ME - DOWNINGTOWN THE FIRST TIME - CHAPTER 13

 CHAPTER 13

In Downingtown o n the corner of Washington Avenue and Chestnut Street a house sits on a fair sized lot. This was the home of the mysterious Fahay Sisters. A wrought iron fence surrounded the yard. There were a number of trees about the grounds that kept the place in perpetual shade. We neighborhood children were afraid of the place. We thought the Fahay sisters were witches.

When we had to walk up to Chestnut Street, we crossed to the opposite sidewalk to pass the Fahay Home.

I’m not sure I ever saw the Fahay Sisters, which probably added to the mystique about that house. You would think it was the perfect Halloween site, but none of us ever had the nerve to knock on that door trick or treating. We wouldn’t even open the gate.

It’s funny what settles in a childish head. As far as I know the Sisters were perfectly nice old ladies, if indeed they were all that old. Yet we imagined rather nasty things about these spinsters, of spells being cast and perhaps children boiled in pots like in Hansel and Gretel. 

Billy Smith lived right next door to the Sisters. This is his home on

the right., when we both lived on Washington Avenue. The left side of this building was an apartment house, each floor holding a different family. The right side was just the Smiths. Billy was an only child like me.

Billy wasn’t just a friend; he was my “bestest” friend. I’m always a bit uncomfortable with the term “Best Friend”. It seems so exclusive. We have many Best Friends over the course of our lives. Sometimes we have more than one at once, as I did in my second Downingtown incarnation when I considered both Ronald Tipton and Stuart Meisel best friends. I had even more in High School when Ron and Stu still remained close and I added Richard Wilson and Ray Ayres to that Best Friend category. It is a bothersome term because it is singular. But Better Friends doesn’t work because that somehow implies status. “My Better Friends have more manners, or polish, or savor faire or economic standing than my other friends,” ththat term says. So I am stuck with saying I had Best Friends of equal status.

However, for the period 1944 to 1950, Billy Smith was my Most Bestest Friend.

 Billy was a toe head, a blond, and he had a big head, in size, not

ego. Since he lived a few doors away I assume I simply met him on the street. At some point our mothers trusted we were old enough to wander about the avenue on our own. I’m not sure when that was, perhaps in the latter months of three or at the age of four. The photos of us playing baseball in my backyard were from 1945 when all in the photo turned four. (Billy is the shirtless boy, Tim Mahan is batting and I am behind the catcher mask.)

He and I clicked. We could talk freely about anything to each other, although I don’t know how much controversial conversation passes between four year olds requiring a lot of trust. We certainly were constant companions always at one or another’s house until I moved out of town in late 1946. We still were able to get together on weekends when I stayed at my grandparents, but just after I moved back to Downingtown in 1950 Billy’s family moved to Coatesville.

I remember some of the games we played around 1944 to 1946. If at my house we sometimes played pirates. 424’s wooded railed porch made an excellent pirate ship in our imagination. On Billy’s front

porch we played something called “Heil Hitler!” You see his porch didn’t have that railing around it back in the 1940s.  It was an all open front just like the twin porch next door. “Heil Hitler!” was a simple game based on “Hot Potato”. 

The participants would toss a ball in the air from one to another, but no one would actually catch it. Whoever it came to would immediately bat it back into the air toward someone else. We pretended the ball was a bomb about to explode. If a person batted at the ball and missed, allowing it to hit the floor,  then he would goose-step across the porch to the edge then fall off to the ground while making the noise of an explosion. The rest of us raised one hand in that straight-arm salute accompanied with a shout of “Heil Hitler” as he stepped off the edge. We would see who could look the goofiest as they fell. We were mocking the blind following of Der Furher by the Nazis as he led Germany over a cliff. We really didn’t think of it that way in our four-year old minds, but that was what we were doing.

 We would pause in this game or any other activity we might be engaged in if we heard planes.  During those years a number of warplanes in formation flew over town on their way somewhere. We would crane our heads skyward and try to identify the type. One time we even saw a Flying Wing pass over us.

When the Smith’s moved, the Shirks moved into their vacated house on Washington Avenue. The Shirks were Denny Myers parents. I had a tentative friendship with Denny from before I moved to the swamp, but it was to turn sour within the first few months after I returned to Downingtown. However, I became friends with his next younger brother, Michael Myers.  The other two younger brothers had the last name Shirk.

