Red Dog Days I

Suddenly and without warning, I am old. And I’m starting to feel like it. I get out of bed with aches and pains that I didn’t have when I went to bed.When I realize how much time has gone by in my life, it makes me want to reminisce, although very often it makes me melancholy to do so, because the only way I can go back is in my head and on these pages.

When I was a kid, we left the house in the morning and came back for lunch, dinner, and when it got dark. A cliché by now I know, but that was the reality. Other than those three times, we were expected to be gone, out of the house, and out of our mothers’ hair. They had adult things to do and we had kid things to do. It was just the natural order of the universe. The only time I stayed in the house was on selected Saturday afternoons, starting at 3:00 p.m., when the original Chiller Theater was on. It was non-negotiable. Black and white movies on a black and white television. This was where I learned about Godzilla, The Monster from the Black Lagoon, Them, The Thing, and one of my obsessions, Molepeople.

I don’t want you to think that my parents didn’t care about me. There were certain restrictions regarding my outdoor adventures. We were not allowed behind the bible, the large stone and concrete bible monument at the edge of the cemetery we lived next to. It was (technically) cemetery property, but practically it was an adventure park that was fueled at least by the fact that it was forbidden; also because John, the cemetery caretaker in his red pickup truck, liked to eat children who wandered onto cemetery property. He was fast, but he wasn’t kid fast.While John couldn’t catch us, I’m afraid that karma could, and did.

One sunny October day the bunch of us went back there to play. We were dressed, luckily, in long-sleeve sweatshirts and jeans. We got behind the bible and I sat down on the ground and kept hearing a loud buzzing sound. I had sat my ass down directly on top of a hornets’ nest. All of the hornets were home because it was swarming season. They were not a bit happy about being disturbed and rose up in a huge cloud of buzzing anger. You have never seen a group of eight-year-olds run so fast in your life. The great part was that the chubbiest, slowest kid in the group was a blur as he passed us up like we were chained to a fence and he was on fire. When I got home I had hundreds of hornets hanging all over my sweatshirt. I’d only been stung a few times in the neck. My mother, assuming that they were all either dead or worn out, began swatting at them with the dish towel she was carrying. They were not in fact dead but very much alive and now really really angry. They swarmed all around and I think I took a few more shots to my head. Finally they dissipated and I was left with welts and one sweet bunch of explaining to do.

Another forbidden zone was about a mile away down a large hill, and through a bit of woods. That was the old brick garbage incinerator (still there, by the way). Now there was a target that was tempting beyond imagination. An abandoned structure. Kids. They just go together. My mother always told me to stay away from there; that bums lived there. That of course was the type of scare tactic used by mothers since forever, but she might as well have said that little kitties lived there and we should go pet them. We wandered around the area quite a bit, off and on, and of course the anticipation was much greater than the reality. Until one day we ran across a fresh campfire with used tin cans strewn about. That sprint was not quite equal to the sprint away from the hornets’ nest, but it may have set a new one-mile record.

Then there was THE CLIFFS. It was an old rock quarry and the approach from our houses was on the bottom side of it. Looking up was like staring at the peak of Everest from a base camp. And for us, “because it is there” was a good enough reason to climb. Plus, at the top was all of the abandoned quarry equipment, including stone cutting saws and other industrial equipment. Or as we knew it, Paradise. We normally climbed up and down without a problem, but one day I climbed onto a ledge about halfway up and realized that I had no way up and no way down. Ricky had to go run home (mile or so away) and get some rope and help. They lowered a bullrope to me and I climbed up to the top. No harm, no foul.

