The Tour 3 – West Auglaize

Caption: 717 West Auglaize Street as it appears today.

The move from Pine Street to West Auglaize was a monumental change for our family.

Auglaize is Wapakoneta’s main street. The town also has a Main Street, but it’s not the main street: Auglaize is. Back then, when I was growing up, if somebody said something about “a store up on main street”, they weren’t talking about Main Street (where there were no stores, except for a gas station, Lavina’s Beauty Salon, which was run out of the home of the lady of the same name, and Big Ed Clark’s Ford Dealership at the far end), but Auglaize Street, which was where Downtown Wapakoneta – with its multiple five-and-tens, bars, restaurants, shops and offices – was located.

A River Runs Through It

The street was named after the river that runs smack through the middle of town. The river is located less than a hundred yards from the street and runs pretty much parallel to it “behind town”, before curving and meandering off toward the northeast where the city parking lot ends, later roughly bordering a stretch of the old Baltimore and Ohio Railroad that crosses Auglaize Street north to south at the far end of the Downtown business district, causing what passes for a “traffic jam” in Wapakoneta, every time one of the still frequent freight trains rattles through town heading south, west of the Old Dixie Highway.

There are two theories about the name. One is that it comes from the Native American term meaning fallen timbers. I personally put little stock in this version since I have yet to hear anyone say what that “Native American term” was (and in the language of which Indian nation – Shawnee, Ottawa, Delaware, Mingo, Wyandot, Miami, Ojibwa or Potawatomi, all of which formed part of the so-called Western Confederacy led by Chief Blue Jacket, which was active in the area when the United States was still struggling to tame and control the Ohio Territory). This theory probably has something to do with the fact that the decisive Battle of Fallen Timbers (1794) – which led to white settlers and natives signing the Treaty of Greenville the following year and to Ohio’s being admitted to statehood in 1803 – was fought only about 60 miles from the confluence of the Auglaize and Maumee (of which it is a tributary). But I never really understood the connection. It always seemed to me to be tenuous at best. The other theory is that the name is a bastardization of eau glaise (from the French: eau meaning water and glaise meaning clay), hence, muddy water. This one seems more logical to me, since, first, the clay bed of the Auglaize indeed gives it a milky greenish color when it’s calm and a coffee and cream hue when it rages through town during the spring thaw, and, second, French trappers and traders were active in the Great Lakes region in the early days of the Ohio Territory and the Auglaize forms part of the Great Lake Erie watershed.

Downtown Wapakoneta is built along East Auglaize Street. West Auglaize is residential and the setting for some of the city’s oldest and most beautiful homes. When we moved onto West Auglaize, the mayor, a judge, a bank president, a couple of doctors and the managing editor of the newspaper all lived just a few doors away, as did members of some of the most long-established families in town. Dad acted like it bothered him that some of the regulars at The Teddy Bear (the restaurant and soda fountain that he owned with two of his brothers) kidded him about “livin’ out there with the ritzy people”, but knowing Dad, I think that, underneath and for as long as it lasted, it was a source of pride for him.

Although our house at 717 West Auglaize wasn’t one of the truly impressive, palatial, mansions that graced the gently curving, elm, oak and maple-lined blocks closer to Downtown, neither was it a commonplace home, by any means. It was already about half a century old when we moved there in 1958. It had been built to the specifications of its original owner, a man by the name of Winget and his surname was carefully chiseled into the riser of one of the quartz-sandstone steps leading up from the street to our front porch. There were two front doors (717 and 717½) since, for some reason, the house had been built as a main house and an apartment. Ever economically-minded, my father was surely attracted by this aspect, since it meant the big house would also provide a monthly rent to help pay utilities and taxes. Despite the division, however, the house was certainly anything but cramped.

A Life of Its Own

Old houses have a life of their own. Especially huge old houses replete with nooks and crannies, which have absorbed the tears and laughter and witnessed the lives and deaths of successive generations.

The Winget house at 717 West Auglaize was no exception. If you were the least bit sensitive, you felt it as soon as you stood alone in one of the rooms – a vibration, not unlike some distant tuning fork, a kind of constant, if almost imperceptible hum that was the life force of the house itself, the spirit that it had developed by soaking up half a century of human energy. Now it lived on its own and permitted us, as the new residents, to live there. Paying for it didn’t make it ours. We could lend ourselves to it, repair it, care for it, but the house was its own. It belonged to itself.

In a certain way, a house that lives to a ripe old age becomes a sort of unwitting sanctuary, a keeper of secrets, a repository of joys, sorrows, songs, cries and whispers, the recorder of a cavalcade of intimate human events. The DNA of its residents hides in its cracks and crevices, the walls are steeped in the remnants of their exhalations, their footsteps echo in its remembered past, the lint from their clothing and the dust of their skin nestles under the woodwork, no matter how immaculate its present homemaker may be. Only brand new houses are spiritless, and from the first day that someone takes up residence in them, they start absorbing life and becoming an autonomous entity of their own.

A Walking Tour

Touring the main house from front to back, the front door opened off of the roofed, iron-railed porch into a small, rectangular sunroom that served as both an entrance hall and as an extension of the living room. It had windows on three sides (counting the front door which had tall narrow panes on either side of it and a windowpane in the top half of the door itself) and was a wonderful place to sit on the small divan that my mother had placed in a corner there and read when the sun was bright.

Caption: Jim and Dan worn out from practicing cowboy 'rope tricks'

Through a square archway lay the living room, which, although it had no windows of its own, received light from the sunroom and from the dining room. It had built-in ceiling to floor bookcases in the northeast and northwest corners of the room on either side of the arch that it shared with the sunroom. I was an avid reader by this time – despite my poor eyesight, which no one had detected as yet – and found this a fascinating feature. To think that someone had actually remembered books when building the house all those years ago and built in a specific place for them! Through yet another ample, square archway was the dining room, with large windows in the western wall and a fireplace built into the eastern one. The fireplace had long since been bricked up, converted to gas, and then decommissioned altogether, but what remained was its lovely firebrick front and heavy oak mantelpiece. Between the dining room and the kitchen was a swinging door of hardwood and frosted, bevel-cut glass.

Caption: Darla, Jim and Dan with new family member, Corky, in the doorway between the living and sun rooms

Typical of houses from the 19^th century, the kitchen was spacious but ill-planned. A big square room with a high ceiling, it was so dark that artificial light was required even on the brightest of days. It had a side door with a windowpane in the upper half and a large double-sash window in the west wall, but they both gave onto a roofed, screened-in porch, of similar proportions to the kitchen, which projected from the house onto the driveway and absorbed light from the north, south and west. So while the porch was a lovely addition, it made the kitchen dungeon-dark. Nor was there any counter space to speak of. Country-style cupboards lined the east wall ceiling to floor and between the upper and lower ones there was a ledge about fifteen inches wide, which was what passed for a counter – actually just someplace to temporarily set whatever one took out of the cupboard before using it. A clever carpenter had created a pull-out counter of sorts about a foot and a half wide and two feet long near the stove, which was an okay place to put ingredients one might be working with, but not resilient enough to be a real work space. So, as in the farmhouses of the same era, it was important to have a large, sturdy kitchen table on which all major food preparation could be carried out. And there was no shortage of room for one. Similarly inconvenient was the placement of the range and oven connections at the north end of the room and the kitchen sink at the south end, so that pots, pans, dishes and utensils had to be carried from one end of the kitchen all the way to the other each time a task was finished and the items used needed to be washed. But in its defense, the old kitchen had a pantry. Access to the upstairs of the house (the only access, which was yet another inconvenience of old-time, farmhouse-style construction) was from the kitchen, which left a slope-ceilinged space under the stairs and behind the kitchen cabinetry. And that was a nook that had been wisely pressed into service by the original owner for staple food storage. For some reason, however, my mother never found any particular use for it other than as a place to put the mops, brooms and dustpans. And this was okay with me, because it quickly became one of my hideouts – a kind of clubhouse for one, with an electric light on one wall by which to while away time reading magazines and comic books and pretending I was in my cabin in the Canadian Rockies or Alaska, places I had read about and dreamed of going some day.

