CHAPTER 45
During my Grade School years I was in Cub Scouts. I joined Pack 8 on January 23, 1950, which was my first month back in Downingtown. I don’t know if it was my idea or my parents. I kind of doubt it was mine. Perhaps they saw this as a way for me to quickly gain friends and although I enjoyed Cubs, I don’t recall really bonding closely with any fellow den members. I earned my Wolf, Bear and Lion Badges and the Gold and Silver Arrowheads before exiting as a Webelo in May of 1952. I turned 11 that June, a year too young for Boy Scouts.
I didn’t give much thought to returning to scouting over the next year, but in June of 1953, between Grade School and Junior High, both Stuart Meisel and I turned 12 three days apart. It was Stuart’s idea we become Boy Scouts.
At that time there was but one Troop in Downingtown, Troop 2, and they met at the Alert Fire House on the West Side (pictured right).
We made the contacts to join and went to our first meeting, which was to be an initiation into the troop. They called the Scoutmaster Red. I can’t remember his actually name. His red hair gave him his nickname. If memory serves it was thick and curly, but thinning. He acted like some kind of military drill sergeant. He treated us like recruits reporting to Boot Camp. There was nothing very friendly about the Troop at all.
The initiation was really a hazing and a brutal one at that. The Scoutmaster allowed the senior Scouts to conduct it. The adult Scout Leaders stepped out of the room. One of the Scouts then blindfolded us one at a time. Someone told us there was a not so tame goat in the adjoining room. The goat was only a barrel wrapped in a sheepskin, but we couldn’t see that. Someone blew a horn that sounded similar to a goat’s bleats. They led us one by one to the goat and told us to touch it, but warned it might bite. When we reached a hand out blindly to touch the goat there was a snapping sound and a tug on our shirt as if something attempted to bite us. They designed the ceremony to frighten.
This may have passed as good clean fun, if they didn’t begin using ethnic slurs when speaking to Stuart and if at one point they didn’t order all the Tenderfeet (we new guys) to strip naked and ride the goat. Stuart and I refused and we left. Stuart was very upset, of course. It had been a horrible experience and we never went back to Troop 2
“This is Buttsky, our mascot goat. You must ride him – naked. Please strip.”
Frank blinked. Why this difference? Naked? Ruben was overweight and shy about his body. He never even took his shirt off in the summertime.
Ruben hesitated, tried to refuse, but was quickly grabbed by several Scouts who began undressing him. They flung a shoe here, a sock there. His shirt went eastward, his pants westward until Ruben stood naked before the circle. He struggled to cover himself with his hands, but the others restrained him. His arms were tugged behind his back and with a few swift Scout knots were bound to his sides. They spun him, bleating the horn near his ear. The block slapper slapped them inches from his crotch.
“Be careful,” warned Ralph, “Buttsky bites.”
Ruben went in confused circles. The block snapper pinched his buttocks with the wood. Ruben screamed and turned blindly toward his tormentor.
“Better watch it, Jewboy. You might get a second circumcision.”
“It looks like the Rabbi snipped off too much the first time,” said Ralph.
“Look out, tubby, here comes Buttsky.”
The blocks pinched Ruben’s side, near the front. Ruben yelled, “Stop it, stop it,” in a high, strangled, jungle voice. Hands grabbed him and flung him upon the rug-covered barrel. The bucking was vicious. With his hands tied he had trouble getting a grasp. They jerked the ropes taunt. The jolt threw Ruben off, but no hands outstretched to save him. Frank tripped as he lurched forward and fell. Someone sat down on his back as he tried to rise.
Ruben had thudded to the floor and lay moaning.
Except from “Death of a Scout” (1973
In my collection, Sins of the Sons (197)
Bucky Lefebvre was cautiously lifting his soup kettle of boiling water on the end of a thick forked stick. He stepped back from the fire.
Terry yelled as he came out from his tent, freed from his own fears by the madness of anger cooking for so long in the tent.
“Goddamn you, Richie!”
Everything froze. Each scout stopped as if solidified by the strange curse. Everything froze except the boiling water, which cascaded backward over Bucky.
The freeze thawed instantly. Bucky fell to the ground screaming loudest in a cacophony of screams. In agony for their own, the scouts formed about the fallen. Bucky lay on his back upon the ground writhing gently. The front of his uniform was wet, but the exposed flesh of his arms and legs was strangely dry.
