I drove through my old neighborhood a few months back – the
one with Mr. Locke’s barbershop. While
it is on the eastern suburb of the city and my home is in the far northwest end
of the county, one circuitous path to avoid a bad interstate highway mess leads
me right past it. I decided to make the
quick diversion and see how things looked on Montclair Road.
Aside from the fact that the old red paint had at some point
been replaced by a pale yellow, the house itself was as unremarkable as ever,
one of hundreds of variants on a cookie cutter theme: living room, small eat
in, three tiny bedrooms, one bath. I
didn’t pause for long there this time; though on a previous occasion maybe 15
years ago I did stop. The house was at
that time for sale and obviously empty, and I figured it would be explainable
to the neighbors or police if I was caught walking around the yard for a look
see. It would have been a far different
story, I’m sure, had they witnessed me try knob on the kitchen door and,
finding it unlocked, proceed to enter and walk through my childhood home one
last time. No, I am quite certain I
would likely have ended up with a court date had I been observed that day. As with many things recalled from childhood,
it turned out that the bedroom I had shared with my brother was tiny. A floor once big enough for towers of colored
wooden blocks, and staged battles of green army man wars, and fiercely loud Rockem
Sockem robot battles with my brother had resolved itself to the size of a walk
in closet. I took a moment to stare
through the bedroom windows. There were
ghosts in the back yard – the kids who had played there when I was confined to
bed for one stomach flu or another, me all the while crying that it wasn’t fair
to have to stay in now that I felt better, and mom insisting that anyone too
sick to go to school was too sick to play freeze tag. There were kids on the phantom swings and
jungle gym my parents bought from Zayre’s Department Store. Others were playing in the used-to-be sheet
metal sandbox that was as likely to give your legs blisters from the gathered
summer heat as it was to serve as a hatching ground for the various seeds that
dropped or blew in. Through the other
window I could now plainly see the street, a feat that was a bit of a stretch
from my childhood bunk bed, though I spent many twilight evenings not sleeping
but instead staring for a glimpse of a car coming down the road.
After glancing into my parents’ old room, I turned into the
hallway and glanced upward at the unremarkable plywood ceiling entrance to the
attic. Up there, in 1967, Santa Claus dropped my football in the dark and couldn’t find it. He had to leave a note for my dad to go look
for it in daylight the next day. But
that particular bit of thunderdancing in the attic was nearly Santa’s undoing,
for it woke my younger sister.
Fortunately my mom heard it too, and she rushed into my sister’s room
and closed the door and whispered to her that Santa must be on the roof and they
had to lie very still and squeeze their eyes shut so they wouldn’t scare him
away.
Sister’s bedroom was as narrow as mine, but a little
longer. It opened on the other side into
the kitchen, so in someone’s mind this perhaps was meant to be a dining
room. But that wouldn’t account for the
double closet on the interior wall.
Maybe someone just wasn’t sure what to do with the space.
Between the bedrooms was the only bathroom in the
house. If these weren’t the same
fixtures, someone had replaced the originals with equally old stuff. The ultra small window above the tub seemed
just as useless as before. But the tub
did bring back a lost memory of one Easter.
The Easter Bunny not only hid colored hard boiled eggs around our
house. He also hid the Easter baskets
for a few years. The three of us would
set off together looking for the baskets, which shouldn’t have been hard to
locate considering how few places there were to stash three baskets in a house that size. This particular year, we found them in the
tub. And perched in front of my basket
(obviously mine since mine had the purple stripe woven in among the yellow and
pink willow bands in the handle) was a book that started my first pitch into
reading a series. The book was “The
Mystery of the Green Ghost” and was book four in a series called “Alfred Hitchcock
and The Three Investigators.” A serial
knock off of the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, these books found Jupiter Jones,
Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews as teenagers who went about solving mysteries
that confounded the police, usually confounding international jewel thieves or
derailing bank robbery conspiracies in the process. This book captured my young imagination, and
I was hooked into reading every book in the original series that our local
library could provide. (After the
original series author passed away in 1969, other authors expanded the series
from a dozen books to over 40, but by then I had begun to move past these old
friends to other tales.) Alfred
Hitchcock appeared as a character in each of the books, presenting an
introduction and conversing with the three boys in the final chapter to go over
plot points deemed too subtle for a preteen’s mind to have caught. And at age 8 or 9, I reasoned that since I
knew Alfred Hitchcock to be a real person, these three boys must be real as
well. I don’t really know how many books
it took me to figure the truth of that out.
