CHAPTER 46
I did odd jobs about the neighborhood after we moved back to Downingtown. Simple things an ten-year could do at first, such as run around to the Esworthy’s little store on Chestnut Street and fetch a loaf of bread. My list of services grew as I did, wash a car now and then, mow a neighbor’s lawn, rake leaves in the fall and shovel snow in the winter. (The photo on the left is the building that once housed Esworthy’s little grocery on Chestnut Street as it looks today.) As my round shoulders became more intrusive and promenate I started finding money along the sidewalks as I went about. At first I considered myself very lucky, but I soon figured out why I found dropped coins that others missed because my backbone was curved and my head was always pressed forward and down. I wasn’t looking at where I was headed; I was watching the earth pass near my feet. This did inspire a short story as a teenager that I titled, “Gift”.
I had home chores to do as well. My folks had seen to that early.
These were simple, pick up my toys when I was done playing, that sort of thing. They were civilizing me more than assigning work. When we moved to the swamp I had to help with mother’s garden in the summer and some of her cleaning. My duties in Downingtown were the same as my little odd jobs, wash the car occasionally, fetch things from that Esworthy store, rake the leaves, mow the grass weekly as soon as I was strong enough to push the mower (no gas or electric mowers in those days it was all push power) and burn the trash.
I liked burning the trash. There was something perverse in my imagination I suppose, a latent pyromaniac perhaps. (I use to try and set some of my plastic race cars on fire after causing a crash. This never resulted in flames, only very smelly melted and blackened plastic.) When I dumped the combustibles from our wastebasket daily I pretended the pile this made in the 55-galleon drum was a city under attack from the Nazis (World War II died hard in we children’s playtime imaginations). Then I would strike a match and drop it in upon a piece of paper, and another match across from it and so on as if the bombs were dropping. At times, I hit a jackpot of long white tubes among the scrap paper. I pretended these were people trapped in the strafed city.
I had no idea what these tubes really were. They had two parts, an outer tube shell and a smaller tube inside, which slid back and forth in the larger. I eventually learned my burning people were tampon inserters. My grandmother would have been appalled.
I wasn’t always prompt in doing my chores though. Doing these tasks about the neighborhood for hire always seemed easier than doing them at home. My folks did give me an allowance of twenty-five cents a week.
Twenty-five cents was worth something in the 1950s. It could get a kid into the movie house including a large bag of popcorn. It covered the cost of a comic book, two toy soldiers and five packs of bubblegum with baseball cards. It could buy you a double-dip ice cream cone, a large Coke and give you change back.
There was a group of stores at the end of the shopping area
downtown, between the main drag and the Bicking Papermill. There was Joe Mfauewd’s Shoemaker Shop where I pointed out the man with the facial discoloration, a corner bar and Zittle’s Cigar Store. You could spend your quarter at Zittle’s and walk out with a brown paper bag full of goodies. Daniel Zittle sold candy for one cent a piece; some kinds you could even buy two pieces for a penny. (The photo on the left is from an earlier day, but it shows Daniel Zittle standing in front of the building that will house his cigar shop, he is the man standing on the left. At the time of this photo, the building housed the Achieve Printing Office. In my youth in would have a Shoemaker Shop on the left, Zittle’s Store next to that and a Tavern on the far right.)
In 1953 the Downingtown Farmer’s Market and Auction opened just east of the town limit along the north side of East Lancaster Pike. It was a long building, with two large wings jutting off the back corners. Inside the long part was stall after stall of everything in the world for sale. Down one side it was all foods. The Mennonites and Amish of Lancaster County ran several of these stalls bringing in fresh produce and butchered meat from their farms. Down the other side was – well, pretty much name it and it was there, records to rugs, shoes to skin creams, clothes to closet organizers. The Farmer’s Market was to become a central place in my young life. To my friends and I it was the mecca of teenage paradise.
In one of the wings they held an auction every Friday and Saturday night (the Farmer’s Market was only open on those two days). They auctioned off all sorts of items. I wasn’t much interested in this activity at twelve years of age. I was interested in the contents of the opposite wing. Pinball machines and other coin operated games filled it wall to wall. It was like the Penny Arcade at Dorney Park and was destined to become a regular hangout for we Townies. (I was surprised I could not find any photographs of the Farmer’s Market except a few of when it caught fire in 1976. That is why you see a fireman squirting water on it in one picture and smoke and flames in the other.)
One of my friends at least at that time, Gary Kinzey, suggested we walk down to the Farmer’s Market and see if we could get a job. The first stall we inquired at hired us. It was a greengrocer. There was no ID required, no permission slip from the parents requested, nothing bureaucratic at all in this hiring of child labor.
