Some of the things I did are humorous today. Probably not so
much when they went down. At least, not for some of the victims and possibly my
parents. None of it was done to be vicious – just pranks by young people who
had too much time on their hands and the hard drug culture wasn’t big enough or
attractive enough to get our attention yet.
Take, for instance, the beginning of my smoking habit. I
started smoking at the age of eleven and it lasted about 40 years. It all began
because a couple of friends and I would ride our bicycles into, and through, the
Hallstead iron foundry on Saturday mornings. It was a huge and awesome place and we
would always get chased by one of the few millers that put in Saturday hours.
One of the millers finally trapped us in a corner of the foundry and threatened
to call the police. But he was a soft old geezer and just couldn’t turn us in.
Instead, he made us an offer that was difficult to refuse. At the time, those little
Swisher Sweets cigarillos were fifteen cents a pack. He would call the
pharmacist at the local drug store and tell him that we were coming to get him
a pack of Sweets. He would give us a quarter to ride our bikes down to the drug
store and back with his Sweets and we could keep the change. Oh, and keep our
bicycles outside of the foundry so we didn’t get hurt. That first time we
learned that a pack of Marlboro cigarettes only cost a dime. So, we convinced
the pharmacist that the quarter was to buy the Sweets AND the Marlboros. After
making delivery on those little cigars, my friends and I would go to our local
“fort” and light up. It was a pretty sweet situation that lasted for several
months. We created our own downfall. On one trip, we had some extra change and
so we bought a pack of Marlboros, a pack of Camels and a pack of Salem
menthols. After we left, the pharmacist called the miller and found out that
the man didn’t smoke cigarettes at all. We were banned from the drug store and
the miller said he would call the police if we ever came back around the
foundry.
Not that it mattered a whole lot. We found other creative
ways to feed our young and growing nicotine habit. After all, John Wayne would
have expected us to be resourceful if we were going to be the bad guys. We
continued getting our cigarettes, with the help of some older boys, using money
we earned turning in bottles or mowing lawns or shoveling sidewalks. We also
kept going to our local “fort” which was a very small one room storage building
for the township. It sat at the top of the hill behind the carnival grounds/Little League Baseball field (truly another story). It was
full of small crates that were pretty well sealed with nails and metal straps.
We never tried to get into them. Hey, we may have been delinquents but we weren’t
exactly criminally minded. Besides, the crates were made out of wood and we
took up the art of wood-burning using matches and lit cigarettes. We created
all kinds of cool designs on those old wooden crates. Right up until we got
caught by the township Assistant Fire Chief. His best convincing argument to
leave and never come back was the fact that the crates contained the fireworks
being stored for the township carnivals. It’s one thing to go up in smoke, but
we sure didn’t want to go down in flames.
It wasn’t long after that that one of my friends was playing
around the old road tar barrel machine kept on the same property. The tar was
kept hot by a small gas flame under the barrel. When he lifted the lid, some
sticky tar created a bubble between the lid and rim. When it burst, Bucky was
covered with the hot tar and severely burned. It was the final straw, so to
speak, that convinced us that it wasn’t a safe place to play. None of the rest
of us wanted to lose our hair, eyebrows, eyelashes or have our facial skin
nothing but pink patches for the rest of our lives.
We moved on to other delinquent activities. Which is another
way of saying that this story has ended, but there are others to be told.
