CHAPTER 43
Ronald Tipton and spent that summer bike riding on weekends and still trading comic books, but Ronald had taken an after-school job as a Paperboy that kept him busy (left). He was still living in the apartment building at 120 Washington Avenue (right). His home had never been a get-together place for us. I think I was in that apartment once, if at all.
I am not exactly certain when Ron began this job, but I would think it was sometime near the end of 1951. He says in his writings he was ten.
When I was ten years old my Mom told me "You're going to get a job." I was ten years old and about as dumb as a bag of doorknobs. "A job? What job?… “. I would earn about $5.00 a week, which I almost always squandered on candy and comic books. I was a paperboy until I entered ninth grade, four years (I think, my friend Larry will correct me if I'm wrong because he took over my paperboy job).
Excerpts from “You’re Going to Go to Work” by Ronald W. Tipton in “Retired in Delaware”, February 3, 2016
I know exactly when he stopped doing the paper route. It was right after Christmas of 1954. Four years earlier was December 1950 and Ronald turned ten in November of that year. He would still have been ten years old when he started Sixth Grade in September 1952 so anytime in that period he might have been forced into this job. I’m thinking it possibly started in the summer after finishing Fifth Grade (1952). There is a photo he used with his post of his manager collecting his collection and his mother overseeing it. Both women are wearing summer dresses. To be fair, the photo did not need come at the beginning of his labors.
Ronald, Stuart Meisel and I continued go to the Saturday movie matinees together quite often, but my quality time with Ronald was now limited. As a result, Stuart and I were spending more and more time together. Some of it was writing The Daily Star, but most of it was playing. We played both at his home and mine, but more commonly at his, especially on weekends when my dad was home. I was always looking for escapes from my father. The further away from each other we were, the better I liked it. (Stuart and I are in this photo at his place with another friend, 1953.)
My father insisted on supper at 5:00 when he was home and that we all eat together. Dinnertime was more flexible during the week because it was just mom and I. Mom had finally learned to cook once living in her own home out at the Swamp House, my grandmother having been the chief chef when we all lived together. Mom kept up her cooking after we settled in at 417, although sometimes we wandered down the street to her parents and ate. Our weekday meals tended to be minimal when just she and me, sandwiches, soup, hot dogs and fish sticks. On Saturday she would put together a full course meal for my dad, but we still ate most Sunday dinners at my grandparents, except during racing season. When we attended Sunday afternoon stock car races my dad would stop for dinner at a restaurant on the way home. As a trucker he knew a great many diners, dives and greasy spoons along the byways and a good many waitresses too. He flirted with every one of them to my embarrassment. Dad was a constant and indefatigable flirter. He was still flirting with the female attendants at the nursing home in his mid-nineties.
Anyway, on Saturdays I always had to leave Stuart’s place by 4:45 PM to be home at suppertime or face punishment. One Saturday I lost track of the time and it was almost 5:00 before I realized it. I hurried home. I didn’t have far to go and I ran all the way, but still arrived a few minutes late. Dad and mom were all ready seated at the kitchen table eating. (We never ate in the dining room at 417 Washington.)
Dad glared at me and I mumbled a hasty apology about Stuart and I losing track of time.
“You spend a lotta time with that Jew-boy,” my dad said. “Maybe you went and got it cut off, too.”
Why were people always saying things to me I didn’t understand?
I had no idea what dad meant by that and I didn’t dare ask. I ate my meal in silence as I always did when dad was home. Cut what off, I wondered. It would be several years more before I understood his odd reference. Even when I knew, it made little sense beyond an unnecessary snide slur.
Circumcised I was. My father knew I was. Chester County
Hospital circumcised all baby boys born during that era. (Pictured right: Chester County Hospital Operating Room, 1950s.) Circumcised had been done on my father, too, as a matter of fact. By the mid-twentieth century seeing a circumcised male was no longer a religious indication. The United States began progressively circumcising male babies as a routine course of action by 1900 and every year thereafter more and more got the procedure.
They circumcised 70% of the males born in the early 1940s. The operation peaked at circumcising 91% in the 1970s and then the percentage began to decrease. (Picture left is a circumcision: ouch!)
Scientists finally accepted germ theory
in the late 1800s and in 1900 there was so much talk about germs it grew into hysteria. People started seeing the human body as a big claptrap of germs and especially the penis with all its nasty fluids. Doctors viewed circumcision as a preemptive strike against disease. They actually believed circumcision would prevent such things as syphilis and other venereal diseases.
