David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: "Randy Has a Rock"

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: "Randy Has a Rock":   “Randy Has a Rock” I don’t remember the name of my kindergarten teacher at Audubon Elementary School. B...

"Randy Has a Rock"

 

“Randy Has a Rock”

I don’t remember the name of my kindergarten teacher at Audubon Elementary School. But I do remember the coatroom, the huge clock on the wall, the desks with inkwells and the picture of Abraham Lincoln over the door. I also remember a lot of noise as I suppose was to be expected from five-year old kids. We recited the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag hanging next to the door.

Why we had inkwells is anybody’s guess. We didn’t know how to print and we didn’t know what ink was used for in those days. The coatroom spanned the entire width of the classroom except the two open doorways at each end. We had our own hooks where we hung our parkas and neatly placed our snow boots. The hooks were black metal and the wood supporting them was made of oak. We were good at following directions, lining up single file, and marching into one doorway only to shed our outer garments and then march out the other side. In all other seasons besides winter and rainstorms, the area was never used.

I suspect all that marching was somehow left over from WWII. The North End of Dubuque, Iowa was full of two things: veterans and people of German descent. There were family names like Kuperschmidt, Udelhoven, Koernschield, Schmidt, Smaltz, Wagner, and many others. We learned to stand up straight, march in unison and never question authority.

And then the huge, wooden door squeaked open and there entered the meanest, scariest, and strongest woman I ever saw. Elsie Schroeder was our principal and seemed to even frighten the teacher who stopped reading to us and stood at attention. She welcomed us to Audubon and told us the rules as she had to other students for the past 40 years. We sat on the floor looking up at her and unable to stop starring at her wide nostrils and thick nose. I was seated in the front of the semi-circle and had to strain to look up at this giant woman. I noticed a hardened booger in her left nostril. I thought it was funny. Each time she started a new sentence, that booger moved back and forth like a baseball card hooked with a clothespin to the spokes on my bicycle. It made a rat-tat-tat noise. She had stump-like fingers and fat calves that were draped from above with a black dress that dropped mid-way to her ankles. She wore black shoes with wide heels that supported her 250-pound frame. The inlaid oak floor crunched and bent (but did not break) as she sauntered among us. She had huge, thick lips that went from below her nose to her chin below. Those big lips must have helped her to enunciate each and every syllable. She spoke slowly and with great intention. She smelled like a combination of my musty-smelling cellar and burnt sauerkraut. She showed us the dreaded wind-whipper.

The wind-whipper was a four-inch wide paddle with six holes cut into its fourteen-inch length of solid oak. It was tapered at the end allowing a firm grip with which to paddle children. We had heard stories about that paddle from our older siblings or kids in the neighborhood. Its name was derived from the fact that when she swung it through the air, one could hear the wind blowing through the holes. Swish, swish.

“Now I know I will never have to use this on any of you children,” she said slapping it into her left palm while gripping the handle with her white-knuckled right hand. She continued, ”But if you ever sass off to your teacher while here at Audubon I will burn your tiny butts hard with huge blisters. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Miss Schroeder,” we all said in unison as if we were saying the Pledge of Allegiance. She picked at her nostril with her thumb and index finger, turned, and left the room. The hardened oak door closed with a bang as the hinges squeaked behind her. We continued hearing wind-whipper slap against her hand in the hallway, like she was looking for prey. About that time George Schmidt let out a shriek.

“Look, teacher. Randy has a rock and it stinks!”

I looked over to see Randy Schickelmyer holding up not a rock but a turd. When old Lady Schroeder came in to talk with us, she literally scared the shit out of him. What had been a neat and orderly semi-circle of five-year old boys and girls turned into a stampede like on the Roy Rogers’ Television Show.

Three girls gave out simultaneous, high-pitched shrills that could have caused a dog to go berserk. Two others ran into the coatroom to hide. I saw one boy gagging, another laughing and pointing at Randy, while a third cupped his mouth with his hands and yelled, “Turd! Everybody run!”

All the kids were screaming, running in circles, pointing, gagging or laughing. I don’t think Randy was too intelligent for a five-year old. He thought it was funny. He loved the attention. He was actually running around the classroom with that turd in his hand. When he cornered someone, he held up his morsel, laughed, and pushed it toward his face. That created even more pandemonium.