Off of the kitchen there was a door with transparent beveled glass panes (which seemed odd considering where it led) that opened into the master bedroom, which was in suite with the only bathroom in the main body of the house. This meant that anytime anybody in the house had to use the bathroom, he or she was obliged to invade the master bedroom. In a household with three youngsters, this must certainly have placed a strain on our parents conjugal relations. The bathroom had a small privacy window for ventilation, but it opened onto the utility room rather than onto the outdoors. While the rest of the house was in need of remodeling, the master bedroom had apparently been a privileged place for the former owners since its walls were covered with a pricey velvet-relief, gold-flocked wallpaper, which bore an aristocratic pattern and in a deep royal red tone that contrasted beautifully with the gold leaf. The wide, antique woodwork had been painted in a tasteful ivory tone and there was a high-quality, full-length mirror attached to the surface of the heavy, hardwood, bathroom door. Like all of the other bedrooms it had a walk-in closet and was so roomy that my mother joyfully bought herself a used vanity and chest of drawers, which never would have fit into the bedrooms of our other homes, and refinished both pieces of furniture herself, using varnish remover and an antiquing kit that she purchased from Bowsher’s Hardware, a locally owned and operated store on the main drag of town – a building that would later be occupied by the regionally renowned Meinerding’s bar and grill. It was a bright cheery room with a big double sash window in the west wall and two high privacy windows in the south wall.

In the far southeast corner of the master bedroom, practically hidden by the closet, there was a solid wood door leading into the utility room. That was where the tank heater, washer, dryer and fuse box were. As utility rooms went, it was good-sized and bright with two big double-sash windows in the south wall looking onto the back yard. The back yard, in turn, gave onto West Pearl Street, with the house and yard thus straddling the entire block between Auglaize and Pearl.

This was not as grand as it sounds. Pearl started at the west end of our block forking off from West Auglaize, so that our block was shaped, west to east, like a slice of pie. Our lot was of respectable size, since ours was the fourth house in from the corner and thus situated in the wide part of the slice, but still two houses away from where the block was actually a full block wide with houses fronting on both streets.

The utility room had another door straight across in front of the one into the bedroom. That one had a lock and bolt and opened onto a small landing. Turn left off of the landing and you descended the stairs into the cellar. Turn right and you went out the back door into the back yard. Straight across was the back door to the other part of the house – a five-room apartment that ran the length of the east wall of the main house.

Through that back door, you entered the apartment’s kitchen. It was a much pleasanter and more practical kitchen than the one in the main part of the house. The sink, range and oven created an L-shaped work area just inside the door in a corner formed by the south and east walls of the house. There was a big window over the sink facing south, through which light streamed most of the day and another large window in the east wall, next to the stove. There was ample space for a kitchen table and chairs at the far end of the room and plenty of cupboard space and shelving.

Through a doorway at the north end of the kitchen was the bedroom, which tended to be dark, since it only received light from the kitchen and living room windows when the doors to those two rooms were open. The bathroom was off of the bedroom against the wall of our utility room. It still had a translucent glass window to let in light from the utility room windows, but when the apartment had become a rental property, that had become a fixed window so that it provided no access to the main house. I imagine that the only ventilation the apartment bathroom had must have been via the air ducts for the central heating system. The living room opened through an archway with sliding hardwood doors off of the bedroom. It was a small, though not cramped, square room with two large double sash windows that looked onto the side yard shared with the house next door. It was bright and pleasant, with its light-colored walls and dark-varnished door and window frames. Off of the living room and separated from it by a French door with multiple beveled-glass panes, was a small sunroom, glassed in on the east side, that served also as an entry hall and gave onto the front porch through a second front door exactly like the one to the main house, except that our door faced east and the apartment door faced north at a right angle to each other.

The upstairs of the house on West Auglaize belonged only to the main residence. It consisted of three bedrooms and an attic, accessible, as I mentioned before, only by means of a steep back staircase out of the kitchen. The first room on the right over the apartment was my sister Darla’s, the only room with access to the attic. The one to the left over the main house was mine and my brother’s and the third one facing onto Auglaize Street was what my mother had deemed “the spare room”.

The Games We Played

What I recall most about childhood activities at the house on West Auglaize is my growing fascination with reading and about how the imagery that sprang from the reading started emerging in our games. At first, my tastes were inherited from my older sister. And Darla had suddenly become obsessed with horses and horse stories.

When we first moved there, my little brother Jim was only four and I was nine, so most of my interaction with him consisted of teasing him until he screamed bloody murder. He found lots of things to keep himself entertained and just across the next yard over from ours were two houses with children just about his age so he didn’t lack for playmates and was immediately popular with them. My sister and I, however, continued to have the same close ties and the same fantasy world that we had shared on both Defiance and Pine Streets. But now it was more interesting because I too could read and write – and intellectual child that she was, Darla really had little use for anybody who couldn’t.

Black Beauty, Beyond Rope and Fence, Tonka, the shelves of the living room bookcases began to be lined with the titles of equestrian novels and reference books for children as Darla collected every story she could about horses, ranches and stables. This new obsession was fed too by a new friend, Mitzy, whose father was a newsman who had moved to Wapak from someplace in the South to take up the post of Managing Editor at the Wapakoneta Daily News. Mitzy, her mother and father and her older brother Ned lived just across the street in half of a huge old double house, whose back yard reached the banks of the Auglaize. With the arrival of Mitzy, another element was added to the equestrian mix: a growing collection of porcelain horses, not unlike one Mitzy had in a glass case at her house. One of the higher bookshelves that our little brother couldn’t reach was cleared for the little horse figurines that began to grow in number until they formed a veritable herd. Darla carefully collected them, buying them at Murphy’s, Grant’s or Wright’s five-and-ten with her allowance, asking Mom and our grandmothers for them for her birthday or for Christmas and receiving a few as gifts from her new-found friend.

She regularly dusted them, rearranged them and admired them from afar, occasionally taking them down one at a time in order to teach me their breeds and how to recognize them: “This is a quarter horse. See how he’s smaller than the rest? This is a pinto. They have these big white patches. This one’s a palomino. They’re blonde, like Roy Rogers’s horse, Trigger. This is a roan. Looks a lot like a bay but redder and with light-color mane and tail. This is a chestnut bay. See the dark brown body and the black mane and tail?” And on and on she would go, naming one kind of horse after another.

