Our Ridge Avenue Neighborhood

A Little Nostalgia Trip to 1303 Ridge Avenue

The ol' place is really tree-heavy now in 2005. After Dutch Elm denied the city its "Forest City" fame, it took some time to implement the funding to re-forest the streetscapes. You can't even see the house at1303 for the trees along the front treebank. Alas the big elm tree in the front yard fell victim to the disease.

If this yard could talk. . . it might tell the story of a big brother placing 45 cal. bullets on top of a Sterno tablet in the driveway, lighting the tablet and placing a tin can over it. How high did the can go?

. . .or the story of the cry that arose from a mother in the kitchen in January, 1944, while three boys were at lunch. "The vacant lot is on fire!"

But I get ahead of myself. More about that later.

The Vacant Lot Across the Street

Playgrounds are where you find or create them as a kid. For my two brothers and I the place for play was across King Street from our home on Ridge Avenue. None of us ever wondered who owned the lot within eye shot of the kitchen, kitty-corner across the street. Kids don’t think about such mundane things. They just find it easy to enjoy the space that offered such immense possibilities for exploration and fun.

For children of our age walking eight blocks to Huffman Park or to Walker School Playground where there were swings and other playground activities was not as attractive as the enjoyment we found in and around the grassy field of about an acre bounded along the King Street by a four or five foot terrace. That terrace offered a kind of defense, shielding from view anyone lookin at the field from the street or from occupants of cars passing by.

Then too, at our ages we were supposed to stay close to home.

There were three ways this space served the purposes of the three of us—beginning at 5-, 7- and 10-year old and extending to 8-, 10- and 13-year old, respectively. It afforded us a swing, a dirt terrace where we could excavate streets winding up and down the incline in hairpin turns and a place to build a fort of discarded Christmas trees.

The Hobbit Village (long before J.R. Tolkien was popularized)

The packed dirt of the terrace was just right for digging out small “garages” and dug-out homes along the winding excavation of roads where our small cars could make their way accompanied by as many adventuresome scenarios as our young minds could conjure. We’d be there for what seemed like endless hours creating our homes and roads connected into what became a hobbit-like village dug into the side of that hill. And each year the terrace inched back from the street.

That was because every downpour that brought eroding rain water flowing down the terrace, giving us occasion for reconstruction of the roads, garages and dug-out hovels of that Hobbit village.

The Rope Swing

Another feature of that space that lot was the tree whose branch afforded a place to tie the perfect pendulum of 1 inch thick rope looped on a branch. Stan as the oldest could climb the tree to get the rope in place. The hanging down rope on which we could swing had multiple knots tied in in to serve as a kind of seat we’d put between our legs. The other end of the rope was tied to around to tank of the tree. We could tighten and loosen the rope from tan end to adjust the height of the seat knot. That swing end was extended back to the edge of the terrace so that we could mount it and shove off from that point to catapult ourselves from the top of the terrace out over the street and back again. Motorists would be startled by the sight of a small body flying out over the street as they drove past our rope swing.

Shooting Lit Matches and the Fire in the Vacant Lot

Finally, and to continue where we left off above. The play space for a Christmas tree fort and the shout from Mom about the fire in the vacant lot across the street…

Having two older brothers gave me the advantage of experiencing what to me were adventures. Stan and Tom included me in some of their play, sometimes willingly, other times reluctantly.

One of the adventures they led me into was the use of an empty spool of thread as a launcher of kitchen matches. Since kids today might find tis interesting let me tell you how this”launcher” is made. One needs an empty spool of thread—the large size is better—a ¼” piece of elastic about 3½” long and a length of duct tape long enough to wrap around the spool. Extending the elastic so that it covers the hole at one end of the spool, wrap the tape around the spool to hold both ends of the elastic tight against the spool, neither leaving too much slack nor stretching the elastic too tight.