As they stood surrounding Bucky, unsure of what to do, waiting for him to sit up with a laugh and joke about spilled soup; they saw the skin of his limbs change. At first this flesh was a slight red, then it darkened, darkened down the length of his arms and legs. Still it continued to change. White blisters grew like radiated mushrooms. Larger, white lumps of epidermis domes, until too large, which caused them to pop, bursting down the line like pin-pricked soap bubbles, breaking open and then pealing back, layer upon layer until his skin was like plowed earth, an ashen, dusty, tissue-thin upturned field.
Hands reached toward Bucky, but Terry pushed through the circle, broke apart the pressing bodies, ordered them away.
“He’s in shock,” Terry yelled, “he’s in shock.”
Bucky moaned.
Excerpt from “A Brother to All” 1976
From my Collection, Sins of the Sons (1976
It would not be the last time I saw the underbelly of anti-Jewish prejudice that existed in my small town. What I saw in my Downingtown years only scratched the surface of what Stuart endured. I knew nothing about the extent of his persecution then. He told me of some of it decades later and wrote about it in his memoir, but I saw enough as a boy to know it existed and there were real physical threats to his wellbeing. Mine as well. A lot of the kids in town didn’t need much help in finding reason to ridicule me, so being close friends with the only Jewish boy only added a few more arrows to their quivers. Guys such as the Charles-Bird-Way gang would call me Jew-lover and worse, but I also had kids I didn’t even know say they “were goin’ to get me” because of my friendship. One day walking home down Manor Avenue alone a stranger followed on the other side, jeering me and calling Stuart and me a lot of names. He left me this way:
“Tell that fat Jew friend of yours we’re goin’ get him.”
Mr. Hendershott in Mechanical Drawing also was anti-Semitic. He returned one of my drawings
with a D- with the comment, “Lines too light.” Bill Brookover also got his drawing back, with an A- and the same comment. I asked Mr. Hendershott why Bill got an A- and I got a D-, and I recall he said, “Because you are a Goddamm Jew.”**
Stuart was a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, but there was a song he refused to sing when the school sang as a group for an assembly.
The Auditorium (where we had Assembly) had two flags on both side of the stage. On one side was the American and Pennsylvania Flags, on the other side was the school and Christian flags. As I recall the Christian Flag, it was white, with a blue square in the corner, and either a white or red cross (I am clear that it was the Crucifix cross, not the Red Cross symbol) in the blue section.
Mr. Bykoski [sic – Bycoskie, left] -- At least one time, he beat the crap out of me because I would not sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” during Assembly. Literally, he grabbed me by my belt and shirt collar and dragged me out of Assembly into the hall and threw me up against the lockers.**
** Quotes from My Story by Stuart G. Meisel, 2004, p. 40.
One day Stuart and I were waylaid in the basement corridor of the junior high school. I didn’t even know who the boys were who surrounded us. They weren’t from my class. They were older, perhaps from the senior high wing. I can’t remember the exact number of them, but it had to be at least six. They shoved Stuart and me out of the hallway into the Gym locker room. The locker room was completely empty and fairly dark. Four of these boys grabbed my arms and pulled me into an adjoining room where the changing baskets were and closed the door. This was a much smaller area with very little light. We were grouped in a narrow passage between the floor-to-ceiling racks that held the baskets where clothes were stored during gym class.
It was very dark in there. One boy had hold of my left arm and another my right. I don’t know what the other two were planning to do, but I figured it was nothing good. I was scared. They twisted my arms in opposite directions. If they hit me I wouldn’t be able to defend myself, as if I had much chance anyway. So I began telling jokes, similar to what I did when Dr. Neff was sewing up my forehead.
I was developing the use of humor as a response to stressful situations. I would use it throughout my life. People don’t expect humor. These guys certainly didn’t. They began to laugh instead of beating me up. Finally they let me go and shoved me out of that room. I was lucky. They took Stuart in there and I don’t have a clue what they did, but he was crying when they let us go and he wouldn’t speak of it.
Ah, such was life in small town America in the ‘fifties.
Gym was always a horror show waiting to happen. Most things were minor, but still enough to make kids like me fear physical education class. There was the humiliation of being picked near last for any team, or last for some, because there had to be a last pick, and it was usually the same guy.
There was the embarrassing team identification. One night my wife and daughter were watching an old episode of The Golden Girls.
“What is Dorothy wearing?” my daughter asked. “It looks like a Pinny.”
“What’s a Pinny?” I asked.
Both answered at the same time, “It’s what we wore in Gym to tell teams apart.”
“Oh,” I said. “When I had gym one team just took off their shirts.”
My wife rolled her eyes.
My little joke really wasn’t funny to me when I had Gym and had to take off my shirt. I hated to be a “Skin”. We would count off, 1, 2, 1, 2, etc. It seemed every time the count put me on the Skins team. As said over and over now, I hated taking my shirt off in front of others because you could have mistaken my ribs for a marimba. The lack of meat on my bones embarrassed me.
you for not wearing a Jock.
