Dead Bodies, Surrogate Fathers and Hanging Out in Country Dives

In the fog of memory I have lost the exact time certain events happened. I know the year because it’s etched in stone, but maybe not the month or day. I may find even that in some record, as I did of my Great Grandparents Meredith’s death dates. He died on May 14 and she on June 4 of the same year. Facts may be hazy. He died after several months of ill health at age 81. Exactly what the health problem was remains unknown to me. She simply died three weeks later at 82, no cause given. They married on February 16, 1893 and twenty years later lived in Elverson, Pennsylvania. They celebrated their twentieth anniversary with 18 guests and a turkey dinner.

They both died at 413 West Minor Street in West Chester, their last home of thirty years. They previously lived in Modena where he operated a lumber mill and the general store. (Pictured left, the general store as it looks today.) He had a brother, Benjamin Franklin Meredith II and a sister, Ivagene Meredith Sessions, who lived at the time of his death in Hollywood. He had a son John, a daughter Ellen and a son Benjamin Franklin Meredith III, who was my father’s dad. The man, William Wilson Meredith, was my dad’s namesake. My dad hated him.

I know far less about Hanna Ella Sheeler Meredith, other than she was from Honeybrook, Pennsylvania and was a mean, nasty woman.

I have one old photograph of her (right), but none of him. I don’t know what he looked like and don’t believe I ever met either of them. They had treated my father very badly and unfairly.  

Florence Blanche Townsley (pictured on right with my dad in the buggy and pregnant with Uncle Ben) had been William and Ella’s hired help,  a mere cleaning woman, and a servant, but she married their son and became their daughter-in-law in 1918. They considered her a gold digger and accused her of seducing their son into getting her pregnant. Was this true? The facts are she did get pregnant by Benjamin out of wedlock and she was six years his senior. She was a woman in her mid-twenties and he was a boy of 19 when they wed. My father was the result of it, not the cause, yet the Grandparents held it against him all their lives.

With little resources and four mouths to feed, my dad enlisted in the CCC. This was one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s alphabet soup answers to the Great Depression. The initials stood for the Civilian Conservation Corps and it existed from 1933 to 1942. It was open to single, unemployed men from relief families and provided manual labor jobs.

When my father announced to his Grandparents what he had done, Ella (as she was known) ordered him to rescind his enlistment.

“No one in this family will be associated with that nigger work,” she said.

Dad ignored her. He worked for the CCC in Virginia, building the Skyline Drive. It was a semi-military existence and they lived in camps where they worked. It was hard labor with $25 of the monthly pay of $30 sent back to his family in Modena.

Grandfather William and Grandmother Ella both died in 1950.

Death seemed to float through the air that year. My Great Grandparents Brown both passed in 1950, too.

The Browns lived in “The Boyer House” (pictured right) on Boot Road at a crossroads village called The

Grove.

            I knew them and liked them. I was young, of course. In fact, Mary Ann Smiley Brown died of a long illness three days before my ninth birthday. She was 71 and had been ill f
or months. Her funeral may have been the first I ever attended. I don’t remember if I was at my Grandmother Florence Blanche Townsley Meredith’s in January 1946.

I remember going to Grandparent Brown’s Boot Road home after the service. There were platters of food in the living room and a large number of people drifting about me. One of my clearest memories of visiting that house during her life was sitting in her kitchen while she cooked. She cooked on a wood stove. There was a metal bucket handy to hold kindling used to ignite the initial fire. The stove was heavy and black in appearance. Her pots, pans and other cooking utensils also appeared to be heavy. (Left: Sara Ann Brown holding me, 1941.)

Millard Charlton Brown died nearly six months later on December 2, 1950, in a home he had built. House building had been his business. The house wasn’t large and it set just off West Chester Pike in a place called Ludwig’s Camp. My grandfather said Charlton died because he couldn’t stand living without his wife of 50 years.

We found his body. My grandfather and I had been riding and he took me to visit his dad. We went in the house and found the old man dead upon the bedroom floor. I say “old man”, but he was only 73. People looked somehow older then. My Great Grandparents Brown looked like old time pioneers to me,

especially her in her long “granny dresses and aprons”, her hair pulled back in a bun. They look like the couple in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” to me in this photo taken the year they died.

            Do my wife and I look quite so old-time at that same age in the photo to the right?

Around that same period another death occurred. Dave Fidler had a little sister known as Sissy. She was not yet school age. The Fidler’s lived on Lancaster Avenue directly across from the East Ward School (pictured left as it looks today). Dave was in my class and our class was outside for recess. Sissy saw us playing and she wanted to join. Someone had left the fence’s front gate open, so she ran into the street. A vehicle struck and killed her.

For me it was like a recurring nightmare. I had witnesses a similar scene less than three years earlier and the coincidences were remarkable. Dave Fidler was a friend and he had two brothers, all three boys older than the sister. My friends at Glenloch had been three brothers with a younger sister. Sissy ran into traffic because she wanted to play where she saw her brother. The other girl ran into

traffic because she wanted to pick flowers with her brother. It was the same highway, Lancaster Pike also known as the Lincoln Highway or Route 30. Here we were hustled into the school by our teachers; there I was hustled home by my mother.

To add to this tragedy, Dave and I had a classmate named Helen Burkhart (pictured left). It was her father who accidentally struck and killed Sissy.

I mentioned my Grandfather Brown and I were driving when we discovered my Great

Grandfather’s body. Such rides had become common by the summer of 1950. If my Grandmother had been almost a Nanny to me as a child, my Grandfather was a surrogate father. He was the masculine image for me and masculine he was.

Francis Fizz Brown (left), known to everyone as Brownie, was not a handsome man. He was relatively short, he was fat and he was bald. His nature was gruff. He drank, cursed and smoked. He told dirty jokes and he hated Democrats, especially Harry S. Truman. (My father was a staunch and steadfast Democrat to his dying day.) Grandfather Brown also hated Milton Berle, whom my Grandmother watched every week after grandfather bought her a television.

What my Grandfather loved was foxhunting. He took me to all the hunts. He didn’t ride horses anymore, so we followed in the car. A hunt was

like a party. There would be iced tubs of beer and soda on the lawn, finger food on card tables. We would go to some farm early on that day. There would be a great crowd and many horses and even more hounds, straining at leashes or waiting in the backs of pickup trucks. I think my grandfather had sold Old Red and his other hounds by then. I don’t remember them being packed in the car with us.

There would be one fox, usually sitting in a wooden crate under a tree off to the side. The hunters weren’t dressed in any traditional outfits like you see in pictures, no “Pinks”, the bright red jacket associated with the sport.  No Bowler Hats or even black riding helmets. They riders looked more like ranch hands in Jeans, flannel shirts and work boots.

People would mill about talking. The Hunt Master dropped the fox at some point. Before releasing the hounds they allowed the fox a few minutes head start. The dogs charged baying. The horsemen would gallop after. Grandfather and I would jump in his car.

I don’t know how he knew where to go. Perhaps he could hear the baying of the hounds. He  drove this road or that and then pulled over on the shoulder. Sure enough, in a few seconds the actors of this drama would charge across the field, fox, hounds and riders. We watched until they disappeared again and then drove to a new spot. Eventually they cornered the fox. They crated the star while restraining the hounds from doing any harm. The farmer who owned the fox would take it home to await the next hunt. (the photo on the left is of my Cousin Bob Wilson and his daughterin 1974. They are at the Pikeland Lutheran Church Thanksgiving Blessing of the Hounds. They are attired in traditional Pinks and hunting outfits. Foxhunting remained a popular Chester County sport.))

We would drive away and stop at a country bar.

Always.

The bar was a dive. It was a plain white building with a gravel parking lot in the middle of

nowhere. The windows were small, rippled glass with neon beer signs taking up most of the panes. Inside it was dark, lit by more blue and red neon ads for booze. There was a small horseshoe bar taking up about two-thirds of the space. To the one side of the bar were a couple pinball machines and shuffleboard.

The shuffleboard was a bowling game. Pins snapped down from the top at the far end. You slid a silver metal object about the side and shape of a hockey puck down the surface to knock over the pins. The pins didn’t actually fall over. They folded up against the top of the machine. There were little metal prongs sticking up from the board surface beneath the pins. The object would slide over these and springs retracted however many pins above each prong.

Pap-Pap, as I called him, bought me a “Wootie”. That was my name for Upper Ten, a lemon-lime soda similar to 7-Up or Sprite. It was popular in the ‘fifties. He’d give me a handful of nickels and I would play the bowling game while he sat on a barstool and drank whiskey.

I never saw my Grandfather drunk in those days. He must have held his liquor well, for he did consume a good bit. (Maybe that is where I got my own ability to drink without effect.) I never saw him weave either walking or driving. He remained coherent and his mood was consistent, always gruff. All that would change in a few years, but in the foxhunting days there was no problem with his drinking.

My Grandfather carried three essential items with him. There was a pint of whiskey stashed

under the driver’s seat and a packet of Redman chewing tobacco in the glove compartment. There were always three or four Phillies Blunts, cigars, in his breast pocket. When he met a friend along the road he would stop and offer them a snort and a chew. My Grandfather had a lot of friends.

He never shared his cigars.

Many times when he ran short of smokes, he would send me across the East Ward playground to the gas station on the corner of Lancaster and Whiteland. The station sold tobacco products, candy bars, soda and ice cream pops. I would buy him a six-pack box of cigars and hegave me enough to get myself a Creamsicle or Fudgsicle (five cents each). I was 9, 10, 11 years old those years and no one questioned my buying cigars.

When I got back home, Pap-Pap would unwrap a Blunt and light up. He would slip the cigar band on one of my fingers like a reward, which is how I took it. There were lots of strange

little rewards I treasured. Many came from booze, such as little Scotty dogs magnets from Black & White Scotch or various red rooster doodads from Seagram’s 7.

I didn’t really remember who smoked cigarettes in the family. As far as I know my grandmother and mom never smoked. My grandfather was always puffing a cigar and my father constantly had a pipe between his teeth. Maybe my dad smoked cigarettes for a while and then switched to the pipe. I do know there were cigarettes in the house, Lucky Strike I believe. Someone was buying cigarettes from a machine that is certain. The cost of a pack was twenty-three cents. You had to put a quarter in the machine and the pack came out with two pennies on the side beneath the cellophane wrapper. I was generally given that two cents, I just couldn’t remember by whom.

That mystery was solved after dad died when I saw this photo of dad and me and noticed he

had a cigarette in his right hand.

I loved my Grandfather then. I called him Pap-Pap and my Grandmother Mam-Mam. Denny Myers heard me call them by these terms. He and his friends met me on the playground at school and he loudly told the others what I called my grandparents. He said I talked like a little baby. Everybody laughed, but I called them that with affection until the days they died.

My friend Ronald says Denny considered me a “suck-up” in school because the teachers liked me. This is true. I was a perpetual Teacher’s Pet, much against my wishes. I didn’t deliberately garner the position. I knew what kids thought of the teacher’s favorites and I had enough trouble with the other kids. But I was not a disobedient child in school. I didn’t act out. I was quiet. For several years I did my work, including homework. It wasn’t that I was an outstanding student that caused the teachers to favor me. It was because I never gave them any trouble.

But I know I was a Teacher’s Pet often enough.

A Tour of Four-Twenty-Four & Down in Downingtown

Let’s take a tour of 424 Washington Avenue. As you can see, it is a narrow house, but long. (These first two photographs are from August 2007.) You walk up the short pavement from the street to the porch; step up two or three steps and cross the front porch to the front door. Going through that door takes you into the living room.

The living room is claustrophobic, not because it is too small, but because it is too dark. The walls are dark and the overstuffed sofa and chairs are dark, maroon or mossy green in color.There is a wooden magazine stand, a small coffee table and an end table, all in dark wood. Doilies cover all tabletops and armrests. There is a floor lamp and a couple of table lambs, but all give off very little glow, thus the room is always dim. There is a large front window and smaller windows on each side, yet the room gets very little sunlight. The porch roof shades the front, a large tree blocks the East and sun just doesn’t hit the West window.

Continuing through into the dining room you find the brightest room. The wallpaper is a lighter color and the two doors to the left front are white. The door nearest the west window opens to circular stairs to the second floor. The other door is to steps to the cellar. The trees do not block the windows on either side. There is less furniture and most is covered with something white. The dining table dominates in the center, but has a tablecloth over it. There is a large credenza along the back wall covered with a six foot long white doily. To the west side is a daybed used as a sofa. There is a telephone table along the front wall. There are a few pictures of foxhunters hanging on the walls. There is a drawing of “Chessie the Cat”** asleep with two kittens by the east window. A ceiling light above the dining table holds multiple bulbs on chains and illuminates the room well at night. The dining room served as my playroom whenever I lived or stayed at 424 Washington. It had the most open space, most sunlight and got the least use in the evenings when everyone else gathered in the living room.

Now we come into the kitchen, a fairly spacious working area. A stove takes up the back wall

between an exit door and a narrow window. There are two windows on the east side, a normal sized one and a smaller one over the sink. The Frigidaire sits to the east side of the front wall and a kitchen table is against the wall just west of it. The Frigidaire freezer component is small because frozen food still isn’t popular. It has a small compartment that held a couple ice cube trays and that was about it. This compartment was in the middle of the top third just below the control dials.

The exit door doesn’t exit the house, but enters a shed or pantry. This is fairly large. I sometimes play here during the day. There are windows looking out over the back yard and another on the west side. There is a door on the east side that opens on a small deck and wooden steps down to the driveway.

Backtracking to the dining room we can go upstairs. The steps curve about, so they are broad at one end and very narrow at the other. They take you into the short hallway. At the east end of this hallway is the bathroom. There is a half-sized window in the bath. The bathroom is small. There is a tub and toilet to the front and a sink to the back.

The other end of the short hallway joins to the long hallway, so as to form a backward letter L. The long hallway leads to the third bedroom, which is fairly large since it is the full width of the house. It has the only second floor window on the west side. It also has a window on the east side and windows overlooking the shed roof out to the backyard. This was my parents’ room when we lived there.

My grandparents slept in the master bedroom to the front of the house. It was not as wide as the back room because the attic steps foreshortened it. It had two large windows to the front, but none on the sides or back.

My room was in the middle on the east side of the house. It was the smallest room, but not tiny. My bed took up a good bit of the east half. There was a wardrobe on the west side and a bureau to the front. The room was fairly dark having only one window to the east. It had a ceiling light. I had a reading lamp that clamped over the headboard rail of my metal frame bed. This was the usual light turned on because I read a lot while lying in bed.

My mother would always come in to say good night and turn off that light and tell me to go to sleep. She would leave and shut my door. In these early years I had a small nightlight over by the bureau because I was still afraid of the dark. Eventually my father decided I was too old to be scared and took it away. It wasn’t bright enough to read by even when I had it. I waited until after my mom left and then pulled my blankets up over the headboard to create a tent. I would turn on the reading light, hidden by the blanket, and read until I was too tired to stay awake.

One night the heat of the reading light set my blanket on fire. This happened after everyone

else was asleep, but I was still up reading. I pulled the blanket off and put out the fire, but it left a hole with scorched edges where the light had touched it. I didn’t want anyone to see what happened, so I got the scissors and cut off the burnt material. This I flushed down the toilet. Fortunately it didn’t clog the pipes. I don’t know how I explained the sudden and mysterious hole in my blanket, though.

The blanket fire probably happened the second time we lived at 424 Washington rather than the first. But during those first years I did sleep walk. I would wander about the house sound asleep or I would jump up and down on my bed. One time I fell doing this and landed head first on the floor. Perhaps that explains a lot.

At least I was never a bed wetter.

There is more to the house. I described the cellar in an earlier chapter and how it spooked me out. The attic spooked me even more.

The attic was large and divided into two narrow rooms. The ceiling sloped down sharply to the front and the back. There were little closets built into the walls down the length, like doors behind which trolls might lurk. There was a window to both sides of the attic, but because of the divider down the middle these only let light into the back half. The front half was very dark; it didn’t even have a lamp. You used a flashlight to find things. There was a light in the back half, but the switch was at the top of the twisting stairwell, not at the bottom. You had to go up in darkness and feel about for the switch.

My grandfather had creatures in the attic. He had a stuffed owl sitting right to the top of the steps. Coming up the last few you would see two large glass eyes glinting in what light there was. If that didn’t startle you maybe the stuffed fox next to it would. The fox had been my great grandfather Wilson’s so I guess my grandmother had inherited the blasted thing. (Pictured: William Frederick Wilson II and his fox.)

Occasionally the creatures up there were real. Bats sometimes invaded that dark and cozy space.

Overall the house was dim inside. It was also missing much of the entertainment appliances of There was no television either at this particular time. We had one source of diversion sitting in the living room, a large console radio and record player. It was as large as the TVs to come, but there was nothing to look at on it. There were a series of dials on the face. The top lifted up and there was the turntable. It only played 78 RPM records. These were about ten inches in diameter with a tiny hole in the center. This hole went over the spindle. You could stack ten records on our player and as one finished the next would automatically drop into place and the needle would swing back and down to play it. These records were easily chipped, scratched, or worst, broken.

today. There were no computers or video games in the 1940s.

The bottom of our console had a little cabinet built in where you could store your records. My parents had quite a few, a mix of pop ballads or big bands of the day and my dad’s Hillbilly songs. You only got two songs to a record, one on the front and one on the back (the B side). Record albums were not like the later 33 1/3 discs that might hold 10 or 12 songs on one record. These albums were a binder and opened like a book. Inside were paper sleeves each holding a record. If there were twelve songs in the album you had six records. I remember two albums in our cabinet. My mom had “Bing Crosby Sings Cowboy Ballads”. My favorite was dad’s Red River Dave’s “Songs of the Hill and Range”. (We had the 78 RPM album, which looked much like this 45 RPM version, only bigger.)

Red River Dave sang “The Wreck of the Streamline Train”, “Death of Floyd Collins”,

“Honky Tonkin’ Thelma”, “Put Me in Your Pocket” among others in the collection. One of my favorites was “Red-Headed Mama Blues” because it fit my parents later on when my father began driving 18-wheelers. A line in the song went, “I drive a truck all day” and my mother was a redhead.

Anyway 1940 houses were dreary affairs with little within to entertain a child. This is why kids of that day spent the daylight hours playing outside with friends.

By Third Grade my folks decided I was old enough to wander about our end of town on my own. It was a different world from today. Our town was relatively small, traffic although heavy on Lancaster Pike by the standards of that day, was light compared to how it is in the years of this millennium. People warned of not talking to strangers, but there was little conscious fear your child might be snatched by a predator or pervert.

Neighbors watched out for each other and each other’s children. Few people locked their car doors when they went shopping. Many people didn’t even bother locking the house door, my father being one of those when he was home. My mother was a bit more cautious, but she only locked it at night before going to bed. In the summer doors and windows were often wide open since very few had air conditioning.

The map shows what we referred to as The East Side. It wasn’t the entire east side of the town, but it was the boundaries of my little world for those grade school years. I have marked upon it the major points of my regular wanderings.

I was free to walk the length of Washington Avenue, perhaps a bit short of a mile in distance, to attend church or go to the movie theater. I could walk downtown, visit the library, and go to my various new friends’ homes.

This map is Downingtown today, not in the 1950s. However it hasn’t changed much from the air over those decades with the exception of the clutter of the downtown shopping area. This is the entire gray surrounding that big letter A. In those days there were rows of stores along Lancaster Avenue. These did not quite run completely east to Green Street. Behind the stores to the north there was an access alleyway and behind that the millrace from the paper mill. The millrace and paper mill are gone and a shopping mall has filled their place. (Photo is 1938)

The borders of the shopping district in the 1950s began at the main intersection of Lancaster

and Brandywine Avenues (Rt. 30 and Rt. 322). The Great Swan Hotel stood on the southeast corner of that intersection and the Downingtown Bank on the southwest corner. (right: Swan Hotel, 1850.)

