A Demolition Demon Reaches New Lows Over Heights

The Grade school train was coming to the final station. In the fall of 1952 I began Sixth Grade. I was 11 years old. It may sound as if my life was improving from what I have written in the last chapters. It might even sound as if I was becoming a leader and gaining confidence; “I started the bike racing, I started the Ditching Club”.  It was more a matter of timing and coincidence than confidence. Those things would have come about just by the nature of kids being kids. Somebody would have started racing bikes, but I happened to be there first because I was fortunate enough to be taken to live stock car racing before anyone else. I had such enthusiasm for these races that it spelled over as I talked about it with a couple friends (of what few I had) and they thought racing would be fun to do. It is that way with boys. You give us anything that moves and we want to see who can move it fastest.

The Ditching Club came because I had seen a Destruction Derby the same week Gary Kinzey tried to wreck me during a race.

Gary Kinzey and Michael Myers were among the first to begin racing with me around the blacktop. Gary’s smaller bike put him at a disadvantage. As several more kids began racing against us, Gary  (right, I have no photos of Michael) slipped further back in the pack. We were racing this particular day and I was passing him. He decided he was going to knock me over as I went by. He rammed me with his bike, but he hit my rear wheel. He didn’t realize this was the driving force of a bike. My rear wheel absorbed the shock and its force knocked his front wheel to the side. He lost control and crashed.

The Destruction Derby and Gary’s foolish attack clicked together in my mind. I actually suggested it as a form of duel. It is also in boys to want to play rough and batter each other around, which was the allure for the others. This trying to knock each other off bikes became an instant fad.

As a fad it lost its appeal fairly quickly. As guys began to see the dents and scratches to their bikes and the bruises and abrasions on their elbows they began to drop out. The racing petered out after that as well; perhaps it was too tame now. Besides I had begun to spend less time riding around the school ground as Ronald and I explored the outer limits beyond Downingtown.

The stock car season was winding down as well. As much as I enjoyed that activity, it too had become a bone of contention between my father and I.

Let’s talk about fear. I have many times mentioned being scared of this or that. I was fearful of the hissing steam engines, I couldn’t sleep with the shades drawn, I was afraid of getting my foot caught between railroad tracks and I was frightened by deep water in the swimming holes. I sound like quite the wimp.

We use a lot of words loosely to convey feelings that aren’t as intense or true as the words imply. How many times in life to we say we “love” something? We just love to use the word love. I love “raindrops on roses”.  I love “whiskers on kittens”. I love green Jell-O. “I love Napalm in the morning.” I loved this song, that song, every other song.

We don’t love these things; we like them.

How about expressions of fright?

“I was scared to death by that sudden thunderclap!”

Really? What we mean is the thunder startled us.

When I came to a railroad track I wasn’t afraid to cross over it because of what I saw in that “Dick Tracy vs. Cueball” film. I was simply careful where I stepped. I wasn’t as afraid of the deep water as I was reacting to my father’s approach to teaching me how to swim.

I wasn’t really fearful of steam engines. I didn’t run for my life when one was sitting across the sidewalk downtown. If I could walk around it to go on my way, I did. When my grandfather offered me the ride in the train cab I didn’t refuse because I was scared of the engine or the steam. It was because I had to climb that little ladder to up above my head. I was truly afraid of height.

There are two types of fear, the rational and the irrational. Rational fear is a built in defense mechanism. Fear warns us of danger or risk. We need some fears or we will become reckless in situations that could harm us. A fear of deep water for a person who can’t swim is natural. One knows they could drown. Fear of height for the average person is also normal. Being careless on the edge of a cliff can lead to falling to your death. Normal, rational fear may make us cautious, but does not totally interfere with doing things or bring our life to a halt in certain situations.

Most of my childhood fears were normal and I got over them or didn’t let them control me. My fear of height was a phobia. It was irrational and debilitating. It caused me to miss opportunities, to be miserable where others had fun, to avoid some everyday situations and to bring insult and teasing my way. I don’t know what caused it; I just had it.

My dad had no qualms about heights what so ever. My father did not view mine as an anxiety disorder. He saw it as a weakness. I was just being a sissy. If I wasn’t such a pantywaist I’d climb up that ladder and find out there was nothing to be afraid of.

