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.

23b: Cruising the Town

The 23b repair sled was on-call for the evening but the boss seemed to be having a good night and it looked like we were not going to have to work. For a delivery guy who only works one night out of the year, he has a pretty good record of satisfied customers.

Anyway, it was a quiet but cold Christmas Eve here in Princeton, so I thought I would take the team out for a spin around town. I laid down the better half of my leftover burrito, harnessed the team and popped the whip just over their antlers. They turned and looked back at me as if to say, "Are you crazy??"

"Uh...fellows...?" I said, as the sled suddenly lurched forward.

We zipped out across the yard and banked up to the left, clearing a split rail fence and clipping the top of the neighbors hackberry tree before leveling off at a couple hundred feet above an asthmatic barking dog on Cadiz Street. I could see the Christmas lights around the court house as we cruised out along North Jefferson.

As we approached the city limits, the team suddenly dipped and made a hard left. I realized that we were lining up on the East bound lanes of I-69, specifically, the overpass under Providence Rd. I pulled the reins hard as the steel and concrete whizzed just over head. We just squeaked by an oncoming eighteen-wheeler and buzzed the top of a family in a white SUV with fuzzy antlers on the luggage racks.

It was close...I counted 8 points.

We made the turn back towards town and stopped next to Wal-mart where I went in and bought some donuts and a couple of banana moon pies for Rude and Nasty and we were off again, just missing the power lines along the highway.

Passing just south of Main Street on the way home, I could see a white SUV at the Police Dept. with a mess on it's roof. I guess I know where the other half of my burrito went.

He's not called Nasty for nothing.

I was a Robot

It was in the fall of 1963, when I was nine years old, that I began to prepare for that ultimate costume celebration.  At that time, robots were big. All a fellow needed was a couple of big boxes, some silver paint, lots of duct tape, and after a few craftily made cuts with one of Mom’s steak knives, it was “Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!”

I was a skinny kid and, of course, there were no skinny legged robots, so I decided that I would beef up my appearance with those round tube boxes from the Quaker Oats company. I really felt brilliant as they were just about the right size to fit inside my pants legs with one at the thigh and another at the shin with a space in between for my knees. I finished it off with a torso wrap of cardboard and duct tape and a box for a head.

Man, I was ready.

I grabbed an appropriate sized pillow case and set out to plunder the neighborhood in the quest for the treasure more precious than gold: Trick-or-treat candy.

As the evening progressed, and the pillow case filled up, gravity began to tug at the oatmeal boxes and it wasn’t long before the space designated for knees was no more. So, while I could still sort-of walk and drag my loot, we decided to finish up at a couple of high porch houses along the home stretch.

I managed the stairs and collected a popcorn ball, and dropped it into the sack amongst caramel apples, Milk Duds, Sugar Daddies, a black banana, 47 different chocolate bars, eighteen and a half pounds of everything else and 38 cents in nickels and pennies from people who just wanted the varmints off of their porch. I turned and reached out for a non-existent hand rail and found myself in free fall without a chute.

I crashed through the prickly top of an evergreen shrub and rolled out into the yard, a broken robot. I limped home dragging the bottom out of the bag and leaving a trail of hard candy and licorice.

 The rest of the night would find me sorting and eating the inventory and feeding the piggy bank.

A Taunting

I remember a really good story teller from my younger days who could make my hair stand up with her ghost stories and tall tales. She was mother to a friend of mine when we were guitar players dreaming of fame.

One night when she was walking home after visiting a nearby nieghbor, we dicided to hide in a late summer garden alongside the road, to see if we could rattle the great rattler.

As she walked by, we tossed corn cobbs into the road and made noises, which she ignored at first. After a couple more attempts to get a rise from her, she stopped, turned to face the garden, and took one step forward, pulling a 10-inch butcher knife from her purse.

"C'mon out, ye sons-o-bitches!" she scowled. "I'll cut yer guts out!"

We came out...the other side of the garden...running.