If I was ‘really careful’, she would sometimes let me hold one of the members of her horse collection. But I wasn’t satisfied with that. I wanted to play with them, make them gallop across the hills and dales of the couch and armchairs, build a corral for them on the living room floor. I was doing precisely this in Darla’s absence one day when one of Darla’s favorites, a shiny black stead with lowered head and raised front hoof, not unlike her revered Black Beauty, slipped from my hands and fell to the floor. The proudly raised front leg broke off clean at the knee. I quickly put the entire herd back on the shelf, pushing the wounded mount to the rear in the hope that no one would notice, but Darla knew right away that I had been tampering with the collection.

A rowdy scene of vengeance and tears ensued as she slapped and kicked me all over the living room and chased me through the house to the kitchen where our mother halted the mayhem and asked for explanations. Our cases pled, the judgment was handed down and, as the eldest, poor Darla lost out as usual. It was, she was told, her own fault for being so selfish and not letting me have a couple of the horses to play with. And this was the fine imposed on her. I got the black one with the broken leg, of course – Mom fixed it with airplane glue and it was good as new – and a pinto, since she had a number of pintos. I got one that was just standing still staring dumbly off into space rather than any of those in action poses.

But I was content with my two horses, which I placed on a separate shelf, out of Jim’s reach. He would point at them and say, “Horsey!” And I would say, “You can’t have them so just forget it.” And he would proceed to throw a fit and scream shrilly enough to shatter crystal, and Mom would intervene, saying that if Darla had to let me play with her horses, I had to let my little brother play with mine. My two horses thus eventually succumbed to his reckless infant hands, but by then I had moved on to other adventures.

Mitzy, unlike Darla, had actually owned horses, when she lived down south and planned to own one again as soon as her father found her a place to board one. And suddenly Darla started talking about the horse she was going to own. Our mother quickly let her know that owning a horse wasn’t in her future.

“You had a horse when you were a little girl,” Darla whined.

“That was different,” Mom said. “We lived out in the country and it wasn’t a horse but a pony and I rode her to school which was over two miles away, because the snow was up to my knees in winter.”

“I could keep it at the Fairgrounds.”

“Ha! Right! I can only imagine what that would cost!”

“Mitzy says its cheap.”

“That’s because Mitzy’s father can afford it. Yours can’t so just quit driving me nuts about it.”

And so, the equestrian fervor was channeled into other activities. Rainy Saturdays Darla and Mitzy spent at the long table in our dining room, reading passages from horse novels to each other and then writing stories of their own – which bore a striking resemblance to the passages previously read – on fat tablets of Golden Rod lined yellow paper. Between the two of them, it was hard to tell which was the more erudite, brainy little girls that they both were. Despite my pedestrian status, they tolerated my sitting at the table writing stories of my own. Mine were mostly childishly rewritten episodes from the cowboy series I watched on TV and were greeted with total indifference by the two older girls when I read them aloud. Meanwhile, their mutual praise and admiration were utterly effusive when they read their own stories to each other. And unlike mine, theirs were purely equestrian tales, stories starring horses, usually wild ones, and in which men were almost always the villains. These were tragic tales of wild horses corralled and broken. The language was technical and specific: check reins, curb bits, tack rooms, cruel whips, savage quirts, vile spurs, wicked hobbles. They knew the vocabulary and found ways to employ it to devastating effect.

And when the sun shone, the stories were acted out. We weren’t people in these stories, but horses. Mitzy with her dark mane was a black beauty, despite the thick-lensed, horn-rimmed spectacles she wore to correct her severe myopia. Tall, blonde Darla was a fine palomino. I wanted to be an appaloosa or an Arabian, but they would snicker derisively at my pretense and tell me to be a quarter horse or nothing. Our entire back yard was bordered by hedge rows, lovely waist-tall hedges that formed an unbroken wall except for the entrance cut through it near the driveway and garage and again on the other side of the drive where a narrow cement walkway led from the garage to the back door. These hedges, then, became the corrals with which bad white men sought to fence us in – while the good Indians often came to our aid and let us go. (White men were about control, about saddles and tack, whips and spurs, barbed wire and tall corrals; Indians let us roam free, rode us bareback and lived, like us, on the open range, ever wandering and savage. Darla and Mitzy were very clear on this point, while for me, it clashed with the admiration I felt for my cowboy and cavalry heroes and was already causing me my first philosophical – and ideological – dilemma).

It wasn’t a sport, but for budding intellectuals, it was a lot of exercise. Darla was, of course, the instructor. From her I learned to trot, canter and gallop, to rear up on my haunches and to bound, steeplechase style, over the hedge rows. Well, I mean long-legged, skinny Mitzy cleared the hedges with ease, and my tall gazelle-like sister flew over them like the graceful palomino that she portrayed, but chunky quarter horse that I was back then, I tended to catch a hoof midway across and topple headlong into the grass or gravel on the other side (usually crushing a section of hedge in the process, something that infuriated our father whenever he saw it, since the man liked his hedges to be uniform). Several times I was in danger of having to be shot after I twisted an ankle, until I could prove I was capable of running with the herd again. For hours on end, we would run and jump and whinny and nay in our flight to freedom beyond rope and fence.

For his part, little Jimmy was clear in his mind about cowboys, Indians and horses. First, he was no horse, so he had no interest in our antics. He was a cowboy. He owned a horse (a red and white candy-stripped broom stick that had a red and white horsey-head at one end, a red leather strap for reins and white yarn for a mane) and he rode it at a gallop until it dropped. The combined back yards of the neighbors were his ranch, little neighbor kids Brad and Sheila were his sidekicks and if any imaginary Apache or Sioux war party wanted to debate territory with him, he would be more than happy to draw his toy six-shooter and fill them full of lead.

I imagine any good sociologist or political scientist could have told us right then that Darla and I would end up being liberal Democrats or independents – in my case, an inveterate maverick, who would be ever plagued by the irritating capacity to see almost every issue from multiple angles – and that Jim was a born Republican (an intelligent and clear-minded one, who saw no purpose in confusing the issues when there was usually a strong, perfectly adoptable side to every question).

Hardy Boys, Ghosts and Murder So Foul

Almost as quickly as she had come into our lives, Mitzy was gone. Her brilliant brother Ned won a full scholarship to the Army Academy at West Point and her father got a shot at an editor’s post in a bigger newspaper elsewhere in the country. Her family sold a few things before they moved and the only item our mother decided to buy was Mitzy’s dad’s portable Smith Corona typewriter, which she got for five dollars. What prompted my mother to buy it I don’t know, although I suspect it was that she fantasized about doing secretarial work and leaving the world of restaurants and food preparation behind. (In fact, in her latter working years she was a legal secretary and office manager and seemed to really enjoy those jobs, but for now, while we kids were young, she worked part-time at The Teddy Bear or as a cook in the school cafeteria). Whatever her motives, I thought the typewriter was a fair trade for losing Mitzy and immediately commandeered it for writing my short stories (using the same four-fingered – first two of each hand – typing technique that I still do today, if at a much slower, hunt-and-peck pace back then).