He even used my fear as a threat. There were these water tank towersalong the road near Philadelphia. My dad always threatened to take me up on those towers and leave me there until I got over my fear of height. If my father did ask me to ride with him I was reluctant because I really believed he might do that.

How did this cause more agitation between my dad and I at the stock car races?

The racetracks had bleachers, not stadiums. The seats were wooden planks bolted on the top of a metal frame. One plank was what you sat upon and a second plank was where you put your feet. If you moved your foot back a few inches or forward too far it dangled over open space. There was row after row of this configuration. You could see down between the rows to the ground below.

I refused to go any higher than the third or fourth row. Frankly, I couldn’t. When I did I broke into a cold sweat, my heart raced, my body shook and I could not think of anything but how high I was. If I had a seat any higher than the fourth row I would sit like a frozen statue, afraid to move, clutching the board edge with both hands with my knuckles white. I was even scared to breath hard, but so scared I couldn’t stop breathing hard. It is difficult to explain to anyone who has never had a phobia how terrifying and paralyzing the fear is.

My father liked to sit up at the very top. He was angry with me for not wanting to go higher. It ended up with me sitting alone while my parents sat where my dad wished. This would have been fine if he could have understood my anguish and let it be what it was. But he could never let it go. He would always be on my case about being a fraidy cat or “a worrywart like your mother.” He would say things loudly when we arrived, such as, “Well, Gertrude, you gonna sit with the men or the girls today?”

Summer ended.

Going into Sixth Grade was going back into the lion’s den. The claws of ridicule were as sharp as ever.

I was also becoming less thrilled about having to go to school. I thought it was boring. I had things I wanted to know, but the school wasn’t teaching those things. I began missing homework assignments in sixth grade and paying less attention in class. I would be doodling in my notebook or daydreaming during class. My marks that year deteriorated badly and for the first time I was getting U for unsatisfactory in more deportment categories than just neatness.

There was the telling comment Mrs. Yost wrote on my report card at the end of the first marking period, “Needs more appreciation.”

I might have needed it, but I wasn’t going to get it.

However, there were two things that probably saved me that year, two things I enjoyed and looked forward to coming to school for.

Mrs. Yost assigned yearlong responsibilities to some of us that first week. One such was Safety Patrol. Safety Patrol members acted as hall monitors and as crossing guards. They wore a white belt and strap with a badge to show their authority. Bonnie Walton and the two Mary Janes, Chudleigh and Sabellico, were members. So were Denny Myers and Jack Swarner. Now Denny and Jack were officially sanctioned bullies.

There was another important post, Flag Monitor. Back then most people were proud of this country for what it stood for. People showed respect for the flag. It was the job of the Flag Monitors to retrieve the flag from the school office, raise it on the flagpole out front and to take it down after school. The Monitors had to make certain it never touched the ground and fold it in the proper triangular shape when putting it away. They also had to hurry outside and lower the flag if it should begin to rain.

Stuart Meisel and I were the Flag Monitors. This teaming up led to “The Daily Star”.

I admit I was somewhat taken aback and a bit hurt when I read Stuart’s account of “The Daily Star” in his autobiography, My Story:

“In Sixth Grade, I decided to print a school newspaper. I was given access to the school mimeograph machine. This was BX time. [He footnoted this as Before Xerox.] Using a mimeo required you to type onto a special type of paper called a master. Then, you would lace it on some totally yucky (or depending upon your point of view, totally cool) jello-like [sic] substance. Then you hand-cranked the machine, and voila, there is your mimeographed page. From a friend Larry Meredith (more about him later), I was able to get one of the items that I wrote in my (using the term loosely) “newspaper”. So, here it is  -- Ya-Ha-Whoey.

“YA-HA-WHOEY

“(By Stuart R. G. Meisel)”

[And he then wrote out the complete lyrics of the song.]

 –Page 25, My Story by Stuart G. Meisel, 2004.

Since these two things, “The Daily Star” and “Ya-Ha-Whoey”, occurred over 60 years ago I will chalk it up to memory failure, but I share credit on both these endeavors and I have always credited Stuart as a co-writer when and wherever I have referenced the newspaper or the poem. Here is my version.

