Daily Excerpt: Forget the Goal, The Journey Counts (Stites) - Absorbing the 20s (3)
Excerpt from Forget the Goal, the Journey Counts (Stites)
Absorbing the ‘20s! (3)
Now, in 1932, about the best medicine around was the herb echinacea. The few pharmaceutical companies were more ethical then. They hadn’t yet figured out that they could stir up almost any chemical, say it would cure whatever, and people would buy it. In those days, we used a lot of petroleum jelly, caster oil, mercurochrome, and iodine and had every torn-up hand or foot wrapped up with the phrase, “Be a man.” We always liked mercurochrome because it didn’t sting, whereas iodine did, although everything healed when we used iodine. Also, our cuts and breaks healed mainly because we ate a lot of vegetables and fruit because they were cheap and because we rarely ate red meat, which was expensive. We hardly ate any candy or sweet stuff at all because “It is a waste of hard-earned money” (Dad). We didn’t get sick much because food wasn’t grown with chemicals. We didn’t know anything about such stuff. We just played hard and got hurt hard when we did.
About the most serious thing that happened to me was that I broke my kneecap in two places with a ball-peen hammer while I was pounding a stake into the dirt. I was on crutches for a long time. And there was the time when I broke three ribs trying to tackle a kid who weighed three times as much as me playing scratch football down at the Baby Camp field. That really hurt but mainly because a kid rode me home on the handlebars of his bike, jouncing all the way. I walked real careful for weeks. Almost all kids broke an arm or leg each year or so and always a finger or toe or two. That was pretty normal. Once, when I was playing catcher in a hard ball game at school, I misjudged a fast ball, and it popped my middle finger up over the joint. I dropped my glove and looked at part of my finger sitting double-decker. The coach walked up to me, looked at the finger, and said “Come on, Al, pull on it; we got a game.” I pulled, the finger popped back, and I caught the rest of the game. I did feel it, though, each time the ball popped into my glove. The finger was a balloon when I got home for dinner. Mother had me put ice on it, which by then didn’t do a bit of good. The finger eventually healed fine.
But back to the sulphur. Every morning, without fail, we would drink a glass of water before breakfast that was about one-quarter the liquid sulphur Dad brought home. My father was pretty smart and guesstimated the amount of sulphur we should drink. We held our breath when we swallowed because of the smell. Sulphur was really stinky, like rotten eggs, although we weren’t supposed to say so. We drank sulphur water all that summer, through the winter, and into the next year. Not only did we drink it, but we also had to bathe in it once a week on Saturday night! In those days, we didn’t waste hot water, so George and I took a bath together. When you drop a little 40-pound kid into a streaming tub full of rotten egg smell it was pretty bad. Dad would stand there and say, “Be a man, be a man!” as we gagged and tried to keep from throwing up. In time, we got used to having sulphur as part of our lives. Then the company in Jersey City stopped making it and we won our freedom the Friday night we saw Dad come home without the month’s supply of bottles. But we never got sick, so who knows?
That was the rough side of a fun time growing up. But all in all, I think we kids who lived during the Great Depression were the lucky ones. We really had it all. We could make our own fun out of nothing, and that was really great! Take climbing, for instance. Even during the Depression, houses would be built here and there, and one went up on the open field down at the end of our block. I can’t think of anything more perfect for an eight-year-old than to have a two-by-four skeleton of a two-story house plus attic to crawl around on. We used to play “Winners” on that house—the first one to climb up and straddle the top roof beam was the Winner. Sometimes it got a little scary when you’re climbing as fast as you can, hand over hand, you’re standing on a lintel of a window, you reach up, and your hand slips, grabbing a two by-four. It’s a long way down two stories. But only one kid fell and broke his arm and some ribs. The house only stayed as a frame for a couple of months, and we only got to play on it for an hour when the workmen quit at four in the afternoon, so it wasn’t very dangerous.
We had another game we played once a week. The Good Humor ice cream truck would come jingling down our street at quarter to five every afternoon in the summer, the bells tinkling out a sound that could only mean the Good Humor man. A Chocolate Covered Vanilla Bar cost a nickel; the Toasted Almond Bar, the best ice cream bar ever made in the entire world, cost seven cents in that summer of ‘31. That was too much for any kid to spend in those times, so every now and then we would resort to the time-honored method of trying to relieve Mr. Good Humor of a bar or two. Like everything else we did in those days, we made a game of filching a bar out of the back of the truck. We considered it a game of agility and didn’t dwell much on the actual stealing aspect. You had to be really sharp and lucky to make it. We would only try it once a week because we didn’t want the driver to stop coming around, and we didn’t want to do any serious financial damage to him because we knew he had to pay for a stolen bar. Once each week a different kid got a chance to make a try. If he got caught, he was probably in for real punishment from his folks because in those days even this “prank” of stealing was considered close to murder or some equally serious offence. Remember, that was a time when no one locked their doors, people were honest, and trust was normal. But the Good Humor drivers knew their stuff, and they had seen kids try every kind of maneuver there is to get a freebie.
The plan was simple: The kid whose turn it was would duck down and hide on the sidewalk side of a parked car as soon as we heard the tinkling bells. The other kids would stand out in plain sight on the other side of the street, and the truck would slow down, the driver thinking maybe one of the kids had a nickel. Right then a kid can run out between the parked cars as the truck slowly passes, run up behind the truck, pull open the small back door to the freezer, reach inside and grab something, shut the door, then duck behind the next opening between the parked automobiles.
Another way we used was when one of the kids had some money and wanted to buy. The truck stopped, the driver went around to the back and gave the kid a bar, then got back in the truck and started up. Right then, when the truck is starting to pull away is the chance to run up to the back of the truck and make the try. The danger is trying to reach into the freezer while the truck is picking up speed. If you get something in your hand, you try and shut the door softly so the driver can’t hear the slam. If he does, he jams on the brakes, and you run like fire to get away. He can’t leave the truck, so you get away, but the whole neighborhood knows somebody swiped something when the driver hollers out. It was stimulating. I never got caught, but I only got one bar one time. Years later they started making trucks with the small door on the side. No more freebies.
The only other thing we did which bordered on, well, okay, it was, stealing, was to filch a pie every now and then from a really grouchy, fat, old German man who lived in a house on the edge of a field down near the Baby Camp Reservoir (which was actually a really deep pond with no bottom that used to be a stone quarry). He would holler at kids if they even stepped off the sidewalk walking past his place. He was a baker who supplied a few of the restaurants downtown with his pies and cakes. He baked pies a couple of afternoons a week and would always put them out on a wide window shelf to cool after they came out of the oven. A pie sitting out on a shelf is very tempting. The trouble was that he had no trees around his place, so if you were going to steal a pie, he had to be away from his kitchen, or you had to be really lucky to race from the woods at the side of his yard up to the window, snatch a pie, then run away, crossing the back yard and into the woods on the other side without him seeing you. No one ever got caught because we could run and he couldn’t. But if he saw you, you never heard such a roaring in German! We didn’t get lucky many times, but when we did, the pies were really good—he was a fine baker.
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