The owner assigned me to cleaning celery. I really didn’t last very long at this position. My friend got to be at the counter waiting on people, which frankly ticked me off. I was envious because his job looked more fun and easier. He was up front talking with people, bagging up items. Meanwhile I was stuck in the back with a brush and an unending pile of celery stalks. Did people in Downingtown actually eat that much celery? The boss paid us an equal amount, twenty-five cents per hour. We worked four hours a day. It may sound like slave wages, but remember in 1953 you could buy a restaurant meal for fifty cents. Two dollars was a small fortune to us; that was 40 plays on a pinball machine or enough ice cream and candy for a two-week tummyache.
I stood all night with my hands in cold water giving spa treatments to celery for a couple weeks, and then I quit.
The changes in my life were starting to have a negative effect
upon me. I had gained some acceptance at East Ward after three and a half years and the bullying had toned down from sheer boredom on the part of others if nothing else. I was still ducking from the Charles-Bird-Way Gang frequently because I was out and about the streets more each year I aged. (Pictured right: Jimmy Charles, leader of the gang.) My interest in school continued declining and my marks and deportment reflected my attitude.
Now being older, Dad was including me when taking mom places on the weekend calling these family outings, but that simply exposed me to more of his criticism. If we went to Hopewell Lake or Kirkwood Pool it was my not knowing how to swim with his threats to throw me off the diving board. If we went to the Auditorium in Coatesville for a movie he would be nagging me to stand up straight as we walked to the theater, thumping me on the back and making the thread of that brace. If we were at the stock car races it was my fear of height. If we just took a ride it was a threat to take me up on some tower. If we stopped in a restaurant to eat he would mimic my choice of food, plus make me embarrassed as he came on to every waitress.
Now I went into Seventh Grade at Downingtown Junior High School. At East Ward I had been with the same kids all day for four grades. We had come to something of a truce, besides I had made a few friends who I expected to be with me at the Junior High School. However, I was also in the East Ward Band. Mr. Poltorne (pictured left) came to me in Sixth Grade and recruited me for the Junior High band, which he also led. I agreed. Since band rehearsals were scheduled during a regular school period, all band members were assigned to the same section, 7A. None of my friends were in band at that time so they were all in a different section than I.
I was basically starting over with a bunch of strangers, many of whom came from the West Ward. I didn’t have classes with my friends and our lunch periods didn’t necessarily line up. Besides, kids didn’t look upon band members quite the same way as they did football players either. They considered us dweebs who sometimes put on funny looking uniforms that didn’t quite fit.
Junior High School was a terrible experience. It did not help that I was experiencing other changes beyond my control. I was not just entering a new school; I was entering puberty. My body was changing in ways I didn’t understand and I was gaining a great deal of curiosity about girls I’d never had before. I was experiencing strange new sensations that pleased me at the same time they scared me.
I was picking up bits and pieces about sex from any classmate that
were generally wrong and not appropriate, but I still did not know how babies got inside mothers.
Another thing that dawned upon me was I did not know what girls looked like “down there”. I knew there was something different and boys and girls weren’t
supposed to see that difference. We had separate restrooms at school for some reason. I could see girl’s bodies were becoming less like mine. They were becoming more like my mother’s. Their chests were growing lumps and their hips were rounder than we boys.
I notised their underpants were different than mine. I had seen girls’ underpants because girls wore dresses to school and sometimes one would hang upside down by her legs on the Monkey Bars or a March wind would blow a skirt high. My briefs had a slot down the front; their panties were completely smooth with no such slot. So, how did a girl urinate? You may think these were weird questions, but when no body has ever explained the real differences between girls and boys they aren’t. I had never played “Doctor”; had never engaged in the “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine” routine, so I didn’t have a clue what the differences were. But those differences must be important because I was beginning to react to girls in a new way.
Like how?
Let me count the ways.
In grade school seeing a girl’s underwear brought giggles and a jingle about seeing London and France, but little else. By the time I entered Seventh Grade seeing a girl’s underwear or even a good bit of her upper thigh sent some kind of shiver through me and I didn’t get the giggles; I got the chills. I actually found something exciting about seeing a girl’s underpants as irrational as that was. I also found myself staring at those lumps on their chests for no good reason. It was as if something in my eyes automatically turned my gaze to a girl’s chest.