(And to think, there are people who put all their faith in science despite its long history of mistakes and stupidity. Here were two beauties. First scientists refused to believe in such a thing as germs. Then when they decided these existed, they concluded removal of the male’s foreskin would prevent a whole shopping list of diseases. It almost makes me glad my teachers destroyed my scientific ambitions.)
Doctors also believed circumcision cured and prevented
masturbation. Masturbation was viewed as both immoral and some kind of addiction. John Harvey Kellogg even advocated circumcision as a punishment for masturbators. Dr. Kellogg had a lot of interesting viewpoints on developing a healthy moral body such as a vegetarian diet, lots of exercise and regular enemas. He is perhaps best known for the invention, with his brother Will, of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. (Pictured left: Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and Will Keith Kellogg. Pictured right, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg’s masturbation cures.)
I will say to Dr. Kellogg and all the other physicians of that time, if circumcision reduced masturbation, then heaven help me, what would it have been like with a foreskin? But “playing with your self” was obviously something I didn’t know about at this time. I wouldn’t have that knowledge until a few years in the future.
I knew Stuart was Jewish. I didn’t know that much about his religion. The only things I knew about Jews came from Sunday school. I didn’t think much about it, because I seldom paid much attention to anything but the clock at Sunday school. Stuart didn’t go to any Sunday school. He went to services Saturday mornings in Coatesville. His family went to Coatesville because there was no Synagogue in Downingtown. The Meisels were the only Jewish Family in the borough. They weren’t overly observant of their religions rules. One of Stuart’s favorite dishes is pork chops, for instance.
Stuart went to see Santa Claus at the Log Cabin every year with the rest of we grade scholars. His parents even celebrated Christmas to a minor extent, “so Stuart didn’t feel left out”. I would kid him about this. “You get eight days of gifts for Hanukkah and then more for Christmas? What a racket?”
I wasn’t prejudice against Jews, but I was pretty ignorant. Stuart’s father worked at a pharmacy in Coatesville (picture of Maxwell Meisel in his Pharmacy on left). They took me on a visit to it. It had a soda fountain and I was treated to an ice cream sundae. Stuart wanted me to see Beth
Israel Synagogue (pictured right), so we walked to it and entered the vestibule. He handed me this odd little black pancake called a Yakama and told me I had to put it on my head before going any further. I panicked inside. I was a Methodist; at least that was what everybody was telling me. Would I be committing a sin if I put this hat on? Would I be renouncing Christ? I refused to do it, so I never got a tour of a synagogue. Stuart wasn’t angry, but I have felt ashamed of that reaction my whole life. I was such a dummy.
Stuart and I played a lot of catch during the times we were together. We both liked baseball. We were pretty much restricted to throwing a ball back and forth if at my house; the backyard was small. It also had that farm machinery building running the length of one side and the next-door neighbor’s garage on the other. There were a lot of windows vulnerable to breakage. (Pictured ight: Stuart in my backyard at 417.)
But Stuart lived on a large property. His yard stretched well back from Lancaster Avenue. (The front of Stuart’s house is pictured on the right, the West side porches on the left and the East side porches just below.) The yard was shortest to the east of his house, ending just before the entry drive and Dr. Neff’s parking lot. Directly behind the main house was a large garage that used to be a carriage house. The yard on the west side was wide. It went about the length of a football field, but it was hard to tell where it ended because it melded with Jerry Miller’s yard. There was the millrun bordering the far back and just beyond that a couple lakes. His property ran along the millrun and lake to the east back into woods.
Description from “Borough of Downingtown v. Friends of Kardon Park LLC”, August 3, 2012:
The land to be developed is
composed of the following five parcels. Parcel UPI No. 11–4–23 consists of 7.6 acres partly located in both the Borough and the Township. The Borough acquired this parcel by purchase from Kathryn Meisel in 1962. This parcel is wooded and contains two man-made ponds known as Second and Third Lakes, which are part of the original millrace system that was fed by the Brandywine River. The proposed plan would retain this parcel as parkland.
(Left is one of the lakes behind Stuart’s house.)
The aforementioned parcel was an ideal place for boys like us to play all kinds of games. We often played war in the woods. In the center of the woods was a kind of large pit. I don’t know its source or its original purpose. It was perhaps fifteen-twenty feet in diameter with sides as high as four feet. There were places you could easily climb in and out of this depression and we would use it as a fort or a prison or whatever else our imagination dreamed up..
