Foothills of Childhood - Part 12 (Mother)

***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words.  It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail.  well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...one of several.  So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here.  Okay?

Part 12 (Mother)

How could an account of ones past leave out this chapter?  She was always 16.  She never realized it, and I didn't either, until many years past the age myself.  It finally occurred to me that the reason for her total inability to grow up past a certain nature, was the fact that she got married at the age of 16, and was in fact the youngest daughter in a large family and hadn't the chance nor the inclination to become any older.

She was an artist of crafts; mostly needle work, knitting, crocheting, seam-stressing.  Mother would sit for hours next to a radio and complete one work after another.  Sometimes they were teeny tiny dresses on little one inch gummy plastic baby dolls made way back in the 40s and 50s.  They attached to a pin and were worn on blouses and hats or purses, or hankies.  Sometimes she crocheted edging and design work on hankies, an item women for a long time unfortunately could not do without.  Hers were unique.  Lovely from the obvious first glance, if one lifted the lovely lacy skirt on the little ladies of Mother's hankies, the view was the revelation of what one would find under the skirt of the real thing.  Mom had a great sense of humor.  Even if it was illegal.

It was my luck to be born when she was about to embark into menopause, the excuse for every sort of peculiar behavior known to woman kind.  As a tiny child I observed her risque behavior daily when I accompanied her to the local village shops.  It was at times so embarrassing as to be intolerable.  We were after-all a Puritan society and backwoods politicists in our place and time.  Mom was something of an outrage.  She said what was expected to most people she met, then would unexpectedly say or do something that would cause us to roll our eyes back in our heads, while the eyes of others just grew too big for their heads entirely.  

My sister always tells the grimacing tale of Mother during 1950 taking a drink in the grocery store on a hot summer day, and then swiping up her dress to wipe the drips from her chin.  I'm not sure modesty was the question here, as much as the choice of underwear might have been.  Mom being an economist, wore underwear until it was merely a memory.  It hung on a clothes line for all the neighborhood to look through, translucent as fog at thigh noon.  Her old timey version of  thong wear.    They never had elastic left around the legs....ventilation?  and she never wore nylons above the knee.  This is not an attractive picture; maybe for Jane Russell, it would have been.  But Mom was a bit more corpulent.

And she told dirty stories.  Told them to men too.  And laughed quite loudly at herself, tears in her eyes.  She was certainly not a prude.  Sort of strange, how some folks come up in the world with the proverbial silver spoon in the teeth and seem to have no class whatsoever.  Maybe she just didn't feel she needed to cultivate any, starting out life very affluent and all.   Or maybe being mostly German, even if you are half German and half anything else, - you are still mostly German, she didn't even respect class.  I knew from viewing her siblings in group, that none of them seemed to recognize or need any class at all.  All of the siblings explained that father August Simon was the epitome of peasantry with power, no class...needed.  They were hard, with a type of humor that makes Lenny Bruce seem childlike.

Mom refused to keep house.  This I hated.  It was painful for me to have friends come to the house under these conditions.  There was a piano in one room that was littered with photos in frames.  The photos grew to become a mass of misplaced persons among books, clothing, dishes, knick knacks, garbage, gum, coins, records, crayons and lots of things buried which I could not see.  She allowed me artistic freedom to decorate the walls with crayons to my full height all the way around the rooms.  The wall paper was gangrenous anyhow, and the floors, old linoleum throws.  

Any chair in the house became a repository for clothing, all mixed from fresh to fair to really ungood.  In the good old days, economy included drying out baby's wet diapers after a pee or two and putting them back on baby a time or two more.  That odor comes to my nose in retrospect of Mom's homey environment.  The steps to the second floor were stacked with newspapers, way before the days of recycling.  What for?? Just in case you needed to pack up some glass, I guess.  Or start a house fire....

Anyway I found out centuries later that the reason for this awful lazy resolve was the loss of a previous home when she was first married, one that was a work of art and truly impeccable in every way.  In those days, bankruptcy or its nameless equivalent was a moral devastation, the great depression notwithstanding.  The loss left her bitter and remorseful and she swore to NEVER keep house again.  And in all the years to follow, that promise and prediction was adhered to with ease.

Mom always made us eat everything on our plates.  Imagine if something crawled up there that didn't belong.  Sometimes it did.  I recall the chicken soup with the black spice with tiny legs.  Oh, well, not to waste, you know.  She wasn't tossing out anything.  And we didn't always use a refrigerator.  I'm not just sure what qualified to have its use, but lots of roasts and soups just sat out and got ripe for awhile.  It allowed us kids the opportunity to get used to the little microbes that attack other normal people and make them sick when they go to Mexico or......Calcutta.  We don't get sick from that stuff.  We don't ever go hungry either.  "No food is too old,"...."I will not serve any food before its time...."

Mom was not a sentimentalist.  She would not give-in to feelings, as if she had none.  She was always looking for a good laugh or a good piece of cynicism, but old sad movies never entertained her.  Maybe she buried the sad stuff years before I ever knew her.  The only time I ever saw her shed tears was a time when I was a teenager, and she sat for two weeks at a table with Kleenex tissue pressed to her eyes as she stared out the window at the back yard and the woods beyond.  I couldn't figure it out.

The daily routine of this went on as she noticeably lost weight.  Then I realized that she might have intercepted a childish note and took it to seriously mean that I was about to run away with a boyfriend and be married somewhere.   At least that is the only thing I could imagine at the time.  There was no such plan at all in fact, and she never said a thing, so it remains a mystery.  It didn't seem to be any good reason for the extreme grief she exhibited, but I was only 16, the age she was, when she ran away and got married......somewhere.  

In the backyard and the woods beyond for a couple miserable weeks, she was probably watching her own old sad movie, the one I never detected, coming into replay.  I didn't run away to get married, and she never cried again.          Never.

