CHAPTER 63
Bucktown, Pennsylvania, population 100, is a village on Route 100 five miles south of Pottstown and fifteen miles north of Downingtown. The center of town is where the West Chester-Pottstown Pike crosses Route 23. In 1956 there was a Sunoco Gas Station on one corner, a slaughterhouse on another, a lot of used cars on the third and some sort of business office on the last. There was a restaurant and not much else.
Our new home was outside of the Village and up
Route 100 a half mile.
Pulling up that first weekend I stayed it looked like another land of isolation. My parents had purchased a ranch house, from a man named Sox Seibold, with three and a half acres of not much (picture right from satellite). There was a large field for a back yard and a small hill covered with trees. There was a strip of marsh around a little stream between the field and the woods.
A farmer named Tom Bishop owned the fields on our south. There was nothing there except an old half buried springhouse. A couple years later Bishop built a lake on the lot fed by that underground spring.
To our north side there was field as far as you
could see and nearly as far as you could drive, although two buildings sat at the top of the property by the road (pictured right). The owner was an auctioneer, who always wore an Amish man’s hat, though he wasn’t Amish. In summer he practiced his auctioneering over a PA System attached to his barn. “Do I hear 10, gimme 10, gimme, 10, now does someone say a 15, can I have a 15…” and so forth.
There was a tiny little house across the street (pictured left), but you seldom saw any people there. It was rented out to different tenants over the years. Bishop owned that, too. Beyond it was a hill of his farmland and Mr. and Mrs. Bishop lived in a home far up a lane cutting through his pastures. He had a
son named Dave Bishop (pictured right), but he was a couple years my senior. I stood with him at the school bus stop, right at the top of our lane, that fall and the rest of that year, but seldom saw him anytime else. There was an older son named Tom, Jr., but I almost never saw him.
My new home sat up an embankment and very close to the highway. There was a gravel lane that circled one side from highway to the back and over to a two-car garage under the house. To the left of the garage doors was a people door to the basement portion and then a whitewashed section of solid cement block wall. On the south corner was another door leading into a separate storage shed from that of the basement.
My parents moved in on May 1, 1956. I did not. The usual routine of my life was suddenly reversed. I was now living with my grandparents during the week and going to weekend visits with my parents instead of vice-versa. The weekends were rather lonely at first. There didn’t appear to be anyone my age around. It fact, it didn’t really appear there was anyone around period. What homes existed beyond the village were scattered along the roadway with some distance between them. It was like when we lived in the swamp, and like when we lived in the swamp I began to invent games to entertain myself.
I drew a home plate half way up the cement block back wall with chalk. This would become a prop in an oft-played game during my life at Bucktown. I stepped to the rear of the back drive, where a short stonewall ran between three small crabapple trees all in a row. I would pitch a ball game in my head. I threw a rubber baseball at the wall. Hitting the chalk plate was a strike, missing it a ball or a hit. I could create a hit by hitting the wall in different spots and different angles. If I hit the wall high, I got a ground ball coming back at me. If I hit the wall where it met the ground, I could create a pop up. If I caught the pop-up it was an out. If I missed, it was a hit. On grounders I would field the ball and throw it toward that home plate drawing. If I hit the plate the batter was out. If I missed they got a hit.
Sometimes I brought out my bat and some large whiffle balls. I made up teams and played baseball with these as well. I would play both teams and do this for nine innings, keeping track of base hits and runs in my head. The home team consisted of all my past friends, Billy Smith, Tim Mahan, Ronald, Stuart and so on. I kept track of everybody’s hits, runs, home runs and batting average. A home run was when I hit the whiffle ball over the stonewall and those trees. I kept all this in a notebook. Over the summer I recorded our teams wins and losses and the stats of all my imaginary players. For some reason I tended to have the best stats.
I did some exploring, but quickly realizes this wasn’t as interesting as the swamp had been. For starters, there was no swamp. There was a marshy strip along both side of the stream that divided field from hillside woods. Big whoop, right? Only thing this marsh did was make it difficult to cross over the stream because you couldn’t get close to its banks, if it had any to speak of, because of the muddy soft ground.
