PERILS OF A PAPERBOY (Published Binghamton Press, September 22, 2013)

I was nine years old when I started in the newspaper business. The impetus came from a book I read in my fourth grade classroom at Longfellow School on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a story about two boys who published a neighborhood newspaper called the Tom Thumb. I’ve forgotten the name of the book, but not the rush I felt when my friend Woody (Walls) and I formed a partnership and produced our own neighborhood paper, shamelessly stealing its name from the one in the book.

With notebooks in hand, we went door-to-door, signing up subscribers and gathering news. The premier issue was printed (typos, cross outs, eraser smears and all) on a gelatin printing press, a letter-size tray filled with a semi-solid gel mix that captured the impression from a freshly typed page and transferred it to a blank sheet of paper. It reproduced four or five images before becoming too faint to read; we reimprinted the master and started over again. It took all day Saturday to type and print copies of the first edition. We delivered it to twenty-seven subscribers on Chadwick and Denton Roads just in time for dinner.  By the next afternoon the neighborhood was abuzz. We had a "Best Seller" on our hands. We strutted around with big heads, taking great pride in our literary skills, clueless that we’d simply produced a neighborhood gossip sheet. One that covered dirt from every family on the block.

Our juicy news items came from the kids, not the parents. The paper grew from a single page publication to a multi-page rag. We were forced to switch from the gelatin press to a mimeograph machine at my father’s office. Twelve editions were produced in this manner and then the enterprise imploded. Our news sources dried up, as one by one, the parents figured out who had provided the perfectly accurate description of a plate throwing argument or some other embarrassing bit of gossip that took place in their very own home. The whistleblower was identified and silenced. Probably got a “time-out” too.

Customers had only been mildly interested in the mundane happenings around the neighborhood: a back yard barbeque at the Colavito’s, a visit from out town relatives at the Almy’s, Hank Merz’s new Ford, the newfangled, 6 inch, black and white TV at the Soldo’s or the bite the mailman received from Hunsinger’s pet duck. It was neighbors’ dirty laundry that wet their appetite. When it stopped coming, the paper’s circulation plummeted.  

My second venture into the newspaper business came a few years later. I started helping some of the older kids on the south side to deliver newspapers. It was an unpaid job (an internship of sorts) that I volunteered for, hoping to “inherit” a route when the owner moved on to a better paying and more prestigious job, like bagging groceries at the Loblaws Supermarket on Vestal Ave.

I applied for working papers when I turned fourteen and bought a route from Ronnie Gordon. He moved on to greener pastures, working at his father’s “East End Appliance” store on Robinson Street. I paid thirty-five dollars, an astronomical investment for a kid in 1956. The management at the Press didn’t allow their routes to be sold, but it was a policy they couldn’t enforce. Thirty-five dollars was the going rate on the black market; the investment was usually paid off on the installment plan. I signed a contract on a Saturday afternoon, acknowledging the debt and my promise to pay a dollar a week for thirty-five weeks, and delivered my first set of papers the next morning. And, as any paperboy from that era can attest, it was the heaviest paper of the week, the hardest to deliver. Sunday was the only day the Binghamton Evening Press came out in the morning. The rest of the week it rolled off the presses on Chenango Street just in time for the “man of the house” to sit back with it in his recliner chair and wait for his wife to announce that dinner was ready. It truly was an “Ozzie and Harriet world back then.

The papers for my route were dropped off at the corner of Vestal Avenue and Brookfield Road. Marshal Reutlinger’s papers were dropped there as well, but his route was so big he had to parcel it out to assistants. His cousin (my friend) Woody handled one of the sections, sometimes delivering the papers to his house on Denton and mine on Chadwick. It kind of galled me that I couldn’t deliver my own paper, that it was part of Marshal’s empire. He was the titan of the south side newspaper delivery business.   

I had 63 customers on a route that started at the corner of Kendal and Brookfield, went along Kendal for a block, up Allendale and then westward on Moore where it ended at the intersection with Chadwick, three doors up the hill from where I lived. The newspapers came in a bundle, tightly bound by a piece of metal wire. If you worked at it, you get the middle copy out, easing the tension on the rest of the bundle. A well-equipped newsboy, like Marshal, carried a slotted wire cutter the size of a silver dollar that would break the wire with a few simple twists. The papers were then loaded into a canvas shoulder bag, folded with an interlocking twist and tossed from the sidewalk to customers’ front porches. (I had an accuracy rate of about 75%). Some customers insisted I walk to the house and put the paper inside their storm door. (The very same customers that apparently considered it immoral to tip a paperboy).

On Monday nights I went back over the route for a first pass at collections. Some kids did it as they delivered, but I never found that very productive. Collecting was a chore I dreaded. I heard every excuse in the book  -  “I already paid you. –  My husband paid you! My husband isn’t home. – We paid you for two weeks last week.  – I don’t have any change. - Can you break a fifty, ha ha?  I heard it all, but I had a collection book with a tear off stub for every week of the year for every customer. Even the cheapskates who borrowed a neighbor’s stub couldn’t fool me. But it was brutal; dog bites, multi-calls, lies and doorbells that mysteriously didn’t work when I pressed the button. I earned every cent of the nine bucks I netted each week. I had to make sure I had enough money to pay “Tony Soprano,” the circulation manager, when he came to my door on Saturday morning. He didn’t accept excuses. He didn’t take checks.

Tips were few and far between. A customer’s weekly bill was forty-five cents. You would think that when I asked for the payment of 45 cents, a customer might hand me two quarters every once in a while and say, “Keep the change kid!” After all, I’d delivered the paper every day and made sure it never got wet. But, NO! I can count on one hand the number of customers who tipped. (And to add insult to injury, Marshall got my parents to tip him because he was smart enough to say thanks and walk away with the fifty cents, leaving it them to call him back for their change, which they, and many of his customers seldom did.) 

Still, that eight or nine dollar profit was a fortune to me. My bike was equipped with every imaginable accessory: chrome fenders, baskets, horns, reflectors and even an expensive and highly coveted generator-light. The rest was squandered too, on soda (which we called soft drink), penny candy, yo-yos, badminton birdies, baseballs, kites and balsa wood gliders. I never saved a cent. But, for two years I was the richest kid on the block (except for Marshal).

Now, more that five decades later, I’m still in the newspaper business, writing “Old Coot” and “Memories” articles that are published here and there, longing for just one more afternoon to pound the pavement on my old route with a canvas paper bag full of papers slung over my shoulder. But alas, there is no Evening Press and the ghosts of the dogs who terrorized me back then are still on the prowl. Someday, my ghost will come by to take them on yet again. This time I’ll be carrying a can of pepper spray! 

Marshal (right, Me (left) 50 years later

Woody (right) and me (left) on a press break

NOT SO PERFECT AFTER ALL (Published June 16, 2013)

I was a “perfect” student in school. I was at my desk every day for 12 ½ years. But I wasn’t so perfect, after all. It began in kindergarten at Longfellow School on the south side of Binghamton. I was one of several students called to the front of the room at the end of the year and presented with a certificate for perfect attendance. I was hooked; I did something perfect? And, got a certificate for it? I wanted more. Year after year, I made it to school every day, on time, and was feted with a certificate for perfect attendance, signed by the superintendent of schools, the school principal and the director of attendance. The last one I received at Longfellow read, “Neither absent nor tardy for 6 ½ years.”

Many of the days when I “occupied” a desk I should have been in bed at home. But, neither head cold, nor sore throat nor measles, mumps or chicken pox (nor the dark of night, I suppose) deterred me from my perfect attendance quest. Eventually, the obsession got me in trouble; it happened in West Junior. My attendance record prevented me from skipping school like everyone else when I hadn’t prepared for a test or finished an essay paper.

I somehow never got into the true spirit of homework. There wasn’t any at Longfellow. We learned stuff in class, not at home. When the bell rang at 3 we ran home with the enthusiasm of escaped convicts. We were free! So, at junior high, I stuck to my elementary school routine, doing little if any homework. The A’s and B’s that once graced my report cards were replaced with C’s, D’ s and an occasional F. My attendance was perfect, but everything else was mediocre. I dragged home my report card after every six-week marking period with extreme dread, until I discovered a flaw in the system. At the end of the marking period we were given a blank report card in homeroom; we took it to each class so the teacher could transcribe our grade from their class book. They signed the card with their initials. Our parents signed them too, proving they saw how we were doing. We returned them back to homeroom. My friends were treated to a sundae or a similar reward; I was treated to the “you better buckle down” lecture.  

