Behind the Dreadful Door, the Missing Dreadful Door

My parents still dropped me off at the grandparents on weekends after we moved. This allowed me to keep my friendship with Ronald and Stuart. On one stay over during mid-October, I visited Stuart. There was another boy there when I arrived. I was a bit disturbed finding him, feeling I had been replaced, which was a silly reaction since Stuart and this boy had been friends before I came on the scene. What we ended up planning that day was to become something of a mystery.
        I had forgotten the incident until I found a story I wrote that somehow had gotten misplaced for several decades. I didn’t use any real names in the writing I found. I referred to myself as Derek. I used the name Sammy Blatt for Stuart. The other boy I called Robert Robebrooks, Rob for short. I wrote a number of stories based on actual events using the name Derek as my alter ego. I also used the name Sammy Blatt as a stand-in for Stuart several times. The use and form of that alliterated name can only mean the other boy was Bill Brookover, yet what happened was out of character for either Bill or Stuart.
        As I puzzled over this I remembered there was another person involved that I didn’t include in my story. I had simplified the story by consolidating this fourth boy into the Rob character. I talked to Stuart recently and this incident came back to him when I described it. He came up with a name of the other boy.
        Stuart has had an entrepreneur’s spirit his whole life. He was always coming up with ideas, such as "The Daily Star" and a Rock Band. In this case he suggested we throw a Halloween Party in the carriage house.

         (In the picture to the right is the back of the carriage house

behind us, me, Stuart & Ronald.)
        “We need to clean the place up a little,” he told us, “and then decorate it.”
        I said, “There is a big box of decorations in my grandparent’s attic. I could bring them over.”
       We then went into the carriage house to clean, if Clean was the word. Renovate was more the case. This is a condensed description from my story.

"The lone lamp inside didn’t illuminate much more than the dim light coming through the dusty windows. An intricate spider web enmeshed Derek who entered first. Ron (Bill Brookover) pushed by him, sweeping any remaining web away with his hand. He took a step and a slim object shot up toward his head. He brought his arms across his face to deflect the rake handle and took a hard whack on the wrist. He stepped back and let the rake fall to the floor.
“Watch your step,” said Sammy (Stuart) a little late.
The rake only made a muffled thump when it landed. We surveyed the room. The rake handle rested atop a scattering of aging newspapers stretching like a sea of foolscap from wall to wall. The papers dominated the room, broken here and there by small islands of other debris and garden tools."

       That is exactly how I remember the place, a mess that took us all day to clean.
       We burned those old newspapers behind the carriage house. We set them on fire, right there on the ground in a big circle, and then we dared each other to stand in the middle as the flames grew just to see who would stay the longest. We did stupid things like this when kids. It’s a wonder any of us are still around.
        The next day we brought our decorations. I brought the most. Stuart was going to start inviting people at school on Monday. It was Sunday and my parents picked me up and took me home.
The next weekend I went back to see Stuart and nobody was home. I knocked on the front door and nobody answered. The place appeared all shut up. I went around the side and saw the porch light was on even though it was daytime. The Meisels only let that light burn like that when they went away on a trip. The carriage house door was locked from inside by a hook and eye. I was able to reach through a hole with a stick and unlatch it. I went inside and discovered all the Halloween decorations torn down and scattered about the room.
       After I read this I remember us cleaning out Stuart’s carriage house, decorating it and the Halloween decorations being ripped up. I also recalled what I had not included in my original narrative. As Paul Harvey used to say, “And now for the rest of the story.”
That Sunday another boy showed up. Stuart didn’t want to involve him with the party and he left. At that time a family lived over Doctor Neff's office next door. They had a son named Jimmy Ferguson, who became friends with Stuart. He was the boy who came by and he was upset we didn't include him. He came back at some point that week and saw the decorations.  He tore them up. He may not have known whose they were and assumed they were Stuart’s and this was his way of getting even.
        Obviously we had no party in the Carriage House that Halloween. The decorations were a mess and the Meisels were away. Instead I went out trick or treating with the Wilson kids.