Darla was temporarily devastated by the loss of her friend, but this provided her with a new departure in her literary pursuits. Since she was off of horses for a while (what fun was it without Mitzy?) she began to take an interest in ghost, mystery and horror stories. We would go to the public library together and while I was perusing the children’s mystery and adventure novels, she would nip into the adult section and look for the scariest things she could find. She had developed a recent interest in mysteries as well, and that was how the entire Nancy Drew series had fallen into my hands. But I had trouble identifying with the “girl sleuth” – always picturing her as looking a lot like my sister, since it had been Darla, whose reading and dramatic skills were so keen that it was as if she were telling me things that had happened to her personally, who had read the first stories aloud to me in order to pique my interest – and quickly moved on to the Hardy Boys. But her real appetite at that moment was for the occult and for horror.

Nothing but the best for Darla, however, when it came to literature, and so, while I devoured detective novels of all sorts on my own and watched Mike Hammer, The Detectives, Naked City and other cop and private eye series on TV, sessions in which my sister still read to me were devoted to such gems as Dickens’ Captain Murderer, a short story about a ghoul who kills his wives, chops them up and eats them in a pie; Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, in which a narrator becomes the casual witness and unwitting accomplice of a madman who entombs his twin sister alive; another Poe masterpiece, The Black Cat, also a story of cruelty and burial alive, in which the murderer’s undoing is the pet of his victim; Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a murderous journey into every man’s darker side; and a thick anthology of ghostly and ghastly tales that was probably Bennett Cerf’s famed 1944 Random House anthology entitled Famous Ghost Stories, including a celebrated hair-raiser entitled The Monkey’s Paw, which Darla learned by heart and could tell to blood-curdling effect.

• Caption: Dan as private eye.

Darla was nothing if not sensitive and our turn-of-the-century house provided the perfect setting for her recitations and permitted her to elaborate stories of her own about strange occurrences that may (or may not, “you can believe whatever you want but I know it’s true”) have taken place there. The house creaked and groaned in the night. The aging furnace knocked and echoed. Sometimes I could have sworn I heard footsteps on the stairs and I always leapt rather than climbed into bed, for fear that the madman who was surely hiding beneath it might grab my ankles, snatch me under and slit my throat.

Upscale as the neighborhood supposedly was, the proximity of the river and woods meant that it had a constant rodent problem – mice, shrews, bats and dreaded river rats that required constant preventive action. And this made it a perfect home for the family of great horned owls that came to nest in the huge cedar trees in our side and back yards. One of those trees grew right outside the window of the room I shared with my little brother and on windy nights the scratching and scraping of its branches on the side of the house and hooting and screeching of the owls as they swooped to clutch their rodent prey in powerful talons were petrifying additions to the weird symphony of noises that the house itself made.

As I mentioned earlier, the only access to the attic was through Darla’s room. And this gave her a certain power over me, as if she held the key to a secret world from which I was banned without her. We were both forbidden to go in there, but, clever girl that she was, Darla knew where the key was kept and when our mother was busy or away, would sometimes sneak in. It seemed to coincide that whenever she invited me along on this kind of adventure, it was shortly after she had read me a ghost story.

The attic door was so short and narrow that the only person in the family who could have walked through it frontwise and standing up was our little brother Jim. But he was never invited. Darla and I, meanwhile, both had to stoop and turn sideways to get through the entrance. And the only times I ever saw our mother go in, it was practically on her hands and knees. The attic, indeed, had personality. It was not just a dusty if harmless behind-the-walls look at the house. It was, rather, a mysterious little world that still held forgotten reminders of another time. Its small single window under the tallest eve of the house provided an ever-twilight illumination that entered from the south in a column-like beam, a soft, yellowish light in which dust motes lackadaisically swam. Its A-frame walls sloped to the floor from the formidable roof beam and the ancient nails in the splintery flooring squeaked and complained with our every step.

One of the Winget men had once been a lightning rod salesman and a pile of his wares still lay along one side of the attic floor, a modest heap of wrought iron rods with a candy cane-like twist to capture lightning bolts and carry them to the ground. (The outside of the house was rife with these protective rods and there was one in the ground under every tree – a fact that caused Dad to curse “that sonuvabitch and his goddamn lightning rods” – every time he hit one of them with the lawn mower blade. But that didn’t keep lightning from striking our TV antenna and blowing out the television set one summer evening while we lived there). Old, yellowed lightning rod handbills littered the floor around the rods. Some glass-covered photographs in frames leaned against the wall-rafters. One showed a serious-looking middle-aged man wearing a suit that appeared to be from the early 1900s. The sepia photo was faded with age, but the man still gazed steadily and frankly into the lens, holding his hat by the brim with both hands in front of him. Another was of two young women. They were of similar size and resembled one another. They were dressed in the sack dresses and cloche hats of the 1920s. I thought them pretty in a sad way as they stood facing the camera with slightly pursed lips and unsmiling eyes.

Darla told me that they were sisters. They had lived in this very house…and died there. They were invalids, had become invalids, in fact, shortly after this very picture was taken. They had lived the rest of their short lives in the front bedroom, over the street – the one our mother never let us use. Why did I think that was? It was because that room was where the two girls had died. Did I ever notice what a chill there was in that room? It was because it was…haunted! I said, of course, that I didn’t believe her, that she was making it up, that she couldn’t scare me. She just shrugged. I could suit myself but she knew the truth. And despite my bravura, the seed was planted and that room too became a place of mystery and night-time terror.

Eventually, however, I got better acquainted with that “spare” room. The truth about why our mother had made it a restricted area and often locked the door so that we couldn’t go in was because Dad was already fretting about the cost of heating such a big house and talked her into shutting the warm air registers to that room and keeping it closed so as not to be “wasting heat”. But when summer came, Mom would open the door to that room during the day and raise the window that looked north onto Auglaize Street so as to cross-ventilate and keep the upstairs where we children slept from being so hot at night. At first timidly, I started slipping into that room and gazing out the window. It was a different world from the one I could see from my window that looked onto the neighbor’s back yard and our driveway. Cars passed beneath it all day on their way to and from town and in the morning I could watch the aging Ritter sisters in their sun bonnets and aprons, washing down their front porch and the concrete steps to the street across the way. For lack of anyplace else to put it, my mother had placed a wooden toy tea table that my sister had outgrown under that window with its accompanying child-size chairs, and despite being way too big for this furniture, the pieces were swiftly converted into my “office”. There I whiled away a couple of hours at a time wearing a disused snap-brim hat of my Grandpa Murel’s on the back of my head (the way journalists and writers did in movies) and packing my Mattel Dick Tracey Snubnose .38 in its durable rubber shoulder-holster rig, while pecking out ‘mysteries’ on the Smith Corona.

• Caption: Mattel Snubnose .38

The Closest I’ve Come to a Bestseller

Darla became a teen-ager while we were living on Auglaize and had the run of the neighborhood. She was popular and made friends easily. I was just the opposite. At the public swimming pool in summer I mostly hung out with my cousins, Greg, who was my same age, and Mike, who was a year older. But a lot of the rest of the time I just kept to myself and played war and cowboys with my little brother, who was older now and more fun, I felt. And if not, I tagged along with my sister and her friends, whenever she let me.

• Caption: Darla in 7th grade.

