ME DOWNINGTOWN FOR THE FIRST TIME --CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 12

 In those preschool days I wasn’t shy. Quite the opposite, I was very outgoing and friendly. with a good many friends, the preponderance of which apparently were of the female persuasion. Of course one of my earliest friends was Iva, the little redhead who lived in the next house up the street, before one was built between us in the vacant lot on the west side of 424 Washington Avenue. 

Another female who was a very early friend, was Sandra “Sandy” Yarnell. The Yarnells were friends of my grandparents. My grandfather was very close with one of his co-workers, Joe Yarnell, who lived in a ramshackle house on Dolen’s Mill Road. I am not certain of Sandy’s exact relationship to Joe. Sandy and I went way  back in our friendship as you see by the photo on the right. I am the one with the long hair and not sucking a thumb. Sandy and I were Baptized the same day at Grove Methodist Church.

I also was friendly in the early years with her brother Bill. Again I am the one with the  long wavy hair. The Yarnells were in and out of my life during my youth. After I grew up they disappeared from it, I wonder where. I don’t really know what happened to them or even if they are still alive  today. Sandy certainly isn’t any older than I so I am assuming she is living

and breathing somewhere. I don’t know her married name, if there be one, which is why it is hard tracking down females.The last contact I had with Sandy was in high school. She grew up into a pretty young woman.  

There were a number of other friends I had in childhood that disappeared from my life over the years. Bobby Lukens was another boy my age that I played with a lot. The Lukens were good friends of my parents and visited back and forth regularly. Is the Lukens Steel family their relatives? I don’t know. Bill Lukens, who served in the Navy with  my dad, was Bobby’s father. The rifles in the picture were real.

I also don’t know the fate of Bobby

after we grew up, except in May of 1962 he married a Peggy Alice Knowles.

 I had another close friend in those early years by the name of Billy Griffith. He is

the boy in the foreground of the sandbox wearing a white shirt; I am shirtless behind him. Sad to say I cannot remember  anything about him beyond his name. The sandbox we are playing in and the swing were build by my grandfather

Brown. I had many things created by him using his carpentry skills such as a toy garage. It is a shame he never passed any of his wood working knowledge along to me. 

My mother gave me birthday parties. The illustration at the very top of this chapter was in 1945 when I turned four. The one shown here on the left was for my eighth in 1949. Several of the same kids appear in both. Iva Darlington was always at my parties. Judy Baldwin, the girl on the end with the pigtails was a friend of mine because she was a friend of Iva. They were inseparable in those days. The same for the two girls seated to the right of Iva. The darker haired girl on the left is Toni Yost and the girl with the curlier hair is Jeannie Bicking. It was as if they were joined at the hip. Jeanie was my first cousin twice removed. Esther Helen Bicking was my Great Great Grandmother. Judy Baldwin married a classmate, Bruce Nixdorf. In later life she suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease and died on my daughter Noelle’s birthday, December 12, 2012. She was 70.

 In the years to come I was to have a crush on the blond girl with

glasses on the right. I thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world, but I never got further than a friendship with her. Just look at how happy I was to have my arm around her in the picture on the right. Her name was Mary Jane Chudleigh and she lived at 120 Washington Avenue, in the same apartment building where my not yet friend Ronald Tipton lived.

It is interesting that there are only three boys in both party photos and one of them is I. In the 1945 photo at the top, Tim Mahan flanks me on my right and Billy Smith on my left. I met Tim in Mrs. Helms’ Kindergarten, but I really don’t know how I met Billy. Most likely just on the Avenue. He lived a few doors up from 424.

 In the 1949 photo things have changed a little. I am on the end looking down at whatever Iva is looking at. Billy Smith is there beside me. Billy was my best friend in the years before 1950. Tim Mahan is not in the picture. I don’t know if we had stopped being friends by then or not. I don’t recall that Tim and I ever had a real falling out. I think we just drifted into different groups as we grew. In the photo on the left Billy and I are playing cowboys. The dog between us is Peppy. In the background is East Ward  Elementary School.

In the photo to the right the other boy is Dennis “Denny” Myers.

At this time Denny and I were buddy-buddy. In a few years we would be quiet a bit less so. Denny would become one of my chief tormentors at East Ward School and on the Avenue. One of the ironies here is Billy moved from Downingtown to Coatesville around this time. Denny Myers moved from an apartment fronting Lancaster Avenue about a block away into the Smith’s old residence. Another friend of the time named Gary Kinzey then moved into the apartment the Myers left. Both Denny Myers and Gary Kinsey have since died. Denny died September 27, 2015. He was 73. Gary died in Wilmington, Delaware at age 70 on October 15, 2011, which was my wife’s birthday. I do not know where Billy Smith is now.