Foothills of Childhood - Part 11

***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words.  It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail.  well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...one of several.  So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here.  Okay?

Part 11

Winter sports were prevalent 'time occupiers' as winter existed for about 9 months each year.  We called it spring and fall as well, but the truth is, we only had one warm year in history, sometime before the sand & gravel pit was formed.  Right after the last Ice Age.  

When we first started ice skating, I was 12 and my sister was 26.  She drove me around after her marriage broke up.  She had moved back home to live with us and her twin sons who were 7 years younger than I.  When I developed a crush on Denny Andrews, I talked Joanne into driving us out to his place to skate one cold night with promises of bonfires along the edge of the ice pond.  

She went for it gladly, since she virtually had no friends at this time other than myself and my goofy pre-adolescent almost pubescent plebes.  We were enjoying a real good skate until Joanne went through the ice.  We were not on a river, so she didn't need to fear for her life, but the cold to her hips was ultimate in both an unequaled sense of freezing along with a tremendously humiliating good laugh for the rest of us.

After that, we took up indoor roller skating as the alternative winter sport.  Actually, we were pretty damned skilled at this artful event, so the most painful thing about it was the bus ride to the Joyland Roller Rink, 30 miles away.  

Back in those days, the bus made a route through Rocky Grove and Sugarcreek (Homey names that conjure up a picture one would expect out of the mid south.)  The bus was an old yellow school bus rather professionally painted up with the name Joyland on the outside, someone's idea of the perfect entertainment facility during the late 40s.  

There was no heat in it, and no insulation, so on the trip up and back - for about an hour and a half each way, we took off our shoes and sat on each others' feet!  I recall Jim Patton, one of the Sugarcreek bums who really thought he was every girls dream, giving us a lot of unwanted attention, until the one night when Francis (who was every guys nightmare) removed his glasses off Jim's face and sat on them.  He couldn't believe it!  He was then blind and about as secure on the rink floor as a jelly fish on a tight wire.  

The best part about the bus was being singled out by the guy of your young dreams, to sit with during the trip, and making out like crazy in the dark.  I was lucky twice;  First I got Mickey, being his first real girlfriend; I was competing against the most adorable girl in all of Franklin, naturally curly blond hair, cute little nose, big dark brown eyes, fun  personality, sweet (something I NEVER was).  Looking back I guess it wasn't all that great an accomplishment.  Mickey turned out to be gay and came out of the closet when we were about 28.  I'm not sure just how the Joyland bus fits into all of that, but we did skate up a storm, and had a pretty damned good routine for a couple of untrained novices.

The second score was Mickey's friend Ronnie.  Ronnie was a pretty innovative skater also, and we worked up a cute routine on the floor, and the bus....  I had a favorite mohair sweater, silk neck scarf and short skating skirt, knee socks and my very own tooled white leather skates with wood wheels and new ball bearings!  We girls pulled our hair up into swinging ponytails, wore each others' lipsticks and were really sharp until one of us would discover that we had just started our period and had come unprepared!  

Someone would have to give up one of their socks for the night in this case...  Which reminds me of the night we tried to learn how to use Tampax.  Some of us already got the hang of it, not at all an easy thing to figure out for those of us who were virgins, and the dumbest virgin of all ...was...Karen.   I can recall 3 of us trying to figure this all out, instructions, suggestions going back and forth...even a suggestion to turn her upside down. What we went through to grow up with modern conveniences!

We had a unique type of fire escape at the school.  It was a long metal tube-slide like a water-slide.  We could climb up the inside and use wax paper to get it really slippery and fast.  Then we decided to put a little piece of wood (perhaps a pencil) in the door at the top during school, so that it wouldn't be completely shut, and would remain...unlocked.  

That night we climbed up the inside of the tube and broke into the school.  I had a couple of garter snakes with me, and put them in a couple of desks for my unsuspecting victims.  It seemed like a fun idea at the time.  We never really got into trouble for stuff like that, back then.  The principal was also our teacher, who had two grades - the fifth and sixth - in the same classroom at the same time.  He always knew who pulled this shit and never even bothered to question us.  He thought we were pretty entertaining actually.  

It was his job to catch us at the bottom of the chute during the fire drills.  After we got the thing waxed one time, I was first out and went literally shooting (or...'chuting') past his arms about three feet off the ground and over the edge of the hill, landing in a forward smoosh, not a roll, right into the coal ash and gravel and slid on down the path over the hillside.  My left knee still  has the gray ashes embedded in the scars from that one.  And I have a sharp acuity of that pain, primarily of the principal cleaning it up with Mercurochrome.

Foothills of Childhood - Part 10

***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words.  It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail.  well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...one of several.  

So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here.  Okay?

Part 10


*asterisk marks a name change for the sake of a small town.

When I first moved to Reno and got the mobility of a 28" boys' bike (which provided me a great deal of pain also, before I was forced to become extremely skilled on the thing in order to preserve my genitalia) we spent all day riding back and forth across our little village of Reno.  Right in the middle of the distance along the highway above the river, was a tiny cluster of small buildings being our town center of activity.  Which was about nothing.  

We had a little one room post office, wooden barn pole construction style, naturally, sitting in the darkness of high Norwegian Pines.  Next to that was a small gas station.  Next to that was the dairy store.  All small stores were called that; they had ice cream treats, candy, maybe one booth for sitting - with old leather or vinyl seats, and a table with everybody's' names carved in it since about 1907.  Every time we came through the door, a little bell above it somewhere jangled, not that you needed to be alarmed of anyones' entrance, you could reach from one side of the interior to the other.  