I also hung out with a boy called Steve who was two years older than I and a year younger than Darla. He was a mature boy who treated me like a kid brother and never teased or belittled me. He wasn’t into sports, which made me like him all the more. Not because he didn’t have the strength and coordination to be, but because he had other things to occupy his time. His father was an excellent cabinetmaker and had his carpentry shop in the garage behind their house, which was across Pearl Street from our back yard. Steve was learning the trade – he had made all of his own furniture for his bedroom, including his bed and chest of drawers. He and his dad let me hang out in the shop with them, taught me to use a drill press and hand saw and would give me little jobs to do like sweeping up the scraps and shoveling them into the pot-bellied stove that they used for heat on cold days. Sometimes they took me along in Steve’s father’s ’52 Chevy pickup when they went to the lumber yard. A couple of times they took me along to Steve’s grandfather’s farm near Lake St. Marys, fifteen miles away, and then fishing at the lake. It was the first time that I realized how much fun it could be to have a guy friend to pal around with.

Darla liked Steve too – but the way girls like boys. I think she felt funny about his being younger and couldn’t figure out how to tell him she liked him. Although powerful for his size, Steve wasn’t very big physically, while Darla was tall and naturally strong – it was hard to find a guy who could beat her arm-wrestling. So one day when we were playing some rough-house game like statue, instead of letting him go when it was her turn to spin him around and sling him to the ground, she fell to the ground with him, straddled him and pinned his shoulders to the lawn with both hands. Then she leaned in close and murmured, “Hey Steve, y’know what?” And Steve said, “Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, now let me up.” It never turned into a romance, but they were friends for as long as we lived there.

Another friend Darla made for us was Jenny. One day she just came home and announced that she had “met this really neat little girl called Jenny” who lived a couple of doors away from the grocery store on Pearl Street. Jenny, it turned out, was a grade ahead of me in school although she was not quite a year older, which put her two grades behind Darla. But she was stunningly erudite and Darla found her literacy an immediate plus. She “got” the kind of scripted games we played and that were based on what we read. She was a cute, plump little redhead with an infectious laugh, as well as being adventurous and a good sport. Darla and I both immediately liked her.

Suddenly, the horses were back and we had Jenny, who was also an animal-lover, reading horse books, whinnying, naying, galloping, cantering and jumping the hedges with us. I was pleased by the fact that she was more like me, a stocky quarter-horse, when it came to physical pursuits and that she also often failed to clear the hedge. But of course, when it came to intellectual pursuits, both she and Darla ran circles around me. The horse stories she wrote were mature and well-crafted for her age and she was good at telling them and a funny and dramatic actress, as well as being girly-girl romantic, which I found “mushy”. Like Darla she was also better than I was at board games and when we had Monopoly marathons at her house or ours in rainy or snowy weather, she and my sister always ended up cleaning me out and owning everything on the board.

But the nice thing was that Jenny was close enough to my age that she wasn’t just Darla’s friend, but mine too, which meant we often played together when Darla was busy with her older friends. And, we had friends in common – notably, my dear friend Martha, from my days on Pine Street. Martha’s grandparents lived just across the alley from Jenny’s house. So whenever Martha came for a weekend or summer visit, the three of us played together.

On one such day, the three of us were acting out a “free version” of Poe’s The Raven. This will sound crazy to the Internet generation but just imagine (what?) Dungeons and Dragons, or whatever, before the existence of the PC. Scripted play, is the best description I can think of. Anyway, as the eldest and most dramatic of the three of us, Jenny was directing the game. She was the wife, I was the husband and Martha was our daughter (which was a little comical, since Martha was head and shoulders taller than Jenny). In Jenny’s plot, I was the writer who would come home from a hard day at the office, retire to my study and proceed to be badgered by the pesky bird and its persistent “Nevermore!” (quoth the raven).

• Caption: Drawing of The Raven by E. Manet.

I don’t recall the details, except that we were playing alone and unsupervised in Martha’s granddad’s shed, which featured a little room attached to the garage with windows and a chair and table in it and that this was to be my study. And whenever anybody knocked there was always the possibility that it might be the raven – which, we were all bright and literate enough to know, represented death. But then again, not always. Sometimes it was my “daughter” dropping by to say hello and other times it was my loving “wife”, who tried her best to convince me not to trouble myself over a stupid blackbird.

Anyway, to make a long story short, at some point “suddenly there came a tapping / as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door…” and when I flung open the door hoping to get the jump on the raven, it wasn’t the flighty bird at all, but Jenny. And to my utter amazement she cried, “Oh darling, I’m so glad to see you’re home!” And with that, she threw her soft freckled arms around my neck and kissed me full on the mouth. It was the first time a girl had ever kissed me and I was speechless. Fast on her feet, if blushing a little at her own boldness, Jenny gave me a hug and said, “Hurry up and wash your hands, dear. Dinner’s on the table.” I just stood there dumbly, feeling her kiss still stinging like a singularly pleasant brand on my lips. It was a chilly autumn day and I would recall the cool, wet, little-girl pucker for weeks to come. Suddenly, things were different. We still played like always, the two of us with Darla or Martha, and everything seemed normal. Nor did Jenny ever kiss me again – and I was far too shy to kiss her. But for the weeks and months from then until my family packed up and moved once more, I had a secret crush on Jenny that made me blush every time my sister mentioned her name.

A couple of years ago, I found an entry in Wikipedia for Wapakoneta and, out of curiosity, decided to read it. It was no surprise to me that it described my town as “the birthplace of Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon” and of “Oscar-winning screenwriter Dudley Nichols”, but I was darned if I had ever heard of another famous Wapakoneta resident, best-selling romance novelist “Jennifer Crusie”, who was also mentioned there. When I looked the writer up, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the pseudonym was Jenny’s – ‘our’ Jenny’s – and that in the romance genre (of which I had never been an avid reader) she was a very big name indeed, with over a dozen bestsellers.

Back then, I kind of thought Jenny, Darla, Martha and I would be friends forever, but one day Dad read the fuel and electric bills, said “this sonuvabitch is too expensive to heat” and the die was cast. The house on West Auglaize on which our mother had put in three years of creativity and effort painting and remodeling and making it beautiful, was placed on the market and quickly sold. So it was off to a new neighborhood, off to high school for Darla, and off to junior high for Jenny, who was suddenly an adolescent. Martha and I would be “little kids” for a year or so more, and that was long enough for my path to branch off from Jenny’s forever.

Funny how things work out that way.

The Tour 2 – Pine Street

*Caption: Our house on Pine Street as it looks today.

A stark, bulldozed lot, a typical, post-war, fifties-style, modified A-frame. A house that differed only in paint color from two beside it, the three all built by the same man, an erstwhile farmer by the name of Botkins, who had decided to start a real estate development, one house at a time, on the cheap and on a piece of his land that was more town now than country.

Whatever possessed my father to sell our house on Defiance Street in a lightning operation while Mom was giving birth to my little brother, I’ll never know. But if I’m guessing (judging from my father’s Scottish thrift, which he inherited from his own dad) it probably had to do not with comfort or aesthetics, but with economics. Perhaps a rise in the price of coal, coupled with less than adequate insulation, with his compulsive neatness and utter hatred of getting his hands dirty – in those days, you had to go down to the basement every so often and heave a few shovelfuls of coal into the furnace, and later clear out the “clinkers” with long-handled tongs – and with the high cost of converting to some other fuel, were what decided him. And when he was on one of his manic highs, he was nothing if not gregarious. So I’m speculating here, but I can just imagine him bumping into Mr. Botkins at, say, the gas station, striking up a conversation, deciding to go see the three new houses the man had built, “just a stone’s throw from the elementary school…young feller like you, y’got kids?” – and, bingo! A down payment and “something to surprise Reba with when she gets home from the hospital, by golly – our brand new, modern home!”