I don’t know if it is a touch of compulsive or obsessive behavior, but as a boy whenever I saw an event I liked I would try to emulate it somehow. This was how the stock cars led to the bicycle racing and the destruction derbies result in our Ditching Club. The bike racing was a bit of harmless fun, more or less, while the Ditching Club bordered on insanity. I mean, here we were smashing our bikes together and trying to knock each other over. It left us with dents and dinks and bent objects on our bikes, not to mention the scrapes, bruises, abrasions, cuts and potential broken bones we inflicted on ourselves.
         Sometime or other over the summer, my dad hauled us up to

Allentown, I think to the big annual fair, and we saw Joie Chitwood’s Thrill Show. I believe they still billed it as Joie Chitwood’s Hell Drivers. Anyway, I was enthralled by the whole presentation. What is it about twisting up cars, having them explode into flame and crash into each other that so attracts us guys? Anyway, you know where this led.
The day after we saw those daredevils I was out in the backyard building ramps, jumps and other objects to ride my bike over or through. If I’d still been back at East Ward I’d been roping others into this fiasco. As it was I did it a while, adding to it over the summer and somehow avoiding breaking my neck. At least I had the good sense not to try jumping my bike through a ring of fire. Of course, good sense probably had nothing to do with it. I probably couldn’t find a big enough loop.


       

On November 4 of 1956 I went on my first ever date. I took Helen Mae Seibold (picture left) to a birthday party. Whose birthday and where are lost to history. I know I went to Boyertown with my parents on the previous Saturday and purchased a sport coat, so it must have been a fairly proper affair, but then back in the ‘fifties we did dress up for just about everything.  For some reason, also lost to history, I came home from Boyertown with the Wilsons instead of my parents. 

Things must have worked out all right at the party because I began

dating Helen fairly steady the rest of the year. I may have taken her to one of the school dances, not sure, most of our dates were movie dates at the Pottstown movie theater, the Hippodrome. My mother would drop us off and pick us up afterward. Helen was the daughter of the man my parents bought the Bucktown home from. His name was Sox Semibold and sometimes we went to the midget auto races with him. I don’t know if my dad knew him before the sale or they became friends during the transaction.

         It was the weekend after that first date I became aware of my Grandfather’s frequent visits to the doctor. I was dropped off for the weekend that next Friday, July 9, and at 6:00 that evening my Grandfather visited Dr. Parke. He was back at Dr. Parke’s for a shot Saturday morning, and again on Sunday morning for another. (Can you imagine getting that kind of attention from a family doctor today?) I could see his weight was clearly down for he had always been a heavyset man. Now his clothes hung on him and his appearance was sallow. Doctor Parke weighted him in at 167 pounds that week. Just a bit more than a month earlier he had weighted 173, and the month before that he was at 183. I noticed he had stopped drinking earlier in the year while I was there, but didn’t know the doctor had told him he had to give up alcohol. I did notice he was tired much of the time.
        We went to my grandparent’s on Thanksgiving as usual. The next day my grandfather came home early from work feeling sick. He wouldn’t return to work until January 7, 1957. During December grandfather was going to Dr. Parke for shots every few days. On December 12 he went to the Chester County Hospital where they tapped his stomach and retreaved two quarts of liquid from it. His weight was down to 152 pounds.



          Ray Ayres and I didn’t become friends until near the end of Tenth Grade. I was still a loner and a stranger for the first semester plus. It wasn’t that classmates were unfriendly toward me.   No one objected if I sat by them to eat lunch, but I hadn’t bonded with anybody either. I drifted between classes alone and on breaks I was off by myself in some corner reading. When you've been a long time outsider it makes it difficult to approach people and you constantly feel vulnerable to attack.

          I knew quickly enough whom not to cross.

         The Q Gang was a group best to keep at a distance, and by distance I mean preferably nowhere in sight.

          Remember The Fonz of “Happy Days”? Well, the boys in

The Q Gang were the real life Fonzies and the only resemblance to Henry Winkler’s character might have been the outfits they wore fall, winter and spring. I assume the costume didn’t vary much in the summer, but mercifully I didn’t have to see them during vacation time.


