“What do you mean it’s stuck?!” 
“Mom, come help me! It’s stuck all over,” Dom yelled from the kitchen.

The incident occurred on an already sun baking morning in 1946. It was a happy time in life for our family. World War II was finally over. All my uncles who served overseas had come home alive. Uncle Frank, my dad’s brother, flew bomber missions with the Eighth Army Air Force. Uncle Al, my Aunt Joan;s husband was a marine and had fought on Iwo Jima and Saipan in the Pacific. Uncle Stan, my mom’s youngest brother, had enlisted at seventeen and served as a radio operate on a troop carrier headed for Japan when the bombs were dropped. Only one, Uncle Ted, was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge, but he recovered and was back home with my Aunt Anne. My dad was lucky. He was a vital defence worker, making K and C rations for the troops overseas.

My brother was six, and I was seven and one half. We lived in a second floor, two-bedroom apartment on Ashland Avenue above a small Mom and Pop grocery store. Which ironically, was directly across the street from a large A&P store, but was still in business thanks to loyal customers.

My brother Dom and I filled most of our playtime with playing war, checkers, or Monopoly. War was our favorite, although peace had come. We still loved to pretend we were American troops killing Nazis and Japanese, especially when our cousins, Bill and Bob, who lived two blocks over, invited us to come by their house and play war in their backyard. There we could hide behind bushes and trees and sneak up and ambush enemy tanks and machine-gun nests. We would first defeat the Nazis and the work on the Japanese. We had helmets, rifles, side arms and canteens. When we won the war against the enemy, we paraded about the yard four abreast, just like we watched the returning troops when they paraded in Chicago along Michigan Avenue with bands blaring, flags flying and crowds cheering.

Dom, at six, was a towheaded kid with a very adventurous nature. But he had this belying look of innocence.

Dad said, “That boy sure asks a lot of questions. He’ll probably end up being a lawyer, a cop, or an inventor.”

However, I had to admit that sometimes his inquisitiveness got on my nerves. Dom had a propensity for experimenting and taking things apart. Once he took my parents' Baby Ben alarm clock apart, and almost got it back together, but he ended up with too many parts. He also would wander away from us to explore something like a rabbit or a bird that caught his attention. One time Dad found him standing on the sidewalk two blocks away, waving to passangers on the Ashland Avenue street cars. Being the older brother, I felt like I had to watch out for him. But his adventurous character often had me mom and even dad at our wit’s end.

One time Dom and I were playing monkeys jumping on the bed. Dom decided to put a nickel in his mouth.

“Why'd you do that?” I asked.

“Don’t know. I just wanna see what it tastes like.”  
“What its taste like?”
“Kinda like the hammer when I licked it.”
“Oh.”

We continued bouncing like the preverbal monkeys on our beds. Suddenly, Dom stopped. He gulped, and he began to cry.

“Hey! What’s the matter with you?” 

Through his tears he croaked, “I swallowed the nickel, am I goin’ to die?

“What!” then I yelled, “Mom, mom, Dom swallowed a nickel.”

Mom, face flushed, came into the room. Dom was lying on the bed, whimpering. She picked him up and put him across her knees and patted him on the back hoping he would cough the nickel up. But no such luck.

I said, “Maybe turn him upside down.” But she ignored my suggestion.

I could tell that Dom was terrified. His face was fiery red, and he kept gasping, “Mom, am I goin’ die?”

Mom told he wasn’t going to die, but that we had to go to the hospital. She called a cab and the three of us went to the hospital. When we arrived, a nurse took us into a dark room and asked Dom to lie on a table. The doctor came in and moved a white glass screen over Dom’s stomach. 

He said, “Don’t worry, son, this won’t hurt a bit. But with this machine we can see where that coin has gone.” He pushed a button and the screen glowed we could see inside Dom. Mom and I watched intently as he performed the fluoroscope examination.

“There it is,” he said, pointing to the nickel with his pen. Dom had stopped crying the fluoroscope fascinated him. He asked the doctor how it could see inside of him. I could tell the doctor never had a kid ask him that question. All he responded was it's a special machine that is able to see inside of people.
The doctor changed the subject. He patted Dom on the head and said, “Look son, don’t ever put things in your mouth other than food or things that are good to drink. Understand?”

Dom nodded and said, “Okay.” Then he asked the doctor, “Are you goin’ to operate me and take it out?”

The doctor smiled, looked over at Mom and me, and said that an operation wouldn’t be necessary. “But,” he said, looking at my mother, “for now we’ll let nature take its course. Mother, you must carefully examine his feces so we can be sure that the nickel passes out of his system. If it does there, of course, will be no further necessary action.”

The doctor gave my mother a plastic bowl-like insert to put on the toilet and several wooden tongue depressors to use as probes. For the next few days, with my mother watching, Dom used the wooden depressors and happily poked through his feces. On the third day, he shouted, “I found it! I found it!” Dom always says he wished he had kept that nickel. It had to be lucky.