We all congregated there religiously everyday, after school, and during the summer, several times a day. There was one pinball machine, a flat freezer to reach down into on a hot day, and pop machines which allowed one bottle at a time to be gripped by the neck and removed after dropping in the proper coinage.  We all thought we knew for sure that the shop owner's son was "queer," and so the poor unfortunate kid was the brunt of many jokes, gay or not.  But they always got even with us.  They being the store owners.

After all, they lived in that store and got all the gossip about everybody else and therefore were able to embellish it and pass it along weathered with necessary dirty details.  Small town justice!  (and of course, the poor "queer" kid wasn't at all, finished his Air Force stint and got married and moved away from the jeering madness.)

One night back in 1957, my then 'crush' (*Bobby Forest) and a couple of younger kids, broke in to the store through some floor boards.  They stole about two packs of cigarettes, about what I would have done if I had been along that night.  They might even have left the money, the whole intent being just to get in and say that you could and that they did!  We really had no huge dishonesty issues to speak of in our little towns.  

For this deed, or misdeed, Bobby  being the oldest was sent away to a place for young delinquent boys for awhile.  He was genuinely one of the very nicest people I ever knew!  Bobby  came from a poor family where his mom was pretty much an alcoholic, but nevertheless, a very nice lady who was very beautiful and loved her children, unable to carry the obligation as she was drawn deeper into her addiction.

His dad was a nice man who nobody knew very much at all.  They lived a ways off down the highway just at the limits of the borough.  Mr. Forest had some old cars that we knew would someday be worth a small and mighty interesting bundle, be it monetary or intrinsic.  The cars were from the 20s and 30s.  Bobby customized a couple into "street rods" and learned the world of mechanics and the gas combustion engine from his dad.  

Anyway, all of the kids were soon sent off to different foster homes and became somewhat orphans so it would seem.  They were all sweet and cute kids, and would eventually choose various diverse lifestyles unalike and spread out all over the country.  Brother *Danny was my favorite though.  He never got to be any taller than myself.  He always looked like a little kid, with a tiny nose and a big cute as Hell smile, an easy laugh and a hand to lend to anybody in the world.  Danny never left town.  Every time I went back home, I found him.  He was always happy, no matter what, and always helping me out with my trucks and cars.  Sometimes he ended up sleeping on the couch at one of my nephews' apartments.  We would share a few beers, sneak out behind everybody and go off to a bar in the woods by a lake and dance and play pool and tell stories.  We would drive around in the dirt roads and watch the moon over the ponds, listen to the peep frogs and katydids in the cat tails by the swamps and go over old times.  Danny was always intrigued by the only story I ever told him about going skinny dipping in a large lake out west.  He had never done that, and was waiting for the opportunity, but I know it never came. 

 Anyway, down by the old homestead where Danny and Bobby grew up there was a gas swamp;  natural gas that leaches out over decaying glacial remnant material and oil deposits.  And their house was alone in that area surrounded by a half dozen acres of forest as well.  I will never forget the night they all ran up to my house to tell the story of the "swinging lamp."  All the guys in town were down there that evening in autumn.  

Danny only about 12, and the oldest kid with them was Gerry Nellis, who was 17.  George was there, he was my idol.  Boy, George was so handsome and mysterious.  He had qualities no one else in that village would ever possess.  He was introspective, pensive, quiet, thoughtful to the max.  He had curly brown hair that gleamed little bits of blond in the summer when he had that greasy stuff on it that guys used back then, and a pompadour that wouldn't lay down with a ton of it combed in.  Well, George was the only one I would have believed about this tale for sure.  He lived down there too in the swamp area.  

The story was, that they were all out in the field having a nice cozy bonfire, when they saw in the mist and fog off in a distance, a swinging light like the kind you would see from a kerosene lantern.  It was coming their direction, so they thought some hobo or hunter was just coming through the woods.   But then they saw the damned light all by itself, swinging just a few feet off the ground about tall-weed-height still approaching at the speed of a slow walking phantom.  The hair stood on the backs of their necks as they repeated the tale that night, I assure you.  

They found it hard to swallow, and their teeth chattered as fast as their lips could.  One of them ran into the house to get a gun as the rest ran right along behind.  They got a shotgun, and the oldest kid, Gerry Nellis,  walked right up to the light about 5 feet away and fired right into it, and emptied the shot fully.  The light disappeared ...but there was nothing else there at all.  It was uncanny.   

They ran back to the house, and up the hill and stayed there until my mom made enough bacon-fat-soaked french fries to keep them all in cholesterol for a week.  After smoking up all the Camels they carried, they packed it in for the night and jumped into George's '53 Kaiser with the right rear door tied shut by a piece of clothesline, and barreled off into the night.  

Lots of folks have seen these lights and attribute it to swamp gas burning vapors.  Who knows ???

Foothills of Childhood - Part 9

***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words.  It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail.  well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...one of several.  So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here.  Okay?

Part 9 (Some Colorful Characters)

*Asterisk marks the names changed for the sake of a small town.


Before the absence of Uncle Wayne, I recall the days of life as a child almost always in terms of summer.  Winter in the North woods is Hellish cold, but we were stock of good timber and somehow always found the fight with Mother Nature one that could be won, would be a good argument while we endeavored to beat her up, and after the conquest we could just laze around all summer and forget about it.  

When I was little on Halyday Street, I rode a little tricycle around the intersection area there on Main Street.  Across the four-way light, was a Golden Dawn store - and before that, I do remember a little tiny neighborhood grocery store, that 1910 pale kitchen green color.  You walked into one small room with one counter, some tables and one hanging unclothed light bulb.  I must have been a baby with this memory, because I view the scene from above it, not below it.  As if I am being carried upright and high.  