Along the front of the house was a cast iron “grape and leaf” fence, and a real 18th Century milestone, with “30 miles to P” chiseled on it. (P referred to Philadelphia.) A race (small creek) ran along the back of the yard. There were huge trees, several stories tall. I believe that they were over 100 years old. Further back were the Woods, and in the Woods was a depression that we named Devil’s Nest. (Recently, I renewed contact with Bill Brookover. It is interesting that the first thing we both mentioned about those days is Devil’s Nest.) Devil’s Nest became the center of our boyhood experience until the city took (by eminent domain) and built a road through it. When I heard about it, it was one of the sadder days of my boyhood.
From My Story, by Stuart G. Meisel, 2012, p.21.
On the corner of the lot, next to the millrace and just ahead of the woods, was a small stone house. Its unsafe condition prevented us from ever entering it. They called it the “Slave House”. Stuart’s home had once been a stop on the Underground Railroad. Abolitionists brought escaped slaves from the south and boarded them in this house before moving them on to Canada. There was a tunnel beneath his
grounds that went over to another exit/entry beneath Dr. Neff’s office, which had also once been a carriage house. Developers destroyed all this history. The Meisels offered the property to the Borough for a dollar to be used as a museum after Stuart’s father died, but were turned down. Stuart and his mother wished it to be preserved, but they had to sell. A builder bought the lot, tore down the house and structures and constructed an out-of-place condominium. (Pictured right is what replaced the Meisel home.)
The Meisel family was the last owner of the house, at 335 East Lancaster Avenue, before it was razed so the Downingtown East Apartments (now known as the Downingtown Commons) could be built across from the Downingtown Library. The house, which had a granite exterior, had many fireplaces, and a stone milemarker (from the early Philadelphia-Lancaster Turnpike days) was in the front yard.
According to Stuart Meisel, who now lives in Fort Lauderdale, FL, his father, Maxwell Meisel, owned a pharmacy in Coatesville, and the family moved from Coatesville to Downingtown in about 1945. Their property, which stretched north to beyond where Pennsylvania Avenue now is located, totaled about 12 acres. Part of that land was sold to the borough in the early 1960s, so Pennsylvania Avenue could be extended eastward, to Uwchlan Avenue. As kids, Stuart Meisel and his best friends, Larry Meredith and Ron Tipton, were “desperately unhappy” because the sale of that tract of land destroyed the “Devil’s Nest,” located in the woods behind the house, where they played as youngsters.
And the property was sold to the developer of the apartment complex shortly after Maxwell Meisel died in 1961. “My mother and I tried desperately to have the house declared an official historical site, but no luck.” Meredith claims that there was a small building behind the Meisel residence, where slaves, who escaped from the South via the Underground Railroad, often were billeted overnight. And he recalls that there was a tunnel that ran beneath the slave house and continued eastward to the house at 341 E. Lancaster Ave.
-- Downingtown Area Historical Society Hist-o-gram January 9, 2014
The last quotes say, “Meredith claims that there was a small building behind the Meisel residence, where slaves, who escaped from the South via the Underground Railroad, often were billeted overnight.” I received that information from various people at the time I was growing up and spending much time at The Meisels. I also remember how much we wanted to go into the “Slave House” and down into the tunnel, but were constantly warned away because the structure and the tunnel were unsafe. I’m certain other sources could be sited despite the use of my name and the word. “Claims”
Here is another reference made by the Downingtown Area Historical Society that appeared earlier than the statement made about my claims, so obviously other sources existed. This was published in the Hist-o-gram of April 11, 2013, Vol. 4, No. 15 beneath the headline, “It Was Once Part of the Underground Railroad”:
Mary Ann Cardelli is the truly perceptive scholar who was the first person to correctly identify the house in last week’s “Where and What Is This?” photo, as being located at 341 E. Lancaster Ave. in Downingtown. Currently, it’s the office of Anthony Mascherino, CPA. And for many decades, it served as the home and office of Dr. Martin Neff and Dr. Richard Smith.
Built in 1729, by Thomas Moore, who established a water-powered grist mill in 1716, on the site where the McDonald’s restaurant is now located in the borough, according to Jane Davidson’s History of Downingtown.