Even though I was only five, I had respect for authority. I suspect it was from my past experience and fear of the consequences if I did not obey. My dad taught me that. My old man was so frightening that when he yelled at one of us kids, all the others fell to the floor simultaneously. He could stop an attacking, snarling, and growling dog in its tracks with just his index finger. His voice could rumble and vibrate anything hanging on the walls two stories above the cellar where, on a regular basis he fought with the fuse box. The heck with all those starving kids in China come suppertime. If we held food in our mouths and refused to swallow, he would growl like an ogre hiding in an empty, fifty-gallon barrel. His commands created a fear that caused us kids to develop suction from our rectums up into our throats that was more powerful than a new Electrolux vacuum cleaner. Immediately our food shot a beeline for our guts. We feared him and consequently knew to follow orders.

That fear I had of the old man was the same fear I felt about Principal Schroeder. When the class went nuts, I stayed put. I sat perched on the floor with my legs bent at the knees exactly where I was when she left the room moments prior. I wanted to be certain that she knew I was not involved. Ah ha. The only change in my posture was that now I covered my nose and buried my face between my knees. One thing I knew by age five was to pick your battles and be certain a whipping was worth the action.

Just as the teacher reached Randy with a huge wad of paper towels, in came Miss Schroeder. She glanced at me for a split-second and screamed, “All right you children, sit down! Now!”

I was impressed with the reaction. It was just like at home. Twenty-one kids fell to the floor immediately. Those kids were spread-out in the room like dead soldiers on a battlefield. There would have been twenty-three children except the two girls in the coatroom who stood and peaked out at the action and hid again. Randy was standing and was being cleaned up by the teacher. Watching the kids fall to the floor reminded me of Penny and Sky King buzzing villains with their airplane, as they did every Saturday morning on television during the “Sky King Show”. Inevitably, the villain also gave up – just like my classmates.

When Principal Schroeder heard what happened, she did not paddle Randy. I suspect she was smart enough to realize the wind-whipper would be covered in poop. I figured she also knew when to pick her battles and if a whipping was worth the action.

Randy was taken to the office and stood there silently until his mother could walk across the street from their home and bring clean clothes. That single event made me become a thinker before each attempt to break rules in Life.
 

A Cowboy Poem

There once was a cowboy named Clyde.

     He fell through a hole in the privy and died.

  Clyde had a brother who fell into the other. 

                                              Now, they’re both in-turd side by side.

PALS - Introduction

Introduction

Dubuque, Iowa is the oldest city in Iowa. I lived in the oldest part of town called the North End. Life in the North End during late 1950s and early 1960s was different than the rest of Dubuque. The North End was an impoverished pocket of alcoholic parents, manual laborers and large families. There was one family on Windsor Avenue around the corner from my house that had seventeen kids. Our family was spread out in ages where the older ones didn’t really know our younger siblings because we had moved out of the house when they were young. There were seven of us kids. I was the third oldest.

The area was a mix of Catholic and non-Catholic families. From any place in my house and, as a matter of fact, any place in the entire neighborhood we would hear the bells of Sacred Heart that would resonate but not crack each day at noon and before each Mass. Dubuque has always been a predominantly Catholic city. It was almost a taboo for the religions to mix in marriage. If a non-Catholic married a Catholic, the mothers in the neighborhood gossiped for days about where the children would go to church or even attend school.

My parents made me attend St. Peter Lutheran Church just two blocks from home. They never attended. The church was located across the tracks from Boyce’s Wrecking and Towing Company. Occasionally, a train would pass by and vibrate the stained glass windows. Often the minister had to yell his message over the rumbling locomotive. This was the church where I was confirmed after it moved to Asbury Road in Dubuque.

My roots in the Lutheran Church on the side of my “natural” father went quite deep. My great grandfather, born in Diebach, Germany was Dr. Johann Michael Reu (1869-1943). My brother, Richard’s middle name is from Dr. Reu. My middle name of “Nelson” was the maiden name of my Grandmother on Ma’s side. She was from Norway. Craig Nessan, former academic dean and professor of contextual theology at Wartburg Seminary once said of my great grandfather, “One might with much evidence name Dr. Reu the most prolific and renowned professor and theologian in the history of Wartburg Seminary.”

