CHAPTER 13
In Downingtown o n the corner of Washington Avenue and Chestnut Street a house sits on a fair sized lot. This was the home of the mysterious Fahay Sisters. A wrought iron fence surrounded the yard. There were a number of trees about the grounds that kept the place in perpetual shade. We neighborhood children were afraid of the place. We thought the Fahay sisters were witches.
When we had to walk up to Chestnut Street, we crossed to the opposite sidewalk to pass the Fahay Home.
I’m not sure I ever saw the Fahay Sisters, which probably added to the mystique about that house. You would think it was the perfect Halloween site, but none of us ever had the nerve to knock on that door trick or treating. We wouldn’t even open the gate.
It’s funny what settles in a childish head. As far as I know the Sisters were perfectly nice old ladies, if indeed they were all that old. Yet we imagined rather nasty things about these spinsters, of spells being cast and perhaps children boiled in pots like in Hansel and Gretel.
Billy Smith lived right next door to the Sisters. This is his home on
the right., when we both lived on Washington Avenue. The left side of this building was an apartment house, each floor holding a different family. The right side was just the Smiths. Billy was an only child like me.
Billy wasn’t just a friend; he was my “bestest” friend. I’m always a bit uncomfortable with the term “Best Friend”. It seems so exclusive. We have many Best Friends over the course of our lives. Sometimes we have more than one at once, as I did in my second Downingtown incarnation when I considered both Ronald Tipton and Stuart Meisel best friends. I had even more in High School when Ron and Stu still remained close and I added Richard Wilson and Ray Ayres to that Best Friend category. It is a bothersome term because it is singular. But Better Friends doesn’t work because that somehow implies status. “My Better Friends have more manners, or polish, or savor faire or economic standing than my other friends,” ththat term says. So I am stuck with saying I had Best Friends of equal status.
However, for the period 1944 to 1950, Billy Smith was my Most Bestest Friend.
Billy was a toe head, a blond, and he had a big head, in size, not
ego. Since he lived a few doors away I assume I simply met him on the street. At some point our mothers trusted we were old enough to wander about the avenue on our own. I’m not sure when that was, perhaps in the latter months of three or at the age of four. The photos of us playing baseball in my backyard were from 1945 when all in the photo turned four. (Billy is the shirtless boy, Tim Mahan is batting and I am behind the catcher mask.)
He and I clicked. We could talk freely about anything to each other, although I don’t know how much controversial conversation passes between four year olds requiring a lot of trust. We certainly were constant companions always at one or another’s house until I moved out of town in late 1946. We still were able to get together on weekends when I stayed at my grandparents, but just after I moved back to Downingtown in 1950 Billy’s family moved to Coatesville.
I remember some of the games we played around 1944 to 1946. If at my house we sometimes played pirates. 424’s wooded railed porch made an excellent pirate ship in our imagination. On Billy’s front
porch we played something called “Heil Hitler!” You see his porch didn’t have that railing around it back in the 1940s. It was an all open front just like the twin porch next door. “Heil Hitler!” was a simple game based on “Hot Potato”.
The participants would toss a ball in the air from one to another, but no one would actually catch it. Whoever it came to would immediately bat it back into the air toward someone else. We pretended the ball was a bomb about to explode. If a person batted at the ball and missed, allowing it to hit the floor, then he would goose-step across the porch to the edge then fall off to the ground while making the noise of an explosion. The rest of us raised one hand in that straight-arm salute accompanied with a shout of “Heil Hitler” as he stepped off the edge. We would see who could look the goofiest as they fell. We were mocking the blind following of Der Furher by the Nazis as he led Germany over a cliff. We really didn’t think of it that way in our four-year old minds, but that was what we were doing.
We would pause in this game or any other activity we might be engaged in if we heard planes. During those years a number of warplanes in formation flew over town on their way somewhere. We would crane our heads skyward and try to identify the type. One time we even saw a Flying Wing pass over us.
When the Smith’s moved, the Shirks moved into their vacated house on Washington Avenue. The Shirks were Denny Myers parents. I had a tentative friendship with Denny from before I moved to the swamp, but it was to turn sour within the first few months after I returned to Downingtown. However, I became friends with his next younger brother, Michael Myers. The other two younger brothers had the last name Shirk.