 

The Shirks were the first family on the block to get a television. Several of us gathered every afternoon in their living room to watch in amazement as Frontier Playhouse brought the Old West right into his home. Frontier Playhouse showed old B Westerns from the 1930s, stars such as Charles Starrett, Tim McCoy and Lash Larue. Lash  Larue was a favorite of mine. He had competition from another Western hero named Whip Wilson (pictured left), but I preferred Lash. Their shtick was the same, both fought the bad guys with a bullwhip more than a gun, but I thought Lash was cooler. 

Whip Wilson was too wimpy-looking in his white hat and well-scrubbed boyish face. Lash came encased in all black giving him a more badass persona.

The picture of Whip Wilson was on a Dixie Cup lid. Dixie Cups were small ice creams and on the inside of the lids were pictures of movie stars. They were similar to the cards that come with bubblegum, except you had to lick the ice cream off the star’s face before putting it in a shoebox for safekeeping.

 My real all-time favorites on Frontier Playhouse were a trio called “The Three Mesquiteers”. This trio changed over the years with different actors in the rolls of the three members. There were 51 Three Mesquiteer films out of Republic Pictures and even John Wayne played one of the bunch in eight of them. His character was named Stony Brooke. The best of the lot were the three actors who showed up most in those roles on Frontier Playhouse: Ken Maynard, Bob Steele and Hoot Gibson. If I remember correctly they went by the names Ken, Bob and Hoot in the films. No more cutesy “Stony Brookes”.

Frontier Playhouse came on from 4 to 5 every weeknight. The normal supper hour was 5 to 6, so around five Mrs. Shirk would shoo us home so her family could eat. We called it supper, not dinner back when I was a young boy.

Suppertime and the chicken’s fryin’

The potato’s mashed

And the gravy is rich..

I thought I’d throw in a little Gershwin.

My friendship with Billy Smith was one that linked three periods of my early life. He remained my Best Friend even when I left Downingtown for a couple years. We saw each other on weekends and then he was still a friend when I moved back. Unfortunately when I moved back, he moved away to Coatesville.

We still visited for a while, traveling by Short Line Bus between towns. (Just to be accurate, Downingtown was a borough and Coatesville was a city. Neither was either a town or a ville.) That was a brand new experience for me, riding the bus alone. I was nervous about it. I was fearful of missing my stop. It is a foolish fear. These buses stopped about every block. If you missed your stop you could get off at the next and not be very far from where you wanted to be.

I would get more and more anxious the closer I got to my stop. Coming home from Billy’s on one occasion I totally panicked. The Short Line took two routes through Downingtown. On one route the bus would turn right in the center of town and go up Rt. 322 to West Chester. The other route continued straight through town and out to Exton where the Lincoln Highway crossed Rt. 202 before the bus turned toward West Chester. On this trip I mistakenly thought I was on the Rt. 322 bus and as it came to the center square of town I hurried to exit. I pulled the cord to ring the bell that told the driver to stop. As I got up from my seat my small cardboard suitcase fell open and spilled all my clothes in the aisle. I was very embarrassed crawling about snatching up my skivvies and other apparel while the bus waited. I was further chagrinned when I got off and watched the bus go straight down Lancaster Avenue. If I had remained on board it would have taken me to Chestnut Street and let me off only a block from my home. Now I had to walk several blocks.

  Billy festooned his bedroom with model airplanes. These hung

from strings everywhere. His were the wooden models where the pieces were cut out of balsa wood with a Xacto knife not

the plastic kits already pre-cut that I glued together. Billy loved building those planes; I didn’t have the patience. I remember the airplane glue, though, a clear thick liquid you pressed from a tube and got high on the odor. It also stuck to your fingers and felt like pulling off skin when you peeled it.

  This will be strange news to anyone
who knows me now, but Billy had an interest in something else I didn’t like, horror comics. Since I became a horror storywriter for the Pulps this doesn’t sound possible, but it is true. At the time Billy’s horror comics gave me nightmares. Yep, right there in his bedroom was a tub full of the ghastly covers of “Vault of Horror” and “Tales from the Crypt”. With my next best friend I would be trading for those ghoulish rags, but at Billy’s I didn’t even want to see the titles.

 On one visit when I stayed overnight, Billy’s family watched a TV show called Tales of Tomorrow just before bedtime. It began with eerie music and told spooky stories akin to the Twilight Zone. “Sleep No More” (1952) was the episode that particular evening and after watching it I couldn’t. The tale told of a man who every time he slept alien monsters entered the world through

his dreams. Notice that after all these decades I still recall that particular episode clearly.

Billy’s family lived in Coatesville a brief time and then moved somewhere out in the country. After that our friendship just faded with the distance.

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.

ME --DOWNINGTOWN THE FIRST TIME -- CHAPTER 11

 CHAPTER 11

 Let’s take a tour of 424 Washington Avenue. As you can see, it is a narrow house, but long. (These photographs are in August 2007.) You walk up the short pavement from the street to the porch; step up two or three steps and cross the front porch to the front door. Going through that door takes you into the living room. 

 The living room is claustrophobic, not because it is too small, but

because it is too dark. The walls are dark and the overstuffed sofa and chairs are dark, maroon or mossy green in color. There is a wooden magazine stand, a small coffee table and an end table, all in dark wood. Doilies cover all tabletops and armrests. There is a floor lamp and a couple of table lambs, but all give off very little glow, thus the room is always dim. There is a large front window and smaller windows on each side, yet the room gets very little sunlight. The porch roof shades the front, a large tree blocks the east and sun just doesn’t hit the west window.

 Continuing through into the dining room you find the brightest room. The wallpaper is a lighter color and the two doors to the left front are white. The door nearest the west window opens to circular stairs to the second floor. The other door is to steps to the cellar. The trees do not block the windows on either side. There is less furniture and most is covered with something white. The dining table dominates in the center, but has a tablecloth over it. There is a large credenza along the back wall covered with a six foot long white doily. To the west side is a daybed used as a sofa. There is a telephone table

along the front wall. There are a few pictures of fox hunters hanging on the walls. There is a drawing of “Chessie the Cat”** asleep with two kittens by the east window. A ceiling light above the dining table holds multiple bulbs on chains and illuminates the room well at night. The dining room served as my playroom whenever I lived or stayed at 424 Washington. It had the most open space, most sunlight and got the least use in the evenings when everyone else gathered in the living room.

 Now we come into the kitchen, a fairly spacious working area. A stove takes up the back wall between an exit door and a narrow window. There are two windows on the east side, a normal sized one and a smaller one over the sink. The Frigidaire sits to the east side of the front wall and a kitchen table is against the wall just west of it. The Frigidaire freezer component is small because frozen food still isn’t popular. It has a small compartment that held a couple ice cube trays and that was about it. This compartment was in the middle of the top third just below the control dials.

The exit door doesn’t exit the house, but enters a shed or pantry. This is fairly large. I sometimes play here during the day. There are windows looking out over the back yard and another on the west side. There is a door on the east  side that opens on a small deck and wooden steps down to the driveway.

Backtracking to the dining room we can go upstairs. The steps curve about, so they are broad at one end and very narrow at the other. They take you into the short hallway. At the east end of this hallway is the bathroom. There is a half-sized window in the bath. The bathroom is small. There is a tub and toilet to the front and a sink to the back.

The other end of the short hallway joins to the long hallway, so as to form a backward letter L. The long hallway leads to the third bedroom, which is fairly large since it is the full width of the house. It has the only second floor window on the west side. It also has a window on the east side and windows overlooking the shed roof out to the backyard. This was my parents’ room when we lived there.

My grandparents slept in the master bedroom to the front of the house. It was not as wide as the back room because the attic steps foreshortened it. It had two large windows to the front, but none on the sides or back.

My room was in the middle on the east side of the house. It was the smallest room, but not tiny. My bed took up a good bit of the east half. There was a wardrobe on the west side and a bureau to the front. The room was fairly dark having only one window to the east. It had a ceiling light. I had a reading lamp that clamped over the headboard rail of my metal frame bed. This was the usual light turned on because I read a lot while lying in bed. 

My mother would always come in to say good night and turn off that light and tell me to go to sleep. She would leave and shut my door. In these early years I had a small nightlight over by the bureau because I was still afraid of the dark. Eventually my father decided I was too old to be scared and took it away. It wasn’t bright enough to read by even when I had it. I waited until after my mom left and then pulled my blankets up over the headboard to create a tent. I would turn on the reading light, hidden by the blanket, and read until I was too tired to stay awake.

One night the heat of the reading light set my blanket on fire. This

happened after  everyone else was asleep, but I was still up reading. I pulled the blanket off and put out the fire, but it left a hole with scorched edges where the light had touched it. I didn’t want anyone to see what happened, so I got the scissors and cut off the burnt material. This I flushed down the toilet. Fortunately it didn’t clog the pipes. I don’t know how I explained the sudden and mysterious hole in my blanket, though.

The blanket fire probably happened the second time we lived at 424 Washington rather than the first. But during those first years I did sleep walk. I would wander about the house sound asleep or I would jump up and down on my bed. One time I fell doing this and landed head first on the floor. Perhaps that explains a lot.

At least I was never a bed wetter.