Then, fate came and tempted me and I took the bait. I lost a card one “report-card” day and was given a new one for the teachers to fill in again. But, before I took it around to the teachers I found it, the one with an “F” in Social Studies. Why take that home and get in trouble?” fate chided me. “Fill in the blank card with good grades.” So, I did! Carefully copying each teacher’s initials. All of a sudden, I was an honors student, a report card full of A’s and B’s. I finally got my sundae! My father signed it and I copied his signature onto the real card. Life was good! Until the Social Studies teacher made a courtesy call to my mother to make sure she knew I was failing Social Studies and needed to buckle down. “How can that be?” my mother exclaimed. “He got a “B” on his report card.

The next morning I was sitting in the principal’s outer office, awaiting my doom and getting a whack-up-the- side-of-the-head from my mother every time the secondhand on the big IBM clock swept past 12. My trial was a short one; I was convicted and sentenced to confinement at the kitchen table until my homework was completed and checked every day after school. Even Friday! I also had to apologize to each teacher, even the ones whose grades I hadn’t altered. Surprisingly, I started to do better in school. The connection between doing homework and learning the subject matter finally sank into my thick skull.

 I kept up my attendance record all the way through high school. I received a check for $25 dollars at the West Junior graduation (a fortune to a 14 year-old back then), got my picture in the paper with the boys counselor at the end of 10^th grade but no picture and no check when I graduated, just a certificate. The school principal was still steaming from catching me going to the pool hall in 11^th grade instead of to St. Pats when we were released from school an hour early to go to religious instructions. But, that’s a story for another day.

Winter Memories, January 27, 2013

Memories of winters past.

By Merlin Lessler (aka The Old Coot)

It snowed more and was a lot colder when I was a kid. Back in the 50’s. At least that’s what us old coots will tell you. But, in spite of our tendency to exaggerate, we really do know the truth about the weather back then; we spent all our free time out in it. We hated to be called home for dinner; our mothers had to threaten us with bodily harm. We couldn’t wait to go back out and spent the entire meal begging for permission. Our moms would eventually give in and say, “OK - but only until the street lights come on.” Which in the winter didn’t give us much time. We quickly bundled up and flew out the back door. 

                                                   my sister, Madeline, and me taking a break



And, boy, were we bundled up:  wool coats, leggings (snow pants), two pairs of socks, leather shoes crammed into buckle boots, knitted hats, scarves and mittens (mine came every year as a Christmas present from my “knitting” aunt in Connecticut). There was always a gap between the end of the mitten and the sleeve of my jacket leaving me with red, raw, frozen wrists. I never was able to convince her to make the mittens longer.

It was a wonderland out there, a real life, snow globe. My sisters and I were lucky; we lived near the top of Chadwick Road (though I never thought so when I had to push my bike up the hill when I came home from playing in the “flats” (the cluster of veteran houses and fields at the bottom of the hill). It was a steep slope, perfect for sled riding (as we called it), as was Denton Road, the next street over. We were a gang, us kids that lived on the two blocks that made up our neighborhood. A gang of winter Olympians.

After a snowstorm the city ash trucks would climb our hill, chains on the tires and a burly worker standing in the back shoveling ashes onto the road in wide swaths. We ran along side the truck begging him to leave a strip of snow by the curb. Usually he would. When the snow on the road melted we shifted our sledding to our back yards and the fields behind the houses on Denton Road. My house was blessed with a steep hill between it and the one next door. It gave us a thrilling ride that carried us across the flat part of the yard and down a second hill into the fields that have since been built over with a cluster of houses. 

We came down those snow-covered hills every way imaginable: face down on a sled, sitting up, standing and holding the rope and on skis with loops of leather as bindings. But, my favorite downhill racer was a flattened cardboard box. It could zip past the fastest of sleds. The Wall’s kids (Woody and Stu) had a toboggan, and like all play equipment back then, it was shared around the neighborhood. No words were spoken, no contracts signed; we just went to the owner’s garage, took the equipment and knocked on the window to let them know who had it. The Walls family had the toboggan, the Harris family had the stilts, I had the Irish-mail, a hand powered, four-wheel vehicle guaranteed to make you as strong as Charles Atlas. The Burtis brother’s back yard, at the top of Denton, was the access point to a makeshift ski lane that started on South Mountain in the woods above Moore Avenue. The slope was so steep we could barely climb it with our sleds. The trail was narrow; trees lined it on the right, thick briars on the left. I could never keep the toboggan out of the briars. As far as I could tell, it was un-steerable, in spite of all the leaning we did from side to side and our desperate tugs on the so-called steering ropes.