Even at that youthful age there were a couple of girls who showed some cleavage. If you were talking to them and glanced down you might even see a little of the roundness of those lumps. Remember Michelle, that girl I kissed in grade school that upset her father? Notice her to the left. That meant nothing at the time the photo was taken, but by junior high seeing something like that would cause that strange little tingle inside me.
Most my female Seventh Grade classmates were still flat and not yet in training bras, but dress code did required them to wear skirts or dresses to school, so they all presumably wore panties. I asked myself, “What if they all didn’t?” That thought brought on that tingle and the tingling felt good. I began checking out the girls’ legs, especially when they sat down, to see if I could glimpse anything.
I employed an old routine, although at the time I thought it was an
original and cleaver ruse. Walk past a girl’s desk and drop something, typically a pencil. As I picked it up I would try to see up their skirt. Pretty much 99% of the time you couldn’t see very far, but that tinkle came anyway just with the anticipation. Once in a while you caught a glimpse of some material, usually pink or yellow. I never found a girl sans panties in any of my classes. What was hidden there would have to wait and I would have to continue wondering. Don’t think I was the lone 12-year old pervert. It is lucky I didn’t bump heads with other sudden pencil droppers. There was a rash of butterfingers among boys and a particular habit of reaching down to find a dropped object while the head was bend facing to the side.
After a time Seventh Grade was throwing enough scares at me to take my mind off girls. Shop was another class I dreaded almost as much as Gym and I had to take it all three years of Junior High. I should have known my way around tools because of my heritage. My mother’s family was builders. My grandfather was a master carpenter. My father was a truck driver, but he knew mechanics. He could fix truck and car engines. They should have passed on these skills to me, but neither had the patience to teach a kid. My grandfather considered me in the way if he was constructing something. My father seemed to think I knew an open-end from a box wrench or a Phillip’s Head from a slotted screwdriver by osmosis. Both men would quickly tire of trying to explain anything to me and send me off to play. Of course I was happy to oblige, especially with my dad. I never wanted to be out there “helping” him anyway, but my mother often told me, “Go help your father.”
Helping dad usually consisted of my standing nearby and handing him a tool I couldn’t recognize when he asked for it. This usually took three or four tries until I selected the correct object along with a comment about how dumb I was. Even more upsetting was when I grew old enough to drive and he would send me to an auto store to buy a part. No matter what I was to get once at the store the clerk would ask me a question about the part that I couldn’t answer, like do you want a left-handed floozle handle or a right? I would now face the choice of taking home the wrong facing floozle handle or nothing and have my father go get it himself. Either way he would remind me once more of how dumb I was and usually call me Gertrude in the bargain. I much preferred to avoid my dad than to play out such scenes.
My shop teachers were like my dad and grandfather, although they never called me Gertrude. I have never understood why certain people become teachers. I have had too many in my life who assume the students know everything the moment they walk into their class. If you don’t know or have any difficulty understanding something, they have nothing to do with you. They spend their time with the students who don’t need them. Meanwhile those who could really use help or close-up personal instruction are left to flounder or fail. If I already know everything, why am I there?
I’ve had opportunities in my life to teach and train people. I had two rules. First, I never assumed my class knew anything until I determined exactly what level of knowledge they had. Second, my object was no one failed. No one of normal intelligence should ever fail a high school class, unless the kid just doesn’t care. If students are flunking a class, then it is the teacher who is failing. You are there to teach these children, not to exhibit your superior knowledge or to take the easy way of concentrating on those already able to achieve. True, you can’t always motivate a student, but you oughta try.
On the first day of woodshop, Mr. Elmer Hemberger (pictured left) gave us a quick tour, pointing out the power drill presses and band saws, planers and lathes that could do us serious damage. He certainly was in the know about such things seeing as how he was missing a couple fingers. Those missing digits didn’t particularly instill confidence in me. He then pointed with a remaining finger to a large pegboard full of various mysterious hand tools. Finally he had us select a project to work on. I picked out a bookend lamp, which seemed a practical project for an avid reader. It looked simple enough, four pieces of wood and a lamp. But I quickly showed my ignorance of which tools to use or how to use them and so Mr. Hemberger seldom came over to me to give any advice. I completed my bookend lamp off in a corner alone. It was a little uneven on one end, but it served its purpose and I got a passing grade in wood shop.
I spent a lot of shop time making magic belt hooks on the jigsaw.
Funny little thing, but I thought it was really cool. You just cut these pieces of wood in sort of the shape of a pipe, except in the middle of the stem you cut a triangle pointing up. It looked like the sketch on the right. The belt rested against the side of the triangle. This provided a counterweight allowing you to sit the thin end of the stem on the edge of a table where it would balance. I liked it because it was like a magic trick. I must have made dozens of these. It made me look busy.