We would take a kitchen match and stick the butt end of it (opposite end from the match head), down toward the elastic so that the butt end extends into the elastic. Then we’d pinch the butt end couched in the elastic between the thumb and index finger and pull back a little, leaving the match head showing enough to strike it on the box or other rough surface. Voila! Match launcher ready.

Now I don’t know the source of this idea, but, rather than something found in Boys’ Life or Popular Mechanics magazines, the directions were more likely part of pre-teen oral tradition, handed on by word of mouth for generations.

There were always variations in the launching. One variation Tom and Stan used was to create "Kamikaze" kitchen-matches by wetting the heads slightly with saliva before striking them and shooting them. World War II made this variation popular with them, though we had no idea of how lethal this suicide attack was in those days. Newsreels at the movies showed footage of these attacks by Japanese pilots, but we never really were shown the full extent of the damage these attacks had. We just thought it was neat the way the damp match delayed breaking into flames only after it was airborne.

Just across King Street from our home on the southeast corner of Ridge and King, there was a vacant lot. And in the middle of the lot was a large lilac bush. It was January, 1944, that we collected discarded Christmas trees from around the neighborhood and laid them around the bush to create a “fort.” We had collected enough trees to create a kind of blind in which we could hunker down behind the trees with the bush at our backs.

Most kids, not their parents, would have thought this fort would serve as a perfect place from which to launch matches. The matches, after all, were being lobbed out away from the dry evergreen trees. And besides, they weren’t that dry. Until one day. . .

Tom, Stan and I had been in our fort shooting our kamikaze matches out into the field around us. Most of the lot was spotted with clumps of leftover snow from an earlier snowfall with grass still brown and damp from the winter melting. After being struck and launched, the matches we were shooting up into the air would come down in the damp grass with a hiss as they died out. Great diversion on a Saturday morning.

Then Mom’s voice called out from across the street, “Lunch time! And we were on our way.

Enjoying our bologna sandwiches with the usual gusto of three hungry boys, we carried on as usual until suddenly Mom’s cry arose as she looked out the kitchen window across to the vacant lot, "The lot’s on fire!"

Stan and Tom leaped up from their chairs in disbelief and ran to the back door and out across the yard to the lot. By the time they got there the dry Christmas trees had already created an inferno with flames rising up about ten feet in the air. Since the trees on the edge were mostly out by the time they got to the burning fort, they were able to grab the trunks of these and spread them out to help dissipate the fire.

All this time, I stayed at the table in the kitchen, trying to look non-chalant as I finished my lunch. Having just become a seven-years-old, I was too young to help with the fire management. Mom mused about how this fire could have started. I said nothing.

When Stan and Tom returned, having seen to it that the fire was out and the trees were no longer in danger of burning, they were looking intently at me. Their concern was more about whether a prohibition against the launchers would result from this accident than for any embarrassment I might be feeling. While I did not admit anything, their suspicions about the role of this toe-headed 7-year-old in the cause of the fire were correctly placed.

The trouble with the last match I shot as we were heading home to lunch was that it landed among the dry fir trees of our fort. How was I to know the thing would burst into enough flame to catch the fir trees on fire? Thank goodness for my two brave big brothers who saved the day by pulling the trees apart before the bush they surrounded was entirely engulfed!

Camping Out. . .On the Porch

I began writing thjs story inspired by the Ken Burns documentary Mark Twain, rerun on CPTV Hartford, 2014.

Every boy likes to “camp out” in the summertime—whether in the back yard under a blanket thrown over the clothes line or at a summer camp.

I remember one evening when the temperatures in Rockford, Illinois, were in 80’s during the day and the temperature in the house was still too warm to sleep comfortably. My big brothers, Stan and Tom, asked to “camp out” on the front porch.

It was something I hadn’t heard about yet in my short young life—a new experience for me as a 6 year-old. So I wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass. Another motive was that the risk was too great that not doing the camping would likely bring down upon me the ribbing of my brothers—as big brothers sometime like to do to their little bothers—about being “chicken.” and I was always up for anything that would avoid that.