There was one place I could cross at the south end, almost to that border of the lot. There were these large rocks in a row that went across the waters, provided you could jump a two-foot gap about exactly where the stream flowed between them. Beyond the rocks the hill rose up thickly covered with trees. Being May the growth wasn’t yet as thick as the picture on the right, but it was still tricky fighting my way up the incline through bushes and trees. This was a hill I could not sled down, too weedy.
At the crest things leveled off a bit. There was a stone wall along the top ridge running as far as I could see both to the north and the south. Beyond the wall was plowed up ground running down the gentler and long slope on that side. Far off in the distance I could just make out farm buildings. That was about the limits of my exploring the borders of my new world.
up on a Friday night and stayed over until Sunday. Saturday
was May 6 and The Benders came to help my mom and dad move much of their furniture to the new home. Joe Bender (left in 1944) had been the guy that helped my dad get his first truck driving job after dad came out of the Navy. His wife’s name was Helen (right in 1986) and they had remained friends of the family ever since. Their daughter’s name was Dottie and at one point she had been my babysitter. She was a couple years my senior. We’ll have more to say about Dottie in later chapters.
Sunday evening Peppy and I, because Peppy stayed with me, went back to Downingtown to live with my grandparents until junior high ended. I was counting the days and missing my pirate lady” fantasies. Meanwhile on May 12 it was back to Bucktown and then my grandparents on the 14th, Bucktown on the 19th and Downingtown again on the 21st and Bucktown on the 26th and so on. I felt like a Ping Pong Ball. My one respite was on Friday the 25th I played ball at Stuart’s house, both of us wondering if it would soon be goodbye forever.
That last day of ninth grade came on June 8th when school closed for the summer. I came home holding my report card that said I was promoted to the tenth grade, despite my dismal marks.
As relieved as I was at escaping Downingtown Junior High alive, I still felt a bit of resentment about the change of names to the yearbook. Traditionally it had been called The Cuckoo, a somewhat unique name for a yearbook, but for 1956 they held a contest to choose a new name. The winner was rather lame, Our Year. This was the winner? What in the world were the losers’ suggestions?
On the third weekend I traveled to Bucktown, it was the weekend of May 26 through the 28th, I went out back with my rubber baseball and pitched what was becoming an obsessive game of imaginary baseball against the house. As I was retrieving a ball that came off the wall at an odd angle and eluded me I was startled by someone standing on the side yard watching. He looked my age and height, but heavier. I was very leery. This stranger looked threatening.
“Wanna have a catch,” he said.
That was how I met Richard Allen Wilson.
Rich became my best friend in Bucktown, not that there were a lot of choices. Dave Bishop was too old and there wasn’t anyone else near my age in the Village. Rich lived a quarter of a mile up the Pottstown Pike north of me. He’d heard a new family moved into the old Seibold place with a boy his age. He had walked down to find out.
On the Sunday after meeting Richard my mom, dad and I attended, along with 22 other people, all strangers to me, a picnic at Richard’s home. His parents were Elmer and Betty Wilson. They became close friends with my parents. He had a younger brother named Tommy and an even younger sister named Sue. Richard was not the son of Elmer, he had been born to Betty and her first husband, a former mayor of Pottstown. Tommy and Sue were the offspring of Betty and Elmer Wilson.
On that first Saturday, Richard and I simply threw the ball back and forth for an afternoon, but in the summer and years ahead we were pretty close. Our times together would be varied, interesting and adventurous and I don’t think we ever had a disagreement. Our lives remained closely intertwined the next five years.
I officially moved to my new home on June 9, 1956. School was out for the summer and I had a lot of idle time now because I had to give up Boy Scouts, MYF and my paper route when we moved. I couldn’t walk over and see any of my Downingtown friends anymore either. My dad’s schedule was just as always, so he wasn’t there during the week and my life returned to the old weekends at the grandparents routine. It was on one of those weekends (June 20, 1956) that I stayed in Dave Fidler’s loft and Ted Miller gypped the Coke machine (See Great Coca-Cola Heist: The Broadway Musical.)