As long as I looked occupied and wasn’t bleeding profusely, Mr. Hemberger didn’t care what I was doing, I was a kid who didn’t know a ball peen hammer from a claw, so I wasn’t worth wasting much time on. Somehow I received an overall Grade of C in shop for the year, probably an act of mercy. I even had Bs in two marking periods. I must have gotten good at making magic belt hooks.
Well, I was getting pretty good at making those belt hooks, but more likely I got my Bs in metal shop. You see half a year was metal and half a year was wood. Mr. Raymond Kipp (pictured left) was the Metal Shop instructor. He was a short man and like a lot of men of small stature, had a slight Napoleonic approach to teaching. However, he didn’t seem to mind that his incoming pupils didn’t know much about working with metal. After all, the average home didn’t do much foundry or sheet metal work at their basement workbenches. Melting down metal always included the off-chance someone might burn the school down, so he gave us all a bit more hands on attention.
Schools didn’t allowed Girls to take shop in the 1950s. Shop was men’s work! Girls had to take Home Economics during those periods. I have the feeling a lot of girls would have liked to take shop just because Mr. Kipp was the teacher. He wasn’t much older then we were and he had been a student at Downingtown before becoming a teacher there. He was what women would call cute. By the time my own daughters were in high school girls and boys both had to take Shop and Home Ec. My daughters loved shop, but then they were better at it than I was.
I was a bit more accomplished at metal shop, but not great. I pounded out some ashtrays and metal candy dishes, but my best projects were pipe holders. Pipe holders shaped like shoes became my belt hooks of foundry work. My father smoked a pipe so they made handy birthday and Christmas presents. You can mold a lot of pipe holders over a three-year span.
Overall, my Seventh grade marks weren’t too bad, but still a slight drop off from Sixth Grade where I finished with a B minus. I managed a 2.38 average for Seventh Grade, which is a C Plus. My worst subject was spelling in which I got straight Ds. The explanation given was “Poor examinations”. Yeah, I probably couldn’t even spell “examination”. If I could have thrown out Spelling, I would have finished with a B plus.
My best subjects were Science and the creative ones: Art, Music
and Reading. I still had some interest in the sciences like chemistry and biology at the time but those subjects weren’t taught until senior high.. I also had my Homeroom teacher for General Science class. His name was Ray DiSerafino (pictured right) and I would bet every person who ever had him for a teacher admired him. Everybody knew him as Mr. D.
He was truly a teacher who cared about we students. His classes were always well behaved because the pupils respected him. He had time for everybody. In Stuart’s memoir, after telling some of the negative prejudices he had suffered, he writes of Mr. D under the heading,
“The opposite of anti-Semitism at DHS”.
There is one teacher who stands head and shoulders above all the others at DHS, and I have just recently learned that they named the football stadium in his honor. Without any question, Raymond DiSerafino (Mr. D) was one of the finest teachers (if not the finest teacher) I ever had. Interestingly, I have no recollection of any courses that he taught. But I do know that he, and he alone, made me believe in my own abilities to get into college. I was sure that I would not get into college because I was Jewish (I still am) and I assumed that colleges were as anti-Semitic as DHS. One time I specifically asked Mr. D if he thought I had any chance of getting into college. He was surprised at my question wondering why I would ask such a question. My response was that I did not known if colleges admitted Jewish people. I recall clearly his surprise at such a question. He was not able to think in such biased terms, and he assured me that I could and should apply to any college I want. He was right! He literally opened my eyes to a world of people who were not anti-Semitic. Where ever you are, Mr. D, “Thank you!”
Mr. D also coached sports teams at Downingtown and eventually he became the Principal of the high school, during which service he was named one of Chester County’s Top Educators of the 20th Century. He died in 2009 at the age of 83. Thank you for the soul you were, Mr. D.
One rare teacher who encouraged my writing ambitions was Mrs. Jean Pollock (pictured left), although the Lord knows why she did. I had her for my aforementioned disaster, Spelling. She also taught English and Reading. My English marks were not very good. I finished with a C after receiving D for each of the first three periods. Yet she still sensed something worthwhile in the moody, skinny kid sitting in the back of the room. She always took time to talk to me and tell me not to give up. You wouldn’t think a guy who couldn’t spell and was barely getting by in English was a prime candidate for a literary career, but she believed in my dreams despite that.
I wish I’d had more teachers like Mr. D. and Mrs. Pollock.
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