        They wore motorcycle boots, white T-shirts with a cigarette pack rolled in the sleeve, black jeans and often a black leather jacket, but beyond the look they were nothing like The Fonz character. These guys weren’t going to take Richie Cunningham into the men’s room and advise him on how to be cool or get the chick. If they took Richie into the men’s room it was to beat the stuffing out of him.  If they kicked a jukebox it wasn’t to make their favorite song play; it was to break in and steal the money. 

       

        The Q Gang was four guys seemingly joined at the hip. You didn’t see one without the other. They took the General curriculum, so most of the time we in Academic weren’t blessed with them, but we did share a couple classes here and there. Those were terrible classes to attend. These guys did nothing but interrupt and disrupt. It was hard for anyone to learn when them were in the room. They may have dressed like The Fonz, but they were closer to Artie West in Blackboard Jungle (pictured left Vic Morrow, with bottle, as Artie West).

       There are states today with laws saying kids have to stay in school until they are eighteen. They are trying to get such legislation in Delaware. This is typical of politicians, looking for easy answers to complex problems so they can claim they did something. All they are doing is making it hard for the students who want to learn. I suggest we let these Fonzies of the world drop out at 14. Get them out of the hair of the rest of us. When I was in school we couldn’t wait until these bums reached the age to get work permits and drop out. 

       The Q Gang used to swagger into class with their girlfriends; they never walked, they only swaggered. Maybe they’d sit at the desks, maybe they'd sit on the desk top. Wherever they choose to sit they did it with their hands down  their girlfriends blouse or up her skirt. What do you think they were looking for in there? Their crib notes?


       They had a fad of carving their girl’s name down their forearm with a knife. That shows you how smart they were. Fortunately for

them, most of their girls had short names, like Sue or Pat. You’d hate to have to keep correcting the spelling if it had more than one syllable. Obviously, the leader (pictured right) was the leader because he could spell a name with more than one syllable. Unfortunately for the rest of us, none of them died of blood poisoning.

       It had been a member of that gang that refused me a bus seat my first day of going to Norco. He was the one with red hair he combed forward into a rusty drainpipe over his forehead. Beyond that, I only had one other direct encounter with them and that was early on in the year. It wasn’t all that serious, just darn embarrassing.

       We had a class in an old basement utility room. That was how overcrowded the school was. We had makeshift classrooms in such places as unused shower rooms. This was a study hall and not a class, thank goodness. That was why the Q Gang was in there at the same time. They often doubled up Study Halls across curriculums. 
I had taken a seat about the middle of the rows. The old chairs in there had one big slat across the back. The lower half was open and your rear tended to stick through. One of those guys sat down behind me, reached forward and goosed me, hard.

        He had perfect aim. It was dead center, bull’s eye. I probably jumped a foot, but given who did it I did my best to act cool and ignore this assault. But the assault wouldn’t ignore me. It made me need to go and go urgently.

        Now, as I explained before, I never used public restrooms. I avoided them as if they carried the plaque. I held it in if need be, and if I couldn’t I sought out an empty restroom. I only used any public restroom to urinate, nothing more. I never used the urinals, always a stall. And frankly, I had never ever even been in a restroom at Norco up to this point. I was going to be in one now.


        Getting excused from a Study Hall was easier than a class.

(I’m not sure I even asked. I don't think I felt I had time for such things as dickering for permissions. I headed for the nearest restroom down there on the basement level. I rushed in. There were several guys already in the place, but I didn’t have time to be shy right then.  I headed for the nearest stall and to my shock and chagrin none had doors. They had sides, but the fronts were wide open for public viewing. It didn’t matter because nothing could stop it now.


     

   My dad took the family to the movies in Philadelphia that December. This time it was to see “Giant”. The film premiered at Thanksgiving, but we went during the Christmas break. He let me bring a friend along. It might have been Ronald, but I think it was Richard. I remember going to the theater and it was a big event with a lot of hoopla.  There was a carnival atmosphere on the sidewalk in front of the theater. There were vendors and milling crowds. They sold these large souvenir books about the production and the stars at the door. The film starred Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, but the talk of the movie was James Dean. By the time the film opened Dean had been dead for over a year.




