ME -- INTO THE WEEDS 1953-1954. -- Chapter 39

 CHAPTER 39

 My grandfather took me while I was a boy to the Downingtown Iron Works where he worked. It was cavernous inside. The area was very cluttered with equipment and worktables. Over to one side was a welder. He was wearing this huge mask with a rectangular glass-covered slot so he could see what he was doing. Sparks and streaks of fire were shooting out in all directions around him. 

Pap-pap led me outside into a yard where some large storage tanks stood on wooden frames. There was this little box above my head that moved back and forth along a track. It had chains hanging down. There was a man sitting inside the little box controlling this crane.

 I discovered this photograph of my grandfather in a book by Bruce Edward Mowday titled, Images of America Downingtown. The caption read: “A company carpenter known by all at the plant as ‘Brownie’ stands by an oddly shaped product. One of his jobs was to secure tanks in cars before shipping.”

The “cars” referred to were flatbeds on trains. The railroad that

crossed Lancaster next to the Minquas Firehouse ran along the east side of the Iron Works and then north through the woods. This rail line was converted into the Struble Trail many years later, part of what is called the East Coast Greenway. My grandfather knew all the trainmen working that line in those days. I saw a train pull to a stop as I followed him through the maze of metal in the yard. We got near and there was the usual steam clouding the air about the boiler. I hesitated, but he walked me right up to the side of the engine.

We stopped by the cab and he said something to the engineer and his fireman, then he told me to climb up. I shook my head. I didn’t like being this close to that dragon with all its hissing and spitting steam. The cab was high above my head and you climbed up a narrow metal  ladder build into the side. I refused to climb and blew my one and only chance to ride in the steam engine of a train. Instead we walked to the back and we took a ride up the rails in the caboose, which was cool, too. In was a little house on wheels. There were some benches along the side and a potbelly stove in the center for heat. Brakemen and other crew would ride in these little lounges on wheels.

Cabooses were not the only non-standard vehicles I got to see up close and personal.

 My father had become very interested in stock car racing. We

began going to races as a weekly family activity. It started as once a week, but grew to twice a week. The first year we went every Sunday of the racing season to Mason Dixon Speedway near Silver Springs, Maryland. We had to leave early because Dad liked to be there for  the time trials. This was fine with me because it meant I didn’t have to go to Sunday School during race season. By the second year we were also going to races at Lancaster Speedway on Saturday evening.

The cars were mostly 1930s models, the kind they made into Hot Rods and Street Rods during the ‘fifties. There were two classes, Stock and Modified. Stocks were factory-equipped autos you could drive legally on the highways. Modified Cars had changes to the engines to soup them up.

 There were several races at every event. They would run four or five heats, depending on the number of cars present. The first three finishers in each heat qualified for the Feature Race. All the cars that failed to qualify in the Heats raced in the  Consolation Race. Sometimes there were two Consolation Races. I

believe the first four that finished in these went into the Feature. There could be nearly 25 cars in the feature. Each heat and consolation race was ten laps. The Feature was usually 50 laps and sometimes as many as a hundred.

I loved everything about the races. I loved the smell of the fuel and the roar of the engines. I found it exciting. There were a number of crashes, too, which always enlivened the action. Many pile-ups were quite spectacular. Cars would roll end over end. Sometimes they would catch on fire. I saw cars fly into the air and go clear over the guardrails around the track. The drivers seldom got seriously injured. 

 I enjoyed wandering about the grounds during intermission and eating the food offerings behind the grandstands. I especially liked the French Fries. They were long, floppy, greasy and salty, but I still have a fondness in my heart for those delicious fries.

Every week we went I bought another plastic race car. These were replicas of those on the track. 

 I had a lot of toy cars and I would race them at home. I would do

the Heats and everything. I lined my cars up two by two. I would push the first two cars so they rolled freely ahead, then the next two and so forth. Some cars rolled better than others and so the lead changed several times as I gave them push after push around a circle. I pushed them in the order they stopped each time until my race ended. That is Peppy watching one of my races.

My dad was a close friend with one of the drivers. His name was Stan Zeliak. We had pit passes and would go watch the cars prepared. Dad would often stop and talk with Stan and I got to sit in his race car sometimes. I even got to put his helmet on. It was surprisingly heavy and was full of foam padding.

My dad considered becoming a driver. He went to the training classes and the tryouts, but in the end decided against it. I don’t know if he didn’t like it once he tried or he didn’t do well enough in the tryouts, or more likely my mother got on him about it.

We attended the races for several years. It was one of the few activities I ever did with my father I enjoyed, but there was still a tension between us, which I will come back to later.

I was very enamored with the whole racing scene. I suggested to friends we have bike races around the blacktop behind East Ward School. The photo on the left will help you picture the layout. Behind the school was a large area covered with macadam. It had a very slight downward slope away from the building. At the very bottom were two basketball net backboards each supported by two metal pillars before the grass began. This photo taken after I no longer  attended East Ward appears to show the basketball nets attached to the back wall of the school, but this was not the case during my years there. The basketball nets were on poles at the bottom of the blacktop then. Our races began with just a few participants, but during the summer grew until even those normally having nothing to do with me joined in.

The school ground races started the year Denny Myers finally got his two-wheeler.

Denny arrived on his brand new bike and was anxious to get in the races. He had waited longer than most of us for his bike because his parents felt eight years old was too young. Now at ten he had one and so did his younger brother, Michael, who did get a two-wheeler at age eight. Denny was probably rankled by this. His two younger brothers didn’t even have to wait till eight. 

It is a wonder his parents didn’t revert to their old policy after what happen the day Denny showed up at the blacktop with a bike. He rode a lap with the rest of us, but as he came to the fourth turn he lost control. He picked up speed going down the small slope and seemingly forgot how to steer and how to stop. He crashed head first into the support pillar of a basketball net at the bottom edge of the macadam.