In fact, there were times when they were going somewhere when I’d pipe up to their annoyance, “I wanna go, too!” “Do we have to take him, Mom?” was their annoyed query every time. And Mom’s response was, “Aw, go ahead and take him, Boys; he won’t be a bother, will you, Jackie?” My innocent answer was always a compliant “Uh Uh!” I knew that was the right answer to assure the sought after tag-a-long permission.

Now our house at 1303 Ridge Avenue had a nice screened-in porch across the whole side of the house. That was the proposed space for our camping out, much more convenient than outdoors. No need to set up a tent. Stan and Tom made the preparations with the quilts and blankets that served as a mattress for Tom and me. Stan had a sleeping bag for his Boy Scouting in Troop 173.

I remember building Lincoln Log cabins that night, complete with a green-slated roof. But more than than I remember the evening dessert we had before bedtime—Chocolate Covered Cookies. These were somewhat like what Nabisco makes today-SnackWell Devil’s Food Cookies, but back then they were square-shaped. Some may remember these delicious treats with a cake-like center, surrounded by a layer of marshmallow and with a glazed chocolate coating. We enjoyed this substitute for what might have been making S’mores had we been able to have a campfire. But since we were on the porch, these were a tasty substitute.

Well, we enjoyed this treat, but we didn’t finish them all off. There were a couple of half-eaten ones left as we dozed off for the night. In the morning as we awoke, we were greeted by company. A colony small red ants were clustered all around the left over cookies having a ball. Luckily the cookies had been left near the porch wall and not near our sleeping area. So none of those hungry ants had invaded our sleeping blankets or sleeping bag. Needless to say, we didn’t lay around long that morning. We were up and rolling up the bedding really fast and getting rid of the ants.

The Pillow Fight

“Stop! stop! hold it!” the small voice rang out in the dark of the upstairs hallway. Tom and Stan moaned thinking their 8 year old little brother Jackie was hurt again. He was such a runt, they sometimes called him “Runt” among other epithets referring to size. It seemed to them that whenever they did anything, he tried to be as big as his brothers 3 and 6 years older than he and ended up getting hurt. That was such a bother for them. Mom and Dad would get on their case whenever Jackie was hurt, as if they were the cause of his misadventurous injuries. But tonight he had to be there with them because mom and dad were out. They were home babysitting.

This time, however, he was hollering “Stop!” not because he was hurt. You see, it’s this way. We boys had arranged a pillow fight. And the location? In the second floor hallway. Homes like this on Ridge Avenue at the corner of King Street have a long upstairs hallway met at its center point by the stairway flowing down in two stages, straight then a turn to the right, into the living room on the first floor.

“I’ll stand you two,” Stan told them. “You two start at the bathroom end of the hall and I’ll start here at the other end. Whoever gets past the other to the opposite end of the hall wins, okay?”

“Okay, and to make it even,” Tom added, “we’ll turn out the light and do it in the dark.” As the middle child, Tom was the measurer, making sure things were fair.

Stan agreed.

They moved the small table with the paper maché Lourdes Shrine, Statue of the Sacred Heart and blessed candle on its silver-plated candle stick out of the way into mom and dad’s bedroom. The hallway was clear of any obstacles to an out-and-out, rough-and-tumble pillow fight.

Before beginning the battle, Tom whispered to his little brother so Stan wouldn’t hear, “I’ll hit him on the top, you get him on the bottom.”

Jackie accepted this since he was half the size of Stan’s hefty 14 year-old frame. His head just about reached Stan’s waist.

The light switch was hardly in the “off” position before the rivals proceeded forward, their pillows swinging back and forth against the dark until thy met their mark.

It wasn’t long before Jackie’s pillow found Stan legs and he wrapped himself around one of them, while at the same time trying to swing his pillow. Tom was swinging away above with major body blows hitting Stan. And Stan, ignoring the small obstacle to the movement of his leg, was retaliating with even more hefty pillow blows to Tom. Shortly after that they heard Jack’s “Stop!”