Not so, for the Barton brothers (Buzzy and Chickadee). They sometimes came over from an adjacent neighborhood with a wooden bobsled (the only one in town as far as we knew). It was fast and it could be steered. I never got to ride it; none of us younger kids did. We just stood off to the side watching in awe and sucking the moisture out of our sodden wool mittens. I'm envious to this day of that bobsled.

The snow we loved best of all was the wet heavy stuff. That’s when our neighborhood turned into an Eskimo village. Every yard had an igloo and the air was ablaze with hard packed snowballs. We were smart back then. Snow smart! You didn’t see us going around in flip-flops like kids do today. And, unlike the “four-eyed” kid on the ever popular “shoot-your-eye-out” Christmas movie, we knew how to unstick our tongue when we’d been double dared and touched it to a frozen, metal sled runner. If you don’t know the secret, you won’t learn it from me. I don’t have time. I don’t even have time to mention Joe Barry’s ski run and rope tow at the top of Stone Road, or the “bear trap” ski bindings that didn’t release when you fell. Or, the trains we formed with our sleds. Or, the army surplus skis we bought that were longer than we were tall. Or, the new fangled flying saucers that came on the market in the mid 1950’s. Or, the day a frozen rain covered the city and we ice skated on the sidewalks and roads all over town. I don’t have time. It’s starting to snow and I have to bundle up. It’s still a wonderland out there! (To me).

Me at age 1 with Madeline age 3

I guess we'd had enough!

My sister Madeline on left, Patsy on right

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A ROOTIN TOOTIN "HOPPY" BIRTHDAY
published in The Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin (9/23/2012)

Birthday # 7, old enough to carry a loaded weapon.

By Merlin Lessler (aka the old coot)  

My 7^th birthday party seems like it was yesterday, not sixty some years ago. We didn’t go to Chuck E Cheese or MacDonald’s playland. We didn’t go bowling or to a theme park. It was a birthday like all birthdays back then: cake and ice cream at home with a handful of friends from the neighborhood. Ones who lived close enough to walk or ride their bike. A lot of moms didn’t drive in those days and even if they did, Dad had the car at work. Birthday parties were a neighborhood thing. 

from left, Sharon Larusso, me, Lind Merz, Cookie Soldo, Pearl Horowitz, Woody Walls

The games were the same at all birthday parties. Pin the tail on the donkey started it off. Somebody always got caught peeking. Then came musical chairs, three from the kitchen, three from the dining room, lined up so each faced an opposite direction from the one next to it. A parent or older sibling would drop the needle on the record and seven kids (the maximum number we were allowed to invite in those days) would march around the chairs hoping to be in front of one when the music stopped. 

When it did, there was a mad scramble for a seat. The kid who ended up on someone’s lap was out, as was one of the chairs. Eventually it got down to two kids and one chair. The winner got a prize: a ten-cent balsa wood airplane, a yoyo or a Baby Ruth. It didn’t matter; it was a treasured trophy. Not every kid won and not every kid got a prize. Not in those days. We were lucky; we learned how it felt to lose. And, more important, we learned not to gloat when we won; we knew the next time we might be the one to lose.

Then came the cake, a special cake. Usually from mom’s kitchen, but once in a while from a real bakery. Two layers, frosting in between. And chopped walnuts pressed into the goo around the side if it came from a bakery. “Happy birthday to “the birthday kid” on top. What a thrill to see your name written in colored frosting!

The candles were lit and the first verse of “Happy Birthday” was sung, followed by the “How old are you verse” and then the response solo, “I’m seven years old, etc. Then came the spanks, one for each year and one to grow on. Something your friends were eager to supply. It helped get rid of the jealousy. The birthday kid would bolt down his cake and ice cream like a starving kid in China (which is where we were told all the starving children lived back then, kids who would love that pile of lima beans on our plate that we were made to finish if we wanted to leave the table). The rest of the kids at the birthday party took their time, savoring every morsel and putting the birthday “boy” in his place, making him wait to open his presents. Except, they were just as anxious to see the wrappings torn off as he was. They wanted to see his reaction to their gift. It was almost always something they wanted themselves. As soon as it was opened, they grabbed it and tried it out. Smart parents knew what to get their kids for Christmas; they simply kept track of what they picked out for their friends. 