It has been reported that Reu’s Catechism was used by confirmands in the Church from 1906 until the 1970s. His influence was worldwide. Dr. Reu taught at the seminary from 1899 until his death in 1943. He was my grandmother’s (gross mama’s) father. My gross mama married my gross papa who was also influential in the Lutheran Church. Dr. Samuel Salzmann was a professor and eventual president of Wartburg Seminary for many decades. Their son, Richard (Dick) was my natural father. He was once a missionary in New Guinea. I saw Dick twice in my life. He and my mother divorced when I was weeks old. Dick Salzmann left the Dubuque area and moved to New York State where he was the Editor-in-Chief of the Research Institute of America located in Washington, D.C. After the divorce, Ma married, my Dad who adopted us. His last name was Nelson and consequently, I have the same middle and last name of “Nelson”.

Many elders in the church knew my two older siblings and me quite well. They seemed to keep an eye on us for some reason. This included Coach Udelhoff from Jefferson Junior High School, who was a member there. It was not until I was an adult that I learned my family history. Family secrets were to be kept in the closet in the 1950s. A divorced woman was a tainted woman. I was not allowed to play with one friend, Leroy because his mother was divorced and never re-married. He and I sure had lots of fun together.

For a few years, I was an acolyte and a member of the children’s choir. We were required to wear a white, fluffy top and a black dress that covered our church clothes. Strangely, I didn’t mind the dress. As a matter of fact many times in my life at Halloween I have gone in drag. I guess I have the church to blame for that.

I was always terrified of not being able to light the candles that were on the altar. We followed the strict guideline of holding the gold-plated rod with the lighted wick on the end, with one hand, and cupping the sacred flame with the other. The fear of one or more candles going out created quite the stress for a small nervous boy like me. God, forbid, if the flame went out we would not receive any green jello with little marshmallows at the after-church potluck luncheon. Green jello with tiny white marshmallows and German potato salad are staples at all Lutheran potlucks.

The honor of being an acolyte was given only to boys and we served a month at a time. Often, my pal Tom followed me in the rotation. On my last service of the month I would try to leave my mark. I pinched, twisted, and bent the wick so it would be difficult, if not impossible to light the following Sunday. I kept this a secret until just now. All those times of watching him struggle made me snicker, as it does now. Sorry, Tom.

I think I was both tone deaf and dyslexic back then. I know for certain I am now. I could clean out a room with a solo piece of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” in less than two minutes. The minister said people were too slow leaving the church after service, so he had me sing many solos. Between the two of us, we got the job done. The junkyard dog whined and crawled under a 1949 Plymouth, old ladies fainted, old men turned down their hearing aids, and children laughed. I was given extra green jello from my friends whenever I sang.

The families in the North End were mostly hardworking lower middle class Germans. There were also low class families who smelled from fuel oil, had no lunch at school and some had dirt floors in their basements. There were many who were undereducated and several were racists. I heard the word “Negro” frequently. Only it was not “Negro”. Our fathers used the word at the supper table occasionally, older boys called younger ones by that name at times and when us little kids were mad, sometimes we imitated what we had learned. I heard for years that, at one time Dubuque was the largest segregated city north of the Mason-Dixon line. I don’t know if that’s true, but with a population of 50,000 people there was only one family of African-Americans.

The North End was the home of America’s first Heisman Trophy Winner, Jay Berwanger. He attended the same junior and senior high schools as I did. He played football for the University of Chicago and was awarded the Heisman Trophy in 1935.

Every region in America has its own colloquialism with phrases or words. I’m not certain if the rest of Dubuquers spoke like some of the families in the North End. I supposed it was remnants of the German ancestry when wash was called warsh. I would hear “Jeet Yet”. That meant, “Did you eat yet?” Then was gunna for going to.

When speaking to a single person or a group, it was common to hear youse guys.

There was a time when Dubuque was second in per capita consumption of beer behind Munich, Germany. All Dubuquers love their beer. When I was young I saw the fathers drinking beers like Dubuque’s own, Star Beer. They may have consumed Potosi Beer from nearby Wisconsin. There was also Hamms, Schlitz and Pabst. What would go better with beer than a good game of euchre.

There is still some debate as to its origin. Some say specifically, Germany. Other reports are Canada and South Africa.  This fast paced card game of taking tricks and making points, is known by almost every Dubuquer. There are euchre tournaments every Saturday evening in bars throughout the North End. Some German bars might play music from Leo Greco. Some folks loved the polka music. Greco entertained generations playing his accordion and hosting his “Variety Time” program on radio station WMT-AM.

