Dan Antion

Go Away Kid… – #1LinerWeds

I think the honeysuckle is looking forward to spring.
There was a little squirrel, wo had a little curl…
This switchblade dates from the time of that Twilight Zone episode.

Lately, I’ve been trying to prepare posts in advance. When I get in the mood to write, the writing tends to flow, so I figured I might as well take advantage of it. Of course, that causes me to sometimes put the cart before the horse. I get an idea for a post, but there’s already one written. Spur-of-the-moment Dan vs. well-planned Dan. It’s hard to know who will win. I digress, but that’s what I do best.

On New Year’s Eve, I was finishing up the post for the Thursday Doors Badge Contest – sorry, the polls are closed – and I was in a writing mood. I was watching “Static” a Twilight Zone episode about Ed Lindsay, a bitter old man that retrieves an old radio from the basement of his boarding house.  He’s upset with the way people have become obsessed with television in its early days. He’s also upset that he didn’t marry a woman (who lives in the same boarding house) twenty years ago, but…let me get back on track.

This isn’t one of my favorite episodes. If it’s running in the marathon or being shown on SyFy, I watch it, but it isn’t one of the episodes I’ll dial up on Hulu. Still, I’ve seen it many times, but I didn’t remember seeing the scene with today’s one-liner.

Mr. Lindsay enlists the help of a young boy to carry the radio into his room. He turns the radio on, and it picks up a modern station. The boy starts a-movin’ and a-grooven’ to the tune.

Mr. Lindsay is visibly annoyed. He digs into his pocket, retrieves a coin, shoves it into the boy’s hand and hustles him out the door. As he shuts the door, he says:

“Go buy yourself a switchblade.”

Switchblade knives were synonymous with delinquents in the early 1960s. They may have been illegal in Pennsylvania (where I grew up), at least that was the scuttlebutt. Of course, switchblades were just the kind of knife every young boy wanted. The fact that they were associated with “hoods” and “hoodlums” made them even more attractive. That they were thought to be illegal made them irresistible.

When Ed Lindsay said the one-liner, his utterance carried the full weight of the then current connotation of the knife, and it made me smile.

This post is part of Linda G. Hill’s fun weekly series One-Liner Wednesday. If you have a one-liner, If you would like to join in on the fun, you can follow this link to participate and to see the one-liners from the other participants.

There wasn’t much snow, but it was pretty.
Maddie had to stop and sniff.
Surveying the yard with Miss Maddie.
We had a couple inches of snow overnight into Monday.
There wasn’t enough snow to require the snow blower. This is my “human plow” shovel.
After the storm and cleanup.
Some of the squirrels are easily startled by Maddie and me. He’s moving pretty fast.
“I would like to go back to sleep.”
I’m not sure what Smokey is looking at. Maybe someone has better peanuts than I did.
This is through the storm door. I need to open it, toss out a couple peanuts to get these guys to move. Otherwise, Maddie might drag me down the steps.
Smokey, ahead of us on the path.
There you go, MiMi, rest easy.

69 comments

  1. Wow, that’s quite the one-liner, Dan. I haven’t watched Twilight Zone for quite a while, but now I’m thinking it’s time. Your photos, as always, are amazing. It must have been complicated to capture Smoky on the fence. Love that one especially! 😊

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    • Thanks Gwen. I have about six versions of that photo. I should carry my camera out with me; there’s only so much I can do with my phone.

      The Twilight Zone is a timeless classic. It’s available on CBS All Access, Hulu, Netflix (but not season four) and maybe Amazon.

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  2. I think switchblades were illegal in some of the states I’ve lived in. Though it seemed that every kid in school claimed that their “cousin’s friend” or, in some cases, their “friend’s cousin” had one.

    They were forbidden in Michigan until 2017.

    When they became legal, we had to declare affiliation with either Jets or Sharks on our voter registration cards (OK, I made that part up).

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    • There was a federal law, but it was very confusing. Pennsylvania’s law allowed you to own them but towns could make it illegal to carry them. The one pictured is one my dad took off a kid. The kid came into my dad’s bowling alley waving it around. I could post a much more colorful one-liner from that incident.

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  3. This is a new one for me. I only just spotted it on a post of a new reader of mine. “Hope you are well and productive.”
    But I sure remember being glued to the screen watching Twilight Zone as a kid. I’d watch them now too, but with my other half, it’s a no-go.

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  6. Yikes! That one-liner is an eye-opener!! Squirrels, squirrels everywhere at the Antions! Fortunately plenty of peanuts to go around…..and no one has a switchblade. And as always, MiMi is as “cute as a button”. Hmmmm, have you ever looked at a button and thought, “How cute this button is”?
    Ginger

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  8. I remember in my youthful days, Dan, there’s was something exciting, but also very dark about switchblades. A friend of mine got one, not sure where and how, and it caused quite a stir among the boys of the neighbourhood. We all crowded around him and he took it out of his pocket and flicked it open. There was a collective “Oohing and Aaaahing” from the group. It was the talk of the neighbourhood. Not sure what eventually happened to it.

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    • I remember similar demonstrations, Don. It’s funny how these things had such an aura around them. From what I understand, the laws were the result of anecdotal evidence.

