...To the Dark of the Dungeon

As I entered the waiting room and looked around I saw the sign on a mantle.

"I guess my wife's out of luck," I said to another man sitting nearby.

"Uh?" he said and I jerked my thumb to the old notice.

My wife is Irish; well, part Irish anyway. She had an Irish maiden name. Her other main parts are German and Native American (one-quarter Creek).

T'is, me Lads, the irony that Mauch Chunk should end up named Jim Thorpe. It is also an example of how this country can and does change usually in the right ways. You see, Jim Thorpe had a part-Irish, part-Sac and Fox father, one Hiram Thorpe. Jim's mother, Charlotte Vieux had a French dad and Potawatomi mom. Hiram and Charlotte named their son Wa-Tho-Huk ("path lighted by great flash of lightning") and raised him as a Sac and Fox. He was also Roman Catholic, which was probably another strike against him in some places in those times.

Jim Thorpe was born in 1888. Eleven years earlier there was an incident in Mauch Chuck that shows he probably wouldn't have been welcome there in 1877, even possibly the decade-plus later when he was born in Oklahoma. He probably would have been shunned or worse for being  (1.) Irish, (2.) an "Injun" and (3.) a papist.

To illustrate some of the mind-set of those times I will take us back to those mansions on top of the hill, specifically the home of Asa Packer.  I mentioned therein that the Packers, rich as they were, but people of hard-working humble beginnings, existed in wealth a long while without the prerequisite servants, until Sarah Packer reached a point when doing it all herself was difficult. They hired a Butler and a Maid, who each had separate quarters in the house. The Packers, faithful to their Protestant morals wanted to be sure there was no hanky-panky between this single man and single woman. Thus they hired an Irish Catholic Butler and a German Lutheran Maid, knowing one would never have anything to do with the other. (This is another story with ties to The Little Woman, with her Irish father and German mother, and being raised a Lutheran.)

If that is an amusing story, there are many darker tales to tell of the prejudices of those times, especially against the Irish.

The Irish lot on their native sod was not a particularly happy one in the 19th Century. They were viewed as less than vermin by England, to which they were subject much against their will. Many lived in abject poverty; in fact, it was rare if an Irish family was able to serve one piece of meat a year in their meals. Beginning in the 1840s many Irish began to immigrate to the United States and this flow continued well into the 1880s. The English took a "good riddance to rubbish" attitude and encouraged this.

The United States also encouraged this influx of Irish, at least the industrialist of the day did. They saw these people as an underclass, a supply of cheap labor and a desperate people they could exploit. They were not welcome in every place of business, as the sign at the beginning of this post shows, but they were welcomed into the black holes of Pennsylvania and West Virginia where coal could be harvested.

Mauch Chunk was a coal town.

Working as a coal miner was far from paradise, not only might you be digging down toward Hell, your life was the Devil's own as well, barely a notch about slavery. You worked a long day on a dangerous job for very little pay. Worse yet, you owed everything to the company. You lived in homes provided by the company, so leaving your job was forfeiting the roof over your head. You had to buy your own work tools and supplies from the company, which you could get at the company store, where you also bought the other necessities of your life. You got credit on your purchases, so to speak, but then your bill was deducted from your wages on payday. It wasn't unusual for a miner to find he owed more than his pay and so go home with nothing in this pocket.

During the time of this miserable situation grew a secret organization known as The Molly Maguires. How secret were they? So much so historians really know very little about them. Were they the terrorist one owner painted them to be in their day, killing brutally and often? Were they a discredited and maligned group of fighters for labor reformation? Truth is they were probably somewhere in between, but they had enough influence that owners of the coal industry saw them as a threat to the status quo and of course blamed every dirty deed that came down the pike on them.

One such industrialist was Franklin B. Gowen (pictured left). Like Asa Packer, Gowen was a wealthy, powerful man in Pennsylvania. He was the president of the Philadelphia Coal and Iron Company and the director of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. He was also a former Attorney General.

To say he was anti-union is an understatement and he did everything in his power to destroy any progress by labor that might effect his business. He made this statement about the words of the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal":

“Men were not created equal, the distinction between mind and matter, between the men who labored with their heads and those who labored with their hands. There [are] two great classes of people in this world, men of genius, or intellectual men, and those who [are] not so, the men of labor."

 Anyway, to make a long and fascinating story short, Gowen came to blame the Molly Maguires for all things Union and hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to bring the group down. Eventually several men were arrested and charged with murder on the word of one detective, James McParlan, who went undercover and acted as an informant. He began accusing Molly Maguires after a murder where he had a hand in and may have been responsible for.

Four men were brought to trial at the Old Jail of Carbon County in the town of Mauch Chunk upon the lone testimony of McParlan. This was not a criminal trial, but a private one in which the county simply supplies the facilities. The Judges were men connected to Gowen and there is the possibilities he rigged the jury. In 1877 four men, accused of being  Molly Maguires and murderers were hung inside the Old Jail on gallows brought in for the occasion. They were John Donahue, Edward Kelly, Michael Doyle and Alexander Campbell.

Campbell left an impression behind. Declaring his innocence, he rubbed his hand on the floor and pressed his handprint into the wall of his cell. This was 137 years ago, but the handprint is still there for all to see (I saw it myself). Attempts were made to remove the print, but all failed. Here is the history of the handprint as described at Paranormal@101:

Over the years, county sheriffs have tried to remove the handprint to no avail.

In 1930, Sheriff Biegler had the wall torn down and replaced. The next day, the handprint reappeared.

Around thirty years later, Sheriff Charles Neast covered the handprint with latex paint, but it reappeared. His son, Tom, in the 1960s, loved to tell friends about the ghostly phenomenon. Word spread and people visited the Carbon County Jail to see the print.

Attempts to wash the image away failed.

In recent years, James Starrs, George Washington University forensic scientist, and Jeff Kercheval, Hagerstown MD police chemist, analyzed the handprint using high tech equipment. They found no logical scientific explanation for the handprint’s existence. They finally measured the exact location of the image in the event it there were attempts to remove it and it reappeared, they would know if the phenomenon returned to the same location or a different one.

The jail’s last sheriff, Bill Juracka, said he wouldn’t try to remove the handprint.

Now a days you can tour the Old Jail in Jim Thorpe. It is fascinating and a bit spooky. You enter and get your tickets and then go to the waiting room to await your guide. This area was actually the home of the Warden and his family, so in a sense the Warden was in jail with his prisoners.  In fact, when you go upstairs you are brought through the Warden's family bathroom and into a side wing of the jail where women offenders were housed.  

From there you wend your way back down into the main cell block where the men were. Here you see the infamous gallows that hung the Molly Maguires and Cell #17, where Campbell's handprint can be viewed upon the wall. (Sorry, they would not allow photographs of the handprint. Now, to tell the truth, it would have been very easy to sneak a picture, especially with my Flip, but I chose not to do that. The photograph seen above is from Weird Pennsylvania.)

To say the interior of the jail is bleak is an understatement. It would not be a place I would ever wish to find myself. That in itself should encourage one to behave. More depressing were the dungeons in the basement. Visiting these isolation cells certainly gave more meaning to the old coal miner's song:

It's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew 
Where the danger is double and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls the sun never shines
It's a dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.

I don't want to tell some of the stories I heard there because if possible I think you should go and enjoy the tour. One of the amazing things to me is this jail was in service until 1995. I will leave you with a few more photos of the place, including our charming young guide holding up the narrow window through which a prisoner once escapes.

Although this prisoner was only sentenced to about a third of a year, he determined to break out. His method was probably worse than his punishment. First he starved himself until he felt he had lost enough weight to squeeze through the window frame the guide is holding up. meanwhile he stole the soap from the shower room until he had a supply hidden away. On the day of his escapade, he striped naked and lathered up his whole body. With help from his cell mates he pushed this window frame out on its pivot. He tossed his clothes down in a pillow case and flung tied together sheets out to climb down upon. Believe it or not, he got through that window and probably would have been far away, except he attempted his escape at 12 noon. Some women eating lunch on their porch were surprised seeing a foamed up naked man shimmying down the jail wall and...well, he was soon caught.

A word about Franklin Gowen, the head of the Philadelphia and Reading railroad. Said Mr. Gowen was found dead in a Washington DC hotel room on December 19, 1889, a small caliber pistol by him and powder burns on his face. His hotel room was locked and his death at age 53 was ruled a suicide. Stories and speculation arose that he had been murdered, and it was claimed this was done by a Molly Maguire who actually looked like Gowen. It was said this assassin had stalked him for years, had even purchased the pistol using Gowen's name and had hid in the hotel room, did the deed and escaped out the window.

People questioned his taking his own life because he was still relatively young, had wealth, reputation and a family. They saw no reason to think he would do such a thing, so it had to be murder and who better to blame than the Molly Maguires. However, I lean toward it being suicide. Gowen was no longer the head of the railroad. In fact, he was seeing a number of bonds he was involved with declining in value at this time and it might have been more a financial concern that led to his self-elimination.

All photos inside and out of the Old Jail by the author except:

The portrait of Franklin Gowen
The Jim Thorpe Wheaties Box
The Campbell Handprint in Cell 17 is from Weird Pennsylvania.

Conversations With Dogs: Viewing Rockwood

We are almost at the top of Rockwood Hill. There is a hidden path off to one side that would take us to the tipsy-top, but we will do that later. First I want to take you down, not to Strawberry Fields, but to the edge of the no-name park that is probably just an extension of Bringhurst Woods.

This path has a bit more slope, with a bit more slip and slide, than the path that got us here [See "Where Civilization Crumbles"], so be careful.

It is already on a downward slant, but the real dip doesn't start until we reach that wooden railing ahead.

Shall we toddle?

These wooden fences have graced many pictures throughout my little lectures. They make for lovely photos, somewhat rustic I suppose, but most of the time the fence seems gratuitous, an unnecessary addition to the scene.

But not always and in this case it is protective. The hill behind actually drops away rather abruptly and steeply. One really wouldn't want to go tumbling down it.

These fences can serve another purpose if you are so inclined to such a thing. They can allow you to take a self-portrait on the trail. Set the timer on your camera, then place the unit on the second rail down against one of the posts, press the shutter button and then quickly across the path to strike a pose. My camera allows ten-seconds to get yourself posed however you wish to be recorded. I don't do many of these. I have done a couple.

Not at this moment, though, I know all too well what I look like.

I'm coming around the last bend toward the road and I see a woman coming up. She has on a long leash a small dog wearing a cozy sweater. As I get closer I see a little white dog with black spots and a black face. It has a stub tail. The dog wears a sweater. Is it possible that is what I think it is?

I say hello to the lady, she returns my greeting.

"What kind of dog is that," I ask.

"A Toy Fox Terrier," she answers.

I was right in what I thought.

"I had a Toy Fox Terrier when I was a boy," I tell her. "Her name was Peppy. My grandfather gave her to me when I was six." I lean other and let her dog sniff my fingers. "What's his name?"

"Jazzy." Perhaps she said Jassy, since she added, "Short for Jasmine."

"Ahh, he's shaking," I say.

It didn't register that Jasmine was probably a girl's name. "I've never seen another Toy Fox Terrier since my own," I said. The truth is I had never seen any other Toy Fox Terrier except my own ever.

"We never saw one before we got her four months ago," she says. "We had a Golden Retriever that died and we wanted something. With the retriever we bathed him in a wading pool with a hose. This one is in the kitchen sink with a sponge."

Since Toy Fox Terriers seem to have become something of a rare breed some of you may not know what one looks like. Here is a picture of Peppy. The dog can grow to about 10 inches and from 3 to 7 pounds. It is an animal bred down to a smaller size from Fox Terriers, thus the word Toy on the breed. The dog is very fast and very energetic, which is why I named her Peppy.

You cannot see it in this photo, but she had a cropped tail, as did Jazzy, the lady's pooch.

(You know, "pooch" is such an odd word and I don't hear people refer to their dog as a pooch as much as they did many years ago, so as soon as I wrote, "the lady's pooch" I got second thoughts. Is  this somehow a double entendre? So I looked it up to make certain it didn't have some dirty meaning. It just sounds like one of those words waiting to become something nasty, but apparently not. It has two definitions: to protrude or a bulge and a dog. It is basically slang for dog, one wonders why. Does a bog look like a bulge? Is a dog always so close to its master it seemed to protrude from his or her body? Just to be absolutely certain, I even consulted the "Urban Dictionary".  If something has a nasty street meaning you can find it there. Again two meanings, one, a belly the bulges a bit, which some find sexy on a woman and two, you guessed it, a dog. Of course, I wanted to be positive because there is an expression, "Screwed the pooch". This seemed to be an old Navy term applied when a pilot missed the deck of a carrier and landed in the water. It has come to mean a terrible mistake, somewhat related to but slightly different from the old Army expression SNAFU -- an acronym we will not analyze here.)

Now I parted ways with Jazzy and her Mistress at this point, but I didn't immediately return up the hill at Rockwood.  I continued to walk through Bringhurst Woods and into part of Bellevue before heading back to my photographic record of Rockwood. I met another lady and her dog in Bringhurst, but I'll speak more about that later in my next piece. Right now I am going to bring us back up the hill from Shipley Road to that hidden path at the top.

Do you recall my little quiz asking if you could see what was on the apex? Were you able to find it? It is over on the far right of the photo on the left.

Here, let me make it clear.

Yes, another gazebo, the one at the high point.

Today some rich dude would probably build his castle way up there. I am not sure why Joseph Shipley didn't. Perhaps the slope was too high and the forest up here not easily cleared back in the 1850s. Perhaps he wanted a more gradual plateauing to look out over.

Certainly his livestock would have found the pastures below more to their liking than the ground here, unless he was raising a herd of mountain goats.

Still he had a gazebo places up here and on summer eves little parties may have climbed the hill and taken tea while enjoying some cooling breeze.

From the back of the gazebo you get a view of the parking lot. Photographs telescope everything in and the lot appears closer than it is. Also, the back end of this hill, just a few feet behind the gazebo, simply drops off in sort of a cliff.

That isn't apparent in the photo either. You get the impression you could possibly walk down this side from here, but I wouldn't recommend it, not that you couldn't scale it up or down, just that it would take some effort and maybe some ropes.

If you also recall from last post, I showed a leaf covered hidden path that led up to the very top of the hill.

This is looking at the top of that path. See how it goes from the gazebo through an opening in that stone wall. Well, maybe not. It is hard to see.

From the stone wall it loops around that big tree and turns down between rocks and bushes to the hill trail where I met Jazzy or Jassy.

Sometimes I come up that trail just for a diversion. I don't think this spot is visited a lot. Much of the year you would pass by and not notice the gazebo. In the summer you are fairly hidden from the world if you are up here.

And the two rough pathways up are both hard to see at any time. A few years back this wasn't the case. The whole one side of the hill was trimmed off and you not only could easily see the structure, you could walk straight up the embankment unimpeded. That was only four years ago, but now the hillside is a tangle of brush and a maze of rock and trees.

I didn't come up that path that splits the stone wall. I came up this path. Yes, there really is a path there, it is just narrow and hard to spot.

It is rutted and has stones sticking up in places, so watch your step here as we descent down to the level portion of the path that is the steepest of the paved hill trails.

As I step out of the brush off this path I meet a couple walking two Pit Bulls up the trail. The one dog seems quite agitated at my sudden appearance and is straining at the leash in my direction.

"Easy, boy," I say, but it doesn't seem to reassure the beast. The other dog remains quite calm.

The couple and I say our good mornings and the man tugs the offended animal along. It goes reluctantly, straining against the effort to distract it from me. Didn't it have its breakfast? It's too early for lunch.

I simply wait quietly and still until they have pulled the dog well out of my reach. I don't want to be tomorrows headline adding to the Pit Bull controversy: MAN MAULED IN PARK BY PIT BULL.

I feel sorry for Pit Bulls. Certain people have given the dog a very bad reputation, but in the right hands they can be as gentle and loving as any other creature who is shown kindness and love.

You see a number of the breed in the shelters. Sometime they advertising them by their other name, Staffordshire Terrier, to take away the onus of the Pit Bull brand.

I had my own favorite Pit Bull for a while, one removed from those who had cropped her ears and left her scarred.

The Pit Bull I was on personal talking terms with was Shadow, although Shadow never said very much. She was pretty tight-lipped about things, but she had a difficult beginning in life before the shelter rescued her.  I used to go out regularly and throw tennis balls for her to retrieve. I always took a couple balls. She would run and get a tossed ball, bring it back, but not let it go. I wasn't going to try and pull it out of those jaws, so I would throw another ball. Then she would drop the one she had to go fetch the other, and so it would go.

I'm happy to say a couple years ago Shadow got adopted by a nice family and is living a life of luxury today. She is fat and happy, and has a ton of tennis balls.

Okay, now this has me stumped (no pun intended). What does it mean, "My wife's?" I'm sure Joseph Shipley didn't carve this, the carving is too clear and lacks weathering. Who did it is a mystery and exactly what is his wife's?

Her chair? I mean the stump does resemble a stubby throne. Does his wife sit here to rest any time they visit Rockwood? Is it verboten for anyone else to dare sit upon it?

Is it his wife's grave? Did he smack her over the head and bury the remains here behind the stump?

We'll never know.

On My Fences

0.032

Perhaps the biggest handicap in life is wanting everyone to like you. It fences you in and is a hard rail to climb over. It isn't logical and it borders on insanity.  It's a syndrome. It is self-suffocation.

And along the line The Kid caught this disease.

There was a period of forced isolation in his early childhood.  (See the posts in "Bends of the Brandywine" such as:  Swamp Rat, Snippet Scenes,   From the Snows of the Himalayas to the Rails of Glenloch and Real Nightmares or the short story Ground Dog Day in "Currents of the Whiskeyrye". [Click on the underlined titles if you care to read any.])

The Kid was born six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Thus like many of his generation separated from his dad in my infant years by war. He was isolated from fatherhood and his dad did not really impact The Kid’s life until age six, when dad returned from battle. Even then there remained separation for his dad became a long-distance trucker and was seldom home. In those first years of his return he moved the family to the solitude of a swamp.

Solitude, with its constant companion of loneliness, can be a bountiful garden for growing a child's imagination, even for fertilization of the developing intellect, but it is a desert of uncultivated social skills. The Kid’s social abilities were on the level of a cactus, too prickly and unlovely to encourage the embrace of others. When he finally moved back to the relative civilization of town life he may have been physically contemporary in age with other children, but they were hardly social peers. 

So after the isolation came the ostracization.

It began with verbal insults. He was constantly ridiculed about his clothes, his hair, his speech patterns and even his cap; that is if classmates or neighborhood kids even deigned to speak to him at all. The counterbalance to the mocking was ostracism. In other words, he was not allowed to join in the reindeer games, unless forced by authority; i.e., school teachers. When this was the circumstance and he could not be simply ignored, The Kid would be kept waiting until the end of choices before being picked.  He couldn't blame them; he had no experience with team sports.

It isn't that he didn't make friends, just that they came slowly with caution and most were also on the outside because they were also "different" somehow.  Many of his friends did not fit the mold of what was small town mainstream society. He was by definition a WASP, by heritage a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant and a male, and although still too early for this to be recognized, a heterosexual. Many of his friends did not share in whole or part what he was born.

If The Kid was suffering the slings and arrows of unreasonable ridicule, his friends were on the receiving end of cultural prejudice. Whether any of them were ever further stigmatized by association with The Kid he did not know, but as he grew older he began to share the bigotry toward them. This was especially true as he crossed paths with more kids in junior high school.  Very nasty epithets were sometimes hurled his way. They usually came hyphenated, such as "friend-of-%$#&@" or "*%^$&#-lover".

Then came the bullying.

I suppose most people have been bullied sometime in their lives. If you never were or it happened very infrequently you need to understand how terrible it can become. There is an old cliché, "Bricks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you". Yeah, right, probably coined by someone who never suffered either.  The Kid reached a point where he feared to venture from his block and walk the streets of town alone. But sometimes he had to.

The Kid had a paper route. He avoided one street because when he rode his bike thought it objects, as well as words, were thrown at him. Twice older, bigger kids jumped him in the field next to his home. One time he managed to fight the kid off and escape; the other his dog broke free and chased the varmint away.

When ever he went into the next block up on his street it was carefully, with constant looking every which way and if necessary hiding behind trees, cars or shrubs, for on this block was a gang. Oh, they weren't gangs as we probably picture today. They were a half-dozen guys, all a year or two his senior in age, who lived on that block. For some reason only they know, it was their goal in life to torment The Kid, to threaten and to chase him. He lived in constant fear of meeting one or more of these guys anytime he was out and about.

The Kid also came to hate going to junior high school. It was often a game of dodging abuse and ridicule. One time a group of guys grabbed a friend and him, forcing them into the empty locker room behind the gym.

While a couple held his friend, the others took The Kid into a darkened changing room. One held his right arm and another held his left. He had no idea what they planned to do, but for some reason he began to joke about the situation. He was probably so scared he didn't know what he was doing, but he learned a lesson that day, which was humor could be a weapon or at least a defensive tool. After a while of not taking them seriously, they let him go. The Kid was pushed out of that space and his friend was brought in. The Kid didn't know exactly what they did, but whatever it left his friend trembling and crying.

There were times The Kid wished to die rather than face another day of such torments. Although I don't think he would have ever committed suicide, he certainly thought about it. More often he expressed to his mother or just to himself the wish of having never been born. Oddly, no guardian angel trying to win its wings ever showed up to show him how much he would have been missed.

You don't know the relief he felt when my parents moved out of that town.

Now there have been those who retreated into such self-pity they did end up killing themselves. There have been those who became embittered and so angry they inflicted pain and suffering on others as a form of revenge. The Kid never succumbed to deep self-pity or outrageous anger at the world. What saved him were those years of isolation. He had learned how to be by himself and survive in loneliness.

And yet beyond all of this and that, what The Kid really wanted was to be liked. He was catching that disease.

Lost in Transition

"Perhaps the biggest handicap in life is wanting everyone to like you. It fences you in and is a hard rail to climb over. It isn't logical and it borders on insanity.  It's a syndrome. It is self-suffocation.

"And along the line The Kid caught this disease."

Yes, I know, I am repeating myself from the beginning of my last post. There is a reason why and eventually we will get to it. Life is a process, these things take time.


The Kid’s family moved a lot during his early years. He lived in three homes in his first six months, first in an apartment in Modena by the railroad, then in "the big house" (as his mother called it) on George Thomas III's Whitford Estate and then to the Avenue in town.

The apartment had been his parents, but they hit hard times and the place had bedbugs, so they moved lock, stock, barrel and The Kid in with his mother's parents. Who knows why all moved from the rental house in Whitford, where his mom had been raised, to the house in town four or five months after his birth. Was it a change in his grandfather's job? Was it the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the start of war? Was "the big house" (pictured on the right) not big enough for five people? It looks big enough. It doesn't matter why they moved to town, just that they did.

His grandparents didn't own the house in town either. It was another rental. His father went to war and The Kid lived at that Avenue house sleeping in the middle bedroom, until his dad returned in 1947 and moved his mother and him to the swamp.

His father went to work driving milk tankers long distance and the swamp house belonged to the owner of the trucking company. They gave his dad the house rent free as a gesture to a returning vet.

When his dad left that job they lost the house and moved back to town into the grandparents’ home again. The Kid came to consider that Avenue house his real boyhood home even though he only lived there for a total of 8 or 9 years, and most of them when he was a preschooler. Still, he was constantly connected to that home from December 1941 through February 1957, a total of just over 15 years.

He had moved into that house over Christmas 1941, moved out over Christmas 1947 and moved back over Christmas 1949. Somewhere around 1953, his parents rented a home of their own on the same block (right). But in those years, while his parents had a place of their own, when his father came home weekends he was packed off to his grandparents down the street. The Kid seemed to always be in a state of flux between bedrooms.

It the years of isolation, when he was dumped at my grandparents for some weekend visits, he could spent some time with a long time friend, if a child of seven can be said to have a long time friend. Billy and he were a set piece by then. (Billy on the right in the photo. The dog is Peppy, a Toy Fox Terrier.) What The Kid missed in the years of isolation was a broader stage and any growth in relationships. He was removed from a society of contemporaries at a time when many, perhaps most children are developing those social connections. To make matters worst, before he moved back to town, Billy moved away and wasn't there to help introduce him back into society. The other friends he had back in first grade had drifted away, some like Billy moved and others simply turned on him, all but one girl who he seemingly knew all my life.

It was about The Kid’s years back in town that I wrote  in the last post. I made this statement near the end of that post, "You don't know the relief he felt when his parents moved out of that town."

The move rescued him from the bullying and the insults, but it may have robbed him of some opportunities to grow socially as well. In that last year in town some blossoms had begun to bloom that were snipped off by the move.

His parents moved in March 1956 to a home they bought in the country several miles to the North. The Kid did not go with them at that time, but moved back to that Avenue home with the grandparents. This was done so he could finish out ninth grade in town. His parents thought it would be too disruptive to change schools with only a few months to go. He hated going to that junior high. He was being hassled too much by other kids and wasn't getting along very well with several teachers either. His grades were suffering, the worse he was ever to have and he wasn't at all certain he'd graduate, but he was stuck until mid-June when school ended and he finally joined his parents. He moved away from town about two weeks before turning 15.


The Kid was a very confused and troubled boy those last years in town, yet there were also some positive things happening that were brought to a sudden halt and the new home was something of a step back to isolation, not quite the heavy solitude of the swamp, but removed from more populated society nonetheless.


One of the things lost was his paper route and he enjoyed delivering papers. He also enjoyed the money made doing it. The Kid was very flush with cash as a fourteen year old, but with the move had to quit that job and give up his wealth. He held some on and off jobs during his high school years, but none paid as well or was enjoyable as that paper route. There was a lot of freedom and movement hauling those papers about town, much more than picking crops on summer farms.

Another possibility that opened was sports. He and a friend had both tried out for Babe Ruth Baseball, but just before being assigned to a team and actually getting to play, he had to resign. 

Probably the biggest set back was leaving MYF and Boy Scouts.

He also lost the opportunity to come out of my shell socially in town. One day while waiting in the cafeteria line at school, a boy from his classes invited him to church on Sunday evening. The boy, whose name was Jakie, said it was a youth group, where they discussed the Bible, played some games and this Sunday were going to Dick Thomas' Brick Oven after the meeting. (Photo on right is the interior of the Brick Oven -- from "Life Magazine", December 16, 1940.) The Kid figured he could endure an evening of church to get to Dick Thomas' eatery, maybe the all time favorite diner in my life, with its foot long hot dogs, delicious barbecue sandwiches and hamburgers. Dick Thomas also cooked up terrific French Fries and shook up thick milk shakes, not to mention offering a nice malted sundae.

(As an aside, Dick Thomas, who had an artificial leg, was of the same family as George Thomas III on whose estate The Kid’s mom had grown up. His family came to the area in the late 1600s onto the same land grant as The Kid’s father's family. Dick Thomas died about three decades ago and the Brick Oven has disappeared into history.)

