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Why (as in yaverbaum)
“hoods” or “rocks,” and most of the time as “Italians.”) Thus, every night when I went to sleep, I would hold on to the rail at the top of the bed and try with great exertion to stretch my body as hard as I could to lengthen it. This had absolutely no discernible effect on me, although it is true that the efforts must have strengthened me, as the frame of the relatively inexpensive bed that my parents provided to me when I moved to my new bedroom in the attic did become somewhat distorted, something that I could not explain adequately to my mom. The fact that I did not grow to my full adult height, which was, in any event, not terribly tall (maybe five feet seven and a half inches at its maximum, with the half inch probably bestowed on me by my mother), did not dampen my social enthusiasm.
Rock ’n’ roll was here to stay, as were the first coed parties that kids were willing to attend. I still recall dancing the chicken to “At the Hop,” and my first “slow” dance. It was to Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender,” which was played as often as possible at Carol Newman’s party in her “finished” basement. Records, not downloads, not disks, and not tapes, were the source of our music (except on Bandstand— Philadelphia or American, as the case may be—on TV, or the “Top 100” programs on the radio). The rock ’n’ roll records spun on the turntable of a standard phonograph at forty-five revolutions per minute and were accordingly referred to as “forty-fives.” Forty-fives had a much larger hole and less music on them than did “seventy-eights,” which rotated at guess how many revolutions per minute, or an LP (long- playing) recording, which rotated at thirty-three and a third. To accommodate forty-fives on the standard phonograph, it was neces- sary to use either a metal cylindrical adapter (an approximately two-and-one-half-inch cartridge concerning which there were, as you might have anticipated, many puerile jokes), which was about an inch across and fit over the central post of the device itself, or a plastic cir- cular disk of the same diameter that clipped into the middle of the record. Songs were sold and referred to as “singles,” although there were two songs, the primary song and another, one on each side of a
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