By the time the Golden Dawn moved in, I was big enough to hold onto the front of the grocery cart and ride it the whole trip through the store.  And those metal gateways that let you in and out were just perfect for me to reach up and swing from, for a good part of the shopping trip.  There was a teenage boy in the back at the meat counter who always gave me a free hot dog to munch on while Mama walked around and did what she did best, talk to all the people in the store. 

 He was Bob Evans, must have been my first boyfriend fantasy.  Or maybe I was just another little sister, but I always could count on a freebie, and it's been a lesson learned for utilization (with some dignity and carefully scrutinized selectivity) ever since, being a woman now and all....

At the store we could always be sure to run into some of the local colorful characters.  There was crazy Duke from up the run, who was one of the old men in hard gray suits and hard brown shoes and old cloth caps, who never worked anymore.  I never knew their stories.  They were too old and not too friendly, just "on the lonesome."  

Duke walked with a swaying rocking motion like a man with one leg about six inches too short.  Maybe it was, and I didn't notice this detail, being a kid.  He always talked to himself or to some invisible party alongside his wildly swaying short self.  His head moved quickly and sharply looking down before stepping off the curb and then up just far enough to check the traffic as he moved across the street.  He did a lot of crossing of the street there, and sitting on the bench in Cupola Park, the little patch of grass and clay in front of the old train depot.

Another good body we might have run into as *Flo Ring.  Flo may have been the most colorful of the bunch, she certainly was ugly.  She really was one of the homeliest women I had ever laid eyes on, and that's being kind.  I remember she was one of the half-witted ones that lived up the hill and around.  Some of these were born in the institution out at Polk, but some were not, and there were a lot due to the inbreeding of the woods-folk.  

She was just  - what we then would colloquially call 'retarded'  -  enough - to be unable to read or write, but smart enough to know what she could do.  And that lead to the way of life that would at least sustain her, not well, but at least alive, when the sun didn't shine and the long fight for warmth began again.  And maybe with her talents, she ended up being the warmest one of all during the cold spells.  

Flo was loud and boisterous.  Mama always got a large charge out of hanging out the upstairs window and calling down to her to ask what the Hell was going on these days.  Flo would always stop and yell up to her and tell her (and the rest of the neighborhood) just who was porking her now, and who they porked before her.  Mama would laugh like Hell and go running out the back door to tell anybody out in the yard who missed any of that report.  They would all let up a whoop in unison and laugh and start telling the latest dirty jokes.  

Mama got a lot of those jokes from Flo.  My sister Joanne was always embarrassed because Mama would stand at the open screen door and converse with this obnoxious loud prostitute on Main and Halyday, right in front of her teenage friends and all that, but years later, my sister and I took what we could learn from Florence too.   Well, maybe my sister took a little more than I did.  But then she had more fun.  The part I learned was the loud obnoxious "entertain the troops" part.  There would always be someone with an open screen door willing to laugh.  And my sister would always be warm in the winter time.

morfedite."  Now of course, I had no idea what a "morfedite" was, and for good reason obviously: no one else did either, including the person in question.  They had a name, probably something like Kim or Pat, or Kerry or Dawn/Don...which could go either way.   I don't even remember if the hair was long or short or if it even mattered.   Imagine the ambivalent nature of this one growing up and going to school with the sorts of people that live in a small town.  Imagine gym class....what did they wear?  How did they cope?

Down Main Street about a half mile was a group of small shacks built up the hillside along sets of wood and stone steps.  They were lived in by people poorer than ourselves.  I don't even know how people get to be this down trodden, but when they do, it's the saddest thing to see.   They always looked old and sad.  The sadness always was at the bottom of a pool of cheap booze.  The saddest house was the *Smuckers.  

They had a few children, and no employment and no money at all.  I remember going down there one Halloween and seeing the boxes they used for furniture inside the shack.  They put paper bags over the windows when the glass broke.   The glass broke from fights and bottles flying from the hands of a drunken father dispossessed of his senses.  The woman was always afraid to do or say anything.  She never had a family to go to, and had to stay with the kids to make sure...to make sure of what?  What would ever change?  

Somewhere in their past there had been a fire.  It had burned all the hair off one side of the youngest child's head, and melted away half of her face, and part of the other side.  She was quiet, sullen and timid beyond belief.  When I was her age, I was quiet and timid too.  Strangers could hardly get a word out of me, but it was nothing like 'Cathleen.'

School started for me, and it meant standing every morning out in front of the neighborhood triad of buildings to wait for the school bus, along with all the local bafoonery of students, a sad lot of intellectual morass.  I watched with deep sadness and anger as the bigger older kids started to ridicule poor little Cathy with her life-long scars and her life-long loss and her life-long resolution to be the recipient of this abuse.  

They would push her around and then hit her on the head with their metal lunch pails.  She would go silent, her eyes water with fear, and her lips quiver, but she didn't cry out or give in to the bullying.  When we got on the bus, I timidly sat beside her by choice.  We were both six.  I hated starting school by myself without my Mom, no one familiar in the room at all.  But Cathy needed a whole lot more camaraderie than I did.  

I asked her to come up to my house and play.  I offered her my Indian bow and arrow set and the feather headdress.  She came up that weekend with her big sister.  We were having a nice time getting to know each other and learning that we were none of us alone, until my well-meaning next door neighbor came out with a broom swinging in the air and chasing them off like wild dogs or vermin from the tunnel next to the house, warning them not to come back.  'Drakie,' the broom wielder said they had lice.  Sometimes you just can't win for all the losing.

Foothills of Childhood - Part 8

***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words.  It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail.  well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...one of several.  So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here.  Okay?

Going back to the period when we first made the move away from Oil City to the little village of Reno, down the road, I do recall when my Uncle Wayne made his sudden disappearance.  At the time, I only knew scattered details about his sudden move west.  It made no sense to me whatsoever.  When it all began, I was only about 9 years old, so conversations around me, were little noticed, barely catalogued, not metabolized, merely blather.  Only years later, as long as 25 years later, would I be told the rest of the story.