         All in all things were looking up for me in the later part of

1956. I celebrated New Year’s Eve at Richard’s house. My folks and his went to a party together with other friends. Tommy and Sue were at their grandmother’s in Pottstown. We had the place to ourselves. Richard talked about cars; his favorite subject and we watched TV. Around midnight Richard opened his father’s liquor cabinet. It was locked, but Rich knew where the key was hidden. We toasted a Happy New 1957. It was the first drink I had not by accident. To tell the truth, I still didn’t like the taste very much. 

Summertime and the Guns Are Loaded

The narratives from this point will jump around probably even more than the Downingtown tellings did. It will be somewhat chronological, but not totally. My stories of my high school years will follow themes in my life and that of my acquaintances more than a strict timeline. Please keep that in mind and hopefully I don’t confuse anyone too much in the pages ahead. For instance this chapter begins and speaks to events in spring and summer of 1956 for the most part. The photo of me on the left, though, is the official tenth grade school portrait, so was taken a bit later than the events we will cover in this chapter. I doubt I changed that much in those few months. Note it is what I complained about since getting glasses, the two-third profile shot.  

The Fates are tricky little women and they played games with the relationship between my dad and my new friend, Richard Wilson. (pictured left: The Fates by Paul Thurman). 

Rich Wilson played the tough guy on the outside, quite a different persona from me, but inside we shared a commonality. Just a couple kids looking for approval. And as I stated, the Fates are fickle woman and Richard got approval from where I wanted to get it, from my dad.

 Rich possessed interests I did not. His demeanor was what my father viewed as manly however. My dad took an immediate liking to Rich quickly showing a friendliness toward him that he never demonstrated to my Downingtown friends. If Ronald or Stuart visited when dad was home, he was civil to a degree, but not overly welcoming. He spent more time grunting and ignoring them than talking, although he was never quite as putting off as Mr. Tipton. It was different with Rich. He treated Rich almost as if he was the son and I was the visitor.

Did it bother me? Yes, it did. I didn’t resent Richard because of it, but it certainly didn’t bring me closer to my dad. I was angry with him.

My father’s attention to him may have been therapeutic for Rich.  His relationship with his dad was as strained as mine. The fates did not arrange a similar flip-flop for me. Richard’s dad or mom never treated me as any more than a visitor. Truth be told, I didn’t much care for his parents at all.

Richard’s father was a truck driver as was mine, but he drove a dump truck for a local gravel quarry. Therefore, Richard had his dad home nightly, but Elmer Wilson was not exactly buddy-buddy with the eldest son. There may have been a cruel reason why.

Betty Wilson had been married and divorced from a former mayor of Pottstown and Richard was that man’s offspring. Tommy and Suzy were the result of the union between Elmer and Betty. His dad and mom constantly put Richard down. Nothing he did was up to their standards. Where he did shine and show talent, they ridiculed as childish foolishness.

Their favorite son was Tommy. “Why can’t you be like your brother, Tommy?” was a common refrain at the Wilson household. It didn’t come only from the parents, but from his grandmother as well when she was around. They had no scruples about comparing Richard to his brother and declaring he failed to measure up or criticizing Rich for any perceived failures in front of his friends. In truth, Tommy was a spoiled brat, sneak thief and agitator. Often Rich got the blame for mischief Tommy caused. Tommy was one of these kids who knew exactly what to say to adults to manipulate them, Rich wasn’t. (Elmer Wilson is the man with his hand up in the center of the photo on the left, 1956.)

My great grandparents Meredith had taken their anger at their own son and daughter-in-law out on my father. They felt my grandmother had seduced their son and gotten pregnant to force a marriage. My father was the result of that pregnancy and although he was an innocent baby, his grandparents acted as if he was somehow at fault.  Betty acted as if Richard was the fault for her own failures. Betty Wilson had been married previously to a Mayor of Pottstown and had a bitter divorce. Richard was the son of that union, not of the one with Elmer. Tommy and Sue were Elmer’s offspring. It appeared to me that Betty took out her resentment at her ex-spouse on their child while Elmer resented him for being another man’s son. (Betty Wilson is the woman with her pinky finger to her eye in the photo on the right.)