Mom was less than thrilled, I’m sure. The last thing she needed to do when she was just home with her new baby boy was pack up and move. But it was all decided, signed, sealed and delivered. As usual, she made the best of it, looked at the bright side and along with her mother and sister, even made the move fun for us, while her brothers and father organized and handled the grunt work. In a matter of hours we were moved in and within a couple of days, the Pine Street house was a fully operating home.

As it looks today, that house is closed all the way across the front. I’m assuming some subsequent owner added on another room or a workshop. But the original design had some surprising features for being a basically economical construction and a house built for sale, not for the builder to live in. Built off of the north end of the house there was, originally, not just a car port – an invention of those times that was basically a cheap way to provide shelter for a vehicle without going to the expense of building a full-fledged garage – but also a garage. This opened up a whole range of possibilities that neither construction, on its own, could deliver. You could have two vehicles, or you could have one and park it conveniently on the car port in good weather and in the garage in bad. You could use the car port for the car and turn the garage into a workshop or storage area. You could even finish the inside walls and floor of the garage and turn it into a playroom or guestroom. This dual feature was really an added value.

There were also some purely design features that were surprising, like the false shutters with rhomboidal designs on the front windows that gave the house a more finished look (and that have since been removed). But in general, it was plain, cheap construction.

Caption: L-R - Dan, Darla and Jim, first summer on Pine Street.

It was fairly bright and roomy for a small house, however. It was all ‘50s efficiency: rather small but well-placed windows to cut down on heating bills, a natural gas furnace for heat, a modern all-electric kitchen and built all on one storey with 8-foot ceilings. The front door at the top of a two-step concrete stoop opened directly into the living room. From the living room there was an open archway into the kitchen and dinette (efficient post-war construction also did away with the dining room, since most people ate in their kitchens anyway). Unlike our kitchen on Defiance Street where light flooded in through side windows and the glass pane of the back door, this kitchen was the only room that was always a bit dark, since it only had a small square window directly over the sink facing west, so that it only got light in the afternoon. There was a side door out of the kitchen with a small windowpane in the top part of it but it gave onto the carport, which was roofed and faced north and, so, offered little light. But the living room had a large thermo-pane picture window that let in plenty of light. Typical of energy-efficient ‘50s construction, it had no side windows that could be opened, so the only way to ventilate this main room in the summertime, when it was hot, was to open the front door and let air in through the screened storm door. But the living room was nothing if not cozy in winter.

Caption: Our first Christmas on Pine St. (L-R: Dan, Jim and Darla)

There was no hallway to speak of, just a sort of indentation off of the southeast end of the living room, off of which opened doors into two bedrooms and the bathroom, located left, right and center. The bedroom on the left was where my parents and infant brother slept. The one on the right was my sister’s. The tiny bathroom stole a piece of space from the bedrooms on either side of it so as to have room for the toilet just inside the door on the left, the lavatory and medicine chest right next to it and a short-ish bathtub wall to wall across the back under a privacy window. On the right-hand wall was a towel rack and above it, my mother had hung a family of five typically ‘50s mother-of-pearl and black ceramic fish that ranged in size from large to small and three diminishing magnitudes in between and there was a tiny linen cupboard behind the bathroom door to which there was access only when the door was closed. The windows in the two bedrooms and bath – one small, typically American-style, double-hung vertical sash window per bedroom – faced east onto the back yard. The only bedroom that faced west onto the front yard was mine, the door of which opened onto the living room.

The Sun also Sets

In my five-year-old world of sheer immediacy, I recall being in two minds about my room. On Saturday mornings when my sister, Darla, would, out of boredom, occasionally invite me into her room for some game of her invention – paper dolls, for instance, which I wasn’t yet old enough to find effeminate and which consisted of using blunt-ended scissors to cut out magazine pictures of our favorite movie and TV personalities, affixing them to poster-board backing traced and cut to fit the cutouts that then became dolly characters in plots that Darla created – I recall wishing I could have that room where the morning sun streamed in when my room was still dark. But each afternoon, I would once again favor my own room where the west-bound sun now lighted the hills and dales of my bed and floor that became the routes on which my toy trucks and cars made fascinating and often dangerous journeys.

Back in our days on Defiance street, we had been among the first families in Wapakoneta to have a television set. It had been a real novelty. But Darla and I had since become part of the first generation of American kids who didn’t know what it was like not to have TV and our little brother Dennis James was born directly into Marshall McLuhan’s “global village”. So our enormous Admiral cabinet-model TV naturally traveled with us to our new home and was ubiquitously placed in a strategic corner of the living room where it was easily visible from all angles.

Clearly, however, we were not the totally media-absorbed, media-interactive kids of today. TV was still a primitive, black and white medium, with fast-growing but still highly limited technology at all levels. And as such, it still had a stimulating rather than stultifying effect on our young brains. I would watch the Lone Ranger (Rossini’s William Tell Overture that served as its theme song was my first introduction to classical music and I never missed the start of the series because I found that piece so thrilling and inspiring) and then act out the episodes in the vast world of our back yard, in scenes peopled by the invisible cast that I carried away from the show in my imagination. When there was snow on the ground, I was Sergeant Preston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the warning I shouted to the crooks and killers I invented was, “Stop in the name of the Crown”, which was fair warning, I figured, just before I gunned them down.

Homemade Interactive

That’s not to say, however, that there was no such thing as interactive TV. Stone Age interactive, admittedly, but interactive all the same. It was a show called Winky Dink and You that aired Saturday mornings at 10:30 on CBS. It starred the tousle-haired, plaid-trousered cartoon character Winky Dink and his dog Woofer. The adventurous boy and his dog were always getting into tight spots and it was my job to help them out. For this purpose, I was required to pester my mother until she finally ordered the official magic screen and special Winky Dink crayons. The kit cost 50 cents (or the price of two hamburgers), which didn’t seem like such a lot to me. My mother assured me, however, that 50 cents was, indeed, a lot if you didn’t have it. But when she saw how frustrating the show was without the interactive portion – the cow-eyed protagonist would stand around waiting for your help that never came, which seemed almost tragic – she eventually gave in.

The Winky Dink interactive kit consisted of a large piece of transparent yellow vinyl and the magic Winky crayons. The TV screen generated ample static electricity so that the plastic “magic screen” could easily be applied to the glass surface and remain in place as if it had been glued on. I then sat cross-legged on the floor, directly in front of the TV or in a little child’s chair that my mother provided so that I would be more at the proper height to carry out the task at hand. As the plot developed, situations emerged in which Winky required my help: “Quick! Winky Dink is being chased! Draw a bridge so that he and Woofer can cross the river to safety!” And I would use my Winky crayons to create a bridge on my magic screen and then watch the cartoon hero cross it – or cross reasonably near it, at least. You had to have a rag handy to wipe off whatever you put on the screen, however, unless you wanted the bridge, or tent, or stick figure, or whatever you had drawn, to invade every scene from then on.

At first, I was often too slow and Winky would, I was astonished to find, eventually rush across whether the bridge was finished or not. But I ended up getting quicker – if for no other reason, in order to maintain the illusion that I was actually helping the hero.

