Binghamton Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Is Binghamton the ‘weirdest’ town in Upstate NY?

Rumble Ponies

Visiting the Forgotten Stars page recently, I see HEY ROGER!!! The post, based on a YouTube video, asks, Is Binghamton the ‘weirdest’ town in Upstate NY? Kelly knows that I originally hail from Binghamton, so he’s going to let me weigh in.

Okay then.

Gab Small posted the piece on July 8, 2026, and had already gotten over 50,000 views in two days.

Let me get some minor stuff out of the way. While she refers to Binghamton proper, she really means the city metro. This doesn’t bother me much. She noted that the Whittman Dam is “normal.”

She’s right to appreciate the MLK Park promenade that runs along the Chenango, as well as the bridge near the confluence of it with the Susquehanna, a place I used to hang out as a teen. However, Chenango, one of two rivers that converge in Binghamton proper, is pronounced as though it started with Sh. NOT WEIRD.

The area having the largest Dick’s Sporting Goods in the world is NOT WEIRD, since, as she notes, the store opened in the area, and I had been there several times growing up, long before the expansion. A full-turf running track.is unusual, to be sure.

The Lost Dog Cafe, where I have I have eaten, is a nice place but NOT WEIRD.

A great sandwich

Gab says, “They are weirdly obsessed with a local sandwich called the spiedie.” It’s delicious when made correctly. I’ve had sandwiches that purported to be spiedies, but they didn’t do the marinade right (2019 NYS Fair in Syracuse; dreadful!). NOT WEIRD, though her have a vegetarian one, instead of chicken or lamb, is a little weird; I did not know that was a thing.

There are six carousels in Broome County, completely free to ride. NOT WEIRD. As a result of these, the minor league baseball team (Double A, Mets affiliate) is called the Rumble Ponies, which is SLIGHTLY WEIRD.

I’ll admit that I had never heard of Binghamton Jellystone Park, which is in Endicott. It is a themed campground based on Yogi Bear. But there are Jellystone Parks in about 30 states and four Canadian provinces. So can’t be that weird.

The stinky corpse flowers at Binghamton University. Okay, SOMEWHAT WEIRD.

TZ

Of course, Binghamton is weird because Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, lived there. There is no doubt of that in my mind. The first time I saw the episode Mirror Image (Season 1, Episode 21), I KNEW that the bus station where a young woman was waiting had to be the Greyhound station downtown. And I was only six. The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street (Season 1, episode 22) featured streets similar to those near Rod’s home on the West Side of the city.

Serling’s inspiration for The After Hours (Season 1, episode 34), when a store mannequin came to life, was inspired by the old Fowler’s department store. I frequented the place as a child; it had the first escalator I can remember! I wish that Gab Small, when mentioning the current store, Boscov’s, had given a touch more history.

And of course, Walking Distance (Season 1, Episode 5) has an overworked New York executive inexplicably transported back to his idyllic 1934 hometown, coming face-to-face with his younger self. I didn’t know that at the time, as I was more prone to go to the carousel at Ross Park than Recreation Park, which was very close to Serling’s home when he grew up in the city. The statue of him is is in Rec Park.

(I suppose I should mention, yet again, that I sort of introduced Rod Serling in 1970.)

Down Memory Lane – the Zionites

Trinity A.M.E. Zion church, 1956

A good friend of mine from my hometown of Binghamton, NY, Cee, wrote that on Friday, May 22, they “attended a wonderful presentation by Brenda Cave James on local Black churches, Susquehanna Street prior to urban renewal, and more.

“One of her display boards caught my eye…” A display showed two different musical revues by the folks at Trinity A.M.E. Zion church in 1948 and 1956. The latter event, with the performers dubbed the Zionites, is of particular interest to me.

Before that, a little history from WBMG-TV (2024). According to Broome County Historian Roger Luther, “AME Bethel closed its doors around 1930, and the congregation merged with AME Zion Church, formerly located where Columbus Park now stands.” I was baptized in the AME Zion church at that previous location. “In 1957, AME Zion was moved to its present-day location at the corner of Oak and Lydia streets.”

Musical triptych

There were three segments of the 1956 program, Down Memory Lane, which was directed by two women I knew from church: Beccye Fawcett, who was my boss when I worked at the Binghamton Public Library for several months in the late 1960s, and Dorothy Owens, a stalwart in the choir.

Part 1 represented the Gay Nineties. For one song, the Floradora Girls danced. Among the women: Geneivive Taylor, another librarian, and Gertrude Green, my mother! A couple of songs were performed by Luvenia McElroy, my sister Leslie’s godmother. Mack Green, presumably my grandfather McKinley Green, performed a Buck and Wing Dance.

The Roaring Twenties included Leslie Green (misspelled as Lesli) performing “Sonny Boy” with his son. Wait, what? I would have been three at the time. For the Rocking Fifties segment, my dad performed folk songs.

The December 3, 1948, performance at Binghamton Central High School also featured my mother, who was then Gertrude Williams, and my father. It was directed by Beccye Fawcett. The repertoire was limited to the Gay Nineties.