My father on the other hand doted on Richard. For instance, dad  sometimes took Richard fishing without even asking me along. I can’t say I totally blame him. Dad had tried interesting me in fishing when I was younger. I found the activity incredibly boring, but I tried to look enthusiastic. Fishing was my dad’s only activity outside of work. He took me on a trip with my uncle and cousin, Big Francy and Little Francy. It didn’t end well. We drove into the country and walked up an old railroad bed to get to the fishing spot. We had to cross a train bridge over a gorge. The bridge was open beneath the tracks. You stepped on the ties over these foot-wide spaces to go to the other side where the fishing hole was located. My acrophobia kicked in and I couldn’t go across. Dad was pretty angry. He didn’t take me fishing after that, at least, not field and stream type fishing.

Now Rich and I did occasionally go fishing together in a stream on the other side of Pughtown.  We’d hide our bikes under the bridge and wade out in the water wearing hip boots, but I never got to where I liked the fishing. I did enjoy the splashing through the rapidly flowing stream and being out in the country. I found the fishing part dull.

As country boys we owned weapons. You would have been hard pressed to find farm boys in that country that weren’t armed. My dad had several rifles in a case between bedrooms. He gave me a 16-shot, bolt action .22. Richard had a .22, but his was a single shot. Every time he fired it he had to hand feed another bullet into a slot.

Dad also owned an old twelve-gauge side-by-side double barrel shotgun. It was a smooth bore with hammers back of each barrel that you cocked with your thumbs before firing.

 We use to do a lot of target shooting in that big back yard with all our shootin’ irons. We’d set old cans far down in the field stacked on wooden boxes. Sometime someone would toss the cans in the air and we’d blast them out of the sky.  I was a very good shot. I liked shooting targets and would practice with my rifle on my own when I could afford shells.

I didn’t care much for the shotgun. It was scattershot, not precise like my rifle. It had a bad kick, but I could handle it. Dad had us out back one weekend firing it. Rich had never shot one before and didn’t expect the kick. He fired off one barrel and the recoil banged off the side of his face and into his shoulder so hard he went over on his rear end. Yeah, it was hard not to laugh. Actually, I did laugh. He learned after that to fit the butt snug and tight into his shoulder and rest his cheek on the stock for aiming.

I went small game hunting once. I didn’t want to, but dad

insisted. There were a group of men and their sons who came to our field. It was early morning and chilly when we set out. My feet got numb in no time. I purposely dragged behind the others and kept hoping I wouldn’t see any game. I didn’t want to shoot anything. Nonetheless, I had a stupid rabbit pop out of the grass and freeze directly ahead of me. I froze too and rabbit and I both stared at each other. I finally did exactly what I knew not to do. I jerked the trigger rather than squeezed. My shot went high and wide and the rabbit escaped. I was glad. It was a long day and I don’t remember anyone bagging much. That result didn’t make me unhappy.

However, before you think I was too soft toward the little creatures of our woods, let me tell you about Rich and my fur enterprise. There were muskrat living in the marshy strip between our backfield and the woods. Rich  came up with an idea based upon that fact. (I wonder why I never was the one coming up with these brainstorms? First it was always Stuart; now it was Richard.)

He showed up with some traps and we went into the muskrat fur business. We were going to catch a slew of these smelly rodents and get wealthy peddling their pelts. We didn’t make any money. We caught one muskrat and neither of us had the stomach for the cruel business of trapping after killing the poor beast. We pulled up those traps and forgot that idea.

Rich and I picked up where Ron and I had left off. We rode our bikes out and about the roadways in our area. Beside our swim trips to Kirkwood we would pedal down Route 23 to places named Warwick and the Village of St. Peters. The difference was Ronald and I went exploring. Rich went because there were some girls he wanted to impress who lived in these places. 

