Estimated cost for the repairs needed were expected to be $500,000 to $1 million a year. The total city budget for 1985 topped out at $426,403. Nowadays that might get you a Hyundai. Don’t expect the touch screen.
For 13-year-old me, the rough roads of Hope were a taken-for-granted thing. I remember a neighbor setting up a basketball goal at the west end of Davis Avenue. Some of us got our Spaldings or Wilsons out to try dribbling. We found within seconds that while we might have had aspirations toward the handles of Isiah Thomas, we could only keep the ball in bounds by shamelessly travelling. We were all Dominque Wilkins, the Atlanta Hawks star of the time who was nearly as known for running without dribbling as he was for his trapeze-artist dunks.
I was not the better player for being able to travel so much. Alas there was no pothole on Davis Avenue that was “my spot.” Let’s just say that as a basketball player in my early teens, I was a great prospect to become an English major. You could tell from my arc and follow-through I would eventually be the go-to guy the team trusted at the end of the fourth quarter--if anybody needed a synopsis of Franz Kaffka’s “The Hunger Artist.”
Moving down, the Star reveals a photo off a truck seemingly mid-turn at the intersection of Hazel and East Third on Tuesday at 4:15 p.m. Its engine had stalled and it took 30 minutes to get it out of the way of one of the most trafficked streets in East Third and one of its top 25 in Hazel. I have no memory of this. At that time I was likely home on Davis Avenue, checking out a grainy EP VHS recording of Late Night with David Letterman from the night before. The glum comic George Miller and the manic multi-impressionist Joe Piscopo were on. Maybe Piscopo brought out his perfect impression of the gap-toothed sardonic host. If you can stand the Youtube commercials that are so wince-inducing you may want to turn your credit card over to them to JUST MAKE IT STOP, you can see George Miller’s appearance the night before in which he asked the nation, “Why are people drinking Diet Coke?” and answered his own question.
“Because they’re fat and thirsty.”
But this was really marking time until I could get to the Smithpeters’ issue of the Hope Star, often being the first of our clan of four to unroll it and collect the beige and inky rubber band. I hope October 16th was not a day I used my fingers to sling shot the thing at Cliffy, our cat, but I do not know that the better angel of my nature prevailed.
On page two I could have read, may have read and unfortunately forgotten, Mary Margaret Haynes’ collection of News from Washington. A couple of the town’s residents took the chance during their retirement to take their camper up through Kansas, Nebraska, Montana and then through three Canadian Provinces to make camp near Haines, Alaska. The wife reported a rocking sensation as she was trying to sleep, which the husband told her was “in her imagination.” They slumbered on.
Here's what they found in the morning, Haynes (not Haines) said. “Their camp coolers stored under the camper had been opened. In the cooler had been smoked salmon, hot dogs, three packages of lunch meat, margarine, cheese, cabbage and carrots. A bear had eaten all of the meat, one cube of margarine and dug his claws into the cheese.” How could I forget this one? The bear who devoured all those cold cuts and cheese and then, tasting margarine, decided one square was enough.
They got the news from a ranger that this had probably been the work of a three-year-old Grizzly “because he had been in the area and had rocked other campers.” Those kinds of bears at that age can weigh up to 300 pounds, depending on diet. Maybe this one’s taste for margarine kept him in the trimmer part of the range, but I would not have chanced staying in the camper. The nearest upper story of cedar tree would have been more tempting, especially had it subscribed to cable.
On page three, we learn CATO on Second and Main is selling BIG SHIRTS for women. And I believe they did. The drawing in the ad shows a shirt made of a material dyed to look like the geometry homework I’d be undertaking at Hope High in two years with a person inside it. She could also have brought with her a compact car, a blender and a microwave. For this salute to Talking Heads’ “Our House” video, you would have paid $15, a savings of $2.99. If you saved that for a year, you could have gotten a 67-pack of New Coke.
The court docket is on page four and there we learn, not only of the lead feet of several of the teenagers I lived down the street from, but that speeding in town cost exactly $41.50. You could also get a parking on the highway for that or a public drunk, depending on what you were in the mood for.
The op/ed page had only one local article, this one a signed editorial already endorsing the one-cent tax for street and sewage system repairs. The paper’s then managing editor put it this way: “If you’re wondering where you’re gonna get the money to pay the extra tax, take it out of the dough you’ll pocket once the downtown parking meters are history.” It makes sense. But who’s gonna saw those things down and what will we do with all those holes in the sidewalk?
In the end, County Judge James Burke persuaded the Hempstead County Quorum Court to pass an ordinance for a county-wide one-cent sales tax (52 percent of which would go to the county roads and to county solid waste service with the rest going to the city's street work) to be placed on the January 14, 1986 ballot. And after it passed by a two-to-one margin (although voter turnout was low), the managing editor would switch tacks, writing the day that the tax was passed that the voters had made their bed and had to lie in it. It seems like in early 1986 flip-flopping was just as much in fashion as shoulder pads in male suits. And just as entertaining.
Photo by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons