The following articles were lost from the blog. Why? Who knows, but now they're back.
The Last of the Cowboys! Published in the Binghamton
Press, April 3, 2009
By Merlin Lessler
Woody shot me! I drew first. And missed. He took aim;
plugged me in the gut. I staggered toward him, took two steps and collapsed in
a heap. He smiled down on me, blew the
cap smoke off the end of his gun and holstered it. A spasm hit me and I flipped
over onto my back. I tried to gain my feet but my legs were rubber. I made it
to my knees and then keeled over, writhing in agony, like a night crawler
marooned on a sidewalk. Woody stood above me. “Shoot me,” I begged. “Put my out
of my misery!” He crossed his arms across his chest and smiled. “If you were a
horse, I would. But, you’re a bad guy. You mistreated your horse, kicked your
dog, pushed a woman and broke the law. Now, you can die like a dog!” He turned and walked away. I died, but it
wasn’t pretty. It took two more minutes of flopping and screaming before I
succumbed. Then I jumped up and yelled, “Now it’s your turn; you be the bad
guy!
We played it. We lived it. “Cowboys and Indians.” There were
no written rules, no parental influence. The movies taught us the game, the
Saturday specials at the Grand Theater on Vestal Ave. For 25 cents, we got two
westerns, ten cartoons and a serial episode with a cliffhanger that lured us
back. Our mothers got three hours of peace and quiet, a reprieve from the acrid
smell of exploding caps and the sounds of dying cowboys. First we saw it; then
we lived it.
Nobody had to tell us to go outside and play. It’s where we
wanted to be. Woody (Walls) and I formed our first posse early in life, before
we turned four. You could spot us in Indian dress or cowboy suits in each
other’s back yard, shooting it out and going into death scenes that put the
best actors in Hollywood to shame. When we turned five, old enough to walk to
school, our play expanded to the fields and woods that surrounded our south
side neighborhood. New houses went up; new cowboys joined in: Warren Brooks,
Bunny Horowitz, the Spagnoletti brothers, John Almy. Play was started by
someone yelling, “Lets play cowboys and Indians. I’m Roy Rogers; I called it.”
It was always a tough decision, be a good guy and win, or be a bad guy and get
to die. I even played it when I was by myself, guns strapped on and riding a
wooden rocking horse with my faithful dog at my side. Girls didn’t play cowboys and Indians. Ours
was a separatist era. Boys sat on one side of the classroom, girls on the
other. Many schools had separate entrances for boys and girls. We played
cowboys; they played house, feeding and dressing their “babies,” pushing
carriages around the block and arranging furniture in lithographed, metal
dollhouses.
Oh, how grand it was to grow up in the cowboy and Indian
era. I can still remember the thrill of belting on my Hopalong Cassidy guns,
tying the holsters to my legs to facilitate a quick draw and walking out the
back door for a shoot-out. Sociologists suggest it gave us a one-dimensional
view of the world, a black and white understanding of morality. People were
good or bad. There was no nuance in the life lessons we learned at the movies
as Roy, Hoppy and Gene mowed down a sea of bad guys, week after week. We may
have grown up one dimensional – our hero’s could do no wrong; the bad guys
could do no good. Yet, it made us good citizens. Not a one of us ever kicked a
dog, bullied a little kid, hit a girl or failed to say, “Thank you ma’am,” when
offered a cookie. It’s history now. G.I Joe came along in the 1960’s and killed
off all the cowboys and Indians.
Never too old for toy trains Published in the Binghamton
Press, November 29, 2010
By Merlin Lessler
I’m an old coot now but I still believe in Santa Claus. In
spite of how he tricked me when I was eight years old. I snuck down the stairs
on that snowy Christmas morning in 1950. The room was dimly lit. Just the
flicker from a set of bubble lights on the tree. I perched on a step near the
bottom, studying the scene through the newel posts on the stair rail. A
dollhouse loomed behind a stack of presents. I knew it was for my sister. But
where was my “big” present? I didn’t see anything. Then, I spotted a gleam of
light, reflected back by metal track. Could it be? Was it the train set that I
wanted so badly? My heart skipped a beat! I hopped over the railing and raced
to the tree. There it was! An electric train! A black engine, four metal cars and
a red caboose. There really was a Santa Claus! What I didn’t know, was that it
would nearly four decades before Santa delivered my train. This one was my
father’s.
Oh sure, I was allowed to place it on the track, switch on
the transformer and crank up the dial to send it speeding down the rail. I was
even allowed to take the extra track out of the box and change the oval layout
to a figure eight and to set up a “Plasticville” village for the freighter to
run through. But, it wasn’t my train, not really. It was my father’s. He was
the one who carved out a space under the basement stairs in order to slip in a
four by eight sheet of plywood to accommodate his complicated layout. He put
lights in the houses, added electric switches, and even created an alpine
village on a mountain, the same mountain that the train disappeared into after
leaving Plasticville and passing by a dude ranch. The rest of the fathers in my
neighborhood did the same thing. Only Billy Wilson escaped the great train
robbery. His trains made it to the attic before his father got his hands on
them. Several sets and a sea of accessories were scattered about the floor.
It’s where we went to be railroad men. Nobody was there to stop the fun, to
prevent a speeding freighter from crashing into the back of a passenger train,
to make us get the cow off the track before it was sent flying into the school
house. Billy’s attic was our electric train sanctuary.
I finally got my own train set when I was forty-four. My
wife was sick of me drooling, every time we passed by the set of “big” trains
in the window at Miniature Kingdom in Owego. The store is gone now, but once
was the place to go for all things miniature: dollhouses, furniture, figurines
and LGB trains. My wife bought a set and put them under the tree. I was eight
years old all over again as I tore the wrapper from the box. I was still there,
lying on the living room floor, sleeping like an eight year old when the clock
struck midnight. The clickety clack of the wheels on the track had lulled me
into slumber. It was a sad, drab day in January when the tree came down and the
trains went back in the box, forced into a state of hibernation until Christmas
rolled around again. Things come slow to old coots, but it eventually dawned on
me; I didn’t need to be train deprived for eleven months of the year. I could
build a shelf around the room above the doorframe and put the train on it. Now,
I “play” with my trains throughout the year. It’s the best cure in the world
for insomnia. Two laps around the loop and I start dozing off. When I dream,
I’m eight years old and coming down the stairs all over again.
I’ve enjoyed my train for more than twenty years, putting
thousands of miles on the odometer, but something was always missing. It
happens when you play with miniature things. Not just trains, but dollhouses,
model planes and every other scaled down version of the real world. You want to
shrink down and get into that world: walk through the front door into the
dollhouse, grab the controls of the plane and board the train. Then it
happened. The possibility emerged on a chilly fall morning this past October. I
was on duty as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Owego Fire Department. I
drove by the train station on Delphine Street station after gassing up the rig and
spotted a sea of pint-sized rail cars sitting on the track and a crowd loaded
with old coots standing nearby, kicking tires, so to speak. They were
discussing the ride they were about to take in their scaled up model trains,
traveling from Owego to Harford Mills and back, with a stop at the depot in
Newark Valley for coffee and within walking distance of the gas station in
Richford for lunch. One of the old timers invited me along, but I was forced to
decline. I was on duty and couldn’t wander farther than five minutes from the
firehouse. I stood there with a long face as they pulled out of the station.
They travel all over the country, hauling their unique railroad vehicles on
trailers behind their station wagons and SUV’s. They find sections of seldom-used
tracks and arrange an outing. One of their rail cars would make a perfect
Christmas present for an old coot. A chance to finally get aboard a model train
and take a ride. I better get started on my letter to Santa.
An old coot recollects summers spent at State park. Published in the Binghamton
Press, October 24, 2010
By Merlin Lessler (the Old Coot)
Many years before I became an old coot I started collecting
memories to fuel my supply of “back in the good old days” reminisces. This one
started with a do-it-yourself article in Mechanic’s Illustrated. “Build your
own camping trailer.” It beckoned to my father, a camera designer at Ansco and
he took the bait. It was a chance to work on something of life-size scale after
years of toiling in the miniature world of lenses, mirrors and apertures.
Little by little, our garage on the south side of Binghamton became crowded
with building supplies. Our 1950 Hudson spent a miserable winter out in the
cold. First it was two-by-fours for framing, then it was beaverboard for
sheathing and finally, steel for the undercarriage and number two pine for the
interior finishes. I still remember that cold Saturday morning when the last
step of the process was completed, attaching the trailer hitch to the Hudson.
Lew Castor welded in on in his gas station at the bottom of Pennsylvania
Avenue. The memory is so distinct, because he burned his hand in the process
and I heard him use the same language my father did whenever he hit his thumb
with the hammer. My vocabulary grew considerably that winter. So did my
distaste for soap, which is what I had to bite down on every time I used the
new words.
The trailer was finished the following spring. It had two
cot-like beds in the back, a double bed in front and a portable table that used
the back beds as benches. There was a refrigerator (ice box if you want to get
technical). An antique chamber pot served as a bathroom for
in-the-middle-of-the-night emergencies. Our maiden voyage took us to State Park,
a place we often went to swim and picnic, but never, to camp. This was the
adventure of a lifetime. Our trusty Hudson made the trip with ease. Dad bought
it because the salesman ran it up to 100 miles per hour on a test drive. Mom
went along with the purchase only after he promised never to go over fifty with
us kids in the car. We camped at the park all that summer.
State Park is of course, Chenango Valley State Park, though
us old coots never call it that. It’s simply State Park to us. WPA workers built
it in the 1930’s. A dam was constructed and a nice sized lake was created.
Camping at State Park was our introduction to the wider world. It wasn’t just
the physical environment that was so different; the people were as well. Like,
Melvin and Mark, from Brooklyn. No twins were ever more different than these
two. Mark was muscular and dark haired; Melvin was scrawny, a red head and had
a screechy voice that he constantly used to imitate Jerry Lewis, our favorite
character on TV and in the movies. Then there was the Brown family from
Rochester, with sons Tommy and Jimmy. Mr. Brown worked for Kodak. We argued
over which company made the best cameras and film, but otherwise got along just
fine. The Bridges’ kids, Tommy, Bobby and Judy, were from Binghamton, who along
with the Olmstrum’s, Kate, Butchy and Tommy, spent the whole summer at State
Park. We became extended families and still feel connected whenever we bump
into each other, these many years later.
The park was a regular Disneyland to us back then. Afternoons
were spent at the beach, swimming and learning to do trick dives off the high
board. I still have a bright red chest from all the times I over rotated trying
to do a front flip. We also spent a lot of time hanging out on the lifeguard
stand. But, it came to a screeching halt whenever the head lifeguard, Norm
Sweeney spotted us. He kept a tight rein on the waterfront and didn’t want a
bunch of kids distracting his lifeguards. One of the guards was John Dean, who
later became famous (and infamous) as an aide to President Nixon. Dean and
Sweeney are still friends. It’s the way things worked out at the park; you
connected for life. (Norm taught school at the time, and eventually became the
Chenango Forks school superintendent. I’d like to think he honed his leadership
skills shooing us off the lifeguard stands.)
The beach was only a short walk from our campsite. Down a
steep hill, onto a path that passed by the fish hatchery, over the dam on a
stone bridge and past the canoe racks that framed the entrance to the swimming
area. The fish were kept in long wooden boxes. We never passed by without
lifting the lid and slamming it down with a loud bang and then scampering thirty
feet to the other end to watch the frightened fish huddle together in a swirling
mass. There were rows and rows of boxes. It made a great place to play hide and
go seek, at least until the ranger came along and booted us out.
In the morning, or on rainy days when we couldn’t go to the
beach, we hiked on the trail that went around the lake, biked the five-mile
loop around the park or explored the woods that surrounded the Pine Plane and
Pine Grove picnic areas. Sometimes we hiked over to the golf course to find
stray balls and to throw rocks into the quicksand bog next to the fourth green.
There were only nine holes in those days. Golfers used a second set of tees
that came at the greens from a different angle for the “back” nine. An archery
range was located a mile or so beyond the golf course, with animal targets
scattered on a trail through the woods. It was perfect for our favorite
pastime, cowboys and Indians. Campfires were mandatory. We gathered every night
at one of the campsites and hunkered down in front of the fire telling ghost
stories and planning the next day’s adventure. Sometimes we double-dog-dared
each other to ask a girl to dance the next time the life guards held a camper
dance party at the stone pavilion near the beach. We were in the early stages
of learning to be cool and it was great to share techniques with kids from other
parts of the state. Like all good things, our idyllic summers at State Park
came to an end. It wasn’t that we outgrew the place and moved on. It was a
policy decision that did us in, a new rule that limited campsite occupancy to
two weeks. Coordinating a schedule with the other families proved too much. We
moved on but we never forgot those wonderful summers at (Chenango Valley) State
Park.
Me and my sister Madeline
The Life Guards with me in front of the stand
From left, Judy Bridges, my sister, my cousin Kathleen
The old coot remembers the
last day in Camelot. Published
November 17, 2013. (Binghamton Press)
By Merlin Lessler
I remember it like it was
yesterday. What happened yesterday? OK, so I remember it a lot better than I
remember yesterday. Has it been fifty years? Really? I had just turned 21,
finally old enough to vote. Things were reversed back then. We could drink at
age 18 but couldn’t vote until we were 21. Couldn’t get married either, not
without a parent’s consent. Boys anyhow. Girls could at 18. Society recognized
that it took longer for males to grow up. I was working for an electric &
gas utility company. I was the newest member of the Planning Department. I'd
turned twenty-one the previous week and had been married nearly a year. My wife Jackie and I were anxiously expecting
our first child, having passed the doctor's predicted due date two weeks
earlier. The engineering team I worked on was housed in a pair of historic
houses on adjoining lots in downtown Binghamton. Our desks were huddled
together in richly paneled rooms, five engineers to an office. It was an
atmosphere conducive to long range planning. I was proud as a peacock to be
knocking down fifty four hundred dollars a year, driving a brand new Volkswagen
Bug, easily making the thirty-seven dollar a month car payment.
I was on a coffee break in a
converted billiard room in the basement when Sherman Piersal rushed in and
yelled, "Turn on the radio. Kennedy's been shot." I was shocked, but
not disheartened. I knew he'd be OK. In fact I truly expected to see him on
television later in the day, wisecracking from his hospital bed, giving the
doctor a hard time about staying in the hospital. We turned on the radio and
like the rest of America, sat waiting for the reassurance we knew would come,
the only imaginable outcome for the hordes of us who had grown up in the
1950’s, in wonderland. We went into denial when we heard unsubstantiated
reports from witnesses at the scene, claiming Kennedy had been hit in the head
and was gravely wounded. Our stomachs dropped to the floor and then, through
the floor. We just sat; nobody made a move to go back to work.
Piersal finished off the somber event by saying he knew this
was going to happen. "Assassination attempts are cyclical, every twenty
years. This is the twentieth year." I couldn't believe how casual he was
talking about this tragedy. I left the room, stopping in front of him on my way
out, "You're an ignorant old coot,” I calmly spate at him, looking deep
into his beady eyes. In my heart I wanted to strangle the callused fifty-year
old crab. When I arrived home I joined Jackie in tears in front of the TV and
listened to the gong sound, announcing that the door to Camelot had been
slammed shut. It was sealed by the words from Walter Cronkite’s lips, “John
Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the united States is
dead." I still haven’t gotten over it. And, now I’m the old coot.
The Old Coot Pays his Respects. Published
August 23, 2006 (Binghamton Press)
By Merlin Lessler
Diane Stack died today. Not today, exactly, but on this day in 1961.
I’ll never forget that awful moment when I heard it reported on the radio. It
was like when Kennedy was shot or the World Trade Center got hit; the moment is
forever etched in my mind. I was in my room doing homework. I was a Broome Tech
student at the time. Some of the Electrical students went to class in summer,
those of us who went out on co-op in the spring. We had to make up the semester
in summer school. The school wasn’t air-conditioned and it was hot as blazes.
They wouldn’t let us wear shorts. I tried the first day and was sent home. The
whole school was empty except for us, thirty, male, Elec-Tech. students. You
would think the dean would bend the rules, but he wouldn’t. That’s the way
things were in the sixties. Rules were rules, whether they made sense or not.
It’s the attitude that spawned the hippie culture, the war protests, the
women’s movement and the civil rights struggle. The intolerance of the people
running the show had to be taken down. The rules that didn’t work had to go.
Diane was one of us, a Broome Tech student, a fellow protester. We’d
been classmates all our lives, from grade school through high school, and now
college students. We weren’t always the best of friends. I still remember the
time in fourth grade when she got her due. Diane was a tattletale. I slipped up
a lot in those days. I spent as much time in the principal’s office, the hall
and the cloakroom as I did in class. I wasn’t a bad kid; I just rebelled
against the rules, the ones that made no sense. Every time I “slipped” Diane
was there to tell the teacher. There wasn’t anything lower than a tattletale in
my mind. Our fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Daniels convened a “quiet time” in the
afternoon. She read to us while we nibbled away on a piece of fruit. My friend,
Woody, and I always had a contest to see who could finish last. We could
stretch out a banana for 10 minutes, an apple for twice that long. At the end
of the reading we were required to put our heads down on the desk and “rest”
for fifteen minutes. Ours was a restless crowd. Our heads were down but our
eyes were open. At least Woody’s and mine. We’d make faces at each other and
then quickly recompose ourselves when Mrs. Daniels looked our way.
Diane, who was a rule follower, broke the law; she peeked. She saw
Woody and I sticking out our tongues at each other. She couldn’t help herself.
She sat up, raised her hand and shouted to Mrs. Daniels, “Woody and Merlin have
their eyes open!” - “Nuts,” I thought to myself. “She did it again; she
tattled!” I expected to get the usual punishment for a crime of this nature.
I’d be writing on the board, one hundred times, “I will not open my eyes during
rest period.” I was wrong. Mrs. Daniels did something totally unexpected. She
challenged the informer. “Diane?” she asked. “How could you know that Woody and
Merlin were peeking unless your eyes were open as well?” I’ll never forget the
look on Diane’s face. Here she was, nine years old, and for the first time,
facing a public reprimand in school. She was horrified. She sobbed the whole
time she was at the board writing, “People who live in glass houses should
never throw stones.”
After that, Diane
and I became friends, a friendship that lasted through our final two years at
PS-13 (Binghamton’s Longfellow Elementary School) and on through high school
and into college. She was my friend. She died in a car accident on what was
called the towpath, now Route 88, just north of Chenango Bridge. It was a clear
sunny afternoon. Her tire slipped off the edge of the pavement. When she tried
to steer back onto the road’ she pulled too hard on the wheel and her car shot
into the other lane, into the path of a tractor-trailer. Here I am, forty-five
years later, wishing she were around to tell the teacher what I did wrong
today. It’s another reminder of how precious (and fragile) life is. I should
write that on the board one-hundred times!
Diane Stack died on August 21, 1961. She was a graduate of Binghamton
Central High School, a student at Broome Community College at the time of her
death. She was the daughter of “Joe” Stack, president and founder of Chenango
Industries.
Merlin
Lessler (the old coot) is a freelance writer with a weekly column in the Tioga
County Courier (wisdom from the old coot). He is the author of several books,
including the “Old Coot Essays” and “I Grew Up In A Briar Patch.”
Sunday
- The day the earth stood still. Published March 11, 2012
By Merlin Lessler
Sunday
was different, back in “the” day. Sunday was church. Sunday was dinner at
grandma’s house, afternoon drives, dress clothes. Sunday was quiet. But, most
of all, Sunday was cousins! The one day of the week when you got to be with
those special kids you shared grandparents or great grandparents with. First
cousins, second cousins, third cousins and some cousins you weren’t even
related to, though you didn’t discover that until you grew up. We often had
Sunday dinner at grandma’s house on Mygatt Street, across town from where we
lived on the south side of Binghamton. It was a festive place to be. The food
was good, the crowd was large and boisterous, the attic was full of treasures
and the back yard, lined with cherry trees, stretched up the mountain in
terraces to a water tank halfway up the hill. Climbing the rusty ladder to the
top was a rite of passage. The city kept a pile of sewer pipes down the road,
making a great place to play hide and go seek with cousins. It didn’t matter
that there were big age gaps between us, we all got along, unlike when we were
on the school playground and older (unrelated) kids bullied us. Cousins were
special.
If
we didn’t go to grandma’s house we “visited” on Sunday. At aunts and uncles
houses or at our house. I always liked it better when the cousins came to our
house. I could change into play clothes and get out of those uncomfortable,
dress-up duds that were mandatory when visiting at someone else’s house. Sunday
clothes limited your play to board games or sidewalk play. Grass stains could
get you in big trouble!
Sunday
was quiet. The volume was turned way down. It was distinctly different from
other days of the week. Blue Laws had a little to do with it, banning certain
activities, but it was mostly a social thing. Most families went to church and
then enjoyed a leisurely family breakfast. Lounging around with the paper was
as rigorous as the activity got. Kids devoured the brightly colored
"funnies," dad groused through the sports section and mom scoured the
department store ads. Lawn mowers were silenced. The hammers and saws of
carpenters stayed in the toolbox. Not a single delivery truck rumbled by. Even
kids were quiet on Sunday. Maybe it was the dress clothes.
Very
few stores were open on Sunday. Armand Emma’s Drug store on the corner of
Vestal and South Washington was one. There were four gas stations at the
intersection of Vestal and Pennsylvania Avenue: ESSO, Richfield, Atlantic and
Flying A. All four were locked up tighter than a drum on Sunday. If your car
broke down and you couldn’t fix it yourself (which a lot of father’s could in
those days) you waited until Monday to get it repaired. When my father forgot
to gas up the old jalopy he had to drive across town to Front Street and fill
up at the only open gas station in town, the one across from Cutler Ice
Company.
Drug
stores were exempt from the blue laws, I guess because they dispensed medicine.
But they took advantage of the opportunity and dispensed a lot of other stuff
too. Those with soda fountains, like Armand Emma’s, did a bang up business. Not
just whipping up strawberry sundaes and malted milks, but also in the gift
department where delinquent husbands, desperate for last minute birthday or
anniversary presents, could pick up a box of candy, some perfume or a
brush-comb set and get away with their forgetfulness. Options were limited, but
drug stores all over town stood ready to bail out the male population. Today's
pharmacies would not have survived in those days. Not because of their
merchandise, which runs the gamut from groceries to electronics, but because
they would have been shunned for breaking the spirit of Sunday. Not anymore.
Sunday is a full blast retail day now.
Once
in a while we went out for dinner on Sunday. My favorite place was the Park
Diner. My sister Madeline and I spent one half our time running over to the
window to peer down on the water cascading over the Rock-Bottom Dam and the
other half fiddling with the miniature jukebox at the table, trying to decide
what song to play with our nickel. I always used mine to play Mule Train. And,
I always ordered a burger, french fries and chocolate milk. A real gourmand!
Sunday sure was special. It provided a therapeutic pause for society, quiet,
relaxing and regenerative. Where did it go?
Some of the cousins. Old Coot is the baby.
Kids went barefoot in the good old days! By Merlin Lessler (The Old Coot)
Published October 22, 2017 (Binghamton Press)
I was walking barefoot through a park in Ormond Beach,
Florida last winter in what once was the front yard of the winter home of John
D. Rockefeller. He purchased the estate when he was in his 70’s, figuring that
its pleasant location between the Atlantic Ocean and the Halifax River, with frequent
sunny days would help him make it to 100.
It didn’t quite work, but he did make it to 97 & ¾. I was barefoot; I’d
just finished a “senior” 3-mile walk/run routine on an 81 degree “winter”
morning. My feet had overheated. I took off my sneakers to cool them down. A
sophisticated Florida native, walking two well-groomed Standard poodles noticed
my unshod tootsies and with a friendly chuckle said, “You must have been a country
boy,” pointing to my feet.
But, he was wrong; I grew up a city boy, of sorts, on
Binghamton’s south side. Even so, as soon as school let out for the summer, off
came the shoes. The first few days were painful as my feet became accustomed.
We had to pay attention to where I was stepping, especially on hot, paved
streets where tar bubbles popped up with great frequency. Those grape sized,
black gooey bubbles were nearly impossible to clean off the bottom of your foot,
only grudgingly yielding to a bath in gasoline.
It wasn’t just my feet, the tootsies of most kids were bare
in the summer. On most afternoons, our T-shirts came off too. The dress of the
day hardly varied over those two months of freedom: T-shirts (white of course,
the only color they came in), PF Flyer sneakers (when we weren’t barefoot) and dungarees.
Levies, if we had six bucks to spring for the high-priced brand. Nobody called
them jeans. Jeans were the denim pants that girls wore with a zipper on the
side; boys wore “dungarees.” It was an era when clothing wasn’t prewashed or preshrunk.
Those highly prized Levi’s had to be a few sizes too large. They started out sporting
a six-inch, folded cuff and were gathered around the waist in the stranglehold
of a leather, or a beaded Indian belt. Not only were they way too big, they were
also so stiff that we looked like the Frankenstein monster when we walked. We
tried to speed up the shrinking and softening break-in process by sneaking a new
pair of dungarees out of the house and beating them with a baseball bat, stomping
on them, dragging them through the dirt, hosing them off, hanging them on the
line to dry and doing it over and over again. Shorts weren’t an option for
“big” boys back then. Shorts were for “baby” boys and girls. If it got too hot,
we rolled up our pant legs.
Private swimming pools were rare in the 1950’s. The
DeAngelo family, on the next block, had the only one in our part of town. It wasn’t
open to my gang. We had to wait until all the lights in their house went out at
night and quietly slip into the water. We were never quiet enough and a yell
from the back door would send us scampering. That was half of the fun. Our
cooling off options on a sweltering, hot day were limited: running through the spray
from a hose or a sprinkler in the back yard or bicycling down to Benny
Medolla’s store on Vestal Avenue at the intersection with Park and going into
his walk-in cooler to spend ten minutes or more to pick out a soda. We got the 10-cent
purchase price by collecting returnable bottles discarded in the “Flats” (now
the home of Macarthur School). If we scored a big load of returnables (2 cents
for small soda bottles, 5 cents for the quart size) we would peddle across town
to the 1st Ward pool. It cost 35 cents to get in, but you got a quarter
back on the way out when your turned in your locker key. My quarter never made
it past Lamb’s Ice-cream Parlor down the block from the pool on Clinton Street.
We were a sorry lot, walking around in rolled up dungarees, a T-shirt sticking
out of our back pocket, but we were cool. We didn’t care. Every kid in town
looked just as bad, and every kid went barefoot.
The “Old
Coot” was a short-cut kid! Published
July 26, 2020
By Merlin
Lessler
I was a
“Short-cut” kid. I grew up on the south side of Binghamton after the war, the
big one, WWII. All kids back then took short-cuts. When I went to Woody’s house
(Sherwood Walls), I took my favorite short-cut route. Woody and I hung out together
since we were toddlers; we made our entrance into the world 18 days apart and
our families lived in the same south side neighborhood. My house was on
Chadwick Road; Woody lived one block away on Denton. I got to his house by
crossing Chadwick and hiking up “Junk” Street, where tree stumps, lumber,
bricks and other construction materials from new houses going up in our two-block
neighborhood were dumped, hence the name -Junk Street. It was eventually cleaned
out, paved and connected to Aldrich Ave, which in those days, only extended from
Pennsylvania Ave to Brookfield. The area between Brookfield and Chadwick was pastureland
gone to seed, part of an old farm with a house and barn at 1080 Vestal Ave. The
barn is long gone but the house is still there, perched high above the tennis
courts at MacArthur Park.
My short cut to
Woody’s house, wound through the rubble on “Junk” Street, shifted to a stone wall
behind three houses on Denton, and ended at his side yard. Walking along the wall
was exciting, especially for a five-year-old kid with a dog tagging along,
wondering why his master made him travel such a narrow, precarious route.
This is a lot of
detail, especially if you’ve never been to Binghamton’s south side, nor plan to,
but I’m hoping my great grandchildren might someday be curious enough to check
out where their (old coot) great grandfather grew up, spurred on after stumbling
onto the blog where the history of my growing up years is contained in the
book, I grew up in a briar patch. (The blog can be found at - oldcootbriarpatch.blogspot.com.)