 His bike crumpled and Denny flew over the handlebars, between the two basketball backstop supports and did a face plant in the grass beyond. He was unhurt, except for his dignity. There was serious damage to his bicycle. It’s basket was squished and knocked eschew. The front fender was twisted. The front wheel was bent. His pride was bent as well, which was the worse of all.

Gary Kinzey was another boy with bike problems. He was

suffering pedal envy. We boys all had 26 inch bikes. The wheel diameter was 26 inches across. Gary had a 24 incher. In those days size mattered. He was somewhat disappointed and disgusted that his bike was the smallest among the pack. He had both his seat and handlebars jacked as high as they would go (pictured right).

Sometimes we moved our races across Washington Avenue onto the empty lot next to my grandparent’s house at 424. There was a large cinder pile to the front of the field. The township used the cinder in winter to give traction on the streets during snowstorms or when it was icy. The cinder piles provided hills for our races. We even reached a point where we thought we were so good that we turned “professional”. Iva Darlington, Judy Baldwin, Michael Myers and I canvassed the neighborhood, going house to house attempting to sell tickets to our bicycle races on the cinder pile. A few people actually came out for it.

 

They had a special race one Sunday at Mason Dixon Speedway. The winner of this event wasn’t the first car over the finish line. It was the last car running. They called it a Demolition Derby. It was controlled chaos. The cars went every which way, on the track and on the infield. The object was to knock every other car out of the race by slamming into them.  Everybody out there was having collisions on purpose. Cars would have tires go flat or wheels fly off, steam was shooting from radiators, metal was bending and glass was shattering. 

It gave me a whole new idea.

I came back to our bike races and upped the bar. I called it the “Ditching Club”. The rules were simple. Pedal around the blacktop and try to bump every other bike out of the race. I was pretty good at this madness. I had no fear of falling or of hitting another bike. I usually won. I knew just where and how to hit my opponents to make them tumble over. It was glorious. There were skinned knees and blood galore. My bike was a moving collection of dings and dents, but usually it was moving. (Pictured left, my ditching bike still with its fenders, Summer 1952.)

I decided to go from stock to modified. I removed my fenders and painted the bike with this bright red, green and white paint. When my dad came home and saw the bicycle the only thing he said was, “It looks like a nigger’s.bike.” 

Okay, I though we were never to use that word. 

I believe it was that summer Ronald Tipton and I began our explorations of the hills. We rode our bikes up the various country roads out of town, often parking them in the bushes and hiking through the woods. It would be difficult to sort out all our discoveries as to time and order. We did this for years until Ronald decided he was too old for bicycles, which was when we were 14. I bought his bike from him. We were too young to drive a car; you needed some kind of wheels. One of our earlier expeditions was up Uwchlan Avenue to the Northwood Cemetery. We both had a morbid bent for walking around graveyards. That penchant persists to this very day.

We circled about the graves and toward the back saw a narrow path

into the woods. We  followed the path and came across a group of neglected and weathered stones. No one would know these graves existed if they didn’t have a sharp eye and a curious streak such as we. The path was narrow and overgrown and only our boyish sense of adventure kept us following it. Why these graves were deserted and forgotten I don’t know, but my suspicion is they were Negro graves. Yes, in those days even Black and White corpses didn’t lie in peace together. (Right, Ronald in Northwood Cemetery, 2004.)  

We were warned not to go, but went anyway, to places such as the old quarry off of Boot Road (pictured left). There was extensive stone mining going on near Downingtown both then and now. Quarry Road was even the name of the cross street. If you went east down Boot Road beyond the town limits you came to a narrow bridge over a railroad. Just before crossing this bridge there was a rutted dirt road going back into the scruff. We pushed out bikes back there, ignoring any Keep Out and No Trespassing signs until we came to a wooden barrier nailed on two posts. Beyond this barrier was the lip of the old quarry. It was a long vertical drop down to dark green water. There were rumors of suicides and accidental drownings connected with this forbidden place. I used this site for the climatic scene in my novel, Gray. 

He should have lit out of this jinx ville yesterday, but that was just that - yesterday. This was today and he could only go on with the present and play out plan two. He was going to take a real loss on this trip. He was going to have to leave with no product for resale and it appeared he was going to lose his car in the bargain. It was well he had been careful and prudent in wiping off any fingerprints and that he left his suitcases at the train station. Most likely he'd be riding the rails out of here anyway.

But first he had to get rid of this car and the girls in the back. That was no problem at all; he had the perfect solution only a few miles away.

"Hey, kiddos, you hear me back there?"

Steps’ head snapped up at his yell and banged the trunk lid. Hester finally grew silent. Both girls went rigid and still.

"I know it's been a short relationship," he said, "but looks like us'n got to part company. There's been some unforeseen problems and you guys is just in the way now.

"It's a shame, too, cause you guys would've been of some value with you're looks and all, but that's done now, isn't it. So, look, I don't want you to think this is anything personal, but I just can't have you guys around, see, so I know a place where you kind of disappear off

the earth. It's just a ways up Shoestring here now.”

Step’s spine chilled and her skin bristled. A picture came to mind. There was a place her dad had taken her once. A place he had told her never to go and she understood this warning looking down at the deep, greenish water below where the land dropped off into a pit.

"He's going to throw us in the quarry," she blurted out, and regretted it at once as Hester began shrieking and kicking at the back of the car. She needed Hester to calm if they were to have any chance and they might only get one. 

Excerpt from Gray. (1995)

We would go to more questionable places. After all, the Gates of Hell were only a short distance from the quarry and the hills were alive with haunted houses. (I suppose that should be dead with haunted houses?) We would explore them all.