla Norma and we sincerely hope that you like eggplant. Lots and lots of eggplant.

Syracuse: My least favorite. Everything is written in Italian. Dull and grey and run down. Beautiful area where the Cattedrale Metropolitano della is. Everywhere you look they spell cathedral wrong. Take photos. Eat drink at Volpi's or Bianchi's and people watch. A few ancient Greek stones in the town center. Big deal. I enjoyed Tombstone Arizona more.

Palermo: A big city but worth seeing for a day. Ask for Luigi.

Agrigento Piazza Armerini: You will think that you are in Greece. On the south coast not far from Africa. General George Patton was here. Spend the day. Wear good shoes and wear a wide hat. It is HOT! and wide open. It looks like the Parthenon, but way more beautiful and way more to see.

Two weeks is a long time for Sicily. You could go north to Naples, not the one in Florida, Amalfi Coast road and Herculaneum and Pompeii, and or a day boat trip to Capri.

If you don’t send me a postcard I will be pissed. Not from Maine, from Sicily.

Roberto Baconi     

110 Stagecoach Drive  

Marshfield, MA 02050

Really, I found them along the roadside ...

 

... but not these four knives. From left to right:

• My brother Mike's hunting knife. He left the building without his knife in 1984 at age 36.

• An orange switchblade knife issued to P-2-V Navy plane servicemen to cut yourself away if you parachute into a tree or some other weird place -- like among the lines of a telephone pole, or even a clothesline pole. Hey, it could happen!

(Lockheed P-2 anti-submarine warfare. 1,177 built. Retired from the military in 1984.)

• A combat knife, Ka-bar, issued to me in Port Hueneme after Class A School in California in 1964. I once took Liberty in Oxnard and saw Tex Ritter in a small honky tonk and I can prove it.

Well at the time, they were thinking of places to send us, and one of them wasn’t Hawaii or Reykjavik. Believe it or not, with most Seabees going to Cau Rong, Da Nang, a sailor from Malden did get his orders to Iceland. His name was Mark Ruane. How do I remember that from 57 years ago?  And why?

• Meanwhile at my phenomenal knife collection, a dinner knife, stamped with USN, from the galley in Argentia, Newfoundland in 1964. Pretty fancy silverware used while the Navy orchestra entertained us. It is actually silver, and needs to be polished. Who knew? Excellent spelling words -- orchestra. Silver - wear? - ware?  Only beaten by the word phenomenal. I think I spelled it correctly.

During my training runs of 23 years and 54,000 miles, I have seen a lot of STUFF.

Wild animals, tools, people kissing in cars (cleaned up for the youngsters in my following) litter, empty nips, 27,000 cans and bottles in 2015, a suicide by electrical cord hanging from a tree on a hot, beautiful, sunny, July afternoon, ... and these twenty knives found alongside the road.

I stuck them in a window sill in Garagemahall. No, I do not know why. 

The other night on TV, on Channel 5’s Chronicle show, they had a man who was a semi-hoarder of grandfather clocks and pocket watches. I fear the disease has hit me, and at my advanced age, I need to unload some STUFF. I thought taking a picture of my knives might make me get rid of them after the documentation. Sorta, maybe.

Check out my knives. Kitchen knives, a Jim Bowie knife -- you of course remember him from Mission San Antonio de Valero or the Alamo. Filet knives, bread knives, a serrated knife, a paring knife, a grilling fork, a butter knife, and an oyster shucking knife. Many of the knives are beach-related. Marshfield is on the Atlantic with five phenomenal beaches.

Everyone knows that our American Indians sharpened their knives only on one side. But so do the Japanese, even to this day.

Which knife should I send you? If not, how about taking one of my 266 scrapbook photo albums? I don’t know why. "I don’t know why I love you like I do. I don’t know why. I just do."

useless information to the lonely from            

- Tocino

My Father's Stillson Wrench

Original owner: Francis Chelsea Bacon (Bob’s  Dad)

In the Seabees, my father was a motor machinist mate. I was always impressed with his knowledge of knots. He knew them all. Square knots, running bowlines that didn’t slip, and even simple half hitches.