The picture of Whip Wilson was on a Dixie Cup lid. Dixie Cups were small ice creams and on the inside of the lids were pictures of movie stars. They were similar to the cards that come with bubblegum, except you had to lick the ice cream off the star’s face before putting it in a shoebox for safekeeping.
My real all-time favorites on Frontier Playhouse were a trio called “The Three Mesquiteers”. This trio changed over the years with different actors in the rolls of the three members. There were 51 Three Mesquiteer films out of Republic Pictures and even John Wayne played one of the bunch in eight of them. His character was named Stony Brooke. The best of the lot were the three actors who showed up most in those roles on Frontier Playhouse: Ken Maynard, Bob Steele and Hoot Gibson. If I remember correctly they went by the names Ken, Bob and Hoot in the films. No more cutesy “Stony Brookes”.
Frontier Playhouse came on from 4 to 5 every weeknight. The normal supper hour was 5 to 6, so around five Mrs. Shirk would shoo us home so her family could eat. We called it supper, not dinner back when I was a young boy.
Suppertime and the chicken’s fryin’
The potato’s mashed
And the gravy is rich..
I thought I’d throw in a little Gershwin.
My friendship with Billy Smith was one that linked three periods of my early life. He remained my Best Friend even when I left Downingtown for a couple years. We saw each other on weekends and then he was still a friend when I moved back. Unfortunately when I moved back, he moved away to Coatesville.
We still visited for a while, traveling by Short Line Bus between towns. (Just to be accurate, Downingtown was a borough and Coatesville was a city. Neither was either a town or a ville.) That was a brand new experience for me, riding the bus alone. I was nervous about it. I was fearful of missing my stop. It is a foolish fear. These buses stopped about every block. If you missed your stop you could get off at the next and not be very far from where you wanted to be.
I would get more and more anxious the closer I got to my stop. Coming home from Billy’s on one occasion I totally panicked. The Short Line took two routes through Downingtown. On one route the bus would turn right in the center of town and go up Rt. 322 to West Chester. The other route continued straight through town and out to Exton where the Lincoln Highway crossed Rt. 202 before the bus turned toward West Chester. On this trip I mistakenly thought I was on the Rt. 322 bus and as it came to the center square of town I hurried to exit. I pulled the cord to ring the bell that told the driver to stop. As I got up from my seat my small cardboard suitcase fell open and spilled all my clothes in the aisle. I was very embarrassed crawling about snatching up my skivvies and other apparel while the bus waited. I was further chagrinned when I got off and watched the bus go straight down Lancaster Avenue. If I had remained on board it would have taken me to Chestnut Street and let me off only a block from my home. Now I had to walk several blocks.
Billy festooned his bedroom with model airplanes. These hung
from strings everywhere. His were the wooden models where the pieces were cut out of balsa wood with a Xacto knife not
the plastic kits already pre-cut that I glued together. Billy loved building those planes; I didn’t have the patience. I remember the airplane glue, though, a clear thick liquid you pressed from a tube and got high on the odor. It also stuck to your fingers and felt like pulling off skin when you peeled it.
This will be strange news to anyone
who knows me now, but Billy had an interest in something else I didn’t like, horror comics. Since I became a horror storywriter for the Pulps this doesn’t sound possible, but it is true. At the time Billy’s horror comics gave me nightmares. Yep, right there in his bedroom was a tub full of the ghastly covers of “Vault of Horror” and “Tales from the Crypt”. With my next best friend I would be trading for those ghoulish rags, but at Billy’s I didn’t even want to see the titles.
On one visit when I stayed overnight, Billy’s family watched a TV show called Tales of Tomorrow just before bedtime. It began with eerie music and told spooky stories akin to the Twilight Zone. “Sleep No More” (1952) was the episode that particular evening and after watching it I couldn’t. The tale told of a man who every time he slept alien monsters entered the world through
his dreams. Notice that after all these decades I still recall that particular episode clearly.
Billy’s family lived in Coatesville a brief time and then moved somewhere out in the country. After that our friendship just faded with the distance.
No comments:
Post a Comment