My seventh birthday was a big one! Seven was the age of reason, or so it was claimed back then. You were old enough to be responsible for your actions. (Now, it’s more like 25, and even then you might get charged with child abuse for forcing a “kid” that age to move out and get his own place) My parent’s bought me a set of  Hopalong Cassidy guns. I was finally old enough to be trusted with a loaded cap pistol! Like most boys of the fifties, we lived for Cowboys & Indians, cap guns and bows & arrows. “Hoppy” was my favorite. Roy Rogers ran a close second, but Hoppy’s gun and holster set was flashier. Corporate profits of the companies that made caps for the toy guns hit an all time high in that era. Especially on the south side of Binghamton where gun battles raged day and night and a blue haze from smoking cap pistols shrouded the hills. Those “Hoppy” guns were the best birthday present I ever got. Until I turned 40 that is. That’s when my mother handed me a package wrapped in black paper. Inside were those same guns. She’d saved them in her attic all those years and thought I’d appreciate getting them as a re-gift. She was so right! Happy birthday to me! All over again.

                                                   my grandson, Atlas, wearing my Hoppy guns

BEWARE THE SCARY "DEAD FINGER': I'LL GET YOU IN THE NIGHT
published in the Binghamton Press and Sun Bulletin (10- 21- 2012)

The Dead Finger!

By Merlin Lessler

 It’s that time of year again. Halloween! The second best holiday in the year. Ask any kid. Why? Because, kids love to be scared! You don’t have to be an old coot like me to know that. It’s been going on since we lived in caves and dressed in animal skins. It’s inborn, inbred and invaluable. Kids need it; it helps them learn to handle themselves in a real emergency, whether they live in a cave or a high-rise condo. It’s why we pop our faces in front of a new baby and say, “Peek-a-boo!” It’s impossible not to. They love it; they wave their arms; a smile breaks across their faces, and a squeal of delight issues from their lips.

Scaring kids has become politically incorrect, but the politically correct crowd is wrong. They are fighting human nature and the kids subject to their influence will find a way to get a dose of terror, in spite of a movie rating system, the V-chip and other mechanizations crafted by a bureaucracy hell bent on separating little Bobby and Suzy from the joy of getting scared out of their wits.

 I was lucky; my era was loaded with scary things. We had full access to fairy tales; we had unregulated Halloween traditions, steeped in the macabre, and we had movies that kept us under the covers in a cowardly attempt to ward off Dracula, Frankenstein and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The greatest terror in my young life came at the hands of my mother, her left index finger to be specific. She set up the situation with a whopper of a tale, claiming she found a finger when she was a teenager. A railroad worker severed his hand while repairing a railroad car, or so the tale went. She was playing nearby and after the ambulance took him away, she found one his fingers near the boxcar. She took it home and kept it in a box.

“The box I have in my hand right now,” she said, as she pulled it from behind her back. “Do you want to see it?”

Of course I wanted to see it. I was scared to death, but I had to look. “Go ahead and take off the cover,” she teased. So, I did. There was nothing in the box except a bed of cotton.

“Where is it?” I cried. She reached in and removed the top layer. There it was, a ghastly, sickly looking, pale finger with a deformed and bruised nail. It was the scariest thing I’d ever seen.

“Breath on it,” she said, “See what it does.” I blew on the box and the end of the finger slowly rose from the bed of cotton.  I was terrified. I loved it. After a few seconds it nestled back down. She put the top on and explained, “It can only be out in the air for a few minutes; otherwise it will start to decay.” Then she left the room to put the finger away.

She wanted to let me enjoy the scare, before telling me that the finger was hers, dabbed with white shoe polish and pushed up through a hole in a matchbox. I should have recognized it; I’d been there when she shut it in the car door and crunched the nail a few weeks earlier. And, I guess I was daydreaming at dinner that night when she told me it was her finger in the box. I went to bed thinking about it, wondering if it was rising out of the box and coming after me.

 
My father cleared up the mystery a few weeks later. He came into my room to tuck me in and found the covers over my head. He asked me why I was sleeping that way. “So the dead finger can’t get me,” I confessed. He laughed and then straightened me out, told me the truth. I continued to sleep with my head under the covers; the habit (and fear) had become ingrained. Eventually, I crafted my own matchbox coffin and used it to scare the kids in my fourth grade class. I ended up sitting at my desk, long after the dismissal bell, writing an endless string of, “I will not disrupt class or scare girls, ever again” Even as I wrote; I knew it was a lie. The dead finger would be back. How could it not be? Kids love to be scared!

