Clothes Pin Prank

John (we're waiting for Pat to write about her grandfather joining Buffalo Bill's circus):

My sister, Gay, and I would excitedly wait for my father (John Hewlett Fawcett, born in New Jersey in 1898) to come home from work and chant, "Did you get fired? Did you get fired?" Dad worked at the Moore (Drydocks) Shipyard in Richmond,\California building Liberty Ships, I believe, and the war was ending in 1944. Little Johnny (Johnny Skeekie) was 4 then, and little Gay (Gaygee Google) was 7. The nicknames in parentheses were my father's favorite names for us. My father wanted to leave the war effort and get back to teaching since the war was ending. Our chants, not withstanding, ultimately came true and he got a job at City College of San Francisco. We lived in Berkeley, across the Bay.

One of his frequent sayings was to threaten me with, "I'm going to put you in my pocket and take you to San Francisco." It wasn't much of a threat, I would have loved to have gone. I didn't like the pocket part, though. A few years later I went several times with him to San Francisco and he would pay me a penny for every word I could read off of billboards as we rode the old Key Train across the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge. That stopped when I could read better. I remember how disgusted he would get when he would see someone spitting in the San Francisco terminal. There were "NO SPITTING" signs to stop that practice. Another thing I remember at that terminal was the big screen movie machine. You would put in a quarter (worth a few dollars in today's money) and the movie of big band music would play, A crowd would always stop and watch, so the clever thing was to just hang around until someone used their own quarter.

An incident last night while I was babysitting Bridget's kids reminded me of a trick I would do during this period. The grandkids stuck a sticker on another's back and then on mine. They would get wise when I would nonchalently press a sticker on their back. My trick was to take a clothes pin (thi kind with two wood pieces with a coiled spring in the middle) and put it on the back of my father's suit. His student's would say, "Mr. Fawcett, there's a clothes pin on your back." He tried to do the same to me without such fun results. I would usually catch on. But even if I went to kindergarten with a clothespin, no one would care as much as my father's students did. After a while he usually caught on. I had to devise a place to put the pin where he wouldn't see it or feel it when he sat down. The best place seemed to be on the back of his suit jacket but on the left side where he wouldn't feel it by reaching for his wallet or by sitting on it.