Field and Stream

But except for evenings and weekend mornings, I really wasn’t the kind of kid that was glued to the TV screen. I was crazy about the great outdoors, and even in the dead of the harshest Ohio winters, my mother was hard-pressed to get me to stay inside. She worried because I had had pneumonia when I was three and was prone for years afterward to any combination of croup, bronchitis and tonsillitis, but my health probably improved as much as it did thanks to all the time I spent outdoors.

I wasn’t picky about activities. Left to my own devices, my vivid imagination permitted me to play cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians or war with a host of other personalities that only existed on TV or in my mind. And later, books would be added to the mix. I never minded playing alone. If somebody else was around, great. But if not, my made-up characters were practically as real to me as any playmate I could have had.

If all else failed there were always Marie and Chuddah, my imaginary sister-friends from Defiance Street, who would continue to accompany me for a while longer. In fact, I remember the day that we parted company. It was about a year after we moved. I was on the back stoop of my father’s parents place, across from the house on Defiance where we had once lived. My Grandma Alice had been peeling green walnuts for some culinary project and, messy as the job was, had decided to do it on the back porch instead of in the kitchen. I was sitting on the steps watching her, taking in the pungent, almost citric fragrance of the green walnut peels, when Grandma Alice hurried inside to answer the phone. It was a long conversation and, as usual when I was bored, Marie and Chuddah showed up. But this time, it was different. The two of them just stood there. They were holding hands. We talked but none of us seemed to have anything to say and nobody seemed to want to do anything special. After a long silence, the two of them, still holding hands, held up their free hands to wave goodbye. Then they turned their backs on me and walked away in the direction of our old house. They had evidently decided to stay there and not return to Pine Street. I never saw them again.

I also tagged along with my sister whenever she let me. Sometimes she naturally got tired of my company, as big sisters will, but she usually was tolerant and involved me in her own more complex games, since she was an unusually intelligent little girl and was already feeding her mind with every children’s book she got her hands on. She often shared them with me, showed me the pictures and read them to me. I was fascinated by this whole reading thing and couldn’t wait to learn how myself. In spite of the new TV phenomenon, reading became an enormous part of our lives. Both our mother and her mother, Grandma Myrt, were avid readers and whenever Mom had time or Grandma was over for a visit, it wasn’t uncommon at all for one or the other of them to sit in the middle of the couch with my sister on one side and me on the other and read classic stories and fables to us from the Golden Book and Childcraft series that Mom bought for us.

Darla was much more gregarious than I was, though, and it was through her that I started meeting the neighbor kids. The first ones to start coming over were Junior and Patty, who lived across the street. Darla made friends with Patty, who was a couple of years older than she was, and Junior, who was between Darla and me in age, started coming over and trying to make friends with both of us. I didn’t really like him much. He was loud, and his nose, which he wiped on his sleeve, ran all the time. He was constantly spitting hawkers in the grass or farting or doing some other gross thing. And if things didn’t go his way, he took it upon himself to beat up whoever his playmate happened to be at the time. On top of everything else, he told the most tremendous lies!

Once when my father was trying to create a lawn out of the rocky, gullied terrain that was our front yard, Junior came over and stood watching. I didn’t want to play with him and stuck close to Dad, pretending to be absorbed in the work I was ostensibly “helping” with. With his usual “joy” for manual labor, Dad was attacking some tough, gnarled roots with a spade and then with his bare hands, yanking, heaving and pulling on them, trying his best to get them to break free. And, also as usual, he starting taking their obstinacy personally. He would punctuate each jerk and tug with an epithet: “Come-the-hell-on, you-stubborn-assed-son-of-a-bitch!” And then remembering my presence and that of Junior, he toned it down, saying, “Did you ever in your life see more uneven terrain than this? You’d think Botkins could have at least leveled the damn thing properly before he built the house on it. I mean it’s just one dip and gully on top of the other.”

Junior, who had a wildly imaginative seven-year-old’s opinion on every subject, took this as his cue.

“Well now, Mr. Newland, I know why it’s like that,” he said.

“Oh you do, huh?” my father answered absent-mindedly while continuing to heave on a particularly stubborn root with his bare hands.

“Yup. It’s cause o’ what ol’ Botkins buried under here.”

Now this even got Dad’s attention. He stopped, stood up, pushed up his steamy eyeglasses with his middle finger and stood with his hands on his hips staring at Junior.

“Buried?”

“Yup. No wonder it’s so uneven. Ol’ Man Botkins buried a Ferris wheel under your house.”

“A Ferris wheel! Aw come on now Junior!”

“Yup, I seen him do it. There used to be a Ferris wheel. I used to come over and ride it all the time. Ol’ Botkins, he couldn’t get it tore down cause it was too big, so he just covered it up with dirt and built that house on it.”

“Aw, come on now, Junior,” Dad said again. “Your darn nose is gonna grow if you keep lyin’ like that.”

“I ain’t lyin’, Mr. Newland. Cross my heart. You got a Ferris wheel right under your house. Nobody else knows it, but I seen that ol’ man bury it.”

Long afterward my parents still laughed from time to time about the Ferris wheel on top of which Mr. Botkins had built our house.

Junior was right about one thing, though: There was indeed something buried there. Namely, the roots of what Mr. Botkins’ tractor had stripped from the surface of the land, the very roots that my father had been attacking with such righteous vigor and with his bare hands. The roots of the ancient stand of poison ivy that had long thrived there, before the land became a real estate project. Needless to say, Dad suffered the worst case of poison ivy you could possibly imagine on his hands, arms, face and chest and almost went crazy with the itching, before Mom soothed his blisters with cornstarch and Caladryl. We also made a discovery about me, since I had been “helping”. We found out that I had a natural immunity to poison ivy. I didn’t get a single blister.

For all of his other faults, however, it was Junior who introduced my sister and me to the “forbidden zone”. Forbidden, because he wasn’t allowed to go there and neither were we, but we went every chance we got. Right behind our back yard was about an acre of land that Mr. Botkins still farmed for his own consumption – a truck patch, he called it. And right behind that was an area that, at the time, was still wild and untamed. It wasn’t very big, I now realize, but back then it seemed like an endless wilderness. It was on the southeastern edge of town, a few acres of swampy, low scrub forest that still probably looked much as it had when part of the Shawnee nation still made its home in all of this area. It formed a kind of crescent around the east and south sides of the three lots that Mr. Botkins had built up with fill-dirt before he constructed our house and the other two beside it and ended in a sometimes-pond beyond the third lot, which went dry in the dead of summer, but sometimes spilled over onto the street during the spring thaw.

The Zone

That was a world like I’d never seen before. It was strange and somehow eerie. The low tree-canopy and heavy underbrush created a natural filter that, to me, made the place seem as if it were in constant twilight. It was so marshy that cattails grew there along with scrub oak, pussywillow, bittersweet and spearmint. That’s not all that thrived there. It was also home to groundhogs, possums and raccoons, crows, cardinals, owls and hawks, toads, tree frogs and a colorful variety of snakes – king snakes, grass snakes, garter snakes and (the name that most fascinated me) blue racers. Some old folks in the neighborhood said there were water moccasins and copperheads back there too, but I think that was just to scare us. There were also anthills and hornet nests and spiders the size of a golf ball.

Caption: Darla and Dan, just back from the forbidden zone.