The building was part of the Thomas sisters’ boarding school, operated from 1837 to 1877 by the daughters of Zebulon Thomas. The school was headquartered across the street, at 330 E. Lancaster Ave., where the Downingtown Library is now located.
Zebulon Thomas, who lived at 341 E. Lancaster Ave., was an agent for the Underground Railroad in the Downingtown area. He created a space on the third floor of 341 E. Lancaster Ave., to hide escaped slaves from bounty hunters.
In the 1940s, the building was occupied by The Tea House restaurant, which was acclaimed for its chicken a la king (chicken, waffles and syrup). In addition to a waffle iron from the restaurant in the Historical Society’s archives, our archival collection also includes a Tea House menu, noting that a full-course chicken a la king dinner was priced at $1.75.
One of the things I noticed while playing at Stuart’s was the uneven ground in places. I was given the explanation on that occasion that the cause was tunnels of the Underground Railroad. Chester County was a major part of the Drinking Gourd Trail.
The Underground Railroad was established in the early
1800’s and included many secret passageways beginning in the South that lead slaves across the Mason-Dixon Line to safety in the North. Slaves were seeking to escape bondage from what were known as slave states – found south of this line, in which ska very was considered legal by the United States Constitution.
In 1853, Harriet Tubman, one of the most popular anti-slavery activists and also once a slave herself began her moral deeds with the Underground Railroad. Once Harriet Tubman reached her freedom, she went back and freed her family and as many as three hundred others.
It is estimated that the Underground Railroad helped 100,000 slaves, escape from the South between 1810 and 1850 thanks to Harriet And many Northerners were determined to free as many slaves as possible. This group collectively became referred to as abolitionists.
Among those Northerners were the Quakers who were one of the very first groups to aid slaves in their escape. The abolitionists sometimes used their own homes to hide the runaways. These Northern citizens, including residents in Kennett area and throughout southern Chester County, took the law in their own hands. It was a very dangerous proposition for both slaves and abolitionists. If caught in the North, they would get fined for hundreds of dollars which was a lot of money back then because they broke the law. Some of the slaves were then captured and taken back to return to work. The slaves were property. If a Northerner was caught helping to free a slave in the South, the punishment was more severe. The citizen would be taken to court and then imprisoned, if he or she made it to court. The citizen would be beaten or burned by the slave owner for stealing his property. There are plenty of rumors on how these safe houses were identified. Some historians believe the information by word of mouth is exaggerated but still holds some truth.
The significance of the Drinking Gourd is the slaves who ran from the south would follow the Big Dipper to reach the North to safety. Once a slave reached a safe house, a network of supporters would donate clothes and money for food. The slaves were secretly passed from one family to another. They were hidden in barns, attics and basements.
“ From, “The Downingtown Times”,“Chester County’s Underground Railroad Remembered”, by Jacqueline Kennedy, March 24, 2016.
The size of Stuart’s yard made life easier for us outcasts. We could do almost anything there that we could do on the playground of East Ward School, but with the advantage of escaping those who ridiculed and picked on us. We could bat a ball just as far as well as throw it to each other We could play golf, but more about that fiasco in a latter chapter. Sometimes we played a modified game of baseball in his yard where you only needed four or five or six players.
We sometimes had that many. Jerry Miller, who lived right next
door, was often with us. Bill Brookover was a long time friend of Stuart’s and he came, as did Gary Kinzey occasionally, as did Dave Fidler, and a girl called Sam. (Nope, no boy named Sue; but we did have A girl named Sam. Pictured right: “SAM”, Shirley Ann McComsky, one of the boys.) Ronald was a semi-regular visitor when he was not working. There were others now and again, Stuart’s cousins, miscellaneous acquaintances. The beauty was only those we invited could come.
Boys will make up games if they get bored or they get forced inside a cramped kitchen due to rainy weather. We played a rather silly game in Stuart’s kitchen every once in a while. I‘ll call it, “The Drinking Game”. I’m not sure anyone else called it anything. It had nothing to do with alcohol. We are talking water here.
I no longer recall whose brainstorm this was. I know it wasn’t mine. I have a vague feeling it was Jerry Miller (pictured left) who conceived it, but whomever, it worked this way.