Because of my dad’s affinity for Rich, he was invited along on various trips with my family, especially to the auto races. Yeah, the watching of speeding cars on dirt tracks was back as a Meredith tradition. It wasn’t only stocks any more. We were going to a variety of tracks. Rich was right there with Dot Bernard and Elmer Lentz going to the Midget Racers in Lancaster on June 23 and came along to the stock cars with the Seibolds on July 7.

We played a lot of catch over the summer, but often Rich would want to take a bike ride just to escape his brother and sister. His sister (pictured left) especially wanted to tag along wherever Rich and I went. She was only in grade school and could be a pain. She was a definite tomboy and tried to out-do us in any dumb teenager stunt. On July 11 she was injured falling off her bike while riding with us. I think she was riding hands free or trying some stunt and hit debree in the road. She banged herself up pretty good. Mrs. Wilson blamed Richard, of course.
 She bounced right back a week later, Band-Aids here and there, accompanying my mom and grandmother, her brother Tommy and me on a trip to the Downingtown Farmers Market.

Rich and I took her out in the back field one day while we shot targets or should I say she trailed along like a yipping puppy. She nagged and nagged to shoot the rifles. Rich refused to let her. His brother Tommy was along and he and Rich took turns with their .22. It was Tommy’s turn, but instead of taking a shot he handed her the loaded rifle. She asked how to hold it, how to aim it and how to shoot while the whole time swinging about in a semi-circle pointing it at us. If she had accidently pulled the trigger on that single shot rifle she would have only got one of us, preferably Tommy. If I had given her my 16-shot repeater she could have wiped us all out and maybe some cars on the highway as well.

Kids shouldn’t play with guns.

There were a couple of pistols of dads he kept hidden in the bedroom. When no one was home, which was a lot, I used to fish them out from beneath his sox. One was a six-cylinder revolver; the other a .45 automatic you loaded with a clip into the handle. Dad hid them in his sock drawer thinking no one knew they were there, but I knew they were there and sometimes took them out just to handle. I had shot the revolver a few times, but that was always when he was home.

On June 24, only a couple of weeks after I had moved to the

new home, we found Topper dead in her box. We believe she accidently killed herself trying to escape from her pen. It was a shame. She was a loving gentle dog. She was only around 8 years old.

There was an enclosed shed off the kitchen and the clothes washer and dryer were there. We always used the shed door to enter and exit the house, never the front door. The front door was in the living room, but the front stoop was too close to the highway. We always  knew when strangers called because they knocked on the front door and not the shed one. Dad had been in the Navy during World War II. He had stashed his old sailor’s duffle in a cabinet in the side shed.

I saw it there while getting something from the cabinet for mom. I got nosy and the next time I was home alone went digging in his duffel. I went searching through that bag during times I was home alone, like I said, I was alone a lot and always looking for things to do. His old sailor uniforms were in it. I found this little booklet, “Gray’s Guide to War Ships” or some such title. It was interesting. It showed you how to identify all the different vessels on the seas during World War II.

What really drew my attention was a folder holding some ten-by-eight sheets of paper. They were pinup pictures, drawings of women in various predicaments that half pulled their clothing off.

 One girl with a picnic basket had her skirt caught atop a barbwire fence, which lifted it above her bottom.  In the distance stood a bull and on the ground halfway between was a spilled picnic basket. Another showed a woman blown by a strong wind that turned an umbrella inside out while blowing her skirt above her waist. I found them immediately arousing, but as I said arousal didn’t take much when I was 15. I put everything back, but I made several visits to his bag over the coming weeks.

Now, I still didn’t really understand this effect the pictures had on me, why looking at them caused a reaction in certain parts of my body or why that reaction felt so good. The cause was not important to me; the feeling good was. I was beginning to crave that feeling more and more.

I always liked taking baths as a kid.