Uncle Wayne was what I would describe as slow.  He lived on the means left him by his tyrannical Dutch father, August Simon.   The inheritance consisted of the farm at the top of the hill in Cornplanter Township, named after Chief Cornplanter of the Seneca tribe.  On the farm were several lease lines making profits for oil companies, of which a portion of per-barrel profit would go to the land owners.  Wayne and Uncle Fritz were caretakers of the property, the lines, the barrels and the pump-houses.  Wayne was there a lot, and my older brother Charles always went with him to help or just to swap stories in the shade of the orchards, while practicing and learning what a back woods people do for survival.  

Wayne had informed Brother Charles about a group of 'hoodlums' known as the Whistle Gang.  Their story was covered at the time in the national news media, and many years later, I even found a large article about them again to my amazement.  The formation of the Whistle Gang would have come out of what we know as the "Black Hand," a branch of Mafia out of Sicily that held small towns in its grip from the early 1900s through the 20s, 30s, 40s and was left to memory mostly.  

As it went, they had been a group of the locals who vandalized, raped, beat up, bookied, loan sharked and stole from several of the merchants and residents of the neighborhood in the small towns of Oil City and Franklin at least.  Once loaded with big oil, natural gas and other subsidiary industries, the thugs drained their portion from the bottom of the money pit, the weakest, the poor to middle class, which were barely middle.

The gang's modus included the use of whistling as warnings amongst themselves while perpetrating their deeds.  After a long list of miscredits to their names, at least the leader was caught and held responsible for some actions, sent away subsequently to a federal prison somewhere far for a long time.

Then one day in the mid 1950s it came to the attention of the townsfolk that this gang leader was to be released and would be on his way back by way of the local train line.  Apparently, he was going to get off the train at the local train depot, either the one downtown, or ....the one next to our homestead property.  The nearest major stop before ours would be the one about 35 miles up the road to Meadville, a slightly larger dispatch.  

The day of his tentative arrival, his friends and family were located casually but noticeably around the benches at the depot awaiting the man.  A few news men also loitered, and possibly only a single policeman.  No "hub bub" was really expected.     and none there was....

At the same time, the night before, we were aware of the absence of Uncle Wayne.  Figuring him to be up at the farm, we put it out of our minds.  We never saw Wayne all the day that the Whistle Gang was being reunited.  But then, the Whistle Gang never found their man either.....

He didn't depart the train at Oil City, so the welcome entourage drove up to the Meadville Station to see if he was possibly there instead.  He wasn't there either.  He had been seen on the train, that was verified, before the Oil City stop.  A large dark figure of a man had boarded at the Meadville Station earlier that evening, described as being in his late forties, neither he nor the Whistle Leader was  seen thereafter.

The following day, as the buzz got around and the confusion continued over this gangsters whereabouts, Uncle Wayne came to the house and took Charles aside to commiserate privately.  He advised him to not do any digging at the farm anymore unless he checked with Wayne first.  It was a strange request, but raised no eyebrows, as my brother agreed to the order.  But I can still see my dad slightly grinning knowingly, quietly as always, cup of coffee in hand at the small old paint-worn table, a single sun ray wrapping him through a plastic yellowed kitchen curtain....

A couple of days went by with Wayne gone again, apparently cloistered at the farm.  Charles went up to see what was keeping him, and Wayne explained that someone was taking "pot shots" at him on the grounds, and he felt safer just staying put than walking around like target practice for a deer poacher.  I recall my Dad making a small smothered chortle and snicker at this.  Then he laughed his small quiet laugh, and said that...."no deer poacher would ever mistake big old Uncle Wayne for anything but what he was, a large dark Dutchman".   And it wasn't deer season, and we owned all the property in sight.  

Wayne warned blind Uncle Fritz and Charles not to come up to the farm for awhile and to "lay low" as he called it.  The situation didn't seem to lighten up, as I recall.  One day soon thereafter, my mother announced that Wayne had come down the hill in the black of night; he waited for the night when there was no moon out, and they are the blackest nights on earth - there - in the woods.   And he had gotten a train out of town that morning - destination - California.  Los Angeles.

One must realize the utter desperation in a soul for him to pick up and leave his home of 40 some years with nothing in hand, no money, and no intent for his future in what would only be a futuristic land for this stranger.  He was heading for L.A. after living in the stoic little countryside community of a bygone era all his totally uneducated life. Wayne with his speech impediment, his complete naiveté of anything outside the borders of a poor village was going to live with his sister, Aunt Lena. 

 She got him a job delivering newspapers, or vending them on street corners.  He soon learned how to use the race track.  He sent me five beautiful dresses after he arrived there, one for each school day of the week.   And a small hand-tooled leather bag from Mexico.  We never saw Wayne again.   And the missing gangster...was never heard nor thought of, his name long forgotten, his whereabouts never accounted for.

Foothills of Childhood - Part 7

Perhaps the death of my Grandma Earley was the first lesson to me on how a loved one's absence effects those left behind.  For myself at that time, my attachment to her, as to most people was one of some detachment, an observer who never got too close, close enough to let anyone hurt me.  

I was eleven when she left this family and the earth.  While she suddenly died, Grandpa was already in the hospital and he was not told of the event.  I do recall everyone talking about Grampa in the hospital asking about "Cora."  

"How is Cora? ...I know she isn't well enough to come up to the hospital to see me...  It is just too hard for her to get around with her legs the way they are.  Tell her I miss her, and I love her."

They were old, typically old.  Not the kind we see today, where you can't guess the age of the overdressed, over exercised, over-indulged senior citizens.  These people were the grandparents who were allowed to be grandparents; who were allowed the privilege of gaining some weight, getting soft, going white-haired or even bald, wearing 'work around the yard' clothes.   They were a comfort zone.  

