ME -- LOST INNOCENT LATE 1950's -- CHAPTER 32

 CHAPTER 32

Sometime after we moved back to Downingtown, my parents began to hire a babysitter for me when they went out instead of always sending me to my grandparents.I’m not sure why this change. My grandparents were just down the street and never seemed unwilling to have me around. As a nine and ten year old I wasn’t privy to everything going on around me. So there may have been reasons I never learned. The sitter was hired only now and again, not every time.

The sitter was Dottie Bender (who I have no photos of). She had lived in the house up along the Lincoln Highway across  from Hines Trucking during the swamp years. Her father was a mechanic there and good friend with my dad. The Benders moved to Downingtown just after we did. They had an apartment on Lancaster Pike beyond Manor Avenue. This was the West Side. You went up a fire escape toward the back of a brick building to enter their apartment building pictured on right. 

Her apartment looked out on the parking lot of the Downingtown

Diner, known then as the Cadillac Diner. It was just a typical eatery of that type and era. Although diners per se had existed for quite awhile, there was an explosion of them in the 1950s.  Diners were usually long and rectangle like a boxcar, and prefabricated. They generally had shiny silver exteriors. The

Downingtown Diner was to gain long-lasting fame by the end of the decade. It was the Diner attacked by the Blob at the end of that Steve  McQueen flick. (That original diner used for the film is not the diner presently on the site. It was either replaced or radically changed in 1960, depending on whose story about its fate you accept.)

 I have other connections to that film besides a diner in my old

hometown. For one, I saw the film in the Colonial Theater when it had its first run. That was in 1958. In the film the Blob attacks the patrons of a movie theater, the very one I saw the film in. The moviegoers stream screaming into the street and several of them run to the diner. They must have been in good shape, because the Colonial Theater was  in Phoenixville and the diner was in Downingtown, about fifteen miles apart.

A fire chief assists the police during The Blob’s climatic scenes. Tom Ogden played the fire chief, but I knew him as Reverend Thomas Ogden. He was my minister at the Downingtown United Methodist Episcopal Church.

Dottie Bender sometimes took me to the movies at the Roosevelt when she babysat. It was several years later “The Blob” appeared. My parents didn’t retained Dottie as my sitter for very long. My mother told my grandmother “there’s something not right about that girl.” I heard mother say, “She’s boy crazy.” Boy crazy meant a person who flitted from boy to boy or constantly craved men. It was not considered a flattering term.

 A couple decades in the future, after I married, Dottie also married and my wife and I became social friends with her and her husband Jack. I can’t say if Dottie was truly boy crazy. I doubt she ever came on to me because she probably liked her boys a little closer to being men than in grade school. My mother may have been half right. Dottie ended up committed to Embreeville State Hospital (right
) twenty years later. When I was growing up we cruelly called Embreeville a “booby
hatch”. 

In the fall of 1950 I entered Mrs. Sara Powell’s Fourth Grade at East Ward. I didn’t like Mrs. Powell. She struck me as overly strict. I thought she had a sharp face, like a bird of prey. I actually had my best report cards in Downingtown in her class. I didn’t really have any problems with her.

I did have problems with my ears. I was getting intense earaches. These had started back when we lived in the swamp, but each year they had come more frequently. These caused me terrible pain; enough that I even begged my mom to take me to see the doctor. Doctor Parke examined me and diagnosed my problem as tonsillitis. He recommended taking out the offending tonsils. Chester County Hospital admitted me to the Children’s Ward once again. Dr. Parke operated. I got the stereotypical reward, a plate of ice cream. I wasn’t in the hospital near as long as when I had appendicitis. I was back to class within a week. 

This was a good thing for I hated being confined to that Children’s

Ward. There was a head nurse who could have been the model for Nurse Ratched. She barked orders to we children like we were Marine recruits. She showed no sympathy or mercy. I hated her. (Left is the character Nurse Ratchet as portrayed in :”One Flew Over the Kookoo’s Nest.”)

I still continued to suffer earaches. Whether this had anything to do with why we switched to  Doctor Neff, a new doctor in town or not I don’t know.

Doctor Neff bought the building next to the Meisel's at 341 East

Lancaster Avenue. (House is pictured on right.) Prior to his purchase it had been a restaurant called the Tea House that had served the town chicken and waffles since 1914. Doctor Neff lived in the main house along the avenue. His offices were in the back in what was once the carriage house. Doctor Neff was childless, whether the problem lie with him or his wife was never reveled to me. Like many people unable to have children, they lavished attention on neighborhood kids. Everybody made a beeline for the Neff’s on Halloween. You were invited into their parlor. There waited a table with many treats and goodies, including apple cider. They urged you to take as much as you wished. And you could eat it there where the Charles-Bird-Way Gang couldn’t snatch it from you.