My mom never had any difficulty getting me to bathe; she had trouble getting me out of the tub. In grade school I would play with boats or other toys. I had a little submarine you filled with baking soda or some such household ingredient and it  would float and dive in reaction to the water. When I reached my young teens I gave up the toys for books. I stayed in the water for an hour or more reading. I would wash myself, then slide down against the back of the tub with my book. I had turned 15 and not long after my birthday I was bathing in my usual manner. I ran a soapy washcloth down my chest to my groin area. When I reached my privates my penis got hard. This didn’t startle me because that happening had become a very common occurrence.  It seemed like almost anything would cause this reaction anymore, to the point it was sometimes a nuisance. Anytime we went some place in the car the motion would bring it on. I was constantly trying to guard against being embarrassed when I stood up at school. I still didn’t quite understand why this happened, although I knew by now I was far from the only boy with the problem. Anyway, it felt really good as I ran that warm washcloth over my privates.  It felt more intense than I had previously experienced and I couldn’t stop washing with the warm water and soap and suddenly…I had discovered masturbation.

As Labor Day approached I got nervous about starting school. Richard being my age I thought I had someone to ride the bus with and show me the ropes. This wasn’t the case. Richard was held back twice in his schooling and was two grades below me. We didn’t even go to the same school. He went to Warwick Junior High School. I was going in the opposite direction to North Coventry High, better known as Norco.

Norco was actually just inside the Pottstown City limits about five miles from my home. I had to take a school bus, which I hadn’t done since third grade. The bus stop was right at the top of our driveway next to our mailbox. I walked out to the stop the first day and Dave Bishop (pictured left) came across the street to wait as well. We said hello and chatted a bit. I assumed we’d sit together on the bus, but he entered first and immediately sat down next to someone he knew. There was an empty seat right behind him next to a skinny kid with a ducktail haircut and leather jacket. When I reached that seat this guy moved over toward the aisle and wouldn’t let me sit down. The two guys behind him giggled. Here we go again, I thought. I was the last stop going in before the school itself and I figured that was probably the last seat.  I kept moving back the aisle as the bus pulled away and a guy near the back motioned to an empty seat across from him.

Pottstown had its own high school where the Townies went.

North Coventry, known as Norco, was a county school for farm kids and country bumpkins like me. It only served tenth through twelfth grades. They were  currently building a new school out near where I lived that would consolidate all the scattered  district schools under one roof. Meanwhile the old decentralized system was it.

The county had built Norco in 1912. It was a brick, squat cube of a building with dark corridors lined with brown lockers. The classrooms were dingy and dirty. We had old-fashioned desks, bolted to the floor with seats that folded down from the front. 

My parents had told me when I entered ninth grade to forget college, I would not be going. At Downingtown despite their objections I took Academic and just about flunked ninth grade. I saw no reason to repeat that mistake. When we registered for the new school I did not chose Academic. My choices were limited, but I made one and boy when I reported on the first day was I ever shocked.

EXCERPT FROM "A MIGHTY HUNTER WILL I BE"

from Something Like a War (2002)

             Rising sun set the dogs barking. Tethered to the back bumper of a pickup, they pulled and strained to go, coughing in that ugly way dogs cough when chain collars tighten about necks.

“Easy, boy. Easy,” whispered different men at different moments, breath floating in mid-air, a permanent mist around their heads and hunched shoulders.

The heavy leather boots failed to keep feet from numbing.

Timmy O’Clare wiggled his toes till they hurt. He watched his dad carefully. His dad stood nearby lighting the ever-present pipe. The man’s nose rosy as he puffed flame into the tobacco and watched the dawn rise above a far wood. The match flickered, appeared to die, and then exploded to life, flashing broad butterfly wings that matched the sunrise. The smoke cut a white path through the hanging breath and the morning gray after the flame’s wings folded to ash. Timmy visualized last night’s fire, with the men huddled around the heat, talking low of hunting and hunts, and loudly bragging.

“’Bout light enough,” said a voice.

Men stirred from the midst of cars and campers and set loose the dogs. The dogs leaped about yelping, circling uncertainly, sniffing, settled on a direction and became a running, baying pack.

Huffing along behind the hounds, the hunting party entered tall grass. It was dryly brown, though wet with morning dew that stained the lower trouser legs. But these were men. They ignored discomfort. It was like the old days again, when they served in the war together, the big war, the old war, fighting slowly toward Germany in the bastard snows of Bastogne. This was the annual hunt that celebrated that they had lived through that together and had not died together.