Everyday when we retrieved the flag to hang or brought it in at end of day we entered the school office. Something in the office caught our eye. It was a mimeograph machine. People used a mimeograph to make duplicates before the invention of the photocopier. I think it was Stuart who suggested it after seeing that machine, but we decided to publish a newspaper.

We approached Mrs. Yost (pictured right), who was also the principal of East Ward, with the idea. We wanted to publish a school newspaper, print it with the mimeograph and sell it to the other students. Surprisingly, she agreed to let us. She taught us how to use the machine and told us when we could have access to it.

Stuart and I named our newspaper “The Daily Star”, even though we only published once a week.

He and I did all the writing. In order to make copies on a mimeograph you must first type a stencil. Mrs. Meisel agreed to type this for us. You attach the stencil to a drum on the machine and by turning a crank you apply ink and print the copies. We sold these at lunchtime at a little folding card table set up in the hallway. Our price was one cent a copy. We made enough money to throw a little party for our class at the end of the year.

We wrote about things going on at school, told some jokes and did a crossword puzzle. Stuart got annoyed because his mother wanted us to print these little anecdotes from the Reader’s Digest. We wanted strictly original material done by us. This was my first writing collaboration with Stuart; it would not be my last.

In fact, another collaboration was the aforementioned “Ya-Ha-Whoey” and it was not for and never appeared in “The Daily Star”. It was written more than a year after we left Sixth Grade. One night I was at Stuart’s house and we were watching “Disneyland” on TV. Mr. Meisel was sitting in a chair wearing his usual smoking jacket. Stuart and I were lying on the floor. The show that night was a series of “Goofy” cartoons. Goofy would often yell, “Ya-ha-whoey” if he went down a ski-jump or fell over a cliff.

When the show ended, Stuart and I went up to an upstairs room where he had this antique Dictaphone. We sat in front of it and made up the poem as a song that we recorded on these old wax cylinders. Now the TV show “Disneyland” did not debut on TV until October 1954. We graduated from Mrs. Yost’s sixth grade at East Ward Elementary in June 1953.  Our song could never have appeared in that publication.

I admit, I was much more interested in writing for “The Daily Star” than doing my daily math homework. My marks were suffering. I had been throughout Grade School an A Minus or B Plus student, although my trend was downward. Now I was barely floating about C level. I was also getting unsatisfactory in “self-confidence”, “takes group responsibility”, “starts and completes work on time”, and “tries to do his best”, as well as the perennial “works neatly”.

There was another problem interfering with my ability to do my schoolwork. I wasn’t aware of it, but my eyesight was getting poor.  I was becoming increasingly nearsighted, but to me I had simply accepted the idea that the world always looked a bit blurry. School seating policy made matters worse. I was one of the taller kids in class, next to Ronald, and we tall ones sat in the back rows, furthest from the blackboard. I did know I couldn’t read what Mrs. Yost wrote on the board, but I chalked it up to her handwriting. What I couldn’t make out by squinting, I simply ignored.

The school gave eye tests. An ophthalmologist visited the school one day a year and performed these. I couldn’t get as far down the chart as most. The school informed my parents I needed glasses, but of course they did nothing about it that year. Spectacles cost money.

I finished Sixth Grade with a 2.64 average, just barely enough for a B minus.

My grades were not going to improve in Junior High, even with glasses. Before I left Sixth Grade I got an introduction to what Junior High would be like, and it was not encouraging.



The lyrics of "Ya-Ha-Whoey"
by Stuart G. Meisel & Larry E. Meredith,
Downingtown, Pennsylvania, 1954-55

Grandpa was driving down the mountain on an icy day,

When his car hit the curve, it began to sway.

Off of the road it found its way

And as he went over you could hear him say:

“Ya-ha-whoey!

Ya-ha-ya-ha-whoey!  Ya-ha-ya-ha-whoey!”

And they lay him away that day.

As up the first hill the scenic started to creep,

A lady stood up to see how steep.

When she saw she began to leap

And as she fell out you could hear her speak:

“Ya-ha-whoey!

Ya-ha-ya-ha-whoey!  Ya-ha-ya-ha-whoey!”

And they lay her away that week.

A man went up into a tower that’s tall.

He took a wrong turn and started to fall.

Though he had a voice what’s small,

As he went you could hear his call:

“Ya-ha-whoey!

Ya-ha-ya-ha-whoey!  Ya-ha-ya-ha-whoey!”