The secret world in the trees - Published November 27, 2011

Tree huts; no adults allowed!

By Merlin Lessler

The hut was perched in Johnny’s back yard, 15 feet above ground in an old maple tree. Smoke wafted out of a dozen cracks blanketing it in a low-lying cumulous cloud. It was nothing more than an elevated hovel. Hacked off boards jutted out at all angles; the roof was covered with tar paper scraps; a bunch of gnarled two by fours nailed to the tree trunk formed a crude ladder to a trap door in the floor. Johnny Almy and his brother Mike built it, but this day it was occupied by Woody (Sherwood Walls), Johnny, friend David and me. We were ten years old and taking our first drag on a cigarette. David, John’s classmate at Saint Johns School, came to visit for the day and brought along a carton of Kent cigarettes that he’d requisitioned from his mother’s secret hiding spot. It was an unusual collaboration; two kids from Saint Johns (Johnny and David) and two from Longfellow (Woody and me). There wasn’t a lot of mixing with kids from other schools in those days. I didn’t know any kids from Lincoln Elementary even though it was less than ½ mile from my school. We were tribal and suspicious of anyone from another tribe (school, neighborhood or other side of town). Johnny lived in our neighborhood, so he was OK, but we welcomed his friend David with reservations. They disappeared the minute he pulled the carton of Kents out of his nap sack.

These huts were precursors to the man caves of today, a private space where you can shut out the world and its pressures, in our case, the pressures of multiplication tables, fractions and sentence parsing. A place to hang out and read 10-cent Superman, Little Lulu and Archie comic books. To down an endless supply of homemade chocolate chip cookies, dipped in metal tinged milk kept cool in WWII canteens. And this day, to lounge around smoking Kent cigarettes, drinking shots of whisky (root beer) while loading up our cap pistols in preparation for a shoot out on Junk Street (now Aldridge Ave) with the Vincent and Tommy Spangoletti gang at noon. Fortunately, none of us inhaled: we’d just puffed on the “cancer sticks,” as they were called back then, ten years before the Surgeon General came to the same conclusion and ordered warning labels be affixed to every pack. We didn’t exactly stagger to the OK coral to meet our fate, but we were a little green and had to stifle an urge to toss our cookies. We faked a macho swagger and strutted in with a fresh roll of caps in our Hop-A-Long Cassidy and Roy Roger’s guns, a “cig” hanging out of the corner of our mouths and intimidation on our minds. The guns blazed and everyone fell to the ground in a death spiral. Heck! Dying was the best part of a gun battle. We worked harder on our death throes than we did on our fast draw.

Woody and I erected a series of tree huts, each one a little sturdier than the last. The best was built a half-mile from home near the creek that runs along the side of West Hampton Road on South Mountain. In those days, the hill was part an overgrown pasture covered with wild blackberry bushes. It was a long way to drag lumber and tar paper from our Denton and Chadwick Road homes, but it was worth it. What a view! It must have been a good location. Some of the finest houses in the area now overlook the creek. The remnants of our 1950’s adventures are long gone. We were lucky, kids of our generation. We didn’t have TV, I pods, video games or other distractions to lure us inside the house. Ours was an outdoor childhood. Prowling through the new houses going up in our two-block neighborhood was a favorite pastime that yielded great rewards: lumber, nails and tar paper. We used the lumber to build hot rods and rafts, but most of it went into our tree huts. The carpenters left at five; we moved in at ten after. First to explore and play, and then, under the cover of dark, to requisition building materials. Most often from the scrap pile, but not always.

Woody shocked me one night when he came running out of a house with a whole roll of tarpaper on his shoulder, staggering under the weight. We dragged it to a staging area in the cow pasture behind Johnny Almy’s house. The next day we wrestled it a half mile to the creek. It was the most luxurious tree hut we ever built. You don’t see these Arial hideaways much anymore. There is one around the corner from where I now live. It has two by four, framed walls, windows, a solid entranceway and a waterproof roof. I suspect the kids that play in it didn’t build it. It has a “professional, fatherly” look. Even so, I’d love to climb in and read an Archie comic. Maybe puff on a Kent cigarette too.