I believe Brenda Cave James is the daughter of the late Allen Cave, who was the vice-principal of Binghamton Central High School.

Spring 1975 redux

getting back at “the system”

Photo by Andre Carrotflower – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=121389827

Here’s a Spring 1975 redux item. When I hit my 20th blogiversary in May 2025, I said I would occasionally repost some items I wrote two decades earlier. So far, I have done that once. I’m excluding my Emmett Till post since I added so much new data. If I add information, it will be [bracketed]. I substituted a later recollection link about Boys in the Band.

At the end of the fall 1974 semester at the State University College at New Paltz (NY), I broke up with the person who would soon be my ex-wife, the Okie. She moved to Philadelphia for reasons that were unclear to me then, and certainly no clearer 30 years later. [Or 50 years later; I suppose I could ask her. Or I could let it go.] The primary relationship issues were religion and money.

I drifted to Binghamton, my hometown. In January 1975, my sister Leslie and I kidnapped our 75-year-old grandmother and took her by train to Charlotte, NC, where her daughter (my mother) had moved the year before. Gram was getting lame. She had a coal stove, and it would have been dangerous to get up and down the stairs to get it. Nor could she walk up the steep street on which she lived.

13 Maple Street

When we came back a couple of weeks later, I didn’t have any idea what to do next, so I ended up living in my grandmother’s home. Funny thing, though: as often as I had seen her tend to the coal fire in my childhood, I could not keep it going at all. I suffocated it, essentially. I even got help from a friend, but no success.

Eventually, the pipes froze. It was an old wooden house with old wiring, so I could run the refrigerator or the space heater, but not both. Given the cold of the house, I opted for the latter.

In February 1975, I spent virtually the whole month in bed watching television. My grandmother’s TV only got one station, the VHF station Channel 12. So I watched the soaps, Hee Haw, and whatever was on CBS that month. It was undoubtedly the deepest state of melancholy I’d ever been in. [And that is still true.]

My mom rescued me

The space heater was on the ground and, of course, I had every cover I could find. One night, a blanket, handmade by the Okie, fell off the bed in front of the space heater. Fortunately, the acrid smell woke me up, and I was OK. My sister Leslie told me later that my mother (in NC) THAT NIGHT woke up from a dream in which I was surrounded by fire, and stayed awake for a time. Perhaps my mother woke me up, six states away. I don’t dismiss that out of hand.

Occasionally, I’d go to the library to listen to music on the record player and headphones. I remember once listening to the Beatles’ Abbey Road. The song that ended the first side was I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”. [I LOVE the Billy Preston organ!] During the dirgelike instrumental ending, I cranked it up louder and louder. So when the instruments suddenly stopped, I really thought for a half-second that I had died.

Now and then, I’d visit my friend Carol, where I got cleaned up.

The janitor gig

I didn’t have a phone, so I missed at least a few job opportunities. Eventually, though, I got a position as a janitor in the brutalist Binghamton City Hall. There were 4 or 5 of us covering the building. I used to empty the wastebaskets from the desks of the police officers, clean the holding cells, wash windows, buff the floors of the common areas, and perform other tasks. Two of the guys started calling me Flash because I would get my work done by the end of the sixth hour of my eight-hour day, at which point I’d hide in the bathroom or a storage room and read. It wasn’t that I was so fast; they were very slow.

I really liked the police captain, and we would occasionally have erudite conversations about issues of the day or my future (which seemed bleak to me, but I’m sure I didn’t say that.) The police officers, however, were a more hostile lot in general, and I often felt that they would intentionally make a mess so that I would have to pick it up.

Drudgery

Now, some folks ABSOLUTELY were making a mess I had to clean up; they were the prisoners. These were holding cells they were in, and the detainees were usually there only one night before being arraigned in the morning. So they thought nothing of taking a lighted match and melting the paint from the walls. More than once, they would take their own bodily wastes and smear them on the walls. Perhaps they thought they were getting back at “the system,” but all they did was make more work for a college dropout.

As the weather warmed, my spirits brightened somewhat. I started going out with this woman named Margaret, but it was a classic rebound situation that lasted about a month. At the same time, I ended up doing a play, Boys In The Band. In the fall, I successfully returned to school at New Paltz.

It was one of the more difficult periods of my life, and I figured that if I could survive that, I could survive just about anything.

Sunday Stealing: Memememe — Part 2

the 1913 Binghamton factory fire

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

Impetua is the blogger who delivered us this mother lode of meme questions. They were originally stolen from someone named Mel, whose blog no longer exists. We took 50+ queries and made it 20 questions over two weeks. (Boy, are they ever random!)

Memememe — Part 2

11. You can build a dream house anywhere in the world. Where would it be located?

Given the vagaries of climate change, I’d say right where I am right now in Albany, NY. It’s not perfect, but it works for what I need to happen.