Later editions were more obvious in listing an author on the front
cover, but this is what my original version looked like:
The kitchen was impossible.
I have vague memories of eating in shifts sometimes, kids first, mom and
dad after. But my mind may be making
that up. I do know that dad was gone 50%
of the time, as he worked 24 hours on and 24 hours off as a fireman, sometimes
filling the other day with part time work at Hamner’s TV
store. So there were many nights the
little formica table we had was big enough for the three of us and mom to all
fit. But that kitchen has no counter
space and less cabinet room. This was
the room that I learned from constant exposure to hate fish sticks and bologna,
and the absolute fact that only kids who ate their bread crust would ever learn
to whistle. This is where the forbidden
sugar bowl was kept out of reach until I was big enough to scale the baby gate
on my bedroom doorway and, if I was stealthy enough, climb up on the counter
while mom and dad were still sleeping to stick a damp finger into the
bowl. I could still see the outline of
built up paint around what used to be the edges of the old black wall
phone. We started out with a “party
line.” I can’t imagine anyone putting up
with that lack of privacy, but somehow it was accepted.
The living room had also shrunk with time. I recalled that Mrs. Jenkins up the street
had used one end of her copycat house’s living room as a dining area and I
stood there trying to figure out how the geometry of that had ever worked. I do not recall if mom and dad ever had a
table in that spot, but I do know for sure that the record player was located
there, at least for a time. Before the
huge Packard Bell stereo console entered our lives, there was mom’s record
player. It played 33’s, 45’s, and 78’s (a
few of which mom still had, including one that had been made when she was a teenager
that featured her singing a cappella and a friend of hers getting in on the
action by shouting “sing it Hilda!” during breath pauses.) My earliest musical memories were of that
turntable – the Camelot soundtrack with Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet and
Richard Burton and Roddy Mcdowell; theme from A Summer Place, West Side Story,
and all of mom’s precious 45’s from the early days of rock and roll. She’d sometimes put on a few for us – Earth
Angel, Lollipop, and others lost to time.
By the time the Packard Bell arrived other musical memories were blended
in: Mantovani’s Manhattan album, The
Nutcracker Suite, Disney and Captain Kangaroo albums, the Mary Poppins and
Sound of Music soundtracks. This monster
of a music center was also an AM radio, and our home was full of music both in
this house and the next.
This house has many other whispers in it. Mostly happy, some painful, some barely
recalled. Here is where I learned to
play the piano that my mom worked until 1 or 2 in the morning as a phone
operator to pay for. It’s where I sat
and watched The Secret Storm and Days of Our Lives and Batman and Captain Nice
and It’s About Time and Mr. Terrific and
Fireball XL5 and Dark Shadows and The Second Hundred Years and The Wild Wild
West and Family Affair and The Flintstones and Jonny Quest and The Double Life
of Henry Phyfe and The Three Stooges and Sailor Bob and Dandy Doodle. Here is where my dad presented me with a
beautiful big boy bicycle that he and his coworkers had rescued from the trash
and fixed up and painted red, complete with my name hand lettered on the
neck. Here is where dad came home with a
go cart that he wanted to play with, and with old Fords and Mercuries that were
still good enough to drive for a while.
Here is where icicles draped real Christmas trees with large colored
lights, and where five o’clock bloomers graced the driveway border. And yes, here is where I learned that parents
are human and children vulnerable. The
mélange is all part of my make up.
But that walk through was several years ago. So in a memory of that memory fog I sat in
front of the old house recently, recalling the earlier visit and the childhood
it evoked. By this visit, the tree in
the back yard had disappeared. I used to
climb high enough to see over the single story roof. From that perch, I could see the steeple of
the Baptist church at the end of Harvie Road.
At 5 PM the church bells played hymns from the steeple, and if the air
was calm you could hear them from our house.
But that tree is gone, and given my lack of common sense it’s probably a
good thing. At my current weight those
branches wouldn’t support me for long.
The chain link is still there, which means the dent is
undoubtedly still to be found on that back stretch. It was created when Randy and I tried to see
who could walk the steel rod at the top of the fence the furthest before
falling. How the impact from my head
managed to dent steel as I fell and how that crunch didn’t scramble my brains
is still a puzzle.