This intersection then and to this day was infamous for flooding. In did so in August 1942, but I was too young to remember that occasion. It did so again when Hurricane Hazel swept through in October of 1954. I rode my bike down to the edge of town to view that devastation. The main intersection and much of the shopping district was under water. I made my way down the access alley a ways, but the millrace was raging up over the street.

On that side of the intersection, just behind the corner store, a great-corrugated pipe under Lancaster Avenue carried the millrace beneath the intersection. The water spilled out into the creek on the opposite side just past the bank lot. Going down the access alley was a foolish and dangerous trek at flood stage. During my childhood the millrace swept a boy into that pipe and beneath the streets. I am not sure whether it was Hazel or another rise of water, but he didn’t survive. I used that instance as a catalyst in my novel, Gray. I changed the sex of the person to female. She survived the pipe. The villain rescued her from the creek and took her prisoner.

The stores ran east from there on both sides of Lancaster until the railroad tracks just to the west side of the Minquas Fire Company. You can make out the train tracks between the firehouse and the Sunoco Station in the photo to the right. I had to cross those tracks many times in my young life and always hesitated after seeing the Dick Tracy film, Cueball.

Trains stopped me on journeys downtown at that spot. The trains would pause across the

highway picking up or dropped off cars on mill sidings. In those days steam engines still pulled many of the freights and I would keep well back, intimidated by the loud hiss and puffs of steam, shrill whistle and grinding of the hitches.

The S. Austin Bicking Paper Mill took up a large portion of land across from the firehouse at that time. Austin Bicking also owned a large paper mill on the corner of Lancaster and Brandywine, running behind the bank building. Austin was a cousin, his great grand uncle, Frederick Bicking, being my great great great grandfather.

That railroad line is also long gone. A nature trail now runs from center town deep into the woods along the Brandywine Creek where the trains once steamed through picking up freight at the paper mill and the Iron Works. The Iron Works is gone as well. The Struble is the name of the trail, after former Executive Director of the Brandywine Valley Association, conservationist Robert G. Struble.

The Downingtown Library was and is on the south side of Lancaster about half the distance

between Green Street and Chestnut. Stuart Meisel lived directly across from the Library and Teddy Miller lived next door to Stuart on the west side of the Meisels. Many homes running east from Stuart’s (including his) dated to the Colonial period.

Dave Fidler lived in an old home directly across from the East Ward School. East Word was on the corners of Lancaster and Whiteland and Whiteland and Washington. There was a gas station on the corner of Lancaster and Whiteland opposite the school ground. I believe it was either an Atlantic Station that later became an Esso or vice-versa.

Uwchlan Avenue ran on an angle toward the northeast off of Lancaster just opposite the east homes built along its west side. Going a bit east on Lancaster just past the gas station was an apartment building. Denny Myers lived in this building when I first knew him and Gary Kinzey lived there later. The apartment building set back about halfway between Lancaster and Washington.

corner of East Ward School. Bill Brookover lived a couple blocks up this street in newer

I lived at 424 Washington, just cattycornered across the street from East Ward’s playground. Later I lived just up the street on the same side as the school at 417. Billy Smith lived on Washington nearer Chestnut Street. Denny Myers moved into the same house after Billy’s family moved to Coatesville. Iva lived about halfway between that house and 424.

Ronald Tipton when I first befriended him lived on the far west side of Washington. He lived in the same apartment building as my heartthrob, Mary Jane Chudleigh, at 120 West Washington. Ronald later moved to an apartment over an office on the corner of Chestnut Street and Boot Road.

My church where I went to Sunday school was the Downingtown Methodist Episcopal Church on Brandywine Avenue, directly across from where Washington Avenue ended. movie theater was about a block down from the church on the same side. It was the Roosevelt Theater and formerly the Downingtown Opera House. The Brandywine Creek ran behind the church and theater and cut the town in half, being the dividing line between the East Ward and the West Ward. We locals called that whole street Creek Road.

