It all began in Boom's basement, where the Mamaroneck HS Forum Club was holding a meeting. I believe the subject was religion in the public schools. To illustrate my point - either banish all religions or treat them all equally - I presented myself as a worshipper of Zeus and demanded the right to sacrifice a goat under the Globe in the foyer at MHS. At the end of the meeting Mrs. Boom served juice and cookies and a handsome lad I didn't know came up with arms as wide as his mischievous grin and proclaimed: "You're Meatball Hertz!" The question is, how did he know?

This handsome, humorous fellow introduced himself as Dog and explained that he was glad to meet a worshipper of Zeus and that I bore a fancied resemblance to a certain Jacob (Meatball) Hertz of T-Neck, N.J. whom he knew from summer camp. Subsequent to this baptism, we became fast friends and it was as "Meatball Hertz" (later "Bear" or "Panda") that I entered a Swinish parallel universe in which Mark Bloom was "Boom" or "Parrot," Ed Greenblatt was "Bread," Mitch Craner was "Brain" (or, in a religious guise, "Pryor Mind"), and Bobby Greenspan was "Lobo" (later "Grobe"). I was happy enough playing the part of "Hertz" in this merry play, although "Meatball" stung a bit because of my embarrassing adolescent corpulence. My father winced at being addressed as "Mr. Hertz" (or Mr. Ball-Hertz) but took it all cheerfully enough. Even Don, the bearded "Prince of Pain" was invited to the Greeman dinner-table, but only after a stern admonishment from my mother (who was NOT addressed as "Mrs. Hertz") to wash before sitting down.

As some more recent Swine and Piglets yet unborn may not be aware, the nexus of this spreading Swinishness lay on the disputed borderlands between the Town of Mamaroneck (which includes Larchmont) and the City of New Rochelle (pronounced "NEW ROOHEEE WOO HOO WOO HEE" after Dog's little brother Jody - alias "Rhino" - repainted the sign.) Thus Dog, a Senior at New Rochelle High and Boom, a Junior at Mamaroneck, actually lived barely 100 yards apart and had been playing together since childhood, which explains Dog's presence in Boom's basement during the MHS Forum Club meeting.

I myself was actually only a sophomore at MHS, but hung out mainly with Juniors because my best friend Tony Hill who lived on the other side of Bonnet Ave. in Larchmont, was a year older than me, and a classmate of Boom and Carnoy. Tony's sister Polly was a year behind me and very popular with boys, whose convertibles often lined Bonnet Ave in front of her house. Jealous, I once shot one of Polly's admirers with my BB gun from the Hill's third floor attic.

My love for Polly, the first girl-child I ever saw in my life, was frustrated by these older rivals who came in their convertibles from all over Westchester County to admire her beauty and parade like peacocks on the sidewalk in front of 24 Bonnet Ave. I had first seen her from across the street at 25 Bonnet, standing on the lawn in pigtails and a little yellow playsuit, her brown chest and shoulders bare under a little bib and straps. She was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen, and she told me her name, "Powwy". Then Katherine came out and told her she had to come in and take a bath. A bath in the middle of the day? This was unheard of and from that moment forth, I dedicated my life to teaching Mr. and Mrs. Hill how to bring up their children (raise Tony's allowance, take us to Walters, etc.) Lou Hill considered me a "little Communist" and so I was.

However, Polly and I squabbled a lot as kids, and so I had to confine my admiration to watching Polly dance naked in her bedroom directly from mine through Dad's WWI German Army periscope. (Peter got to baby-sit, but he was hot for Mildred).

Now I found my Sophomoric self thrown in with a gang of crazy intellectual neurotic Seniors from another, bigger High School, a gang of which my new friend, the Dog, was the charismatic leader. How was I to keep up? Obviously! By being wilder, louder, more zany, more bizarre, more rebellious-in a word more Swinish-than the older boys. Our Swinish activities in those frantic years of adolescence involved a certain amount of Swilling. Of course none of us was old enough to buy beer, but Bill "Hondo" Holland (aka "Billy Beechmont"), a handsome blond boy from New Rochelle, was the son of the owner of the Beechmont Pharmacy and somehow could get us beer. We then proceeded to golf courses where we ran around acting drunk, being hysterical, creating havoc and swilling beer until the Police arrived and we all ran like Hell.