Photo booth

12. Have you ever taken a photo in a photo booth?

Yes. Quoting me:

“These pictures were undoubtedly taken at a Woolworth’s, not terribly far from Binghamton Central High School, which is now and has been Binghamton High School since 1982. This is Michele, Steve, and I doing what one does in a tiny room, the camera flashing every ten seconds or so. I probably never saw these since they popped out of the side of the booth over 45 years ago.

“In the era of the selfie, if you have never had a photo booth picture taken at a Woolworth’s or similar venue, I should explain this process. There’s a booth with a curtain, and you would get three or four photos for 25 or 50 cents. For years, they were always in black and white, though the latter years had color. It didn’t take long to process, although the three minutes waiting seemed like an eternity.

“And the pictures were unique. “There are no copies, no negatives. Photo booths use a direct positive process, imprinting the image directly to the paper — creating a one-of-a-kind artifact.”

Steve sent these to me about a decade ago. Undoubtedly, I took many other photo booth shots, including at a Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library gala only a few years ago, but I don’t know where the pics are.

13. What’s your favorite kind of mustard (dijon, spicy brown, bright yellow)?

In order: Dijon and spicy brown.

14. What did you do on New Year’s Eve?

To the best of my recollection, I stayed up until midnight, hugged whoever was up—probably my daughter, unlikely my wife—and then went to bed.

School daze

15. Did your parents ever share memories of their high school days?

I don’t remember specifically—certainly not my father, who, I gather, hated school at the time. My mom went to the same high school and, for that matter, elementary school that my sister Leslie and I attended. I’ve seen pictures of her in elementary school; one is here.

16. What’s the most famous thing to happen in your hometown?

Most folks will probably note that Rod Serling, the creator of the famous TV show The Twilight Zone, grew up in Binghamton, NY. There’s a new statue of him in Recreation Park in the city.

But, and I guess more infamous, was the 1913 Binghamton factory fire, which occurred on July 22, “on the premises of the Binghamton Clothing Company… It destroyed the Wall Street building in less than 20 minutes, killing 31 of the more than 100 people inside. Though not as deadly as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, it put even more pressure on New York officials to strengthen life safety codes, increase funding for more inspectors, and increase penalties for violations.“

From Atlas Obscura: “The monument is at the top of the hill on the south side of Spring Forest Cemetery. Enter through the Mygatt St. entrance and bear left through the valley and up the hill. The stones stand in a clearing and are easily visible from the path.”

It’s weird, then, that despite spending my first 18 years in Binghaton and having visited that cemetery several times, even this decade, I did not hear this story until 2025. Here’s a link to the documentary The Devil’s Fire by WSKG Public Television and filmmaker Brian Frey. The book Return to the Embers of Tragedy by David A. Bogart was published in August 2025.

The short answers

17. Did you ever have a MySpace page?

Probably, but I surely didn’t know what to DO with it.

18. Will you eat a cookie today?

If it’s oatmeal raisin, yes.

19. Who is the last person you spoke to – not texted with – on the phone?

My wife. She was coming home late, which is not unusual.

20. Do you play poker?

As a kid, I played penny ante, but not really. Still, I taught my daughter how to play while going on college excursions, as described here.

Dad and the neighbor’s tree

Wizard of Oz

Here’s the story about Dad and the neighbor’s tree. The photo above was taken in August of 1969. My baby sister says she remembers the picture but not the incident, whereas my recollections are the opposite.

Let me tell you about that tree. I saw it from my bedroom at 5 Gaines Street, Binghamton, NY, looking towards the tree and the house at 1 Gaines. The photo was likely shot from our driveway.

The tree weirded me out. It reminded me of one of those mean trees in the Wizard of Oz movie: gnarled and sinister. Sometimes when I woke up from a dream, I would see an ominous face on the tree.

Sidebar (1965)

Here’s something only tangentially related. In 1965, when I was a 7th grader at Daniel S Dickinson Junior High School, there were some new kids in our class. One of them was Dawn, with flaming red hair. Based on a note her friend Bernadette passed me, Dawn seemed romantically interested in me. I was 12—she might have been a year or two older—and I had no idea what to do with this information, so I did nothing.

Back to the main story (1969)

The caption says the tree “accidentally crashed into the house… and the elm was being felled by the building’s owner when it tipped in the wrong direction into the building.”

My father is watching this young man, probably in his early twenties, work on this tree, ensuring it won’t strike our house. Dad told the guy that the tree would hit his dwelling. The fellow told Dad to mind his business as though this “old man,” who would have been in his early forties, was a foolish meddler. My father told me about this exchange before the tree was felled.

It “accidentally” hit 1 Gaines, which is technically accurate, but it was an avoidable incident. I don’t know the tenant in the photo; I suspect he lived upstairs, and the tree branches breached his dwelling area.

(Do you know how to “fell a tree” safely? If not, click here. This is from OSHA, which sister Leslie sent me.)

I think the owner lived downstairs with his wife, who I’m almost positive was Dawn from 7th grade, with a baby.

My father, an artist and floral designer, had excellent spatial acuity. He would have been 99 years old tomorrow.

PS: My sister