Stuart filled a large pitcher with water and set it upon the kitchen table along with some glasses, which he also filled with water. We would sit around the table, each with our glass. “The We” almost always included Stuart, Jerry and I, but others drifted in and out of this activity over time. On the table was a spinner from some board game. It was a cardboard circle. In its center a rivet held an arrow that could be spun. Around the arrow were pie pieces in different colors. Each pie wedge had a number. It was used in some board game to determine how many spaces you moved a marker. We used it to determine how many glasses of water to drink.
Each took a turn in order. You flicked the arrow around with a finger and if it stopped on 1, you had to drink one glass of water. If it landed on 2, then two glasses and so forth. I think the spinner went up to 6. I don’t know what the object of the game was or what determined the winner. I think it was more a test of your bladder, to see how many glasses you could drink without going to the bathroom. It was a form of Russian Urination Roulette. The winner was probably the one who held out longest and didn’t wet their pants. (They labeled the photo on the right WC-Spinner, how appropriate.)
I had a distinct, if odd, advantage in this. I was good at holding it in. I did not like anyone seeing or hearing me go and definitely had a “shy bladder”; therefore, I disliked public restrooms. I wouldn’t use them if at all possible. I trained myself to hold it in so I never had to use them. I avoided the restrooms at school as if they were plaque ridden. I really developed an amazing capacity for this, as we’ll see later. I was not going to be the first to head for Stuart’s bathroom no matter if I spun all sixes. My bladder would have to explode first. I just applied my super holding power to win this game. It wasn’t that I was adverse to using private bathrooms in a friend’s home, as long as I went in there alone; it was I wanted to win the game. I really am a very competitive person inside.
Now for the sake of a public service, let me explain that there
really is such a thing as “Shy Bladder Syndrone” (sometimes referred to as “Bashful Bladder”). It even has a scientific moniker, paruresis or parcopresis, depending upon the particular bodily function under observation. Being under observation or even imagining such a possibility is the problem. It is not unusual for nearly everyone to have occasional bouts of Shy Bladder, but these are brief instances perhaps when someone else is standing a bit too close
or it’s too open an area. However, Paruresis and/or parcopresis are phobias and like I described about my fear of height, these can be very paralyzing and inconvenient. Parcopresis can lead to constipation or being impacted. Heaven knows what Paruresis might cause, but there are suffers in extreme cases who can only urinate through catheterization. Others can only go if at home alone. I was close to that home alone one as a teenager, almost only able to go if alone in my own bathroom.
This, plus climbing to any great height, was what scared me most
about maybe having to go into the Armed Services. I feared having to climb up those giant log ladders I had seen recruits doing in a movie, of course. My Shy Bladder fear kicked in after I saw pictures of an Army bathroom where all these toilets were simply lined up out in the open.
Fortunately for me I never had to give an observed urine sample for drug testing. If I had both the observer and I would have grown old waiting.
Getting back to kids inventing new games if they become bored with the old. One of the guys other than Stuart. Teddy and I)who took part in this drinking game (he has since passed away) hinted the whole thing was getting monotonous. (It was probably Gary Kinsey.) It needed higher steaks, he told us, required a more daring twist. He thought we should turn it into a striping game. Of course he suggested this just as a matter of elimination (no pun intended), there was no sexual connotation to our play, at least none I am aware of.
Neither Stuart nor I liked to take off our shirts in front of others, let alone our pants. I felt I was too skinny and he felt he was too fat. We didn’t like our bodies and we didn’t like anyone seeing them. Maybe the guy who made the suggestion felt he was statuesque (he wasn’t; he was flabby) and wanted to display his physique or he was not self-conscious or was plain confidant he would win and not be stripped naked. (He would be wrong about that.)
Despite Stuart and my hesitation he kept nagging until we agreed to do it. It is more accurate to say he clucked us into it, the old “Are you chicken” approach. It is incredible how the chicken routine convinces boys to do stupid things.
We only played it once. This was the one time Mrs. Meisel left us alone in the house to go out elsewhere. All other time she was wandering about and might pop into the kitchen without warning.
I’m not sure what the specific rules were. If we based it on running to the bathroom I am sure I never lost a stitch, but I believe the number on the spinner determined it. If you landed on 1 you had to take one article off and drink one glass of water and so forth. That certainly put Stuart and I in danger.
Man, what if I landed on a six? It was summertime and hot. Was I even wearing six articles of clothing?
