Lockport Home Page Exclusive!Book Excerpt - "Lockport Boy"
Lockport Home Page Exclusive!
Following is an excerpt from Chapter One of "Lockport Boy," the newly-published memoir by Frank Bredell. Copies of the 272-page book are available postage paid for $14.50 from Andiamo Press, Box 484, Lincoln Park, MI 48146.
The Waterman Street Gang
Being an only child didn’t mean being lonely. There were plenty of other kids in the neighborhood to play with—the members of the Waterman Street Gang.
There was a thick vine over one side and the front of Doris and Audrey Donner’s porch, something we called Dutchman’s pipe, that had little white blossoms in the shape of pipes. Sometimes while we were waiting for Audrey to decide whether she wanted to risk nearly all her Monopoly money to put a hotel on Massachusetts Avenue the rest of us would each pick a pipe and "smoke it." The vine also had some thin, dry little branches that broke off easily, so since the blossoms were pipes, we assumed that this had to be the tobacco.
We tried to smoke it once, not in the little Dutchmen’s pipes, of course. They were just flowers and wouldn’t hold any tobacco. Jack Schuler stole a pipe that his father used to smoke and hid it out behind Jimmy and Howard Garlock’s house. He and I nonchalantly broke off a few twigs of the dry vine while Audrey pondered over a Monopoly move.
After a while we got tired of playing and took an intermission. I don’t know what Doris and Audrey did, but Jack and I sauntered over to Garlock’s and got out the pipe. We rubbed some of the dry curly stems of the Dutchmen’s pipe vine in our hands and made a coarse dust that we put in the bowl of the pipe.
Jack had stolen some matches, too, so we tried to light the pipe. The "tobacco" didn’t catch so we tried another match. That one didn’t work either, so we tried a third. We had to get this right, there weren’t many more matches. The twigs started to smoke when Jack lit the next match, and we each quickly took a puff at the pipe.
It was awful, we could hardly breathe. We gagged and gasped for air, then tried to throw up but couldn’t. Jimmy and Howard Garlock were cheering us on, very quietly so their mother wouldn’t hear. They weren’t quiet enough, though. She peeked out the back window and spotted us.
She didn’t come out, and we didn’t see her so we assumed all along that we were safe. Howard and Jimmy were severely interrogated later when they went into the house, although their mother could see that it was only Jack and me rolling on the ground.
For us, it was now a matter of recovering our wind, cleaning out the pipe and hiding all the matches. Jack and I were still gagging, so Jimmy and Howard gathered up the matches and hid them under the weeds that grew profusely in their back yard.
Finally Jack was able to recover enough breath to take a little stick and clean the remaining "tobacco" out of the pipe, which he then hid in his pocket to take back home.
Fortunately neither my folks nor Mrs. Garlock had a telephone. (I think Jack’s parents might have.) Mrs. Garlock always kept to herself so she didn’t report our misdeeds to anybody. She didn’t have to. Later in the afternoon, when I went home for something, my mother asked me if there had been a fire somewhere. She smelled smoke. I said something about someone on Millar Place burning trash, which she knew was a lie, but she let me get away with it.
I think she had been over to call on Mrs. Donner and Audrey had told about how we had picked the curly branches off the Dutchmen’s pipe to smoke. I expect that my mother and Mrs. Donner nearly fell off the porch with laughter while they thought of how awful that would taste. My mother decided I had punished myself enough, so she didn’t have to do anything more. None of us ever tried to smoke the Dutchmen’s pipe again. As a mater of fact, Jack never again tried to smoke anything. We did still strut around with the little pipe-like flowers in our mouths that summer though.
The Clubhouse
All of our back yards were the same size, except that Garlock’s was bigger. I suppose it couldn’t have been, but it always seemed that way. Maybe because there was a little shed at the far end. It had once been a chicken coop, then storage for tools, and later was sort of abandoned. It was perfect as the clubhouse for the Waterman Street Gang.
First, we needed desks. In those long ago days oranges came in crates made of thin wooden sides and thicker ends. Those would make perfect desks if we could get them, and we could from the little store on the corner. We didn’t bother to paint the crates or even sand the splinters off them but just stood them on end for desks. The "chairs" were other wooden boxes from the grocery. Kids now can’t do any of this because everything comes in cardboard boxes instead of wooden ones.
No girls were admitted to the clubhouse, of course, so we needed a way to keep them out. We got a piece of cardboard and lettered on it in heavy pencil "Keep Out." We tacked it outside the clubhouse. There had once been a lock on the shed, but it was long gone. The hasp was still there though, so we found a stick that would fit through the loop and hold the door shut. That and the sign certainly ought to keep the girls out and did. We never stopped to wonder if the chicken dirt had anything to do with their lack of interest in coming in.