The yard is now as it was then, full of clover that barefoot
kids would avoid lest the bees reward young feet for carelessness. When the inevitable happened, mom would
slather on a paste of baking soda and water and insist for the hundredth time
that shoes needed to be worn.
Beyond the house is the neighborhood. At one time there were over fifty children we
could name within a two block radius.
Now the streets are more or less devoid of outside activity, except for
the residents standing in driveways or on porches staring suspiciously at this
slow driving old man in a suit so obviously not belonging there. Out in front of our house and just to the
right, Thalen Street intersects with Montclair Road. On a few precious occasions, mom and Mrs.
Baum had a group of us out there cheering as the two of them ran full speed up
and down Thalen, getting kites airborne for one kid after another. Montclair stops at the end of our block at
Howard Street, the cross street offering a choice of left through the
neighborhood and up near the four lane about five blocks away or right one
block to Ratcliffe Elementary School with its playground and the ball diamond
that we used to ride our bikes to in order to watch the local men’s church
league teams and spend our pennies on pixie sticks at the snack bar. Though we didn’t attend that school (we went
to the school that was tied to our church) it was in that 1950’s era structure
that we took part in summer art classes and where we received the magical sugar
cube laced with polio vaccine way back when.
Just across Reynolds Road from the school is the corner house where I
saw my very first color television. I do
not recall why my parents and I were there, but I can still remember the
oversaturated image of the blue sky with the woman performing a jackknife off
of the high dive. We got one of those
TVs shortly thereafter, but the wonder of that first sight has stayed with me.
Sitting at the end of Montclair, I could see beyond
Georgeanne’s house on Howard Street to what had been in my youth a large
farm. Or a small one, since everything
else seems to have changed sizes. I
recall warnings that the farmer (whose name eludes me) had set his dogs on boys
caught crossing through his corn field, or perhaps had shot at them with rock
salt, or more improbably had reputedly marched some friend of a friend back to
his shed at gunpoint and waited for the police to arrive to arrest the
trespasser. We never ever saw the
farmer, though we always heard his dogs as we skirted around his cornfield on
the way to The Woods.
Dad always told us to stay out of that man’s field, and stop
playing in the woods. Fortunately, he
wasn’t usually around when mom told us to go find someone to play with. And running off to play in the woods was
always a special treat. Randy and his
brother Stuart, the two youngest Snyder boys, and I would make a bee line
through the field and trace through the half visible paths in our own Hundred
Acre Wood. There were streams to dam up
as we dumped handful after handful of mud into the center of the flow, the
trickle of water getting smaller and smaller as the mud got higher and higher,
until the pent up water overcame the structure and magnificently tore it away
and gushed downstream. There were tree
forts to plan but never build, since cut 2x4’s and planks of plywood were
surprisingly difficult for 7 year olds to find lying about in the middle of the
woods. And there were blackberries to
pick, always mindful of the snakes that just had to be there at our feet but
that we thankfully never encountered.
Sometimes I’d tell mom I was going for the berries and she’d give me a
pan to transport them home in. Despite
my efforts, there was never enough for a pie, though sometimes I managed to get
enough home for a few tarts. But most of
the time we just spent exploring. There
were open areas that were apparently dried up wetlands, with cracking but still
moist mud just starting to curl up away from the underlayer. There were needle sharp thickets to be
negotiated on the way from one nowhere to another. And dozens of small streams to jump across
and recross…. Or maybe just one that we confronted over and over again. We’d scare each other with tales of hobos and
Indians that were seen at the other end of the woods by someone’s brother’s cousin
who barely escaped being kidnapped or scalped or whatever else. We’d outcuss each other and see who could
surprise who with a pine cone or gumball hurled at head or back or calf. On one occasion we even went hunting for bear
with Danny’s BB gun, but we had to settle for shooting in the general direction
of bird sounds when the bear proved too afraid to show his face.
The farm is gone now, and so are the woods. A sprawl of too-quickly built homes and cul
de sacs, planted in waves from the 70’s through the 00’s, now sit atop the
ghosts of tree forts and dammed streams and blackberry bushes. They were fun while they lasted. I can’t help but feel a little sorry for
today’s boys, though. Outdoor activities
are much more restricted and organized.
Woodland imaginariums are replaced with postage stamp green spaces, if
they are replaced at all. Kids can’t
roam anymore. It’s just not safe. Not that it ever really was.
