Dead End Street

Trying to pinpoint a year in my life is like locating your upper floor hotel room from the parking lot. And if by chance, I should be on the wrong side of the building, I hope someone lets me know.

Somewhere in the early to mid-nineteen sixties, I lived near the end of North College Street in Marion, at number 502.  College Street was a no outlet street, terminating at creek’s edge, three houses down. In those days, a “no outlet” street was unheard of, as they were commonly called Dead End streets. Ours had a big white wooden sign with black letters spelling, “DEAD END”, right there at the end of the pavement, so that there would be no doubt, exactly where you were. An eight or nine year old might read into this, “BEYOND HERE, THERE BE DRAGONS”, and in our minds, there probably were.

The last house on our side of the street was home to Johnny. He was almost a full year older than me. Plus or minus a year usually makes a big difference when you’re a kid, but if it did, I didn’t notice it at the time. He was already building plastic models; one in particular was an Army tank of some sort with several machine guns mounted on top. I really thought this was cool.

The sidewalk in front of Johnny’s house ended like the street: abruptly, dropping off into the corner of the yard before leveling off in their driveway. This was the perfect launching site for many a red wagon juggernaut and later, a ramp for our bicycles.

I remember once seeing a multicolored string lying on the ground after our wagon made a pass. I went back to pick it up but it decided to slither across the yard.  After much commotion, Johnny’s Dad, a tall thin man, came out and dispatched the snake with a hoe. We were always on the lookout after that. Snakes were probably common around the creek side, but us being the terrors of the neighborhood, they were probably more afraid of us than we were of them, so we didn’t see very many.

There was a street light situated right over the dead end sign, drawing night bugs and of course, bats. On summer nights, when we were allowed to play outside after dark, we would throw small rocks up in the air and watch the bats chase them. This was also the place to hone ones skills with a slingshot, culminating in lots of pock marks in the sign from BBs and small stones.

If you gathered two or three boys together, chances are, one of them had firecrackers in his pocket and they were crying out to be lit. We blew up everything: toy soldiers, stick huts, crawdad holes, you name it, and when we ran out of things on the ground, we looked to the skies.

With some regularity, the “Air Force” as we called them, passed overhead in C-119, Flying Boxcars. We knew they were Air Force, because they were the ones with the airplanes, right?

Anyway, we would find an old pipe, or in one occasion, an old Pogo stick with the handle gone, and stick it in the ground, lined up with the flight path of the oncoming planes. We placed a firecracker in the top end of the tube and hooked the fuse over the edge. Once the fuse was lit, and the hook burned away, it fell down the pipe and went off. The U.S. would boast the world’s largest Air Force, but when I was a kid, we shot a whole lot of them down.

We learned a lot about science, you know, why things do what they do. We discovered that, if your firecracker failed to go off, all was not lost. We broke the firecracker in half, and lit the exposed powder. This would provide a show of sparks and if you still wanted to get the bang, you stomped it while it was spewing. This was hard on my old tennis shoes.

We knew that Mom’s Strike-Anywhere kitchen stick matches fit nicely in the end of our BB guns and when fired at the sidewalk, would pop and ignite into flames.

Caps were a great invention. They were not only a fun supplement for your cap gun; they were also a singular source of amusement in themselves. These could be set off, one at a time, or even a whole roll under the impact of a good claw hammer. This was amazingly loud for a roll of caps.

We played Army a lot, hiding in the weeds or bushes along the creek, ready to shoot or be shot, and then argue as to who shot who first. We were into camouflage long before it was a fashion statement, with weeds sticking out of our plastic helmets and sometimes our clothes. I think we could have had as much fun with simply a game of hide-and-seek, as the hideout was the biggest part of it all. But, we were too big for that, we thought, so our toy guns and garb made all the difference.

But, life was not all about pyrotechnics and such.

There were also baseball cards. It was a proud display to have your cards lined up on the sidewalk, set up your “Dream Team”, or trade for someone else’s. Names were everything. Names like Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle or Yogi Berra just sounded like great players, even if they hadn’t been. So many future valuable cards were lost in the spokes of our bicycles, not to mention, many of Mom’s clothes pins.

The Ben Franklin store, on Main Street, offered a kid everything he needed to survive in the world. They carried all of the fodder needed to cultivate the imagination. The people who worked there knew this, as they watched kids very closely.

There, I was introduced to the world of wind-up balsa airplanes, making a dead end street a fine runway for our rubber band squadron. The flights were short and often ended disastrously, but every once in a while, one unlikely take-off would catch the breeze and soar on a seemingly endless flight, only to turn and make a perfect landing right in front of me.

I still live for those moments.