And they laid him away in a hole.

A man went up to tie a noose.

He did not know the ladder was loose

And as he fell from his roost,

You heard him call like a stricken moose:

“Ya-ha-whoey!

Ya-ha-ya-ha-whoey!  Ya-ha-ya-ha-whoey!”

And six men gave him a boost.

A man went up to a scaffold real high,

A way to roofs simplify.

Got too near the edge, sweet old guy,

And as he slipped, you could hear his cry:

“Ya-ha-whoey!

Ya-ha-ya-ha-whoey!  Ya-ha-ya-ha-whoey!”

And they laid him away to lie.

Stuart & Larry, 2011

Edmond O'Brien's in Drag, Mr. Peanut's in Burlap and the Mountains are in Papier-Mache

My Fifth Grade teacher was Mrs. Shellenberger and I liked her. She was very nice. She was kind to me. She was a big woman, tall with broad shoulders. She looked like the movie actor Edmond O’Brien. She could have been his sister or him in drag. (O’Brien is pictured right. Mrs. Shellenberger is on the left.) Just picture the actor with long hair wearing a print dress and clunky shoes.

We celebrated Halloween each year at East Ward. Everybody (well, the kids anyway; not so much the teachers) came in costume and the entire student body lined up and paraded around the schoolyard. In our classrooms we had parties afterward with treats and best costume contests. There were prizes for funniest, ugliest, scariest and most beautiful. I won a prize every Halloween from

Fourth grade through Sixth. I won in every category, a different one each year, except most beautiful. I might have even won that once. I dressed as a female one year.  People said I made a pretty girl. It was my eyes. Women would tell my mother they wished they had my eyes. “He has such long lashes,” they would say.
(Right: me as a Playboy Bunny, 1993 – “Pretty Woman, walkin’ down the street” – No? Yes?)

My costumes were always homemade, mostly by my grandmother. We purchased the masks, but everything else came from stuff around the house. I won a little book about birds for being The Ugliest in Sixth Grade. That year I was a witch. My clothes were just old pieces of my grandmother’s wardrobe dyed black. My hat was fashioned out of poster board. I was a rough looking hobo another year in my grandfather’s old clothes. I hate to say it, but the mask bore a resemblance to my Pap-Pap, especially since there was a cigar stub in one corner of the mouth.

One night my mother, grandmother and I went about door-to-door with my grandmother wearing the Witch costume sans hat, my mother as the Hobo and me as a very politically incorrect Black Woman.

The year I started Fifth Grade I also marched in the big Halloween Parade in West Chester. I was marching along having problems seeing through my costume when a man grabbed my arm and pulled me out of line. I wondered what I did wrong. Instead he told me I won third place in the most original costume category (five dollars). I  was dressed as Mr. Peanut. My body was an old potato sack with a cloth monocle sewed on around one eyehole. A pair of grandfather’s Long John’s my grandmother dyed black covered my arms and legs. My cane was one I won at a carnival. My hat was just cardboard cut, glued and taped together.

I received a gift that kept on giving that Christmas. Santa brought me an electric train (his last official visit. this being the year Iva and I had discovered the truth about that old man). Trains became a passion for the rest of my youth. My annual Christmas List included something for the train layout every year thereafter.

My father put a plywood platform in the dining room of 417. I don’t know if he or my grandfather built it. He said it was for the tree and put the tree up at its center. (He put the tree up and almost knocked everything down trying to place the star on top. His stepladder slipped off the edge of the platform.) Christmas morning I came down and a train was chugging around the tree.

Every year at Thanksgiving I would get to put my trains up. Each year I added more to my display. I would get another car or another Plasticville building. My train displays were my pride and joy.

Gary Kinzey (right with my dog, Topper) was a close friend during a few of those years. He was as passionate about electric trains as I, but more focused on the electricity. He made an elaborate control panel with a lot of dials and levers that controlled all aspects of his layout. I considered Gary an electronic genius. He had a Ham Radio in his room and in Junior High he came to class showing off a fountain pen. It wasn’t a working pen, however. He had gutted it of ink and built a radio receiver inside. When Gary became an adult he did go into the electronic field.

I was interested in the design of the layout rather than the power source. My landscape grew as I did. A tourist attraction called Roadside America in Shartlesville, Pennsylvania inspired me.  It billed itself as “The Worlds (sic) Greatest Indoor Miniature Village”.