The Kid went for the restaurant, but enjoyed the meeting that came before and suddenly he was with kids who seemed to accept him right into the group. He became a regular member of that Methodist Youth Fellowship, but that too ended with the move.

Scouts came out of those MYF meetings. A couple of the other boys were Boy Scouts and they began urging him to join their troop. He was reluctant. His initial experience with the Boy Scouts in that town had been as bad as any other. When he was 12, one of his closer friends and he went to join Boy Scout Troop 2. They went to an orientation meeting in the firehouse across town where the Scouts met. They came to be sworn in, but were greeted with a hazing. They were made fun of, shoved about and laughed at by the Scouts and by the Scout Master. Blindfolded at one point, they were threatened with nudity and paddling and who can remember what all. The Kid was scared and couldn't wait to escape. He never went back. 

But this was a new Troop, Number 82 and he joined it, became a Patrol Leader, went camping a lot, and was well on his way to First Class when the move came. That ended scouts as it ended MYF as it ended Babe Ruth Baseball and somehow, perhaps, a new and different Kid was lost in transition.

(The photo of The Kid in his summer Scout uniform is one of his least favorites. He was 14 years old, with gangly arms, bony knees and a skinny body. His head looks like a balloon about to pop.  He hated wearing short pants in those days.)

A Vat of Feral Cats

Maybe I shouldn't even write this. By doing so, am I being vengeful? I hope not. I'm not really a vengeful person, I don't hate anyone and I don't hold grudges. But I do sometimes get frustrated, if not always angry, with people.

I don't think being angry with people who have been cruel to you is wrong. Nor do I think if you could punish the people who were cruel to you is being cruel in turn. There is a difference between being mean-spirited and seeking justice. Seeking justice is also different from seeking revenge.

I'm not generally interested in "getting back" at cruel people. I just want them to stop being cruel.

This has not been a particularly good year for me and mine. I will admit to anger in the last few months and that only adds to the irritation of dealing with cruel people. And I don't even really know these cruel people.

The most disturbing is the egg-man (or perhaps egg-woman), but it somehow seems a more masculine act, although hardly a manly one. After all, the acts were done in secret, perhaps under the cloak of night. The person is a sneak and a coward. It began in mid-may when my son left for work and discovered someone had egged the side of his car. I didn't realize my car had also been egged until after I  finished work that day and was walking back to my car. Then I saw the goo down on the bottom of my windshield at the wiper bin. It had been so low I hadn't even noticed it while driving.

We were egged again during Memorial Day weekend, but this time no egg apparently hit the cars, but there was broken egg in the driveway.

I reported both instances to the police.

Yeah, like they care.

Then in July it happened again, this time eggs hit my windshield just below the roof line and drizzled down over the glass. I spend a good deal of time scraping and washing and scraping again and washing again to get this gook off so I could see to drive. It was hot. Some of the egg actually cooked. I still have traces. It is a hard material to remove. And it can leave a film you don't notice until one day it rains and you turn on your wipers. Swish, swish and you have an opaque smear across your line of sight.

Again I reported this to the police, who I am sure take it as a minor bit of vandalism. But since there is no apparent reason for anyone to do this and we don't have any known enemies it is a random act of terrorism. Who knows if it has stopped or if it could escalate.

The Little Woman has a theory that the perpetrator is not actually egging out cars, but is trying to hit stray cats that may have been wandering about or snoozing atop the cars.  If so, then the miscreant is even more vile, an abuser of animals.

A  _ _ _ _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ in other blanks.

During the initial eggings we also discovered someone had thrown beer bottles into our yard, probably the same _ _ _ _ _ _ _ again with the possibility they were tormenting  Hobo Joe, who was still just a stray cat at that time.

The beer is the brand that "most interesting man in the world" drinks. I didn't find this action interesting at all.

These acts of cruelty are most personal, directed at us or at some poor creature wandering across our land.

You know what I would do to such a person?

Strip them naked, smear them with tuna oil and throw them in a vat of feral cats. And then throw eggs at them.

Now that would be interesting.