Other pastimes were more intellectual. Swine, as everyone knows, are among the most intelligent animals and we were all more or less top students. But alienated. Outsiders in the Eisenhower, grey flannel, McCarthyite, conformist 50's. We reminded ourselves of J.D. Salinger's characters: oversensitive, crazy, mixed up brainchildren. Like Holden Caulfield, we scorned Phonies: the "popular" crowd in high school, the Principal and some of the teachers, all Rabbis, our parents. We were truly rebels without a cause. I remember seeing the movie at the Larchmont Playhouse with Dog and HIS girlfriend Dianne Moore. Dog was played by James Dean, Dianne by Natalie Wood (a look-alike) and Plato (I mean Meatball) by Sal Mineo. We didn't play "chicken" (although Peter and his friends apparently did), but we did drive like maniacs. I soon lost my license for speeding (egged on by Carnoy), and Dog and I nearly died driving off the Taconic State Parkway at 90 mph in his parents' "borrowed" Dogwagon on the way to Lake George, where we broke into a house to sleep and toured the lake in a "borrowed" canoe.

Humor was our salvation and our bond. Our turn of mind was ironical, paradoxical, outrageous. The world was divided into "Tykes" (us kids) and "Gaffers" (hypocritical, solemn pedants like our parents). The age qualifier was mental. Kids who took their grades and themselves seriously were considered Gaffers. Ninety-year old George Bernard Shaw, with his love of paradox, was a Tyke. Irreverence was cultivated, and sacred cows were ridiculed. In Dog's basement there was a tape (or wire) recorder on which we acted out improvised radio plays. It was in these plays that we developed our Swinish characters, invented rambling adventures against Western, sci-fi or medieval settings. My favorite line of one drama, concerning I believe someone who had just been stabbed by an assassin: "Doctors are working feverishly to snuff out his life." I just had a fit of hysterical laughter remembering this scene. We often broke up and had trouble articulating. Dog also wrote a mysterious poem called "Cansic Days." I also admired the caption under a photo of Robert Cassadesus at the piano pasted into Dog's term paper on the subject of French Music: "Cassadesus playing French music." I could read on Dog's face the expression of smug triumph at having put one over on the teacher.

The acme, indeed apogee and virtual summit of our Swinish pranks concerned the Dogwagon, Rose and Morris Breslaw's tan Chevy station wagon, which had enough seats for the whole gang. But how to take it out at night? Dog, albeit a Senior, was under eighteen, and his Junior License was not valid after dark or in New York City, where the White Horse Tavern beckoned. Hertz to the rescue! HE, a Senior at Mamaroneck, had already turned eighteen, and had a Senior License - at least as far as Rose and Morris were concerned. The same gambit was effective, a fortiori, with my parents, as Dog really was a Senior and they didn't know how many grades he had skipped. And so it was that late one night we were pulled over on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village by an old Irish cop. Dog and Don in the front seat of the Dogwagon, me, Boom, Julie and Zeus knows how many in back. When the cop asked to see Dog's licence and registration, Dog opened the car door and proceeded to vomit on the officer's shoes. The Irishman did a slow burn, shook his head, and remarked: "Lad, you're goan to lose your waggon."

I am not going to enter the controversy about when Swineday began. Let the First Swineday remain wrapped, pristine yet invisible, a legend from the mists of time. The very multiplicity of porcine origin-narratives attests to the facticity of the event, and each tale has its compelling facets. Indeed, the cultural historian might prudently make the claim that the Swine culture was already ripe for such a seminal event, and the Big Bowl Games played on the Saturday after Thanksgiving were a tempting target for parody throughout the 1950's. Without positing a vulgarly deterministic hypothesis, one may nonetheless not be totally incautious in ascribing a certain inevitability to the unfolding (heinaussbegagnin) of this porcine practice. In other words, we would scarcely be not un-justified in shouting from the rooftops that the birth of the Swine Bowl a half-century ago was Inevitable! Divinely Inspired! in a word, the work of Zeus himself!