My Obsession

Task 26, June 27 to July 4th

There’s nothing like a good, healthy obsession. You may justify them to your wife, family and friends as “hobbies”, or “interests”, or “pastimes”, but they’re obsessions, and you know it.

My obsessions began at an early age. When I was about ten years old my friend Bernie, who to this day is kind of an obsessive kook, turned me on to coin-collecting. And I don’t mean poking around in your mom’s purse for stray coins, noooo, Bernie and I would bike down to the Farmer’s Bank with a dollar bill that he borrowed from his father, which we would exchange for a roll of a hundred pennies; then we would sit on a curb in the bank’s parking lot, go through the roll of pennies, and set aside ones that were dated between 1900 and 1960, replace them with newer pennies that we brought with us, and go back into the bank and exchange them for another roll of a hundred pennies, and go back to the parking lot…this would go on for hours.

If that wasn’t enough, Bernie also introduced me to slot car racing. I don’t know how to explain this to anyone younger than 60, but I’ll give it a whirl. Bernie’s dad, who not only condoned, but encouraged Bernie’s obsessions, built an enormous twenty five foot figure 8 slot car race track in a room above the family bike shop. The track held six lanes of track–each track had a slot down the center in which you placed your slot car (which had a flange on the bottom to fit into the slot), and the connection between flange and slot somehow powered the slot car, and you–the nerdy social outcast who would waste his time racing tiny cars in the steamy hot room above Bernie’s dad’s bike shop–raced the slot cars against other nerd-oids.

I won’t go into this any further. Even writing it made me shake my head with disbelief and remorse for wasting so much time.

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After slot car racing, actually concurrent to slot car racing, I was collecting Mad Magazines, matchbook covers, Nestea football coins, Topp’s trading cards, and in honor of my late Aunt Mary, who was better known as “Big Momma” in our family, I collected salt and pepper shakers. Big Momma, who lived in Youngstown with her short, wiry Greek husband Frank, had an entire wall of her living room dedicated to her S & P collection, and I marveled at its peculiarities.

As I grew older I got obsessed with cameras, all kinds of cameras, and I own quite a few, ranging from vintage polaroids and Rolleicords, Leicas and the like; also cassette tapes, CDs, LPs, vintage black and white photos, especially work by Walker Evans, biographical literature, paint by number kits, bobble head dolls (Ohio State or Cleveland athletes only), and movie scripts. The show biz stuff was so voluminous that my wife ordered it out of the house, and the vast treasure trove is now enshrined in the “Jeffrey Shore” collection in the Bowling Green State University Popular Culture Library. Google it.

From where did this weirdness spring? My mom! Carefully hidden behind her rigidly shellacked hair do and stern countenance and her no-nonsense, black and white, my way or the highway attitude toward life, she was inordinately obsessed with the Sam Sheppard murder case.

Who the hell is Sam Sheppard? Sheppard, a prominent physician/surgeon who lived in Bay Village Ohio, and his pregnant wife Marilyn lived in the lakeside community. On the morning of July 4th, 1954, Marilyn was found bludgeoned to death in their bedroom. Sam’s story was this: he was sleeping soundly on a daybed when he heard the cries from his wife. He ran upstairs where he saw a "white biped form" in the bedroom and then he was knocked unconscious. When he awoke, he saw the person downstairs, chased the intruder out of the house down to the beach where they tussled and Sheppard was knocked unconscious again.

Long story short–the subsequent investigation tore the town, and eventually the nation, apart and after a trial that could only be called “circus-like”, Sheppard was found guilty of murder. Later he was freed on appeal by up and coming lawyer F. Lee Bailey, and he went free.

My mom became fixated on Sheppard and the case. Many times she tossed my brother and I into the back seat of her Chevy Biscayne and drove up to Bay Village just to look at the house and environs and ponder the evidence. She had albums filled with articles and photos on the case carefully cut from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She would blather on about it at the dinner table until my father would stand up, put down his fork and knife, pop a Kent cigarette into his mouth, then wordlessly walk outside for a smoke.

Eventually she stopped talking about the latest twists and turns of the case and turned to other distractions, like sewing dresses, but her Sheppard photo albums were stacked next to her bed until the day she died.

But how did that impact me, you ask? In the late 60s my dad took me to see “Big Time Wrestling”, the precursor to the WWE and all the insane cage-match lunacy of today. At that time pro wrestling was a traveling circus, bussing its way from town to town, setting up a ring in a school gym or community center, and featured fighters like Ed “The Sheik” Farhat, Bobo Brazil, Dick the Bruiser, The Love Brothers, Reginald and Hartford (“when we come to town the divorce rate goes up”) and Haystacks Calhoun.

The night my dad and I went, the feature fight was between Bruno Sammartino and–incredibly–Dr. Sam Sheppard! Sheppard, after his release from prison, had fallen on hard times and ended up as a wrestler. His gimmick: the SLEEPER HOLD. He would get his opponent's head in a vice-like grip, then apply a fingertip to the side of the neck, and the opponent would slump into a coma.

It was thrilling, and taken seriously by the attendees, including the press–the next day in the Ashtabula Star Beacon was a small article that stated that Sammartino had awoken, groggy, from Sheppard’s sleeper hold.

This of course led to my obsession with wrestling which lasted about ten years and morphed into my obsession with reality shows and, nowadays, soccer.

So I blame my mom. What are your obsessions?