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  9. Go away kid ! Can we send that message to the orange clown at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue ? I will stop the metaphor there. It has been 2 weeks of mostly grey here. So that snow and sunlight looks tempting. Not that I want to play the removal game. Happy hump day Dan.

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  10. I have my shovel at the ready, but have used it only once this winter and that was to remove less than an inch of snow that was being saturated when the precipitation changed to rain. I’m ok with that and can enjoy your snow from a distance. I distinctly recall the time of my youth when switchblades had a “bad boy” reputation. I don’t think that I actually saw once until I was an adult.

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    • There were plenty of bad boys, or cool kids, depending on your view, hanging around where I grew up. I think my elementary school teachers must have all had a collection of knives, including switchblades by the end of each year.

      I don’t mind pushing light snow, but this was close to the limit. We have a long driveway, and I take care of my neighbor’s sidewalk and driveway, since he’s 95. I’d rather have enough snow to justify using the machine ;-)

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      • I chuckled at your suggestion, Dan, that the difference between a “cool kid” and a “bad boy” was merely one of perspective. As for snow removal, I live in a townhouse community and the biggest problem we have when there is a decent accumulation is finding a place to throw the snow when we clear off our paths and assigned parking spots–we are packed in pretty tightly.

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        • Our neighborhood is pretty tight, Mike. In the years when we get a lot of snow, I reach a point where I can’t keep our snow from blowing over the fence into our neighbor’s yard. Fortunately, they don’t seem to mind.

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  11. I love the photo of Smokey peeking over the fence…the grass is always greener, isn’t it, little guy?
    Back in Jersey, there was a boy down the street who, rumor had it, belonged to Hell’s Angels. He wore a black leather jacket and had a switchblade. Then his younger sister started wearing black leather and heavy black eyeliner. Yup. Definitely Hell’s Angels.

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    • I’ve heard Jersey girls can be tough ;-) It’s funny, we had our share of tough kids, but Jersey had a reputation that rolled across to our side of PA.

      Smokey is pretty cute at the fence. I couldn’t figure out what he was looking at, or if he just knows that if he does something cute, we give him an extra treat.

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  12. I have a “Leatherman” multi tool that my dad gave me. Does that count as a cool switchblade? Or am I still a nerd in possession of something I can easily cut myself with?

    It’s funny how we miss a line or meaning of a line in a TV show or movie that we’ve watched a number of times over. I have been re-watching one of the serial shows that Natasha and I picked up on during Covid. First time around, we couldn’t understand a lot of the slang and colloquialisms, but now I get it. Google helped with some of it (ken is the Scottish word for know). We’ll also have to re-watch the current season of Star Trek Discovery when it’s done – too much techno-babble to keep track of!

    Hope you’re having a great week, Dan, and no Twilight Zone moments!

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  15. I’ve never had a switchblade but one of my brothers did he widdled stuff with his. Totally not living up to the “bad boy” image. 😀 I am a pocket knife gal. I still have my little one from when I was a teenager, but now I love my swiss army pocketknife. I used to carry it with me in my purse, but then when carrying one became illegal after 9-11 I carry it in the car. It’s so handy.

    I don’t think I’ve seen that episode of Twilight Zone. I watched only a few episodes this last marathon and it wasn’t one of them.

    The long shadows in the snow are lovely, and the squirrels are cute especially that one with the curl in its tail.

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  17. You got a chuckle from me with the one-liner, Dan. Every now and then, I used to come across an old rerun that had more scenes than it did on a different outlet. And sometimes whomever owns the series seems to sell different numbers of episodes to different outlets. I was always a combination of happy and annoyed to see a new episode or scene.
    That photo of the sun/honeysuckle/snow is absolutely splendid. Your brave squirrels continue to amaze me. Hugs on the wing!

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    • It’s so funny to have this experience, Teagan. I’ve seen all these episodes do many times, I should know then by heart.

      I’m not sure if SyFy cuts the same scenes each year. They had a lot of episodes squeezed into a 25 minute time slot – with commercials. The original episodes are 24-25 minutes long.

      In the winter, the sun rises right over the honeysuckle as Maddie walks the back fence. It’s very pretty.

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  19. Happened to know what a switchblade is, because of David Wilkerson’s book ‘The cross and the switchblade” about the beginning of one of first rehab programs in NY.at the end of the 60ties. Is a coin enough for a switchblade?

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    • No, the most knife shown in the gallery at the top was selling for $5-$6 in 1960. Minimum wage (for reference) was $1.00/hour. I just looked up the book. It sounds interesting.

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  21. It’s interesting how we can watch a show many times, but not remember a scene. Maybe they had cut the switchblade scene out in the past. The snow photos are beautiful – makes it worth some of the cold.

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  22. Ha, yes! That “go buy yourself a switchblade” line often gets a double-take from Twilight Zone fans. 😄 But poor Ed has good reason to be grumpy, as you know. Nice to see him get a second chance. 🙂

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  23. Oh, I can tell I would have loved this episode. Every time you watch the show, there is something you didn’t remember. Have you ever told your bloggers your favorite Twilight Zone show?

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  24. It’s a good line :)
    I’ve never understood how they’re illegal but people have them. I’m not saying my blade-connoisseur husband has any, cause they’re illegal in Indiana, but like, MANY people have them. WHY are they illegal and everyone has one? Now that I’ve typed that, I’ve also considered some other things that fall into this category —
    Anyway, good line!

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