In a few days we’ll renew the annual tradition of watching A Christmas Story on the network that shows it on a loop for 24 straight hours. Somehow I never saw A Christmas Story until I was into my 30s, but in the last decade and a half it’s become a special movie to me, and I won’t dare go through the holidays without watching it at least once.
If you’ve seen A Christmas Story (and if you haven’t…well, what are you waiting for?), you’re familiar with the scene involving Flick, a flagpole, and a triple-dog-dare. But could you ever guess there’s a similar story involving a young Dave Garroway? Dave himself told it in the draft of the memoir he never completed. In the spirit of the season, here it is.
One day in Schenectady, fourth-grader Dave Garroway was headed to school. As he recalled, it was snowing that day and about ten degrees. His route took him across the Crane Street bridge, which spanned a little valley near the school. About halfway across the bridge, young Dave looked down at the thick snow blanketing the valley below, and thought it was beautiful. For some reason – “just out of love, I guess,” he later said – he had the impulse to lick the bridge. His tongue reached out to the bridge’s metal railing.
You get one guess what happened next.
No matter how he tried, Dave couldn’t pull his tongue away. He began to yell for help, but his pleas were muffled. Some of his friends came to help, but when they tried to pull him from the railing, it made things worse. Dave kept trying to yell “Get help! Get help!”
Someone had the idea of getting pails of hot water, pouring it on the rail to free Dave’s tongue. Three pails later, Dave was scalded but still stuck. The metal held the cold too well for the water to have any effect. Dave had the idea that heating the rail would do the trick, and finally had the idea to yell “Fire! Fire!” Which then prompted a call to the fire department. Young Dave had reasoned they would have torches that could heat the rail.
By the time firemen arrived, Dave had been stuck to the bridge for about 45 minutes. He was tired and his tongue was bleeding. The firemen brought over a gas torch and held it against the rail a short distance from Dave’s stuck tongue. “Gradually, slowly, I could feel the warmth creeping toward my tongue,” he remembered half a century later. Soon one side of his tongue let go, and then the rest peeled away. “Oh! What a relief. And then my tongue began to hurt worse than ever.” As he recalled, “I didn’t taste anything for some time, except the bitter flavor of the Crane Street Bridge.” Worse, he had several people upset with him. The school principal sent him home, and the fire department paid a visit to his father to tell him to stop doing that. “As though I did it every day,” Garroway remembered. “I was the guy who should have done the complaining.” Why not, the inventive fourth-grader thought, have a heated Crane Street Bridge? “But I kept my mouth shut. After all, I was only in the fourth grade. And, besides, my tongue hurt too much to talk.”
Like so much of the Schenectady that Dave knew, the old Crane Street Bridge is long gone. It’s been replaced by a newer and wider span – and though it still has a rail, I doubt today’s fourth-graders feel the urge to give it a lick. But if you look the modern bridge up on Google Earth, you’ll find an interesting bit of graffiti just a little more than halfway across the span.
No matter the real reason why that graffiti’s there, I can’t help thinking that if Dave saw it, he’d get a chuckle from it.
Whatever you celebrate, make sure you celebrate it well. And be sure to keep your tongue away from frozen metal.
Grateful acknowledgment to the Schenectady Historical Society for the two images above. See more about Crane Street on the Society’s website here.