Careful who you mess with.

Sprung

Back around July of 1971, my older brother and I went to the Marion Jail to visit a friend of his who was, at that time, a guest of the County. The old jailhouse, having been built in 1901, was a bleak environment of stone and iron bars and in every respect, a bad place to be.

It was the heat of the summer that found us standing beside an open second floor window where a slight breeze might be felt coming through the bars. The window sash had been cocked to stay up because the sash wieghts no longer held the window.

At some point I leaned on the window sill which displaced four or five molecules of the window frame, just enough to send the sash crashing down in a shower of flying glass.

The Jailor and his Deputy came running up the stairs in typical SWAT team fashion, to get to the bottom of what he might have thought was a failed jail break. We explained the situation which seemed to suffice but the less than amused Jailor proclaimed that our visit was officially over.

That's right.

We were kicked out of jail.

The Beast

This was as far as I was going to go. I knew this moment would come, and that the outcome was inevitable, so it would be here, that I would be forced to make a stand.
From the deepest part of the woods, it had come. Every other creature that roams the night had fallen silent, even the dogs were strangely quiet, perhaps knowing that this was way out of their league.
It gave a low, rumbling growl, the kind you felt as well as heard. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I felt a numbing cold and became acutely aware of every other small noise in the house. A great breathe exhaled outside as the weight of something large pressed heavily on the wall and the door.
My eyes were drawn to the top of the door where the panels were beginning to bulge and crack. The sound of enormous claws raked the woodwork as it quickly became enraged. I knew that the old door would not stop it and I braced.
Suddenly the door panels gave way as I reached for my last line of defense, holding it out in front of me, my thumb quickly pressed down. For a moment the room went dark and then…
“And now, your Local on the 8s. The temperature for your area is 62 degrees under partly cloudy skies…”

Just a Pair of Pliers

Manufacturing today is all about “team” with sometimes little regard to what is practical, logical or simply the right thing to do.

Over the years, I have made several trips to a particular out of state factory to assist with mechanical problems of one kind or another. On one such occasion, having finished with the designated business at hand, I mingled around the production work areas exchanging ideas and discussing procedures.
It was then that I noticed the operators were using the same pliers as was used in our processes, but with one small difference. I had modified our pliers to make them spring return after closing, a convenient feature not available in this particular type of pliers at that time.
I mentioned this to one of the operators, who thought this might be helpful and less fatiguing in the long run. She produced an extra pair which I carried to the maintenance shop and proceeded to install the spring feature.
The maintenance people I had been working with, had retired to their perches in the shop, leaned back with feet up on the work bench, awaiting the next reactive call. Blatant, I thought, but still, none of my business.
Anyway, it was a simple task. I drilled a small hole through one handle near the hinge and halfway through the other. I inserted a small compression spring through the hole and drove a spring pin in behind it. In ten minutes I was done.
The operator liked the pliers and two other operators requested the modification. I added the spring to these and later, at the hotel, drew up instructions for the maintenance guys to follow-up with pliers on the other shifts.
Months later, on a return visit for a different mechanical problem, the operators informed me that the maintenance people had opted out of making the pliers modification. Fine, I thought, however, I was completely perplexed when they told me of their reasoning.
It seems they had formed a team of people to evaluate the conversion. They had produced parts estimates, man-hour estimates, with full color displays on charts and graphs, all meticulously prepared to convince themselves that this modification was a total waste of time and resources, unlike, of course, the time spent fabricating the detailed report itself.
Furthermore, they believed they could purchase the pliers, with this feature, cheaper than they could make the change.
Remember, this is just a pair of pliers, but of the type that wasn’t going to be found on the market with spring return, and they knew that. We had already looked and I had told them. But the issue, as far as they were concerned, was closed.
The team had spoken.
Unbound by this impediment, I reworked several more pairs of pliers before I headed for home, knowing that this team directed workforce was destined to litigate itself to a standstill.
The factory later closed for unrelated reasons.