And to each other - you knew they looked forty years younger.  Some people see each other through the memory's eye only, as well as the heart.  And that is how it was with them.  We never told Grandpa the woman he loved and missed and waited to see was gone, until he had to come home.  Imagine the sadness and the overload that impact must have had.  He wept like there was no tomorrow because there truly seemed to be none - for him.

Somehow, Grandpa Earley had the strength to recover without going into deep depression.  He did live with us in that small trailer for awhile, and my brother Charles was still with us at that time, and we kept Grandpa occupied.  In fact a few years later, he went to live with Gramma Cora's sister a county or two away.  Her husband had recently died, and since they were related by marriage and good friends of a lifetime already, they lived out his few remaining years together - good friends in a most beautiful comforting closeness.

When Grandpa died, I was living in my own apartment a few miles from my Reno home.  One night I came home about 10PM (uninformed yet of his death)  to see my Dad standing under the street light by my apartment, obviously waiting for me to return.   I had learned from a very early age that Dad's temper was not something to trifle with at all.   He was a gunsmith and a hunter, and a number of times he hunted for me, armed.  

That scene of him under the lamp post frightened me.  I never went home that night, and worried about why he was there like that the entire night.  Later I found out that he was there to inform me of the death, and to let me know that he and Mom were driving to Florida for a couple of weeks to visit family,  as of the next day.  It was an ambiguous relief, but I felt so guilty at having Dad stand there waiting for me for God knows how long, while I had been hiding.  

He could only have gotten angrier at the thought of me not being home, at a decent hour after-all!  The funny thing about that night was, it so frightened me that I never went home the whole weekend.  When I did get back, I found that I had inadvertently knocked the refrigerator's electrical plug out of the reciprocal.   The freezer was full of venison which now was really ripe from the long thaw.  All the ice and water - and, yes, venison blood - had run out and gone down through the walls into the ceiling of the apartment below.

The occupant of the downstairs unit, was one old woman of undoubtedly high moral character, and obviously no fun at all.  She must have had mold in her crotch, making her so crotchety.  The woman, who I never even saw one time, was my nemesis.  She hated me passionately, occasionally leaving letters in my mailbox telling me what a slut I was for staying out late, having visitors late, making noise...    After-all, I provided her the only interesting aspect of her life, intrusive as I might have been.  

Anyway, she deserved the smelly stuff in the ceiling, as far as I was concerned, something to break up the monotony of her sterility.   Finally, after many escapades at that slum joint, which it was, I was evicted, the house subsequently  condemned and consequently burned to the ground.  I don't know if she was in the place at the time of the burning, I was out of town, far away with an alibi.  

Foothills of Childhood - Part 6

***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words.  It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail.  well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...one of several.  So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here.  Okay?

It was shortly thereafter that my father decided to build us a small modest but new home just five miles down the road in a tiny village called Reno.  Our house by the railroad tunnel and depot was now condemned and marked for demolition.  The move meant we would share a trailer with my Father's parents, Gramma and Grampa Earley.  

Grandma Earley was a short rotund lady who laughed a lot, a quiet but full-to-the-heart laugh, and she was now hobbling around with the aid of her cane.  She too had been the victim of a few strokes; determination was her best point too, and she would not give up or give out.  

My remaining relatives recall her as a nasty mean cantankerous bitchy woman, but I never saw it.  She really favored me, and I felt that.  I sat next to her in her winter cold home, before the move to the trailer, when she had the ultraviolet heat lamp on to warm her rheumatic legs.  She crocheted and knitted terrible looking caps and mittens, things I gladly accepted from the loving giver/creator of gifts.  

When we all came to share the trailer together during the building of the new small house, I never noticed any change in her.  But of course she must have been terribly unhappy at leaving her house of many long years, her incredible dense wall of thick dark emerald ivy, her gardens of multi-colored zinnias, hollyhocks, hibiscus, all those personal rooms and items she tended for so many years with such care, now gone to be replaced by a trailer and new family in this small space.

Still, that didn't show.  Until one day she began to cry.  

Sometimes thereafter I would see her sitting on the lounger under the awning at the side of the trailer home, holding a hanky to her eyes, her body softly quivering in sobs.  I asked her what was wrong.  She never could tell me.  

Then one day I knew something terrible was wrong with her.  I went to our almost finished house next door and got my Mother.  She made me go into the back-bedroom of the trailer as we returned to Grandma and wait....    All I could hear was moaning, groaning over and over.   It was awful.  I was angry.   I muttered quietly under my breath in that back-room with my hands on my ears, "Please, just shut up.  Stop.   Stop it!"  No one could hear me, but myself.  I was angry, she was dying and I still would not cry.  It was my Grandmother's final stroke.

Foothills of Childhood - Part 5

Part 5

My disabled grandmother was Granny Simon.  She lived upstairs in an old house the family kept for her --- alone.  For awhile, Fritz and Bernie kept a room upstairs for them also, while Granny lived in one bedroom quite alone in the bed unable to leave it.  

Once in awhile under some unknown unbelievable will, she would pull her paralyzed body out of the quilts and get beyond the door to the stairwell leading to the downstairs...where the bathroom was.  I can only surmise she was stopped before a horrid end could come of her cascading the entire flight.

There was a large picture facing her bed, of a long-dead couple who stared at her hypnotically from a past century.  They were her own grandparents, fore-boding, menacing.  

The chore of taking food to Granny was sometimes mine when I visited Uncle Fritz and Aunt Bernie, even though I was too young to understand the motive behind my necessity in this scene.  Emotionally, I was almost flat in this, my way of not screaming in terror or crying in shear fear.  Granny made me incredibly sad.  She couldn't speak, but would try, and then she would cry, tears...at me...a little girl too young to even go to school yet.  