Shortcuts were
the norm in that era. Still are for some kids, though most of the time, mom and
dad drive them to where they are going. We had more freedom in those days; our
parents did as well. Now it’s harder to take shortcuts; a lot of yards are
fenced in and people are concerned with privacy, almost to the point of
paranoia. Fences were rare in the fifties; the privacy issue was nonexistent. Woody
and I didn’t realize we were trespassing when we cut across private property; we
were unaware of the concept. We “borrowed” stuff in neighborhood too, not seeing
anything wrong with that either. If something was outside a house or in a garage,
Woody and I assumed it was fair game. Like, the two-story alpine playhouse in
the Cook’s yard on the corner of Brookfield and Overbrook. And even though the playhouse
was enclosed in the yard by an eight-foot stone wall, picket fences and a garden
creek, we played in it more frequently than the kids who lived there. I checked
the other day; it’s still there, looking just as good as it did 70 years ago.
We “borrowed”
the swimming pool behind the DeAngelo family garage on Vestal Ave. We snuck in
from Kendal Ave at night, when our “trespassing” wouldn’t be detected. It was
just a shallow, two-foot-deep, in ground kiddy pool, but the water was
refreshing on a hot summer night. Out borrowing was more forthcoming when it
came to the stilts in the Harris family garage on Overbrook Ave. Linda and John
each had a pair, but Woody and I put most of the mileage on them. We’d simply walk
down their driveway, get them out of the garage and wave to the kitchen window,
in case Mrs. Harris might be at her sink and see us. We were highly proficient
stilt walkers, traveling the four blocks to Longfellow School, down a steep
staircase to the sunken playground, across the play yard and back. Sometimes we
stilted down to the “Ward,” as the commercial area on South Washington was
called, and splurged on a 25 cent, hot fudge sundae at the soda fountain in
Armond Emma’s drug store. The site is now occupied by Domino’s Pizza.
Woody and I took
a shortcut to school every day too, starting from my back yard, across a small
wood lot, around a pond (requiring a check for tadpoles) and then along a path through
the abandoned pasture to the intersection of Aldridge Ave and Brookfield. From
there, it was a three-block sidewalk stroll to Penn Ave and across the street to
PS-13 (as it was called by all the kids who went there). We were careful to
leap over sidewalk squares that had a contractor’s logo imbedded in the cement;
it was bad luck to step on those sections. It was also taboo to step on a crack.
That was more serious; it would break your mother’s back. Part of the folklore
of our kid’s world. We also believed that mothers (and teachers) had eyes in
the back of their heads. It sure seemed like it; we couldn’t get away with
anything in their presence. It didn’t matter that they were facing the other
way.
We took the “long
way” every so often - when we had roller skates clamped to our shoes or were on
bikes, and of course when on stilts or pogo sticks. The only time we didn’t
take a short cut to school was on our first day in kindergarten. My sister
Madeline, and Woody’s brother Stu (only 3rd graders themselves) led
us on the long route – from my house to the top of hill, left onto Moore Ave,
left at Penn Ave and down to the crosswalk where Police Officer Terry held up
traffic on the busy street so we could cross safely. He was like Santa Claus to
us: chubby, jolly, red cheeked and kid friendly. Everybody at PS-13 loved him.
In our short-cut
world we rarely heard, “You kids, get off my property!” Not while giving a
neighbor’s swing set a workout, riding across yards with sleds and toboggans, shooting
hoops at a basketball net attached to a garage or grabbing a quick drink from a
backyard hose.
Our
trespassing lifestyle got Woody and I into big trouble when we were five years
old. We “helped” paint the inside of a house under construction on Moore Ave.
The work crew was at lunch at the Red Robin dinner down in the “Ward” (yes, the
same one that now resides on Main Street in Johnson City). Curiosity drew us
into the house where we spotted open paint cans and brushes soaking in
turpentine, begging to be put to work. We painted the entry hall and part of
the living room, hardwood floors and all. We didn’t get caught by the painters;
we got caught trying to clean the paint splatters off our hands and clothes with
a water hose. We weren’t allowed to play with each other for weeks. His parents
blamed me. My parents blamed him. We were trespassers, borrowers, and I guess, criminals
by today’s standards. But not in the good old days. We were just kids being
kids. And, taking short cuts.