I wanted to rival it. Thus I build mountains with tunnels by shaping wire mesh into shape and covering it with paper Mache. I placed a small mirror in a valley, built up banks around it to shape create a skating pond. I ran a string of Christmas tree lights beneath the platform and up holes beneath my buildings to give them inside lights that I could turn on and off at will. I hung a plywood sheet on an angle over one end of my little world. I drilled holes and stuck little bulbs through to create a night sky of stars. (Of course, I did a lot of these things as I became a teenager and had a bigger platform in the garage/basement of our home in Bucktown.)

Okay, I came up a little short of Roadside America, but give me a break, I was a kid!

Beginning My Education: Inside and Out of Schools

In June of 1947 I turned six. East Ward Elementary School (pictured) allowed me to enter First Grade that September. My teacher was Mrs. Mary L. Warren. She was a tall woman with broad shoulders, who sported heavy shoes and a stern face. She took no brook with misbehavior or inattention. She stalked about the classroom and if she thought you a slacker or caught you talking, chewing gum or goofing off, would grab your hair and yank.

I never had my hair pulled by her. I knew my alphabet and could read well in advance of coming to First Grade and I was never a discipline problem. My final grades for the two marking periods I was in her class were 4 As, 2 Bs and an S. The S was Satisfactory in Health. The As were in Reading, Spelling (surprisingly), Arithmetic and Art; the Bs for Penmanship and Music.

I was absent two and a half days in the first marking period. I don’t know why. I had two of the dreaded children’s diseases in those early years, Chicken Pox and a Mump, but I can’t place a date on when. Yes, I did say Mump rather than mumps. I only had it on one side. Either disease would have kept me out of school more than a couple days. The school nurse probably sent me home for a virus, which would account for the half day.

Although I never suffered a hair pulling by Mrs. Warren, I observed a number who did in my time there. It wasn’t a gentle tug either. It was a real yank that got the victim’s full attention. Her

physical punishments were not limited to hair abuse. My friend Ronald Tipton fell pray to her corrective measures. Ronald (pictured right) was not yet my friend. He was just another face in the crowd even if he was tall enough his face showed above the rest of us.

Ronald had a problem then. He stuttered. When he stuttered, Mrs. Warren would come up behind him and slap the back of his head.

“See D…D…Dick r…r…”

Whamp!

Now through all the years Ronald and I were friends I didn’t hear him stutter. The Mrs. Warren cure must have worked.

The approach to education was different in the 1940s from today. Educators forced my wife to write with her right hand because she was left-handed. Unlike the cure for Ronald’s stutter, this cure didn’t take.

There is a mystery concerning my First Grade report card. I did not return to East Ward

Elementary after the 1946 Christmas Break. Despite this, my Downingtown Public School First Grade Report Card contains marks for the last two marking periods and the final exam. These are in a different handwriting than the first periods. The attendance record for the second half of the school year is blank, yet my mother signed as my parent for both these periods on the back of the card. The back of the card also says, “The pupil is hereby promoted to Grade 2”. M. Wallace, Principal approved the report card. Mrs. Yost was the East Ward Principal.

I assume that when I transferred to my new school for the remainder of the year, my Report Card transferred too. It appears that the West Whiteland school used my Downingtown Report rather than issue a new one. I don’t know the reasons for the attendance left blank.

If this last half on the Report is correct, my marks dropped with the transfer. I maintained straight As in Reading, but everything else slid to Bs. Spelling and Music are no longer even  subjects.

And here the mysteries collide. What was my dad doing in 1946 after the service and why is my Downingtown East Ward Report Card complete?

These are the facts I know.

My father did come home from the war early in the year 1946. I was not happy about it. I

resented his arrival back on the scene. I had my mother to myself and now he came home and stole her away from me. I was jealous and angry with that. I resented his presence and we were at odds the rest of my childhood. It was partly my fault and partly his.

My dad did get a job driving Milk Tankers at a company in Glenloch, Pennsylvania called Hines. This is my dad’s account:

“When I got outta the Navy I didn’t want to go back to what I use to do. I wanted something different where I had some freedom to get about. I had a friend workin’ at Hines out in Glenloch told me they were hirin’. He said, ‘Don’t tell Old Man Hines you know mechanics or you’ll never get out of the garage.’  So I told Old Man Hines I was a trucker and he hired me at $50 a month plus the house.”