The topography included soppy, methane-smelling swamp, small grassy knolls, briary thickets and an occasional quartz boulder. There were even treacherous patches here and there of what we called quicksand – perhaps not the real quicksand that sucked people in and swallowed them whole like in scary movies, but boggy ground with greasy clay-like mud into which a child could easily sink to mid-calf and over. For us, it was a vast land of adventure, practically in our back yard. And when our mothers heard the yard fall silent and we were nowhere to be seen, they could usually count on finding us there.

Punishment for straying there, in our case, ranged from being made to stay inside (Darla couldn’t have cared less, since if grounded, she simply read, colored with Crayola crayons in her coloring book or played with her dolls, but for me, being penned up was a fate worse that death) to a couple of good whacks across the bottom with Mom’s yardstick, which, if she had to come looking for us because we failed to answer her calls, she was sure to carry along for the occasion.

Mom was not the cold, premeditative type, who would tell you you were in trouble, leave you stewing and thinking about your transgression, call you into a room after the fact, give you a talking-to and sentence you to a spanking “when you father gets here.” No, not at all. Reba Mae believed in swift, on-the-spot punishment. Though back then this sometimes seemed to me unfair, arbitrary and even cruel, I learned to love this trait in her. I found the meditative, dangling-sword judgments of some other kids’ mothers and fathers sinister, unloving and mean. Didn’t they have better things to do than to think all day about how to better make their children’s’ lives miserable, I wondered, or how to demonstrate that they were the superior power and that their kids were mere subjects? With Mom it was never like that. Swift, balanced, expedient, over. That’s how punishment worked with her. Usually she had forgotten completely about such incidents within minutes, while Darla and I were still going around acting as if we were “never speaking to her again”.

Even though we knew the risk we were taking, however, ‘the zone’ was entirely too attractive not to risk it. Usually, it’s the little boys who scare little girls with creepy crawly things. But in this case, Darla was the white hunter and Junior and I who stood by watching in open-mouthed amazement. There was almost nothing my sister was scared of. She caught lightning bugs, preying mantises and spiders in jars, and toads and snakes in her bare hands. She knew just how to hold a toad so that it didn’t hop away or pee on her and she was, to our amazement, able to do it without changing expression or squealing ‘like a girl’. She snatched up snakes, latching onto them at the back of their heads with the professionalism of a snake-charmer and let them wrap body and tail around her forearm. She would catch flies and feed them to a captive mantis and watch as the strange creature enjoyed the feast, holding the prey in its dexterous ‘paws’ and devouring it with it triangular swiveling head. But, unlike a lot of boys, she was never intentionally cruel and always let her captives go after observing them for awhile. It was a treat to go to ‘the zone’ with her. And it wasn’t long before we no longer felt we needed Junior to guide us and left him out completely. ‘The zone’ became exclusively ours. No amount of punishment seemed capable of keeping us from slipping off there from time to time.

Other Friends

Also soon after we arrived at the house on Pine Street, Darla and I were playing outside, making a snow man in our back yard, when we received the visit of two little girls whose own back yard was just across an alley from ours. They approached us like two little phantoms. We were concentrating on our snow sculpture – mostly trying to figure out how to roll up the pristine snow without its getting all full of grass and dirt from the ground beneath – when we suddenly looked up and there they were, standing on the very edge of our yard, by the alley, just gazing impassively at us.

“Hi there!” Darla said, stopping what she was doing. One of them, the biggest one, smiled but didn’t respond. The other one drew closer to her big sister, clutching the sleeve of the older girl’s coat.

I ignored them at first and kept messing with the snow, unsure what to make of the pair. They looked so pretty and vulnerable, somehow, standing there mute in the drifted snow in the pale winter sun. Especially since we had no idea where they had come from. They were wearing tweedy coats and woolen scarves. From under the hems of the coats hung skirts that reached beneath their knees and what showed of their wool-stocking-clad legs were plunged into the same sort of rubber boots my sister was wearing. They were pallid, Nordic-looking girls, with light-colored eyes to match their skin. They wore warm wool stocking caps but the hair that emerged from the bigger girl’s was a shiny, light brown while her little sister’s was unmistakably blonde.

"Do you want to play with us?” Darla tried again.

In response, the older girl leaned over to the younger one and, cupping her mouth and her sister’s ear with a mittened hand, whispered something. Then the other little girl precisely mimicked this same gesture and whispered something into her big sister’s ear. Then in unison, they said, “Okay!”

That was how we met Martha and Mary Lou. Martha, it turned out, was my age and Mary Lou a year or two younger. Darla played with all of us on an occasional basis, but Martha and I became inseparable and wherever Martha went, there too went Mary Lou, so we became a band of three. The fact is, these two sisters came into my life just before Marie and Chuddah decided to leave for good.

Caption: Martha, aged about 8.

With Martha, it became a friendship that would last throughout grade school and high school. But never was it more intimate than during the years when our back yards were an alley apart. On sunny days our respective yards expanded into one and became a world of our making. In bad weather we played at Martha’s house and although my mother tried her best to prevent me from “driving Martha’s mom nuts every single day”, Martha’s mother always got Mom to give in and let me go over and play. The two of us started primary school together, and since Centennial School was just a hundred yards the other way down the alley from us, we walked there and home together every day during the three years that we both attended Centennial.

Martha was a lot like my sister, except that she was my same age, was much less capricious about playing with me and wasn’t, well, my sister. She was, like Darla, however, intelligent, adventurous, imaginative and fun. We were both fast to learn to read in school and by third grade competed to see who could read the most books. We not only enacted many of the fantasies that we read about and saw on TV but also used them as the basis for fantasies of our own invention.

I particularly recall Martha’s “magic wand”. She was “Queen of the Fairies” and could make any wish come true with a wave of that wand. The “wand” was, in reality, a wooden paint-stirrer that her father or mother had obviously used on numerous projects around the house. Half of it – the half Martha held in her hand - was a plain, wooden stick, but the other half (the wand per se) was adorned with the most gorgeous colors – robin’s-egg blue, flamingo pink, ivory-white and bright canary-yellow. But the colors were not nearly as captivating as the magic with which Martha imbued the otherwise unremarkable stick. Over time, I became so enchanted with her ability to convincingly play the Fairy Queen that I actually believed she could wave the wand and make fantasies come to life.

As we grew and had a greater run of the block, our sphere of friends extended and we all engaged in games that permitted more people to participate. Darla was invariably an organizer, along with a newfound friend a year or two older than her, Darlene, from the big house on the corner: We played ‘statue’ and hide-and-go-seek and built snow fortresses for our snowball wars, in the expanding territory of our combined back yards. But from the time I met Martha until the time we once again had to move, if the game didn’t include her, it didn’t include me either.

Moving Day

Three years after we moved to Pine Street, Dad one morning tried to raise the bathroom window that was swollen shut and couldn’t. By this time he was convinced that Mr. Botkins had somehow “hosed him” and had again gotten it into his head to move.

By this time, his manic depression had led him to have his first complete nervous breakdown. After he came back from a clinic in Indiana where he went for treatment, he hit a new high and once again swiftly sold the Pine Street house and moved us to a new place. But this time, Mom couldn’t have been happier. It was, she felt, a dream home.

For me, it would take awhile to adjust. For right now, it simply meant leaving behind Martha and ‘the zone’ and it wasn’t something I wanted to do.