Down in the backyard of one of my friends was a fence that ran the length of the neighborhood. On the other side lay adventure. The other side was a couple of acres owned by one of the original residents of Carroll Township. I don’t think any of the residents ever came down to the bottom of their property. Part of it was pretty much an open field, but there was a circle of very tall pines surrounding a beautiful, grassy patch. Once inside the pines, no one would ever see you. On another area stood three weather-worn, dilapidated, and collapsing one-room houses in a row. We understood that these were servants’ quarters. By the condition of them I would guess 50 years or more had passed since they were used. Someone had to look inside. The floorboards were broken and fallen in. I have no idea how many animals had used them for a home, or how many were actually home at the time. No, we were too pumped with adrenaline to care. The greatest find of all was a WWI gas mask and some sort of flag. I didn’t recognize the flag, and to this day I cannot remember what it looked like. We grabbed our treasure and ran for the fence, climbed over and ran to my friends’ house. There we began to examine the trove with which we had absconded when their mother appeared and demanded to know where we had obtained our artifacts. We could hardly contain our excitement as we described the houses and their contents and how we made it in and out and back over the fence and the entire discussion came to an abrupt halt when she held out her hand and said “You are not allowed in there. Ronnie I will be telling your mother what you did.” With that, the historical, museum-quality artifacts were lost to history, and we were given our due, which was far less pleasant than the consequences of climbing around dilapidated houses could have been.

Our roads were made of red dog and were unnamed. There was “our road,” the “first road,” and the “second road.” Red dog came from scrapped mountains of coal that were unusable due to the mixture of stone, sulfur, and other impurities with the coal. The heat generated within those mountains caused the coal to ignite and bake the stone so that it turned various shades of red and even orange. The roads were hell to ride a bike on, so you had to be an expert rider. The stones had sharp edges like flint, and if you fell, you hoped your mother had plenty of iodine and Bandaids because there would be blood. Once a year the township oiled the roads to keep the dust down. That was a most glorious day of the year! Of course it meant that we couldn’t walk or ride our bikes on the road for a week or so, but we got to play in the oil. In spite of our mothers’ best efforts, we always ended up with oil on our shoes, which of course we then tracked right across the linoleum floor that they just waxed. We enjoyed ourselves making dams to hold back the running oil, then throwing various objects into the lakes of death. It was the early 1960s—we were easily entertained.

Our toys were simple, yet in some cases, deadly. I had a mortar that was a three inch diameter tube, tripod-mounted, and about two feet long. It had a metal plate in the tube that was attached to a large diameter sprint. The spring was compressed with a cocking device on the side of the tube, readying the mortar with a hair trigger. When anything went down that tube and hit the metal plate, it immediately came back out at about 200 feet per second. Heaven help the twerp that had his or her face over that tube. The mortar came equipped with plastic shells, but they were definitely not exciting enough. No, we used dirt bombs–basically a fist-sized lump of hardened clay in somewhat of a spherical shape. That mortar threw the dirt bombs in a long parabolic arc, landing about 100 feet from the mortar and exploding in a spray of shrapnel and dust. Perfect.

We also had the early versions of Estes rockets. Always fun, and always dangerous. The engines came with a fuse that had to be lit with a match. No electronics to keep you at a safe distance from the hurling missile. The process was 1. lay on the ground on your stomach near the launch pad, 2. light a match and hold it to the one inch long fuse, 3. wait for the familiar hiss, and 4. roll away as fast as possible. We never had a casualty, except for the rockets, which occasionally went up and apparently ended up in Oz.

Winters were great in the early 60s. Road cleaning equipment was scarce and tire technology as well as automobile technology were relatively primitive. The cars had rear, one-wheel drive, which meant if you slipped, you were done. Limited slip didn’t arrive for a few more years. At any rate, that all meant that when it snowed, nobody went anywhere. That absence of traffic meant that the roads were open game for sled riding. Because we lived on a hill, the roads were perfect and we took full advantage of them. Well, until the road crews did show up with a plow and ashes. They didn’t use salt to clear the roads. They just put ashes on top of the snow to give you some traction. Obviously those ashes (I believe it was potash left over from coke burning) were the enemy of sled runners. When we would hear the truck coming we would load up on snowballs and pelt the hell out of that truck. We also did some serious sled riding in the cemetery. It had a seriously steep road on which we would build yankee bumps to launch us on the way down the hill. It was a perfect place except when our old nemesis John would show up to clear the roads. Needless to say, he was not a fan of our using the cemetery for our own purposes. But he still never caught us.

End of Part I