Yes, plus the house.

(The photo of me on the pony (1947): a man came around with the pony and the chaps and cowboy hat. He must have traveled from state to state. When I worked at Wilmington Trust several of us brought in our photos on that pony wearing the very same outfits.)

We moved to that house during Christmas week of 1947. (We did a lot of changing addresses in December when I was a child.) This is not That House pictured left. This is Loch Aerie also known as Glen Loch or The Lockwood mansion. It sits alongside The Lincoln Highway twenty-five miles west of Philadelphia. This places it about seven miles east of Downingtown.

Addison Hutton, the architect who designed Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr Colleges and Lehigh University, designed this ornate castle of a home. Charles Miller, who had designed Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, landscaped the original grounds. This was at one time the estate of William E. Lockwood, owner of W. E. & E. Dunbar Lockwood. His company manufactured envelopes, tags, boxes and so forth. Mr. Lockwood commissioned its construction in 1865. It was the one of the largest estate in Pennsylvania at 684 acres. It was so large four railway stations were within its boundaries.

Our new home stood about a mile or two east of Glen Aerie on what was once part of theThe House my father received as part compensation for hauling milk.

Glen Loch estate. This was

It was a bit less imposing than Glen Aerie.

Mr. Charles Miller must have overlooked this little patch when he lay out the landscape for Mr. Lockwood.

What I show of That House is all I have to show. I pieced this image together from two separate photographs. It is impossible to obtain a better photograph today. The house and land disappeared beneath a Corporate Campus Parking Lot. Today the Lincoln Highway is almost a continuous series of malls and corporate commons. In 1947 this area was country with little around.

The land the house occupied was then mostly swamp. The marsh began on the east side of our lane just off the Lincoln Highway. This boggy area came almost up to the house, leaving a small front yard as it curved about and around to one side then continued southward to the woods beyond.

To the west of the long driveway from highway to house was a large fenced pasture. Cows roamed about this field in the warmer months of the year. There was a tiny creek that split the pasture into halves. It ran west to east like a scar. Watercress grew in abundance along its banks and the water was full of small crawfish.

We had a bit of a backyard and a vegetable garden my mother planted. My father built a rabbit hutch on stilts to house Snowball, my pet white rabbit. On the other side of the garden the flat country turned into a long sloping hill upon which was a cornfield. There was a fencerow to the west of the cornfield and then another field. To the east was forest. The Mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad ran straight through a cutout just over the crest of the hill.

The driveway came level to our home where it split into a second short lane that curved west to another house a bit further behind ours on that side. Some people came and occupied that house for a month one summer, but I never saw them again

Our house had a split personality. One side was cinder block and the other stucco. Scaffolding

remained standing along the east side of the house. Whoever began stuccoing left off half finished. There were steps and a short porch on the front and a larger porch on the back.

The inside of the house was nicer than the exterior. There was a kitchen to the back and a dining room to the front on the west side. A large living room was on the east side. There was a staircase between dining and living rooms to the upstairs. There were four good-sized bedrooms on the upper floor. My parents had the front bedroom on the east side and I had the rear. The front west bedroom was for storage. The remaining one was my playroom.

There was no one in eyesight to the western horizon. Our nearest neighbors were a quarter mile up Lincoln Highway to the east. There was a line of row houses, perhaps three or four. We knew two of the families there, the Holmes and the Benders. The Holmes has a son, Tommy, who was several years older than me. The Benders had a daughter named Dottie who was also my senior and who in the near future would be my babysitter and in the distant f

uture would be a friend of my wife and I. Both of these were a bit too old to be playmates or companions to me in 1947.

The Hines Trucking Company was set back a ways from the highway directly across the street from these homes. I suspect Joe Bender (pictured right) may have been the friend who suggested the job to my dad. Mr. Bender was a mechanic for Hines and Dottie’s father.

A little further up the road was the Autocar Motor Company, a manufacture of trucks (taken over by White Motor Co. in 1953). There 

were several Cape Cod style homes running atop an embankment east of the Autocar factory. These were company houses. There was one family I knew who lived there, but more about them later.