There is more to the house. I described the cellar in an earlier chapter and how it spooked me out. The attic spooked me even more.

The attic was large and divided into two narrow rooms. The ceiling sloped down sharply to the front and the back. There were little closets built into the walls down the length, like doors behind which trolls might lurk. There was a window to both sides of the attic, but because of the divider down the middle these only let light into the back half. The front half was very dark; it didn’t even have a lamp. You used a flashlight to find things. There was a light in the back half, but the switch was at the top of the twisting stairwell, not at the bottom. You had to go up in darkness and feel about for the switch. 

My grandfather had creatures in the attic. He had a stuffed owl sitting right to the top of  the steps. Coming up the last few you would see two large glass eyes glinting in what light there was. If that didn’t startle you maybe the stuffed fox next to it would. The fox had been my great grandfather Wilson’s so I guess my grandmother had inherited the blasted thing. (Pictured: William Frederick Wilson II and his fox.)

Occasionally the creatures up there were real. Bats sometimes invaded that dark and cozy space.

Overall the house was dim inside. It was also missing much of the entertainment  appliances of today. There were no computers or video

games in the 1940s. There was no television either at this particular time. We had one source of diversion sitting in the living room, a large console radio and record player. It was as large as the TVs to come, but there was nothing to look at on it. There were a series of dials on the face. The top lifted up and there was the turntable. It only played 78 RPM records. These were about ten inches in diameter with a tiny hole in the center. This hole went over the spindle. You could stack ten records on our player and as one finished the next would automatically drop into place and the needle would swing back and down to play it. These records were easily chipped, scratched, or worst, broken.

The bottom of our console had a little cabinet built in where you could store your records.  My parents had quite a few, a mix of pop ballads or big bands of the day and my dad’s Hillbilly songs. You only got two songs to a record, one on the front and one on the back (the B side). Record albums were not like the later 33 1/3

discs that might hold 10 or 12 songs on one record. These albums were a binder and opened like a book. Inside were paper sleeves each holding a record. If there were twelve songs in the album you had six records. I remember two albums in our cabinet. My mom had “Bing Crosby Sings Cowboy Ballads”. My favorite was dad’s Red River Dave’s “Songs of the Hill and Range”. (We had the  78 RPM album, which looked much like this 45 RPM version, only bigger.)

Red River Dave sang “The Wreck of the Streamline Train”, “Death of Floyd Collins”, “Honky Tonkin’ Thelma”, “Put Me in Your Pocket” among others in the collection. One of my favorites was “Red-Headed Mama Blues” because it fit my parents later on when my father began driving 18-wheelers. A line in the song went, “I drive a truck all day” and my mother was a redhead.

Anyway 1940 houses were dreary affairs with little within to entertain a child. This is why kids of that day spent the daylight hours playing outside with friends.

 ** Chessie was an emblem for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, from an etching by Guido Gruenwald. It first appear as an ad in “Fortune” in 1933, with the tag line, “Sleep like a kitten”. The picture was so popular with the public the cat was given a name and became quite a popular image in both ads and in merchandise.

I still have the picture that hung in the dining room at 424 Washington Avenue of Chessie and her two kittens.

ME --DOWNINGTOWN THE FIRST TIME -- CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 10

Nellie was my mother’s dog. Mom had raised her since a pup and by the time I came  along Nellie was getting long of tooth. She became a companion to me, traipsing about with me in the yard and sleeping up on my bed at night. 

I don’t know what kind of dog she was, a mix surely. She was gentle, but not overly active. Her run was a slow trot and she didn’t do a lot of running. She was shaggy, with a round body and fairly short legs.

  Nellie wasn’t the only animal in my life at 424 Washington. I

have already mentioned the chickens my Grandparents raised in the rear of the back yard. My Grandfather also owned a string of hound dogs. He had four or five of these and they lived in doghouses lined up alongside the west side of the house. My favorite was Old Red (photo left: me in Old Red’s house)

These dogs were not for playing fetch or anything. They were kept chained to their boxes most of the time. They were for fox hunting, a popular activity of the farmers in Chester County at the time and a favorite of my grandfather Brown. He would load the hounds in his old Ford on occasional weekends and take them to a hunt.

 Nellie died a few months after my father sailed away with the Navy. My mother found an old suitcase and laid her out inside. She festooned it with some kind of plants and we had a little ceremony in the back yard before my grandfather buried her in the garden. This was my first experience with death. I learned that living creatures died. Dead things did not move and got put in the ground so no one ever saw them again.