In the clubhouse we made great plans for projects, games and deviltry. Mostly the club meetings revolved around planning how to get even with the hated Pine Street Gang if they ever attacked us. The backyards of my house and the Garlocks’ house backed up to the yards on Pine Street. Somewhere in those houses on Pine Street lurked the menacing Pine Street Gang.
We were never certain, at least I wasn’t, who the members of the Pine Street Gang were. I don’t think we had ever seen them up close. They also didn’t have a clubhouse like the Waterman Street Gang did, so they certainly must have been of a lower social order.
Howard, being the oldest of our gang members, proclaimed himself president. Jimmy, Jack and I were vice presidents. Since we had no money, individually or collectively, we needed no treasurer. And we didn’t plan to keep any records. Heavens no. Everything said in the clubhouse was supposed to be a great secret.
Sometimes, maybe once a week or oftener, Howard exceeded his authority and one or more of us resigned from the gang and left the clubhouse. Occasionally these exits lasted all day, especially if the blowup came in late afternoon. But who else were we going to play with? Not the hateful Pine Street Gang and we didn’t want to hang around with Doris and Audrey all the time. The gang soon got back together.
In late September when the days were getting shorter there would be some after-dinner meetings in the clubhouse, if we all had our homework done. Since we all went to different schools, we couldn’t do our homework together. Our gang meetings were very serious and very secret. We planned to go "graping." That meant that on a night the next weekend, when there would be no homework to do and we could stay out late (maybe an hour after the streetlights came on), we’d raid a neighbor’s grape arbor.
There was always someone in the neighborhood who was growing a few grapes. Jack took it upon himself to ride his bicycle up and down every street within our purview to see what grape trellises he could spot and how big the grapes looked from a distance. Then there was a not-very-learned discussion about the superiority of green grapes vs. the blue ones.
On the given night we met outside the clubhouse. We couldn’t meet inside at night because it had no electricity, candles might have burned it down and besides we weren’t supposed to have any matches, and flashlights would have been a dead giveaway that we were up to something we shouldn’t have been.
We knew the location of our target. Jack usually scoped out whether the grape owner had a dog, and let us know about fences and other menaces. So we set off, slinking along in the shadows until we were near the coveted grapes. Then we tiptoed across lawns and gardens up to the arbor. Somebody had a jackknife. That was usually Jack, because he had a pair of high top boots that came with a little jackknife that fit in a special pocket.
The knife was opened silently, and some bunches of grapes were sliced from the vine. Filling our hands, we ran out of there at top speed, especially if there was a dog barking. The barking added to the fun, our adrenaline was racing, and our hearts were pounding for fear of getting caught. We plunged through the gardens we had been so careful to ease through earlier. Tomatoes were crushed, sometimes a squash got in the way and was kicked to pieces or taken along for no good reason.
Gardeners on Waterman Street seemed to be fond of putting low, almost invisible wire fences around their gardens at ankle height. We almost always got snagged by one of those and fell face down in the dirt. Grapes were scattered and had to be hastily swept together, as much as possible in the dark, and taken away.
Often we split up in making our escapes. We’d learned the value of doing that while watching the cops and robbers movies on Saturday afternoons at the Rialto Theater.
Back outside the clubhouse we slumped to the ground, on the side where Mrs. Garlock couldn’t see us, and sampled the grapes. They weren’t ripe. We’d come too early again this year, as always. Nevertheless, we all tried to eat a few and proclaimed them excellent. Then we took them out to the street to watch for traffic so we could spatter the rest of the grapes against the back of a truck, preferably a white one.
Waterman Street had very little traffic in the daytime and hardly any at night, so we had to venture over to Pine Street where there were more cars. "Here comes a bus," said Jimmy and wound up his pitching arm. "Don’t," yelled Howard, "The driver can see you." So the bus escaped unscathed.
Same thing for all cars. Throwing grapes at them would clearly be too dangerous. Bicycle riders, if there were any, were also off limits. They could hop off the bikes and chase us across yards. Sometimes a truck really did come by and we hurled away at it. Our missiles fell harmlessly in the street to be crushed by the next car, but we’d made a good try. Congratulations were due all around, and we headed for home wondering whether we’d be able to sneak into the kitchen or bathroom to scrub the grape stains off our hands before our parents began to question where we’d been.
The gang gets a vehicle
We needed some distinctive vehicles. We supposed that the Pine Street Gang had bicycles, so we needed something different, something better, something we could build ourselves. Scooters!