On the other side of the Autocar company houses was the Church Farm School, which took up acreage on both sides of the highway. This was a boarding school for boys run by the Episcopal Church. The farm buildings and land were north of the highway and the dormitories were to the south. Boys my age boarded there, but the school was off-limits to me. The Church School restricted the students to the school grounds.

This house in the swamp was compensation to my father for driving milk tankers for Hines. Supposedly this was because my dad was a returning Vet, but I suspect it was cheaper than paying him more than the $50 a month he received in wages.

In Downingtown I lived on a street full of children my age and directly across from my grade school. Here I lived in virtual isolation from the world. My mother did not drive and my father was gone most of the week. I went to school on a bus. This was a situation that had a profound effect on my personality and development.

I walked out of East Ward Elementary School on Christmas Break December1947. I entered

West Whiteland Elementary School (pictured right) when the break ended in January 1948.

I might as well have stepped into a black hole. My mind is totally void of any memories of that school. I can’t describe what my classrooms looked like or name my teachers. I don’t know if my teachers were women or men. I don’t remember the subjects taught or who were my classmates. My knowledge of being in that building and what transpired there for two years is gone. Even the report cards I received have ceased to exist. I don’t know what my marks were, except for the mystery of my First Grade Card at Downingtown that had the periods I didn’t attend East Ward filled in and my promotion on the back.

Here is the sum total of everything I can tell related to West Whiteland School:

I learned to play soccer there, but I don’t remember playing.

I made one friend in my class, Robert Cuellers. I don’t recall him in class, but I remember visiting at his home at least once. He moved to Downingtown the same month we moved back and we went to East Ward together for the latter grades. It may be for this reason I even remember Bobby (pictured left).

My bus stop was on Route 30 at the end of our long lane. It was my first experience riding in a school bus. The only trip I actually recall was one coming home from school. We were on the Lincoln Highway not far from my lane. There was a dog struck by a car and it lay on the centerline with its hindquarters crushed, but it was trying to get up. That is the one image connected to that school I wish I had forgot. I had nightmares about it then and have never been able to erase it from my mind.

I recall much about the house and grounds where I lived. Probably because I spent so much alone time there. I don’t know where father hauled the milk, except he kept the schedule he would follow the rest of my childhood. He would leave early on Monday morning, be home briefly on Wednesday and be gone again until Friday night.

This did not make me unhappy. I got more attention from my mother than ever before, after all, she was isolated too. My mother didn’t know how to drive. When dad left it was she and I until he next appeared. The move to Glenloch forced her to quit her job. She had no other occupation than that of housewife and mother.

 She had never been in this position before except for the first year of her marriage and that was in a small apartment with no kid. All the other years of her life my grandmother had run the house and cooked the meals. Keeping house wasn’t a problem. My mother was used to work after the jobs in the mushroom plant as a teen and the two she held while dad was in the South Pacific. It was cooking that challenged her.

It wasn’t one she conquered, at least not for another forty years when her mother died.

Our meals were simple, both because we couldn’t afford a lot and because mom couldn’t cook. If it wasn’t a sandwich it was out of a can. Lunches and suppers were quite similar. Typical meals were tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich, hot dogs and beans, just hot dogs on buns, tuna fish salad sandwiches, chicken noodle soup, beef stew, dried-beef gravy over bread or leftovers from Sunday dinner. But she didn’t cook the Sunday meals.

When my father arrived home on Friday evenings I would have my little suitcase packed and ready. It was over the hill and through the woods to Grandmother’s house we would go. I would spend Friday and Saturday nights at 424 Washington while my parents had their together time. My parents ate out somewhere on Saturdays and on Sunday the whole clan gathered at grandma’s for a big sit down Sunday dinner cooked by my grandmother.

Mom saw little need to cook a big meal for just the two of us during the week. She was not a and eat out meager meals at the kitchen table. Superman was often on the radio while we ate. I would dry the few dishes while mom washed and then we would go into the living room.

big eater and I was a fussy one, so why bother. She would fix what I liked. We would sit

Mother would listen to her radio programs or read, while I played on the floor if it were wintertime. During the months when the days were long with sun I went outside and played to bedtime. Sometimes we played a board game.  On the rare occasions when dad would be home he would choose the radio shows and I usually went up to my playroom to escape him