I could not understand her situation, but the picture of her torment reached me clearly.  I handed her the food, and she always reached softly for me.  Maybe she thought I was my older cousin Jane going through childhood again, Granny's favored adopted child.  Everyone spoke of Granny as being a saint with a stern hand.  If they really thought so, why did they exile her and leave her only to me at these times?  or to occasional 'check-ins' from the shack next door?  

Jane had been her favorite child, whom she had somewhat adopted beyond her own ten children.  So maybe she saw Jane when she tried to hug me without words and cried at me.   Anyway, after all these years, I still do not forgive myself the inability to reach back and hug back and utter any kindness besides my dumbstruck remote caution.  She died in a rest home on my tenth birthday, but my guilt for not being able to respond softly to her at that time did not.  and no, I never cried.

Foothills of Childhood - Part 4

***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words.  It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail.  well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...one of several.  So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here.  Okay?

Part 4

Uncle Fritz's wife, Bernie, was a beautiful natural looking lady, with hair to her knees, always braided up in a very Ukrainian style.  She was my favorite relative as a child.  I didn't realize until years later, after her demise, that Bernie didn't really like me.  To her I was just another unfortunate nuisance in her already too busy life of cleaning and waiting tables, cooking and taking orders.  Fritz was also a major autocrat and serious chauvinist, his way.  

Although blind, he still gave her orders on how to drive.  Finally one day when she was only 37 or 38, they left for California driving all the way, for a vacation visiting some of his siblings.  Bernie contracted pneumonia out there, or along the way, and died.  They had only been gone a number of days.  

I remember the body.  She was displayed at the home of her mother.  All of the family walking around eating and drinking around dead Aunt Bernie.  I was only 7.  I watched her.  I watched them.  And I listened very closely to everyone.  One of her sisters grabbed me and shoved me up to the casket and said, "Look, Susette, she is dead.  No more trips to Lake Erie."   Then she went on to say to someone else grown up and infinitely wiser than myself, "Kids, they just don't understand death, they can only equate it in terms of some kind of other loss."  I had been taught to never speak back of course, or speak up, so my anger burned quietly at the stupidity of this insensitive woman.  

I never cried.  My favorite grandmother died shortly thereafter, and my grandmother who was totally disabled and unable to speak also died next.  No, I never understood death nor did I cry about it.  Crying I left only for life and the death that drifts along with the living, the zombies.

Foothills of Childhood - Part 3

***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words.  It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail.  well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...one of several.  So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here.  Okay?

Part 3

Uncle Wayne was tall and hefty.  We said 'fat,' but looking back at them now, I realize they were just very big Dutch men.  The family had inherited oil properties, not the booming exploits they had been in the 1800's, but still slowly profitable.  The two brothers, my uncles - Wayne and Fritz, were the sole remaining brothers in charge of the lease lines and pump houses at the approximately 30 acre farm at the top of the hill in Oil City.  

Uncle Wayne would come by the house (a long walk from his place on top of another hill in town known as Pollack Hill), no one drove in that family, for some reason; still the dust bowl mentality I guess.  Then he would have me walk up the hill with him.  It was straight up and curvy.  I was about 2 feet tall.  The uncles always held my hand, and I well remember the blood draining out of my arm long before we made it up that forever long ascent on a hot sweaty summer Pennsylvania day.  

When we got there, I would spend a lot of time in the rabbit house.  Dad raised rabbits for pelts.  All my little years I was promised that someday I would have a rabbit fur coat.  It never happened. They finally became quite popular in the late 70's and 80's, but my husband always referred to them as 'whore coats,' so I was discouraged from finally ever obtaining one, not that I could have purchased one anyways, and so one of the dreams of childhood goes away. 

 Anyway, the farm, I recall how the acres of weeds grew up over my head, and I could be lost all day there smelling dry heat from straw grass and drying leaves from the apple and pear orchards.  There was beautiful golden rod, lots of wild purple flowers - even the purple thorn bushes were wondrous before they dried into trouble-some painful weedy things called 'thistles.'  There were lots of wild rose bushes, we called them bramble bushes.  and mostly there were white daisies and black-eyed Susans and orange day lilies and dandelions.  

It was wonderful, and in the fall, the trees were full of all kinds of apples.  We had an old fashioned apple cider press up there.  Cider was everybody's drink in autumn.  We never waited for it to 'harden.'  That happened by accident on the back porch.  It would suddenly foam up and pop corks or caps and spew a beery odor all over the place and be good and sticky and quite obnoxious, only making us laugh about it, and the good life, being able to pick those apples free and drink all you wanted before winter.  It was the last of the party season, and a long heritage of Germanic Octoberfest, and proof that an apple a day, or several, would certainly stave off a great deal of things.

Uncle Fritz was the real wizard of the family on my Mom's side.  He was blind from the age of about 30, very handsome, and another large burly Dutchman.  Extremely intelligent and indulged by his mother, he came to know how to subsist without doing real work.  Fritz maintained ownership of the lease properties and could do a lot without his sight.  Mostly he walked miles each day from hill to hill and up to the farm.  Also he collected antique guns - driven with a passion to do so, and coins.  

He married a Polish lady, Aunt Bernie, who was pretty and worked her ass off to keep them barely alive and living in a small shack of a house built around a small potbelly stove.  Myself and my twin cousins were up there a lot of weekends at that shack.  We all sat on his big lap as he told us marvelous fairy tales with infinite details and forever lengthy at his own creative genius.  

Fritz taught us how to count change and gave us mathematical riddles, which I hated (even now I have math anxiety) and he taught us how to use raw gun powder to make our own fun explosives!  He even had a little cannon for the Fourth of July.  

