170605 June 5, 2017

The Battle of the Pipes

Rainer Klauss

LHS '64

To Jim and Bob Pierce

    A few years after my neighborhood, Darwin Downs, was built, the city saw the need to install storm sewers throughout the subdivision. At a site closest to my house, in an empty lot at the bottom of the long hill coming down Bide-A-Wee, work crews had trucked in concrete pipes that were about 3’ by 5’ and dug a trench down to the Big Ditch, the most logical dump for the run-off.

    One winter afternoon (I think I was in the fifth grade at Rison, Mrs. Pullen’s room) at the beginning of this project, several friends and I gathered at the site.  We had been there for awhile, climbing up on the pipes, trying to roll them, jumping around on them, leaping into and across the trench-- just having a big time when intruders appeared: the Pierce boys, Jimmy and Bobby (and perhaps their friend, Chris Chambers).  

     They had lived on Polk Drive for some time by then, but we had never played with them. They were from the wrong part of the neighborhood (there were only five or six houses between where we lived, a short block), they didn’t go to Rison, and they were Yankees, too). Plenty of reasons to exclude them and be wary of them, right?

     When they showed up at the dig, they just wanted to join in on the fun, but we thought they were trespassing on our territory. (They lived about three houses away from the construction site, at the intersection of Bide-A-Wee and Polk.)

    “We’re playing here. Beat it. This is our place,” one of us proclaimed.

     “No. We can play here if we want. You don’t own this.”

     “We were here first.”

     “So what?”

      The situation escalated to taunts and insults after that. I’d been at Rison for a year: I could talk the talk.

     I don’t know who started it, but suddenly we were battling.  Against the warnings of all our parents, we found ourselves engaged in a type of warfare our hometown was working to advance—the launching of deadly projectiles (dirt clods and rocks, in our juvenile version).

     We ran for cover or grabbed some ammunition. I saw a small missile headed for me, so I started to duck into one of the pipes. Unfortunately, I didn’t stoop low enough, and I rammed my head into the edge of the pipe.

     I was knocked on my butt. I don’t know if I saw stars, but I was stunned and in pain.  Only one or two minutes into the fray, and I wasn’t interested in repelling the invaders any more. I just wanted to go home.

     My friend Hartwig could see that I was wobbly, and he accompanied me as I walked off.  Dirt clods pelted us as we retreated.

     We walked a little way up the street and Hartwig said: “Rainer, you’re bleeding.”

     “No, I’m not,” I replied.

     “Yes, you are,” he said, pointing to the side of my head.

     I took off my cap and looked inside. A big patch of blood was soaking into the gray fabric. I clapped my hat back on my head and began crying.

     We started running. Hartwig was first into my house, and he alerted my mother. I’m sure I was an alarming sight as I burst inside, crying and bleeding.

     Actually, my mother and I were veterans of this kind of bloody scene. My head had already been stitched up a few years before that when my forehead collided with a friend’s toy gun. (I almost took his eye out with my pistol). In the grip of this new minor trauma, I remembered the earlier appointment with the needle, and I didn’t want another one. 

     “Please don’t take me to the doctor, Mutti (German for mommy),” I pleaded and sobbed.  “I’ll be alright.”

     But she could see that my scalp was split open; mercurochrome and Band-Aids weren’t going to suffice. She got me and the bleeding under control. After awhile my father came home, and we drove to the Huntsville Clinic on Washington Street.

     Doctor Robert Sammons, who had sewed me up the first time, got to work on my noggin. Maybe he joked about me showing up again so soon.  Soothing me by telling me I was a brave boy, he deadened the area around the wound with novocain. Then his nurse snipped and shaved the hair off so that he could put in the stitches. I could feel the sutures going in, but there was no pain. I felt braver and braver. I left the clinic with a round gauze patch on my head—a little white crown—and wore it to school for about a week before the stitches were pulled.

     So, how did the Battle of the Pipes end? I don’t know. I’m probably the only one who remembers the event at all. I did go back to the pipes, though. Once they were buried and before the protective curb and drain were installed, I crawled through the pipes to the creek, keeping my head down as I moved toward the small circle of daylight.

    We never tangled with the Pierce brothers over disputed turf in Darwin Downs again. The next time we encountered each other was in high school, and then we became friends. Bob played the Sousaphone in the band, and Jim served as the stage manager of the Lee auditorium and assisted Mr. Foley numerous times.  In recent years, I know that Bob’s continued music-making (accompanied by his wife) has been a ministry to many people, and Jim was of profound help to me during a troubled time in my life.