The Day of T-Rex, published August 21, 2011

The great dinosaur expedition. (a 1950’s Southside adventure)

By Merlin Lessler

“Look! A baby dinosaur skull!” I didn’t know it when John Almy announced his discovery, but before the day was over, I’d regret ever becoming a dinosaur hunter. He was the new kid on the block. This was his first venture into the hills on the south side of Binghamton that hovered above our new, 2-block, Denton and Chadwick Road neighborhood. Woody (Sherwood Walls) and I were old pros. We’d been scouting the nearby hills for three years, ever since we’d turned five and were allowed to venture beyond the confines of the block. Our release came when we started school at Longfellow Elementary on Pennsylvania Avenue. “If we’re old enough to walk to school, we’re old enough to explore the big woods,” we argued. And much to our surprise, we were allowed to venture forth. It was the 1950’s. Kids had a lot more freedom back then.  

We put aside our cap pistols and bow & arrow sets, deciding that playing cowboys & Indians was for little kids. We strapped knapsacks on our backs (brought home from WWII by our fathers and uncles), loaded them with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies, tied canteens filled with metal tinged milk to our belts and headed for the summit of the mountain in a quest for dinosaur bones. Twenty minutes later we crashed down on the first of three seldom used roads that traversed the hillside in long switchbacks that made a gradual assent to an aging farm-estate at the top. We were exhausted. It was a steep climb by the route we took, straight up. An even steeper and longer climb lay ahead. Two sandwiches and half of our milk supply disappeared before we started climbing again.

We eventually made it to the top, making sure to stay far away from the “haunted” house. It was run down and creepy; the old guy who lived in it hated kids and would race out the door with a shotgun if he spotted you messing around. That was the rumor, anyhow. It was barely a working farm anymore. There were some fenced in pastures. But, they were overgrown and only a cow or two was in evidence. We found an area in one of the deserted pastures with a dozen or so large mounds. We were sure they contained the remains of T-rex and his smaller relatives. We crawled under a rusted bob wire fence and started digging. We used Army-issued, folding shovels, “borrowed” from my grandfather’s attic.

Nothing! That’s what two hours of hard labor got us. We did unearth some bonelike fragments but they turned out to be old tree roots. We slunk back down the hill and through the neighborhood, passing the Almy family’s brand new house. Johnny was in the front yard and asked where we’d been. “Dinosaur bone hunting,” Woody grumbled. “We didn’t find any, but we’re going again tomorrow. Wanna go with us?”  So, bright and early the next morning, we set off on the hunt, 3 boys, 6 peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, a dozen chocolate chip cookies, a canteen of milk and my dog, Topper. So named, because he was the first of his six siblings to make it to the top of the basement stairs.

This time we went to the other side of the mountain, further to the west, the section that Powder House Road girds on one side and Hawthorne Road on the other. Back in those days, Hawthorne Road followed the creek all the way over the rise and connected with Powder House Road, about two miles from Vestal Ave. Now it’s only three blocks long, cut off to make way for the subdivisions that started popping up in the early sixties. We found a promising area on a level spot halfway up the hill. We split up and started searching. We’d only been at it for a few minutes when Johnny yelled out those fateful words, “Look! A baby dinosaur skull!” We circled it, and couldn’t believe our eyes. It looked exactly like the head of a miniature T-rex. Woody pushed at it with a stick and a swarm of maggots squirmed out. A horrible odor engulfed us. But we were not deterred. Johnny stuck a stick in the eye socket and we escorted the skull to the creek and plunked it down. The water washed through it, sending hundreds of maggots (and an ugly gray wad of gunk) downstream.

We looked like hunters on an African safari as Woody and Johnny shouldered a long pole with the head hanging from the center while I led the parade. Mr. Almy was in his back yard as we broke through the underbrush and marched in with our dinosaur trophy. He took one look and ordered us to drop it. Then, he rushed us over to the hose and started scrubbing us down with ice cold water and yellow laundry soap. But it was too late. We were already turning green from spending the past two hours messing around with a rotting deer skull. It took twenty-four hours for the unrelenting waves of nausea to ebb. I was one sick dinosaur hunter. My episodes of heaving and stomach cramps didn’t stop until my father got some coke syrup from the soda fountain in Armand Emma’s drug store on the corner of Vestal Ave. and South Washington Street.

We brought back out our cowboy & Indian gear, deciding it wasn’t such a “little kid” pastime after all, especially when we added BB guns and hunting knives to the mix. Even with the possibility of shooting out an eye, it was a lot safer reliving the days of the old west on South Mountain than it was hunting for dinosaur bones.