My brother had this weird habit of eating chalk. Dad took him to the doctor, and the doctor said Dom had an eating disorder called pica. Chalk, the doctor explained, is not poisonous. However, it still is not something that humans should consume. From then on, chalk was no longer left on our blackboard tray. Dom or I had to ask Mom and she would give us one stick at a time and we had to return it to her when we were done. I was tasked with making sure Dom did not put the chalk in his mouth. However, the first time we asked for chalk, when Mom wasn’t looking, Dom bit off a piece. I slapped the rest out of his hand and told Mom. She sent Dom to our room. The next time we asked to draw on the board, Dom didn’t attempt to eat the chalk. It seemed like he quit cold turkey.

What led to the story I’m about to tell was our shared fascination, that is Dom and me, with a product called fly paper. It was a popular product back then because many windows were not screened and flying insects could easily invade a house or apartment. This was a time before the sound of bug-zappers could be heard sizzling unwanted insects invading backyards. For those of you who don’t know about fly paper, it was a long paper ribbon that came in a tube. It had a sweetly fragrant odor, it was extremely sticky and it trapped flies and other flying insects when they land on it.

At the time, our family still had an icebox, therefore Mom would daily cross Ashland Avenue and shop for food she would cook for supper at the A&P store. Of course, we had to go with her, which we didn’t mind because if we were good, she would reward us with a Baby Ruth or a Holloway bar, which I preferred, because the bars came on sticks and would last much longer. One could lick ‘em, suck ‘em and even stretch them out.

I was in command of pushing the shopping cart. Dom helped by getting items that mom would point to that were within his reach. The three of us happily traveled through the store, plucking items from the shelves and dropping them into the cart. Near the checkout stations, there was a special rack where our most desired item was housed. It wasn’t candy or soda; it was a product called Tanglefoot Fly Paper. The packaging was stunning. I loved it. The container had the picture of a big black fly, his six feet stuck to tacky paper and his giant eyes bulged with surprise. We’d plead for mom to purchase a package before we checked out.  

She would usually say, “Okay, okay, get one.”

“Thanks, Mom, I would always be sure to say, and happily grab a package of fly paper and drop it into our grocery cart. Dom and I were both elated, anticipating the enjoyment we would have watching those nasty black flies get stuck on that fragrant, curling ribbon.

When we got back to our apartment, Dom and I watched as Mom climbed on a kitchen chair and hung the long ribbony fly strip from the light that dangled over the kitchen table. Now that I think about it, it probably was not at all a healthy thing to do. But everyone seemed to have a strip when we visited the houses of our relatives and friends. We never heard of anyone claiming to have gotten sick from breathing the sweet smell or, for that matter, the dead insects slowly rotting on the strip.

Right on the package the word sanitary was printed in large letters. Mom said it meant clean. So we felt good about using the strip. As soon as mom hung the strip, Dom and I began our vigil waiting for insect victims to appear. The apartment windows did not have screens, so there was no problem coaxing insects to our snare. Mostly black flies got caught, sometimes a wasp or a bee and once even a large moth. We delighted in watching our victims land on the strip and struggle to get off. I don’t recall one ever making a successful escape. I realize our joy was a bit sadistic, but I now rationalize our behavior by thinking maybe we were inured to death because of WWII.

Anyway, to go on. One morning, when mom was vacuuming the living room, and I was out on the enclosed back porch digging in our toy box, gathering our army things because we were to go over to our cousin’s house after lunch. Unbeknown to Mom or me, my brother climbed up on a chair and then onto the kitchen table and grabbed the fly strip. The strip stuck to his fingers. He tried to shake it off as dead flies dropped on the table. But as he shook his hand, the strip caught in his hair, curled about his neck and down the back of his shirt. He began screaming, “Mom, Mom! The flies are gonna eat me. Hurry, please get them off.”

Mom came running. “What’s the matter?” When she looked up, she saw Dom standing on the kitchen table, fidgeting about and waving his arms. She yelled, “What are you doing up there?”

“Mom, get them off.”

“Okay, okay, calm down.” She took arms and held them and calmed him a bit and then helped him sit down on a kitchen chair.
Mom unwound the fly paper from Dom’s neck, pulled it gently from his hair and the back of his shirt.

“Is the sticky stuff off, Mom?”

“I’m getting it off. Now stay still.”

“Mom, I feel them. They’re still crawling on me.” He reached under his shirt scratching his stomach.

“Okay, let’s get your shirt off.”

I watched with anticipation as she pulled Dom’s tee-shirt over his head and shook the shirt. Sure enough, several flies fell to the kitchen floor.

“See,” they are tryin’ to eat me.”

“You know flies don’t eat people.”

“But,” Dom replied, “these guys are mad. They’re not all dead.”

“Okay, take off the rest of your clothes and get into the tub. We’ll make sure there are no flies on you,” Mom said. “And I never again want to see you climbing on the kitchen table. You hear?”

“Yes, Mom, I promise.”

To this day, our family and friends have a good laugh whenever they hear the story of my little brother’s fly paper adventure. After which, Dom will grin and take a bow.