The

It was a large enough world for a nine-year old. My boundaries stretched further each year and by the time I was 12 years old I could go just about anywhere my feet or bicycle would take me. Most of those further places I went with Ronald.

** Chessie was an emblem for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, from an etching of Guido Gruenwald. It first appear as an ad in “Fortune” in 1933, with the tag line, “Sleep like a kitten”. The picture was so popular with the public the cat was given a name and became quite a popular image in both ads and in merchandise.

I still have the picture that hung in the dining room at 424 Washington Avenue of Chessie and her two kittens.

Moving Again: Beginning of Lost Innocence

Jingle Bells is playing on the radio. It is Christmas season; it must be time to move to a new address again. This will be the fourth move in my eight years of life and the third time in December.

Born in West Chester in June, lived in Modena. Moved to Whitford not long after birth. Moved to 424 Washington Avenue in December of that same year. Moved to Glenloch in December of my sixth year. Moving back to 424 Washington Avenue in December of my eighth year.

How did Santa Claus ever find me?

Of course in the December of my ninth year, with the help of Iva Darlington, I got the answer to that question. (See Chapter 19 of Swamp Rat.)

My dad had changed jobs.

After two years hauling milk for Hines, he took a job with Atkinson Trucking headquartered in the steep hills of Manayunk, Pennsylvania. He switched jobs for the money.Atkinson must have paid very well in comparison, because leaving Hines meant losing that rent-free house in the swamp. I think dad told me he went from $50 a month to $50 a week. That still was far below the average salary in 1950, $23 a week below it actually (Average annual salary in 1950 was $3,800.). Minimum wage was $.75 an hour or $30 a week. My dad was basically on the job 120 hours a week, and that works out to 41 cents an hour.

Dad took me into Manayunk to the Atkinson terminal a few times. I remember one time we went in toward the end of day. I no longer recall street names, but we left the Schuylkill Expressway at some point and we had to go down this long and steep street. At the bottom it took a sharp turn onto a bridge. Dad talked about how if the brakes failed or if there was ice on the road how easily it would be to smash

full speed into the bridge adutment, a tale not designed to put me at ease. Once across this narrow bridge we followed a series of narrow and hilly streets until we came to our destination. It was also a narrow street, seemingly much too narrow for a truck terminal, but there it was. He went inside and left me waiting in the cab. It was well into evening now and growing dark and deserted. Every once in a while a dark figure would pass by in the dim shadows under the one street lamp. Those old Silver Theater films flashed into my mind and I kept sinking further down on the seat, shivering and fearful and wishing dad would return. He finally reappeared and we left for home. He hardly said a word during this trip other than describing the dangers of that long and steep entry street.

He hauled sugar from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh for Atkinson. All he needed was the cereal to go with the milk and sugar, but it wasn’t cereal he backhauled. It was steel. The change of cargo didn’t change his schedule. He still wasn’t home much. The photo on the left is the old Sugar House Plant of the Pennsylvania Sugar Division of the National Sugar Refining Company where dad picked up cargo for Quaker Brand, Jack Frost and Arbuckle sugar. It was in what is known as the Fishtown area of Philadelphia. The Sugar House Casino stands on the sight as of this writing.

Philadelphia to Pittsburgh is 300 plus miles. You’re talking, especially in those days, of six hours of driving one way because at the beginning it was older roads, especially up through the mountains. The Pennsylvania Turnpike Extension between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh wasn’t fully up and useable until December of 1950. When that happened it made his driving safer, but didn’t cut the time much.

Dad set off early Monday on an average week. He’d pick up the sugar at the plant in Philadelphia and head west. He’d stop at a greasy spoon or a HoJo’s (Howard Johnson’s – this chain had a monopoly on the Pennsylvania Turnpike during the 1950s) along the way for lunch. That might kill a half hour. He might have to pull through a weigh station for inspection, which farther delayed the run. Truckers hated those weight stations. If he made his delivery point by late afternoon there would be time to offload same day. Otherwise he would sleep in his truck for offloading in the morning and then hightail it to Butler for his steel. If he did get offloaded the day he arrived he might have made Butler Monday night. This would be nice because then he could get a meal and sleep in the large truck stop bunkhouse.