Let’s see, T-shirt, no undershirt, pants, briefs, shoes and socks (did
shoes and socks count as two each or just one? Did my hat count?) Maybe there was some other element, an escape clause, where you didn’t have to remove anything at certain times. Perhaps you removed only if you landed on a certain number. There was no zero, no free zone. Then there was added a particularly scary dare for the loser. Whoever ended up totally naked was to run briefly out onto Stuart’s side porch…IN BROAD DAYLIGHT!
To the right is Stuart standing behind the infamous side porch off the kitchen. It was a flat slab. The further door came from the dining room, the next from the kitchen from which the loser was to dash and the last was off a shed that was used as a pantry; nowhere to hide.
The boy who suggested the game lost, much to my relief, and I am sure Stuart’s, and anybody else that was playing that day. Gamely he even prepared to take the final dare, but when he opened the door he slammed it shut and ducked back into the kitchen.
“Mrs. So-and-so is walking down Lancaster,” he said. I forget the woman’s name he yelled; it was a neighbor’s of theirs, not mine.
We quickly put back on whatever we had removed and we never played that stripping game again. I don’t even think we ever mentioned it again. I wasn’t the loser that day, but maybe I should have taken that game as a foreboding of what lay ahead and been prepared for another dare later that summer.
There was something that happened during the summer between
sixth and seventh grades that changed my life. It began as a negative, but resulted in a positive. During my grade school years I collected a number of toy figures. Many I had bought as a package deal offered on the back of a comic book. Others I had purchased over time from the dime store. Most were soldiers, but some were Cowboys and Indians. (The term “Native Americans” had not yet come into use. It would sound very strange to say we played “Cowboys and
Native Americans”.) The majority of the Cowboys and Indians were made of hard plastic. The soldiers were a greenish rubbery plastic.
I also had some odd figures. These were older toys made of cast
iron and a Cowboy that was a hard metal. They once must have been my father’s. That Hard-bodied Cowboy was usually my hero figure, my alter ego. (We didn’t call anything “Action Figures” during my boyhood.) All these figures were generic, too, not created to promote some TV show or movie.)
There were several Army trucks, jeeps and tanks I purchased one by one over time at Newberrys. The figures cost a nickel. The vehicles were ten and fifteen cents.
It was not long after my twelfth birthday. I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom with my toy men spread out before me when my father came up the steps and peered in through my open door. He stepped into my room.
“You’re too old to be playing with dolls,” he said.
Dolls?
I looked at him. “I’m not playing,” I said. “I’m writing.”
He gave me one of those; “yeah, right” looks and stomped away. I immediately got up and took a pencil and some paper from my desk. I sat down and wrote a story using my toy figures as the characters. The metal Cowboy was the leader of a small group of specialists, which included one of the plastic Cowboys who had a floppy hat and a one-armed Indian. (See, the crime-fighting team in which each person has a unique talent or skill is not new nor has it gone away as a plot device, think the TV show “Scorpion”.)
The story revolved around a mad scientist who had created a monster. The scientist lived on an island surrounded by quicksand. I had a large figure with a missing leg, and this became a mysterious hermit who lived on the island. He was a composite of Ben Gumm and Long John Silver. A narrator named Tom Reiser told most of the tale in
the form of a diary. Reiser was dying from an encounter with the monster. My story was a combination of Doc Savage, Treasure Island and Frankenstein.
It was pretty bad.
I called the story, ”It!”
This was the first, but wouldn’t be the last, title I beat Stephen King to. (I later rewrote this story as a novella called, Dream. It doesn’t bear much resemblance to the original except there is still an island surround by quicksand.)
After finishing my story I said, “I am going to be a writer.”
I meant it. I have written something almost every single day since I wrote “It!”
And this decision was one my teachers were never able to knock out of me.
I have also questioned whether writing is a gift or a curse.
He leaned forward, the cold rain blowing against his face, walking fast as possible into the strong wind. The TV banged his knees. There was a sharp edge that kept catching his kneecap. It was snagging in his trousers. He would jerk it loose, swing it out from him, but it would bang back into the kneecap. It was digging a tiny hole into his flesh, which stung in the cold. At the bridge the silver chest unsnapped and half the utensils splashed into the creek. Water lapped his shoe tops. His feet hurt and felt detached. The TV dug deeper into his knee and he jerked it back with force. It swung away banging loose a section of the rotted railing. His numbed feet skidded on the wood, his balance shifted. He flung away the silver chest and grabbed the remaining railing just when all was swept away. The TV screen smashed on some rocks. Roscoe grabbed for the shore, but the water was too swift and it washed him backward into the marsh.