From my house at 617 Lincoln Avenue we could hear the squealing of hogs and the bellowing of cows about to be slaughtered at one of the largest employers in Dubuque and the largest independent meat packing plant in America. It was called the Dubuque Packing House. We simply referred to it as just the “Pack”. If parents didn’t work at the Pack, they worked at the other large employer – John Deere. I had one pal whose mother worked outside the home. Most of the mothers did not. My mother, however, worked for a short time until she had another “nervous spell”.

All the houses had either red or green roofs and many were an arm’s length away from the neighbor’s house. They were built with steep pitches, had almost no front yard and the back yards were long and narrow. My house was built in the mid 1800’s. Two doors away was a house that once was a horse stable and blacksmith shop. For the most part homes were heated with coal or oil. Our house was drafty in the winter and stifling hot in the summer. We had no air conditioning.

Each day we heard the rumbling of trains past our houses and smelled the oil cars from the railroad maintenance yards two blocks away. Bums or Hobos were a daily sight that we ignored as kids. We also ignored drunks who pissed or shit their pants and were unconscious on the sidewalks where we roller-skated or played tag. We didn’t ignore older kids who were on the hunt to beat up younger children. I learned at an early age that I had the gift of running fast. I used that gift many times to outrun an older thug. If we had a bicycle, it had no fenders, patched tires and often we rode double with a buddy on the front handlebars. Sometimes we stole bikes from other kids.

In 1957, our territory on the North End of Dubuque was not a great expanse. Our roaming was bounded on the north by Windsor Avenue, by Rhomberg on the east, Kniest on the south, and East 22nd to the west. Movement beyond those limits was by express permission only. However, if an eight-year-old was daring enough, he could always sneak past the lines of motherly defense, brave the dangers of traffic, and find himself off the map, exploring the vastness beyond the Audubon School playground. If you got caught, the penalty was severe: we’d all felt the sting of a newly snapped and skinned lilac switch smartly applied to the tiny buttock. But we had to face the danger; we had no choice. We were boys and the threat of whizzing cars and the whistling of the switch is just too small a thing to dampen the wanderlust of young boys. And ours was a wanderlust sharpened and amplified by the knowledge that out there, beyond the pale, was an El Dorado worth risking it all to find: Kress’s Confectionary.

Had we been able to search the world over, no cache of gold and silver could equal the treasures to be found in Kress’s: Duncan yo-yos; black licorice, two for a penny; High Flier kites; hard penny candy; packs of Topp’s baseball cards, five cents each; seven-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola and Bubble-Up; ice cream sodas for one fat quarter. So many delights that no amount of money or appetite could ever consume.

Kress’s was located on the corner of East 22nd and Johnson Street. The children in the neighborhood called it Huey’s, after the owner and operator, the man behind the counter whose life’s work it was, it seemed, to stock every luxury a child could imagine.

It wasn’t until I was seven or so that I even realized Huey’s store had another name, or that it offered bread, bologna, and milk along with gumdrops, malted milk balls and solid rubber baseballs that ached for pulverizing swat of a junior Louisville slugger (and which would eventually would be lost to the roof of Audubon, there to disintegrate in the sun and rain).

Huey’s store was old. At least the building was old. On the outer wall a barely visible sign painted in red, white and blue advertised Wonder Bread (“Helps Build Strong Bodies in 8 Ways”). Years of bouncing rubber balls off the wall and catching them in the middle of Johnson Street had chipped most of the paint from the pitted bricks. However, the age of the building belied the newness of its riches.

On either side of the entryway, two dimly lighted glass cases exhibited the newest toys and comic books. Behind the glass cases, built-in wooden shelves from floor to ceiling housed a greater assortment of bright red wax lips, candy cigarettes, bubble gum cigars, jacks, pencils, notebooks, and binders. Directly opposite stood a marble-topped counter protecting the cold cavernous cylinders of genuine chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, and black raspberry flavored ice cream. While an ambulatory towhead was free to wander throughout the store (an excursion that could take anywhere from a minute to an hour), no one crossed the marble barrier except Huey. You’d pay your nickel, he’d go behind the counter, and roll a perfect ball of ice cream into the scoop and place it just so on top of a wafer cone. Two scoops went for seven cents.

Between the display cases and the frozen delights was an aisle; at least, that is what it should have been. Not in Huey’s, however. That space of no more than ten by fifteen feet was occupied by a jungle of wire racks and baskets where tiny bodies could get lost examining the latest in genuine, imitation leather, miniature big league gloves—a buck twenty-five and balsa gliders (one fat quarter, and one skinny dime). Such was Huey’s store, a small consumer paradise in the middle of a denying, abusive, oppressive parental inferno.