At the time of this 1949 party I was not living in Downingtown, but my mother had the party at my grandparents home, which was 424 Washington.

 Another friendship I had beginning in 1943 and lasting into adulthood was with Patty Lilly, yet another girl. Her parents were friends with mine and we all visited back and forth a good deal in those years. Patty lived out along Creek Road near Lenape. The picture of Patty and her brother Bobby with me was in a field behind her home. 

The Lillys were a tall family. Mr. Lilly was very tall with broad

shoulders and a square head. Mrs. Lilly was nearly as tall as he and a big woman. On the right are Sara and Bob in 1939. Patty took after her parents and grew to be at least six feet tall if not more. I know she was always  able to look me straight in the eye. Patty married another friend of mine from a different place and different time named Paul Miller. He was another giant sized human being. He also served as an

usher at my wedding.In the photo of my wedding party, Paul is standing on the right in the back row.

 But that is getting ahead in my story.

The two boys I played with most in the early 1940s were Tim Mahan and Billy Smith. My grandfather, who had given me the Stan Musial bat, also gave me a full baseball uniform and a  catcher’s mask. I was thus a catcher in my first attempts at the game. There really weren’t a lot of full team games then. Mostly it was Billy, Tim and I playing catch or trying to bat the ball to each other. My bat was too long and heavy for any of us, but I persisted and I think swinging that outsized bat helped make me a good hitter.

Tim also had a full baseball uniform. He seemed to prefer a crouched batting stance. The bats we have here were more to our size than that club I owned.

Tim was given a bow and arrow set either for Christmas or his birthday one year. Not a toy set like the one I once owned, with suction cups on the end of the arrows. He had the real deal with metal-tipped arrows. A friend shot Tim in the temple playing with it. It penetrated, but was just off enough to miss killing him or causing major damage, probably as a young boy the friend didn’t get a lot of pressure on the string before letting it fly, lucky for Tim.

As previously explained Tim and I drifted away to different cliques later.

Billy Smith and I remained best friends until geography became too great to overcome. When our friendship began we lived a few doors apart. There weren’t a lot of buildings on our street. 424 sat at the east end with vacant lots on both sides (the lot on the west side later had a pink double house constructed on it). Going west, the next residence was a double home. Iva Darlington lived on the side toward us. The Ingrams lived next to her. Next was a small single home belonging to a Mr. Daniel Zittle. Mr. Zittle always dressed in black
and wore a derby hat. As far as I know he lived there alone. I thought he was an odd fellow because of his peculiar dress. I believe he is the man on the right in this  photograph taken in 1900. In the 1940s he was still dressing in the same manner.

Just past Mr. Zittles was a large building. It was a mixed residence. The east side was apartments and I believe three separate families occupied it, one family to each floor. There was a lady living on  one floor whose name I forgot, but as a boy she reminded me of the comic book character Etta Kett. It may be her name was Etta. There was also a young man living there whom I have also forgotten. Another friend of my youth, another girl, lived there. Her name was Mary Louise LaFevre, shown below on the right with Michele Buckley in the background.

 Mary Louise was a close friend with Iva and Judy, and the four of us played hopscotch and jacks, not exactly considered manly games. Michele was a friend of mine until a certain instance in grade school. 

One day at recess I chased after Michele near the Monkey Bars. I caught her somewhere near the seesaws and I kissed her full on the mouth. Mister Buckley was none too pleased when he heard of this and took the matter up with my parents. My father was home from the Navy by then and he confronted me on the street in front of our parked car. He told me if I ever did something like that again he would take his belt to me.

 Let me say my father often threatened to take his belt to me, but I can’t recall an instance where he actually did. He would sometimes unbuckle and draw it partly out of the loops, but he never hit me with anything more than his hand, and he only used that to spank me. I didn’t even get very many spankings.

I don’t to this day understand why all the fuss. I wasn’t old enough

to be dangerous. I wasn’t capable of anything further than a kiss nor inclined to such anyway. I  knew nothing of sex as a child. As I said, I wasn’t shy in those days. I was outgoing and friendly, apparently a bit too so in this case. I think I might have done it on a dare, although looking at our closeness in some of

these old photographs; maybe I did have a thing for her.