My mother had decided after she learned we’d be
moving out of Downingtown that she better learn to drive. She got her license shortly before the move.
One problem I had after the move was money. My paperboy job was very lucrative for those times and I was used to having plenty of spending cash. I had managed to save some from that job, but knew that wouldn’t last forever. Of course in the beginning of living where I did there wasn’t anywhere to spend anything on anyway (pictured right, Bucktown from the air).
I did manage to get some work for a few weeks that summer picking tomatoes on one of my cousin’s farms. It was there I also got to ride a cow. It didn’t pay a lot, not like the paperboy job, but it was better than nothing. It was a whole lot harder to do than
riding along dropping papers on porches though. I really didn’t care for it at all. It wasn’t the work. It wasn’t the hot sun all day or the dirt and dust that covered me by the time I finished. It was the spiders. The tomato field was full of Daddy-Longlegs spiders. Despite the silly rumor that these were the most poisonous spiders in the United States, they were quite harmless. Even if they were poisonous (and all spiders are to an extent, it’s how they kill their prey) its fangs were too short to bite a human. Besides they don’t have venom because Daddy Longlegs aren’t really spiders, although they are arachnids. Spiders have two body sections and eight eyes. Daddy Longlegs have one section and only two eyes. They do have eight long legs. “Daddy” is a British and Canadian term for long legged flies, which are insects of course. The Daddy Longlegs isn’t an insect either. There is a long legged house spider that people also call a Daddy Longlegs. The Daddy Longlegs species had no kinship to that spider. Another name people give Daddy Longlegs is Harvestmen. Given the number in the tomato field Harvestmen is a better name anyway.
Although these things are harmless, it gets
annoying when all day long they are running over your hands and arms. I would pick a tomato and disturb a nest of these buggers and they would scurry not away, but up my arms. I was glad to leave the tomato fields alone after that summer.
One thing happened after we moved to Bucktown that I didn’t like at all. I fought against the idea, but I lost. My parents forced me back to attending church. Mom and dad had not attended any church during my whole life up to that point, excepting sometimes at Easter or Christmas,. My mother’s parents hadn’t attended either. Now a sudden my parents joined the Bethel United Methodist Church of Spring City , Pennsylvania (pictured left) and insisted I go with them every Sunday morning.
They give me no choice and so I go along to get along for the whole year. When I get my driver’s license there will be some adjustments made.
Kirkwood, the man-made lake my dad would take us swimming at, is only two miles or so south of Bucktown. Richard was familiar with this swimming hole too. We would pedal our bikes down the pike on hot days and swim. Rich was a good swimmer. He liked to do a lot of diving down at the deep end, but I stuck up in the shallows because I still hadn’t learned to swim.
I did want to learn this skill but my father repeatedly tried to teach me by the old sink or swim method, so I preferred to avoid him in the water. It never crossed my mind that Rich might be able to teach me, so I never asked him.
We were going to go swimming one weekday, but Rich couldn’t come at the last minute. His parents were punishing him. They were always punishing him for something. It was hot and I had my trunks on ready to go, so decided to pedal out to Kirkwood anyway.
I arrived at the lake and there wasn’t a soul about. The place never had lifeguards, only a sign saying, “swim at your own risk”. I was use to the weekends and a good number of swimmers and sunbathers being about, but this was the middle of the week so people must have been working. I parked my bike over by the side and walked along the edge of a stonewall that bordered the water. I continued out to where the diving board jutted over the 12 to 15 foot depth. I took off my shirt and sneakers and I jumped in.
“I’ll throw you in and you’ll either sink or swim,” was my dad’s constant threat. I did it for him. It was do or die. There was nobody around to pull me out. I had watched others swim; I saw how they stroked with their arms and kicked with their feet.
I learned to swim that day or you wouldn’t be reading this now. I had long before become a risk taker to avoid ridicule, preferring dying in secret to failing publicly and being laughed at.
My life was full of secrets and I was soon to have some more.
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