In Port Hueneme, California, at Seabee Electrician Power Pole School, we learned the bowline to rescue a man from the top of a 35 foot power pole. Everyone calls power poles telephone poles but they ain’t. Bowline sounds like a way to tie up a boat so that it doesn’t get away. That knot does not slip.

In his civilian life he was a millwright, welder, and blacksmith. Knowing ropes and come alongs and torches, he could fix The Crusher at New England Lime Company when it broke down. Huge, no tailgate Euclids would dump the broken up limestone into the The Crusher. It was loud, and you could easily hear it all over the Italian section of town, Zylonite, where we lived. When it broke down, everything from Greylock Mountain to the valley floor in Adams stopped. Except the blasting. Every day around 2pm, the quarry crew would blast a huge section that would then topple into the open pit quarry bottom. You never went near the quarry around 2pm. Never.

Rosa Carnazzola, at her grocery store, would have to put the cans that had fallen back on the shelves. Mom would straighten her picture frames in our little house. As I was saying before you interrupted, everything stopped. The ball mills that pulverized the soft ball size limestone, the kilns that heated the powder, the bagging machines that had nothing to bag if nothing was coming from the quarry. The empty tractor trailer trucks and railroad cars that would haul the lime out of state. Some of it even went to Yankee Stadium. There were no Red Sox fans in Adams. We got our TV signal and news from WRGB Albany. It is in New York. 

Dad would drive up the limestone road with five or six men and they would do the repair. Sometimes it would take days.

In Ms. Malley's English class in 1962, each of us had to stand in front of the class and make a presentation. I made mine using Dad’s Stillson wrench pictured above. It is the actual one.

Ms. Malley wore her hair pulled back and she had leather, quite substantial, tie shoes, which she wore with her below-the-knee dresses. She wore granny glasses and took NO prisoners. She was partial to the high school football players. My halfback Adams High captain father was scouted by the New York Giants. But then the war came. In 1939 she was my father's English teacher also.

Just like Samuel Colt of Connecticut did with his pistol, Daniel Stillman of New Hampshire, around 1865, made his prototype from wood. What was new about it was unlike the monkey wrench, the teeth on the Stillson were on an angle. He paid someone to build it of steel, and every plumber or swimming pool builder you know today has a Stillson. 

I carry this one in my pick up truck. The loop loc swimming pool safety covers are secured with brass screws into the concrete. There are around 40 of them. They get full of sand, or they get stripped, and sometimes you cannot unscrew them -- unless of course you own your Dad’s Stillson wrench.

Say Kids, What Time Is It?

 I am reading a book called The Other Custers.

George Armstrong Custer, who married Elizabeth Bacon, had three brothers and one sister. The book covers from their births, through the Civil War and Little Big Horn in Montana Territory, and more. Brother Tom won two Medals of Honor. Boston was not named after our town but after a small town in Pennsylvania called East Boston where their mother was from. I am still reading.

His brother Nevin was the only brother who did not go to war. Tom and Boston, and sister Maggie's husband  James Calhoun, all died on that hill near the Big Horn River. In the end Captain Myles Kehoe's horse, Comanche, was the only warm body of the Seventh Calvary still standing. Crazy Horse, Gaul, and Sitting Bull were not harmed.

Nevin had a daughter named Clarabelle. We know Clara from Hotel Cabanas on Isla Mujeres.

Why is that name familiar? Then it hit me, “Say kids, what time is it?"

Sing with me, "It’s Howdy Doody time, it's Howdy Doody time!"

It ran on TV from 1946 until 1960. Buffalo Bob was the host. How did he come up with that name? He lived to be 80. Some of the characters were 

• Clarabell

•  Princess SummerFallWinterSpring

• puppet Howdy, of course  
• Phineas T. Bluster
• and Don Salmond's favorite, Chief Thunderthud

No wonder that children born in the 40’s, especially Republicans, are dull witted.

Bob Bacon 1945