Complaining, they stopped, “Aw, now what, Runt?” and reached for the light switch. The light went on. As they squinted against the sudden brightness, their complaints were changed to amazement. The light revealed a veritable storm of feathers floating down to the piles of feathers already on the floor. Their high energy for the pillow fight quickly switched into clean-up gear. They had to get the feathers up before mom and dad came home. Never daunted, the clever boys began the task of vacuuming the feathers up with the Electrolux.

Once everything was cleaned up and the burst pillow case well hidden, they were in bed as if nothing had happened by the time mom and dad came home.

The next morning the boys were in the kitchen having the breakfast mom had prepared. Totally confident mom had no idea what had transpired the night before, they nonchalantly ate their breakfast.

The calm was broken by mom’s question, “Did you boys have a pillow fight last night?”

The boys gulped, looking at one another with suspicion about who had ratted on them. Jackie was the immediate target of their suspicion.

Never daunted, Stan innocently asked, “What gave you that idea?”

Continuing her kitchen work without turning around, she responded, “Well, this morning I found all these feathers in the vacuum cleaner.”

Playing with the Half Gallon Carton of Milk

Kids do the strangest things sometimes. This was an occasion when I reflected that truth.

One morning at the kitchen table while Stan, Tom and I were having breakfast, I had this moment of inventiveness. I started fidgeting with the Dean’s milk carton on the table. It seems I just needed something to do. A six-year-old does not have a way of keeping occupied while eating, like reading the morning newspaper. Anyway, reading at the table was not allowed. Stan and Tom were busy in conversation. So I entertained myself by bending the edge of the half gallon waxed carton back and forth. As I did this, the carton edge kept getting more and more worn. Now at age 6 I had no experience with waxed cartons and did not, of course, understand the physics of flexing the edge of a carton of milk. Imagine my surprise when I pushed my thumb into the edge, creating a hole out of which milk began pouring out onto the table. The carton was over half full and I had made the hole about a third of the way from the bottom. As the milk poured out the hole like water from a broken pipe, the liquid began to be absorbed into the tomato-patterned tablecloth. But the point of saturation was reached and the milk began running toward the edge of the table. Now all this happened within a split-second. By the time Stan and Tom noticed, the milk was spilling over the edge of the table and onto the floor. They jumped up and Mom turned around totally mystified how milk was spilling across the table and onto the floor. My thumb was too small to plug the leak. Mom’s was not. Once she noticed the source of the spill, she grabbed the carton, putting her thumb over the hole. And because Moms—especially ones with three preteen sons—are super-capable at multi-tasking, she was at the same time placing a towel over the spill on the table to stem the flow of liquid. The matching mystified and quizzical expressions on the faces of Tom and Stan told me I’d done it again. Sometime, even without a word being said, little brothers get the feeling of being told “you did it again!” . . . even if they didn’t actually do it. This time I had actually done it. Meanwhile, the wrinkled up expression on Mom’s face told me I was in for it. “Why in the world did you do that?” Mom asked, half in curiosity, half in frustrated anger. There’s no way I could have answered a question like that. And, at that age, there’s no way I could have understood the nuance of rhetorical questions at that time. Surprised at all this happening, puzzled that my fidgeting with the carton could have caused this mess, and just plain embarrassed, I was too frozen to even help with the clean up job, not that there’s much a child can be trusted to handle in that process. I could only sit in my chair with my chin on my chest and tears of regret running down my cheeks.

But then once it was all over, the milk-soaked table cloth removed and the milk on the floor was wiped up, Mom’s reassuring arm around me and her “That’s all right, honey” overcame all.

Disclaimer: The foregoing stories might be considered by some as purely fictional. Names have been included to make sure no one denies they really happened. Any resemblance to actual events is totally intentional.