If a nickel could not be earned, the drainage ditch at the far south end of Audubon School almost always yielded a two cent deposit pop bottle discarded by some extravagant teenager. Huey kept stacks of pop bottles in crates out back of his store, surrounded by a wooden seven-foot fence. It had a gate that was locked only at night from intruders in the alley. He kept it latched during the day.

We never believed adults fully appreciated the essence of Huey’s. How could they? They would rush in for a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Part of the tobacco industry’s advertising slogan was L.S.M.F.T. That was an acronym for Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. The adults would also buy a quart of Hilldale milk without ever stopping to scan the latest Tarzan comic book through a pair of colored cellophane 3-D glasses that cost fifteen cents. (1) Written by Richard Reu Nelson

As kids we drank from garden hoses. Often the first few seconds of water was hot from the sun on the hose and usually had bugs that were washed out with the initial water pressure. We were held back in school if we could not meet the standards, and we rode bicycles without helmets. There was lead in our painted cribs and lead in our gas. We believed in our President and Congress. We never questioned authority. If we were spanked at school we were spanked or beaten by our fathers when we went home. We could buy cigarettes for our parents at the neighborhood grocery store as long as there was a written note. These same stores would deliver to our houses. The doctor would come to our homes, as did the milkman and the iceman, who delivered ice in blocks for the icebox.

Some people had party lines for their telephones where two or more families used the same line. My phone number was 31037. We had only push lawn mowers with rotary blades. We tried out for baseball and not everyone was chosen to play. Trophies were not given to winners. Boys were taught not to cry. There was one bathtub for families as large as seventeen kids. Bras were worn on the outside of a sweater during television commercials. Armpits could not be exposed for deodorant commercials. 

Children were to be seen and not heard. We were never allowed to miss school. It was “cool” to smoke. We would eat all the fish we caught. Our parents worked the same job their entire adult lives. The flat-head V6 engine was simple and owners did their own repairs. Doors to our houses were left unlocked twenty-four hours a day. It was safe to hitchhike. 

My parents were alcoholics and Ma was mentally ill. She suffered severe bouts of depression that were magnified with the beer. I lived in a constant state of tension wondering if I’d be beaten again each night. The tension was accompanied with depression and sadness. I suspect the roots of my life-long clinical depression started at that time. My brothers and I were beaten with belts, kicked with steel-toed work boots, forced to stand at attention in the corners of a room. We had to take two steps back, lean into the corner with only our heads for support and our arms hung at our sides. This position was assumed for one hour on many occasions.

I was constantly told I was a no good dirty son-of-a-bitch and would never amount to a damn. One time I was locked away behind a cellar door. The steps inside had long ago had been filled in from the outside to create a patio above. The only way to reach the darkened stairwell was through the basement. I spent some eighteen hours alone in total blackness with only insects and severe heat to accompany me. I was eight years old.

I’m convinced there was an element in my personality that balanced my need to be amusing and entertaining. It was my sorrow that gave depth to my humor. I was known as the class clown while all the time hurting inside due to the physical abuse and absence of maternal nurturing.

PALS is a story of friendship involving five boys and one girl. It is a story about how this group became friends at an early age and remained friends over fifty years later. It is a story of conflict, trauma, and escape. It is a story of love, respect, laughter, pranks, and life. It is my story. To an outsider, my life might seem abominable. To me it was normal.

You will be there the morning we heard that Marilyn Monroe died. There will be egg and watermelon throwing, fart lighting, booby squeezing, and pastry stealing along the way as you join me in my past ventures. You will be there for a peeing contest. There will be boners, train hopping, and bridge jumping. You will hear the ice breaking on the Mississippi River during a spring thaw. You will learn how I changed the ways some American businesses operate. This includes the telephone company, Coca-Cola, the auto industry and a few more. 

We could walk anywhere in Dubuque and feel safe- except for the Flats, which was an adjoining neighborhood to mine. We walked everywhere- except for the Flats.

By the way, Jay Berwanger was the only Heisman recipient who was tackled by a future President of the United States. It was Gerald Ford during a game between Michigan and the University of Chicago. President Ford reported years later he received a bloody nose and still had the scar to prove it.

