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.