Another Trip Down Memory Lane

I went on another trip down Memory Lane today. A friend sent me an e-mail about “things that were being said back in 1955”. I was four years old. The e-mail mentioned twenty-five cents a gallon for gas and twenty cents for a pack of cigarettes. My memory recalls prices a little differently and it got me to thinking about some of the things I did as a kid. I’m not sure if any of those things actually would rise to the level of felony, but it’s still a darned good thing that I didn’t get caught. Mostly, anyway, as you’ll find out when I tell this story and the one about smoking in the boys room.

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.