Madras Bellbottoms

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0rG2ME4sAc

If you go to 2:45 of this video clip and watch ten seconds you'll see Kevin Dolan, Paul McTiernan, Kevin Ridge and me standing by the roadside minutes after we pulled into Woodstock on the Thursday afternoon before the festival. This was probably the happiest I had ever been to that point. I'm in the madras bellbottoms.

The Graduate

My Dad was insistent that one of his three sons attend Roxbury Latin School in West Roxbury, Mass. Lucky for me, I got to go. I've never been anywhere else in my life that valued creative thinking and the intellect more than my high school. This shot is from 6/9/69, my graduation day.

The Cyclist

This photo would be from the Summer of Love when I was fifteen. Very few images survive of my bike-riding adventures. The first time I ever successfully maintained balance on a bike, I was ten plus. With the Duffey brothers exhorting me, I managed to coast fifty yards down Clement St. until I married the first telephone pole I could find.
I was the last kid I knew to learn how to ride a bike, tie my shoes or light a match. For every geographical, mathematical and historical fact or idea I grasped, I sacrificed some measure of physical dexterity. When I began to do crossword puzzles, I was suddenly no longer able to dance.

The Mountaineer

This picture is incomprehensible to me. When in the name of God have I ever been willingly near a cliff or precipice. My nuts clench and twist when even Wile E. Coyote goes shooting off a mountainside. Since I'm roughly fourteen when this shot was taken, I would have been fifteen before I figured out how to get myself down.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

In the summer of 1964, I enrolled almost all my friends in producing a performance of the rustic scenes from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

(Top Row L-R, Joe Duffey, Joe Ayoub, Paul McTiernan, Tebby Broderick, Tommy Atwood, Susan O'Connor; Middle Row, Jimmy Atwood, Frankie McCoy, Eric Hegsted, Jimmy Owens; Front Row, Elaine Duffey, Cathy O'Connor, Mark Duffey, Peter Swanson, David Swanson, Freddie Atwood, Hannah Swanson)

Pigeon Cove

In 1963, my family visitied my Aunt Esther in Pigeon Cove, near Rockport. Here am I suitably in awe of the raging sea.

I'm Dickens, He's Fenster

In the summer of '62, my Ma decided that her husband and youngest son would spend one month together alone at the family cottage. It must have seemed like a good idea to her on some level. White Island Pond is on the Plymouth/Bourne line, north of the Cape Cod Canal. TV reception there was spotty and there were one billion bugs so I never clamored to spend any time in sunburn country.
What made this "vacation" extra special was the plan my father had hatched to build a pier with my help. Perhaps a little less time with my nose in a book and a little more action with a hammer in my hand would make me a more tolerable boy.

This was the only concentrated period of time I ever spent with my father until he was in his eighties. I'd like to say we bonded. I'd like to say I learned something about carpentry that has made me the handyman I am today. These photos, however, are my only proof that it wasn't all some dream.

The Aquanaut

It's no wonder that I have never been able to swim. This picture indicates an advancing state of armlessness. Also, if I were to stand up, the waves would lap at my calves.

Munn The Barber

Discomfort reigns as my father removes my right ear with a pair of scissors and beetles crawl up my bathing suit. As this photo indicates, I've come by my current hairline naturally.

Child Labor

When I was six or so, my Dad and uncle Bill were building adjacent cottages on a peninsula on White Island Pond in Plymouth. This photograph had to have been staged as incidences of my doing manual labor were few and far between.

All Dressed Up

One Sunday, fifty years ago, we went on a family boat ride from Boston to Provincetown. My greatest recollection was of being terrified of a circus clown greeting us as we disembarked.

(L-R Karen, Jimmy, David and Kathleen)

The Twins And I

Cape Cod Canal
backyard and frontyard in West Roxbury

Here we are in the spring and early summer of 1957, that's a half-century for all you arithmetic buffs. Karen and David would be ten years old in these pix, which would make me five. Elvis Presley's All Shook Up was dominating the nation's airwaves.
I could not possibly have had anything to complain about and my expression reflects that fact.

Baby Einstein

The more I examine this surprise trove of childhood slides, the more I begin to question the whole "child genius" tag I've worn pinned to my lapel forever. This snapshot indicates that sipping on a straw while holding a bottle of Coke and a whiskered balloon tested the limits of my capabilities. I certainly know better than to try that juggling act today.

Dear

If I'm four in this shot then my sister Cornelia would be eighteen. Since my Mom got rheumatoid arthritis when I was an infant, I was wicked lucky to have a full crew of older brothers and sisters to take care of me. I must have had trouble saying her name as I referred to Cornelia at this time as "Dear" (pronounced Dee-ah).

At The Zoo

Here's a shot my family just located from a visit to the Franklin Park Zoo. I have no recollection of this occasion but in this particular scene it seems I'm attempting to entice a mangy deer with my own version of a "salt lick". The young lady in the foreground appears aghast and on her way to alert the authorities.

Thus Spake Munn

In 1915, when Cornelius Robert Owens was 3, the little tyke had flouncy, blonde ringlet curls (as was the style on young boys of the day). A traveling salesman stopping by their tiny Roxbury home inquires, "Little girl, may I please speak with your mother?" My dad pulls a toddler nutty, barking at the guy, "I'M NOT A LITTLE GIRL! I'M A BIG MUNN!"
Thus spake Munn. The family legend of how my father got his nickname followed him throughout the century.

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