The earlier he was at the steel mill the better. If he was later there would be a long line of trucks waiting at the gate and it might take all morning to get his backhaul. Then everything would go into reverse and he’d make the six-hour or so drive to a drop off site around Philly. Usually he would arrive too late to offload and have to sleep over by the plant to be first in the morning. He’d pick up the next payload of Sugar and stop home in the afternoon.

This would be Wednesday and he’d stick around long enough for dinner before heading west again. Wednesday evening he would drive for several hours, then pull over on the shoulder and sleep in his cab. Drive, load, drive, sleep, unload and do it all over again. He generally rolled home Friday evening. Sometimes he didn’t get home until Saturday morning. Sometimes he left Sunday night. All I can say is I didn’t see a lot of him as a boy and I was comfortable with that.

Dad’s trucking companies, cargos and destinations changed many times over his life, but that basic schedule stayed the same until he was seventy-six, a man then older than I am now. I don’t know how he endured, except he just loved to drive. He gave up his Class A CDL in 1991 and got a Class B license. He kept on truckin’ so to speak, except now he drove a school bus for another 13 years, until they decided 88 was too aged for that.

I always joked dad’s coffin would have to come equipped with a steering wheel or he wouldn’t go. The doctor’s took the steering wheel out of his hands at age 90 and told him because of his heart condition he was a risk on the road. Driving anything any more was not allowed. This meant he had to also quit his then current job as Sexton (maintenance and cleaning) at his church. Seventy-three years of almost never being home and now at 92 he couldn’t leave the house.

With the loss of the Swamp House we all moved back with my maternal grandparents. As Yogi Berra said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” I’m back in my old bedroom and it is the Christmas season once more. I’m able to look out my window and see the houses on Whiteland Avenue lit up for the holidays. The one house is all in red lights; another all in blue. I stare at the blue house and find it makes me feel melancholy.

I don’t have a playroom anymore. I’m back to playing in the dining room, but I don’t like being in plain sight anymore; it inhibits me. For instance, I imagined I ran a grocery store one day. I clipped pictures of boxes and bottles from the ads in mom’s old magazines. I sat on the floor and pretended there were shelves and I stocked these with my cutouts. I had a little toy cash register I had gotten for Christmas, which is probably why I got the idea to play store in the first place. It had working buttons and a little window where numbers popped up. I don’t know if it actually added correctly, but it did have a no sale sign that sometimes appeared and a cash drawer that opened. It served as a bank, too. There was a slot near the top and a little lever on the side that allowed the coin to drop into the drawer.

I was playing away, serving my make-believe customers when my grandmother passed by me between living room and kitchen. She stopped and her face got red. She was upset about something. She bent over and snatched up a couple of my cutouts, snapping, “You don’t want those things.” She gave no explanation, just took them out to the kitchen trashcan.

I was shaken and wondering what I did wrong. These pictures were no different from any other on  my pretend shelves, no different from my ones of Wheaties or Kleenex. I had no idea what Tampax and Kotex were, except now I thought they must be evil or illegal, but then why were they in my mom’s magazines. (Left, a German Tampax ad; right a 1950 magazine Kotex ad. I would have cut out the little picture of the boxes at the bottom of the page to use in my “store”.)

People didn’t speak of certain subjects in the 1950s, especially to children. There was a great conspiracy to protect out innocence. Thus I didn’t understand my grandfather’s bathing suit joke about two Band-Aids and a cork nor my grandmothers angry reaction to it and to these little ad boxes I had cut out.

This secrecy would have consequences later on.

After New Year school began again and I was back at East Ward Elementary for the last half year of Third Grade. I don’t remember my third-grade teacher at West Whiteland, but I do remember that teacher at East Ward. Her name was Elizabeth Ezrah and she was to have a more positive effect on my future than the strange secrets of Tampax, Kotex and sex would.