“The Flats” (2)

 by

Bryan Mihalakis

What constituted the Flats area was different according to where some people actually lived. Some folks who lived on Elm, Washington, Jackson, and White Streets considered their neighborhood a part of the Flats. But to me and my neighbors, the boundary of where the Flats began was simple: the railroad tracks. Everything east of the tracks was the Flats and everything west was a completely different world.

The Flats to us was bounded by the Milwaukee Road railroad maintenance shops and a switchyard that ran north and south until 18^th Street where it veered to the northeast out to the Municipal swimming pool and then north again towards Minnesota. Adjacent to the railroad shops and yard was the stockyards for the Dubuque Packing Company where they received all of the animals prior to slaughtering them. Next to the stockyards was the main plant that covered a significant portion of the area and rose high above the neighborhood of small homes. To the east was the city dump that ran along 16^th Street when I was young.  What wasn’t part of the city dump, were wetlands from the adjacent Mississippi River.

There was City Island, which included the Yacht Basin, the dump, the first airport in Dubuque, The Sports Bowl stock car racing, and the water ski club. On the eastern banks of the Mississippi were cottages built during the early part of the 20^th century.  The most famous was Camp Seventeen, as each of the cottages had a number. Nobody knew why Camp Seventeen was famous, but it seemed like everyone in Dubuque knew about it. There were also a number of floating boat- houses and boat docks spread along in the Peosta Channel.

South of 16^th Street were more wetlands and the area where the storm sewers of Dubuque emptied. The southern boundaries of the Flats were the A.Y. McDonald brass foundry, the Caradco warehouse, and the Interstate Power Company plant. While the western boundary of the Flats was the railroad tracks, there was an industrial buffer on the west side of the tracks that separated the area before once again, homes appeared. From 18^th Street south was the Metz Manufacturing Company, Max Blum’s junkyard, the Decker Coal yards, the Municipal Garage, Jacobson’s Junkyard and then the outcropping buildings of Caradco.

The Flats was the only neighborhood in Dubuque completely surrounded by heavy industry, which subjected the inhabitants to the terrible smells, polluted air, the never-ending noises, and the heavy traffic created by these companies. This area is where I grew up and it was many things to us; our playground, where we worked, and where we lived.

As children most of us had little oversight and no supervision. We went out of the house in the morning only stopping back to eat lunch or supper and then we’d be off again until it was time to be back home at night. It was a little like a “Lord of the Flies” existence except you returned home at night We were street kids and we knew every inch of the area and just about every inch of every industrial facility. Packs of us kids would venture into all of these buildings looking to see what was going on and what we could possibly steal and sell at the local scrapyards. The scrapyards would not buy from us kids directly so we had to sell to a neighbor who lived next door to me and who had a junkyard in his backyard.

One of the few times we ventured out of our neighborhoods was to go to the Boys Club. We walked in a pack, stayed all day at the Club and then walked home at night when it closed. We would sometimes use the excuse that we were going to the Boys Club for the day and to be out of the range of our parents. In reality, at ten years old we would sometimes go shoe shining in the bars that lined lower Central Avenue and lower Main Street. We walked among the adults, many of whom were drunk. We offered to shine their shoes. We charged them twenty-five cents. Oftentimes, they would pay us fifty-cents – especially if they were trying to impress the woman sitting on the bar stool next to them. The key to shoe shining was to sneak into the bar and get someone to agree to a shine before the bartender saw us and kicked us out of the bar. If you already had a customer the bartenders would leave you alone. Shining was a lucrative business. On a good night we could make as much as a factory worker. Not bad for a ten year old.

Other than the weekends, there were always the sounds of the railroad in our daily lives. The freight trains passed by periodically during the day while switch engines spent the days and nights until midnight putting trains together.  Waiting for trains to pass by was an everyday thing. We adapted by becoming proficient at crossing the moving trains or riding them to where we wanted to go. Sometimes we would “scooch” under the stopped trains while people in the cars would look at us like we were crazy. But we knew how trains worked and nobody ever got hurt. One time, however, I jumped off one in the dark and immediately ran into a lantern holder. Bam!

When I was very young I remembered passenger trains coming through the neighborhood filled with military troops returning from Korea. The trains would sit there for an hour or so until they moved out. Soldiers would pay us twenty-five cents to run to the grocery store a block away and buy them things like ice cream. Glad to be home, they were big tippers and many of them would throw loose change on the ground for us to collect. At other times I saw African-American families passing by in a freight car, the door wide open while they were all perched in the doorway like they were posing for a photograph. Hanging out around the tracks and climbing in and out of the freight cars, we ran into hobos.  We would run home, make a sandwich, steal cigarettes from our parents, and return to listen to their endless stories.