Well, true, you were wearing Gym shorts over the Jockstrap, why worry if there was no inner seat cover? (FYI: That is not my bottom [sad to say] or anyone whom I know.) You must understand the perversity of pubescence boys. There was an ever-present danger someone would de-pant you. You might be jogging down the track to the athletic field and someone behind you would grab your shorts and yank them down.
This was not the worst.
If I hated to be a “skin” and take off my shirt, I really hated group showers. We were required to shower after every Gym period. The Gym teachers regularly seemed to miss guys pulling down your shorts, tripping you or throwing you under the curtain, but they always knew if you weren’t wearing a Jockstrap or if you didn’t take your shower.
I didn’t like the other boys seeing me nude, but there wasn’t any way to avoid it. The locker room’s layout gave you no cover. You undressed in this small room where there were racks of wire baskets. You put your clothes in these baskets and locked them on the shelf with a combination lock. (You had to buy a padlock when you bought your Jockstrap.) Outside this little room was a much larger room and at the other side the showers. The showers were merely a long corridor with tile walls and drains in the floor. Every few feet a shower head stuck out of the upper wall. There was no privacy anyplace. I tried to get in and out as quick as possible and I tried not to look to my right or my left.
One time, not sure in what grade level, I was hurrying to the shower and I saw three guys ahead of me talking. They were naked, two White guys and a Black guy. The Black guy was actually holding his penis, as if showing it off. As I passed I heard him say, “You know I can do it by lying on my back and just shaking.”
I had no idea what that was about. I just wanted to get out of eye and ear range.
The Boys’ Basket Room backed up to the Girls’ Basket Room. There was a locked door between these two rooms. This door had a space between the floor and its lower edge of an inch or an inch and a half. Some guys would lie down on the floor and try to peek through that opening. I don’t know if they could see anything but feet; I never tried it. This door meant you had to be very careful how you tucked your clothes away in those baskets. You could padlock, them, but there were open spaces between the wires and at the top. Not wide enough to get your pants out and steal your wallet, but wide enough to work your underwear through if it was near the front. You would be in the shower and come back to discover your briefs missing. Guys would be grinning sheepishly. Somebody had fished them out of the basket and pushed them under the door into the Girls’ Room.
If you were lucky some girl would push them back. I knew of a couple guys who went back to class scans underwear.
There was a tour of the girl’s locker room one day. I have no idea why. It didn’t matter, but we guys discovered the girls had private showers! There were a bunch of individual shower heads encircled by curtains. Life isn’t always fair.
I found a sanctuary from the tormentors at school and my home life, a place of peace and comfort. This was the Downingtown Library. I got my library card in Third or Fourth Grade. I took a lot of books out of the Library, but seldom spent much time actually in the building in the beginning. When I joined, the Librarian was an elderly lady. A child’s mind can perceive a person of forty as elderly, but in this case she was quite a bit older than that. She bore no resemblance to Donna Reed as Mary Hatch as an elderly spinster in “Its a Wonderful Life”. No, this lady looked as dry and dusty as the volumes on the back stacks. Around Sixth Grade she disappeared, either retired or she died.
She had been a stern woman, especially strict with children. She only allowed me to go into the Children’s Room across the hallway from where she sat. I wasn’t even allowed to walk through the adult room. (Perhaps I should refer to this area as the grownup section. Adult Room may give the wrong impression of the material it held.) The point is, she didn’t make a child feel particularly welcome.
The new Librarian was a young woman and she was pretty and
very friendly. By the time she came I had read a great many of the volumes in the Children’s Room, at least, those I wished to read. I had read all the Hardy Boys, The Call of the Wild, White Fang, several other adventures featuring animals, a whole series of science fiction, books about Robin Hood and King Arthur and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Black Arrow. I read Treasure Island four times as a matter of fact. I wanted to read The Strange Case of Dr, Jekyll and My. Hyde, but they didn’t have this book in the Children’s Room, only in the Grownup Section.
I loved the Library. I started spending evenings there. I talked with the Librarian about writing and she became the first of my few
mentors. She allowed me to use the library typewriter to type my opuses. It was on a stand that I would roll back behind the stacks to a corner. It was dimly lit, but private and somehow cozy.
She would read what I wrote and comment and correct my abysmal spelling. I wish I could remember her name; she was extremely kind to a boy that was becoming a very troubled youth. I might have become even more messed up than I did if not for her.
My second book from the grownup section was Stevenson’s tale about the battle of good and evil within us. It could be considered an appropriate read, a portent of how I would become.
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