Excerpt from “Dream”, a rewrite of my fist story “It!”
Collected in Smoke Dream Road. (1960)
We boys spent a lot of time in the woods behind Stuart’s house, even constructing a lean-to as a sort of clubhouse (pictured left). There were many times we would go back to that large depression at its center, what Stuart called “Devil’s Nest”, and play war. I did not know that all the property, the woods and the lakes, belonged to the Meisels.
Their property [The Meisels], which stretched north to beyond where Pennsylvania Avenue now is located, totaled about 12 acres. Part of that land was sold to the borough in the early 1960s, so Pennsylvania Avenue could be extended eastward, to Uwchlan Avenue. As kids, Stuart Meisel and his best friends, Larry Meredith and Ron Tipton, were “desperately unhappy” because the sale of that tract of land destroyed the “Devil’s Nest,” located in the woods behind the house, where they played as youngsters.
-- Downingtown Area Histrical Society Hist-o-gram January 9, 2014
No one told us in those days that our woodland playground was toxic.
Beginning in the 1930s, the parcels west of UPI No. 11–4–23 (the first parcel that was purchased from Meisel) were privately owned and used as a quarry. When this use ended, the exposed cavities were filled in with industrial waste by-products and municipal waste… [Might this been the source of Devil’s Nest?] Except no one filled in in with toxic waste or otherwise.)
-- Excerpts from Borough of Downingtown v. Friends of Kardon Park LLC Transcript, August 3, 2012
There was another instance that was to have some impact on my life as I aged into adolescent. Was my suddenly out of character behavior caused by the polutants?
Larry Meredith was another high school friend with whom I maintained some contact after high school. Years before, Larry and I used to play war in the Woods. He often took off his clothes, pretending that he had been captured by the “enemy” and tortured. I thought it was strange that he would run around with no clothes. What struck me more, however, was that he was white as
snow – Almost like a ghostly apparition floating between the trees in the woods. Imagine a white figure, in the distance, moving lightly through the woods in the Blair Witch Project film.
-- From My Story by Stuart Rayfield Meisel
The description Stuart gives in his autobiography fits right in with
future fantasies I would have during junior high. but Stuart had no knowledge of these, nobody did. At the time of the events he is describing, I didn’t either. These fantasies would began as I became a more and more troubled young teenager. As junior high went on I became lost in my loneliness, fears and imagination. If something hadn’t changed at the end of ninth grade I would have been doomed. What happened wasn’t going to save me entirely, but it would temporarily.
Stuart also has forgotten this was not a sudden whim on my part. I was dared by another boy (the same one who came up with the stripping game) to take off my clothes one day. Why I took such a dare, I don’t know. As I stated earlier, I didn’t like anyone to see my bare body, even just my chest, let alone expose my all to other eyes. Running about starker’s was totally against my nature up to that period. You can find photos in the family album of my young friends playing bare-chested in the summer sun, but not I. I never took my shirt off when playing outside. I seldom wore shorts either. I wore long pants.)After kindergarten, or perhaps first grade, I decided shorts were for little boys. “Big boys” wore long pants and I would only wear such. I also always wore a hat, usually a baseball cap. Maybe all this cover up explained why I was so ghostly white.
For some reason I not only took the dare, but according to Stuart’s narrative, did so on more than one occasion. Maybe given the constant rejection I was receiving by this point in my boyhood I was afraid not to and that my friends too would reject me if I didn’t. For whatever reason I consented. In doing so I discovered I enjoyed the sensation of being naked and free to run about outside. I was indeed lost in the weeds. I still knew nothing about sex. I didn’t yet experience any sexual feelings in running about bare, although I would say I did feel a form of sensual pleasure in this.
Despite doing this over who knows how long that summer, it did not destroy my initial shyness about my body. I did not continue to practice nudity around any friends and I went right back to wanting to hide my body from any prying eyes. I was going to hate group showers and many other common practices of gym and boy scouts.
I didn’t consider it particular wrong that I was streaking, but eventually a related matter would bring me trouble. Remember what I said about the two strong causes of people’s falling into sin given throughout the Bible. One was love of money, which I wasn’t tempted by and was quite honest. The other was sexual immorality and sexual immorality can even destroy honesty in an honest man as we shall find out somewhere in the coming sections I call, “Sex and the System”.
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