The smell of the packinghouse was a sickening odor we adjusted to, as it was ever-present. Those coming into our neighborhood would immediately notice the smell of dead animals, excrement ground into the streets where we played, the vapors of hides and guts, while blood permeated every crack and crevice in the four square block area. A.Y. McDonald factory had a steady steam of black smoke spewing out its chimneys, which was only a problem when the wind blew from the south. Everyone’s laundry hanging outside often was covered in black, hard-to-remove, soot. Kids in the Flats seldom received any money from their parents. If we wanted money for pop, chips, ice cream, or the pinball machine we had to figure ways to get it. One thing we did was to scrap for brass from the A.Y. McDonald Company. Many days we made more money than a full-time worker at the Pack.

We also went junking where we would occasionally find a gondola. This was a boxcar without a top. It would be filled with scrap metal and if there were no Dicks around one of us would climb on top, throw out what he could and the rest of us would grab it and run like hell. Later we split all the profits after selling the stuff to older guys who in turn sold it back to the junkyards. We were the first people in America to re-cycle, so to speak.

Another way to make money was to collect pop bottles and turn them in for the cooperage. The best place to do this was where the young men worked on their stock cars at night. I had a special route and would some days make quite a bit of money picking up the pop bottles they threw away the night before. We walked the factories and foundries every day looking for any kind of metal. If we didn’t have to crawl over or under a fence or if it wasn’t fastened down in some fashion, it was fair game.

One time an older kid ruined the fresh paint job on a “scrammie” I’d just made. A “scrammie” is a push type version of a stock car. Like everything else in my life, I knew I had to handle this older kid by myself. I found a long lead pipe and hunted him down. When he turned toward me, I hit him as hard as I could smack-dab on the shins. He never again bothered me. Show ’em what you’re made of, that was the lesson I’d learned. To survive this kind of environment, one learns to never back down. Better to get your ass kicked once, than to be picked on for an eternity. When a bully gets in your face you immediately get back in his or her face. I compare it to prison and the idea of respect. Being civilized about threatening situations can be fatal.

The Flats was strictly a blue collar neighborhood, a mixture of Catholics, a few non-Catholics (Protestants) and a significant portion that never saw the inside of a church except for funerals and weddings. Sex was a taboo subject in the homes and schools so we learned about the mysterious process sitting on a street corner at the feet of the “Big Kids.” In every poor neighborhood there are the bulk of children who are basically good kids. Then, there is a smaller portion who are the source of most of the problems, brutality and anti-social behavior. There were usually the “Big Kids” who pontificated to the group of which we were a part, young with eager ears lapping up all the details. The “Big Kids” would go into descriptions of their sexual exploits, most of which would land someone in prison today. Many of their stories were pure machismo and bragging on their part. And some were not. Some were true stories of sexual brutality that no ten year old should be listening to or even be aware of that bad behavior.

My dad worked all the time and my mom spent the day trying to raise nine kids. Many of the parents had large families and low budgets. By the time many of them were able to relax at night, they did not want to be troubled with the problems of their children. Many of the parents walked to the Airport Inn and for a few hours had a few beers and talked with neighbors. They would come home feeling a buzz, go to bed and the next day do it all over again tomorrow. Children in the Flats did not receive much nurturing, empathy for our problems or attention. This lifestyle made you tough and taught you to solve your own problems or suffer them. The Streets devour the weak. That was the case of some of the children in the neighborhood. This lifestyle was the formula for creating a kid with “street smarts.” And I became such a kid and then an adult that has served me well travelling around the world by myself in third world countries.

Growing up in poverty and in a dysfunctional environment lacking the nurturing and protection that all children need, has a tendency to create anxiety filled individuals that learn to live by doing whatever is necessary to survive. Many times this is exhibited through anti-social behavior. “Fight or Flight” comes to the forefront often. Children are always on the lookout for any opportunity, danger or threats on their horizon. This attitude provides them instinct and the ability to survive on their own. Sensitivity to others is an unaffordable luxury at times.

(1)  The description of Huey’s Grocery Store was written by Richard Reu Nelson

(2)  The description of the Flats was written by Bryan Mihalakis

“Some children experience their childhood and then spend the rest of their lives trying to get over it.”

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