I used Nellie as the model for a story I wrote many years later called “Passing”. In this I moved the location from Downingtown out to the lonely house in the swamp at Glenloch. The young character experiencing the reality of death and questioning God was also switched from a young boy to a young girl. 

Jenny kept her vigil at the window. 

The sky deepened in tone. Across the moonlight on the hill moved a shadow. This shade prodded toward the house. Jenny stiffened. A brown and  white dog shambled into the yard. Its muzzle was low, nearly scraping the grass. The dog was covered with faded shaggy fur making it appear plump, but you could see its thinness in the boniness of its wobbling legs. It came to the back porch and passed the house beneath the kitchen window. At the patch of light the window threw across the lawn the dog paused and looked toward Jenny. Brief recognition glistened in its black eyes. It wagged its tail and then the eyes misted over with film. It lowered its head and passed.

Jenny watched the tail disappear beyond a shed. She left the window and  threw her arms around her mother’s hips.

Excerpt from “Passing (Written 1961)

Published 2003 in

Soon to Be Famous

Analytic Writers

Wilmington, Delaware

Tracey Landmann, Editor (left)

 Death came into my young life again in January 1946. My father

came home on emergency leave because his mother was dying of cancer. She died on January 19. I don’t remember my dad coming home at that time. I barely remember Grandmother Florence Blanche Townsley Meredith. She was a big woman and that is about all I recall. I never knew my Grandfather Meredith because he died in 1937. According to the date on her tombstone, she was 53 when she died. According to the obituary in the Coatesville Record of January 19, 1946 she was 55. If the newspaper is correct she was 27 when she married Benjamin, eight years his senior rather than six. That is her holding me.

One Easter, I received a present of a white rabbit. I named it

Snowball. I say it because I don’t know what sex Snowball was. It was around this same time my Grandfather gave me a puppy. He came home one night and told me to look in his jacket pocket. I did and two eyes were staring out at me. The puppy was very tiny. It was a Toy Fox Terrier, a little White dog with a black face and a couple large black spots on its body. Its tail was bobbed to a short stump like many such sports dogs.

 Since the puppy was extremely frisky, I named it Peppy. I had Peppy until after I graduated high school. When Peppy reached adulthood she had a funny habit. At that time the comic strip “Li'l Abner” by Al Capp had introduced these strange critters called Shmoos. Shmoos looked a little like walking bowling pins with whiskers. They were all white. I had several Shmoo squeeze toys, each about  four or five inches long. When Peppy went through heat she believed these were her puppies. She would carry each in her mouth to her dog bed and then guard them. If you came near she would snarl. After a few days she realized they weren’t really puppies and go back to her normal playful self. 

Peppy had her own doggy bed, but most of the time she would curl up beside me in bed to sleep, just as Nellie had. She was young and full of energy. She liked to play fetch with a little rubber ball or chase about the yard. (The photograph right is me holding Peppy in 1951.)

My grandfather often brought me gifts, not always with the approval of my grandmother. I’m not sure she was happy when he pulled Peppy out of his jacket pocket. Her usual objection was my grandfather didn’t get me age appropriate gifts and she was right. It isn’t he gave me anything wrong for a child to possess; only he gave to me at too young an age.

  For instance, he gave me a

baseball bat. Every young boy of the ‘Forties and ‘Fifties needed a baseball bat. It was expected boys would play the game. It was the National Pastime for Pete’s sake. However, he gave me, at four years old, an Official Stan Musial Louisville Slugger. The bat was 34 inches long and weighted 36 ounces. At four I could barely lift it. I still have that bat. It’s badly beat up now with a crack near where the barrel narrows. The wood is rough with pockmarks because at some point I took to hitting  stones with it. Stan Musial’s signature has long faded away just as he has.

It was not only gifts inappropriate for my age Grandmother objected to. My grandfather sometimes said things in front of me she didn’t like either. One May morning in 1946 Grandfather Brown was reading the paper at the kitchen table as usual. There was a story about a car engineer named Louis Reard who just introduced a new model in Paris, France. It wasn’t a car. It was a bathing suit and Reard called it The Bikini. (Reard’s first Bikini is pictured on left being modeled by nude dancer, Micheline Bernardini, the only woman he could find willing to pose in it, 1946.)

My grandfather looked over the top of the paper and said, “You

know what the next new women’s bathing suit’s gonna be?”

Grandmother cocked an eyebrow. I just shook my head no.

“Two Band-Aids and a cork,” he said and laughed.

Grandmother didn’t laugh. Her face got red. “How can you say such a thing front of the boy,” she said.

I had no idea why my grandfather laughed or why grandmother got so angry with him. I didn’t understand that joke for another ten years.