Fritz was also the unfortunate victim of constant belligerent kids who would mock him, and throw stones at him while he was walking blindly.  No matter how young I was, I was always completely surprised at how stupid and cruel any one at any age could be to do that sort of thing.  They amazed me.  Maybe that instilled in me the anger that spouts up whenever I see some wretch being unfairly treated.  In our family we were motivated very easily to take whatever measures necessary for defense and vengeance.  It is part of the poverty background but probably a good part.  

My Dad - although not very conversant - and quite reclusive, I do remember him saying before he died, that he always felt sorry for Uncle Fritz.  He hated seeing the way people treated him sometimes, and that Fritz couldn't utilize the talents that he had.  And here we are, with all of our senses intact, and fully capable of using talents which we choose not to.  Such is life.

"Foothills of Childhood" - Part 2

***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words.  It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail.  well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...one of several.  So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here.  Okay?

Part 2

While living at Reno, Pennsylvania, in the new little house, life became even more Tom Sawyerish.  My big brother Charles was 13 years older than myself.  He had completed time in Korea during the conflict, and he had converted to the Mormon faith.  Charles was now a very nice person, pretty mellow, gentle, able to appreciate everything there was.  He never lacked for a smile or a laugh, and became my Mother's darling, due to his constant doting manner.  

Charles lifted weights constantly, something he had picked up from Dad.  He dressed like a real nonconformist, a true Bohemian, probably due more to the absence of money and good taste than to the attempt to be different.  He never tried to be different, it surely just came naturally to him.  

He wore an Army green suit jacket, probably army issue dress, with a pair of ordinary dress pants, no jeans, no socks, an old pair of Cordovans, no shirt under the dress jacket...just tan on a hirsute chest.   He rode an old bicycle and sometimes he rode it with me, riding handle bars, or I rode mine alongside Charles.  We traveled through the woods on old roads made just for woods people, like the ones that live in Appalachia, or for travel by jeeps that needed to check the many oil lines in the hills.  

It was hot when we went, but there was plenty of mud and quicksand in the hills.  Sometimes we would travel for hours and suddenly I would call to his attention the fact that we were passing a poster on a tree which I had already read some time ago.....   

We found an overhanging boulder sheltering a cave overlooking the Allegheny high up on a ridge.  Dead-center was an ancient rock carved into the shape of a solid chair.  It had been a ceremonial seat for the Indians and Mound Builders.  It was wonderful.  The view went from hill to hill and from one city to the other.  

Strangely enough, from the ceremonial seat, one could look across to the opposite hill to an area known as Rich Hill and see one of our family's old homesteads.  It was a very large prestigious looking hacienda-styled home built by a rich uncle whose name was John Rich.  The roof was red tile, there was a square area used for gala events to set off hot air balloons around the turn of the century.  that is...the 19th to the 20th.  

Uncle John went on to be the subject of many interesting tales within the family circle.  He made the paper many times, as did his wife, my Aunt Lena, even the New York Times, but we are talking about 1916.  Especially when he was indicted on a charge for some kind of stamp collecting embezzlement, and now we are talking about 1930.  Hers was more interesting, if not criminal.  We will speak of that later!

   Anyway, Charles taught me to never go into the woods without a great deal of rope, just in case you do fall into the quick, or fall into one of the old wells, many of which were just boarded over from a hundred-fifty years ago and more.  We found a small settlement of woods-folk one day;  The kind that lived on both sides of a small dirt path in about four little wood shacks.  They all had old hickory-twig chairs and maybe a porch swing out front.  

The women all looked like the men, only they wore dresses of flour sack material, and smoked the same corn cob pipes as the men.  The men wore old tattered felt hats and straw hats and overalls and looked like they were very inbred, which they were.  Everybody had the same name before they were married, oh, maybe they were not married, but they were certainly all related.  

And they had dogs and cats sitting on the porch with them, chickens pecking around, and I don't believe any of them could play a banjo to save their souls.  

Years later, I would work with the Head Start program, when Lyndon Johnson first initiated the War on Poverty.  I would meet some of these same types again searching through the woods for kids who were not registered with the state.  There were children eight years old who had never seen a pencil, never seen an orange, a crayon, a pair of glasses.  It was not culture shock to me, however.  I did feel privileged, even though my own shack was bleak at times as a younger child.  Nothing was as dark as these spots.

     In the new house, my next door neighbor, Linda, the girl one year older than myself, had become my new best pal.  We dedicated a great deal of time to our resolve that we could grow up one day without sprouting breasts.  "Imagine, the humiliation of walking around with those things poking out at everyone, you can't pretend they aren't there!  Everyone sees them!"   

We were adamant, and for a longer time, Linda lucked out.  She held out until she was about 18 before her breasts decided they could no longer grow concave.   She also resisted full blown puberty until she was at least 16, an achievement most worthy and highly unusual.  

I failed the test by the time I was 12.  It was my ruin.  They were not big, but I knew they were there, and so did Billy Bean and Denny Weeter.  I used to get dressed for bed at night on the floor behind my bed because I just knew the local pervert boys were outside somewhere trying to peer in at me and every girl I knew.  

They probably were, because just that same time, I had invented a handful of periscopes out of cereal boxes and pocket mirrors, for myself and my little girlfriends so we could 'spy' on these guys in THEIR houses!  (However, we restricted our views to the living room, kitchens and dark root cellars.)  

These periscopes enabled us in the "Detective Spy Club" to see up over window sills, and down into cellar window wells.  We were smarter than the guys.  and we were better at being Huckleberry Finns than they ever could be.  Boys were really stupid back there.  That didn't make them special.  Boys were really stupid everywhere.  (Denny grew up to be Dr. Dennis, a nuclear physicist and taught the same at Penn State. How silly.)