First we had to round up the parts. Needed: one roller skate, preferably one on which the wheels would still turn even if a bit balky, a 2 x 4 board about three feet long, an orange crate and a smaller board. The orange crate was no problem, and the clubhouse or my cellar yielded suitable boards. Luckily somebody could always locate a skate. I didn’t want to sacrifice one of mine because they were still in good condition, but I think the older Garlock brothers may have been reckless with their things. By rummaging around in their stuff Howard could come up with one skate that had no mate.
These were not in-line skates, mind you. Their wheels were like those on a car, two in front and two behind, and made of hard steel that made lots of noise on the sidewalk and eventually grew flat spots that made skating even more of an adventure than the bumps in the pavement. The skates had no shoes of their own. They simply clamped to the bottoms of our leather shoes and were held tight by a threaded bolt that was tightened by a skate key.
If you lost your skate key you were in trouble because the skates always had to be tightened about every five or ten minutes. We wore skate keys on shoestrings around our necks. One good thing about those skates was that they adjusted for various sizes of shoes, so we didn’t outgrow them.
To make a scooter we had to cut one skate in two so that we had two sets of wheels. For that we needed a saw or a hammer and chisel. My dad had those things all neatly hanging up over his workbench in the cellar but I didn’t think I could take any of them outside. Jack’s father apparently didn’t care. Or maybe Jack could sneak them out so his dad wouldn’t find out.
Skates, as we learned, were made of very tough steel. The two sets of wheels were meant to stay together and stay they did despite our best efforts with saw or hammer and chisel. We took turns sawing and swinging the hammer and watching the sparks fly as the steel chisel smashed into the skate. Little by little we dented the part of the skate that was supposed to go under your foot and eventually it would come apart, leaving jagged edges behind that usually gave us some minor cuts, but such was the price of invention.
If we were lucky we could find a 2 x 4 about three feet long, but if necessary we had to hack it out of a longer board. The skate pieces were nailed to one of the wide sides of the board, front and back. Then the orange crate was nailed upright on one end and a little board nailed across the end of the orange crate to make a "steering" handle. This whole operation, as simple as it sounds, would take us a whole day to achieve, or maybe more because we had to interrupt it for Monopoly games, meetings in the clubhouse, safaris in the jungle, etc.
Once completed, the scooter could be propelled like any other scooter, with foot power. It didn’t run as well as a store-bought scooter with big rubber tires and smooth handles, but it was ours. We made a second scooter if we could find more parts, but if we couldn’t duplicate our efforts we had to take turns riding the one scooter. The Pine Street Gang had nothing that even came close. At least, we didn’t think they did. How could they have even conceived of such a wonderful invention? We never went over to Pine Street to see if they had stolen our technology.
Eventually we graduated to bicycles and launched "war games." Our first weapons were little white berries, a little larger than peas, that grew on bushes in Donners’ yard. By running our hands down a branch we picked off a handful of the berries all at once. Of course, we denuded the branch of its leaves, too, but we didn’t ever worry about that. The berries weren’t fit to eat, even by birds, but they were fairly firm and were good missiles when thrown. We threw handfuls at each other while we rode around on our bikes.
But we needed some something better. You know what countries do in an arms race, they keep getting more and more powerful weapons. We moved on to pea shooters, little hollow tubes through which we could blow to propel small objects. We tried dried beans. Too uneven in size, some got stuck. Peas, despite the name of the shooter, weren’t good either. Dried split peas were too small and our stores didn’t have any other kind. We settled on pearl tapioca, small, pellets as hard as rocks. Did they ever sting when we got hit by them.
The proper technique of using a pea shooter was to take a whole mouthful of tapioca, being careful not to swallow any, put the pea shooter lightly to the lips, ride along on the bicycle to a likely target and blow away. With a little practice what skill we developed. The ground became white with tapioca pellets.
Our mothers hated the pea shooters and tried to get us to give them up. That stood as much chance as the anti-gun lobby has against the National Rifle Association. Their next ploy was an attempt to get us to reduce the caliber of our ammunition. My mother suggested that we switch from tapioca to rice, and gave us a bag to use. "You’ll put someone’s eye out with that tapioca," she warned. Why do mothers always think something that is fun will put someone’s eye out? They never say, "That’ll take somebody’s ear off." No, its always the eye.
We tried the rice, each of us putting a handful in our mouth. We blew mighty blasts, and the rice just dribbled out the ends of the shooters. The grains were too little. We refused to sign our mothers’ "Geneva Convention" about the weapons of war and reverted to tapioca. Now the Pine Street Gang had better watch out. We were armed.
Copies of the 272-page book Lockport Boy, are available postage paid for $14.50 from Andiamo Press, Box 484, Lincoln Park, MI 48146.