 The school took us to see Santa Claus each year between Thanksgiving and Christmas break. We marched down to the Log Cabin in lines two by two. At the time the Log Cabin was closer to the center of town than its present location in Kerr Park near the Brandywine Creek. Scholars were trying to determine if it was the oldest standing home in America. (It turned out it wasn’t.) We would line up at one cabin door and exit out the other. We had a little tete a tete upon Kris Kringle’s ample lap. He gave every child a gift and not some cheap candy cane either. I received a tube of Tinker Toys one year, something I really enjoyed. Billy Smith had an Erector Set, I didn’t like Erector Sets because of all the tiny bolts you used to erect anything. Tinker Toys were easier to assemble.  I think the American Legion sponsored these visits.

I’m sure I had a nice list for Santa, not knowing that in the very near future Iva Darlington and I would uncover the terrible secret exposing the truth and exploding the myth in a spare bedroom closet. After that year, Santa didn’t come anymore.

 It was also a year I discovered something much more exciting to me than Santa Claus. Well, more exciting now that I knew the truth. Mrs. Powell had us read a story in class that totally engrossed me. It captured my imagination completely. It was, “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. A couple years before I was avoiding horror; the comic books, the Tales of Tomorrow TV shows gave me nightmares. I read this Poe story and I became enamored with the horror tales. I wanted more.

     I joined the Downingtown Library, receiving my first official Library card, an event that proved very auspicious for me eventually. It was a big disappointment at first. The Library banned Edgar Allan Poe to me. His stories were in the adult section and I was a child. It was frustrating being a kid. Everybody kept getting in my way.

The two gravediggers decided this was not their line of work and left. The minister looked at Mister Beryl to see if he was going as well, but Mister Beryl was determined to find his brother’s body and no one could have sent him away. He stayed and both waited for the groundkeeper to return with the light. The man was not gone long. He came running back down the hill, a torch in one hand, the heavy bar in the other and they started right to work.

The door opened easier than expected. It revealed a windowless, dark chamber, heavy with cobwebs and a dank odor. The light beam was hardly able to cut through the pitch and the dust. The three men entered reluctantly, but resolved to their task. The groundkeeper was the most reluctant and yet he was forced in first, the light wavering in his shaky grasp. He shown it down the walls and then let it illuminate the center of the crypt where two large caskets lay. The men stood still, gazing at J. B. and his wife’s resting place in awe. Gold and silver glittered in the light, hardly tarnished by the years, almost as if a mysterious hand had polished it all along.

At nearly the same instant, they each heard the grating noise. It came from one of the caskets and the groundkeeper shown the light down the box. A moment later he watched the lid slide sideways and a long arm appeared. It was not lit for long, for the groundkeeper in his terror dropped the torch, but during the moments they could see it, it impressed them. It was long and slim, not more than bone width, but the hand was deformed into a claw and the entire arm and hand was green, as if covered with mold or moss or mildew. It was an unpleasant sight.

The men struggled to find the exit in the dark. They bumped together. Once Mister Beryl fell to his knees, but he crawled forward until he could get to his feet and out into the daylight.

Excerpt from “Crypt” (1958) collected in Never-Contented Things

Something else occurred in Fourth Grade that greatly encouraged me. I still don’t exactly know how it came about. I’m just glad it did.

 I became interested in ventriloquisms. My grandfather had bought

a television, joining his house with several others sporting antennae on the roof. One of the shows I watched with interest was the Paul Winchell Show. Here was this guy who talked to big dolls and they talked back. You seldom saw his lips move. I had seen Edgar Bergen perform on TV, too. but Bergen’s lips always moved. I was fascinated. I wanted a dummy like Jerry Mahoney, but I never got one. I did have several hand puppets. I would sit in front of a mirror and practice making a hand  puppet talk without moving my lips.

I had a dozen or more hand puppets and a marionette. It was an eclectic mix. I had little rubber headed puppets of Snap, Crackle and Pop, the breakfast cereal mascots. I sent away to the Howdy Doody show for them. I had some sock puppets my grandmother had sewn for me. They had cardboard supported mouths and buttons for eyes. I had a couple paper mache ones. I had a monkey.

Mrs. Powell  allowed me to put on a puppet show at school. I don’t know if it was part of a larger entertainment, like a variety show, though it doesn’t seem it was. I think I was like a one-man assembly

program. The school had a puppet stage. I made my own scenery and wrote the script. Since I had a monkey puppet and I still liked Frank Buck, I did a jungle story. I was greatly influenced by the Punch ‘n’ Judy shows one of the Philadelphia Department stores put on every Christmas season, so my play contained a lot of characters hitting each other with a stick. Stuart Meisel did one after mine was a success. Perhaps it was some sort of class project.(You seldom see Punch and Judy shows anymore. They were probably banned as too violent for children.)

Nonetheless, I was creating things that others saw. This make-believe world was a place I could escape and for whatever reason gain some acceptance among my peers.