My Parents Part 2*

*True story of Al Zimbler’s life as it appears in his eighth short story humor book MORE BEDTIME STORIES FOR NIGHTTIME LOVERS.

In part one of my story about my parents I told you of their great support and protective roles in my formative years. As in the case of most children growing up in the 1920s and the 1930s and into the beginning of the 1940s, we lacked knowledge of sex. There were no Playboy magazines, no TV, or other informative magazines unless you wanted to read the National Geographic. Then, like now, boys learned of sex from their boyfriends or, in the case of girls, from their girlfriends.

At the end of the first month in middle school we had a lecture from our health teacher. He was a tough-looking man teaching health and gym. “Boys,” he said, “if you masturbate you will go blind.” That sounded funny for in the month I had been at middle school I had never seen a blind boy. What really made that strange is the fact that I knew what was going on in the boys’ bathroom.

When I was 17 years of age one of my cousins took me to a house of ill repute in Calumet City, Illinois. If I can remember, the cost was $2 a visit. Big money then. I went into a room with a woman not exactly young looking. She said I should pull down my zipper. I did as directed, and then she said, “Okay, you are through. Go home.” I went out the door and said to myself, “Wow, I am no longer a virgin and all I had to do was pull down my zipper.”

Then I became 21 and got married. My wife and I were married at the Hamilton Hotel in Chicago on April 6, 1946 (a few months after I was honorably discharged from military service during World War II). At the end of the wedding my new wife and I took a cab to the Ambassador West hotel where we were to spend our three-day honeymoon.

My wife and I have some great memories of our honey-moon, including that, when we took a taxi ride home to our rented room with kitchen privileges, the taxi driver made every green traffic light on the five-mile drive from the hotel to where we were to live.

As I have often said, “Things aren’t what they used to be.”